Changing Out The Ghosts Jan 20 '07    Write an essay on this topic. Tweet Popular Products in Books Rick Bragg - Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg From $6 260 Drum Machine Patterns From $8 The Bottom Line Installment number four, y'all. We didn’t kill Benjamin St. Clare because he was fat, or because his greasy longish hair, always-darting reptilian eyes, and impenetrable Cajun accent came together to create the single most unattractive creature to ever settle down in the quiet town of Stowey. Thomas Langley and I just couldn’t stand the thought of living in the same community as a monster whose idea of a good time was to remove and wear the scalps of women buried in Hawthorn Cemetery. A jury might be inclined to disagree, but I believe we did the community a service by sending him to the bottom of a quicksand pit. Benjamin first came to our attention when we spotted him hurriedly walking one night through Hemlock Thicket, a desolate place where we’d sometimes go to tie one on with a stolen bottle of sour mash. Most inhabitants of Stowey avoided the area altogether, lest they risk an encounter with the source of the mysterious lights that folks claimed to see flickering in and about the trees. The boneyard sat on the western edge of those woods, and it was to that final resting ground that Benjamin St. Clare was headed. We followed him as closely as we could, flitting from one tombstone to the next once we reached the cemetery so that he wouldn’t detect our presence. I won’t bore you with the details, but I will reveal that the perpetrator took off all his clothes, dug up the corpse of Barbara Hennessy, and used a Stanley knife to remove the long blonde tresses and a considerable amount of flesh. He then put everything back in order, grabbed his garments, and made his way back toward the Thicket with his grisly prize sitting crookedly atop his head, mumbling to himself and in an obvious state of arousal. Thomas suggested that we go to the police with what we witnessed, but I pointed out to him the uselessness of the law and how it’d merely turn a man like Benjamin loose upon the streets again, with a hatred in his twisted heart for two teenage accusers. Remember, we were fairly young back then and as prone to rash and irrational thinking as any other kids our age. And so we decided to come up with a scheme that would restore honor to the violated dead and protect the graves Benjamin was fixing to get into while ridding Stowey of the most demented individual this side of the Mississippi River. For obvious reasons, it was also imperative that the death of Mister St. Clare appear to be an accident. We allowed him to practice his wicked craft on another two or three corpses only because the furtherance of our plans demanded that we first get more acquainted with the methods of his madness. On the day of Mildred Butler’s funeral, Thomas and I both had the feeling that once the sun went down, one last person would be around to pay his respects to the recently deceased in a way that anybody else in Stowey could hardly imagine. We took our places in the Thicket and waited for darkness to deliver its son into our care. And sure enough, he came along, with the oft-used spade in his fleshy paw and thoughts of freshly-scavenged pates swirling through his thoroughly crazy brain. This time, instead of following him and observing the gruesome ritual, we waited in the humid, clinging blackness of the Thicket for Benjamin’s return. While he was robbing his last carcass of its crown, I lit the lantern we had earlier suspended from the branch of a certain tupelo tree. What made this old black gum so special was its proximity to the quicksand pool we had discovered on one of our many explorations of that gloomy little wilderness. And so it was that curiosity lured the scalp-hatted, naked Benjamin St. Clare from the path into the deeper recesses of Hemlock Thicket, that dreary dwelling place of possums, snakes, the occasional white-tailed deer, youngsters seeking a secluded location to do the things they were explicitly told not to, and the legendary phantom that kept most of Stowey’s residents away with its eerie antics. Using his shovel as a walking stick, he carefully maneuvered his way through the woods to get a better look at the gently swaying light. As he approached the bait and realized that he’d left the safety of the trail for a mere lantern instead of a look at the Thicket’s ghostly occupant, he let out a disappointed sigh, then plunged headfirst into the muck as Thomas used all his weight to knock the brute in from behind. In the light of the lantern, we could see Benjamin frantically kicking his massive pale legs until they ceased to move at all. By the time we got back from scouring the path and woods for evidence, he’d completely disappeared into that puddle of muck. It’s been many years since Thomas and I last saw one another, much less hung out together in Hemlock Thicket. In fact, we pretty much steered clear of the place after that night, not wishing to be associated with anything folks might find in its lonely shadows, and while Stowey City Council has shot down any attempts to burn down, bulldoze, or otherwise harm the Thicket, it’s still a wild and forlorn place that the townsfolk tend to shun. If you ask ‘em why, the ones willing to discuss the matter mention nothing whatsoever about spooky lights, but will wax wide-eyed over the shade of a shovel-bearing and very unsightly man, whose hair looks more like a woman’s wig than anything the good Lord might’ve planted on top of his skull. Copyright 2007 The Coming of Elliot Stephens http://www.epinions.com/content_4939489412 Where Everybody Looks The Same http://www.epinions.com/content_4938047620 Abner http://www.epinions.com/content_4937785476

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