had turned out so wrong, and that Ramer had turned into somebody she had to escape from. The gun had been propped up against the wheelbarrow; he didn’t even turn around when she picked it up. He was intent on his butchering, and his hands were red to the wrists. Franchette walked around in front of him, balancing the gun around her swollen belly. He did look up then, just as she fired. She put the gun in his hands, and went back to the house to wash away the blood. The hen’s blood and Ramer’s were all mixed together on her hands.
She spent the walk to Della’s house taking deep breaths, trying to feel calm again, and thinking how she should react when she got home that afternoon and discovered that Ramer had shot himself in the shed while cleaning his gun. Maybe she should be real upset, and then say that she couldn’t sit around the house all day dwelling on the tragedy, and that a job would take her mind off things.
She stopped at Della’s mailbox to catch her breath. In the white tube labeled
THE WITNESS
IT HAPPENED ON no particular day-not close enough to Christmas or his birthday for Sam to mark the time. It was warm, though, because he was playing outside, and there were white flowers on the tree in Aunt Till’s yard. Her cat Old Painter lay tucked in the hedge, keeping one yellow eye on the birds wobbling on the clothesline. He scarcely moved when Sam crept close to his hiding place and snapped a twig from the hedge. Sam was thinking about elephants.
Dad ought to be home soon. Maybe he could get him to tell the story again. Sam walked to the ditch at the edge of the yard and looked down the gravel pike toward town. No one in sight; it was too early yet for Dad to have walked the three miles home from the machine shop. The ghost train had just rattled past on the tracks behind the house.
When the family first rented the white frame house, the year Sam was three, it was supposed to be haunted. Pictures fell off the wall for no reason; dishes rattled on the shelf and sometimes fell. Something white had been seen at night moving behind the house. A few weeks after they moved in, their neighbor “Aunt” Till had been hanging out her washing and had called across the hedge to pass the time of day with Sam’s mother. The two women met at the privet hedge, and Aunt Till talked a mile a minute. Addie, who like all Solitary McCrorys lived in mortal fear of being talked at, stood twisting her apron until she came up with something to say. “What about them ghosts?”
She started to recite the peculiar goings-on, but by the time she finished Aunt Till was smiling and shaking her head.
“Shoot far,” she said. “When them heavy coal drags come south or the time freight goes by headin’ north, that whole little house of yourn purt near shakes itself to pieces. No wonder yer pictures fall. You’ll fall out of bed if you ain’t keerful.”
But the white phantom out back?
Aunt Till studied about it. “Well,” she allowed, “sometimes of an evening I go out back there in my nightgown, looking for that no-good rascal Old Painter.”
They weren’t bothered by haints after that, though Old Painter continued to roam and squall. They took to calling that northbound freight the Ghost Train, first as a family joke, and then from force of habit.
Sam was twisting the hedge twig into the damp ground, trying to make it stand up by itself. He pulled the leaves off the lower part of the stem to give himself a better grip. After a few more turns the stick found a wobbly purchase in the wet earth. Sam scooped up a handful of dirt and patted it around the base of the twig. He wondered if it would take root if he left it long enough, like Grammaw Hemrick’s switch. Every time they went up home to Preachin’ Grampaw’s, Sam would stare at the mulberry tree in the front yard, and try to picture Grammaw as a young bride from Sinking Creek riding sidesaddle over the mountains with a young black-haired Preachin’ Grampaw.
He must have heard tell a dozen times how she got off her horse at her husband’s homeplace and stuck that riding switch in the ground in the front yard, where it grew into a mulberry tree with limbs strong enough to support him and Jamie both for berry-picking. Sam liked going up-home even if he was a little scared of his stern old grandfather. The house was always full of grown-up uncles, and there was Jamie, the youngest, who was only two years older than Sam, even if he was an uncle. That mulberry tree was the least of the wonders up in Pigeon Roost. The uncles had rigged up a generator in the barn and made their own electricity with creek water, so that the old homeplace had real electric lights, while Sam’s parents’ house like the rest of those in town was still using oil lamps. Sam liked to hear the uncles tell how they rigged up the old waterwheel on the gristmill with the materials Lewis brought back from up north, and how they wired up the house, the barn, the outhouse, the chicken shed, and even the backyard and put in electric lights. Then Francis would tell one of his stories about coon-hunting or bee- tracking. He always had a couple of hives in white boxes down near the creek. Last, and best, was Sam’s daddy’s turn. Wesley, the town-dweller now, would allow as how it was all right to track coons or play with your mechanical toys, but he was a man of experience: he’d been there when they hanged the elephant. Sometimes he’d even get Grammaw to take down the family album and he’d turn to a picture of himself and announce: “That was the day they done it.” The photograph showed a solemn young man with the Hemrick cheekbones staring into the camera. It was a close shot of his head and shoulders against a gray sky; there was no sign of the elephant or its railroad gallows, but Sam never forgot which picture was the crucial one, proving that his daddy had actually been there.
Sam tested the twig with his forefinger. It gave a little to the pressure, but remained firmly in position. The gallows was ready. Now he’d go and get the tiny wooden elephant that Dad had carved for him. It took Sam a while to get back out of the house, once he got in. He found the elephant right off, but when he went to ask his mother for twine, she’d put him to work setting the jars of home-canned pickles and beans on the table. She was busy in the kitchen frying up side-meat and potatoes for supper. By the time he got back out, Dad was already home, chopping firewood for the kitchen range.
“Don’t get too close here,” he warned when Sam stopped to watch. “Wood chip might catch you in the eye.”
Sam nodded and took a step back, but kept watching. Dad wouldn’t be doing any storytelling now-too busy. Once he got the stove wood chopped, they’d have to go in and eat, and by then it might be too late for him to be allowed outside. Sam thought about this stay of execution for his wooden elephant. He almost had the story down by heart, anyway. He decided to go back to the twig and do it from memory. He could always ask Dad later if he forgot any of the parts to the story.
Sam walked over to the hedge and took the string and the carving out of his pocket, and lay down in the grass beside the gallows-twig. He wrapped the twine once around the tiny elephant’s neck, and began to experiment with different ways of wrapping the end to make a knot. As he worked, he thought the story to himself in the words Dad always used.
“Her name was Murderous Mary-leastways that’s what they called her after Kingsport. She was a performing elephant with one of them little traveling circuses, and they were doing a show in Kingsport. Some figure she had a new trainer; boy didn’t seem to know much about the beasts, seems like. He was a-setting on her head and parading all them circus elephants to a water hole, when Mary spied a watermelon rind by the side of the road and she went for it. Well, when she veered out of line, that feller on her head, he jerked at her hard with a spear-tipped stick that they have, but he musta done it too hard because Mary threw back her head and let out a bellow. Then before he knowed what was a-happening, she reached around with her trunk and snatched him off her back and threw him at a lemonade stand.
“He probably coulda lived through that, but Mary wasn’t about to let him. She went over to him and stepped on his head, and that was all she wrote. That was one dead trainer. The blacksmith run out of his shop right then with a 32-20 pistol and put a couple of shots into her, but it didn’t do no good. They say she didn’t even act like she felt it. I wasn’t there when it happened. That was in Kingsport. They got her on back to the circus with the rest of ’em and she was in the show that same evening.
