Dorothy's Ghost

(Short story by Carlos Navarro)

“Hello, it’s Dorothy,” the voice said. I looked up from the exam papers I was grading and saw her, a woman in her early fifties, seated in a wheelchair with a plaid woolen comforter covering her legs. But no sooner had I opened my mouth to speak, than she vanished, and I woke up. Having pulled an all-nighter doctoring my résumé without actually lying, for a job interview at another college, I had dozed off at my desk and dreamt I saw this woman in a wheelchair. So vivid was the dream that it seemed more like an out-of-body experience. The setting was an exact replica of my tiny visiting professor’s office--the book case, the file cabinet, the lamps, the desk--everything the same, except for the woman, Dorothy. And though she appeared for only an moment, her luminous brown eyes and impish half-grin lingered long in my mind.

My visiting professor stint at Davidson College, North Carolina, had been the fifth since I received my Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Pittsburgh twelve years earlier. Had this been the 1960’s, when the demand for language professors was at its peak, I could have easily earned a secure tenured position at a well-endowed college or university. But nowadays language Ph.D.’s like me were a dime a dozen. Though better qualified than most tenured old timers, the best we could do were two year stints in whatever institution would have us, at whatever the going pay rate, which was not much higher than that of the clerical staff. Itinerant slave labor, that’s what we were, too unsettled to marry and raise a family, verging toward middle age with no decent prospects in sight, just more of the same.

I had decided that when my contract at Davidson expired, I would quit academe and join my father in his thriving construction business. But then, on second though, I changed my mind. Maybe at the next college one of the old full-timers would retire, or die, and I would be selected to take his or her place.

Then a week later it happened again. I had dozed off at my desk and there, beside me, in her wheelchair, was Dorothy. This time she didn’t vanish so quickly. “Who are you?” I asked her. “Why do you keep visiting me?”

Dorothy didn’t answer. Instead, she smiled and launched into what obviously was an answer to a question once asked by somebody else.
“A swagman, Carlos, she explained in a distinct Australian accent with a jaunty, playful tone to her voice. “is an itinerant worker; the swag, his bedroll; a billabong,a sort of lake formed at the bow of a winding river; a billy, a crude cooking utensil fashioned from a tin can; a jambuck, a ram; a tuckerbag, a food knapsack; and a coolibah, a tree that grows in watery places, a species of Eucalyptus. Knowing that, you should be able to follow the lyrics of the song without any trouble. Some say it’s based on a true story.”

“I gazed quizzically at the woman in the wheelchair. “Song? What song are you talking about, Dorothy. That is your name, isn’t it? And what strange language is this you’re translating? And who is this Carlos you’re talking to?” And I repeated my earlier question. “But tell me. Who are you? What do you want with me?”

Dorothy, again, didn’t answer, and when I reached to touch her, she again vanished, and I woke up. Though there was no breeze blowing that day, the curtains in my open window were stirring as if disturbed by something flowing out of the room. The Australian woman in the wheelchair, what did she want with me? Was she a dream, or an apparition? Had I really been asleep when I saw her or was I hallucinating, losing my mind? Were the stressful years of job hopping finally getting to me? But, strangely, I didn’t care. Whoever or whatever the woman was, dream or ghost, I was hoping she would visit me again. I had liked her on sight. Maybe next time she’d stay a while longer.

And she did. In her third visit she spoke of stories and novels she had written, one about a mistreated pet kangaroo, another about a family eking out a living in the Outback of Australia. She also spoke lovingly of her husband, Mac, their travels by boat in the West Indies, their three-story house in Homestead, Florida, and, when done, as in her previous visits, she vanished, again without answering my questions.

But I didn’t need to hear her answer. From the names she mentioned, Carlos and Mac, and their residence in Homestead, Florida, I was finally was able to figure out who my ghostly visitor was and, eventually, what she wanted from me. The Carlos she addressed in her translation of the swagman song was none other than my father, and Mac, her husband, full name Walter McKenzie Cottrell, was my father’s Boy Scout Master when Dad emigrated from Cuba to Homestead in the 1950’s.

