by Ronald Kelly
They were to stay the night at the house of Green Lee.
At the mere mention of such a visit, Rebecca felt as though she were being cast into the prelude of some horrid nightmare. Both she and her brother were deathly afraid of the lanky man with the skeletal hand. Several times since that day in the tobacco rows, the Benton children had been aware of an unwholesome interest that Green Lee seemed to hold for them. Sometimes he would simply stand beneath the hickory tree and watch silently as they played. Other times, as they walked along the winding bed of Devil’s Creek, they would see him following at a distance. Once, when she and Ben were sleeping near the open window of their bedroom during a particularly hot night, Rebecca had awakened to Green Lee’s whispering voice. She sat upright in her bed and saw the skeletal hand, blue-white in the moonlight, snaking through the open window and gently running its bony fingers through the hair of her sleeping brother. Rebecca had unleashed a shrill scream, but by the time her parents awoke and came to them, the intruder was long gone. Her mother and father had insisted that she had only been dreaming, but she knew that had not been the case.
And there was one other thing in connection with Green Lee that made her uneasy. Sometimes, at the hour of midnight, she would awaken to a peculiar sound – a harsh and unnerving sound. The sound of grinding. Sometimes when she looked from her window, Rebecca saw nothing. But on other occasions she would see a weird glow coming from the back porch of the Lee house. It was the spray of fiery sparks; the kind generated from the clashing contact of steel against whetstone. The grinding would last for only a few moments, then the sound and the strange light would cease, once again surrendering to the nocturnal symphony of crickets, toads, and lonely whippoorwills.
Much to the dread of Rebecca and her brother, the night of their visit to the Lee house finally came. Will Benton had left with the other farmers for Nashville with the dawn and, when the dusk cast its shadow upon the rural countryside, Sarah locked up the little house and ushered her reluctant children to the residence next door. Charlotte Lee and her two children welcomed the Benton family in their customarily quiet and nervous manner. Suppertime was long since over and the women sat around the long eating table, talking and drinking coffee, while the children played with a well-worn set of ball and jacks on the dusty planks of the cabin floor.
Green Lee was there, sitting in a cane-backed chair next to the potbelly stove. He sat there moodily, smoking a corncob pipe and staring intensely into the hot, red slits of the grate. The crimson glow reflected on the whites of his eyes and sometimes he would chuckle, as though he had glimpsed some mysterious revelation within the crackling coals. Fortunately, Green Lee seemed to pay neither Rebecca nor her brother any mind during the course of the evening. He merely sat there hunkered over, indulging himself with his smoking and fire-watching.
Eventually they all settled in for the night. The Lee family retired to their own beds in the back room, while Sarah Benton and her two children slept on pallets on the bare boards of the floor. When the candles had been extinguished and the last creak of bedsprings was heard, Rebecca laid there next to her brother and stared into the unfamiliar darkness. She strained her ears for the first sound of Green Lee leaving his bed and making his way to her pallet. But after a half-hour of fearful anticipation, she heard no such move on the old man’s part. Fairly exhausted by her anxiety, Rebecca was soon claimed by slumber, joining the realm of the sleeping forms around her.
Later on that night, Rebecca was awakened by the sound of harsh grinding. She rose and looked at the old German clock that hung on the bedroom wall. The ornate hands read five minutes past twelve. Rebecca’s eyes searched through the darkness. She found the place where Green Lee slept to be abandoned. Quietly, the girl left the blankets of her bed and padded from the room into the adjoining kitchen.
She hid behind a kitchen chair and stared through the interlaced bands of cane weaving at the strange sight that revealed itself beyond the back door, which was open despite the coolness of the autumn night. The lank form of Green Lee, clad only in filthy longjohns, hunched over the big grinding wheel on the back porch. His bare foot worked the pedal furiously, sending the circular stone whirling at a steady pace. The man giggled and cooed softly as he worked. First, he pressed the edge of a hatchet to the stone, honing its breadth with expert precision. Shavings of hot steel glanced from the hard surface in orange sparks, then died as they cooled to dark cinders in the September chill.
