The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

by James Lincoln Collier

  “Okay, then we go,” Sonny said. “I don’t aim on getting soaked.”

  We turned, and Sonny kicked this door open. For a moment we stood and stared.

  “Holy Christmas,” Sonny whispered.

  Dangling from the light fixture in the ceiling was a rope tied in a hangman’s noose. On the floor underneath it were a man’s clothes, neatly in place, as if a headless man had lain down there—pink striped shirt, brown pants, black socks still in his shoes—rotted here and there, but otherwise neat and tidy. And inside the clothes were his bones—ribs holding the shirt up, finger bones at the end of the shirtsleeves, leg bones visible between the cuffs of his pants and the top of his socks.

  About a yard away lay his skull, tipped sideways, so that the eye sockets stared directly at us. The jawbone had fallen off and was lying beside the skull.

  Then came a flash of lightning and a huge crack of thunder. We let out a howl and then we were tumbling down the stairs, racing through the living room, across the porch, through the brush in the yard, and on down Spring Hollow Road. We didn’t stop running until we were back in front of Grampa’s old house at the corner of the blacktop road.

  Chapter 7

  We stood at the corner in front of Grampa’s old house, gasping for breath and looking at one another. A whole lot of questions were whirling around in my mind, going so fast I couldn’t catch hold of any of them. “Sonny,” I said finally, “do you think your dad knew about—knew what was in that room?”

  “I don’t know. He never said nothing about it. I’d have remembered that and would have gone to have a look a long time ago.”

  “But some people in Magnolia must have known about it,” I said. “How could you keep it a secret?”

  “Not necessarily,” Sam said. “He might have gone up there all alone and committed suicide.”

  Sonny shook his head. “Didn’t commit suicide. You got to have a chair or a table to jump off of to hang yourself. Wasn’t anything in that room you could jump from.”

  “Maybe there was some furniture there at the time,” Sam said. “Maybe people came along later and hooked it.”

  “They wouldn’t have,” I said. “Whoever did would have told everybody in town that there was a corpse out there hanging from the ceiling. The state troopers would have taken him away.” A spit of rain hit my cheek. “We better get going,” I said.

  We started walking back toward town at a good pace. “That’s just the point,” Sam said. “If somebody had got lynched in Magnolia, it’d be hard to keep it quiet.”

  “Especially if the lynching had to do with this oil guy,” I said.

  Suddenly Sonny stared at us. “Oil,” he said. “What was that all about, exactly?”

  “As far as Gene and I can figure it out,” Sam said, “this guy Ernest Gallen came down from Chicago and bought the Toffey place from old widow Toffey. Then he began telling everybody there was oil under the land there, and got them to put their money into it.”

  “Invest in it,” I said. “I guess they would have needed money for oil wells and stuff.”

  “I know something else,” Sonny said. “My dad was in on it, too.”

  We all stopped walking. “Your dad?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “My dad. He had this big old yellow envelope he kept tucked away in his dresser drawer. He used to take it out every once in a while and stare at it. Just stare at it. And then put it away in his dresser drawer again. Once Mom told me that they was oil certificates. Dad had sold everything he could lay his hands on to raise the money for them—his watch, his little old fishing boat, an old Model T he had back then. Couldn’t get much for the stuff, Mom said, but nobody’d lend him any money to buy them oil certificates with. Mom said they was worthless and to forget about them.” He looked at me. “You think your specter has something to do with them oil certificates?”

  He’d forgot that Sam didn’t know about the specter. I gave her a quick glance. “I don’t know,” I said.

  But nothing got past Sam. “What specter?” she said.

  “Blame me, Gene,” Sonny said. “I figured you’d told her.”

  Sam looked from me to Sonny. “What specter?” She looked at me again. “What’s this all about?”

  To be honest, I was just as glad to tell her. In a funny way, the more people who knew about the voice, the more protected I felt from it. I couldn’t tell Mom and Grampa; they’d never believe me and they’d probably ship me off to a nut doctor. But Sam would believe me. “I’ve got a voice inside me, Sam.”

