by Donis Casey
“Why didn’t you tell your Papa about the thing you saw?”
Shaw felt a jolt like someone had punched him in the chest. He rolled onto his back and found himself nose to nose with her. “How did you know?” He spoke so loudly that Alafair shushed him.
Her breath warmed his face as she murmured her answer. “You said you wished you hadn’t of disturbed that grave. Add that up with the fact that your mama told us the Goingback place is haunted. And considering that you’ve been acting like you’ve seen a ghost, I put one and two together and come up with three.”
He continued in a strained whisper. “Have you told anybody else? Does Mama know?”
“No, I didn’t have time to mention it to her before Scott and Barger rode up and then I forgot about it. That is until later this evening. After supper I got to studying how you’ve been so shook up since you got home from that hunting trip. Whatever is on your mind, you don’t want to talk about it.”
For days, Shaw had been carrying the memory of the strange visitation like a weight, fearful that if someone found out what he saw they’d doubt his sanity. He’d been doubting his own sanity. But now that Alafair knew, he felt a rush of relief wash over him. He made a move to sit up. “We’d better go ask Ma and Papa to tell us everything they know about this ghost.”
Alafair put her hand on his shoulder. “I expect we’d best wait until tomorrow, honey. It’s a bit late.” She sounded amused.
Shaw flopped back down. He could have felt embarrassed at his unreasonable eagerness to get to the bottom of this if he had not been so relieved. Perhaps he wasn’t crazy after all.
Alafair nestled down under the covers. “Now, tell me what you saw.” She laid her head on his shoulder and listened as he recounted his tale of the disembodied legs and the shadow in the trees.
Chapter Seventeen
Sally and Peter weren’t alarmed when they heard the front door open in the middle of the morning, even though they weren’t expecting visitors. They had so many relations that they had long ago lost count, and none ever bothered to knock when they came to Grandma and Grandpapa’s.
The couple was in the kitchen at the back of the house. Peter was just pulling on his coat. Sally was canning pumpkin. She had already put up quarts of plain pumpkin purée over the previous weeks. The batch she was working on now was seasoned for pies, and the whole house was fragrant with the smell of cinnamon and clove, nutmeg and allspice. Thanksgiving was right around the corner, after all.
Sally gave the big pot of simmering pumpkin a final stir with her long-handled wooden spoon before she wiped her hands on her apron and headed out to see who had come calling.
“Ma?”
Sally smiled at Peter when she recognized Shaw’s voice. “In the kitchen, son,” she called. “Come on back.”
Peter hung his coat back on the peg beside the door and sat down, prepared to visit. Sally returned to the stove and slid the coffee pot back over the fire before moving a covered ceramic pie plate from the pie keep to the middle of the long kitchen table. She was pulling saucers out of the hutch when Alafair appeared in the door with Shaw right behind her.
Peter grinned. “Well, I declare! What are you children doing out and about his time of day? Sit yourselves down and have a piece of pie.”
Shaw’s gaze darted around the kitchen, hunting for the source of the enticing odor. “Pumpkin?”
“Not yet.” Sally removed the cover on the pie dish to reveal three-quarters of a two-crust apple pie. She cut and plated three enormous slabs and handed them around the table. “There’s cream in the pitcher on the windowsill yonder.” She went to the stove and poured coffee into mugs and distributed them before seating herself across the table from her son and his wife.
“Gee Dub get off to Stillwater all right?” she asked.
“He did.” Alafair spooned the unsweetened heavy cream from the pitcher over her pie. Not that it wasn’t rich enough. The crust was so short, crisp, and flakey from the lard that Sally had made it with that it barely held together. But this was what Alafair called a “Peter pie.” Peter McBride had a terrible sweet tooth and any dessert that Sally made to please him was so sweet that it set a normal person’s teeth on edge. In fact there was so much sugar in this pie that the apples had dissolved. Applesauce pie, was more like it. And to top it off Sally had sprinkled granulated sugar over the top crust. Alafair was amused to note that the super-sweetness didn’t seem to bother Shaw any more than it did Peter.
