Midnight Grinding (36 page)

***

On the night following the Masons’ funeral, I had the strangest dream. One in which I was not a participant, but a spectator.

I was in an old farmhouse. In one room a baby cried. In the other a frail woman wailed mournfully.

I stood in a doorway between kitchen and bedroom. As the woman vented her grief, two neighboring women were silently at work. Lying across the eating table were the bodies of three children, two boys and a girl. All were dead, being prepared for burial.

A man paced around the room like a bobcat on the prowl. His eyes burned with a rage only a father can feel at the loss of his children.

I turned and looked into the bedroom. A baby—perhaps two or three months old—wept loudly from a hand-made cradle. Feeding time had passed, but the infant had been forgotten. And there was another child. A four-year-old girl who sat cross-legged in the center of a big brass bed. The girl didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the events that were taking place around her. Her eyes were focused on an object that stood on a cherrywood bureau across the room.

It was a bottle. A tall, skinny bottle with a cork in the top. The label read DR. AUGUSTUS LEECH’S PATENTED ELIXIR.

The little girl smiled. She was quite fond of Augustus Leech, the medicine show man who had driven his horsedrawn wagon into town and stirred things up a bit. She had watched, enthralled, as he performed incredible feats of magic, picked a few tunes on a five-string banjo, and touted his patented elixir as the “Cure-All of the Ages.”

And, when her father wasn’t looking, he had slipped her a prize. A playing card with a picture of a fairy princess on the face.

She had placed that card beneath her pillow last night and dreamed that she was in an enchanted kingdom full of ogres, dragons, and wizards. A place more real to her than the drab town of Harmony had ever been.

Her baby sister continued to cry. Slowly, the girl left the bed and took the skinny bottle from the bureau. She knelt beside the cradle.

“Hungry?” she asked.

The baby continued to wail.

She uncorked the bottle and unleashed a single drop. The infant rolled the dark liquid around on her tiny, pink tongue for a moment. Then grew silent.

No more middle child,
the girl thought.
Only me.

She smiled a curl of a thin-lipped smile…that girl with my grandmother’s eyes.

***

I woke up in the darkness, my heart pounding. I climbed out of bed and went downstairs…to the pantry.

The bottle was still there, even after all these years. But it was only a quarter of the way full now.

A cold feeling threatened to overcome me. I began to recall bits and pieces of conflicts during my childhood. Conflicts that didn’t involve me directly, but were always between my parents and my grandmother, my grandmother and friends and neighbors. An accusation of infidelity toward my grandfather. A heated argument over meddling interference with my father. A petty grudge between my mother and Grandma that echoed from years before I was born. Hurt feelings and imagined wrongs done to the matriarch of the Plummer family by townfolk and neighbors. But the dust had always settled and peace was always made.

And, afterwards, there had always been sweets from Grandma’s kitchen.

Followed by death.

I began to wonder if she was responsible. That maybe she was poisoning folks with that ancient elixir that sat on the pantry shelf. But my mind couldn’t comprehend such a thing. The Masons had died in an unfortunate accident, like my father. A ninety-six-year-old woman can’t condemn someone to cancer or a fatal car crash by baking them a lemon meringue pie.

I left the kitchen pantry that night, telling myself that I was being foolish, that my kindly grandmother had nothing to do with the misfortunes of the citizens of Harmony. But I could never erase that dream from my thoughts. And that little girl with the wicked grin on her face.

***

Several days ago, everything just sort of fell apart for me and Grandma.

It happened on Sunday morning. I was back home from college for the weekend, sitting in a right-hand pew of the sanctuary. Church service was proceeding as it normally did at Harmony Holiness. Jill Thompson, the pianist, and Grandma Plummer at her organ, were playing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” flawlessly. Then, before they had finished, Pastor Alfred Wilkes rose to his feet prematurely.

The ladies stopped their playing. The entire congregation froze. Everyone was already on edge, as it was. Bad things had been taking place at the church in the wee hours of the night. Vandalism and desecration.

It had begun two weeks ago. Someone had thrown rocks through three of the stained-glass windows. Then, later, an intruder had stolen the church’s 180-year-old King James Bible from a display case in the foyer and set fire to it on the stoop outside.

