by Ron Shiflet
“For Les Best, Joey Plastic sends only his best.”
GHOSTS OF THE BAYOU
TRENT ROMAN
Eileen Collins was known throughout Grant Parish for two things: her no-good layabout husband Leroy, and a mane of bright red hair that proclaimed her Acadian heritage. Generally a composed and polite young woman, those who had seen her angry—perhaps at children who had tracked mud into the church, but more likely at her husband, returning from an absence of two or three days, with the smell of gin imprinted into his clothes—would say that both the eyes and the hair would blaze in sympathy, and foolhardy indeed was the person who believed they could stand against her fury.
If asked, Leroy Collins would have gladly confirmed this perception of his wife. Indeed, he would say that those who may have had cause to flinch at her temper in public simply didn’t know what they were talking about, because it paled to the wrath she could unleash in private. When truly furious, all the blood would drain from her face, making her flesh seem whiter than a freshly-laundered sheet; her hair would billow behind her with every sharp gesture of her head, creating a fiery halo about her figure.
Privately, Leroy Collins would sometimes think of his wife as an avenging angel, a figure right out of an Old Testament story about heathens being slaughtered. And while it would never do for a man to admit publicly that he was afraid of his woman, there was really no other way to explain why he was making haste into the bayou, at this hour and in this darkness, chasing after fanatics. Whatever terrors the bayou might hold, they would at least be natural or human, while back in their small (but tidy) cabin, Eileen would greet any cowardice with the temperance of divinity slighted.
Old Sherman, who was, if possible, as generally lazy as Leroy himself, did not appreciate being raised at this hour and whinnied disagreeably as Leroy saddled him up. Leroy patted the old horse on the muzzle, whispering that it was just a quick trot through the swamp, that they would be back in little time and the aging mustang could return to whatever dreams horses dreamt. As he bridled Sherman, his right hand drifted to the shape of the pistol hanging on his hip in the holster.
How he hoped that he would not need to draw the gun—or, worse yet, actually fire it. Leroy made his living doing odd jobs, a lot of seasonal construction, and supplemented the whole thing by making surplus inventory vanish… mostly unobtrusively, but once or twice, when really stretched for income to cover a debt, he’d slipped on a highwayman’s mask. Never did he need to actually fire the pistol, because he always picked small, undefended targets. He didn’t want to contemplate what the consequences would be if, tonight, he pulled and fired on a Klansman.
“Just an evening stroll,” Leroy said, patting Sherman’s neck. Sherman whinnied as though pointing out that evening had come and gone. The sliver of moon in the night sky was well advanced, and although Leroy didn’t own a timepiece, he estimated they were closing in on midnight. He decided not to pay any attention to that fact or risk giving himself the willies even worse.
“Yah!” Leroy exclaimed, surprising Sherman into a sudden gallop out of the stables. The stables weren’t his, of course—the town owned them communally, and the old mustang, which had belonged to his older brother before he’d moved north, was strictly speaking a luxury item in this small Louisiana community. They were about two-hundred and thirty in Bedford, including fifty-odd negroes who lived in their own little “neighbourhood” on the other side of the pounded dust road that cut through town… and if the Klan had their way, there would be one less by the time dawn broke.
Leroy looked towards the cabin he shared with his wife as he rode by and wasn’t at all surprised to find her standing on the porch in the soft torchlight, watching him. The firelight reflected in her eyes and highlighted the red of her hair, and Leroy again couldn’t help but wonder if this brimstone visage might not have been the last thing the damned in Sodom and Gomorrah had seen before being consumed by the judgement of the righteous.
Eileen’s steady stare managed to stab a certain amount of guilt into him as he rode on by, and like a lodestone, the sensation caused his head to turn towards the negro quarter of Bedford, from which Nathaniel Kelley had been plucked less than an hour ago. He was surprised to see torchlight from there, as well: standing before the Kelley cabin, the man’s wife and daughter seemed to be maintaining some kind of silent vigil, standing at attention as though expecting their man might return. The woman stared ahead determinedly, but in the torchlight he could see that the girl’s eyes, red-rimmed, were tracking him. He wondered if they knew that he was responsible for Nathaniel being taken away, and then dismissed the possibility.
