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I like Karl’s jokes better than his ghost stories, but it was nothing personal, and it had nothing to do with his easygoing narrative style. It’s like I said once before about there being no such thing as old news in the South. Likewise, there is no such thing as a private matter.
On the Internet someplace there’s a list of things you’ll never hear a Southerner say. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s funny—though I’d love to add in the phrase “But it was none of my business, so I didn’t ask. ” News or a damn good story will always find its way out, so ever since the whole mess with Malachi I’ve been a lightning rod for spooky anecdotes.
All of that having been said, by the time Karl showed me the article I had heard no fewer than a dozen versions of the Decoration Day incident at the Chickamauga Battlefield.
The story made the rounds in the valley with a speed that would shame a wildfire. Of course it expanded with each retelling until the saga came to include a regiment of skeletal Union ghosts, a couple of soldierless spook horses, a bloody-headed drummer boy, and at least two bugling wraiths who foretold the imminent rebirth and rise of the Confederacy.
So you had to understand my skepticism.
“You just look right here—they hid it on the third page, but it made it in all the same. ” Karl unfolded the Times Free Press and sorted it out, seeking a certain picture and finding it. He bent the third page double, nudged my coffee cup out of the way, and pushed the paper forward.
“‘No Leads Yet in the Disappearance of Ryan Boynton. ’”
“No, not that one. ” He tapped the paper, down below the headline I’d just read.
“‘Mystery at Battlefield Park,’” I tried again, and he approved. “Sounds like a Nancy Drew title. ”
He patted at the columns with two long, bony fingers. “Go on and read it. Look what it says about Decoration Day. ”
“‘The first unusual incident took place at a Sons of Confederate Veterans gathering, attended by nearly sixty people who claimed their picnic was visited by a ghost. According to eyewitnesses, the specter of a young soldier approached the group and tried to speak, but he seemed unable to communicate. Before he vanished, the ghost pointed at the woods.
“‘One witness, Edna-Anne Macomber, insists that the soldier bore a strong resemblance to her husband at the age of twenty—prompting speculation that the unexpected visitor may have been her husband’s great-uncle. “He had the same-shaped face, and the same way of standing. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather when I saw him there. He looked right at us,” Mrs. Macomber claims. “And he knew it too. That’s why he chose us, I think. He knew Evan when he saw him. ”
“‘Jeremiah Macomber fought with the Deas Brigade for the 19th Alabama regiment. He died in the Battle of Chickamauga on the first day of fighting, September 19, 1863. ’”
I put the paper down and shrugged. “That wouldn’t be too surprising, I guess. Maybe that is what drew old Jeremiah out in the first place—he spotted the family resemblance. ”
Karl got all excited. “You think it’s true? You think some old soldier crashed the picnic?” He shifted around in his chair and gripped the bri
m of his hat with glee.
“I can’t say it’d shock me. ” I tried and failed to remember a few details from a long-ago school trip to the battlefield visitors’ center. “How many people died out there, anyway?”
“A lot. ” He beamed.
“I should’ve paid better attention in history class. But we know that a lot of people died under violent and painful circumstances. I’d be astounded if there weren’t any ghosts out there. ”
“But you don’t hear a lot of ghost stories about the battlefield. You get stories about Old Green Eyes instead. ”
“Yeah,” I said, though that fact was something I’d always found strange. Thousands and thousands of dead soldiers are buried in the park, and most of the scary stories passed around campfires were about a made-up monster instead of the logical legions of war dead.
Karl must have been thinking the same thing. “There’s a couple of stories about the tower in that field, and there’s one or two about weeping widows roaming the grounds looking for their husbands; but for the most part Green Eyes gets all the good lines. ”
“The villain always does. ”
“Now that’s true. I wonder why?”
I tossed my head to the left in half a shrug. “I couldn’t tell you. ”
“Do you believe in him?” he asked, leaning forward. I’d given him an inch, and here he came chasing after me for a mile.
A year or two before I might have said no, but I’d had my horizons broadened a bit since then. “I don’t know. I’ve talked to people who’d swear on their mothers’ graves they’d seen him, but that doesn’t mean anything. One of them was Mike, for God’s sake. ”
“Mike’s the one who got drunk and fell off the roof of the library?”
“That’s him,” I confirmed. “He was trying to prove he could rock-climb at three in the morning. He used to live out by the battlefield, in the subdivision on the other side of the train tracks. You know—there on the edge of the park. Mike and his brother have a million and one Green Eyes stories, but since most of them start off with a case of beer I’m not inclined to take them very seriously. ”
Karl tapped the paper again. “But this—this looks like something you could sink your teeth into, doesn’t it? This is the sort of thing that you could maybe confirm, at least some of the little details. ”
