Whistling Past the Graveyard Read online

  Grimby opened his mouth to say something to the judge, but Mrs. Heaster cut him off. “You may laugh, sir. You may all laugh, for perhaps to you it is funny. A young woman dies a horrible death, the life choked out of her, the very bones of her neck crushed in the fingers of a strong man. That may be funny to some.” The laughter in the room died away. “My daughter was a good girl who had endured a hard life. Yes, she made mistakes. Mr. Grimby has been kind enough to detail each and every one of them. Yes, she had a child out of wedlock, and as we all know such things are unthinkable, such things never happen.”

  Her bitterness was like a pall of smoke.

  “Mr. Grimby did his job very well and dismantled the good name of my daughter while at the same time destroying each separate bit of evidence. Perhaps most of you have already made up your minds and are planning to set Trout Shue free.” She paused and flicked a glance at Holmes, and did I catch just the slightest incline of his head? “The law prevents me from telling what I know of Mr. Shue’s life and dealings before he came to Greenbrier. So I will not talk of him. Mr. Grimby has asked me to tell you how I came by my personal knowledge of the death of my daughter, and so I will tell you. I will tell you of how my dear Zona came to me over the course of four dark nights. As a spirit of the dead she came into my room and stood at my bedside, the way a frightened child will do, coming to the one person who loves her unconditionally and forever. For four nights she came to me and she brought with her the chill of the grave. The very air around me seemed to freeze and the ghost of each of my frightened breaths haunted the air for, yes, I was afraid. Terribly afraid. I am not a fanciful woman. I am not one to knock wood or throw salt in the devil’s eye over my left shoulder. I am a mountain woman of Greenbrier County. A farm woman with a practical mind. And yet there I lay in my bed with the air turned to winter around me and the shade of my murdered daughter standing beside me.”

  The room was silent as the grave as she spoke.

  “Each night she would awaken me and then she would tell me, over and over again, how she died. And how she lived. How she endured life in those last months as the wife of Edward Trout Shue. She told me of the endless fights over the smallest matters. Of his insane jealousy if she so much as curtsied in reply to a gentleman tipping his hat. Of the beatings that he laid upon her, and how he cleverly chose where and how to hit so that he left no marks that would show above collar or below sleeve. My daughter lived in hell. Constant fear, constant dread of offending this offensive man. And then she told me what happened on that terrible day. Trout Shue had come home from the blacksmiths, expecting his dinner, and when he found that she had not yet prepared it—even though he was two hours earlier than his usual time—he flew into a rage and grabbed her by the throat. His eyes flared like a monster’s and she said his hands were as hard and unyielding as the iron with which he plied his trade. He did not just throttle my daughter—he shattered her neck. When I dared speak, when I dared to ask her to show me what his hands had done, Zona turned her head to one side. At first I thought she was turning away in shame and horror for what had happened...but as she turned her head went far to the left—and too far. Much too far and with a grinding of broken bones Zona turned her head all the way around. If anything could be more horrible, more unnatural, more dreadful to a human heart, let alone the broken heart of a grieving mother, then I do not want to know what it could be.”

  She paused. Her eyes glistened with tears but her voice never disintegrated into hysterics or even raised above a normal speaking tone. The effect was to make her words a hundredfold more potent. Any ranting would have painted her as overly distraught if not mad; but now everyone in the courtroom hung on her words. Even Grimby seemed caught up in it. I hazarded a glance at Shue, who looked—for the very first time—uncertain.