I recalled that when my brother Luke and I were homeschooled, Dad used to regale us with stories of how Mac used take his Scouts on weekend “survival” excursions into the nearby Everglades wilderness, to live entirely off the land, with no gear other than machetes, knifes, a coil of rope, a first-aid kit, and a flint-and-steel or wooden friction set to build their fires. Dad also recounted how folks for miles around would find some pretext to drop by the Cottrell's three-story frame house, dubbed the “haunted house” before they moved in, to see the ingenious hand-pulley elevator that Mac had rigged for his handicapped wife, Dorothy. Dad swore it worked better than a motor-driven one, and it cost less than $300 to build.

Those oft-told stories about Mac and Dorothy Cottrell apparently had made a lasting impression on me. And that song whose words the woman in the wheelchair had translated, I now remembered, was the Australian iconic “Waltzing Matilda.” Dad used to sing it to us at bedtime. He had learned it when a Scout in Mac's troop. Dad was thirteen at the time, and Mac, and Dorothy in their fifties. That was over half a century ago, so both Mac and Dorothy, I figured, must be long dead by now. The woman in the wheelchair, then, was no stranger. She was the ghost of Dorothy Cottrell.

Next day I phoned Dad. After our usual exchange of greeting and casual chit-chat about family matters—-my mom’s upcoming retirement from her post as editor at the UN, my brother Luke’s dentistry practice, my next visiting professor stint-- I brought up my memories of his stories of the neighbors that had so impressed him in his youth. On hearing their names, Dad’s voice waxed animated.

“Mac and Dorothy Cottrell? Why, off course I remember them well. How could I forget them. Hell, they were my role models back when I was in dire need of role models. When you and Luke were little I used to entertain you with stories about my camping trips in the Everglades with Mac’s Boy Scout troop. Remember?”

“Yes,” I nodded into the phone. “I remember those stories well.”

“Mac,” Dad went on, “was one of the most respected men in town, a Scout Master and community team player. But looking back, I’d have to say that Dorothy was the one I most admired.”

“Why was that, Dad?”

“Well, imagine her, a polio victim since age five, bound for life to a wheelchair, yet learning to sail, swim, shoot, plant gardens, travel over rough terrain and, on top of all that earn a living as an artist and a writer. In her day, she was a best selling author. Some of her stories were made into movies. I have nothing but praise and fond memories of Dorothy Cottrell.”

”But as a person, what was she like? You say you have fond memories of her. What are some?”

“Well, of the seventeen scouts in Troop 14, or “foreen” as Mac pronounced it in his Scottish brogue, I was Dorothy’s favorite. Why, I’m not sure. My father, as you know, was killed in an auto accident and my mom sent me to live with an uncle in Homestead, a close friend of the father of the actor, Desi Arnaz. I told you many stories about them also."

”Yes, I remember those stories about their love-hate relationship. A colorful Cuban duo, those two.”

“Colorful is too mild a word for them,” Dad chortled. “But back to the Cottrells. When I joined Mac’s troop I could barely speak English and was still hurting over my father’s death. So maybe Dorothy felt sorry for me. Or maybe I reminded her of some kid she had met in a Cuban port, a character study for one of her stories. She and Mac used to do a lot of sailing in the Caribbean and must have anchored in Cuba at one time or another. But whatever the reason, she took a special liking to me, and I to her.”

”So what was your relationship with her like?”

“Well, to give you an example. One day I had gone to the her house to give her a rattlesnake wallet I had made for her, when she happened to be meeting with some bigwig from New York, the editor of a major magazine, if I recall. But instead of asking me to come back later, Dorothy insisted that I join them. And so there were sat, the three of us—the famous author, the bigwig guy, and rustic 13-year-old me giving them a lecture in broken English on how to skin and cook rattlesnakes. A delicious white meat, by the way”

“I can see why you were so fond of her, and she obviously was fond of you.”