Shaw shoveled in another mouthful before looking up at his mother. She was sitting across from him with her mug in her two hands, her apron stained with pumpkin puree and smelling of nutmeg, watching him, patient as always.
He swallowed his bite and looked at Peter. “I’m surprised to find you home this time of day, Papa.”
“I’m betwixt the apple barn and the stable at the moment, son. Some fellow from Shawnee is coming in this afternoon to talk to me about having Red Allen stand to stud for a walker filly he owns. I told him to meet me here at the house. I don’t expect he’ll be here for a couple of hours, but you’re welcome to come with us if you want.”
Shaw suddenly lost his appetite and pushed the plate away. “Thanks, but we’ll not be here that long. Me and Alafair got to talking last night and she reminded me that you had said the old Goingback place is supposed to be haunted. Papa, you told us that you didn’t know who the haint is supposed to have been when he lived. But we were wondering if the folks that live around there have a story about somebody dying in those woods. Was there a battle there, or a fight, or a killing back in the past? If there was, it could give us a hint as to who we dug up last week.”
Peter shook his head. “Not that I ever heard about, son. The only tales I heard from the good citizens of Oktaha told of lights in the forest, lights in that old house. Before she left, Miz Hawkins told me that strange things were happening and she was afraid. I figured it was wastrels who had heard of a woman alone out there and took advantage to do some thieving.”
Sally stood up and returned to the stove in order to stir her bubbling purée. “Don’t you remember the story Jack Cecil told us, Peter?”
“Oh, I had forgotten that, Sally, dear.”
Sally glanced back over her shoulder at Shaw and Alafair. “Jack took his boy Joe out there camping, oh, four, five years ago. Said bits of their food kept disappearing. A knife went missing out of a knapsack. They woke up one morning and everything in the camp had been rearranged. Not ruined or broke, mind you. Just moved around and set back down real neat. Joe told his daddy that he had heard somebody whispering in the night but when Joe stuck his head out the tent to see who it was, no one was there.”
Shaw’s heartbeat picked up. He determined to have a talk with his sister Josie’s husband Jack Cecil at his earliest opportunity. He shook himself. “Well, animals could have got to their food. And I saw for myself how deep and wet the woods are. I’d say swamp gas and moonlit fog for the lights. The other thing sounds more like a vagabond who likes to play tricks than a ghost.”
“Maybe,” Sally admitted. “Jack thought so at first, ’til he passed through Oktaha on the way home. Him and the boy stopped off at the market there, and when they related their tale to the proprietor, he told them that there had been something in the woods out that way for years.”
Alafair took a sip of her coffee. After the pie the strong, bitter brew was delicious. “How many years? Before Hawkins got there or after?”
“I don’t know, sugar.”
Whether it was before or after the disappearance of Roane Hawkins, Shaw was relieved to hear them confirm that the disturbance had been there for years. He was not the one who set it loose by disturbing its grave.
Alafair put her hand on Shaw’s arm. “Shaw, if the grocer told Jack about the ghost I’m sure the sheriff heard the same tale when he went to asking around in Oktaha after y’all discovered the body. If anybody in Oktaha had an idea of who folks think could be haunting those woods, Sherif
f Barger probably knows about it by now.”
“You’ve seen it, Papa?” Shaw asked.
Peter shrugged and poked at his pie with his fork. “Maybe. Just once have I stayed all the night there. That was not long after Miz Hawkins moved away. The house was still standing, then, and I rolled out my sleeping bag on the floor. It was a bitter cold night, I remember. I heard something outside and went to investigate. There was no one around the cabin but I thought I saw a figure slipping into the woods and called out. I still had it in my mind that vandals were about, you see. But it was dark as Hades. Perhaps I saw something and perhaps I didn’t. ” He smiled. “Your mother assures me I was hearing things, but I could have sworn I heard a voice say my name.”
That last sentence caused the hair on Shaw’s arms to rise. “You ever been out to that place, Ma?”
