Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry

by Susan Vaught

  I ignored my aunt’s opinions and kept my eyes on the girl. After a few minutes, she just looked scared. My own conscience nudged me. I stood, then closed the few steps between myself and the girl, and I stuck out my hand. “CiCi Robinson,” I said. “I teach school over in Holly Springs.”

  “Leslie Marks,” the girl said as we shook. “I just graduated from Ohio State University. I moved down here to help.”

  You’re White was about all I could think, but I couldn’t for the life of me understand why I was thinking that, because I wasn’t prejudiced, at least I didn’t think I was, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. “Come on, then,” I told her. “Work on these mailers with us.”

  A CHILL RIPPLED THROUGH THE silent classroom, and I shivered. Air conditioner. Had to be. But . . .

  No sunlight crept around the heavy drapes pulled over the windows, and a rolled blanket across the bottom of the door blocked any glow from the hallway. The air smelled like dust and perfume and turpentine from soaking paintbrushes. Indri and I sat cross-legged on our floor mats, gripping each other’s hands as Naomi Manchester from Square Books shined a flashlight under her chin. She had brown eyes and dark, arched eyebrows. In the spooky light, her M-shaped mouth looked huge, and her teeth seemed way, way too white.

  “The year was 1862, and Mississippi writhed in the grip of the Civil War.” Her quiet words sat in the air around her, and I imagined cannon smoke, the flash of rifle fire, and men shouting and running for their lives. I held my breath. I was pretty sure Indri was holding hers, too.

  “Eighty miles northeast of where we’re sitting, twenty-four thousand Americans lay dying on the battlefields of Shiloh, Tennessee.” Ms. Manchester’s dark hair glittered in the yellow beam of the flashlight. She had it pulled into a bun, and her cheeks flushed as she shifted her gaze from me to Indri to the next person in the listening circle. “Confederate troops limped back to Corinth, Mississippi, then fled farther south, to this campus.”

  I glanced to my left and right. This building was old. Had the soldiers come here? Was I sitting in the exact spot where some guy bled to death, or had his brains run right out on the floor? Another fit of shivers made my teeth chatter.

  “Why did the North and the South fight like that anyway?” Sheila behind me asked before Ms. Manchester could start talking again.

  “Duh,” said Bobby, who was sitting on my left. “Over slavery. Everybody knows that.”

  Ms. Manchester looked around the room as she answered. “There were many, many reasons for the Civil War, but disagreement over the moral soundness of slavery was a big one.”

  “Why did they have to kill each other, though?” Sheila said. “Couldn’t the people who had slaves just release them and apologize?”

  “I think there are things too huge and awful to fix by just saying sorry,” Indri said. “Like kidnapping people and making them into slaves, and torturing them for three hundred years just because they were Black instead of White.”

  “Be niiice,” I whispered to Indri.

  “That was nice,” she shot back.

  “Indri has the gist of it,” Ms. Manchester said. “The problems between northern states and southern states had grown so deep and gone on so long that they couldn’t be sorted out by talking—or at least that’s what everyone believed. So the war began. Then, in May 1861, Company A of the 11th Mississippi Infantry Regiment in the Confederate Army was formed, leaving only four students at Ole Miss.” Ms. Manchester held up four fingers, wiggling one at a time. “Four. That’s all. The college closed, but was soon forced to open its doors again as a hospital for the wounded and dying. They came on horseback, carried by friends, carried by wagons. Two by two and three by three they came, dozens, and dozens more, and then hundreds. The Lyceum filled to capacity, so the wounded spilled into other buildings, like this one.

  I choke-gripped Indri’s fingers until she yanked her hand away and smacked me on the shoulder.

  Ms. Manchester’s eyes traveled slowly around the circle. There were twelve of us, and she looked each of us in the face as she spoke. “Nurses and townsfolk did what they could, but most war wounds don’t heal. Moans echoed through these walls. Men suffered, and men died. Bodies lay stacked in the fields outside. Back then, nobody burned the dead. They put them in the ground.”

