Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  It happened so fast that he couldn’t believe it was real. When it seemed like it must be through, he got back in the car. What was left of Amber was spread across the backseat.

  He drove long, slow circles around town. He drove to the airport and back. Beale thought he might be in shock, and that was why he couldn’t do anything. All the while, he listened to the snapping and gnawing of bones. The cat ghost was hungrier now than in real life. It had eaten all of Amber.

  He finally drove around behind the Sonic Drive-In and put his grandmother’s car in Park. He opened the car door. The dome light came on. Heavy with fear and dread, Beale climbed out of the car and leaned back in to see what might be done. He had to take her somewhere. He had to do something.

  Amber was entirely gone. Nothing was left but her clothes and shoes. Not a speck of blood or skin or bone anywhere. Her skull and teeth were gone. The cat had eaten everything human.

  Beale put her clothes and shoes in the trunk and closed the lid. He walked to the big green dumpster to take a leak. No sooner was he finished and zipped up than a spotlight came on, blinding him.

  Beale put his arm over his face so he could see.

  “Come over here,” a male voice said.

  The spotlight went off. Beale walked to the police car.

  “Do you know a girl named Amber Monroe? She’s about your age.”

  “Yes, sir, I think I do. But I haven’t seen her lately. Is something wrong?”

  “Probably called her boyfriend in Memphis to come down to get her. Her parents said she didn’t come home tonight. They call us all the time.”

  Beale nodded.

  “It’s against the law to pee back here, you know?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t know that. I apologize.”

  “That’s all right then. Just don’t be doing it often, Beale. You better get on home now. Don’t want you worrying your momma over little things.”

  Beale drove out of town on Fox Island Road instead. It was quiet out that way. He kept his elbow out the window. If he told anybody, they wouldn’t believe him. He’d get in trouble of some kind for having her clothes, but without a body it wouldn’t be murder. They’d hound him to say each place he and Amber had been. And they wouldn’t find her anyway. No one ever would.

  He got to work early the next day and used the phone on his break to call some of the numbers that had been placed under the wiper of his car. The first one he called was the man who ended up buying the Bel Air from Beale.

  “That’s my grandmother’s name on the title. It was always her car.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “It has a cat ghost that lives in the seats. Won’t bother anyone unless you go to sleep in the car. He was my grandma’s cat. He died when she did.”

  The man stared at him.

  “Don’t let anyone go to sleep in the car.” Beale had to tell him. “The cat will eat their face if you do.”

  The man laughed.

  “They all have a story to tell,” he said, shaking Beale’s hand. “These old cars all have a story or two.”

  EDGEFIELD, SOUTH CAROLINA

  Cat Shine

  They had to tear down the outhouses and build new ones at the Free Will Baptist church out in the Edgefield district. The good Southern Baptists there were getting the ghost in the wrong way at those outhouses back behind the church. The preacher blamed it all on Gedde Hahn. But the preacher had a little bit to do with it himself.

  Gedde Hahn hated his wife. He hated his neighbors. And he hated the man in the moon.

  He hadn’t set out to hate people so. They just seemed to deserve it. When he came home from the War Between the States, having served in Hampton’s Legion through to the end, he hated that both his brothers were dead. They’d been killed in battle and by army fevers, along with almost everyone else in South Carolina except the generals, who were all lawyers to begin with. Lawyers could live through about anything, if someone else would die in their place.

  When Confederate general Martin Witherspoon Gary returned to Edgefield, Gedde found out he hated him for certain. Gary was just another lawyer trying to tell people how they should vote. According to the general, they should vote for him.

  Gedde had a cat named Lee, and that was about the only being he liked to spend time with those days. Lee was gray all over, and Gedde thought he should be named something else, but everyone thought the world of Robert E. Lee. Gedde had never met the man. But if he had been introduced to Robert E. Lee, Gedde was sure he would have hated him. But since he didn’t hate him yet, Gedde named his gray cat Lee.

