Nobody knows where the Hittites come from.
Some people claim they was what happened to the Lost Colony, when the white folks went off, or was carried off, and mixed with the Indians. Some say they are descended from Portuguese sailors that come up from Florida even before the English got here, and settled amongst the Indians. Some say they come from thieves and murderers that run off and hid in Kinlaw’s Hell and raised their families there. Some claim the first Hittites was Frenchmen that fled their revolution. And some say they come from hell.
There ain’t many of them left anymore. Or at least, they have scattered and married outsiders so that you can’t hardly tell who they are now. I’ll read something in the Post ever now and then where some Formy-Duval has been arrested for breaking and entering, or a Boudrow has got married or a Devoe got hit by a car up in Eagle Grove. They seem to be all over the place now. I used to could pick them out walking up High Street when we’d go to town, but now everybody’s so mixed up that you can’t tell the whites from the coloreds from the Lumbees from the Hittites.
Nobody even knows why they’re named that. Momma said they told her that it was because of the Hittites in the Old Testament that the Israelites had to fight to get back the Promised Land. Maybe the first folks from England or Scotland that come across the Hittites was reminded of that story. I’m right sure they had to fight them if they come anywhere close.
We used to have this little song that the boys would sing at recess:
A white man, he shoots with a gun,
a nigger will cut you and run,
a Lumbee will cut you if you look at him wrong,
and a Hittite will cut you for fun.
They was crazy people, and they lived in a crazy place.
If you was to go east from Maxwell’s Millpond, you’d finally come to the East Branch, which runs into the Campbell just this side of Newport. Up this far, you can walk across the East Branch just about anywhere, and when you do, you’re on the outskirts of Kinlaw’s Hell.
The swamp, which is just a part of the Blue Sandhills that’s lower than the rest, runs for twenty miles, near-bout halfway to the ocean. It’s got bogs and pocosins and about eight billion water moccasins. It got its name because a fella named Kinlaw is said to have walked in there one day to pick huckleberries. He got lost, and was gone for four days. On the fifth day, two boys on a farm clear down at Saraw come across him lying at the edge of the first cleared field on the other side of the swamp.
“Boys,” he’s supposed to of said, “my name’s Kinlaw, and I just been through hell.” And when they looked at the back of his ankle, there was this big old cottonmouth that he must of drug for miles. He died right after that. At least, that’s the story they tell. It is a scary place. The moss hangs from the cypresses and bay trees, and briars seem like they come out of nowhere to smack you across the face. Daddy got lost in there one time when he was deer hunting, and when he finally got back after dark, one of his eyes was all bloody. It was about the only time I ever seen him scared.
A couple of miles east of the East Branch is the Marsay Pond. There’s a paved road in there now from Cool Spring, but back then, a trail was all there was, and folks would get ambushed along that trail. They used to say that the Hittites was cannibals and would put you in a pot and eat you if you wandered over there, but that was just to scare the young-uns, I’m mostly sure.
The Marsay Pond is right much bigger than Maxwell’s Millpond, about three miles across. Me and Lafe saw it one time when we was hunting over there, about a year before he died. We come through this clearing and there was the biggest lake we’d ever seen. We’d heard tell of it, but we couldn’t believe that this big old lake wasn’t but six or seven miles from home and we’d never seen it. And there was little houses, more like huts, built right over the water, so that you could of took a pole and fished right off the back porch. There must of been a hundred of them, all with unpainted boards and rusted-out tin roofs. The water, when we looked down at where it lapped over the white sand around our feet, was dark, like rust or blood, even darker than the millpond. We could see women and children in these little shacks, which was maybe two hundred yards away, but we didn’t see no men around. When one of the women that was looking our way started pointing and yelling over to the woman at the shack next to hers, we got on out of there. We didn’t want to be anybody’s dinner.
The Hittites didn’t go to school, at least not back then. They was supposed to, I’m sure, but nobody in the state department of education was crazy enough to go back there and tell them that. They had a funny accent, and when one would come to work in East Geddie at the sawmill, folks would come around just to hear him talk.
The first Scotsmen that come up the East Branch must of been dumbstruck to find all these folks with dark skin and black, straight hair, so black that it looks blue when the sunlight hits it. Some folks called them Blue Hairs. When I hear somebody call a old lady a blue hair, it always confuses me for a second. All the Hittite men I ever saw back then had lean, bony faces, beards and thick eyebrows that met in the middle. They was hairier than the Indians and looked more white, somehow. They said that the Hittites was good-natured folks so long as they wasn’t drunk or you didn’t upset them, in which case they would as soon kill you as spit.
