It got so that I could diagnose scarlet fever by the terrible sore throat, high fever and skin that turned red and peeled off in little scales like a snake. Some kids got rheumatism and others couldn’t pee when their kidneys stopped working. Doc painted infected tonsils with a carbolic solution and drained pus out of abscessed ears. Sponge baths brought down the fever, but nothin’ helped very much.
When Billy Malone’s little sister came down with fever and a sore throat, I knew right away what was wrong. She couldn’t swallow and had a real bad earache. My heart just about broke from hearing her cry out in pain. Billy couldn’t even stand to be in the house when she carried on. I held the mirror while Doc cut the eardrum and drained pus. It was just like the Indian boy. At first, she was better. Two days later she had a terrible headache and her fever came back. She was dead by the end of the week. Billy cried his eyes out when they lowered her little casket into the ground.
“Ain’t there nothing more to do?”
“Doc says if he could study a skull, he might learn how to help,” I said.
“How ‘bout an animal skull?”
“No, it has to be a real human skull and a young one at that. I ain’t having nothing to do with skulls. Those big empty eye holes give me the shivers,” I said.
I thought about Billy’s sister and all the other kids who died and had the terrible dream about trying to kill a ghost. It was hard to know who it was, but it didn’t make for a peaceful night. The next morning, Doc looked up from his bacon and eggs. “You comin’ down with something. Those big dark circles under your eyes don’t look healthy.”
I squirmed around and played with the eggs, but figured it was time to get this thing off my chest. “Ever since getting out of the orphanage, I have bad dreams about trying to kill someone, but there’s something that stops me every time. It’s just about making me sick.”
“Maybe it’s from that bump on the head you had a while back. You always talked about killing Indians or Rebs. Most boys your age are bloodthirsty savages, but they get over it and sometimes turn into useful citizens.”
He put down his fork and gave me such a look as I have never seen on any man. His eyes became dark and flat and there wasn’t no expression on his face. It was like something inside of him got turned off. “Killing is easy, Tom, too easy, until after it’s done. For some men, it’s like drink. They can’t get enough. There were a few like that in the war, but thank God, most men didn’t want to kill. It’s better to save lives. I learned that and I hope you do too.”
He left to go see another sick child. My insides felt all messed up. It was like I hated Reverend Pendelton and old Murphy so bad, I wanted to squeeze the life out of them. On the other hand, I was so scared of dead eyeholes, I couldn’t even think about hunting for a skull. I owed Doc and kept thinking about what he said. In the bright daylight the picture of the deaths head in the book didn’t look so bad. I got to thinking that a skull that had been buried long enough for the flesh to rot off wasn’t much use to anyone. The more I thought about the whole thing, it sort of made sense. If Doc could study a skull and learn to save little children, like Billy Malone’s sister, it would be worth the risk. Then I got to worrying about what folks would say if a grave was dug up. If we did the thing, it would have to be in broad daylight when there weren’t no hants around. Everybody knew that spirits hovered over burial grounds at night, looking to take away live people.
Billy Malone was all broke up about his sister and I figured he would help get a skull on account of he was so brave and wouldn’t be afeared of skeletons and graves like most people. It got pretty warm between Christmas and New Years, when school let out. One afternoon, we were hunting along the river, hopin’ to pot a duck or a rabbit.
“I don’t suppose you know of any old graveyards out in the country?” I asked.
“Now what do you want with an old graveyard? They’s haunted and them hants will ketch you and put you down in one of them graves if you ain’t careful. Nosiree, you don’t want nothin’ to do with any graveyard.”
Billy sat down on a log and skipped a flat stone across the river. He was pretty good; it skipped four times. Then he tossed a stick into the water and handed the .22 rifle to me. “See if you can hit that stick.”
I shot and the splash of the bullet rocked the stick. I couldn’t tell if the bullet even touched it. It’s always like that if you shoot at a stick, on account of it won’t sink. It’s more fun to shoot at a bottle.