But the last blasphemous act had been the worst. Someone had defecated on the altar.

Pastor Wilkes’ face was long and mournful as his huge hands gripped both sides of the podium. “The Devil has been testing us lately, my friends,” he said in that deep baritone of his. “At first I just thought it was some disrespectful kids. But after the second incident, I realized that it was something much more serious. It is not an outsider who has committed these sinful acts, but someone in our own midst.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. A member of the congregation had done those horrible things? A nervous sensation of cold dread began to form in the pit of my stomach, although I wasn’t sure why.

“Following the burning of the Bible, the deacons and I discussed the matter and came to a decision,” he told us. A grim smile crossed his face. “It’s amazing what you can buy at Radio Shack these days.”

He then picked up a manila envelope that was lying atop the podium and unfastened the clasp of the flap. “I really hate to show you this,” he said, “but God has compelled me to do so.”

Pastor Wilkes then pulled an 8x10 photograph from the envelope and held it at arm’s length for all to see. The congregation gasped as one. The nervous ball of dread deep down in my belly suddenly turned into a cold, hard stone.

Pictured there in the dimly-lit sanctuary, with her granny panties and support hose pooled around her ankles, was my grandmother…smearing her feces across the front of the pulpit.

I groaned involuntarily, as though someone had just sucker punched me in the gut. I heard someone clear her throat haughtily from the pew behind me. It was Naomi Saunders, the church busybody. I could feel her hot, self-righteous eyes burning into the back of my neck.

An uneasy silence hung heavily in the sanctuary for a long moment. Then Pastor Wilkes turned and regarded the elderly woman sitting at the church organ. “It grieves me in my heart to do this, Miss Sarah, but I must ask you to leave us now.”

I watched as my grandmother primly turned off her organ and, for the very last time, left the spot she had occupied for countless Sunday mornings. With her head held high, she walked down the center aisle, enduring the stares of shock and disgust that etched the faces of the congregation.

As she reached the rear doorway, I shakily stood to my feet. I couldn’t believe the pastor had handled my grandmother’s comeuppance in such a callous and tactless manner.

Why couldn’t he and the deacons have confronted her privately? Standing there, I stared the preacher square in the face. “This isn’t right,” I told him in front of everyone.

I looked for some sign of satisfaction in his face, but there was none. “No,” he said flatly. “It wasn’t.”

Outside in the parking lot, we sat in the car. “
Why,
Grandma?” I asked her. “Can you give me a reason?”

She was silent.

“Was it because you wanted the church to buy that new organ last month and the budget committee voted it down?”

She said absolutely nothing in her defense. She simply sat there in the passenger seat, head bowed as if in prayer…but eyes wide open.

***

I found Grandma dead the following Monday morning.

She lay there peacefully in her bed, wrinkled hands folded across her chest, a tiny curl of a smile upon her thin lips.

The cause of her death was undeniable. Sitting on her nightstand was a tall, skinny bottle. The stained cork sat neatly next to it.

“Aw, Grandma,” I sighed as I picked up the bottle. It was completely empty. “You drank it all.” It had only been a quarter full the last time I had seen it, but apparently that had been enough.

The next two days were a blur to me. There was so much to attend to. The proper arrangements were made at the local funeral home: the casket, the vault, the times of visitation and, of course, the funeral itself. After the preparations, I went back to that empty little house on Mulberry Street. The place was a wreck. Along with her will to live, Grandma had apparently lost her will to clean. I made the four-poster bed she had died in, then moved on to the rest of the house. There were dirty dishes in the sink and damp towels strewn across the bathroom floor.

The following day, Grandma was stately and dignified in her burnished, rose-hued casket, wearing a dress she had worn at many a Sunday service. The chapel was decorated with a forest of flower arrangements, ceramic angel figurines, and matted pictures of Thomas Kinkade churches that played “Amazing Grace” when you wound a music box on the back.

The funeral was almost unbearably long, populated by the folks of Harmony, as well as the congregation that had ousted her from their midst only a couple of days before. As Pastor Wilkes droned on and on about what a faithful, God-fearing woman she had been, I sat there on the front pew and tried to imagine Grandma in heaven. But I couldn’t. It simply wouldn’t come to me. Trying to picture her in such a celestial setting was like staring at a blank canvas.

