Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Jeery’s single-wide was at the eastern corner of the park, close to the bog and the swarming blood-suckers that churned in the air like a quiet storm. There was no answer at the screen door and I called out his name, peering into the darkness of the trailer. The inside was scattered with refuse and bottles. There was an old plaid cloth couch that looked like it was delivered from the seventies and a small table with a massive Bible, which lay opened beside it. I left the front entrance and began to slowly make my way around the outside of the home, catching glares from some of the residents across the dirt pathway.

I found him sitting in a chair in the small patch of weeds that looked out over the swamp. I said his name several times. He was asleep and there was a mason jar of moonshine beside him. His face was surprisingly smooth for such an elderly man, bequeathed with a solemn dignity that, even in this place as he slept off an afternoon drunk, could not be taken away. I thought for a moment of all those years—the social and cultural changes—that he had seen, that had quietly and meticulously carved their places into his memory and cast their shadows in the form of liver spots on his light brown skin.

He awoke and looked up at me as if I was expected. He sighed and then looked back out at the swamp. “You social services?”

“No.” I said.

“Good. I’ve had about enough of them pestering me. Want to put me in a museum or somethin’. They call it a ‘home,’ I call it Purgatory where I wait to meet my maker.”

“Isn’t that the ultimate goal of the believer?” I said. “To finally meet the maker?”

He looked at me long and hard. He reached down and took a swallow from his mason jar and beckoned to me. I realized that we were communing. I took it up and had a swallow that instantly burned through my sinuses and into my brain, evaporating on my tongue before even reaching my belly.

“I used to think that I’d welcome the day when I’d meet him,” Thomas said. “But now, when it’s so close, you can feel death just waiting over your shoulder like… Well, it changes your perspective a bit. This world, I tell you, it’s a terrible place. But what I fear is that the place we go to is even worse.”

“You don’t believe in Heaven?”

“Nah. All that’s rubbish. I’ve seen things in my age that tell me otherwise. That tell me maybe the maker we seek is not the kindly old man we hope he’ll be.”

“It could even be a woman,” I said with a smile.

He laughed briefly and said, “Yeah, that might even be worse for a fella like me.” I sat down beside him, and he added. “So what you want, anyway?”

I told him about the song I was researching, about the belief that it may have been an old slave hymn at which point he scoffed. “Huh! Ain’t no slave song, I can tell you that. Sure it sounds pretty when some lovely white woman sings it—and I’ve heard it sung by many a white woman—but that song should make a black man’s skin crawl.”

“Why’s that?”

He looked at me somewhat incredulously, almost frustrated. “Where you think they’d find the slaves that run away, that was tortured and killed, huh? You think those white plantation owners gave those people a proper burial? No way. They’d take ’em down in the valley, toss ’em in the river. Where ya think the Klan did their lynchings after the emancipation? White man doesn’t do nothin’ out in the open. Nah. It’s all backwoods and shady deals under cover of night.”

He paused for a breath, working himself up. “If you was going down to the river to pray—like it says in that song—you was praying that you were only gonna come out with a beatin’ and not be swinging from a tree. My mother and father were slaves just before the emancipation and they told me good. A white man wants to take you down to the river, down into the valley, you don’t go down there, you run!”

“Isn’t this a baptismal hymn?” I said.

“In a way, I suppose. Black man goes down into the river, he comes up into the embrace of God. Nothin’ but a spirit. But, like I said, that’s only if you subscribe to those kinds of notions…”

“What notions do you subscribe to?” I asked.

“Oh,” he nodded with almost a smile, “there are other notions, son.”

I looked at him closely. “What is the starry crown?”

He looked back at me with a look of quiet foreboding. “Now you onto somethin’, son. Now you onto somethin’.”

I went down. I went way down into the valley. Down to the river to pray for my soul, to pray that what Thomas Jeery had told me wasn’t true. But it haunted me, pulled me in an inexorable flow through the muddy darkness of history.

“You want to know where that song come from,” Jeery had said to me, “then you gots to see for yourself. Nobody can see it for you.”

“See what?”

“The rite of the Starry Crown. There be men and women that pray to it. They pray to the crown. And they make a sacrifice.”

“What kind of sacrifice?” I’d asked.

“The same kind that’s made every day across this country. The same that you read about on page ten of the paper. You look at the lost black kids in this country. You look at them and you’ll see the crown, all souls gone to their resting place up in the sky. What ‘good ole way’ you think they’re singin’ about anyway? The song done come out after the Civil War. Use your college-educated brain, son.”

It couldn’t be, though. It seemed impossible, so into the valley I went, stepping another foot in the rich loam of the South Carolina river valley. The land was flat, the earth black with tall ghostly trees that shot straight up into the abysmal night. It was dried floodland, devoid of underbrush that got swept away in the spring when the river would overflow its banks and send it all downstream. Overhead was a full moon, and its ghastly light reflected on the white bark of the trees.

Up above, standing guard over this sacrilegious land, I found the old First Baptist Church. Tiny, rotted, and being pulled down to the earth by ropes of kudzu vines. It was barely visible even in the full light of day.

“Once that church was gone,” Jeery had said, “it was free reign for the Starry Crown again. They wanted their sacred ground back, and they got it. Land deals, real estate prices, offers of big, brand new churches down in the town proper. It wasn’t the congregation’s fault. No one knew. No one remembered.”

“Except you,” I’d said.

“Except me. I warned ’em. But I’m just an old fool, see? The congregation took a deal for a brand new church down in Evanstown, and the realty company took hold of First Baptist’s land more’n twelve years ago.”

“What are they doing with the land?”

“Well, that’s what you want to find out, isn’t it?”

He looked out at the swamp and took a sip from his jar of white lightning. “They haven’t come for me yet,” he’d said. “They just letting time run her course. Nobody believes an old fool anyhow.”

After my visit with Jeery, I’d returned to the town hall of records and looked up the land purchase for First Baptist Church. The crone was gone that day. In her place were fat and friendly clerks with teased-out hair and big, white Jesus-lovin’ smiles. They showed me to the proper files and I dove in for some tedious reading. First Baptist was purchased by Old Pride Realty in 2002 for an extravagant amount of money plus the building of a new Baptist church in the city of Evanstown, just as Jeery had said. Old Pride Realty was actually a collection of real estate agents, owners, and attorneys throughout the state that pooled resources to purchase land and historical sites considered part of the Antebellum South’s heritage. They owned and operated estates and manors, plantation homes and historical sites clear across the south from Illinois to Florida and west to Arkansas. It was a new Confederacy, a quiet Civil War, and Old Pride Realty was buying back the south in one of the largest private land grabs since the Homestead Act.