  The family land was all his now, 160 acres above West Stores Crossing. It was mostly scrub trees and brush, far too much of it covered with woods. His wife made a garden and kept the house. Gedde didn’t know how she managed it, and he didn’t care. He didn’t like her much, and as best he could tell she didn’t like him.

  He was still a young man and needed a better way than crops to make a living. He put a few acres in corn but rarely messed with them. He grew his beard.

  Gedde had learned to make pots and jugs when he was young, while his older brothers took care of the farm. He still knew how. Gedde had two good hands for it. He made a clay smoking pipe and kept it in his mouth almost all the time, to keep from telling people, and his wife, how much he hated them.

  The slaves left the potteries at the end of the war. All of them up and walked away. General Gary didn’t want them around if they could vote. He would have told them to leave, but they were already gone. Gedde saw his opportunity was to make pots cheaper than the factory potters could. They were lazy no-accounts over at Pottersville, and he hated every last one of them. They once had the slaves throwing those big jars together for them, and turning the jugs in the fire when it was at its hottest. They were all too lazy to do it for themselves now.

  Lee stood guard atop the toolhouse while Gedde built a large pottery shed. Then he and Lee rode his wagon to the old Modoc camps near the Savannah River and loaded it with clay. He could dig clay almost anywhere, but the Modoc people had already processed the dirt and chips out of theirs, so he could start working right away. He hated them, though, for charging him so much. Neither he nor Lee said a word on the haul home. The next batch, he would use his own clay.

  He dug a groundhog kiln the size of four graves. Lee watched him every step of the way. Gedde bought bricks for the lining and the roof of it. He filled washtubs with water and worked the clay on a treadle wheel. He practiced cutting lids of clay to match the storage jars he made. Half-gallon on up, jars for pickling, for salting meat, for storing lard. Jars for about anything.

  When Gedde was done with those, he made jugs. The handles were trickier, but he picked up the skill on his own. The jugs didn’t have to be as big. The jugs were for holding vinegar, wine, molasses, and spirituous liquors. Lots of boys were making spirituous liquors after the war. He tried pitchers and didn’t like it much. He did up a handful of pans, and some bowls for kitchen mixing. Gedde made a few tobacco pipes. He wanted one for himself that was glazed on the outside and wouldn’t get so hot when he smoked it.

  The glaze was a messy job, but an important one. Gedde ground up feldspar with a stone and added wood ashes, lime, and any sand he could find. He wasn’t sure what color the syrupy glaze would turn out until he fired it, but at the beginning it was green. The firing took three days. It was awful work, and Gedde had to go at it flat out to keep enough wood for the flames.

  He hated the pieces that broke in the fire and cussed them good. But most of them didn’t break. Gedde made them thick to keep that from happening. The glaze was different on some, tan and brown, olive and brown, gray and brown. Most of the top runs were brown and looked like tobacco juice. The glaze cooked hard as stone. He had to use a grinding wheel on the bottoms where it ran down and made lips around the edges.

  Gedde Hahn went to church to let as many people know as he could that his pots and jugs were done. He loaded one of each on the
wagon. His wife came along. They might not let him in without her. Lee guarded the works at home.

  “Nobody’s going to steal anything,” his wife said. “They’re all in church.”

  “The people who don’t steal are in church,” Gedde corrected her. Then again, she might be right. Gedde hated the idea of that.

  Gedde had listened to plenty of Episcopal sermons in the camps during the War Between the States. The Virginia preachers spoke softly of duty and sacrifice and made complicated definitions out of parts of the Bible that Gedde had never read. Some things paralleled some other things, he learned, and parallels amounted to tantamount. The fact he couldn’t disagree with a one of the preachers made him like them less. He had quit listening altogether after Second Manassas.

  The Free Will Baptist preacher, Brother Blaine, was different from the Episcopalians. He said his sermons simple and plain. And about the only Bible Brother Blaine knew was the Ten Commandments, although he added several by the time he was through. You could hate him right off the mark, if you wanted to.

