Southern Fried Weirdness | Southern Speculations

Grave Seasons

By Barry Napier

The boy came sprinting through the woods with his fishing pole slung over his shoulder. His eyes were wide and his black skin glistened with sweat. The tattered sandals he wore on his feet slapped against the ground and sounded impossibly loud in the silence of the forest. He ran without looking back, his heart trembling with excitement and fear. He wanted to look back, but knew that he shouldn’t. Instead, he kept his eyes focused ahead of him as Mama Miriam’s cabin came into view.

The tiny cabin sat in a quiet clearing so far away from everything that Mama Miriam could often hear log trucks rumbling down the highway six miles away. She’d listen to them in the afternoons, the noise of their engines traveling through the forest to the tiny light-green strip of her front yard where the sound became oddly abstract. She would sit on her porch with the boy that called himself Clairvius, drinking tea in silence and listening to the progress of the world through the trees that hid her away from it all.

It was because of this perfect silence that she was able to hear Clairvius as he made his way out of the woods and into the front yard. He dropped his fishing pole and bound up the porch steps, his sandals sounding as loud as gunshots. She watched him through the window as she stirred at a pot of stew she had just put on the stove.

“Mama Miriam,” Clairvius said in an excited tone as he came through the front door. The screen door slapped against the frame behind him and Miriam bit back a smile when she saw him jump at the noise.

“Calm yourself, boy,” Miriam said, setting her spoon down and studying him. The last few years had been rather hard on Clairvius. He was only fourteen but often looked as old as thirty—as he did now.   “Now what is it?” she asked him after he took a moment to catch his breath.

“There are two of them on the road,” he said, pointing out into the woods beyond the screen door and the front yard. “There are two strangers, walking this way.”

“Are they locals?”

“I’m not sure,” Clairvius said. “But I don’t think so. I heard their voices. They sound like they’re from the north.”

“Huh,” Miriam said. She made her way to the screen door, pushed it open with her large, callused black hand and peeked outside. The dirt road that began at the edge of her yard and wound into the forest looked abandoned. But when she trained her old ears to the forest and concentrated, she could hear two voices breaking the silence.

“I see,” she said, her eyes still on the road. “Clairvius, fetch the gun and stay hidden. You know what to do, right?”

“Yes’m, Mama Miriam.”

“Good boy.”

Clairvius quickly made his way to the back of the cabin. Miriam stood at the door, waiting to see the shapes of the strangers as they rounded the bend to where they would be able to see the clearing and her cabin.

Miriam supposed that if they looked beyond the cabin they would see the rather large field that sat behind it. Thinking of that field and what it meant, Miriam felt a slight tightening in her chest and she could feel her pulse over every square inch of her body.

The strangers came into view two minutes later. Seeing them, Miriam listened for any signs of Clairvius moving around in the rear of the house but was pleased to find that he was being extremely careful. Miriam could smell his sweat and his anticipation, but that was because she had been in this cabin, in this clearing, for over sixty years. She knew every smell and settling noise within the cabin. The smell coming off of Clairvius wasn’t one that these strangers were likely to notice, especially from out on the porch.

Miriam stepped out onto the porch, a bit self-aware that her old dress was stretched along the top and torn along the left leg. But what did she care? She was sixty-eight years old and far beyond concerns of vanity. Also, she belonged here. These strangers were only here because of the myths and the mysterious history behind the surrounding woods. Miriam wasn’t sure, but she thought that there was a chance that her cabin was now a part of those legends. There had been countless people out here in the last twenty years, snooping around for any leftovers of the voodoo history that had dominated these Louisiana woods so many years ago. If the legends were intricate enough to lead interested parties out here, surely her cabin was somehow known and used as a landmark of sorts.

The strangers spotted her as they came to the edge of the road. The road emptied out into the cabin’s front yard, allowing them a clear view of Miriam standing on the porch. As they continued to approach cautiously, one of them waved.

Miriam waved back, putting on a smile and waving them forward. As Clairvius had said, there were two of them; a man and a woman. It was the man that had waved to her. They both looked rather excited as they approached the porch. The man wore one of those ridiculous straw cowboy hats, a plain white polo shirt and a pair of khakis. The woman was dressed in a sundress and carried a walking stick. Miriam wondered how ignorant this woman was, walking around in these woods with her pretty little legs exposed to mosquitoes, bees and snakes. Still, she managed to maintain her smile as the man approached the porch steps and looked up to her.

“How are you, ma’am?” he said.

“Just fine,” Miriam said, taking a seat in the ancient rocker that sat by the front door. “Come on up and sit a spell if you like,” she offered although the rocker was the only chair on the porch.

