The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  How could he have forgotten the cold? The cells had no heat and no light. In summer the prisoners sweltered in the humid, airless stench, and in the winter, the cold seeped into their bones until even their thoughts slowed down, and they couldn’t sleep because every movement under the thin blanket was a reminder that no matter what you did, how you turned or lay or tried to wrap your arms around yourself, you would still be cold.

  Too bone-chilled and hungry to sleep, and nothing to stay awake for. He had managed to endure it when he knew that he had only to survive for a stretch of months before the nightmare ended and he could go back into the world. But this time there was nothing to look forward to except the same endless round of hunger and misery for as long as he lived.

  There was some consolation in knowing that the rest of his life wasn’t going to be that long. He hadn’t minded the fever, because at least it kept him from feeling the cold, but the blood disgusted and frightened him. He couldn’t see it when he coughed at night, but he could feel the thick, warm fluid on his thumb and forefinger, and even in the dark he knew it was not phlegm. In the daytime, when he worked and ate in the company of the other prisoners, he heard the coughing and saw the pink-stained rags with which they staunched it. Consumption. The prison doctors, helpless to treat it, solved the problem by ignoring it. “It’s only a bad cold,” they would say. “Come spring, you’ll feel better.” He knew better, though. He’d heard about somebody back in Greenbrier County, who, contracting consumption in Moundsville and sent home to die, nevertheless recovered in the pure mountain air of that beautiful place. But staying here with consumption just meant a quicker way to die than waiting for your heart to give out.

  He didn’t suppose it mattered. He was, for all intents and purposes, dead already. Immured here in a tomb-sized cell, alone in the dark. It was worse than dying, really, because he could still feel things, still shiver, and starve, and suffer. The dead knew nothing, felt no pain, and had nothing more to fear.

  It didn’t seem fair. Here he was, shut away in the cold dark in a stone coffin, while Zona, who was supposed to be dead and gone, was apparently out and about, talking to people and appearing wherever she wanted to.

  Where was the justice in that?

  He even saw her himself sometimes. In the quietest hours before dawn, when his thin and weakened body was shrouded in sweat and his fever raged, shapes took form in the utter blackness of his cell. It was only a sign of delirium; he knew it was. He had heard other men talk about the night terrors that tormented consumptives. It wasn’t only the madmen who screamed in the darkness. Those who coughed up blood saw harrowing visions of their past crimes or of tortures to come in the hereafter.

  Sometimes he saw Zona.

  He would be lying on the bunk, staring off into nothing and willing sleep to come, and there she would be, standing an arm’s length away against the cell wall, watching him, her headed tilted and a faint smile playing on her lips.

  On her first appearance, he had wiped the sweat away from his eyes, thinking that she must surely be a fever dream but not caring much one way or the other because, after all, what was there left for him to fear? She was wearing that brown dress, the one she was wearing when she died, and which he hid and later burned. Idly he wondered why she wasn’t wearing the dress he’d put on her to be buried in. The crooked smile was beginning to irritate him, and he closed his eyes, hoping she’d be gone when he opened them, but she was still there, watching him with a vaguely curious expression. He could have understood anger or a smirking triumph, but the calm contemplation puzzled and annoyed him.

  When the silent staring became unbearable, he muttered, “I didn’t mean to kill you, Zona.”

  Her eyes widened and her smile became broader now. She put her hand over her mouth as if she were afraid she’d laugh aloud.

  “You’re thinking about Lucy, aren’t you? And maybe Allie, too. I don’t reckon I was a good husband to any of you, ever. I always meant to start fresh, and to make things different every time, but you and Lucy were so besotted with me, so eager to please and so much like cringing cur dogs when I lost my temper that it made me want to kick you. And when I did raise my hand to you, instead of fighting back, you just crept about, trying even harder to please me, until I swear I began to want to see what it would take to get a rise out of you.”