  She lifted her arm and pointed one finger over our heads, like she could see the exact spot where the bodies got planted. “Hole after hole, prayer after prayer, those men were buried right over there, behind our football stadium. A hundred. Then two hundred. And it wasn’t over, no, not even close. Before the year was out, General Grant himself pitched a tent in Oxford’s town square, a few feet from Square Books where I work now. There were more battles, and more wounded, and Union dead joined Confederate dead until the cemetery held the remains of more than seven hundred soldiers.”

  Indri glanced at me, eyes bigger than a Madagascar lemur.

  “Souls of the dead killed in battle, now they’re restless at best,” Ms. Manchester said. “Townsfolk brave enough to walk by the graves at night told tales of whispering and moaning and distant screaming. Some said they heard cannon fire and rifle shots. And then in 1900, workers sent to cut grass and weeds moved the markers. Once the cemetery had been cleaned, nobody knew where to put the gravestones, and seven hundred soldiers lost their names.”

  Well, that about sealed it. That graveyard would so totally be haunted. Judging by the way Indri squeezed my fingers, she thought the same thing.

  “How would you feel if you died for your country, got buried in strange ground—and then somebody went and lost your marker so your people couldn’t even pay their respects?” Ms. Manchester looked at each of us again, and she nodded at the frowns on our faces. “That’s right. Angry. And sad.” She leaned into her flashlight, turning her cheeks almost translucent. “And restless.”

  She paused. The air conditioner rattled in the background. My own breathing sounded too loud, so I held the air in my lungs until the darkness around Ms. Manchester seemed to pulse.

  “All that remains is a single monument, put up later to list as many names as we could find.” She shook her head. “But I don’t think that monument appeased the offended dead. I heard tell once of a student, we’ll call him John Smith. Brave John, he took it on himself to show his fraternity brothers that Ole Miss’s cemetery ghost stories were nothing but tall tales. So he dragged his sleeping bag out to that monument, to spend the night.”

  Stupid. Why were people in scary stories always so dumb? I’d have glued my feet to the floor before I went to a graveyard in the middle of the night—for any reason, much less to prove there weren’t any ghosts. People who tried to show ghosts didn’t exist always got eaten by something fanged and nasty. The second anybody in a spooky story laughed at ghosts, you knew blood was gonna flow.

  My teeth ground together as I waited for the worst to happen.

  “Idiot,” Indri whispered about Brave John.

  Ms. Manchester’s eyes drifted in Indri’s direction, and Indri clamped her mouth shut. “His fraternity brothers went halfway to the graves with him,” Ms. Manchester said. “But they stayed back, respectful and scared.”

  “More like smart,” Indri whispered.

  I nodded.

  Ms. Manchester’s eyes narrowed.

  We both got very still.

  “After a time, the night moved on, and the fraternity brothers fell asleep.” Ms. Manchester let us imagine that, then leaned into the flashlight’s beam again. Her voice dropped. “The first brother woke hollering and ducking, saying he heard rifles shooting right over his head. The second woke running away from the ear-bursting boom of cannon fire. As for the third—”

  She shifted away from the light, so far back I could only see her mouth moving.

  “The third brother said he heard something screaming . . . but it wasn’t human. More like a war horse, maddened from battle, bellowing as it charged. He heard hoof beats, then they all heard hoof beats, hammering
the ground, coming straight for them, thundering down the unmarked graves, and they ran, and they ran, and they didn’t look back.”

  Ms. Manchester moved.

  I couldn’t see her face at all, just the flashlight beam blaring in a column all the way to the ceiling. When she spoke again, she was nearly whispering. We had to lean toward her to make out the words.

  “Come the morning, when Brave John didn’t show up at the fraternity house, his friends went looking for him, and what do you think they found?”

  She waited.

  Nobody said a word.

  “BONES!” she cried, and we all yelped and shrieked. “BLOOD AND BONES!”

  The flashlight clicked off, pitching us into total darkness. Up turned to down and down turned to up, and I almost fell backward because I couldn’t figure out where I was. Indri started giggling like a psycho nutjob in a bad horror movie.