  “Lord,” he said,“it is a sin to want things!”

  It was a sin to drink. It was a sin to smoke. And, he shouted, it was a sin to eat.

  It was a sin to eat when other people were hungry. Gedde didn’t hate him for saying that. I eat when I’m hungry, he thought, not when other people are.

  Money was a sin, too. And to prove it, the deacons passed the bowls to help you get rid of yours. The next time he came with a wagon of pots and jugs, he’d have to get to church sooner, before the money ran out when Brother Blaine took it all.

  When it came to the Bible, Gedde concluded that the only thing left for a man to decide was which sins he’d take on and which ones he would leave for others. It was handy, having a list shouted out for you, so you could choose.

  Gedde’s pots and jugs were good ones, heavy and stout, and word spread around West Stores Crossing and beyond. Over time, he sold most of them. He made money. And then he made more pots. It was hard work, but he was used to that. He made more money when he dug into a hillside on his place and began processing his own clay. People in the district ended up with plenty of storage jars and lard pots.

  Before two years were out, Gedde learned that the demand was in jugs.

  The boys who cooked up illegal liquor ordered them in advance. They paid more for jugs than anyone paid for pots and jars. They paid even more when Lee made the half-gallon jugs with the bottoms twice as thick and curved up from the middle a small ways in. They said it was to keep the bottoms extra strong because the jugs got dropped and plunked down hard on rocks and benches and stumps and things. Gedde knew better. They wanted those particular half-gallon jugs because they held pretty much less than a half-gallon.

  Gedde Hahn marked his jugs for the liquor trade by cutting into the surface of the clay with an awl before the glazing and firing. He knew which ones were which from then on. He came up with the idea to write things in the clay with his awl. Gedde got a kick out of that. His favorite was when he wrote “Ain’t No Sin” on some he took to his church the first Sunday after a firing.

  Lee got old watching Gedde make jugs. He’d move his gray tail in time while the wheel spun. But otherwise, Lee looked bored by it all.

  “Let’s do something new, Lee,” Gedde said around the glazed clay pipe in his mouth. “The boys that put up shine are paying me twice what anyone else can pay for a jug.” He stared hard at the cat. The cat stared back. “That means they are making more money than anyone. That means they are making more money that I am. I hate that.”

  He put all his tools on his wagon and hauled it up to the back of his land, where he cut clay from the hillsides. He already had dug a big clay cave in one of those hidden hills. Gedde built his still in there. A man couldn’t see a thing from anywhere, for all the trees. He well knew he could make more jugs than one still could use up. So he put another still right next to the first. And then he built a third. Much as he hated to, Gedde planted more corn.

  Gedde became the first man in all of the Edgefield district to make his own squeezins and his own jugs to put them in. He kept his liquor pure. He put in sugar, of course, and a smidgen of molasses to add color and a hint of taste besides copper pan. Gedde had learned to mix for color by making glaze.

  He sold his spirituous liquor for less than the old boys could. Gedde had made his way in the world. A liquor cooker couldn’t buy an empty jug from Gedde Hahn anymore.

  Gedde went to church more often. He put a canvas cover on the wares in the wagon. He wrote some of the words that he heard at church on his jugs. “The Lord Taketh” was one he used. Then he wrote on the other side,“Drink Fast.”

  Lee enjoyed watching the stills cook. The small fires flickered and licked at the air. They didn’t drive him off like the kiln fires did. The copper tubs pinged when they got hot and cooled off, which kept his attention. The clay was cool for a cat to stretch out on.

  Lamp and ladle ledges were carved all along the sides of that clay cave. One day, Gedde moved a ladle from one clay ledge to another while stirring hot mash. Maybe Lee was too old to take note of it. When Gedde was out at the wagon getting sugar, the gray cat leapt to a ledge from another one and ran into that ladle. He came off the clay and fell into the cooking mash. Lee died right away. He sunk down in and stayed.

  Gedde hated that the most. It broke his heart to lose his friend that way.

