Red String

At first she thought the lump in the road was clay thrown up by a trucker’s wheel. Then Beatrice saw the mess of feathers: Six or seven geese stood in the right-of-way, staring at the blood, their black heads rigid above white throats. Unmoved by passing wind or familiar violence, they fixed their gaze on dead flesh and something more, a bird on the wing. It whirled in a thicket of fog that grew up from fields plowed and turned to winter. It joined other spirits exhaled before dawn, creatures that once had crept or flapped or crawled over the land. Beatrice had heard her mother tell of men who passed as spirits. They hid in limestone caves by the river, hooded themselves inside the curved wall, the glistening rock. Then just at dark they appeared, as if they had the power to split the earth open to release them. White-robed, faceless horned heads, they advanced with torches over the water, saying: We are the ghosts of Shiloh and Bull Run fight! Neighbors who watched at the bridge knew each man by his voice or limp or mended boots but said nothing, allowed the marchers to pass on. Then they ran their skinny hounds to hunt other lives down ravines, to save their skins another night from the carrion beetles, spotted with red darker than blood, who wait by the grave for the body’s return to the earth. Some years the men killed scores, treed them in the sweetgums. Watched a man’s face flicker in the purple-black leaves. Then they burned the tree. Smoke from their fires still lay over the land where Beatrice traveled. Out of this cloud the dead of the field spoke to her, voices from the place where some voices never stop: They took my boy down by Sucarnochee Creek. He said, “Gentlemen, what have I done?” They says, “Never mind what you have done. We just want your damned heart.” After they killed him, I built up a little fire and laid out by him all night until the neighbors came in the morning. I was standing there when they killed him, down by Sucarnochee Creek.