When Green Lee was satisfied with the job he had one, he set the hand-axe aside and took up a straight razor. Again, he hunched over the wheel and went to work. Back and forth he drew the wicked blade of the shaving implement across the whirling flat of the wheel. When the razor was finally lifted away from the stone, Green Lee held the blade aloft. In the faint moonlight outside, Rebecca could see that its edge had been ground to a thinness that bordered on transparency.
She was about to duck back into the bedroom, when Green Lee twisted his grizzled head around and stared straight at her, as if he had known of her presence all long. His snaggle-toothed grin grew wider and his eyes wilder, and he asked in a rasping voice “Is this the one, Lord? Is this the one that I seek?”
Rebecca broke from her hiding place and ran back to her pallet. She burrowed beneath the blankets and pulled them up over her head, shuddering with the fear of having been discovered. She waited, listening for the old man’s approach. It came moments later, the creaking of floorboards beneath bare feet. She pulled herself into a tight ball, expecting the edge of honed steel to bite through the cloth of her blankets and find the tender flesh of her body or the fragile shell of her skull.
But it did not happen. She peeked from beneath the covers and saw the shadowy form of Green Lee next to the big brass-framed bed. The old man lifted his pillow and laid the sharpened hatchet and razor underneath. Then the sleeve of cloth and goosedown obscured the weapons from view and, with a soft prayer on his lips, Green Lee settled into the sunken spot next to his wife and soon drifted into a snoring slumber.
After that night, Rebecca never strayed far from the Benton farmhouse. Life went on in the farming camp as the colorful fall stretched into a bleak, gray winter. Most of the men, her father included, found jobs at a sawmill in a neighboring county to make ends meet, while Green Lee did odd jobs in town, toting firewood and cleaning out chimney flues.
But, at night, she could still hear the urgent sound of grinding.
Then, in mid-February, horrid screams roused the farming camp at the hour of midnight. Will Benton and a few of the neighboring farmers armed themselves and went out to see what the commotion was all about, while their wives and children watched fearfully from the frosty panes of the windows. They could see fleeting forms running across the barren, snow-covered tobacco field; frantic forms that wailed with shrieks of laughter and terror. Then there came the sound of a rifle shot and, soon, Rebecca’s father and the others dragged the weeping form of Green Lee back across the road. His right leg was bleeding from a gunshot wound and in his hands he held the weapons that Rebecca had seen that night in September. The hatchet was clutched in his good hand, while the razor was wedged tightly within the bony fingers of his skeletal claw.
After Green Lee had been tied to a rocking chair on the front porch of the Lee house, his family was brought to the home of the Bentons. They were distraught and trembling, bearing a few shallow wounds, but nothing worse. A while later, the county sheriff arrived and took Green Lee with him. It was the last time that Rebecca ever saw the madman with the bony hand and the heavenly plea of murderous intention on his lips.
Not long afterward, Rebecca and her family moved on to another farming camp, for her father was a man who wandered from one community to the next, searching for a life he was never destined to find. A few years later, Rebecca heard that Green Lee had died in an insane asylum. According to the stories told, the lunatic had laid thrashing on the dank floor of his solitary cell, bound in a straightjacket and screaming for t
he Lord to “answer the riddle of his madness.”
He had screamed long and loud, until his brain exploded with the strain of his hysteria and his eyes grew dark and bulging in their sockets, like blood-engorged ticks on the point of bursting.
In the year of 1923, Rebecca returned to Bedloe County, Tennessee. With her was a husband, Jasper Howell, and two young children, Mitchell and Millicent, who were barely of school age. Like Rebecca’s father, Jasper was a tobacco farmer by trade. When he had told her that they would be moving once again, Rebecca had really thought nothing of it at first. She had become accustomed to the nomadic ways of the itinerant farm family during her childhood. But when they arrived at the farm camp and Rebecca realized exactly where they were, she felt a wave of cold dread engulf her like the treacherous waters of a swollen stream.