  A cat distilled was to Gedde’s mind a cat taken care of, same as if he’d been cremated or buried. He had an idea for a grave marker, and he put his hands to it.

  He wet the clay and threw the jugs on the wheel licketysplit. He worked a good thick lip on each one. He marked a set of cat whiskers with the awl into each of them. Gedde ran the glaze from top to bottom. He fired the kiln.

  Four day later, those jugs had cooled.

  When the half-gallon whiskers jugs were filled and corked, Gedde raked out the mash and let it dry. He layered it in a canvas tote and carried it by Jakob Jaynes’s farm as slop for the hog.

  It was a cold autumn come down. Gedde rode the wagon to West Stores Crossing in the middle of the week. People called it “airish” when it got this cool. Gedde wore a slouch hat to hold his hair on. The crops were out, and the gardens were done. The harvests were in. It was cold enough to drink, and everybody wanted some. Gedde parked his wagon in the road. His beard tilted in the wind. It came straight down from the north, where it was airish most every night.

  A man could have a sample if he asked for it. Gedde kept a little liquor in an open pottery jar. They’d hoot and holler and stamp the ground. Gedde kept his pipe in his mouth and thought Lee would be proud.

  “Don’t break that jug. You can use it again.”

  That was the only thing he said to them.

  He sold every jug of cat shine he had on his wagon.

  When Gedde got out of bed Sunday morning to stoke the fireplace and put a pot of coffee in at the edge, he heard a cat meow. It sounded like Lee. Every time he took a step, he heard the meow. His wife snored away in the covers. He hated the way she snored and didn’t like sticking around. Still, he looked for Lee where he heard the meow loudest. He looked under the bed.

  A silliness came over him for doing that. Nothing was under the bed but the chamber pot on the low side, where his wife slept. He hated her for weighing the bed down like that.

  Gedde combed his beard for church and put a brand-new pipe in his mouth. He wrapped up and tramped out to the pottery shed. He had kept one jug for himself. The rest were sold. Lee’s passing was being marked by many men in the district, more than would ever attend a funeral for a cat, he bet.

  He swirled that jug in his hand. It was lighter than it should have been. It sloshed when it should have been full. His wife must have had the cork out of this one. Gedde wondered how long she’d been doing that. It made him smile to understand why she had taken to singing late at night sometimes before coming to bed. He liked her for it. And he wouldn’t hate church as
much from now on, knowing that the properly dressed woman with her hair tied up sitting next to him was a sinner, same as he was.

  Uncorking the bottle, Gedde heard that long meow. The whiskey he had made was part Lee. There wasn’t a cat in the world that liked being bottled up. He took a good long swig. He put the cork back in.

  Gedde waited, but not long at all, and pulled the cork out.

  Meow!

  This was fun. Gedde grinned and danced a bit. He hadn’t danced since before the war. He put the cork in four or five more times. Every time he got it out, Lee let loose with a healthy meow. Gedde laughed so hard his pipe dropped out of his mouth.

  In a little, he came out into the wind, wobbling some. Gedde stumbled around to the back of the shed and leaned one arm against the planking to relieve himself. As he did, Lee meowed, long and loud. The dead cat wouldn’t stop meowing when he hit the open air. That explained the chamber pot. Gedde laughed so hard he fell down. He rolled on the ground in his overalls, laughing at Lee. For a good ten minutes, he didn’t hate anything or anyone. The war was over for Gedde and for everyone who had died scared and sick and away from home. The war was over for every wretched one who died in pain.

  Little pieces of leaves were in his beard when he carried the jug back into the house that morning for pancakes and coffee.

  Gedde Hahn couldn’t stop grinning long enough to go to church that Sunday. He danced his wife around the house instead.

  Two weeks later, a man in a suit and tie stepped down from the train in Trenton, South Carolina. He asked to hire a carriage to take him to the Jakob Jaynes farm. He wore a waxed mustache and a derby hat. He said he was with the Southern Circus. He carried a cane with a jade elephant on top.