The man walked slowly up the stairs, taking in the dilapidated little cabin. There were a few tiny skulls and rocks lining the porch railings, the skulls those of rats, squirrels and a rabid cat that Clairvius had been forced to kill three years ago. There was also a rather large snake skin wrapped around one of the porch’s posts. Miriam felt a surge of delight shoot through her as she saw the woman cringing at it.

“Are you lost?” Miriam asked them.

The woman chuckled at this and looked to the man, rolling her eyes. “We’re not quite sure,” she said. “We were told that there was a road in these woods and we assumed that this one was it.” She pointed to the dirt track that they had just come up, looking at it suspiciously.

“Well that there road is the only one that comes through these woods,” Miriam said. “It’s the only way I can get to and from town.”

She gave them a moment to realize that she didn’t have any means of transportation in order to get to town, but they didn’t notice. The woman looked slightly uncomfortable, standing arm to arm with her companion. She held eye contact with Miriam and kept a polite smile on her face, but it was clear that she was uncomfortable.

“Do you know much about this land?” the man asked. Miriam assumed he didn’t understand how daft of a question it was.

“Aye, I see now,” Miriam said, feigning surprise. “You’re here seeking some of the dark history surrounding these woods.   Yes?”

They both nodded and Miriam was happy to see that the woman’s unease had now spread to the man as well.

“Yes ma’am,” the man said, removing his hat to wipe sweat away from his brow.

“Tell me then,” Miriam said. “What are some of the stories you have heard?”

“The usual stuff about the voodoo rituals,” the woman said quickly. She spoke as if she didn’t believe any of it, but her stature and the growing fear in her eyes said otherwise. It was almost as if she knew what was about to happen to them.

“Yeah,” the man said. “I know all about the dark magic that was practiced out here and how there is supposedly some sort of deal between the people in the nearby town and the spirits of the land. Whatever that means. I think the woods are supposed to be haunted or something, too. It’s all centered around some white people hanging a bunch of Haitians back in the 1800s.”

Miriam nodded, even though this abridged version was only partially true. Several Haitians had been hanged in 1887 by a group of Christians who believed the Haitian’s voodoo practices to be the work of the Devil. It was this ill-conceived belief that kept these strangers coming to the forest. Many of them also believed that all voodoo was dark and of the Devil. And they all wanted to find proof that the fabled history of these woods was accurate. They wanted to go home with stories about how they had come face to face with the cursed land and lived to tell about it.

But none of them ever did.

Smiling, Miriam slowly got out of her rocking chair. “Ease yourselves,” she said. “I’ll go inside and fetch us some tea. Then I’ll tell you all I know about these woods.”

“Oh that would be fantastic,” the man said. The unease that had crept into him moments ago was fading now. But the woman still seemed to be on edge about something, her eyes trying to survey everything at once.

Nodding to them, Miriam went inside. When she heard the screen door fall back into place, she said a silent prayer and sat down quietly at the kitchen table.

Outside, the couple waited patiently, the man now enjoying himself and happy that they had decided to spend these three days looking into a ghost story that he had heard for most of his life. He studied the little skulls along the porch railing with fascination rather than fear and did his best to ease his girlfriend with a wink.

When the door opened again, it was not Mama Miriam that they saw. Instead, they saw Clairvius, holding a shotgun in his hands.

By the time they were able to make sense of this, it was too late.

At the kitchen table, Miriam winced at each of the gunshots. They filled the cabin like mortar rounds and left her ears ringing afterwards. In the moments following the second shot, she heard one of the bodies fall backwards from the porch and onto the ground.

“It’s done,” Clairvius called out from the porch.

“Can you do the rest by sunset?” she asked him.

“Yes, Mama Miriam.”

Miriam stood up and made her way to the stove to once again stir her stew. As she stirred, she listened to Clairvius moving things around on the porch. She then watched through the kitchen window as the boy made his way around to the field behind the house. She finished the stew, had two bowls of it and then headed out back to watch Clairvius work.

*

Clairvius had dragged the two bodies around to the back after cleaning up the mess that the gunshots had caused. He had caught the man in the neck on the first shot and had placed the second shot squarely between the woman’s eyes, removing most of her forehead. Miriam sat several yards away from the bodies, staring emotionlessly at the large red mess along the woman’s head.

Near the middle of the large field, Clairvius was digging two holes. He wore no gloves and Miriam could imagine the slight stinging of the shovel’s handle against his palms. Miriam had once received many blisters from the same act, digging hole after hole upon a stranger’s arrival at the cabin.

