"Sure," I said. I was going to add, "That's my favorite part of the job, sending out the bill," but he wasn't the kind of guy you joke with. And if you ever saw him, you'd know why.
Everything about him tells you he's one of those men who used to be called aristocratic. He's handsome, he's slim, he's athletic, and he seems to be very, very confident in everything he does—until you look at his eyes, at the sorrow and weariness of them, at the trapped gaze of a small and broken boy hiding in those eyes.
Of course, on my last trip out here I learned why he looks this way. Byerly was out and the maid answered the door and we started talking and then she told me all about it, in whispers of course, because Byerly's wife was upstairs and would not have appreciated being discussed this way.
Four years ago, Mrs. Byerly gave birth to their only child, a son. The family physician said that he had never seen a deformity of this magnitude. The child had a head only slighter larger than an apple and no eyes and no arms whatsoever. And it made noises that sickened even the most doctorly of doctors...
The physician even hinted that the baby might be destroyed, for the sake of the entire family.
Mrs. Byerly had a nervous breakdown and went into a mental hospital for nearly a year. She refused to let her baby be taken to a state institution. Mr. Byerly and three shifts of nurses took care of the boy.
When Mrs. Byerly got out of the hospital everybody pretended that she was doing just fine and wasn't really crazy at all. But then Mrs. Byerly got her husband to hire me to take pictures of deformed babies for her. She seemed to draw courage from knowing that she and her son were not alone in their terrible grief.
All I could think of was those signals we send deep into outer space to see if some other species will hear them and let us know that we're not alone, that this isn't just some frigging joke, this nowhere planet spinning in the darkness...
When the maid told me all this, it broke my heart for Mrs. Byerly and then I didn't feel so awkward about taking the pictures anymore. Her husband had his personal physician check out the area for the kind of babies we were looking for and Byerly would call the mother and offer to pay her a lot of money... and then I'd go over there and take the pictures of the kid...
Now, just as I was just about to turn around and walk off the porch, Byerly said, "I understand that you spent some time here two weeks ago talking to one of the maids."
"Yes."
"I'd prefer that you never do that again. My wife is very uncomfortable about our personal affairs being made public."
He sounded as I had sounded with Merle earlier today. Right on the verge of being very angry. The thing was, I didn't blame him. I wouldn't want people whispering about me and my wife, either
"I apologize, Mr. Byerly. I shouldn't have done that."
"My wife has suffered enough." The anger had left him. He sounded drained. "She's suffered way too much, in fact."
And with that, I heard a child cry out from upstairs.
A child—yet not a child—a strangled, mournful cry that shook me to hear.
"Good night," he said.
He shut the door very quickly, leaving me to the wind and rain and night.
After awhile, I walked down the wide steps to my car and got inside and drove straight home.
As soon as I was inside, I kissed my wife and then took her by the hand and led her upstairs to the room our two little girls share.
We stood in the doorway, looking at Jenny and Sara. They were asleep.
Each was possessed of two eyes, two arms, two legs; and each was possessed of song and delight and wonderment and tenderness and glee.
And I held my wife tighter than I ever had, and felt an almost giddy gratitude for the health of our little family.
Not until much later, near midnight it was, my wife asleep next to me in the warmth of our bed—not until much later did I think again of Mrs. Byerly and her photos in the upstairs bedroom of that dark and shunned Victorian house, up there with her child trying to make frantic sense of the silent and eternal universe that makes no sense at all.
Midnight Grinding by Ronald Kelly
There is a sub-genre that seems to have come to life on its own—a kind of spontaneous generation once ascribed to maggots on dead meat, or that coiling swirl of dust balls in the corner of an abandoned house. It's called Southern Horror, and it's marked largely by a preying upon the natural urban paranoia of the rest of us, i.e., those of us who don't live in places called "vales" or "corners" or "hollows." Ronald Kelly writes the stuff, and it's marked by a strong regional flavor, a familiarity with custom and superstition, and a style that can't be faked. "Midnight Grinding" is a curious little piece that's part folklore and part rural nightmare.
"Which one must I kill first? Oh, sweet Lord in heaven, please tell me... which one must I kill first?"