“Once, not long after Peter bought it.” Sally didn’t turn from her stirring. “Miz Hawkins had already moved away. It was daytime, so I never saw any roving spirits. I thought it was a nice house when I saw it.”
“It was on its last legs when we were out there. I was afraid to let the boys explore it for fear it’d fall in on their heads. When was it that Miz Hawkins asked you to buy her place, Papa?”
“I don’t remember exactly, but the Sheriff said it was in ’06. It’s on the deed transfer. It was about this time of year. Lucretia came riding up here to the house in a broken-down old buckboard and told me that Roane had skipped and she was looking to sell. I followed her back out there the next morning and stayed a couple of days looking over the property before I agreed to buy it off her.”
“I remember he told me it was a nice, big, wooded parcel, with a house and water,” Sally said. “He was back out there once or twice to complete the sale. I never thought much about it again.” She cast a casual glance at Shaw before replacing the lid on the simmering puree. “I suppose you saw the haint, son.” It wasn’t a question.
Peter nearly choked on his coffee. “Did you now, Shaw!”
Shaw knew it shouldn’t have, but his mother’s statement took him aback. He exchanged a look with Alafair, who didn’t seem at all surprised. “Well, I saw something, Papa, and I’d appreciate to know what it was.” The situation suddenly struck him as ironic and he laughed. “So much for trying to keep a secret around you two gals.”
Sally shrugged. “You’re awful curious about that ghost. I’ve never known you to show much interest in the other world before now.”
“I’d like to go back to Oktaha and ask around about the haint. I wish I could do it right now, but I plan to butcher tomorrow. I’ve got John Lee coming over to help out, and the hogs are already fasting. I can’t put it off.”
“You’d better not,” Alafair admonished. “I’ve been cooking for days to get ready. Ruth and Charlie are staying home from school tomorrow, and Phoebe and Alice both will be over during the next week to help me put up sausages and render lard. Nobody will be gallivanting off to Oktaha for a good while.”
Chapter Eighteen
After the first frost Shaw had placed a bucket of water just outside the back door. When an almost imperceptible skin of ice formed on the water for three or four mornings in a row, he decided that the weather had finally turned cool enough to butcher. He had already decided which pigs were going to meet their fate. The two porkers had been isolated in their own pens for some weeks.
Shaw always approached butchering time with mixed emotions. He loved late fall and the end of the heat and hard work of summer and harvest. He loved tending to all his animals, raising happy and healthy beasts. He felt no guilt when time came for them to die, but he had to admit he did feel regret. Still, he concentrated on the task at hand and made sure they met their ends in as humane a fashion as possible and as they had lived, without fear.
Early in the morning after breakfast, just as dawn made its first streak on the horizon, Shaw loaded his .22 pistol and herded Charlie out the door. He missed Gee Dub at times like this, when there was a big and unpleasant job to do. Gee Dub was a calm and efficient presence, working quickly and quietly when he wasn’t cracking jokes. Charlie had always been something of a gnat, buzzing around, easily distracted and often more an annoyance than a help. Shaw had to admit, though, that Charlie had buckled down considerably in the last year or so since his older brother had gone off to Stillwater. He had turned fourteen. He had always been a scrawny little bundle of motion, but lately he had shot up and filled out so much that sometimes Shaw caught himself wondering who was the strange youth living in his house and eating up so much of his food.
As they made their way toward the confinement pens, Shaw found himself wishing that he had brought a cane to herd the dawdling Charlie. Charlie’s way of dealing with the onerous job before them was to avoid it as long as possible.
Shaw, on the other hand, had a different philosophy. “Come on, son. Let’s get this over with.”
He rounded the barn and caught sight of John Lee Day, his daughter Phoebe’s husband, sitting on a sanded-off stump with Kurt, waiting for them. John Lee was a small, neat-figured young man with a wealth of coarse, unruly dark hair, and solemn, oversized black eyes. All four men were dressed in their raggediest clothing: overalls with broken straps, faded woolen shirts with multiple mendings and missing buttons, frayed trousers patched at seats and knees, old boots with holes in the toes and run-down heels or no heels at all. This was going to be a hard, messy job, and whatever they had on would not be fit to wear ever again.
