Ghost Cats of the South

by Randy Russell

  The ticket clerk told him the farm was on the other side of Edgefield, and that he had just heard about it himself.

  “How long will it take to have me there, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “You’re too late, if you come to buy those pigs,” the clerk said. “They stopped meowing more than a day ago.”

  “I see,” the man in the suit said. He pushed the front edge of his derby up with the head of his cane. He leaned forward and spoke softly. “Do you think any of that whiskey is left?”

  “Don’t matter.” The clerk smiled. “Gedde Hahn made those jugs to be reused. Any whiskey you put in them comes out the same.”

  The new outhouses at the Free Will Baptist church in the Edgefield district had a sign on each door painted by Brother Blaine. “No Hard Lickuor of Any Kind,” the signs said. That was the Eleventh Commandment in those parts.

  NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE

  Bump-Heads Cat

  Most people know that witches can see at night, but they don’t know why. Witches can see at night because they trade eyes with cats. It’s easier than flying with flashlights or lanterns through the darkness.

  Jeanie Epps read about witches in England and Japan. Witches in England boil eggs to cast spells. Their eyes look like eggshells. The witches in Japan are all women who are ghosts. They wear their hair undone and have no feet. They glide with their arms held out. They have no eyes, only teeth.

  The world around, you know you’re in a witch’s house when you see a pair of human eyes in a glass of water by the bed. The witch is off somewhere with a pair of cat’s eyes in her head. You best get out. No one should steal the witch’s eyes, Jeanie knew, or the witch would need to replace them. And dead eyes wouldn’t do.

  A witch uses her cat to find new eyes for her.

  An area not far from where Jeanie lived was known as Dogtown before it became part of Nashville, Tennessee. Dogtown was full of witches and drunks. A witch who was a prostitute put spells on men to make them think she was beautiful and young. Sometimes, the spell wore off too soon, which wasn’t good for customer relations. Once, a disgruntled and drunken gambler came back and stole her eyes while she was asleep. From then on, she needed human eyes to see. The problem was they’d last only a week before drying out, so she was in rather constant want of fresh eyes.

  The sightless witch taught her cat to get eyes for her. When the drunks fell down in the street at two or three in the morning, the cat would come out of the shadows from under a wooden porch along a dirt street. The cat walked softly to one fallen drunk after another, putting its nose to each man’s face to see if he would wake up easily.

  When he didn’t, the cat went to work. Using furry paws so soft you could barely feel a thing, the cat milked both eyeballs from inside their sockets. When the cat had them all the way out, dangling on their sinewy cords of pink flesh, it extended its claws and cut them cleanly off, one after another. It escaped through the night at a silent run, a human eyeball dangling from each side of its mouth. The witch could see for a few days and became a beautiful young prostitute again. She learned to be careful not to put the eyes in upside down.

  “Bull malarkey!” Rusty said when Jeanie was through telling him about it.

  “How do you know it’s not true? You’ve never seen a prostitute. You don’t know whose eyes they wear.”

  Jeanie’s cousin didn’t know for sure what a prostitute was, except that he wasn’t supposed to say the word around adults, which made it interesting. He liked Jeanie, and he liked being at her place. He learned all sorts of things.

  Just off Brick Church Road north of Nashville was a little farm valley called Willow Creek. Most pets in Willow Creek were house cats. They stalked through the yards and fields like all cats do when given the opportunity. The family cats would loll around on a porch or under a tree and let you look at them. One big cat in Willow Creek, however, was just a blur.

  Jeanie Epps grew up there. Her family had a large red-shingled house, two pastures, and two hay barns, along with a good-sized yard that was as pretty as a park. Jeanie was a tomboy when she was younger, about Rusty’s age. She had many fun places for her girlhood adventures. She could wander pretty much where she wanted.

  Only one place was off-limits. It was the old widow’s farm. She’d died, and the farm was in disrepair. The house had fallen in, and the barn was about to. A fence was along her parcel. Jeanie’s parents had forbidden her to ever go on the other side of that fence. They pretty much knew she would explore the old barn at the widow’s house. Falling-down barns were dangerous.