  “I screamed,” said Mrs. Heaster. “Of course I did. Who would not? Nothing in my life had prepared me for so ghastly a sight as this. After that first night I convinced myself that it had all been an hysterical dream, that such things as phantoms did not exist and that my Zona was not haunting me; but on that second night she returned. Once more she begged me to hear the truth about what happened, and once more she told me of the awful attack. I only thank God that I was not again subjected to the demonstration of the extent of damage to her poor, dear neck.” She paused and gave the jury a small, sad smile. “I pleaded with Mr. Preston to let me tell my tale during this trial and he refused. I fear he was afraid that my words would make you laugh at me. I believe Mr. Grimby placed me on the stand for those very reasons. And yet I hear no laughter, I see no smiles. Perhaps it is that you, like I, do not find the terrible and painful death of an innocent girl to be a source of merriment. In any case, I have had my say, and for that I thank Mr. Grimby and this court. At least now, no matter what you each decide, my daughter has been heard. For me that will have to be enough.”

  She looked at Grimby, who in turn looked at the jury. He saw what I saw: twelve faces whose eyes were moist but whose mouths had become tight and bitter lines and whose outthrust jaws bespoke their fury.

  Then the silence was shattered as Shue himself leapt to his feet and cried, “Tell whatever fairytales you want, woman, but you will never be able to prove that I did it!”

  The guards shoved him down in his seat and Holmes leaned his head toward Preston and me. “Do you not find it an interesting choice of phrase that he said that we will never ‘prove’ that he did it? Does that sound like the plea of an innocent man or the challenge of a guilty one?” And though he said this quietly he pitched it just loud enough to be heard by everyone in that small and crowded room.

  -9-

  That was very nearly the end of the Greenbrier affair and Holmes and I left West Virginia and America very shortly thereafter. Erasmus Stribbling Trout Shue was found guilty by the jury, which returned its verdict with astonishing swiftness. The judge, with fury and revulsion in his eyes, sentenced Shue to life imprisonment in the State Penitentiary in Moundsville, where Shue died some three years later of a disease that was never adequately diagnosed. Mr. Preston sent Holmes a newspaper account from Lewisburg after Shue’s death in which the reporter recounted a rumor that Shue complained that a ghost visited him nightly and as a result he was unable to sleep. His health deteriorated and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave. No one that I knew of attended the burial or mourned his passing.

  But before Holmes and I had even set out from Lewisburg, as we shared a late dinner in our rooms at the hotel, I said, “There is one thing that confounds me, Holmes.”

  “Only one thing? And pray what is that?”

  “How did Mr. Grimby know to ask Mrs. Heaster about her story? It was not commonly known as far as I could tell, especially not here in Lewisburg. Certainly neither she nor Mr. Preston shared that information.”

  Holmes ate a bit of roast duck and washed it down with wine before he answered. “Does it matter how he found out? Perhaps he learned of it from a ghost in his dreams.”

  I opened my mouth to reply that it surely did matter when an odd thought struck me dumb. I gaped accusingly at Holmes and set my knife and fork down with a crash.

  “If it was someone on this physical plane who tipped him off then it was criminal to do so! The risk was abominable. What if she had raved?”

  “We have not once seen Mrs. Heaster rave,” he observed calmly. “Rather the reverse.”

  “What if the jury did not believe her? What if Grimby had managed her better on the stand? What if—?”

  Holmes cut me off. “What if once in a while, Watson, justice was more important in a court of law than the law itself?” He sipped his wine.

  Once more I opened my mouth to protest, but then a chill wind seemed to blow through the room, making the curtains dance and causing the candle flames to flicker, and in that moment I could feel the heat of my outrage and anger leak out of me. Holmes cut another slice of duck and ate it, his glittering dark eyes dancing with a strange humor. I followed the li
ne of his gaze and saw that he was looking at the curtains, watching as they settled back into place; and then the chill of the room seemed to touch my chest like the cold hand of a dead child over my heart. Though the day had been a hot one the night had been cool, and the maid had shut the window against the breeze. The curtains hung now, as still as if they had never moved, for indeed they could not have.

  When I turned back to Holmes he was looking at me now, half a smile on his mouth.

  Was it a breeze that had found its way through the window frame, or perhaps through an unseen crack in the wall? Or had some voiceless mouth whispered thank you to Holmes in the language of the grave? I will not say what I think nor commit it to paper.