  He looked at Zona, still watching him with that half smile and eyes like flint, so solid-looking that he felt he could reach out and touch her, but if he did, then he might discover that she was real, and somehow he couldn’t face that.

  “I guess what it took to get a rise out of you was being throttled to death. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose while you were still alive, but once we put you in the ground, you found you had plenty to say, didn’t you?

  “I didn’t mean to do it, though, Zona. I was hungry that night. I had worked all day in Crookshanks’s blacksmith shop, and I came home ravenous. Then when you stood there and told me in your whiny little voice that there was no meat to be had for supper, but only those puny salted vegetables in jars left over from summer, why, I felt the black rage swallow me up like a swarm of bees. I had starved before, Zona, when I was here in Moundsville last time, and I swore back then that I would never endure hunger again. Didn’t you know that? Nothing ever set me off like an empty stomach. I swear, Zona, if you had bothered to kill one of our chickens and put it in the stewpot, it would have saved your life.”

  He thought he saw her shake her head, ever so slightly. “Well, it would have saved it that night, anyhow. Maybe it would have happened sooner or later, anyway. I’d already got away with wife-killing once, and that made it easier. I wasn’t as afraid with you as I had been with Lucy.

  “Poor mousy little Lucy. She used to creep about the house as if I were a rattlesnake that she might tread on if she weren’t careful. Well, you’ve come back, Zona, but I wonder where she is? Still afraid to come near me, even after she’s dead? Or has she gone through the pearly gates already?” He was hit by a spasm of coughing and felt the thick, warm blood on his clenched fist. He wiped his hand on the sweat-soaked blanket that was as thin as a bedsheet. “Well, I don’t reckon I’ll be seeing her in the hereafter. I’m headed elsewhere, I suppose. I wonder if they’ll let you slip down into hell to watch me roasting over the coals? I bet that would be heaven for you, Zona. You couldn’t leave off chasing men while you were alive—oh, yes, I heard about George Woldridge!—and now that you’re dead, you are still coming after me. Well, I’ll be dead, too, soon enough, and I hope I can get away from you then. I thought you’d be sorry that they didn’t hang me . . .”

  Did he imagine it, or was there a slight shake of her head? No.

  “I don’t think you mind, though, that I escaped the noose. Hanging would have been quick and merciful: a few seconds of pain and then a broken neck—same as you got. Now that I think on it, I reckon that would have been fair. A neck for a neck. But wearing my life away year after year, starving in this cold darkness, in a cage too small for a hog pen, why, I’m getting far worse than I gave. You didn’t suffer long, Zona; you’ll have to allow that. And I have. Oh, I have. Day after day, with nothing to look forward to but more of the same until the consumption finally wears me away. And now you come and stand here, with a little girlish smile on your face, and watch my torment. You are dead and I am alive, but I’m the one in the tomb and you are free.”

  The fit of coughing began again, wracking his body with the force of it. He lay facedown on the blanket, and coughed until his throat was once more clear enough to let him breathe. When he looked up again into the darkness, he was alone.

  * * *

  Edward Erasmus Stribbling “Trout” Shue died in the tuberculosis epidemic in the West Virginia State Penitentiary at Moundsville, on March 1, 1900. He was buried within the grounds of the prison in an unmarked grave, now situated beneath a more recently constructed building.

  twenty-six

  GREENBRIER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA


  1897

  NEARLY SIX MONTHS since Zona died, and the churchyard was green and shady. There was still no headstone on Zona’s grave—probably never would be, if Jacob had his way, but I needed no marker, for I would never forget where my daughter was buried. Every time the family came to church, I’d go around to the side yard just past the end of the church and up the slope a bit, and I’d put some little token of remembrance on her grave, just as I had from the beginning. In July, I brought pink cabbage roses from the bush out by the back porch. I wish I could have brought white blooms, which would have been the proper color to honor the dead, but we only had the one rosebush.