  “Just don’t you do it,” her mother said. “And don’t tell Rusty to do it when he’s here.”

  “I don’t tell him to do anything,” Jeanie said.

  So she did. Jeanie waited until her cousins were visiting and the adults had gone into town. Rusty didn’t know the rule about the fence, so he couldn’t be blamed. She could say she had to go after him. If caught, that is. But she wouldn’t be caught.

  Jeanie stirred sugar and a dead bug into a cup of coffee one of the parents had left behind.

  “Here, drink this,” she told her cousin. “You’ll need it where we’re going.”

  She was careful how they slipped away from the house that day. Jeanie waited until the younger kids were watching cartoon videos. She and Rusty went out the back, and she didn’t let the screen door bang. Jeanie raced across the pasture, Rusty right behind her.

  “A prostitute is a woman who sleeps with a man for money,” she told him. “I couldn’t say it in the house with the little kids there.”

  “I know!” Rusty lied. He wondered how much money he would have to pay to watch a woman sleeping. Why would she have to charge him anything? “Why don’t you let me see you sleep some? You could go to sleep right now if you laid down.”

  Jeanie laughed. “I’m not sleeping for you, Rusty Wheeler. You’re too young.”

  “Am not.”

  “Besides, girls don’t sleep for their cousins. It’s wrong.”

  They stopped at the fence, then went right over it.

  “Are we going to smoke?” Rusty wanted to know.

  “Maybe. If you aren’t a baby, we will.”

  Jeanie wanted to look around the widow’s farm and see what they could find. She wanted something to hide in her room. She didn’t know what, though.

  “If we don’t smoke, what are we going to do?”

  “There’s something in this old lady’s barn I’m not supposed to see.”

  “What?”

  “I won’t know until I see it,” Jeanie said.

  “Is it big?”

  “I don’t know! Now, shut up and come along.”

  “I will if you kiss my arm again.”

  “That was just once to show you how it’s done. I’m not doing it again. Rusty, you’re dumb. Hurry up, now.”

  Rusty didn’t budge. Jeanie wanted him to come with her, so he decided to hold out.

  She walked back and stood in front of him.

  “Okay,” she said. “Pull your shirt up to your neck, and I’ll put a hickey on your chest.”

  When he did as he was told, she punched him right in the ribs.

  Rusty fell backwards. It hurt, and he wanted to cry. But if he did, Jeanie would call him a baby and would never let him watch her sleep. Rusty followed her, but not too quickly. He was disappointed in their outing. It was a lot of work trudging around farm fields.

  “Where’s the old lady?” he finally asked.

  “She’s in the graveyard, if you have to know. Now, come on!”

  The weeds were thick and tall in the field on the other side of the fence, and it was a hike to the widow’s barn. They found an old tractor path, and that made it easier. Jeanie stopped to pull a cocklebur off her shoelace.

  “There’s a bee on your butt,” Rusty said.

  Jeanie stopped walking and turned around.

  “There is not,” she said.

  “I know. I’m supposed to slap yo
ur bottom after I say it.”

  “You touch my bottom, Rusty Wheeler, and I’m breaking your arm.”

  Jeanie managed the hike without further physical assault upon her younger cousin. She’d trained him well.

  The old barn was great. It was better than she’d hoped. It leaned far to one side under its roof. It was near to completely falling in. It was a hundred years old at least. The door was entirely off. Shafts of light shot through holes in the roof and where boards were missing.

  “It’s full of snakes,” Rusty said. “I’ll wait here.”

  He tucked his shirt in. Rusty didn’t want anything crawling inside his shirt. He pulled his socks up over the legs of his Levi’s. It looked pretty stupid, but Rusty knew that snakes lived in barns. He’d been in barns before. Just hanging around the outsides of barns, you risked having a snake find you.

  Jeanie walked into the barn.

  “Come on,” she called. “You aren’t a sissy, are you? You’re a sissy, Rusty Wheeler, and a big baby, too.”