The women had the same dark complexion and straight, blue-black hair, the same long faces, but on them what was fearsome in the men was real pretty. And Angora was the prettiest one I ever saw.
In November, Daddy would let us have Saturdays off to go hunting sometimes, which was a nice change from cutting ditch bank. That morning, Lafe said he had plans of his own. He had been acting right peculiar, slipping off when we had a free day, or sometimes in the evening, and not telling anybody, not even me, what he was up to. He had got real quiet.
This time, though, I was bound and determined to go with him. I followed him down past Rennie’s, across Lock’s Branch and into the sandhills. He wasn’t too happy about it, but Lafe was too good-natured to stay mad for long.
“Look-a-here,” he told me just before we crossed the Ammon Road, “what we do today is just between you and me. You can’t tell nobody about this, no matter what.”
Of course I told him I’d swear on a stack of Bibles to keep quiet. Secrets was exciting to me back then.
We went across the road and on through the sand and pine straw, headed for the millpond with our Iver-Johnson single-shots over our shoulders, me talking about where we’d seen deer skat in September, him being quiet. It was real warm that day, even for Indian summer, and by the time we had got down to the pond, we was ready to throw our jackets over by the pine tree at the water’s edge. It was about eleven o’clock.
Lafe looked at me right strange, and then he put his fingers up to his mouth and whistled. Before too long, I spied somebody coming out of the woods on down toward the lumber mill. It was a girl, and when she got closer, I could see that it was a Hittite girl. She had that straight dark hair parted in the middle and pulled behind her ears. She had kind of thick lips that made her look all pouty. She didn’t seem real enthused to see me.
“Littlejohn,” Lafe said, “this here’s Angora Bosolet.”
I don’t know how long they’d been meeting like that, or even how they met, except that her daddy worked at the mill. I never got to talk to either one of them about it. Angora put one of her long tan arms around Lafe, and I couldn’t help but wish it was me that she was hugging.
He told her who I was, and then he turned to me and said, “Angora’s going to be my wife.”
I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to ask him what Momma and Daddy would have to say about that, to say nothing of her Hittite family. I asked him when, soon as I got my breath back, and he said soon as he saved up a little money and got up enough nerve. I hate to say it, but I was jealous. I know it sounds peculiar, but Lafe had been the only friend I’d had for most of my life, and now he was leaving me behind. And already I was able to see a world where Momma and Daddy would forgive Lafe for marrying a Hittite, because he always was the favorite.
Angora had a funny accent, talked faster than we did and used her hands and arms more to make herself understood. She had brought a jar of moonshine with her that her daddy had made, she said, and she give us some. Lafe had been drinking for a couple of years, and he’d let me try some of the stuff one time that the Faircloths sold up by the Mingo Road, but this stuff that Angora had was different; it would set your fields on fire. I choked a little on the first sip and passed it to Lafe, who drunk some and passed it back to Angora. She took a big gulp and wiped her lips off with the back of her hand real slow and lazy, and then she smiled at me and Lafe. I could see what made him want her.
We sat around next to the pond, under that pine with our 12-gauges propped on either side of us, and we passed the jar around. After a while, Lafe sidled up next to me and told me that him and Angora was going to go for a walk, but that they’d be back directly. Said they’d meet me back at the tree in an hour or so.
He took his gun with him, said he might run across a deer or something, but I was thinking that it was right unlikely that any deer in his general direction was in danger of getting shot that day, the way Angora had her arm around him and the way they was laughing and giggling.
I felt right neglected, I don’t mind telling you. I knew a little about girls, from what us boys would talk about and from Alice Fay Cain, who showed me a little about kissing. But it hurt my feelings to think of Lafe going off with a woman (although it turned out that Angora weren’t no older than I was, just seemed older) into a whole ’nother world and leaving me back in that little room at Momma and Daddy’s.
I went down to a place where I’d seen deer skat and walked around a little bit on the bluff that looked down on the millpond. I could see the workers over at the mill walking off in different directions, some up the tram tracks toward McNeil, some toward the Ammon Road, at the end of their half day of Saturday work. Down at the other end, the pond looked even more lonesome than usual, with a loon off in the distance making me feel lower than I already did. I took a couple of shots at some squirrels that peeked around the side of a sycamore, but I didn’t spy any sign of deer and didn’t much care that I didn’t, to tell you the truth.