  I would talk to Zona, too, if nobody was nearby to overhear and think I’d taken leave of my senses. I didn’t know if she was still this side of heaven, or if she cared about earthly things anymore, but it gave me comfort to say my thoughts out loud, whether or not she was lingering here to listen.

  “Well, Zona, the trial is over and done with, and the jury had no trouble in finding that worthless husband of yours guilty of murder. I wonder if you have been waiting for him at the gates of death to have your say—though I’m sure he will not be spending eternity in the same place as you. That’s what I came to tell you, though: don’t expect him to be crossing over into the hereafter any time soon. That worthless jury recommended life in prison, and shipped him off to Moundsville a week after the trial. A lynch mob from here in Meadow Bluff almost put the matter to rights, but Sheriff Nickell got wind of it, and Deputy Dwyer hid Edward Shue outside town somewhere until the danger had passed. So now he’s in prison over on the other side of the state, and I guess we’ve heard the last of him. You may know when he dies before we do, though I think I may feel a weight lifted off my heart when he finally departs this world.

  “It doesn’t seem fair, does it, for him to be walking around, eating and sleeping and seeing the sun shine and the grass growing, while you have had all the pleasures of this world taken away from you forever. I hope it’s better where you are now, Zona. I hope heaven is splendid enough to make up for what you lost here.

  “And I hope he has found his hell on earth. I hope he is cold and friendless and miserable. And above all, Zona, I hope he’s hungry.

  “I did what I could to get you justice. I hope the Lord will forgive me for the lie I told—about seeing your ghost and all—but I knew in my heart that devil had murdered you. It was the only way I could make them look for proof. I was right, after all, and I don’t suppose it matters what method I used to get them to find out the truth, but even if heaven faults me for the sin of telling a falsehood, it was worth it.

  “Rest in peace, Zona. I did all I could for you, and you are not forgotten.”

  I was there, Mama. You couldn’t hear me, but I was there.

  You were so tangled up in your own grief and anger that I couldn’t make you hear me.

  You were locked inside your own thoughts tighter than I was in Handley’s wooden coffin. I was sorry to have put you through so much anguish, and sorrier still that Daddy hardened his heart to keep from feeling anything at all. I wish I could tell him that it doesn’t matter about a tombstone. All a grave marker is for is to make sure that the person will be remembered, but I think you made sure that people won’t forget me ever, Mama.

  * * *

  Zona Heaster Shue finally did get a tombstone erected on her grave in the Soule Chapel Cemetery by local citizens of Greenbrier County in 1979.

  Mary Jane Robinson Heaster died on September 6, 1916, without ever recanting her story of seeing her daughter’s ghost. She is buried with her husband in the churchyard of Soule Chapel, near the grave of Zona.

  Author’s Note

  THE STORY OF ZONA HEASTER Shue, “The Greenbrier Ghost,” is West Virginia’s best-known tale of the supernatural, but the incident has always been treated as folklore, a jumble of hearsay and supposition built on a handful of facts. When I first requested information on the Greenbrier Ghost, I was referred to a book of regional folktales, in which Zona’s story took up all of a page and a half. Two years later, with the help of a number of generous and scholarly people, I had amassed a pile of documents six inches thick—census records, birth and death certificates, property records, maps, photographs—a wealth of evidence to bring the folktale back into the real world.

  As I uncovered more and more facts about the incident, the story became more than an account of a mother’s search for justice for her murdered daughter. The Greenbrier County of the Gilded Age came to life, and I have tried to enlarge the narrative into a portrait of that time and place.