The first time Rebecca heard the voice of Green Lee it came rasping through the lush leaves of the tobacco rows like the coarse hide of a snake rubbing against dried corn husks. She and her brother, Ben, had been performing the chore that Papa had given them that day; picking off the plump, green worms that nibbled on the summer tobacco and squashing them beneath the toes of their bare feet. But as they left one dense row and moved on to the next, the old man's whispering plea echoed in the dusty afternoon air, curling through their youthful ears and stopping them dead in their tracks.
Rebecca and Ben backed up a few steps, listening to the sinister words and watching for a sign of the one who uttered them. "Heavenly Father, Lord Almighty on high, please tell me... which one shall it be?"
A rustling of tobacco leaves sounded from a few feet away, drawing the frightened eyes of the two children. And from within that dense patch of greenery crept a gnarled claw of stark white bone.
The youngsters broke from their fearful paralysis. Screaming, they ran along the field rows, feet churning clouds of powdery clay dirt into the hot, still air of mid-July. They soon burst from the high tobacco, their cries rising shrilly as they crossed the barren road to the gathering of shabby tin and tarpaper shacks that made up the itinerant farm camp. They saw their mother sitting on the front porch of one such house, washing a few articles of clothing with a scrubboard and a bucket of sudsy, gray water.
"Lordy Mercy!" said Sarah Benton, looking as drab and threadbare as the clothing she washed. "What's the matter with you young'uns?"
It was a moment before they could summon the breath to tell her. "There's a ghost in the tobacco field," gasped the eight-year-old Rebecca. "A ghost with a bony claw!"
"Ya'll hush up now," said their mother. She cast a glance at the house next door and saw their neighbors sitting on the porch, snapping beans and eyeing the two children curiously. "I don't wanna hear such foolishness from the two of you!" The Benton family had only joined the farm camp a few days ago in that sweltering summer of 1908 and it wouldn't do to have the three neighboring families thinking that the Benton children were touched in the head or some such thing.
"But it was there, Mama!" proclaimed little Ben, nearly in tears. "And it said it was gonna kill us!"
Sarah was about to put her bucket and board aside and give the unruly pair a sound thrashing, when her husband, Will, emerged from the tobacco rows with a few of the other farmers. He approached the stone well that stood in the middle of the encampment, where a bucketful of cold water had been drawn, and took a long drink from a gourd dipper.
Rebecca and Ben left their mother and ran to the big, rawboned man. They frantically told their father the story of the voice in the rows and the bony claw that had poked out of the leaves.
Will Benton laughed heartily and put comforting hands on their shoulders. "Aw, don't go fretting yourself about such. That was just old Green Lee over yonder. He ain't gonna hurt you none."
The children looked to where their father pointed and saw a man standing in the speckled shade of a hickory tree several yards away. The fellow was gaunt and lanky, wearing faded overalls and filthy longhandles un
derneath. He leaned against the trunk of the tree and grinned at them, his teeth stained with tobacco and his eyes holding a disturbing shine of madness. He had a scraggly gray beard and what little hair he possessed laid lank and lifeless along his scalp like sun-shriveled cornsilk. The children looked to his crossed arms and saw that the right hand was strong and whole, hard with the calluses of daily work. But the left one was fleshless; a gnarled claw of stiffened bone, looking like the pale, dry husk of a spider that had curled in upon itself in death.
Rebecca stared at the man, still uneasy in her mind. From the shadows of the big tree his eyes burned with a feverish light and his lips silently mouthed those awful words she had heard him utter in the close-grown rows of the hundred acre field. Then, with a big wink, the old man turned and walked to his own house no more than a stone's throw from the place where Rebecca and her family lived.
▼
That night after supper, their father told them the story of Green Lee.
He had once been a good man; a religious man who tilled the earth of the fields during the week and preached the word of God on Sunday morning. He had fought in the Spanish-American War as a young man and, after serving his country, had returned to his native Tennessee and worked as a farmer in the tobacco fields near the rural town of Coleman. He married a sturdy woman named Charlotte Springer, who a year later bore him twin sons. In all, Green Lee was a respected member of the community along Old Newsome Road... or he had been until his unfortunate accident in the spring of 1903.