I got back to the tree after one, but they was still gone. Maybe they just won’t come back a-tall, I was thinking. Maybe they’ll just go off and get married today. I felt like if I could get Lafe back at the house and talk to him, I might get him to change his mind. I wasn’t thinking too much about Lafe’s happiness.
We’d brought along some dinner. I had a piece of sausage and a couple of Momma’s biscuits and then got a drink of the dark millpond water, which you could still do at that time and not die. Then I set down next to that pine tree and dozed off.
The next thing I knew, the whole world seemed like it exploded around me. There was this loud bang and I felt a stinging feeling all over my face. I thought I might be dead, but I didn’t know what of. My eyes burned, partly from the sand, partly from looking into the sun. When I was finally able to make heads or tails out of it all, there was Lafe, laughing like he’d just heard the funniest joke in the world. And Angora was next to him, laughing harder than I’d ever imagined somebody that pouty-faced could of.
Lafe and Angora had come back and found me asleep by the tree. They told me that they, meaning Lafe, couldn’t help but fire a shot in the sand in front of me just to see what happened.
Now, I take a spell to wake up. I like to of popped Daddy one time when I was fourteen because he come in and started dragging me by my foot out of bed, just messing around. You got to give me a few seconds. Lafe ought to of known that, but when I saw the empty jar Angora was holding, I knew that they was most probably drunk. Before I noticed that, though, I had already made a lunge toward Lafe and tackled him to the ground. He was still bigger than me, though, and I come to my senses before I was able to hit him upside the head with the piece of wood I had grabbed in my left hand.
After everything calmed down, Angora and Lafe sat and had some dinner. She had brought some smoked fish, which the Hittites would cook over coals outside and dry out so that you could keep it a right good spell. Even though I was full, I tried some.
Angora wasn’t talking much now. Her and Lafe looked over at each other once in a while and kind of smiled, like they knowed something I didn’t, and I felt about as welcome as a ant at a picnic. But I didn’t want to go back by myself. I had this feeling that if Lafe didn’t come with me, he might never come back.
After a while, Lafe kind of shimmied a little lower down the pine tree and said he was fixing to take a nap. Sleep it off is more like it, I thought to myself. But Angora wasn’t sleepy, and she didn’t seem to be much drunk. When Lafe shut his eyes, she started to cleaning up the mess we’d made, and then she asked me if I’d like to take a walk with her.
“After all, we are going to be family, are we not?” she said. She had the funniest way of talking I ever heard. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know what she meant by “take a walk.” I had a feeling that her and Lafe had been doing more laying around than walking, from the looks in their eyes and the pine straw that was still stuck in Angora’s hair.
But she was such a pretty girl that she made my head spin. All the girls I went to school with seemed so plain and predictable. Even the good-looking ones was fat with two or three babies by the time they was twenty-one or twenty-two, it seemed like, and you could see them turning into their mommas even before they got out of high school. Maybe Angora had a fat old momma back in Kinlaw’s Hell, but I somehow doubt it.
We took the trail that I had gone on earlier, walking alongside the pond on the west side. I asked her where she came from, and she pointed east, over toward the Marsay Pond. She said her daddy, which she called her papa, worked for the lumber mill, and that she would walk with him to work sometimes, and then go fishing in the millpond, which had better and bigger fish in it than the Marsay did, probably because it had better water. The fish that was there didn’t have anywheres else to go, since there weren’t any creeks feeding it, and they got to be pretty big. It was all fished out twenty years ago, but now they’re trying to bring back the bream and perch and even some bass.
I felt a lot like them fish right then, kind of locked in.
She told me that she liked to take water jugs up here with her and bring a bunch back, because the water in the Marsay was bitter and full of iron. I told her about the time me and Lafe had walked to the Marsay and was scared we’d be caught. I didn’t tell her about being scared they’d eat us.
“The Marsay folk, we just want to be left alone,” she said. She told me a story I hadn’t heard before, about when the Klan tried to “straighten out” the Hittites. I didn’t know, until I met Angora, that the Hittites didn’t call themselves that. They called themselves the Marsay folk.