For a moment, the torch flickered and burned brighter, consuming some particularly juicy piece of flax, and Leroy thought he saw, in the second before Old Sherman carried him out of sight, that she was clutching chicken bones in both her small hands and that the red around her eyes were palm-shaped smears of blood. Then the torch quieted as horse and rider passed out of town, and the fiery portrait dissolved into darkness.
Leroy shook his head to banish the image. It was the torchlight, surely: it had cast something no doubt quite mundane in an odd light. That, and his own apprehensions—riding out after white-sheeted ghosts, this late at night… a man’s imagination was bound to play tricks on him, conjure up strange and heathen interpretations. He had certainly heard talk of the primitive cults that some claimed had been brought by slaves from the Caribbean islands to the South, but the idea of such practices taking place in a strict and virtuous Baptist town like Bedford was absurd.
No, best to focus on the very real dangers of what he was riding into. The bayou could be tricky to navigate even in the daylight, and he certainly didn’t want to ride Sherman into a sucking quagmire or a morass where he could break a leg—or worse yet, eject Leroy himself from his back and against a trunk or into the swamp. True, he hadn’t seen a gator in going on two years now, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there, waiting for a piece of white meat to come their way.
His quarry had already been gone for an hour, but although the Klansmen rode horses, their prisoner had been on foot. And while it was likely they would make Nathaniel run behind them, hands tied, Leroy should still be able to catch up to them before they reached Bald Spot, a barren track of land like an islet deep into the bayou. Rumor had placed local Klan activity at Bald Spot, and it made sense, since it was as dry a parcel of ground as could be expected to be found this deep into the Louisiana marches that would likewise be removed from inhabited areas. Leroy didn’t quite see why discretion would be an issue since, according to those same rumors, most county officials were part of the fraternity, but perhaps they remembered what had happened to the first Klan back during Reconstruction.
In fact, Leroy had been counting on that fact when the scrutiny of the authorities started becoming somewhat too focused on Grant Parish. Leroy had thought he’d been very cautious with his robberies, both the mundane and armed variety, but evidently some smart buck over in the parish seat at Colfax noticed a pattern because deputies had been nosing around Bedford, Montgomery and the surrounding hamlets. Leroy had spent a few restless nights thinking that the law might be able to track the thieving to him, until realizing that he had the perfect scapegoat right here in town.
In the local taverns, and on occasional trips to Colfax with the express intent of spreading rumors of his own, he’d let it be known that Nathaniel Kelley, the uppity negro unofficially in charge of the Bedford community of coloreds, had been seen moving about at night an awful lot, and that he seemed to be buying a lot more goods and booze than a man of his standing ought to be able to afford.
Kelley was relatively well-known for a negro; he’d been part of the Buffalo Soldiers that had gone over to France to fight the Krauts in the Great War. He’d come back with enough pay to buy his own parcel of land instead of working a patch for a white owner, and was said to still have his fancy Springfield M1903 rifle. Needless to say, members of the brotherh
ood weren’t well disposed to a negro who might have killed white men, even if they were Germans, and who was still armed besides—and certainly didn’t take well to word-of-mouth stories, these mostly true, that Kelley had developed a backbone that many of his brethren lacked while overseas, and seemed untroubled about standing up to white men.
It didn’t take long for the stories to fall into the ears of the men in white—certainly not in Colfax, which was remembered across the state and beyond as the site where over a hundred negroes in the state militia were slaughtered by the first Klan and the White League over a disputed election, back in ’73. The fact that some people in Colfax spoke of the incident with overt pride, showed how strong the brotherhood had become in the area. Leroy hadn’t been at all surprised when a veritable procession of white-hooded men descended on Bedford earlier that evening—really, he had all but invited them.