After the graveside service, everyone met back at the church fellowship hall for a lunch of covered dishes and desserts. I wasn’t very hungry. I just wanted to accept my share of condolences and get out of there. I had much to deal with that afternoon…mostly the nagging question of exactly why my last living relative had done the terrible things she had.

I found myself standing next to the dessert table with Naomi Saunders. As the woman stuffed her face, she told me about how wonderful a woman Grandma had been and how they were all going to miss her dearly. I pretty much nodded my head solemnly and thought about how very delicious the cookie I was munching was, my second one, in fact.

“These are pretty good,” I said. I took another bite and washed it down with sweet tea.

“Snickerdoodles,” Naomi said with a smile. “She always said they were your favorite.”

I stopped chewing. “Who made these?”

“Your grandmother, apparently,” she told me. “We found them on that table when we came to set up this morning.”

Dirty dishes in the sink. Coffee cups, supper plates, mixing bowls…

“I guess it was one last, loving gesture…God bless her.” Naomi picked up a greeting card from off the table and handed it to me. “This was with it.”

Numbly, I took it. The card face read, “
From your Sister in Christ.”
When I opened it I found there was no printed caption, only Grandma’s unmistakably floral penmanship. I barely took two breaths as I read the inscription.

Farewell, my friends…May we meet again in the glorious hereafter…where the hearth fires shall crackle with warmth and we shall labor together in eternity. I shall see you there. Love, Sarah.

“Sad, but sweet, wasn’t it?” said Naomi.

I stared at the handwriting in the card. What had she been talking about? There were no hearth fires in heaven…no fire at all. And paradise was a place of rest, not a realm of endless labor…

I looked down at the half-eaten cookie in my hand, then at the platter on the table. Only three cookies remained where there had been an even two dozen before.

As I left the church, I wanted to puke…but I couldn’t. The poison was there to stay.

When I had cleaned the house, I had made the bed…but had neglected to look beneath Grandma’s pillow. When I did look, I knew exactly what I would find.

A yellowed playing card with a fairy princess on the face.

Now I understood why I couldn’t picture Grandma in heaven. She was in a much more sinister place. A fiery realm full of ogres and dragons…and wizards named Leech.

MIDNIGHT

GRINDING

The first half of this story is absolutely true. There really was a demented farmhand named Green Lee who terrorized the children of a Tennessee farm camp back in the early 1900s. One of those children was my late Grandmama Spicer, who would chill me to the bone with the deranged exploits of Green Lee and his back porch whetstone. I gave myself the creeps when I wrote this story and it still disturbs me every time I read it. It was almost as though it was written by a hand other than my own. Perhaps even the bony claw of Green Lee himself.

Which one must I kill first? Oh, sweet Lord in heaven, please tell me…which one must I kill first?”

The first time Rebecca heard the voice of Green Lee it came rasping through the lush leaves of the tobacco rows like the coarse hide of a snake rubbing against dried corn husks. She and her brother, Ben, had been performing the chore that Papa had given them that day: picking off the plump, green worms that nibbled on the summer tobacco, and squashing them beneath the toes of their bare feet. But as they left one dense row and moved on to the next, the old man’s whispering plea echoed in the dusty afternoon air, curling through their youthful ears and stopping them dead in their tracks.

Rebecca and Ben backed up a few steps, listening to the sinister words and watching for a sign of the one who uttered them. “Heavenly Father, Lord Almighty on high, please tell me…which one shall it be?”

A rustling of tobacco leaves sounded from a few feet away, drawing the frightened eyes of the two children. And from within that dense patch of greenery crept a gnarled claw of stark white bone.

The youngsters broke from their fearful paralysis. Screaming, they ran along the field rows, feet churning clouds of powdery clay dirt into the hot, still air of mid-July. They soon burst from the high tobacco, their cries rising shrilly as they crossed the barren road to the gathering of shabby tin and tarpaper shacks that made up the itinerant farm camp. They saw their mother sitting on the front porch of one such house, washing a few articles of clothing with a scrubboard and a bucket of sudsy, gray water.

“Lordy Mercy!” said Sarah Benton, looking as drab and threadbare as the clothing she washed. “What’s the matter with you young’uns?”

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 Benton 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.