But she was old and used up now and it had been nearly five years since her old body had been capable of digging. When Clairvius had come to her six years ago, she had taken it as a sign. He had been the first to show up at her cabin not out of curiosity about the forest’s history, but because of his heritage. When his parents had both passed away at young ages, Clairvius claimed that he had been called; he had been instructed by some higher power to leave Haiti and go to Louisiana where he would find a woman named Mama Miriam.

When he had arrived, Miriam had never touched a shovel again. And while she had taken the lives of some of the strangers, Clairvius had taken most of those duties as well.

Miriam watched as the boy finished up the second hole. By rule, the holes should be four feet deep as opposed to the traditional six. The shallowness of the hole allowed Miriam to see the boy’s shoulders pumping up and down as he removed the last few shovelfuls of earth. Done with digging, he tossed the shovel out of the hole and crawled out.

Between the two holes there was a bag of salt which Mama Miriam had blessed when she had opened it two months ago. Clairvius unrolled its top and dumped the remainder of the bag out into the holes, dumping just enough to line the bottoms of the graves.

Seeing that the boy was obviously fatigued, Miriam stood up and went to the bodies of the strangers. She grabbed the woman by the wrists and pulled her forward through the grass, towards the graves. A thin streak of blood followed like a hesitant crimson shadow.

“I can do that,” Clairvius said, stepping in to take the woman.

“As can I,” Miriam said, grinning. “You’ve done a fine job. And while I may be old and brittle, I can still do my part to help.”

“Yes’m.”

Clairvius walked to the man’s corpse and began pulling him across the field as well. They rolled the bodies into the holes together, as was the custom. There was a light crunching sound as the bodies fell onto the salt.

Once the bodies were in their holes, Clairvius reached for the shovel but Miriam stopped him. In the light of the setting sun, he looked older again and Miriam felt for him. When she had been his age, she had watched her father kill and bury the strangers. She couldn’t imagine going about the task herself at such a young age.

“Go inside and get some stew,” she told him. “I’ll finish here.”

Clairvius knew not to argue. He simply nodded and walked back into the cabin. Behind him, Mama Miriam began to fill the holes.

She packed down the last bit of earth just as the last light of day was slipping out of the sky, leaving golden ripples across the field. The simple act of refilling the holes had winded her but there was something redeeming in the feel of fresh blisters on her hands.

Miriam walked to the edge of the woods and began kicking the foliage around. After a few moments, she found two suitable rocks. She picked them up, hefted them in her hand and nodded to herself. She then returned to the new graves with a rock in each hand.

She knelt down to the ground, studied her hands for a moment and then bit into one of the fresh blisters. She squeezed at the torn skin until blood came out, working as fast as she could in the dying afternoon sun. She placed her bleeding hand onto first one grave and then the other, leaving a small scarlet stain in the plowed dirt and grass. She then covered these marks with the rocks and slowly got to her feet.

She looked away from the new graves and the rocks that marked them, peering out into the rest of the field that sat beyond. In the shadows of the evening, she studied the other rocks out there and tried to recall how many she had placed within the field. How many graves had she dug? How many times had she marked the graves with her own blood?

She knew that there were at least fifty of them that were her work. Another sixty had been placed there by her father. The rest of them were the work of her grandfather and other men whom she had never met. She had never taken the time to count, but she was sure that there were at least one hundred and fifty rocks—one hundred and fifty graves—in the field, stretching out to the edge of the surrounding forests.

As the sun finally escaped the day, Miriam returned the shovel to its place under the cabin and threw the empty bag of salt into garbage. When she returned to the cabin, Clairvius was busy spooning out another helping of stew.

“Is it done?” he asked her.

“Yes, it’s done.”

She poured herself a glass of tea and walked out onto the porch. She hunkered down in her rocking chair and listened to the night set in. Somewhere, an owl had gotten an early start. The owl was followed by a fledgling chorus of crickets and tree frogs.

And beyond it all, there was something else. There was a light roaring noise behind all of it, getting louder by the moment. She knew that it wasn’t the sounds of engines from the highway; this sounded different somehow…closer.

By the time she realized what the sound was, she saw the white glow of headlights breaking through the trees. She listened to the hum of the truck’s engine as the headlights approached, slowly bouncing down the thin dirt road.

When the truck appeared, Miriam smiled thinly. As she watched the driver park and get out of the truck, Miriam got to her feet and descended the porch steps. She met the driver halfway across the yard, a rather large man whom she knew well.

“Good evening, Mama Miriam,” the man said.

“How do you do, Sheriff? What can I help you with?”

“I’ve got one for you,” the sheriff said. “Sorry to bring it so late, but it was a hectic day at work.”

“It’s not a problem,” Miriam said. “I can get to it tomorrow.”

“Well then,” the sheriff said, “just show me where you want it.”

“Of course.”