Anyhow, Angora told me that right before she was born, the Ku Klux Klan got mad at the Hittites because one old boy went back into Kinlaw’s Hell to hunt and got beat within a inch of his life. So they figured they’d have a little cross burning right there by the Marsay Pond. Angora said the Hittites let them come on in, down the only trail leading in from the main road, let them set up their cross, everybody with their robes and hoods on, and then they attacked. She said they closed off the only road with a few logs and then they went after the Klan. She said most of the Klansmen went running through the woods after they was attacked by about a hundred Hittite men and women toting everything from tree limbs to knives, and that the Hittites still had horses that was bred from what the Klan left behind that night. She told me that one of the Hittites, a great-uncle of hers, was killed from one of the Klansmen firing into the crowd, and that two Klansmen was killed, one when he got caught between the Hittites and the lake, tried to swim away and drowned, the other one beat to death. She said they hadn’t heard tell of the Klan since then, and didn’t expect to, neither.
She seemed like she talked more when Lafe wasn’t around, and I couldn’t help but like her a little.
“Maybe you can come live with us,” she said, “after we are married.”
We walked on through the woods. All of a sudden, there was a crash in the brush up ahead of us, and this beautiful buck deer, must of been a eight-pointer at least, broke through. The afternoon sun hitting him made him look red. I was toting my gun, but the whole thing caught me so much by surprise that I didn’t even get it off my shoulder. It’s funny, but now I can ride up to Montclair and they’ll take me for a ride up on the parkway, where we can see deer all over the place. Back then, I probably hadn’t seen four live deer in my life.
We stopped and listened to the noise die away. It seemed real quiet all of a sudden, and a wind was picking up. Angora shivered and moved closer to me.
In a day that didn’t seem to have no end to surprises, Angora leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “You are so pretty, like your brother,” she said. I wasn’t much used to being kissed, and I sure wasn’t used to men, and especially me, being called pretty. Then she reached up with one of them berry-brown hands of hers, turned my face toward hers and kissed me right on the lips. I had never tasted nothing so sweet. I was as drunk as if I’d chugged all that moonshine myself.
“We’re family now, eh?” she said, and I told her I reckoned we was. And then she laughed like she was dying, like she couldn’t stop. I thought she was mocking me and moved away from her, but she grabbed my arm and pulled it around her.
“You English are so funny,” she said. That’s what the Hittites called us. The English.
It was about two o’clock when we got back to Lafe, and he was still passed out by that pine tree beside the pond. I was feeling my oats pretty good by this time and was still about half drunk from Angora’s kiss.
“Look at Lafayette,” she said. I don’t think I had ever heard anybody use Lafe’s whole name before, not even Momma when she was mad. It always made me wish Littlejohn could be shortened, because it sounded so much worse when Momma would say, “Littlejohn, you come here,” than it did when she called Lafe.
“He’s still sleeping,” Angora said; and then she added, “How good a shot are you, Littlejohn?”
It hadn’t occurred to me until she mentioned it, and if she hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t of done it, because Daddy taught us never to mess around with guns, and I was always more careful than Lafe was.
But here was this beautiful girl, practically daring me to scare Lafe so bad he’d pee in his pants, and the idea wasn’t all that unattractive to me, when I remembered how bad he’d scared me when he had the chance.
“I ain’t a bad shot,” I told her. “Watch this.”
I took the 12-gauge, the one I’d got for my twelfth birthday, off of my shoulder, picked it up and aimed. But I didn’t aim down on the ground like Lafe did. I picked out a spot about two feet over Lafe’s head, right in the middle of the pine tree, so that he’d hear the shot and feel the bullet explode into that tree at the same time. I was about sixty feet away. I could pick off a squirrel at two times that distance.
But then the thing happened that you never can plan for, the thing that can happen when you’re careless and don’t have no leeway left. Angora, thinking about how silly old Lafe was going to look, I reckon, started to laugh before I even pulled the trigger. It was that same laugh that she had back in the woods, like she couldn’t stop. I started to squeeze the trigger at the same time that Lafe woke up, hearing Angora laughing, and saw me pointing an Iver-Johnson right at him. He must of jumped up to try and get away, still half asleep and not knowing anything but that somebody was aiming to shoot him.
He jumped the two feet it took, and the last thing my brother ever saw was me pulling the trigger of my shotgun, pointed at him.
Angora was real quiet for a few seconds. Then she started making this little sound like a hurt kitten. Finally, she squawled like a panther and turned and started running.
Lafe twitched just once. I threw down the gun and walked toward him, and I could see the black blood oozing out of a hole no doctor could ever fix, right over his eyes. Angora was going in smaller and smaller circles, screaming words I had never heard before, some of it not even words. She fell in the sand directly, looked over at me and spit out, “God damn you to hell.” She went over to where I was kneeling next to Lafe, just stood there and stared, then turned and started running again, this time in a straight line. I looked down at Lafe, felt one more time for a heartbeat, and when I looked up, she was gone.