  Rusty reluctantly followed her in. He hated it when she called him a baby just because she was older than he was. It smelled bad inside the barn. It smelled like poop, and the air was full of dirt. He could see dirt moving in the light shafts. Moldy, hay-covered wooden steps were to one side, and a broken ladder to the loft. Everything looked awfully old and maybe rotted. An old pair of gloves was on the floor. A hat covered with spider webs hung on a hook. The loft was full of old hay bales.

  “They just left everything here when she died,” Jeanie said. She looked around. Then she pointed at a board on the wall. “Grab that hat and put it on.”

  “No!” Rusty said. He shivered.

  “Go on, now. Do it, you big baby!”

  He wasn’t about to touch the thing. “What are we looking for anyway?”

  “An old hunting knife, maybe,” Jeanie said. “A gun.”

  “There’s no gun.”

  “Might be in the loft.”

  “Maybe we better go. It smells like snakes.”

  “You going to start crying? Might be old fishing stuff we can use for ourselves. Just start looking.”

  Rusty picked up a broken hoe handle and poked at the clumps of hay on the floor.

  A big cat jumped from the loft above them. Rusty saw it coming and tried to yell. When he turned to start running, his shoe came off. Jeanie jumped to the side, and the cat missed her. It looked too big to her to be a cat. In a blur, it was gone.

  They were both outside the barn in a hurry. They ran about twenty steps and stopped. It was sunny out, and nothing was chasing them now.

  “My shoe,” Rusty moaned. “It’s inside.”

  “What was that, a wolf? So, go get it.”

  “I’m not going in there. Didn’t you see that cat? It didn’t have eyes.”

  “That was a cat? No way. It was too big for a cat. Missed me by a hair.”

  “It was a cat,” Rusty insisted. “And it didn’t have eyes, just empty holes in its head. You didn’t even see it.”

  “If it was just a cat, I’m going back in. Barn cats run off like that. They’re afraid of you. It was running off, that’s all. Are you sure it was a cat?”

  “I’m not going in again. I’m going home.”

  “What about your shoe?”

  “I don’t care. I’ll say I lost it somewhere.”

  “You going to hop all the way back to the house?”

  “If I have to.”

  “All right then, I’ll get it for you. You’re a big baby, you know that? It was just a cat, and it had eyes. You heard me say that about witches in Dogtown, and you just thought it didn’t have eyes. Barn cats have eyes, Rusty Wheeler. They all do.”

  Jeanie walked back to the barn. That’s when she learned the truth about a witch’s cat that wants a pair of eyes. It leapt right on her, full into her chest, and knocked her down. Jeanie screamed when eighteen pounds of matted fur and bone slammed into her. She lost her breath when she hit the ground. It hurt. It hurt worse than getting punched in the chest.

  The old blind cat was on her in an instant. The witch’s cat bumped heads with Jeanie, just like any cat will do. She still couldn’t get her breath. It hardly hurt, though, when Jeanie’s eyes popped out of their sockets and into the cat’s. The cat’s extended claws sliced through the eye cords in a flash. And then the cat was off her as quick as that.

  Rusty threw his other shoe when Jeanie screamed. He ran as hard as he knew how to get back to the house. He banged his toe climbing the fence.

  After two years of attending a special school for the blind, glass eyes in her face instead of real ones, Jeanie telephoned her cousin. He was older than the last time she called him. He would help.

  “I know what to do,” Jeanie told him. “You come out here and help me find that cat. If I bump heads back, I’ll be able to see again.”

  “Naw,” Rusty said. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ll show you how to kiss with your tongue,” she offered.

  “No. I’m still a big baby,” he said.

  He disconnected the call. He’d said the same thing before to her. Every time she called.

  Sometimes, through no fault of her own, a witch doesn’t make it home when she goes out at night. Some poor cat has to go through the rest of its life without eyeballs unless it can find someone to bump heads with, like the cats around Dogtown do.

  DECATUR COUNTY, GEORGIA

  Ice-Cold Cat

  It was too hot to kiss.

  The sun shimmered, rising early on yet another long summer day in Decatur County, Georgia. It was too hot for young lovers to be outdoors and do anything much more than look at each other. Holding hands made your fingers sweat.