The “slaughter house” was simply a ramada, a small, roofed shelter next to a very large American elm fitted with a block and tackle over one limb, located a few yards behind the barn and toward the woods. The shelter covered no more than a packed earth floor, a long, sturdy table, and a very large iron cauldron. The smoke house was only a few steps away.
It was a frigid morning and their breath fogged the air. They immediately hung their coats on hooks in the shelter, far removed from the action. Adrenalin and sheer brute toil would keep them plenty warm.
Each hog was quickly dispatched with a bullet in the brain, then hauled up with a block and tackle to hang head down from a sturdy limb of the elm tree, where the real work of preparing the carcass began.
The entire process of putting up the meat for two two-hundred pound hogs was going to take much of the upcoming week, so Alafair had been baking and preparing for easy-to-cook meals for several days. Charlie and Ruth had been kept home from school to help, but Alafair had sent Grace to Phoebe’s house and the younger girls were in school. Martha was at work and Mary should have been as well. Shaw expected that she had volunteered to help out because she was interested in spending time with Kurt rather than from any desire to clean hog intestines. Other grown children and children-in-law would appear at intervals throughout the week to assist in the work.
By noon the group was so inured to what they were doing and so depleted by the physical toll the work took on them that they ate Alafair’s vegetable soup and cornbread like a squad of soldiers after a battle.
The younger girls came home from school, changed clothes, and joined the family for the rest of the afternoon as they sat around tubs of hot water, washing intestines and stomachs for sausages and head cheese, turning them inside out, scraping out the fat for rendering. When the light began to fade, Shaw rigged a portable shelter around the hog carcasses and left them cooling overnight in the chill November air, the innards soaking in salt water, before the men trooped inside to clean up and go to bed. Alafair made “bear soup” by heating milk and pouring it over bowls of left-over cornbread for supper, but everyone was too exhausted to eat much.
Chapter Nineteen
The sun hadn’t even tickled the horizon when Shaw stumbled outside first thing the next morning with a lantern in hand, half awake, to check on the cooling hog carcasses.
He left Alafair in the kitchen heating up the stove for breakfast and went out the back door with Charlie Dog trailing behind. Crook appeared, all charm and go
od humor, wagging his crooked tail in greeting. The three of them proceeded to the processing shed in a companionable knot. Buttercup was being held incommunicado. Last night Shaw had noticed Crook sniffing around her, distracted and stupid with love. Shaw recognized the signs and immediately locked her in the tool shed. He wasn’t prepared to deal with a litter of puppies at the moment so Buttercup would be spending a week or so in her own private convent.
The butchered hogs were still hanging suspended from the ceiling beams, protected from night critters by a jury-rigged shelter of Shaw’s own invention. It was made of chicken wire and a grid of sturdy poles driven into pre-drilled holes in the hard dirt floor. It wouldn’t stop a bear, he expected, but few had been around in past years. It was good enough to make a raccoon or fox stop and scratch his head, though. And the best part was that he didn’t have to lug the hogs around before they were cut up into manageable pieces.
As they approached the shed Crook put his nose to the ground and began to snuffle around in circles. This was normal hunting dog behavior and Shaw barely noticed. But when Charlie Dog fell back and emitted a low growl, Shaw paused and lifted his lantern. The pink carcasses caught the light through the wooden cage. Everything looked the same as it had last night. The only movement he could see was the pale fog of his own breath in the lamplight. He looked down at the yellow shepherd now sitting at his feet, ears pricked. The dog seemed alert but not alarmed.
“What is it, boy?” Shaw’s voice was barely above a murmur.
Charlie Dog looked up at him, always happy to be acknowledged. His fluffy tail swept the dirt a couple of times. Shaw snorted. Whatever had gotten his back up, the dog had forgotten about it already. Crook was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps an animal had checked the situation during the night and Crook was on its trail. Either that or he had slipped off to see if he could find a way to sneak into Buttercup’s cell for a tryst.