“Yes, I'm sure she was. Dorothy Cottrell. Bless her soul. Loving but not sentimental, tough but not hard, curious but not prying, talkative but not glib, venturesome but not reckless, upbeat without being giddy—the Aristotelian Golden Mean between extremes. A truly admirable person.” Though a civil engineer by profession, Dad was an avid reader of philosophy books. He particularly got a kick of metaphysicians who went to great lengths to prove that they really knew nothing. “Hell,” he would laugh, “I could come to same conclusion in one brief sentence.”

“But tell me, Son,” he inquired. “Why, after all these years are you suddenly so interested in Dorothy Cottrell?"

“Oh, I don’t know, Dad. Maybe it’s because the other day she visited me in a dream so vivid that I thought she was right there in the room with me.”

“Really? But you never met her. She died fifteen years before you were born? How could you possibly have dreamt what she looked like?"

“Through your descriptions of her, I suppose. Your Cottrell stories were pretty vivid.”

“O.K., then, let me test you. Describe the Dorothy Cottrell you saw in your dream."

“Well, she looked to be in her early fifties, light-skinned, small but sinewy, dark eyes, black hair streaked with gray. She was seated on what appeared to be a state-of-the-art wheelchair with a plaid woolen comforter covering her legs.”

“Wow, that was Dorothy, alright! My descriptions of her must have been pretty vivid, indeed, for it to have made such a lasting impression on you.”

“Also, in another dream—-I’ve had several—she translated the dialectical vocabulary of 'Waltzing Matilda.'”

“Swagman, billabong, collibah billy, jambuck, tuckerbag? Those words?"

“Yes, those words. You used to sing the song to us, I had forgotten the lyrics, but then they came back to me after I heard Dorothy translate the key words in my dream.”

Dad paused a moment to clear his throat his throat. “'Waltzing Matilda',you know, is the most famous folk song in Australia. Their unofficial national anthem.” And in an off-tune voice further distorted by the crackle of the cell phone, he belted out the first lines.
“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,/ Under the shade of a coolibah tree,/ And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled/ You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda with me"

”I see you haven’t lost your musical touch,” I jested. “But I don’t recall you ever telling us who this Matilda was.”

”Well, some say she was a real woman, the swagman’s deceased wife; but according to most interpretations, Matilda was the swagman’s swag, his bedroll. Because there were so few women in sheep country for a man to keep warm or dance with, the swagman’s swag apparently was the closest thing to it. Men out in the wilderness get pretty lonely, you know, and after a while start imagining feminine spirits in their possessions and surroundings.”

“Like the French explorers in the Rockies who named the mountains in the offing the Grand Tetons, big tits.” .

Dad chuckled. “Yes, precisely. They do resemble big tits.” “And now, let me guess. It was Dorothy Cottrell who taught you ‘Waltzing Matilda.’” Right? .

“Yes, as a matter of fact, she did. Now and then our troop would meet in the living room of their house, and it was at one of those meetings that she introduced us to "Waltzing Matilda". Though none of us had ever heard the song before and, of course, had no clue what swagman, etc meant until she told us. Hell, I was having trouble enough understanding standard English words. We adopted 'Waltzing Matilda' as our campfire song. When we got to the line: ‘Down came the troopers; one, two, three.’ We’d all stand up and shout out the numbers. Among her many gifts, Dorothy had fine, robust singing voice, an alto, if I recall.”

“You campfire song, you say?”

“Yes, hard to believe, but back in those days, before the advent of a TV set in every home, singing and story telling were the most popular forms of home entertainment, that and charades, particular in rural communities like the one where we lived."

“My, how times have changed!”.

“Nor did anyone there do much reading,” Dad continued. “None of my American fellow scouts had an inkling that Dorothy was a best selling author. To them, she was just the 'crippled wife' of our Scout Master, a very nice lady, that was all. It was only years later, after I joined the Navy that I read some of her works. But, I ask you again, Son, why are you having such vivid dreams about someone long dead and that you knew only through me?”