  “Might have been sharp hooves that did him in,” Ms. Manchester said, each syllable slow and quiet in the cavelike nothingness. “Might have been splintering wagon wheels. And maybe, just maybe, it was the rough heels of seven hundred pairs of war boots.”

  Pictures flickered to life on the cinder block walls around us. A black-and-white photo of a stone monument. An oil painting of a Civil War battle scene, complete with blood-stained grass and a sky blackened with smoke. A surreal digital picture of a Confederate officer riding a huge black stallion with devil-red eyes, its mouth wide and steaming. A graying, grainy shot of Oxford’s town square and its courthouse, surrounded by dozens of white tents and covered wagons. The pictures faded, until only the last one remained.

  “Is that real or Photoshop?” Indri whispered to me too loudly.

  “Real, I think,” I told her.

  The classroom lights clicked back on, blinding me as Ms. Manchester said, “This is the only known photo of General Grant’s occupation of Oxford, Mississippi, during the Civil War.” She stood by the picture, and the gray light covered half her face. “So yes, Indri, this picture is real, and not Photoshopped. What’s also real is the cemetery with seven hundred unmarked graves, and the fact that the campus closed for the Civil War because almost all the students were fighting as the University Grays—and those boys never came home.”

  “What happened to them?” Mavis Simpson asked.

  Ms. Manchester favored her with a smile. “On the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the University Grays reached the farthest point in Pickett’s Charge up Cemetery Ridge and established what became known as the high water mark of the Confederacy. That achievement came at the cost of one hundred percent casualties. Every single soldier was either killed or wounded.”

  My mouth came open. Indri squeezed my hand, and her brows pulled together. She really didn’t like to hear about military men getting killed in battles. I wanted to grab her and hug her and tell her not to listen, that everything was going to be fine with her dad, but she wouldn’t like that. It would make her go all weepy in public. Soldiers’ kids don’t cry. She had told me that a hundred times. I didn’t think that was true, or even good for her, but it was what Indri wanted. So I just let her murder my fingers until Ms. Manchester moved on with her storytelling.

  “The buildings at Ole Miss actually did serve as an infirmary to the wounded and dying from Shiloh and other battles,” Ms. Manchester said. “And the campus didn’t reopen for classes until 1865. Now, as for Brave John, him and his tale are all my creation.” She tapped her chest and grinned. “Local legend has it that on dark, dark nights, you can hear hoof beats in the cemetery, as the ghost of a general rides his patrol—but he’s never killed anybody.”

  Indri let go of my hand before my fingers went totally dead, and we clapped along with everyone else as Ms. Manchester gave us a deep, courtly curtsy. I knew she was around the same age as my mom, but she looked younger somehow. Maybe it was working in a bookstore instead of cutting up dead bodies.

  When we settled back on our mats again, Ms. Yarbrough switched off her iProjector, shutting down the creepy picture of the town square full of little white tents. Then she turned back to us with her hands clasped in front of her.

  “So who can explain why people tell ghost stories?” she asked.

  “To scare themselves silly,” Indri muttered.

  “That’s right.” Ms. Yarbrough smiled at her. “For entertainment. A good scare can be fun, and that’s the primary purpose for many spooky tales—excitement and entertainment. Why else do people tell ghost stories?”

  “To explain things they don’t understand,” Sheila said, and Ms. Yarbrough nodded her approval.

  Bobby came up with, “To warn people about evil, and bad choices. You know, scare them into acting right.”

  That got approval from Ms. Yarbrough and Ms. Manchester, too.

  Indri poked her hand in the air and said, “To help themselves not be afraid of what happens after death, ’cause if there’s ghosts, then there’s something, and we don’t just disappear.”

  Ms. Manchester gave her the thumbs up.

  I wanted to say that people told ghost stories to make sense out of what really was their circus and which monkeys they should worry about, but I figured all that would get me would be a trip to the campus infirmary. So I raised my hand, and when Ms. Yarbrough pointed to me, I said, “People tell ghost stories so they don’t forget the past.”

  Or their grandmothers.