Most people had stayed indoors when the ghosts rode into town, white and black alike. The Klan’s membership might be growing every day, but so was its reputation for violence, and a growing perception that they might not particularly care if some of those trampled underfoot in the pursuit of their goals happened to be paler than their usual victims. Leroy stood at the window of the cabin, peeking out as they swooped into the negro quarter, smiling to himself at the apparent success of his plan.
Eileen was with him then, similarly staring out the window, her expression drawn and face pale. Eileen was a proper woman, there was no doubting that, but she had also expressed sympathy with the negroes on more than one occasion, decrying their poverty and squalor—a stance arrived at through a fusion of Christian sentiment and Acadian history. Leroy had known this, and could not, at the moment, imagine what wild impulse had led him to recount his scheme to her after the Klansmen had left town, their prey in tow. Perhaps he was not so thoroughly ingrained to petty sins as he thought, since he could not resist the allure of the matrimonial confessional. She knew of his thieving and had berated him for it, but had ever been the dutiful wife regardless.
But the stakes of this deceit were higher than a few pilfered items, and to say that Eileen was outraged was to put too fine a point on it. The wrathful seraph that haunted her features ignited in her eyes and consumed her body, pushing him away against a wall despite weighting half as much as he did, then turning to any available piece of crockery or handy object and showering him with invective and domestic articles both. At first, he could not understand her words, as her great fury caused them to be stillborn, but the fire gradually solidified and he understood the depth of his error in speaking to Eileen of his connivances.
The stream suddenly stopped, and Leroy found the furious, contemplative silence that followed even more frightening than the barrage that had preceded it. She walked towards him—not the easy ambulation of a woman busying herself about the house, certainly not the seductive sliding that would lead to the marriage bed, but rather the determined pace of an Indian squaw about to scalp her prisoner. Her eyes narrowed to pinpricks of coal as she seized his chin in her hand.
“You are going to stop them,” she said. Leroy tried to mutter a response, but she shook his jaw and continued: “You are going to stop them, or if you don’t, then so help me God in Heaven if I ever see you take a step towards this house again I will remove your manhood with my knife and strike the whole shrivelled package into the church door so that everyone can see what a balls-less yellow coward you are.”
“How?” Leroy managed to articulate through her grip.
“I don’t particularly care,” Eileen said. “You’ve got that old horse of yours over in the stables. You go after them and get them to free that man. Plead, beg, bribe, cajole, if you have to, you could even try telling the truth for once in your miserable life, but you will get it done.”
Leroy ducked and managed to free himself from her grasp, though he was still as skewered as ever on the sharp glare of her fury. “I can’t go out there!” he said, lounging the walls of the cabin as he went. “If I try to stop them, they’ll call me a nigger-lover, or a crook myself, and they could kill me for it! Don’t know if you saw, but they’re all armed, and they outnumber me plenty to one!”
Eileen turned her head as he walked, tracking him, and Leroy started thinking there was more of the basilisk, the cockatrice and the medusa in those cold balefires than there was of the angelic. But he was quickly set to right:
“Leroy Collins!” she thundered. “If that man out there tonight dies for your sins, you can be assured that you will never be forgiven yours when the Almighty calls you to account.”
Messages from above could not be ignored even by the meanest sinner: Leroy was quickly sent scurrying for salvation to the stables. Mounted atop old Sherman—who was getting more exercise in this one evening than he had in the past year—he raced the deepening night, occasionally glancing at the crescent moon to assure himself that he had not lost his rough path through the bogs and was still on course towards Bald Spot. The silver sliver was much higher in the sky than he would have liked.
As he rode, thoughts rose, quite unbidden, of the confrontation to come. Buried under anxieties was the constant mental pulse that he might not live to see another dawn; and, as complement, the thought that even should a red sun rise tomorrow on his grave, there was still no guarantee that Heaven’s Gates would open to him. He just prayed that Nathaniel was still alive to save; he hoped desperately that the former soldier might not have tried to defy or escape his captors and merit a more summary judgement.
