Haints

The title story of my collection

As I lay murdered and dying, I swore my revenge, never reckoning on what it would cost me.

Afterwards, I stood on the side of the road in my bare feet and overalls. The blacktop curved as it fell away, and just out of sight, beyond the bend, was the land where I died. Just a moment gone by and now I was here, feeling the cold of death but not chilled by it, staring down the way to the land I'd known for all my time living.

Age didn't have much meaning no more. I was a boy, and I was a man. I reckon I was everything I’d ever been.

Behind me, wind chimes tinkled on the porch of a ramshackle store. They played a melody filled with sorrow, like the creek before it comes a flood.

The store looked as if it belonged there, and though I knew otherwise, no fear or dread gripped me. The shopkeeper stood on the porch, staring. He had the lean, hard face of a farmer, full of half-gray whiskers.

“Take a look at where it happened.” He spat on the grass and hitched his pants. “That's why you're here.”

I squinted to see if maybe he'd disappear. “I'm surprised to be so kindly welcomed, all things considering.”

“Come see me when you're done.” 

“Do I know you?”

“We've never had the pleasure and never will again.” He coddled the screen door to keep it from slapping the frame as he went inside.

I walked down the road and out onto the dirt and the grass. Our two-story house needed paint, and the chicken coop looked better kept. Between me and the coop were the barn and hog waller, and fields ran to the woods where the land dropped to a creek and rose again to old-growth hills.

The wind bayed like it'd treed its quarry.

I headed for the woods and water and hills. They pulled at me with a longing that could have been mine but might have come from the land itself. It had me so focused I almost missed what was missing.

No chickens scurried about the coop. No pigs wallowed in the mud. No cows lowed. No dogs barked.

I stopped and listened and cried out a loud hello that echoed off the hills. 

Nothing. No birds. No insects. In all the world, there was only me and the stranger at the roadside store.

The tug of the land pulled me into the woods. It left me at the turn of the stream in a sandy clearing below the dry banks where floods had cut the rock and exposed the roots of crippled trees. 

I felt the beating of a dying heart and could almost hear my oath. Trouble was, that's all I remembered. I had the place and the feeling, nothing more. I'd grown up hunting here and been murdered on this spot. It went no further. I couldn't even tell if either of us were born to this land, a Chester by blood. Might have been, I’d been a farm hand or master of the house. Weren’t no telling. Could be I had parents, a wife, children, but there existed nothing certain but me and the land.

Aside from the wind and the leaves, nothing changed. The creek neither receded nor swelled. The earth hadn't eroded from around exposed roots. This was both the space and the moment where I’d died, and yet it was something different and removed, between spaces and alone.

When the woods had nothing more to offer, I strode across the fields. A smokeless fire covered a broken crib and a pile of rubbish. It felt wrong, that crib. I couldn't say why.

Through the back door, I entered the kitchen where a pot rested on a black stove. Three cane chairs sat around a wooden table. Framed photographs decorated the hall, but the images were blurry and overexposed, clouding their faces. 

At the top of the stairs, I found two bedrooms and a third that was nearly empty. It held no furniture. A framed, nursery-rhyme illustration hung catawampus on a sky-blue wall. A picture book lay open on a crumpled rug that showed dimples where furniture had mashed it flat. The placement and distance of those indentations brought the fire to mind and the crib.

Though outside, the house had weathered and chipped, the paint in this room was fresh. I stared longer than seemed reasonable, knowing that paint meant an expected child and wondering if it’d been born and died or just passed away in the womb. It hadn’t lived. The empty room told me so, that and the grief that leaves a crib to burn.

I followed the road to the store, and as had the stranger, so I coddled the screen as it closed. The shopkeeper stood at the counter beside the little black register. The air tasted of sweet tobacco and pine.

“You get what you come for?” The shopkeeper's voice rose out of gravel roads and rooting hogs.

I shook my head.

“I reckon you will, but be quick about it. It's getting late.”

He gestured to ticky-tack bookcases and side tables full of trinkets, the collected debris of a man's life.

I felt lost. “What am I meant to be looking for?”

“What draws upon you most?”

As if the motion weren't my own, I snatched up a rifle and butted it against my shoulder. The stock brushed the hairs of my cheek as I tested the sight and aimed square below the shoulders of a hand-carved, wooden dog.

In the rifle, as in the earth, I felt an unremembered rage. 

#

Green leaves surrounded me, and the creek below gurgled past a young man with a rifle abutted to his shoulder. He held the muzzle high from recoil, and the echo of his shot ripped through mountains. I clung to the branches and to my pain and breathed out a low hiss as hate festered. That hatred gave me weight. It drew me into his world, and soon, I would feed.