“Doc needs to study a skull to find out why so many kids are dying with scarlet fever. Seems the least we could do is find some old skull that ain’t no use to nobody. Besides, just supposing that you got an infection in your ear and it spread to your brain. Wouldn’t you want the doctor to know what to do?”
The stick had floated farther away. Billy took careful aim and broke it in two pieces with one shot. He was crazy about guns.
“Has Doc still got that big Navy Colt?”
“Sure, he keeps it in the bottom of his medical bag.”
“I might know where to find an old graveyard if I could shoot that Colt pistol.”
I sat down on a log and thought about that. It would be easy to snitch the pistol out of the medicine bag, but Doc would find out right away. Snitching might be allowable for a good cause and it wasn’t even really stealing if you took something and then put it right back. It was hard to know what was right and wrong in a case like that. It was sort of like picking apart a hard knot in a piece of hemp rope. If a skull could help Doc save sick kids, wouldn’t that make it right to borrow the pistol?
“What do you want with that old pistol?”
“Why, to shoot it, what else? Those forty fours make a terrible noise and it’s about the most powerful gun ever invented. If you get that pistol, I’ll take you to an old graveyard in the hills bout’ a mile back from the river. I seen gravestones last fall when I was hunting squirrels. There used to be a cabin back there before the war, but the people all died. The bodies would be old and most likely, the flesh is all rotted off. I ain’t goin’ lessen you get that pistol. Loud noises and burning gunpowder scares spirits of dead folks.”
Doc hardly ever used his bag on Saturdays when he saw country folks in the office. On Friday night, after I filled the medicine bottles and sharpened the scalpels, I sneaked into his office. The Colt pistol was wrapped in an oily cloth at the bottom of his bag. It was heavy and looked as if it had been used hard. The barrel was scratched and there were dents in the wooden grips. I held it in one hand and sighted at the bookcase across the room. The pistol wobbled and so I couldn’t line up the sights. When I held it in both hands, it settled down and I eased back the hammer. It was all primed and loaded, so I let the hammer down to half cock and spun the cylinder. That pistol made me feel powerful, like I could lick most any man alive, even Murphy. I imagined firing at those men with hoods and killing them one at a time. Then I got to feeling foolish and remembered Doc saying that it was bad to kill. I wrapped the pistol in a newspaper and put it in a feed sack. We figured on getting a real early start, so we would get to the graveyard at noon, when the hants were least likely to be hovering around.
The next morning, I told Aunt Alice I was going hunting with Billy Malone.
“You ain’t goin’ anywhere until you split wood for the cook stove,” she said.
That took almost an hour; she fixed chicken, fresh bread and apples for a lunch. I put the food in the sack on top of the gun and got a shovel from the tool shed. Billy was waiting down by the river with an old mare he had borrowed from the livery stable. She was bony and swaybacked and might have been gray once, but now was mostly white, especially around the muzzle. Nobody rented that old horse anymore and that’s how come Billy was able to borrow her. We rode bareback with Billy up in front. The spine of that horse was sharp as a knife and when Billy got her up to a trot it felt like I was split right up the middle. I almost fell off and had to hold on to Billy’s coat.
It was nearly noon afore we got across the river. Old Sam Turner, who ran the ferry wanted to know why we were carrying a shovel. I said that we were going to dig for gold. He laughed and said there weren’t no gold in these parts.
The bottom road was muddy and cut up with ruts from wagon wheels. The horse wouldn’t do more than a slow walk until we got to the path that led around the hills alongside of Sandy Creek. It was a warm day and I had on the wool stockings that Aunt Alice had knitted and long underwear with a new wool coat. It was really sweaty inside all those clothes.