Miriam walked to the edge of the cabin and back out towards the field. Behind her, she heard a rummaging sound as the sheriff reached into the back of his truck. He then grunted and followed her behind the cabin.

They walked by the light of his headlights, stopping just shy of the center of the field.

“Here will be fine,” Miriam said.

“Right here out in the open?” the sheriff asked. “Won’t something come out of the woods and take it? We don’t want the rats to have a nice little dinner, do we?”

“Not tonight,” Miriam replied. “There will be no creatures on this land tonight.”

As she said this, the sheriff noticed the two freshly dug graves in front of them. The soil was still soft and the signs of it having been recently packed were evident.

The sheriff lowered the bulk of the body wrapped in a tarp from his shoulders and set it on the ground. A hand fell out of the wrapped tarp; its fingers were opened in a wide grasping motion, as if searching for help.

“Two?” the sheriff asked. “You already had two today?”

“Yes. They were walking through the woods, curious about the history of the place.”

The sheriff was silent for a moment, considering something. He looked away from the graves and the body he had just delivered, casting his eyes to the sky and the half moon above them. “Well, this one…he was a hitch-hiker. He got hit by a car just east of Baton Rouge.”

“I thank you, sheriff,” Miriam said. “As does the town, I’m sure.”

“Jesus. Three in one day. Have you ever gotten three in one day?”

Mama Miriam thought about it for a moment before answering. She also looked to the sky, as if summoning the memory from her loved ones who may be in the rumored Heaven above their heads.

“Not me, no sir. But my father had four in one day. But it happens like that. Sometimes we go as much as six months without anyone coming by and then there are days like today.”

“Still,” said the sheriff. “Three in one day…what’s it mean?”

Miriam laughed. “It means that the crops will be abundant this season. You should know this by now.”

“Speaking of which, I have some corn, peas and potatoes in the truck for you.”

“Thank you. Now, why not come in and have a bowl of stew, sheriff? I just made it today.”

“No thanks, ma’am. I’d best be heading back into town.”

“I understand,” Miriam said. She was sure that he was not being honest. The sheriff always seemed troubled when he delivered a body to her. Although he knew that it was what the land required, he always seemed jittery when he came to the cabin. It seemed to bother him even worse at night.

Still, he did his best to show respect as they walked back to his truck. “Is there anything you need, Mama Miriam? More food, maintenance around the cabin?”

“No thank you, sheriff. Clairvius and I do just fine by ourselves.”

He grinned at her and reached into the cab of his truck. He handed her several plastic bags with the promised corn, peas and potatoes that local farmers had supplied her with. The farmers and most of the townspeople all knew that it was because of Mama Miriam and the land on which her family had lived for so long that the town had any crops and agricultural goods at all. It had been like that for as long as anyone could remember. Probably even further back than 1887 when her relatives had been hung in the woods. It had been this act that had caused the Christians to barter with the voodoo priests in order to revoke the curse that had been placed upon the land.

The general rule to come out of that exchange in regards to the town and the forest around it was a simple one. For what you take from the earth, you must return it with your own.

“Have a nice night,” the sheriff said as he got back behind the wheel of his truck.

“Same to you.”

She watched him back out of the yard and followed the bouncing trail of his headlights as the truck made its way back down the dirt road and into the forest. She spent another moment listening to the night and taking in the fresh air before she returned to the cabin.

“What did the sheriff have for us?” Clairvius asked her as she returned.

“These,” she said, showing him the plastic bags full of vegetables. “And he also brought another offering.”

“Would you like to me start digging the grave now?”

“No. It can wait until tomorrow,” she said as she started sorting through the vegetables.

*

Mama Miriam awoke shortly after midnight to voices outside of her window. As she slowly sat up in bed, she trained her ears on the voices and discovered that they were coming from much farther away. She got out of bed once her eyes adjusted to the darkness and walked to the front door. She opened it slowly and peered through the screen.

Behind her, she heard Clairvius enter the room. “What is it?” he asked.

She held up a finger to silence him and listened closely. As she looked to the night outside, she saw three darting arcs of light. It took her a moment to realize that these were flashlight beams. As she followed the lights, she then clearly heard at least three voices.

“What the hell is this?” one of them asked.

“Sure is a messed up place to have a house, right in the middle of these fucking woods. I mean, can you imagine—,”

“…Seriously guys, let’s just turn around. This is creepy…”

“Do you think anyone lives there?”

“Hell no, not way out here. I’d go crazy if I—,”

Mama Miriam closed the door quietly and turned to Clairvius. “Fetch the gun,” she said.

Clairvius nodded and walked on tiptoes to the back of the house.

Mama Miriam sighed, waited a moment and then walked out on the porch to greet her visitors.