I breathed in the man's scent and waited for him to turn so I could see his face.

#

The shopkeeper took the rifle. “This ain't where you're meant to begin. It's not allowed, not till you've made your first purchase.”

“I don't need no rifle.” I shook off the anger and felt each breath fill and calm me. The carved eye of the dog stared blindly in my direction. “What I need is to remember.”

“The items ain't on offer,” he said. “All that is are the memories.”

“What's that mean?”

“Pick something what draws you.”

The dog tugged, as did a locket that held a photograph of a wedded couple, standing hand-in-hand at the church. Nearby, a bronze medal hung from a multicolored ribbon. On the medal's face, a winged angel held a sword and shield.

The shopkeeper came alongside, tall and paler than before. “That there is a Victory Medal, awarded for military service from 1917 to 1920.”

I took the medal and studied it. “This mine?”

He shrugged. “Ain't my memories.”

“What then?”

“Make a purchase.”

I moved to a folded, hand-stitched quilt. “I want nothing here.”

“What you want is what I sell, and all it'll cost you is your forgetting.”

“My what?”

He opened his mouth wide as if to bite the air instead of breathe it. The color in his cheeks grew weaker. “You can remember, or you can forget. You can't do both.”

“I'd like to remember.”

His smile showed no kindness. “Then pick something.”

I returned to the medal.

#

My grandpa and I sat on the porch steps. He's quiet now, although an hour before I'd been lectured to and whipped. “Do a thing or don't,” he'd told me when I'd quit crying. “You can't kill an animal halfway. I'd sooner respect those boys who left for the city than a man who works in half measures.”

He'd gone in to take a phone call and returned with his old medal. For a long time, he stared at where it lay draped in his large hands. The corners of his eyes crinkled, and he pulled down the tip of his straw hat, covering his face in shadow.

“I ever tell you about haints, boy?”

I waited, eager for one of his stories.

“In the war, we'd hear enemies in the trees, even when there weren't none there. Buddy of mine called them haints, the ghosts of men we'd killed, following after us.”

My legs shivered. “Haints.”

“Cause they haint there.”

I choked out a soft laugh, suppressed by fear. 

Grandpa stared off into the woods. “Got word this morning he's passed on.”

I told him I was sorry.

“They say it was his boy what killed him, but part of me wonders if them's what did it.”

“The haints?” I asked.

“The past always catches up.”

#

The outside world rumbled. Floorboards shook beneath my feet.

“Time's a wasting,” the shopkeeper said.

I stirred from the scent of Grandpa's pipe. “So, I can remember any of this?”

He nodded, and I turned back to the rifle.

“You'll have to pick what you care to recollect.” His skin faded to a deathly white. “Some memories you can carry with you.” He turned his eyes heavenward. “Others hold you down in pain and sorrow. If you want revenge, it's the weight of sorrow and the fire-fueling pain that matter.”

“I swore I'd make him pay.”

He closed his eyes, as if moved by some remembered joy. “I know it. Now, don't take too long making up your mind. I'll be closing soon.”

“I need time.”

His face grew thinner, and his eyes sunk into obscured shadow. “Some things can't be delayed.”

I touched the rifle and felt the grain of the stock and the iron of its bolt. The quilt, the toy, and the locket laid before me on the shelf, untouched, their moments unremembered, but in this weapon rested all the memories of my passing.

With an unspoken question in my heart, I plucked up the quilt and held its cloth to my chest.

#

Grandma held my hand as we stood at the grave. She wore the quilt over her shoulders like a shawl, shielding her against the cold.

“It's a good place to be,” she said, “when you're no longer here.”

The family drew around us, and my wife hugged me, her sandy blonde hair pulled back in a braid. A silver locket rested against the bosom of her black dress. Our son clung to her side.

My wife, her name was Ruby; she said, “Grandpa had his share of sorrow, but he taught me you choose your inheritance. The hurting lands may be plenty, but you can live in your few acres of joy.”

I kissed her. “That don't sound like him.”

Ruby blushed. “When a man don't say much, a woman learns to listen.”

“What were his words?” I asked. “His own words?”

Ruby's gaze turned to the woods. “A man can't spend his life watching the trees.”

Grandma patted Ruby's cheek, and as she drifted off in thought, her hand lingered. “Still don't understand what happened. I never seen nothing so horrible.”

My boy whispered, “Some animals store their kill in trees.”

I shot him a look, but he had too hard a head for any thought to enter.

Instead of hushing up, he just got louder. “That's what the sheriff said. It's so they can come back and eat later.”

Each word tore through me like buckshot, but it wasn't me I worried about. Grandma covered her face. She'd lost a son before, but, the way grandpa went, it made a death by hanging seem gentle.

