Now I know I shouldn’t have spoken so presumptuously to Jasmine about Granddaddy’s ghost. I never meant to mislead her, but a well-dressed young English teacher was not the ghost she saw. I felt Jasmine stop breathing in the same split second her hands flew all around, as if she were warding off an unseen swarm of bees—in the same split second I felt her hot urine flood over my thighs, and I heard the diaper man bellow, “Not Little Ray!” Not his classroom voice. Even before I could manage to see him, I knew the emeritus had moved on from punctuation. There was nothing schoolteacherish about this ghost. This was the infantile shitter, on the verge of electrocution.

I had to shield my face from Jasmine’s flying hands. Her rings were cutting me, everywhere. There was a clunky, glitzy ring on each of her fingers—except the wedding one. “That woman’s hands were mostly diamonds, dear—big ones,” Nana told me later. (Sharp ones, I can attest.)

“Not Little Ray!” the enraged diaper man kept shouting. He didn’t need a lip-reader to be understood now. I saw he was the infant in extremis, the infant terribilis, the near-death diaper man—the scrawny lunatic emeritus, naked except for the diaper, clutching a fistful of croquet wickets in his wizened hands.

“Not Little Ray!” Jasmine was now wailing—she was doing her best to convince the ghost she was on his side.

“Not Little Ray!” they now screamed at each other. If my grandmother didn’t hear (and couldn’t see) Granddaddy Lew, she of course could hear Jasmine screaming the unmentionable.

“I got this, Mrs. Brewster!” I heard Dottie calling.

Our neighbors must have heard Jasmine screaming, “Not Little Ray!” The raving bed-wetter was now standing on my bed, where her soaked negligee clung to her. In truth, although Jasmine was slightly younger than Molly, she looked a lot older than the ski patroller in these circumstances.

“Little Ray is my mom,” I felt compelled to say, since Jasmine wouldn’t stop shrieking her name. For no known reason, what I said appeared to upset Jasmine more. At that moment, the diaper man stopped shouting. A passing semblance of sanity crossed his face. He squatted, grunting. Could ghosts crap? Did they? I’m done with generalizing. All I’ll say is that the diaper man appeared to be trying to fill his diaper. Not to be outdone, or having abandoned what remained of her reasoning, Jasmine—still standing on the bed—let her bowels go. Or she let go of both her bowels and her sanity, in no discernible order.

Yes, Jasmine shit in my bed. No, this never happened with another girlfriend—marriageable or unmarriageable. Such a spontaneous act of defecation defeated or outdid the diaper man. He disappeared, which ghosts can do as suddenly as they can show up.