After we had gone three-four miles, Billy got turned around. We went up alongside a trickle of water on what looked like an old game trail to where the stream came out from under a rock into a little pool. We stopped and had a drink of spring water and ate the chicken and bread. We were drowsy. It felt good to lie back on the leaves to let lunch settle. A whole bunch of crows landed on the branches of a tree right above our heads and made a lot of ruckus. I swear crows talk to each other just like people. Once I shot a crow with Billy’s rifle. He made me skin and gut it and roast it because he said you shouldn’t shoot nothin’ you don’t eat. It was a tough old bird and tasted even worse than it smelled. We were just putting off finding the graves, maybe because we really didn’t want to. The shadows were getting longer and the sun wasn’t so bright and we still hadn’t found the graveyard.
“I gotta find a skull before it gets any later,” I said.
“First I wanna see that pistol,” Billy said.
I took it out of the tow sack. Billy checked the primers, pulled back the hammer and fired at a knothole in a walnut tree. There was a lot of smoke and a terrible noise and the bullet hit the edge of the knot. Billy had good eyes and steady hands. He would make a good soldier or an Indian fighter and would probably get to be a general.
“All right, that’s enough. Now we got to find the graveyard.”
I put the pistol back in the sack and led the horse down a path until Billy found another trail that led higher into the hills to a pretty meadow where there was an old cabin with a stone fireplace. It had been a farm once, but now the fields were overgrown. It looked like someone had partly rebuilt the cabin and out back, there was a corral made of fresh cut saplings. The ground was trampled with cattle tracks. Billy studied those tracks until I made him get along and find the gravestones.
The old mare was shy and didn’t want to go no further, but Billy went on ahead, leading the horse up a hill back of the cabin past some outcroppings of limestone. It was fast getting dark and a gusty wind sighed through the trees. Limbs creaked and a squirrel scampered after hickory nuts. Off in the distance a twig snapped. I nearly jumped out of my skin, but after that, there were just the usual woodsy sounds. Billy said it must have been an animal. He knew better. Animals don’t break sticks.
The ground on top of the hill was covered with leaves which had fallen from a grove of oak trees. Billy said this was the place and sure enough, after kicking the leaves we found four gravestones lying flat on the ground. The stones were ice cold and covered with a greenish moss. They hadn’t been touched for years and if the spirits had their way, they would never be disturbed.
“This here is your old graveyard. You better do what you gotta do and then we skedaddle out of here,” Billy said.
The gravestones were scratched with names and dates. The mother and three children had died in January 1840. I cleared off the stones until I found one for Elihu Jasper, born in November 1835 and died in January 1840. I hated to bother him, but a skull from a five year old child should be just about right. Bile came up in my throat and I tasted chicken. My legs turned shivery and I wanted to run down the hill and make for home, but didn’t want Billy to think I was a coward.
The thick pile of leaves had protected the ground from frost and it wasn’t too hard to dig in the soft earth. I dug until I got tired, then Billy dug some. It was about a half hour before the shovel struck a rotted wooden plank with a hollow “thunk”. We stopped and rested a spell. By the time we got the dirt off the top of the coffin the sky was a dark gray with only a little light in the west. Sometimes a little sliver of moon shone through the clouds, but mostly it had got so dark the trees were just shadows. I was shivery and scared and Billy was skittish as a girl. When I pried the lid off the wooden box, he ran down the hill and stood by the horse. Ever since I got frostbit, I always took sulfur matches and a candle when I went out in the woods. I lit the candle and set it on the edge of the dark hole. The clothes were mostly rotted off the skeleton and the hands and arms crossed over the ribs. There was a musty odor, like from an animal that’s been dead a long time. I felt around for the skull and was wrenching it loose from the neck bones when our horse whinnied. Another horse down the hill, near the cabin, whinnied back. I raised up from the grave. My hair must have stood straight up, when the hant came up the hill.
“Hey what’s goin’ on up there,” it said.