  She squinted her whole face and stared at me through the squint. “What? A voice?”

  “It isn’t there all the time. It comes every two or three days to talk to me.”

  “Who comes?”

  “The voice. The specter. It’s the spirit of somebody. I think maybe it’s the spirit of that guy who was hung up there in the Toffey house. Or maybe it’s someone else. The voice won’t tell me. It says I have to find out for myself so I’d be convinced.”

  She went on staring at me through her squint. “What do you mean, a voice? Where’s it coming from?”

  “It’s inside of me. Inside my head.”

  “I don’t see how that can be,” she said. “Are you sure you aren’t just hearing things?”

  “Oh, it’s real, all right. It can make me do things I don’t want to do.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how. It just can.”

  She stopped squinting and wrinkled her forehead. “Why did this voice pick on you, especially?”

  “Because of my grampa. I think it wants me to kill him.”

  “Kill your grampa? You wouldn’t do that, Gene.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s pretty strong when it gets its claws into you. It killed Sonny’s dad.”

  “What?”

  Sonny nodded. “The voice told him to walk off that lumber platform. He knew it was trying to kill him, because it told him to dive in front of a car once. He said it had a grip on him so strong he couldn’t resist. He was all set to dive, but the driver saw him leaning out into the road and hit the brakes in time. Dad said that afterwards he was as weak as a kitten and covered with sweat.”

  Nobody said anything for a minute. It was spitting a bit of rain and we started to walk again, this time more quickly. “Isn’t there anything you can do to make it go away, Gene?”

  “Sure doesn’t seem like it.”

  There was more silence. Then Sam asked, “Aren’t you scared, Gene?”

  “I sure am. I walk around scared out of my pants half the time. Scared when the voice is talking to me, and when it isn’t there, I’m scared it will come. I’m blame tired of being scared day in and day out.”

  “Dad said he was scared, too. Scared to death. Said he knew the voice was gonna get him in the end, though. Said he was fighting it as hard as he could, but he didn’t think it would be any use.”

  “It hasn’t come after you, Sonny?” Sam said.

  “No. I guess it was satisfied with killing Dad and is willing to leave the rest of us be. Wouldn’t be any point in going after my little sisters anyway. They ain’t worth killing, even the two added together.”

  “You shouldn’t say things like that, Sonny,” Sam said.

  “I reckon there’s a lot of things I shouldn’t ought to say.”

  There was more silence. Then Sam said, “Sonny, we’ve got to help Gene. We’ve got to help him get out of this.”

  “I reckon we should,” Sonny said. “I just wish I could see a way how.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t help me. Maybe the voice will come after you if you help me.”

  “Sonny and I’ll have to chance it,” Sam said. “That’s all there is to it.”

  “What I don’t get,” Sonny said, “is that the body must have been rotting out there for months. A thing like that makes an awful stink. You ever smell a dead possum by the roadside? How come nobody smelled it and reported it to the police?”

  “Hardl
y anybody goes down there,” I said. “No reason to.”

  “But somebody must have gone down there once in a while,” Sonny said. “Maybe somebody who knew about the berry bushes, same as you did, Gene.”

  “They were covering it up, Sonny,” Sam said. “That’s the way I see it. Gene and I have been through a whole bunch of old Chronicles and we didn’t see anything at all about a lynching, or the oil swindler getting arrested.”

  “It figures, don’t it, Sam?” Sonny said. “They wouldn’t bring that body in, for once you got a body you got to do something about it. Blame hard to pretend nothing happened when you got a corpse laying in the back of your pickup truck. So they decided to leave it out there to rot.”

  Sam shuddered. “What a terrible thing to do.”

  Sonny nodded. “Seems so to me, too,” he said. “Hard enough on a fellow to get lynched. Worse when you was left to rot instead of being buried proper.”

  Sam nodded vigorously. “If you’re going to lynch a guy, at least you ought to have the goodness to bury him. Everybody deserves that much.”

  “Well,” I said, “maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to blame people. We don’t know what happened yet.”