The four drab tin and tarpaper houses, the stone well, and the vast expanse of prime tobacco land across the dirt road – it all came back to her from the year of her eighth birthday. She was back at the farm camp that had served as her home fifteen years before. It was the place where she had first been introduced to the emotion of sheer terror, in the form of a crazed cripple with murder in his heart and stone-honed steel in his grasp.
Rebecca said nothing to her husband about her sudden revelation. It would have done no good. He would have simply called her foolish and refused to move on. There were two other families at the camp when they arrived, which meant that two of the shabby houses were still vacant. Luckily, they moved into the same house that the Benton family had occupied when she was a child. That left the ramshackle structure next door empty and dark… the house that had once been the uneasy home for the family of Green Lee.
They arrived in early spring, in time for Jasper and the other men to set about the task of furrowing the vast field and planting the shoots of young tobacco in orderly rows. The first few weeks passed without incident for the Howell family. Jasper worked the fields from sunrise to sunset, Rebecca busied herself with the chores of a homemaker, and Mitch and Millie spent their days studying at the one-roomed schoolhouse near the forks of Old Newsome Road.
Then, one night, Rebecca woke at the hour of twelve. She sat up in bed and stared into the darkness, trying to determine what had roused her from her sleep. It had been a noise – a coarse, monotonous sound that rang with a disturbing familiarity. She strained her ears and heard the sound again. It echoed through the blackness of the outer night. From the direction of the old Lee house.
She rose and walked to the window at the far side of the room. From that vantage point she could see the southern face of the abandoned house. The moment she looked through the dirty panes of the bedroom window, the puzzling noise ceased. She peered at the shadowy overhang of the back porch, certain that she had glimpsed a flash of fiery sparks a second before the sound of grinding had come to a halt.
Which one must I kill first? echoed the voice of Green Lee from the far reaches of her mind, as chilling now as it had seemed fifteen years ago. Tell me, Lord, which one shall it be?
Rebecca stared out at the darkness for a while, then returned to her bed. She lay awake for a long time and listened for the haunting clash of steel against stone, but the only sounds she heard was the chirping of crickets in the dark hours of the night, as well as the soft snoring of her sleeping husband.
Spring stretched into summer, and soon the tobacco grew lush and chest-high in the hundred acre field. The men spent their days weeding and hoeing, while the children played hide-and-seek amid the thick stalks and pretended they were explorers in some great and mysterious jungle.
Rebecca and the other women of the farm camp had planted a small vegetable garden behind the houses and, by mid-July, the patch was ripe with fresh tomatoes, snapping beans, and corn. On one such summer day, Rebecca was digging taters and picking roasting ears for that night’s supper, when the sound of youthful screams cut through her ears like shards of broken glass. The sound froze her heart and, at first, she was sure that one of the children had fallen down the stone well or had been bitten by a copperhead snake.
She stepped from the garden and watched as Mitch and Millie ran screaming from the dense growth of the tobacco rows and ran across the rural road as if Old Scratch himself was fast on their heels. “What’s wrong?” she asked as they clung to her gingham skirt, nearly in tears.
“It was a man!” sobbed Millie. “There was a man in the field!”
“What are you talking about?” demanded Rebecca. “What kind of man?”
“A crazy man,” said little Mitch. “A man with bones for a hand.”
Rebecca’s heart grew as cold and heavy as a winter stone. She grabbed a hatchet from off the chopping stump near the back porch and – despite their squalling protest – made the children show her where their frightening encounter had taken place. She felt her skin crawl with gooseflesh when she discovered it to be the exact same spot where she and her brother had first known the horror of Green Lee.
She walked up and down the adjoining rows, but found no sign of anyone having been there recently. Her husband and the other men were working at the far end of the property that day, a good distance from the spot that Mitch and Millie had shown her. Although she hated doing so, she assured the children that it had merely been their imagination playing tricks on them. They looked doubtful at her explanation, however, and felt that she didn’t believe their fantastic story.