It wasn’t no hant, but a flesh and blood man comin’ up the hill, makin’ a lot of noise. I scrunched down and blew out the candle, hopin’ that whoever it was wouldn’t see me. He stopped and lit a lantern and kept on coming up the hill. I was practically on top of the skeleton, hoping and praying that the hant or the man would go away. Instead, I could hear his footsteps scraping the rocks and breaking sticks. He got so close I could hear him breathing. My heart was thumping and I tried to scrunch down deeper into the hole, but my hand slipped and I fell against the ribs of the skeleton. The bones crunched like dry sticks. I groaned out loud. The lantern light shined right down into the grave where I had fallen over on my side and was looking up out of the hole.
“You lil’ bastid, now I gotcha.”
He had a greasy long beard and glittery, mean eyes and a scar on his forehead. It was Murphy. A gold tooth dangled from a string around his neck and sparkled in the lantern light. I let out a yell. He grabbed my coat with one big hand and hauled me out of the grave. I was shaking hard and figured I was a goner. There was a shot and the lantern shattered. The light went out. He cussed and let go. I got up and ran down the hill, but Billy and the horse were gone. I kept running and got into the woods, then tripped and fell down.
“Tom, Tom, over here.” I ran into dense brush. Billy had put his hat over the horses head to calm her down. “I hid her in a gully and sneaked back up the hill. When I saw him lookin’ down in the grave, I shot out the lantern.”
We lay on the ground and listened to Murphy thrashing around in the brush.
“You little bastids. I’m a goin’ to kill both of you,” he shouted.
“Murphy a gold tooth hanging from a string around his neck. That proves he killed Young Isaiah,” I said.
“We are gittin’ outta here, fast,” Billy whispered.
“I gotta go back and get the pistol and the skull,” I said.
“God, no, Tom, he’ll kill us and won’t no one know the difference.” Then he thought a spell, while I caught my breath. “I’ll go down the road a spell and fire a couple of shots to draw him away; you go back a ways and shoot the pistol. He’ll think there’s a whole bunch of vigilantes in the woods,” Billy said.
I couldn’t think of anything better and figured that I had to get the skull and the pistol or not go back home. Billy slipped away and led the horse down the gully toward the creek. After a while, there was a shot and then another from a slightly different direction. When Murphy went crashing down the trail, I sneaked back up the hill and got the feed sack. It took another minute to wrench the skull loose from the neck bones and put it into the sack. I stuck the pistol into my belt. By then, my eyes were used to the dark and I could make out the old cabin at the bottom of the hill. I went around back and pulled dry kindling up next to a pile of logs. I lit the dry sticks and pretty soon the logs blazed up. I ran back in the woods and sat down. When cabin blazed up, I ran like crazy up the hill and laid on my belly behind a stump. I was panting something terrible and scared, but excited too. When Murphy came running up the trail, I could see him, clear as anything in front of the flames. He was so close I could see that glittering gold tooth. I rested the Colt on the stump, but when the front sight was right on his chest I got to shivering like a bad chill. I yanked on the trigger, but nothing happened because I hadn’t pulled back the hammer. It was just like the dream when something always stopped me from killing the ghost. Then a horrible feeling come over me on account of how close I had come to killing a man.
I crawled through the woods until I came out on the trail by Sandy Creek. A twig snapped back in a willow thicket and a bobwhite quail whistled. When I hooted like an owl, Billy came out of the brush leading the horse. When he got close, I whispered. “Murphy had a clear look at my face and as sure as God’s in heaven, he will wait for us by the ferry landing,” said I.
