Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  Goddamn, he cried. He fairly leapt from the bed, ran across the room with his bare feet slapping the floor, whirling back when banked lightning in staccato progression showed the bed bare save the pale length of Corrie’s naked body, the rumpled bedclothes.

  He ran to Stephie’s room, turned on the light. She was asleep with the covers thrown off, pajama-clad knees against her chest. He turned back the way he had come, went into the hall. He stood naked for a moment beneath the chandelier, confused and disoriented, looking wildly about the foyer, the staircases climbing incrementally into shadows.

  A fierce bloom of light lit all the windows simultaneously with photoelectric brilliance, coincident to the boom of an explosion and Binder was sunk into oblivion. The silence there in the dark was enormous. It grew and expanded. He seemed deprived of all his senses save touch, sank to the floor. He could feel against his naked body the cold, smooth surface of floorcovering wet with rain driven through the open screen. The walls of the foyer seemed removed. He was lost in windy darkness, and the atmosphere of the house had changed, become profoundly malefic, as if the air had been charged by the switching on of some enormously evil battery.

  Out of this silence came a feminine laugh, fey and whimsical, dry as the sound of cornshucks rustling together. The laugh rose in timbre, strangled itself instantly on a high gurgling note like the watervoiced call of a thrush. It was silent again.

  I’ve got to get a hold of myself, Binder thought, but it took an enormous effort to remember his name. He sat waiting for the lights to come back on. They did not. The goddamned transformer, he thought, remembering the explosion. He tried to recall what he had done with the flashlight: the nightstand drawer. He arose, felt his way cautiously toward the wall until lightning mapped the room. He made the bedroom door, paused again, gained the wall in darkness, and felt along it until the room was briefly lit.

  The flashlight was there. He snapped it on and felt better immediately. He looked at Corrie. He didn’t know how, but still she slept. He hesitated by the door of Stephie’s room, loath to turn and go, but ultimately the thought of someone else in the house was intolerable. There was no way he was going to get back to sleep. He wished the gun had been unpacked. Binder was trying not to think about the hand on his leg.

  He was halfway up the stairs when the singing began. Vague, far-off, murmurous, no words he could decipher and maybe no words at all, maybe just the voice filtered through the walls and time and his consciousness, the melody familiar and curiously nostalgic, timeless. He thought desperately of songs he knew, anything to drown out the hypnotic song. The Beatles, he thought, think of the Beatles, listen to the music playing in your head.

  He was on the landing, and the music had grown clearer, louder in volume. A feminine voice, a contralto, innocent and pure, a young girl’s voice.

  He couldn’t understand the words yet. The beam of the flashlight played about the upstairs hall. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing. The singing was coming from behind a closed mahogany door. Cheek laid against it, he could feel the smooth, cold wood and hear the woodfiltered voice singing still.

  He threw open the door. It was empty save a bed, a functional-looking chest of drawers. Silent, too, for the singing had stopped at the opening of the door as surely as if he had jerked the tone-arm of a phonograph off a record, cut off instantly in midnote. He could hear, rising above the silence, the wash of rain at the uncurtained windows. Turning with the light he saw only his reflection and the glassed-out silver motion of water. The air of the room felt electric and telluric, as if it had just been quit by the presence of another.

  The singing commenced in the next room. Sweet, a capella, for some reason it made him think of a young girl at her toilet, preening before a mirror, singing softly to herself.

  He turned with the light, crept stealthily into the hall, approached the bedroom door, twisted the knob gently. Abruptly he kicked the door so hard it slammed against the wall, played the light desperately over the room. Now the singing was behind him, descending the stair, and he began to understand the words:

  Lay down, my dear sister

  Won’t you lay and take your rest

  Won’t you lay your head upon your Savior’s breast?

  And I love you, but Jesus loves you the best

  And I bid you goodnight…goodnight…goodnight

  He descended the stairs two at a time, but the voice had turned a corner in the hall. Shining the light toward the corner he saw for an instant the hindquarters of a black dog. He ran toward it, the light bobbing from ceiling to floor, rounded the corner into the kitchen and swept the light from side to side.

  Nothing.

  The singing was faint and far off, indecipherable. A man’s hoarse and guttural voice abruptly said something. It might have been curse or invocation. The singing rose in timbre. The man’s voice began again, singsong, a nursery rhyme, patient and slow, as if laboriously explaining something to a child.

  A is for ark, that wonderful boat

  Noah built it on land getting ready to float.

  Silence then except the singing.

  The man said patiently,

  B is for beast at the ending of the wood, who ate all the children

  When they wouldn’t be good.

  The voice slurred drunkenly off into an incoherent mumble.

  Above the voices Corrie was calling David, David, a rising voice verging on panic.

  The lights came on. The refrigerator compressor kicked in, began to hum reassuringly. He could hear the air conditioner whirring from the bedroom. The atmosphere of the house altered, seemed drained of evil.

  She was sitting on the side of the bed, a blanket across her lap, hands cupping her breasts defensively, eyes wide with alarm until she recognized him.

  Where were you, David?

  Looking for something. I heard something.