  “I’m going to see what I can get out of Dad,” Sam said. “He knows a lot of things he never puts in the paper. He’s bound to know about this oil well guy.”

  “He won’t tell you, Sam,” I said. “They’ve been covering this thing up from the beginning.”

  “I’ll worm it out of him,” she said. “I’m good at worming things out of him.”

  By now the rain was spitting pretty hard. We began to trot, and left off talking in order to save our breath for getting home. Soon I was in our house, feeling kind of damp. Nobody was at home. I went upstairs to the bathroom to dry myself off. I had hardly started rubbing my head with a towel when I felt that pressure come, and the little movements inside of me. “I knew you’d be coming,” I said. “After what we saw today.”

  “You’re right about that, Eugene. What did you think of it?”

  “That was you who they hung, wasn’t it? You didn’t commit suicide. Somebody lynched you.” From down below I heard a car pull up in front of the house. It sounded like Grampa’s Model A.

  “You’re a smart boy, Gene. I like the way you think.”

  A car door slammed. “If I let out to everybody that you were lynched, will you get off my back?”

  “There are a few other small things I’ll need you to do, as well.”

  I heard somebody come into the house. “It’s Grampa.” There were footsteps on the stairs.

  “Yes, Grampa. He’s high on the list. We’ve got to do something about him.”

  “I’m not going to kill Grampa, if that’s what you’re thinking.” But the tightening was already loosening, and the specter was sliding away. The bathroom door opened. Hastily I began drying my hair again, and turned my head to look. Mom was standing there. “I went to the park with Sonny and Sam,” I said. “We got caught in the rain on the way home.”

  Mom was frowning at me. “Gene, did I hear you say something about Grampa?”

  Of course what I’d said was that I wasn’t going to kill Grampa, but either way it would have sounded pretty bad to her. “What do you think I said?”

  “Something about killing Grampa. I heard it plain as day. You were talking quite loudly.”

  “Mom, I never said anything like that. You must have misheard.”

  “I certainly hope so. You’ve been talking to yourself a lot lately. Talking in a loud voice as if somebody were there with you.”

  I would have to learn to lower my voice when I was talking to the specter. “People talk to themselves, Mom. I’ve heard you talk to yourself in the store. ‘Oh, look at what they’re charging for tomatoes now,’ and ‘I guess I better take four cans of beans as long as they’re on sale.’ I’ve heard you say stuff like that.”

  “Yes, I admit it. I talk to myself like that sometimes. But not the way you did, in a loud voice as if somebody were actually there. This is something new.”

  I had to get out of this conversation. “Mom, I’ve always talked to myself. I didn’t realize I was being so loud about it.”

  She didn’t say anything for a minute. Then she said, “Well, all right. Put on a dry shirt. We’ll be having supper shortly.”

  But I knew that wouldn’t be the end of it because she was bound to discuss it with Grampa, and he’d want to have a talk with me.

  The next afternoon I went over to the Chronicle office with Sonny and Sam. I’d never expected them to become friends.

  Sam was bound and determined to go to college and become a brilliant mathematician or a brilliant archaeologist—it didn’t seem to matter much what it was, so long as it had “brilliant” in front of it. Sonny was hardly likely to finish high school—always said he would, but I knew Sonny. Along about the time he got to be fifteen he’d start skipping school a lot: every time there was a nice morning he’d decide it’d be more interesting to laze under the willow tree with his dad’s fishing pole than sit in a stuffy classroom learning to do square roots. By and by he’d have missed so many days there’d be no chance he’d pass. The idea of repeating a grade he’d hardly been to in the first place would be too much for him, and that’d be the end of school for Sonny.

  But I could see that they were curious about each other. Sam had never known anyone like Sonny. Sonny wasn’t the kind of kid who got asked to nice birthday parties where they had hot dogs, paper hats, ice cream, and a cake with the right number of candles on it. Sonny barely went to his own birthday, much less anyone else’s. His dad would give him a couple of fishing lures he was likely to use himself, his mom would make him his favorite—spaghetti and meatballs—and that would be about it.