But, secretly, Rebecca Howell had good reason to believe every word of what they had told her, even though it was impossible to consider such a thing actually happening… especially with the culprit long since dead and moldering in the dark depths of his grave.
As the summer months slowly gave way to autumn, life in the farming camp continued uneventfully. The routine of each new day remained the same as that of the day before.
The children seemed to have forgotten their harrowing experience in the tobacco field, but Rebecca hadn’t. The screams of Mitch and Millie still lingered in her mind, as well as the distant image of a claw of gnarled bone and the memory of a malevolent whisper from her own childhood. She attempted to drive those thoughts from her mind, for it seemed foolish to linger on such things.
Then, toward the end of September, thoughts of Green Lee resurfaced. Rebecca was awakened by that peculiar sound of metallic grinding. Swiftly, she left her bed and went to the bedroom window. This time she saw a faint hint of irregular light coming from the back porch of the old Lee house. Intrigued, she felt her way through the pitch darkness of the room and made her way to the kitchen for a better view. From her own back porch she saw the flashing bursts of orange sparks and heard more clearly the distinct grating of steel against stone.
Curiously, she padded with bare feet across the weedy stretch of yard that separated the two houses. By the time she got within thirty feet of the rickety porch of the deserted house, both the noise and the light had vanished. Cautiously, Rebecca stepped onto the bowed boards of the porch and approached the old grinding wheel that still sat where it had fifteen years ago.
She put her fingertips to the wheel and immediately jerked them away. The stone was hot to the touch. She crouched down and found that tiny bits of newly-ground steel were scattered upon the dusty boards underneath. But there was no sign of the person who had done the grinding, or the instruments that had been subject to the stone’s whirling edge.
Could he still be alive? Rebecca wondered. Could Green Lee be alive, despite what I heard before? Or could his ghost be haunting this place after all these years?
As if in answer, the sound of heavy footsteps on aged floorboards echoed from the within the darkness of the open door. Rebecca found herself rooted to the spot as a pale form slowly emerged from the shadowy kitchen beyond.
“What are you doing over here?” someone asked her and Rebecca felt her fright melt away at the sound of her husband’s voice.
“I thought I heard something,” she said, catching her breath.
“So did I,” re
plied Jasper. “A noise and a light. But doesn’t look like nobody’s here now. Must’ve been an old hobo messing around or something.”
Rebecca crossed her slender arms against the night chill and was escorted home by her husband. When they finally settled into bed once again, Rebecca glanced at Jasper’s pocket watch lying on the bureau and saw that it was only a few minutes past the stroke of midnight.
During the next few weeks, Rebecca couldn’t shake the dreadful shadow of that night on the back porch of the Lee house. During her daily chores she found herself casting an uneasy glance at the dark, empty windows, as if expecting to see a wild-eyed, whiskered face leering out at her from amid the broken panes.
And it was even worse at night. Her dreams were filled with the threat of Green Lee. Sometimes she would find herself running across a snowy field with Mitch and Millie in tow as a dark form pursued them, fistfuls of honed steel flashing wickedly in the cold, winter moonlight. Sometimes she would dream that she heard the whimpers of children drifting through the ebony night, along with the smell of cooking meat, and she would go into the kitchen and find Green Lee standing over a vast iron pot on the wood stove. From the boiling waters he would drag the bodies of her children, holding them aloft and cackling insanely as the blistered meat slid limply from their naked bones and fell like pale suits of dead gristle into the steaming cauldron.
As if the horrid nightmares weren’t enough, Rebecca began to have suspicions that her husband might be playing a part in her sudden uneasiness. She came to the realization that he was acting strangely and not at all like the man she had married.
Lately, Jasper had chosen to spend his evenings sitting by the door of the big, iron cook stove, smoking his pipe and staring into the glowing slits of the grate, as if searching for the clue to some inner mystery. He also began to talk in his sleep. Not coherently, but in low whispers, reminding Rebecca of the breathy pleas of that lunatic handyman she had once known.