  Heard something? What? Why was it dark, was the power off?

  I guess lightning knocked it out and they fixed it. I heard something walking.the door was open. I guess it was a dog.

  A dog, she said in disbelief.

  She said something else, but Binder did not hear. He checked on Stephie then lay down on the bed. The sheets were damp and cool, the air conditioner was drying the sweat on him. His head hurt. He closed his eyes, aware of her beside him, but he was thinking of the cool hand on his calf, the aching purity of the voice. He wondered at which point his fear had turned to exultance and he was remembering Charlie Cagle on the park bench saying, You let such as that in your own self.lSomehow he had done that, and the thought of his own complicity in it was more frightening than the singing had been.

  An Excerpt from The Beale Haunting by J. R. Lipscomb

  Jacob Beale was born in 1785 in Halifax County, Virginia. He was the eldest son of Henry Beale, a wealthy landowner and planter of English and Irish descent. For over a hundred years the Beales had been a wellknown English family.

  He was educated to the standards of those primitive times, going to school in the wintertime and the rest of the year being trained in the management of the Beales’ lands, and proved to be an exceptional pupil, for almost immediately he began to prosper in the manner of his father and of Beales before him.

  In 1809 he began to court a young woman named Elizabeth Anne Cotton. The Cottons were also a highly thought of family, being of good stock and acquisitive of possessions as befits those who would build an empire from a virgin wilderness. In the standards of the time, Miss Cotton had many other admirers, being most comely and healthy, stout enough to be an admirable helpmate, an attribute not to be taken lightly in those harsh times. She was known as Becky to these suitors, and widely sought after.

  But the Beales, as has been said, were an important family in Halifax County and young Jacob the most eminent bachelor, and when his heart bade him seek the hand of Becky Cotton he did so with the same unreserved determination that he used in his business pursuits, and all opposition fell before him
, so that they were married in October of that year.

  The Cottons were most gratified to welcome young Beale into the bosom of their family. They presented as a dowry a young Negro man named Vestal and a good stout Negress called Chloe, as well as several good head of livestock and sundry other items of value.

  The newly married Beales built a house on a part of Henry Beale’s holdings, and for some twenty years Jacob continued his duties as overseer of the family lands, during which time he continued to prosper materially as well as other ways, nine children being born to him, six of whom survived: Jacob Jr., Elizabeth, Anne, Sewell, Drewry, and the baby, daughter Virginia, comely from birth and from all accounts the apple of Jacob’s eye. She was flaxenhaired and blue-eyed, named for the good Virginia soil that had so abetted her father’s continued enrichment.

  Chloe, the slave woman, was extremely fertile as well, presenting him with eight children, all of whom lived and were healthy, eventually maturing and breeding and adding to the wealth he was accumulating.

  The only cloud on Mr. Beale’s horizon was that about 1830 his wife developed some type of female affliction that prevented the birth of further children, and from all accounts prevented the Beales from having a normal husband-and-wife relationship.

  He was a most thrifty man, extremely close with his money, so that it surprised many when he bought a parcel of land in Tennessee and prepared to move, but he did so in the face of malicious rumors that surfaced and were spread. There had been hints of heinous deeds, most certainly unfounded and probably born out of the jealousy the deprived must feel for those who gather about them effortlessly the trappings of material wealth, and one need only peruse the affidavits signed by the men who knew Jacob Beale in his lifetime and witnessed his persecution at the hands of the Haunt to recognize immediately the forthrightness and candor of his nature.

  The most persistent of these innuendoes made reference to a scandal involving an itinerant traveling preacher and his young sister. This preacher was a worshiper of the serpents he used in his services and his sister, possessing an affinity for the snakes, tended them. In the fall of 1837 the preacher came to Halifax County and, for a sum of money, was allowed to set up his tent on the Beale land.

  Within the week the nude body of the young girl was found in the woods near the Beale holdings, strangled and assaulted in a manner whose description would appeal only to the prurient. Probably for reasons of blackmail, the preacher accused Jacob Beale, claiming that he had seen his little sister strolling into the woods with Beale a day or two before the body was discovered. He went so far as to swear out warrants and cause them to be served, but before the matter could be brought before a grand jury the preacher himself disappeared, most everyone supposing that he had grown afraid of the consequences when his ruse was discovered, others assuming that he might have committed the atrocious act himself.

  However base and unfounded these stories might have been, they could be part of the reason he departed Virginia. For whatever reason, in 1838 he came to Tennessee and purchased a 1,600-acre tract of land in the Sinking Creek area of Limestone County, an area recently moved to by some of Mr. Beale’s friends. The house on the place was one of the best in the state at that time, being a large log dwelling two stories high and weatherboarded with cedar.

  Immediately the Beales began to improve their new holdings, planting a large orchard between the road and the house and clearing the thick timber away for new grounds, the logs serving as building material for slavequarters and for other outbuildings, as well as a great barn that remains standing today, though the original house has been torn down and a larger one built some distance away.

  In those days neighbors helped one another with their tasks, there being log rollings and barn raisings and cornhuskings. These communal endeavors, as well as attendance at church, which neared one hundred percent, served to engender a closeness among these people.