  But Sam could see there was value to Sonny, even though he chewed grass, spit, and let his shirttail hang out. She said to me once, “Sonny’s a whole lot smarter than you would figure. I’m getting used to his shirttail and chewing grass. I just wish he wouldn’t spit so much.”

  On the other side of it, Sonny was mighty curious about Sam. In a way, she was as foreign to him as a French or Siamese person would be. I spoke good English, or was supposed to, anyway, and tucked my shirttail in, but Sonny knew that I didn’t have much more money than he did—didn’t get an allowance the way Sam did, and had to pay for baseballs and gloves myself, same as him. I was more on his side of the fence. Of course we played baseball with kids from nice homes like Sam’s—but everybody was glad enough to have Sonny on their team, even if his shirttail was out and his English wasn’t so hot. But he didn’t hang around with those kids much—wasn’t asked to their birthday parties or to go to the movies with them, which they could afford because they had allowances.

  Now he was hanging around with Sam, and he was curious about her. What was it like to have two or three pairs of shoes, a couple of extra shirts, a nice warm coat with all the buttons on it for winter? What was it like to have a dad who people in town looked up to? What was it like to be on the inside of town, rather than hanging around on the edges picking up leftovers—secondhand clothes, an old bike you had to fix up yourself with wires and tape?

  But he’d got to know her better, and I guess when you know people you’re more likely to get friendly with them, even if they’re different from you. Of course, they argued a lot—wouldn’t have seemed natural if they hadn’t. But that was okay: it spared me having to argue with Sam—let Sonny do it.

  At least this time we had some idea of what we were looking for. We took down the papers from around the time of the hanging—October 1925—and started going through them, just to make sure we hadn’t missed something. But we hadn’t. There wasn’t anything in the paper about the lynching—not for the week that it happened, nor the one for the week after, nor the week after that.

  “Maybe we got something wrong,” Sonny said when we’d given up looking.

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Like maybe t
hat guy who got lynched didn’t have nothing to do with the story in the newspaper we found out there. That piece of newspaper could of got dropped some other time, not when they was lynching him.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “There’s another explanation, though.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “What if my dad knew all about the lynching and decided not to put it in the paper.”

  “Would he do that? Leave an important story like that out of the paper?”

  “Sure. He does it all the time. Like when the deacon got caught robbing the church’s bank account to pay for his gambling, Dad didn’t put it in. The family was still living in Magnolia. Dad said they didn’t need the shame of it.”

  “So you think he might have left the lynching out on purpose? Wouldn’t people have thought it was funny that the story wasn’t in the paper?”

  “Maybe nobody knew,” Sonny said. “Maybe the only ones who knew were the ones who did it.”

  We were quiet for a minute. “Sam,” I said, “what about asking your dad about it?”

  “If they was covering it up, he won’t tell you nothing,” Sonny said.

  “That’s probably right,” Sam said. “If he wouldn’t put it in the paper, he isn’t going to tell me. He knows I can’t keep my mouth shut.”

  “Try anyway, Sam.” I said. “It was a long time ago. Maybe nobody cares about it now. You said you were good at worming things out of him.”

  She shrugged. “I can try.”

  So we left it at that, and a couple of days later she told us about it. “I asked him if there was some kind of hanging here in about 1925. He said, ‘I thought you kids were working on a school project. What kind of school project is it?’ And I told him that the hanging wasn’t a school project; we just heard about it. He said, ‘Where’d you hear about it?’ I told him Sonny Hawkins got it from his dad. And Dad said, ‘Since when are you such a big pal of Sonny Hawkins?’“

  Sonny gave her a look. “You don’t have to be a pal of mine if you don’t want to. I don’t need anyone for a pal.”

  “I didn’t say that, Sonny,” Sam said. “I told Dad you were okay even if you didn’t comb your hair and your shirttail was always out. I said we weren’t supposed to judge people on their appearances anyway, only on the inside of their souls. He said I was right, probably Daniel Boone didn’t comb his hair or tuck his shirttail in.”