#

The smell of sweet tobacco drifted back over me. I let go of the quilt and reached for the locket. The shopkeeper grabbed me. The thin flesh of his fingers traced each curve of his knuckles and bones. “You got time for one. Nothing more.” He shoved the rifle into my chest. “Murder needs answering. If you ain't angry enough, you're left to fester. This here's where the anger burns hottest. Take the fire to your bosom and burn.”

I hesitated and looked at the locket and our wedding photograph inside.

“Feel the draw.” The shopkeeper's eyes dissolved into black, hollow pits. “That's where the need remains.”

In the rifle, I felt the clear-watered stream and gentle curve of the land. In the fallen foliage, pain and anger rotted into the earth, feeding worms.

“Some moments you take with you, but some moments take you.” The shopkeeper ran his tongue across his lip-less maw as if the smells of supper were drifting in. “Their pull gives you weight and draws you back into that old world. They'll give feed to your hunger.”

No matter my dying oath, I wanted something more than revenge. If I could take the memories of my loved ones with me, that’d be enough. The mystery of who killed me I could leave to the living. 

I lowered the rifle and reached for the locket.

“Don't be a fool.” His mouth pulled wide, revealing narrow teeth. “Ain't nobody knows what memories you got trapped in that. Feed your vengeance.”

I could think of no greater damnation.

“Make the wrong choice now,” he said, “and all that hate don't do none of us no good.”

“I don't want this.”

He leaned in until his teeth touched my ear. “Do a thing or don't. Maybe you ain't got no vengeance in you, after all.”

I pulled away. The walls shook. Glass rattled. The Victory Medal fell. The shopkeeper turned his eyeless face toward the windows where dead leaves obscured the view.

From the locket, I felt an uneasy joy. The rifle pulsed with hatred.

The wooden dog rocked on its shelf. It felt vulnerable, like it needed protection and there weren't nobody coming.

I reached for the shelf and, as the shopkeeper clawed to hold me back, grasped the wooden dog.

#

A deluge of dead leaves beat against me as I stepped into the road. The world breathed a deep-throated roar; the little shop splintered out of existence, and I was alone beneath the midday sun and a quilt-work canopy of autumn leaves. The ever-present, ever-approaching wind pushed me forward. If I wanted to go anywhere but back to the land, I'd have had no choice.

As I stepped onto the first patch of grass, chickens clucked in their coop. Hogs slopped in the mud. A cow lowed beyond the barn.

Ruby threw open the back door and called out to the woods. My son's answer echoed back. Their voices played a melody filled with memories, like the creek when it comes a flood.

I planted my feet against the wind and stared into my wife's face. We’d grown up in the same church. When my father hanged himself, it was only her what never backed away.

My grandparents loved her as their own, and when we had our boy, she insisted on calling him William Floyd, after my grandpa and me.

Farming is hard on small families, and thoughts of easier lives prey upon the mind. That'd been especially true of late with a private offer made to buy the land and everything on it, but this land was my blood.

Grandpa's only son left him only me, and for years it seemed fated I'd have one child, too. Then all that changed. Ruby carried our second child low. If I remembered grandma's lore a’right, that meant it was a boy.

Ruby stood in the doorway with her belly as big as the day I died. Her cheeks were rosy and full. 

Beyond the coop, the fire crackled, and the burn pile shifted, revealing the charred frame of a crib. Ruby drew closer, her hand clutched to her chest. A wooden dog smoldered among the ash. I'd carved that dog for our unborn son. Ruby looked back to the house, where the crib and the toy should have been, in a room freshly painted.

With a wind-fueled cry, leaves of skin and blood flowed around me. They lifted me off the ground and over the house and into the woods to the bend in the creek where I slipped into a cluster of green-leafed branches.

My son worked the bolt of his rifle and lowered it again to aim. I lay in a pool of blood, wheezing for air and bubbling curses.

His eyes narrowed. His knuckles whitened, but Ruby's voice echoed through the treetops, calling us home.

He answered her back, and, when the sounds had rippled into silence, he faced me. “Don't you worry. I've got plenty left for her. One last hunt on Chester land.”

He squeezed the trigger.

High above, I clung to my anger and pain.

He walked to the house, reloading as he went, but at the edge of the fields he stopped and looked back, like he'd heard me in the trees. I reached out an arm the color of autumn but couldn't break through to touch him. The film between his world and mine stretched. It grew thin in places, and I clawed, breaking off filaments of space beneath my fingernails. The scent of his world filled my nostrils.

But I lacked the rage needed for breaking through. All the sorrow and pain that welled within me meant nothing against that veil. I looked past my boy, to the house and the fire where Ruby stood, and my son turned toward his mother.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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