  Jacob Beale almost immediately caused a schoolhouse to be built and hired a schoolteacher, paying the first year’s salary out of his own pocket. This alone should serve to refute the lies about Mr. Beale’s stinginess. Though he was sometimes harsh in his dealings and forthright in his needs, he was never less than honest, and during years when his neighbors failed to prosper, through bad luck or ill weather, he was not averse to loaning them money until their own conditions improved. Such improvement was not always the case, however, and over the years the Beale holdings increased due to defaulted notes and mortgages.

  In these first years in Tennessee, before being afflicted by the Haunt, Mr. Beale entered into the spirit of the community, though he was of a stern and religious nature and not given to frivolities such as dancing and strong drink, which he thought of as sinful.

  On the eve of the haunting, Virginia was fourteen and Elizabeth and Jacob Jr. were married, having become betrothed to members of the community and built their homes on one-hundred-acre tracts their father granted them. Life seemed to have fallen into a pattern of content, and Jacob Beale must have contemplated happily the tapestry that the loom of life was weaving for him; he would have been less than human had he not. He had a large, healthy family that had never hungered for food or shelter, sons and daughters who were marrying well, Elizabeth marrying a young sawmill owner named Zadok Kirk and Jacob Jr. taking as his bride Julia Primm, the daughter of the Baptist preacher Joseph Primm, who will recur in the narrative at a later time.

  Drewry was at an impressionable age when the Haunting began, and he was so afflicted by the things he saw the Haunt do to his father and sister that he never married, living his entire life in the fear of the monster’s predicted return and never allowing during his lifetime the publications of any of his journals, though huge sums of money were offered by various national periodicals. Virginia Beale became known in the national press as the Queen of the Haunted Dell, and received worldwide attention in the press, as clippings from newspapers in London, England, attest.

  As to the nature of the haunting, the phenomenon in question was referred to as the Haunt, for want of a better term. The Haunt was invariably called “she” owing to her feminine voice, notwithstanding the obscenities it spoke.

  Life passed uneventfully for the first two or three years in Tennessee. Jacob Beale and his family were by all accounts well thought of and admired by their neighbors, and Jacob became an important factor in the local elections. Possessing a fine speaking voice and being a large, handsome man with a fine head of curly grey hair, he cut an impressive figure in his splittail coat and beaver hat when his many business dealings drew him to Memphis or Nashville.

  At fourteen, pretty blueeyed Virginia Beale, or Ginny, was already sought after by local swain, one of her suitors being Thomas Campbell, the schoolteacher her father had hired. Another was Eulis Varner, a likable local boy of great promise. At the time their family trouble began (Drewry referring to it thusly in his journals), she was gay and carefree, nothing ahead of her but the unbroken serenity of her future, playing with her brothers and sister in the surrounding woods and learning by heart all the names of the birds and wildflowers, making pets of the rabbits and young deer with which the forest abounded, and secure in the love of a doting father.

  One day Jacob walked over his fields to see how his crops were faring, as harvest time was nigh and the weather critical. He was walking across the field toward his overseer, Vestal, when he stopped to stare at an unusual black animal watching him from a corn middle. The animal looked like a dog, but of a breed Mr. Beale was not familiar with; it was high in the shoulders and had a long, snoutlike mouth.

  He had his gun with him, the slaves having reported snakes about the place, and the peculiar fixity of the beast’s eyes so perturbed Mr. Beale that he aimed and fired. The dog appeared to fall but then vanished and left no trace.

  Ginny claimed to have seen a woman strolling in the orchard, wringing her hands and crying, who beckoned to her and called her by name. Having no reason to suspect that the figure was othe
r than flesh and blood, and possessed of a concern for the woman’s apparent grief, Ginny approached, only to see her vanish in the summer twilight.

  Drewry shot at a great brown bird, a bird such as none of them had ever seen. It alighted one dusk in an enormous cedar with a great flapping of its wings, and it was of such a malevolent appearance that his first thought was to destroy it. Drewry was one of the finest marksmen in the county, being generally the winner of all the turkey shoots and bird hunts, but though the bird seemed to drop from the cedar he could find not so much as a feather to attest the trueness of his shot, and was wont to blame his poor aim on the failing light of dusk.

  There was much work to do that fall, and Jacob Beale, with many slaves to supervise and all the crops to gather, with the attendant sorghum-making and woodcutting for winter, putting up of food and also of grain for the animals, gave all these events short shrift.

  As has been said, he was by nature a most stern and pragmatic man, and even severely reprimanded Ginny, by all accounts his favorite. According to Drewry’s journal, he told them, relenting a little his severity, that in Tennessee there were many fowl and animals strange to them, that they were seeing normal animals and attaching the trappings of superstition.

  The winter, a harsh one with many snows, seemed to have passed uneventfully, the Beales reporting nothing out of the way, though Vestal swore he saw a light bobbing about the winter cornfields and that on the way to visit his wife, who lived at a neighboring farm, he habitually met a black dog in the same spot of the road every night, no matter what time his progress brought him to that point.