  I am grateful to Jim Talbert of the North House Museum in Lewisburg, West Virginia, who was patient and helpful in the earliest days of my research. Mr. Talbert pored over maps with me and gave me pointers in county geography, so that I could locate the places where the events took place and the sites of the residences of most of the key figures. Early on, Mr. Talbert directed me to the museum’s material relating to the Greenbrier Ghost, located a photo of John Alfred Preston, and suggested helpful source material on the attorneys. Greenbrier County physician Kendall Wilson spent a summer afternoon giving me a guided tour of Greenbrier County, helping me to get a sense of the local geography, including the Soule Chapel Cemetery, the house occupied by Edward and Zona Shue, and the place where the community of Livesay’s Mill once stood—it is now open fields with no signs of human habitation.

  Raymond and Lynn Tuckwiller, owners of a beautiful farm not far from where Livesay’s Mill would have been, generously gave me a tour of their home, which is similar in age and construction to the one Edward and Zona Shue once lived in, so that I could visualize the setting—especially the steep flight of stairs leading to the front hall. The Tuckwillers, accomplished drivers of horse-drawn coaches, own an impressive collection of antique vehicles, and their advice was invaluable in helping me to decide what sort of transportation each person would have used in 1897 Greenbrier County.

  Sandra Menders, a native of Greenbrier County, and an expert at finding obscure documents, was my guide and fellow time-traveler, helping me to reconstruct the lives of long-forgotten county residents. As I assembled the list of people who were the major players in the incident, I would fire off questions to Sandra asking for biographical data on each one, and she would track them down through a maze of century-old records. One of the most poignant moments of our research happened when Sandra was examining the birth and death records of the family of Anderson Jones, the youth who discovered Zona’s body. “I think I have just uncovered a tragedy,” Sandra informed me, sending me the paper trail detailing the fate of the Jones family in the fall of 1897. The scene in which Martha Jones tells Mr. Gardner what happened to her family is based on information from their death certificates.

  By tracking these people through half a century of official records, we were able to draw some conclusions about their behavior and personalities. For example, in the folklore accounts of this incident, Anderson Jones is variously described as a child or a young boy—the impression the reader gets is that he was about twelve years old. According to census records, though, Anderson Jones was eighteen years old in January 1897 when he discovered the body of Zona Heaster Shue. Why, we wondered, did the tales depict him as a child, and even more to the point: in a rural Southern community in 1897 why was an eighteen-year-old black man never suspected in the murder of a twenty-three-year-old white woman whose body he discovered? We followed Anderson Jones through census records and county documents until his death in Lewisburg on June 17, 1953, and we learned that he worked at handyman jobs; he never married; and he lived with his mother for most of his life. Putting all these facts together, we concluded that Anderson Jones was developmentally disabled. The folktales depict him as a child because in that era he would have been considered one.

  Sandra Menders and I went from paper trails and library archives to the roads of Greenbrier County, in search of the key places in the story, and for the graves of all the people w
ho by then we felt we knew. We went round and round about the timing of Zona’s death and funeral. The (now defunct) local newspaper, the Greenbrier Independent, listed her death as occurring on Sunday, January 24 (in the paper’s January 28, 1897 edition), but in an article published on February 25, announcing the autopsy, Zona Shue’s date of death is given as Saturday, January 23, which is also the date written on her death certificate. Later accounts from other sources say that she was buried on Sunday, January 24. An interval of eighteen hours from death to burial seems improbably quick, given the distances involved and the weather in January. We spent many hours trying to make sense of the chronology.

  It is approximately twenty miles from Livesay’s Mill to Meadow Bluff, where the Heasters lived and where they buried their daughter. In 1897 the journey would involve unpaved roads and horse-drawn conveyances. On January 23, in West Virginia, sunset comes around 5:30. If Zona died on Saturday, January 23, and was buried on Sunday, the following things have to take place within twenty-four hours:

  Saturday ca. 11:00 a.m. Anderson Jones finds the body, and notifies his mother and Edward Shue.

  Saturday ca. 11:45 a.m. Someone travels the five miles to Lewisburg to summon Dr. Knapp to examine the body. (Is the coffin ordered from the Lewisburg undertakers at this time? If not, there would be a further delay waiting for it.)