A loon cried way off in the distance like a soul making tracks. My last hope was that it was all a dream, and if I started running too, maybe I’d wake up. So I run up toward the sawmill. Even if it is a dream, I thought to myself, I ought to try and get help. By the time I got to the mill office, I was pretty sure it wasn’t any dream, but there wasn’t nobody at the mill; even the foreman had already locked up and gone home.
I thought about just running into the millpond until the water covered me up, or just heading off into Kinlaw’s Hell, never to be seen no more. But I didn’t. No guts, I reckon. I run for home. It was a good two miles, but I stopped when I got to the Ammon Road, thought about running up into Geddie to get help there, or about just turning around and going back into the Blue Sandhills for good, just plowing into Kinlaw’s Hell until I disappeared. But I didn’t. I kept running for home.
It was late Saturday afternoon. A chill had come up, and the sweat was starting to turn cold under my shirt. I had left the jacket back next to Lafe. I run by Rennie’s house, and thought for a minute about just having Rennie and them hitch up the mule and go after Lafe’s body, but I could see the house from there, so I kept on going, just slowing down long enough so that when Rennie’s brother come toward me, ’cause he could see that something was real wrong, I could tell him Lafe had been shot.
Momma and Connie was in the kitchen fixing supper. I come in by the back-porch door, closing it real careful behind me, I reckon so that there could be one more second of peace before everything ended. Then I turned the doorknob, walked in the kitchen and they both knew something terrible had happened.
“Where’s Lafe?” Momma wanted to know before I could tell her anything. “Where’s Lafe?” she asked me again.
“He’s been shot,” I told her, and I couldn’t hold the rest of it in. “I think he’s dead.”
Momma went all to pieces, sat right down on the kitchen floor with the wooden soup spoon still in her hand. Connie said that Daddy was out in the near barn shucking corn. I had run right past him on the way to the house, but I reckon he didn’t hear me for the corn sheller, and I didn’t hear him for the wind and my own breathing.
So I went out to get Daddy. He was sitting there gathering up corn off the barn floor to shell, and he looked so peaceful there, the old tabby cat sleeping over in the corner. I couldn’t hardly bear to tell him what I had to tell him.
“Daddy, Lafe’s been hurt bad. He’s shot,” I told him. He tried to get up quick and fell when his wooden leg got caught under him. I helped him up.
“Where?” was all he could say.
I didn’t know which where he meant.
“At Maxwell’s Millpond. In the head.”
He hitched up the mules to the wagon and yelled for Connie to have the Williamses send for Dr. Horne. Then me and him headed back east to get Lafe’s body.
I told Daddy that Lafe had been cutting through some vines when he tripped and the gun went off.
“Don’t lie to me, Littlejohn,” he said, not taking his eyes off the rut road in front of him. “I can stand anything. Just don’t lie to me.”
Well, I told him, and it turned out that he really couldn’t stand that after all. What I told him, though, was that we was hunting for deer, and all of a sudden Lafe come through some brush to the side of me, and I thought he was a deer.
“Son, how could you mistake your own brother for a deer?” he asked me, like it was a insult to Lafe to do that. Actually, it happens about three times every deer season to somebody in the state. I didn’t say anything a-tall; the whole idea of what I’d done was starting to sink in, and I started to shivering from more than the cold. I sat there all the way to the pond, shaking. Daddy was crying.
It was just about dark when we got there, and for a minute, I had this crazy feeling that Lafe was going to pop out from behind a tree and scare us half to death, and we’d all laugh about what a joke he’d played on us all.
But there he was, or his body was, lying right by that pine tree, not moved since I run off, his head kind of twisted to one side. Daddy walked up to him, felt his body and said, “I wish you had of shot me instead.”
Then he grabbed his legs and said, “Help me load him into the wagon. He’s gone.”
He didn’t say another thing all the way back to the house, which was where Dr. Horne was waiting, since neither me nor Daddy had told anybody where Lafe’s body was.
There wasn’t anything to do except have him hauled to the undertaker’s, which one of the Williams boys did. I had to tell that story about ten times before they buried him, to every blessed relative that come by, and every time I told it, I could feel Momma’s and Daddy’s eyes on me, and I knew right then and there that it would take more than one lifetime before they got over it. They might forgive me or at least stop blaming me, but they never would get over it.