“Well, Dad, now that you mention it, that’s how it was in the dream. Dorothy never addressed me directly or answered my questions. She spoke only to you, Carlos.”

“Wow! This is getting spooky!”

“Yes, very spooky. The Dorothy Cottrell that visited me was no mere dream. She was more like an apparition, a ghost, if you will, yet not in the least scary.”

Dad paused a moment to reflect. “Son, I recall from my childhood in Cuba that though people professed to be Christians, the unofficial religion was Santería, a form of voodoo, so most Cubans, my folks included, believed in spirits.”

“Yes, I’ve heard from Cuban colleagues of mine that that’s still the case in Cuba. Even hidebound Marxists in the Cuban Government—-Fidel, Raul and their entire staff--believe in spirits. And most of my Cuban colleagues as well, though they're reluctant to admit it.”

“Hell,” Dad went on. “Our home was haunted with all kinds of spirits, good, bad, but mostly insignificant. Just lost souls looking for a place to rest. So it could be that I subconsciously passed on those memories of my childhood on to you, along with the stories of Dorothy and Mac Cottrell, and in your dream, you made a connection.”

“Could be,” I muttered.

“But trust me, Son.. There are no such things as ghosts. Once dead, people either pass on to the Great Beyond, if there is such a thing, or simply cease to exist, save in the memories of those who remember them, and when these also die, they are completely forgotten. But actual ghosts? apparitions? No way. A physical impossibility.”

Detecting a shift of tone to his voice, I smiled at the phone and said. “Dad, somehow you don’t sound quite convinced.”

Dad again hesitated, trying to connect the conflicting thoughts and memories chasing each other through his brain. “Well, no, of course, I mean, no mortal has a monopoly on the truth. Maybe you were, indeed visited by Dorothy’s ghost. But if she didn’t speak to you directly, delivered no message or offered no advice, what difference did her visit make? She might as well have stayed home in the Afterlife.”

“Like that grandaunt of yours who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary?”

Dad chortled. “Yes, her, Tía Petrona. She kept seeing the Virgin Mary in her kitchen, but the Virgin would just stand there, saying nothing, statue-like, with a blank look on her face. So after a while Tía Petrona got bored with her, and the Virgin never appeared to her again.”

“But Dorothy’s ghost, Dad, she’s was no statue. She talked, and gestured with her hands and head. She was more alive than most live bodies in this college.”

“Well, then, why don’t you wait her out. Maybe she’ll talk to you directly and tell you what wants,” Dad said jokingly.

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do, wait her out,’ I said, going along with the humor. “I’m sure she’ll visit me again.” Then remembering what he had said about the Cottrells’ house, I asked:

“You mentioned that the old house they bought in Homestead was haunted. Were there really ghosts living in it?”
Dad though for a moment. ”That old house, it was a story in itself. It sat on the corner of Tennessee Road and Coconut palm drive, atop a slight knoll, some thirty yards from either road. Our house, which you have seen pictures of, was about half a mile up from the Cottrells’ on Tennessee Road. Between our house and theirs was another house. On the other side of the road, the only inhabited house was a mile away."

“So you and the Cottrells weren’t exactly neighbors."

“No, not in the urban sense of the word. Today the Atlantic southeast region of Florida, from Fort Lauderdale to Key West, Homestead included, is one unbroken chain of motels, housing developments and shopping centers. But back then, Homestead and the surrounding area, was a sparsely populated agricultural community. From the Cottrell house, the town of Homestead proper was five miles south, and Miami, twenty miles north. A few miles to the West was the Everglades wilderness, where Mac used to take us camping. Much of that has since been later drained to provide water for the urban sprawl”

“But back to the Cottrell house. Why did people think it was haunted?”