We led the horse and went through the brush away from the trail, stopping every so often to listen. We wouldn’t have a chance against that repeating rifle. I shivered every time I thought of the bullet holes in Young Isaiah. Billy sort of knew his way through the swamp but we went over our boot tops in water and had to walk around patches of quicksand. Once the horse got stuck and thrashed around but we pulled her loose. We were lost until I found the Big Dipper, standing almost on it’s handle and then saw the North Star. We headed north and a little after midnight come to the river about a quarter mile below the ferry landing. The moon was down, but sickly starlight reflected off the water. Every so often something that looked like a corpse floated by. The dark water was plumb scary and we jumped when a real owl hooted back in the brush. There wasn’t a skiff or even a big log to paddle across the river. We were shivering and scared of that river. “It’s too wide to swim, here. Let’s go to the ferry landing, where it is shallower,” Billy said. Then we heard the creak of a saddle and hooves clopping and sucking at the mud coming down the road.
“Come on,” Billy said, “you get up on the horse and I’ll lead.”
It was just about the bravest thing I ever saw. Billy took off his denim coat and his shoes and put everything into the feed sack with the skull and pistol. I slung his .22 rifle over my shoulder and held the sack with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other. The mare didn’t want to move, but Billy yanked on the halter until she started. When we got into deep water where the current was strong, Billy and the horse both had to swim and once, when the horse’s head went underwater, I thought we would all drown. All of a sudden, I thought about Elihu Jasper being lowered into his ice-cold grave in January. Somebody, probably his pa, had a hard time digging through the frozen ground.
The worst part of dying was the cold. I never prayed so hard in my life and promised to never again get into trouble or have impure thoughts about Rachel or dream about being in bed with Mary. I would go to church and Sunday school and if Aunt Alice wanted, even Wednesday night prayer service. I thought about Pa dying all alone. I didn’t want to die in the middle of the river and have my corpse float all the way to New Orleans. Billy yanked at the halter and I kicked hard until the old mare swam like she was a young colt.
We were half way across when Murphy fired the first shot. I ducked as low as I could and stay on the horse. There were a lot more shots, but it was dark and all the bullets missed. It seemed like half the night before Billy touched bottom so he and the horse waded up the bank. We got into the trees where Murphy couldn’t see us. Billy’s teeth chattered so loud it sounded like a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. I gave him my coat and held him up or he would have fallen down. We couldn’t have done a thing if Murphy had come across the river. The powder in the Colt was wet and the .22 rifle was filled with water. The old horse was about to fall down and croak.
“My pa will whale the tar out of me for being out late, but if he’s gotta pay for a dead horse, he will like to kill me,” Billy said.
“We gotta keep moving and get on home. Let’s take the horse to Doc’s barn and let her get warmed up and have some feed. You can stay overnight with me and get your clothes dried out before you go home. We can think up a story, so your pa won’t be so mad.”
We pulled the mare into the barn and hoped to sneak in the back door, but we had no sooner got into the kitchen than Aunt Alice was all over us, bawling her eyes out. When she calmed down and I got loose from her, Doc and Bessie Pendelton and Billy’s pa came out of the back parlor. Mr. Malone had a long sad face that turned beet red and the corners of his mouth turned down. He grabbed Billy and would have whaled the tar out of his backside, but Doc got hold of his arm and kept him from hurting Billy. “Let’s hear what the boys have to say,” he said.
Billy and I shivered and our teeth chattered so bad, neither of us could talk. Doc gave us each a cup of hot water with rock candy and a dash of whiskey. Aunt Alice built up the fire in the kitchen stove and wrapped us in quilts after we took off our wet clothes. I didn’t say nothin’, but took the skull and the pistol out of the sack and put them on the kitchen table. When the whiskey got to my brain, I told how Billy shot out the lantern and swam across the river to get away from Murphy. Then Billy told about the cattle tracks and the new corral. “The rustlers are back in the county and that must be where they hide stolen cattle,” Mr. Malone said. Aunt Alice put her arms around me and started to cry all over again. Doc might have been mad about the pistol, but was happy with the skull.
Bessie Pendelton sat on the horsehair couch with her sour pickle look when Doc gave us the whisky. “We had to go out to the Bontrager place tonight,” she said.
“Was it about Rachel?”
“No, her mother has cancer,” Bessie said.