We ain’t much on sensitive around here, or at least we weren’t back then. Times was tough, and nobody thought about sending a boy to see a psychiatrist because he shot his brother by accident. I doubt if there was any psychiatrists around here back then. You was supposed to mind your manners and say yes sir, no sir; be polite and tell the folks how come it was that you shot your brother dead.
“Littlejohn,” my aunt Ida, who we saw about four times a year, said, “how in the world did you mistake your own brother for a deer?” And I was supposed to sit there, patient and calm, and tell her how it happened, or how I said it happened.
The worst thing about the shooting, or maybe the second worst, was that, to this day, I can’t look you or God in the eye and say, for sure and certain, that I didn’t have a little spite or meanness in my heart when I pointed that Iver-Johnson at Lafe. Oh, to be sure I never meant to kill my brother. But maybe I tried to cut it a little too close. If I’d of aimed three feet over his head instead of two, I’d of still missed him a foot when he jumped up. It just shows what comes from going too close to the edge. You can fall off.
I’m only sure that I saw Angora Bosolet two times in my life after that. Both times was within a month of Lafe’s death.
There wasn’t any sign of her at the millpond, although I reckon somebody looking for a third person could of found them little footprints of hers in the sand, and they might of found the wrapper around the smoked fish and wondered where that come from. But the sheriff was more gentle about it all than my family was, figured that nobody would be stupid enough to lie about shooting his own brother to death because he was a deer, I reckon.
Thing is, I felt like I would be betraying Lafe if I told everybody he was seeing this Hittite girl on the sly, that it would make his whole life seem cheap, like people might snigger and laugh when they mentioned his name. I couldn’t of stood that. It seems right crazy now, thinking back on it: I was so concerned that nobody would think any less of Lafe, when he himself was fixing to marry Angora, no matter what anybody thought. I expect that it might hurt somebody a little more to put a bullet in his brain than it would to tell everybody who his secret girlfriend was. But that was the way I felt at the time. Besides, I promised.
It was two weeks after the funeral, walking back from the swamp on a Tuesday, that I seen Angora for the second time. She must of waited until the Lockamys was already headed toward their house, so she could see me alone. We was back cutting the bank by Lock’s Branch, and all of a sudden she just appeared from behind the Rock of Ages. I started to back up. It was near-bout dark, there was a cemetery to my left with Lafe’s body fresh in it, and a full moon was already up just over the Blue Sandhills, turning brighter by the second.
She looked just as pretty as she did the first time, but she was dressed all in black, and her eyes looked all puffy.
“You’ve got to help me,” she said. “It’s your fault. You’ve got to help me. He was going to marry me.”
I turned and run. She chased after me, and for a while, I could hear her feet, near-bout feel her breath as she tried to talk to me while I was running away.
Later, I remember she said something about two months, but it didn’t hit me what she meant. I just kind of shut it out of my mind. Maybe if she hadn’t jumped out from behind the rock like a ghost, I would of stopped and let her have her say. But I was sure she meant me harm, that maybe she would tell Momma and Daddy everything that happened and make it even worse than it was. Whatever, by the time I come out of the woods next to the Lockamy place, she had give up and gone back.
The last time I’m sure I seen Angora, it was a Friday the week after that. I had to work on the tobacco barn roof farthest from the house, because it had leaked in the fall and ruined some tobacco.
It was a hateful job, because those tobacco barn roofs was steep, and it was a one-man show. I was already starting to talk to Lafe’s ghost, and it seemed like any minute I might come over the crown of the roof and see him on the other side, grinning like he did. It made me a little spooked.
I had just climbed down the ladder to take my dinner break when she stepped out of the woods right in front of me. Thinking back, she must of spent a awful lot of time tracking me to catch me with nobody else around twice like she did.
“Please don’t run off, Littlejohn,” she said, and she tried to smile, but it just scared me worse somehow. “I need help, Littlejohn. Please.”
I turned and run. She chased me a quarter mile or so, cussing me and begging me not to run away. But I never wanted to see Angora Bosolet again, couldn’t look at her without thinking about Lafe and the millpond.
It was a long time before I found out what Angora wanted. At the time, I thought she was either crazy over Lafe dying, or she was a ghost, or she wanted to make trouble.
The longer I’ve lived, the more I have become convinced that nothing ever comes to nothing, that everything we do comes back to haunt us, just like Angora did.