While distracted by these possibilities, Sherman trundled into a deep bog, splashing Leroy with muck. He cursed as he wiped mud off his face, snapping the reins to encourage Sherman out of the mire. As he did so, he thought he heard a low moaning sound from somewhere nearby. He scanned the dark trees, but couldn’t make out either source or direction. He didn’t want to call out—not with the Klan’s harriers about, who would surely take a dim view to being followed. Then again, what if it was Nathaniel, who had accomplished the impossible, evaded the ghosts and, injured in the escape, was even now struggling to return to the hearth?
Reluctantly, aware that he might be wasting precious time, Leroy dropped from Sherman’s back when the horse reached high ground and whispered for the aged mustang to stay where he was. Sherman stamped the ground as though indicating his assent, and Leroy skulked off into the swampy underbrush, ears strained. It was less than a minute before he heard it again, clearly human and plaintive, doubtlessly someone in distress. This time, listening for it, Leroy was able to get a better sense of the direction and turned that way, trundling across the marshland.
He heard his quarry a few more times before he finally spotted him in the distance, between two moulding trunks. Though he couldn’t make him out clearly through the fens, it was impossible to miss the rather bright whiteness of the figure—a Klansman, unless anybody else had business wandering the swamp in bedsheets, though it was odd for that fraternity to abandon one of their brethren. This is where the moaning was coming from; from what Leroy could see, whoever this unfortunate was, he had managed to bury himself half into the ground, sucked in by a quagmire. Must have struck his head, too, since his struggles to free himself from the bog were so slow and jerky, and punctuated by those wordless whines.
For a moment, Leroy wondered if he should bring assistance. On the one hand, Eileen would say that it was his Christian duty to aid his fellow man in times of need, but she wasn’t here and hardly needed to know about this tangent to his real quest. Nor was he particularly inclined to think that the other ghosts would be so glad so see their brother restored to them that they would agree to spare Nathaniel. And helping this one out would take time, of which he had very little, and could simply add one foe to his number should the affair turn violent later on.
Then Leroy saw another fragment of white dancing through the trees in the distance. Ah, so the Klan hadn’t abandoned their companion after all—they must only have noticed his vanishing some time afte
r this one had his accident. Leroy followed the more distant figure: at the moment, it seemed that he was walking in a fairly straight line, aimed towards Bald Spot, but Leroy reckoned this second would hear his fellow’s moaning soon enough and find the misplaced brother. Feeling that whatever responsibilities he might have had here were now absolved, Leroy crept back towards Sherman, moving with both haste and silence.
After mounting the old mustang, Leroy whispered encouragement into his ears and kicked the flanks, sending the wearied horse forwards again into the bayou. They passed a sort of fluid midpoint where the ground was at its swampiest and the ride became easier as patches of hard earth and dry land became more frequent. Leroy aimed Sherman for these, trying to make the best time he could to Bald Spot, mentally chastising himself for the pause even though he knew it to be the best decision he could have made at the time.
He knew his suspicions about the Klan’s meeting place were correct when he spotted the first filigrees of red and yellow flame through the shrubbery as he approached the vicinity of Bald Spot. It wasn’t long before he could make out the white dresses and pointed hoods of the members, occasionally inscribed with red stencilling. Leroy crouched at a distance, wondering how best to approach them.
Should he dismount and try to sneak in, perhaps extract Nathaniel from out under their noses? No, that wouldn’t work—they would all be paying attention to their quarry. Perhaps he could make a lot of loud noises, here in the forest, and frighten them into thinking a large force, perhaps the National Guard (who still took a dim view to lynching), were on their way? But, no, that was a silly idea, something out of the pulp magazines: one man couldn’t make nearly enough noise to frighten off a troop of armed Klansmen, and there was no guarantee they wouldn’t simply shoot Nathaniel before leaving anyway. It seemed like the direct approach was the best one… which was quite unfortunate, in Leroy’s opinion, since it meant exposing himself to these scofflaw fanatics.