  Double nods for me, and then Ms. Yarbrough said, “Who can tell me what story-telling elements and techniques Ms. Manchester employed to make her tale dramatic?”

  Hands went up, and the discussion took off again until Ms. Manchester had to go back to work.

  * * *

  Ms. Yarbrough told us another campus ghost story about a fraternity boy who got killed in a car wreck in the 1960s coming back to campus from the LSU–Ole Miss football game. Apparently, he was mad about dying, so he haunted Saint Anthony Hall, the Delta Psi frat house. Ms. Yarbrough didn’t use a flashlight, and her story wasn’t that scary. She wasn’t as good as Ms. Manchester at making all the words sound interesting.

  People started doodling on papers and reading other books and fidgeting with their phones while Ms. Yarbrough talked. I felt a little sorry for her as she blabbered out a third tale that started in the 1960s, about screams coming out of the Lyceum part of the old steam tunnels that ran under the campus. Could I tell a story as good as Ms. Manchester? I could write a little bit, like poems and short stories, but I didn’t think my writing was smart like Grandma’s had been, and definitely not like Avadelle Richardson with all her awards.

  According to Mom and Indri, I had an “expressive face.” Maybe that would help me scare the snot of people if I decided to tell spooky tales.

  I had a sudden image of Grandma, asleep at home in her hospital bed, her thin fingers gripping the white sheets like they were all that kept her from floating up to Heaven. My throat tightened. Grandma always thought I was smart and special. My parents said that stuff to me, but Grandma really made me feel it, whenever she looked at me and smiled at me. Back when she remembered me, anyway.

  I really, really missed her, even though she was still alive. Sort of. Jeez, even thinking stuff like that made me feel guilty. I slid my pack into my lap, and carefully eased out the page from Grandma’s packet that I had been reading this morning.

  . . . On your second birthday, I gave you a magnetic alphabet board with big purple letters, and your daddy about had kittens when you threw those letters every which place and they kept wrecking his vacuum cleaner. You were running ninety miles an hour up and down the halls, and you could say so many words, but NO and WHY were your favorites. By the next year, you were spelling all kinds of things on that alphabet board, and I told everybody how you’d take after me and write for a living. . . .

  “Earth to Dani.” Indri poked my shoulder.

  When I looked at her, I realized she was getting to her feet. Everyone was. Reality seeped back into my brain, and my legs felt like concrete.
Worse than that, I had a seriously bad case of mat-butt. I tucked the pages back into the envelope and put it in my pack.

  Indri yawned and stretched. “Lunch time. And then we’re going to the Grove to draw or take a break if you don’t want to sketch.”

  I pushed myself off the mat and stomped my feet to wake them up. Indri was good at sketching, not me. But my grandmother thought I’d take after her and write books. That made me happy. She was telling me again how smart she thought I was, even though she couldn’t really talk to me anymore.

  How awesome was that?

  6

  AN IMPLIED PROMISE

  * * *

  Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 163

  “I took a class in peaceful resistance,” Leslie Marks told me a few weeks later as I held a dropper over a cut on her right shoulder and dripped Mercurochrome on the broken skin, staining her bright red.

  “Ouch!” she hollered. “That stings.”

  I blew on the cut just like I blew on my son’s skinned-up knees, to lessen the ache, then I covered the spot with a Band-Aid strip. “Well, they should have taught you to duck when people’s throwing rocks.”

  “I can’t believe that happened,” she said. “He had on a business suit. I think he works at the bank where I put my money!”

  “Honey, you’re a White woman walking out of Mt. Zion. He knows why you’re here. He knows what you are.” I glanced past her to the door to the bedroom where my mother lay sleeping, fighting off cancer as best she could. When I was young and fresh back from Chicago and college with all that I thought I knew, did I try her patience like Leslie tried mine?

  Leslie frowned. “He called me some of those names, yeah. He told me exactly what he thinks I am.”

  I put my first aid kit back together and closed it up with my red-stained fingers. “Just being at my house on this side of town, you know that can earn you a lot worse than a rock to the shoulder.”