“Because, for one, it was so different from the rest. The typical Florida home back then was, and still is, a one story cinderblock structure so built to minimize the impact of hurricane force winds and guard against termite damage.”

“Like the one where you lived? I recall seeing pictures of it.”

“Yes, long and low slung. But the Cottrell house was a three-story gabled wooden structure, like the kind built in New England in the 19th Century, something right out of one Poe’s or Hawthorne’s stories. In fact it was the oldest house in that part of Florida, built by some wealthy Northerner named Gossman, some thirty or forty years before Miami or Homestead were settled.

“And just because the house was old and different looking people assumed it was haunted?”

“No, there was more to it. Not only did the house look spooky, like a set from a horror movie, but some locals spread the rumor that a murder-suicide had once taken place on the third floor and that town officials who had gone inside to inspect the place had seen ghosts descending the staircase. Though there were no records of a murder suicide or of town officials seeing ghosts, the story held, and for years the old house remained vacant, until the Cottrells bought it.”

“But why on earth would they buy the only three-story house in all of South Florida if Dorothy was bound to a wheelchair. Wouldn’t a typical one-story Florida house made more sense?”

“That, I can’t tell you. All I know is that they bought the house and Mac fixed it up himself. He was quite the handyman. Cleared the brush around it, and made it livable for Dorothy. Like that elevator he built so she could get up to the top floors, on the south side of the house, with Dorothy’s help. Our teen-aged neighbor across the street, Ron Gagliardi, who worked part-time on the project, recalled how Dorothy scooted around in her wheelchair as if she was one the workers. .

“So I suppose that after the Cottrells moved to the old house didn’t look quite so spooky."

“No, not at all. Now it looked more like a bread and breakfast inn. Just off the elevator, Dorothy grew flowers on pots set on racks at wheelchair level. And inside, when she wasn’t writing, she was cooking, baking or canning. Some of us scouts, though, couldn’t shake the ghost stories. When the troop met in the living room we couldn’t help but steal glances up the stairs, expecting to see ghosts.”

“You’re right, Dad, the story of that old house is a story in itself. But tell me if was that tall and made of wood, wouldn’t a hurricane have blown it down or termites reduced to dust?"
“No, not this old house. It wasn’t stitched together like the ones mass produced nowadays. The structure was a sturdy post and beam. No studs or joists. and the wood—floors, siding, sheathing, rafters—-all termite and rot proof Dade pine.”

“Like the cypress pilings holding up the city of Venice, Italy,” I said.

“Yes, a similar kind of wood. And because the house was never painted, it looked all the more spooky.”

“So maybe that was why the Cottrells bought it, because it had character, and a couple of resident ghosts in the bargain.”

“Well, Maybe so. Writers do tend to have a wild imagination, although I’m sure that Dorothy didn’t believe in ghosts, or Mac either. Anglos are not like us Cubans. They’re a more sober people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Anglos believe in ghosts, goblins, spooks, fairies and such, as much, or even more than Cubans do spirits. Remember, Shakespeare’s plays abound with all sorts of ghosts and supernatural beings. Then there’s the swagman in 'Waltzing Matilda'.”

“Ah yes, the famous swagman. He jumped into the billabong to avoid capture and drowned, but his ghost lived on.” And Dad belted out the last lines of the song.”
“And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong/ “’You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me!’”

"Great voice, Dad," I jested again. ”But back to the old the old house, I’m curious. What became of it after the Cottrells moved out? Is it still standing?"

"No. Shortly after Dorothy died, in the third floor, where the murder suicide had allegedly taken place—-Mac found her dead there one morning—-the house burned to the ground."

"And how about Mac? Did he remain in Homestead. Did you stay in touch with him?"

“No, I was serving in the Navy when all that happened, in 1957. I only learned about it when I came home on leave a month later. Mac had meanwhile returned to Australia leaving no forwarding address. And as to Dorothy, her whereabouts is a mystery.”

”Her whereabouts a mystery? But didn’t she die?"