  We said nothing for the rest of that evening, and in the morning we took ship for England, leaving Greenbrier and the ghosts of West Virginia far behind.

  Author’s Note on “Calling Death”

  A few years ago editors Eugene Johnson and Jason Sizemore contacted me about writing for an anthology they were putting together called Appalachian Undead. All zombie stories set in that strange and storied mountain range that stretches from Georgia to Maine. There were two big draws for me. First, I’ve traveled those mountains from end to end a couple of times. I spent a lot of time on the road and on foot and there is magic in them thar hills.

  The second draw was that so many of my friends were involved. John Skipp, Gary A. Braunbeck, Tim Lebbon, Maurice Broaddus, Lucy Snyder, Bev Vincent, Tim Waggoner, John Everson…well, nearly everyone in the book! So, sure, I was in. And besides, I already had a story in mind about those mountains.

  Calling Death

  “It weren’t the wind,” said Granny Adkins.

  The young man perched on the edge of the other rocker, head tilted to lift one ear like a startled bird, listening to the sound. He was stick thin and beaky nosed, and Granny thought he looked like a heron—the way they looked when they were ready to take sudden flight. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure as maybe,” said Granny, nodding out to the darkness. “The wind fair howls when it comes ‘cross the top of Balder Rise. Howls like the Devil himself.”

  “Sounds like a howl to me,” said the young man. “What else could you call it?”

  Granny sucked in a lungful of smoke from her Pall Mall, held it inside for a five count, and then stuck out her lower lip to exhale in a vertical line up past her face. She didn’t like to blow smoke on guests and there was a breeze blowing toward the house. A chime made from old bent forks and chicken bones stirred and tinkled.

  She squinted with her one good eye—the blue one, not the one that had gone milky white when a wasp stung her there forty years back—and considered how she wanted to answer the young man.

  Before she spoke, the sound came again. Low, distant, plaintive.

  She left her initial response unspoken for a moment as they sat in the dark and listened.

  “There,” she said softly. “You hear it?”

  “Yes, but it still sounds like a—”

  “No, son. That ain’t what I meant. Can you hear the sound? The moan?”

  “Yes,” he said, leaning into the wind, tilting one ear directly into its path.

  “Now,” said Granny, “can you hear the wind, too?”

  “I…” he began, but let his voice trail off. Granny waited, watching his face by starlight, looking for the moment when he did hear it. His head lifted like a bird dog’s. “Yes…I hear it.”

  They listened to the moan. It was there, but the wind was dying off again and the sound was fainter, thinner.

  “That, um, ‘moan,’” the young man said tentatively, “it’s not the wind. You’re right.”

  She nodded, satisfied.

  “It’s a separate sound,” continued the young man. “I—I think it’s being carried on the wind.” He looked to her for approval.

  She gave him another nod. “That’s another thing about living up here in the hills,” she said, tying this to their previous conversation. “When you live simple and close to the land, you don’t get as blunt as folks in the cities do. You hear things, see things the way they are, not the way you s’pose them to be. You notice that there are more things around you, and that they’re there all the time.”

  The young man nodded, but he was half distracted by the moans, so Granny let him listen for a spell.

  His name was Joshua Tharp. A good name. Biblical first name, solid last name. A practical name, which Granny always appreciated because she thought that a name said a lot about a person. She would never have come out onto the porch if he’d had a foreign-sounding name, or a two first-name name, like Simon Thomas. Everyone Granny knew with two Christian names was a scoundrel, and half in the Devil’s bag already. However, this boy had a good name. There had been Tharps in this country going back more generations than Granny could count, and she knew family lines four decades past the War of Northern Aggression. Her own people had been here since before America was America.

  So, Joshua Tharp was a decent name, and well worth a little bit of civility. He was a college boy from Pittsburgh who was willing to pay attention and treat older folks with respect. Wasn’t pushy, neither, and that went a long way down the road with Granny. When he’d shown up on her doorstep, he took off his hat and said ‘ma’am,’ and told her that he was writing a book about the coal miners in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and was using his own family as the thread that sewed the two states together.