  David Hyatt had a cool idea. He drove out of Climax, Georgia, with his girlfriend in the passenger seat of his Toyota pickup. He worked nights all summer. The heat of the day was all that remained for his dates with DeeAnna.

  “I’d rather go to the movies than have a picnic,” she said.

  David would rather the two of them were alone that Saturday. The air conditioning filled the cab with noise but made it possible to sit in the truck without your shirt sticking to your back. The dashboard, taking sunlight through the windshield, was too hot to touch.

  “It’s not a picnic,” David said. “It’s a camping trip.”

  David had packed two flashlights for their outing. The sleeping bags were in the back of the trunk. An ice cooler you could pull on wheels was packed with soda pop and bottled beer.

  “It’s not a camping trip, David, unless you stay overnight.”

  “Day camp,” he mumbled, knowing she couldn’t hear him over the air conditioning.

  “When we get there, I’m sticking my feet in the ice chest,” she said. Because he had said they were going camping, DeeAnna wore sneakers instead of flip-flops. Her feet were hot. “I don’t feel like traipsing around.”

  David’s destination was an opening between two large rocks. It was one of the numerous back entries into the winding labyrinths of the Climax Caverns. More than seven miles of underground limestone passages had been charted within the cave system in southwestern Georgia.

  Decatur is the only county in the coastal plain of Georgia with underground limestone caverns. A few entries to Climax Caverns remain hidden. David had learned of one such opening from a cousin. His goal that day was to escape the heat and, he hoped, create a little of his own with DeeAnna. He started by dragging the cooler as far as the opening between the two rocks. Once he found a suitable private room in the limestone caverns, he’d go back for the sleeping bags to spread out like a picnic blanket. The bottoms of the sleeping bags were waterproof.

  All he needed was for the flashlight batteries to hold their charge.

  The entry was narrow, and DeeAnna complained. Eventually, David led them into a cavern the size of a hotel lobby. The air was noticeably cool. He shone his flashlight around the limestone walls. Just beyond a jutting of vertical rock, the caverns co
ntinued in a series of rooms into the deeper recesses of the cave.

  “Keep your flashlight pointed down,” David said. “There’s water here and there.”

  He didn’t want DeeAnna to point her flashlight straight up, in case bats were hanging from the ceiling. DeeAnna held his hand.

  His cousin had told him of a small room-sized cavern off to the right with a skeleton in it. He told David to avoid that room, that it would give DeeAnna the creeps. He would recognize it, his cousin said, because an old wooden bed frame was in that room.

  David’s cousin thought the bed was from the War Between the States. It wasn’t. It was much older.

  DeeAnna saw the cat before David did. The cat walked a ledge just two feet or so from the cavern floor. DeeAnna screeched and dropped her flashlight. She wrapped her arms around David from behind.

  “Over there,” she said.

  The cat’s eyes lit up as David moved the beam of the flashlight. She was a funny-looking thing. Her fur was spiky. At first sight, it looked as though the cat had extra sets of ears, but it was just her fur sticking up in pointy locks. The cat’s fur glistened like ice in the circle of yellow light from David’s flashlight.

  The cat walked the ledge slowly, watching the visitors to her cavern. She bounded away into the darkness. David tried to keep her in the light, but she quickly disappeared around a corner of rock.

  “It’s just a cat,” he said. His voice echoed in the limestone chamber.

  “I know that, David. I know what a cat is.” She let go of him. It had felt warm and comfortable with her arms around him. It was cool in the cave. Cool enough for goose bumps. “It looked sort of strange, though.”

  “Just a cat,” he said. “I think the place for our picnic is around that corner. See how the floor of the cave rises? It will be dry up that way.”

  “I think that cat wanted to show us something.” DeeAnna retrieved her flashlight.

  David rolled his eyes in the darkness. Whoever heard of a picnic cat?

  They came to an elevated cavern and stood side by side looking at an old bed against the wall. David put his arm around DeeAnna. They both had their flashlights on the cat.