”Yes, but to this day I don’t know where she was buried, or if her body was cremated, or a memorial service held for her. Strange for one of the more popular writers in her day.”

"That is mysterious," I said.

”My guess is that she wanted it that way. When she saw the Grim Reaper approaching. She probably instructed her heirs to dispense with the conventionally postmortem rituals, because she wanted to live on in the memory of her future readers as the venturesome, energetic person she had always been, not as a corpse. But I can’t be sure”

”You’re probably right,” I said, imagining the anguish that someone like a Shakespeare or a Walt Whitman would have suffered at the moment of death had they known they would be forever embalmed in footnotes and scholarly articles.

”But all this talk about Ghosts and haunted houses—-Hell, we’ve been at it now for half an hour—it’s just idle talk, Son, isn’t it? You couldn’t possibly believe any of it.” Then chuckling, “Because if you do, I’ll schedule an appointment with your nearest psychiatrist first thing tomorrow morning.”

”No need to Dad,” I said, returning the chuckle. “I may be a bit eccentric, but I’m not crazy. It was all idle talk, as you say.” Then bidding each other a cursory “bye,” we simultaneously cut off.

But I wasn’t altogether truthful. The dream or ghost or whatever that vision of Dorothy Cottrell was had utterly possessed me. That evening, in preparation for her next visit, I cruised the Internet for information on her and learned that though she had once been a highly successful novelist and short story writer, all her books had been out of print for decades, and that hardly anyone today, not even in her native Australia, had heard of her.
So now I understood why she had visited me. Dad had guessed right. She did not want to be cast into oblivion. She wanted to live on in the memory of the living and figured—if what goes on in the minds of ghosts can be called figuring—that I could help her. But because we never knew each other, because we had no common memories, the only way she could reach me was through the memories of my father, who, for all I knew, may have been the only person alive who remembered her. Was I losing touch with reality? Maybe, but it felt kind of good, therapeutic. A lot more interesting than doctoring my oft- doctored résumé.
I thereby resolved to do all I could to resurrect Dorothy Cottrell, by creating a web page about her life and works. Now I was ready for her next visit.

She appeared to me again in my office, this time wearing a denim apron rather a woolen comforter over her legs. Her face seemed somewhat flushed, with a sun bonnet on her head, as if she been out working on her garden. Without further ado, she began talking in an animated pitch, to my father Carlos as before, her dark eyes intently fixed in my direction, yet not looking directly at me.

“You see, Carlos, it was like this with me. When I contracted polio at age five, well-meaning counselors convinced my family that by learning to walk with state-of-the-art crutches and braces, I could lead a normal life. But it didn’t work. People couldn't help but see, and in my child’s mind it was perfectly obvious to me, that I was different. So not until I stopped trying to be like everybody else and started to see what could be done with just me, differently but comfortably sitting in a swift little wheelchair, I began to reopen the doors of life.”

”Since then I have had a radiantly happy life. And by a happy life I do not mean one of beautiful thoughts and compensations, but one of much adventure in half the odd corners of the world with Mac. If the good fairy of the old stories offered me the one gift, the ability to walk would not be the thing I would ask for. More years with my husband than I would normally expect, the ability to write better—a dozen things—would come before it.
I have only one great grievance. And that is the shortness of time. I know that I have to die some day, and that may be sooner than I wish. Yet I do not want to cease to exist, for it all to end in nothingness. I would die in peace knowing that I would somehow be remembered.” Saying that, a sad look came over her eyes, and she fell silent.

“Dorothy! Dorothy!” I said half shouting, though not expecting her to hear me. “I understand you. Really. My father, Carlos, explained it all to me. He was your friend. Trust me. I’ll see to it that you are not forgotten.”

But this time Dorothy did hear me. For a moment she locked eyes with me, flicked a knowing little smile, then vanished, never to return. She would not need to visit me again. The title of the web page I created for her is “Dorothy Ida Cottrell, 1902-1957.” Comments and suggestions welcomed.