  Now they were deep into their third porch sitting, and the conversation wandered a crooked mile through late afternoon and on into the full dark of night. Talking about Granny and her kin, and about the Tharps here and the Tharps that had gone on. Joshua was a Whiskey Holler Tharp, though, but there was no one left around here closer than a third cousin with a couple of removes, so everyone told him to go see Granny Adkins.

  “Hell, son,” said Mr. Sputters at the post office, “Granny’s so old, she remembers when God bought these mountains from the Devil, and I do believe the Good Lord might have been short-changed on the deal. You want to know about your forebears—and about what happened when the mine caved in—well you go call on ol’ Granny. But mind you bring your full set of manners with you, ‘cause she won’t have no truck with anyone who gives her half a spoonful of sass.”

  Granny knew that Sputters said that because the old coot phoned and told her. Wrigley Sputters was a fool, but not a damn fool.

  Come calling is exactly what young Joshua did. He came asking about his kin. That was the first day, and even now they’d only put a light coat of paint on that subject. Granny was old and she was never one to be in a hurry to get to the end of anything, least of all a conversation.

  Joshua’s people, the true Whiskey Holler Tharps, were a hard working bunch. Worked all their lives in the mines, boy to old man. Honest folk who didn’t mind coming home tired and dirty, and weren’t too proud to get down on their knees to thank the good Lord for all His blessings.

  Shame so many of them died in that cave-in. Lost a lot of good and decent folks that day. Forty-two grown men and seven boys. The Devil was in a rare mood that day, and no mistake. Guess he didn’t like them digging so deep.

  Granny cut a look at the young man as he sat there studying on the sounds the night brought to him. He was making a real effort to do it right, and that was another good sign. He came from good stock, and it’s nice to know that living in a big city hadn’t bred the country out of him.

  “I can’t figure it out,” said Joshua, shaking his head. “What is it?”

  Granny crushed out her cigarette and lit another one, closing her eyes to keep the flare of the match from stealing away her night vision. She lit the cigarette by touch and habit, shook the match out, and dropped it into an empty coffee tin that had an inch of rain water in it.

  She said, “What’s it sound like?”

  That was a test. If the boy still had too much city in him, then there would be impatience on his face or in his voice. But not in Joshua�
��s. He nodded at the question and once more tilted his head to listen.

  Granny liked that. And she liked this boy. But after a few moments, Joshua shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s almost like there are two sounds. The, um, moan, and something else. Link a faint clinking sound.”

  “Do tell?” she said dryly, but with just enough lift to make it a question.

  “Like…maybe the wind is blowing through something. A metal fence, or…I don’t know. I hear the clink and the moan, but I can’t hear either of them really well.” He gave a nervous half laugh. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, I—don’t spend a lot of time out of doors,” he confessed. “I guess I haven’t learned how to listen yet. Not properly, anyhow. I know Granddad used to talk about that. About shaking off the city so you could hear properly, but until now I don’t think I ever really understood what he was saying.”

  Another soft moan floated over the trees. Strange and sad it was, and Granny sighed. She watched Joshua staring at the darkness, his face screwed up in concentration.

  Granny gestured with her cigarette. “What do you think it might be?”

  “Is it…some kind of animal?”

  “What kind of animal would make a sound like that, do you suppose?”

  They sat for almost two minutes, waiting between silences for the wind to blow. Joshua shook his head.

  “Some kind of cat?”

  That surprised Granny and now she listened, trying to hear it through his ears. “It do sound a might like a cat,” she conceded, then chuckled. “But not a healthy one. Had a broke-leg bobcat get his leg caught in a bear trap once and hollered for a day and a night.”

  “So—is that what it is? A wounded bobcat? Is that clinking sound a bear trap?”