by Ronald Kelly
It was a moment before they could summon the breath to tell her. “There’s a ghost in the tobacco field,” gasped 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 yourselves 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 underneath. He leaned against the trunk of the tree and grinned at them, his teeth stained with tobacco juice 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 lay 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 the 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 headstrong. 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 of 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 the bones and fell like a fleshed 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 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 Bent
on 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 lay 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 done, 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 along. 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 goose down 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 lain thrashing on the dank floor of his solitary cell, bound in a straightjacket and screaming for the Lord to “answer the riddle of my 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 return
ed 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.