It had been a scorcher of a day and Green Lee was plowing a forty acre stretch, when something peculiar happened to him. His wife went out to call him to supper that evening and found him in the center of the half-plowed field, standing over the lifeless body of his finest work mule. When she walked out to see what had happened, she found her husband giggling wildly like a demented child. The mule had been stoned to death, obviously by the farmer himself.
Large hunks of uncovered rock lay scattered around the poor animal and a particularly heavy chunk had been used to shatter the mule's skull.
By the time Charlotte could summon some of the neighboring farmers, Green Lee had collapsed in the evening shadows and laid trembling in a violent palsy of unknown origin. He was immediately put to bed and his body bathed with cool water. The local physician drove out that night in a horse and buggy, and examined the feverish man. The doctor soon came to the conclusion that Green Lee had suffered a heatstroke, due to plowing that hot day without benefit of a hat to shade his head.
After a month in bed, Green Lee escaped the prospect of immediate death and rose to resume his life, although never fully recovered. He was given to bouts of uncharacteristic behavior. For weeks at a time he would seem normal enough, tending to his crops and preaching the Lord's gospel. Then, abruptly, his morals would become totally depraved and devoid of restraint. He would frequent a local roadhouse known as the Bloody Bucket and blow his earnings on whiskey, gambling, and whores. Soon his behavior lost him the respect of his neighbors and the faith of his congregation. Gradually, the good and bad of Green Lee seemed to balance out and he grew more eccentric as the days went by, dividing his time equally between God and the Devil.
Before his illness, the man had been stubborn and head-strong. But in the years afterward, Green Lee became increasingly weak in mind and incredibly gullible. This condition was best summed up by the incident that led to the ghastly crippling of his left hand. Among his other afflictions, Green Lee suffered a bad case of arthritis in his wrist and finger joints, and he was always on the alert for some new medicine or folk remedy that might cure him of the bothersome pain. One night a couple of drinking buddies pulled a cruel joke on the man and suggested a cure that he had never heard before, but one they assured would rid him of his agony. That night, after his family had gone to bed, Green Lee fired up the woodstove in his kitchen and set an iron pot of cold water over the flame. He immersed his left hand in the water and—per his friends' instructions—let the water come to a steady boil. Slowly, the nagging pain in his fingers and wrist disappeared until only numbness remained. Green Lee was sure that he had miraculously been healed of his ailment... until he withdrew his hand from the scalding water and watched as the meat slipped free from his bones and fell, like a fleshen glove, into the churning currents of the boiling pot.
His unfortunate crippling made it impossible for Green Lee to sustain the rigors of tobacco farming. He began to make a meager living as a handyman and an errand boy, working for a man named Leman McSherry who owned a number of itinerant farm camps in Bedloe County. To that day, Green Lee helped out the farming families that plowed, planted, and harvested the fertile tobacco bases along Old Newsome Road. He harnessed mules, went into town for supplies, and helped chop and split tobacco when the crop was mature enough to be readied for sale.
The old man's bizarre behavior was endured with a grain of salt. Most farmers thought of him as nothing more than a harmless imbecile. But the women and children of the camp felt differently, especially the handyman's own family. Sometimes he would approach the children, his bony hand outstretched and the menacing words of "Which one must I kill first?" quavering through his whiskered lips. As of yet, Green Lee had harmed no one, had not even lifted a hand to his own young'uns, but there was some talk that he was a man to be watched, especially when the menfolk were busy laboring in the far reaches of the tobacco field.
▼
The sweltering days of summer soon passed and with the cooling of autumn came the time of harvest. The ripened leaves were cut, lashed to long poles, and fire-cured in the tobacco barn of a local landowner, Harvey Brewer, whose structure was large enough to prepare four crops at one time. Toward the end of September, Rebecca's father and some of the other men planned to load the cured tobacco into mule-drawn wagons and make the long trip to Nashville to the big auction house near the Union Station railroad tracks. During Will Benton's two day journey, his family was to stay the night with their next door neighbors.
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 reluctan
t 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 or 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 bed-springs 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 an 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 lanky 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.
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