Midnight Grinding (3 page)

***

Dawn brought the sound of Doc Travers’ footsteps as he descended the stairs and joined a haggard Jeremy Burke in the kitchen. Silently, he poured himself a cup of coffee, then spoke. “I gave her something to quiet her down. Physically, I think she is all right. The awful shock of it all did the most damage, but she’ll get over it. In time, we will all get over this whole damned ordeal.”

Jeremy shook his head, reliving the horror. “But that…that horrid
thing
living inside her for all these years…”

“Indeed,” sighed Doc Travers with a tired smile, “but I had best get back up there. My work won’t be finished here for some time.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jeremy with alarm.

“I mean, young man, that your wife is in early labor. The baby will be premature, but I have delivered many that way,” he said, rising. “I wouldn’t worry if I were you.”

Jeremy buried his head in his hands. “I just pray that dear Abigail can make it through the strain.”

The labor of Abigail Beecher Burke turned out to be a long and painful one and, by the eve of that winter day in 1920, it finally came to its end. Jeremy was there, despite the doctor’s protest, to offer his young wife comfort and to see that things went well.

He watched silently as the birth of his child took place. First the infant’s head appeared, followed by the tiny body and limbs. He watched as Doc Travers tenderly handed the newborn fetus to Nurse Henderson and carefully withdrew the umbilical cord from the womb. Jeremy felt a thrill of terror grip him momentarily for, at first glance, it appeared that the physician held a snake in his hands. That was not the case, but for some reason the link between mother and child was darkly colored and possessed a scale-like texture. He quickly studied his firstborn
—
a little boy
—
and relaxed. His new son was incredibly small, but appeared completely normal.

A big wink and a grin from Doc Travers assured Jeremy that everything would be all right as he lifted the baby by its heels and gave it a sharp slap across the buttocks.

Jeremy exchanged a weary, but loving smile with his darling Abigail, took her hand gently in his own and eyed his squawling son as he squirmed within the grasp of the doctor’s experienced hands.

But as the infant began to cry, Jeremy noticed something that caused his newfound pride to swiftly rise toward horror. For the inner lining of the baby’s mouth was not a tender pink in color, but rather a ghastly milky white.

And, just beneath the pale gums, a hint of tiny fangs.

FOREVER ANGELS

To me, the worst nightmare imaginable would be the death of a child. The devastating loss, the grief, the realization of a life unfulfilled, would seem to be more than one could bear. Folks in the South derive some comfort from the belief that children are incapable of going to Hell; that these earthbound angels are simply making the transition to heavenly ones.

I wrote this story when I was a single man and, back then, it really didn’t bother me that much. But now that I am a father of two, it seems particularly disturbing.

Deanna Hudson didn’t believe her second-grade classmates at first. Not until they actually took her there and showed her that it was true.

The Glover County school bus let them out at the corner of Flanders Drive and Pear Tree Road at a quarter after three. Together, they walked the two blocks to the Milburne Baptist Church. The building had stood there for nearly one hundred and fifty years, always virgin white and immaculate, the lofty steeple rising in a pinnacle that could be seen throughout the entire township. Milburne, Tennessee was located on the very buckle of the Southern bible belt and the little church was a picturesque example of how very prominent religion was in that region of the country.

There were five in the youthful procession that walked quietly down the sidewalk, then crossed the well-mown lawn that separated the church property from the adjoining graveyard. There was Deanna, Jimmy Thompson, Butch Spence, and the Waller twins, Vickie and Veronica. They made their way through the cramped cemetery, past marble headstones and a scattering of lonely trees, their backpacks slung over their shoulders. Thunder rumbled overhead. The day had begun cheerfully enough, but by afternoon dark storm clouds had rolled in from the west, promising the threat of spring showers and perhaps a thunderstorm before the night ended.

“Well, there it is…just like I told you,” said Butch with a sneer of triumph. “Can’t call me a liar now, can you?”

Deanna said nothing. With the others, she slowly approached the little half-acre lot that was fenced in ornate wrought iron. An unlocked gate sported a couple of trumpet-playing angels overhead and a poetic inscription:
Those who are called to the Lord in innocence shall be, forever, angels.

“Come on,” urged Jimmy, pushing the iron gate open with a rusty squeal. Deanna followed the others inside, trying hard to suppress a shiver of cold uneasiness. Yes, it was exactly what it appeared to be; exactly what Butch and Jimmy had described so masterfully on the elementary school playground. It was a miniature graveyard.

A graveyard for children.

They began to walk among the rows of tiny tombstones, each a quarter of the size of their adult counterparts in the next lot over. “Don’t be such a scaredy-cat!” Butch shot back in disgust when the fair-haired girl hesitated near the gate. Finally, she drew up her courage and followed her schoolmates onto the gently sloping hill of the small graveyard.

At first the stones seemed fairly new, chiseled from pastel granite of pink and blue, bearing cryptic names like “Little Tommy” or “Baby Linda.” Unlike the headstones out in the big graveyard, these seemed devoid of flower arrangements. Instead, long forgotten toys were scattered upon the short mounds: rubber balls, pacifiers, and rattles, their colors bleached by sun and rain, the plastic cracked and broken. A teddy bear lay on its side before the grave of “Sweet Andy Wilson,” its eyes blank and unseeing. The stuffing had been burrowed from the fur of its matted tummy, strewn across the grass by some wild animal that had come foraging for food with no luck.

Further into the cemetery, as the little hill reached its peak and began to descend to the edge of a thick forest, the headstones grew older and the rows were choked with weeds.

The inscriptions were more difficult to read, the names sanded clear down to the bare stone by decades of wind and harsh weather. “My dad says these have been here since the 1800s,” said Butch. “Said there was a big diphtheria epidemic back then that killed half the babies in Glover County. Most of them are buried right here…beneath our feet.”

They stood there in reverent silence for a moment. The gentle breeze had grown blustery, stripping the leathery leaves off the cemetery’s only tree, a huge blossoming magnolia at the very heart of the grassy knoll. Deanna began to back away, a creepy feeling threatening to overcome her. “I’ve got to get home,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.

“Go on home, if you want,” said Butch with a shrug. “But you ain’t gonna be able to escape them, you know. Not as close as you live to this place.” They all peered into the three-acre woods that separated the churchyard from the new subdivision that had been built to either side of Pear Tree Road. Through a gap in the pine grove, Deanna could see her parents’ split-level house, the one they had moved into only two months ago.

“What do you mean?” asked the girl, clutching her book bag tightly. “Who are you talking about?”

A devilish grin crossed Butch Spence’s freckled face. “The babies, that’s who. They crawl up from their graves at night, you know. Old Man Caruthers, the caretaker, he’s heard them out here before…giggling and crying, crawling among the tombstones, trying to find their mothers. And on dark, stormy nights they hop the fence over yonder and crawl through the woods…to
your
house!”

It began to rain. “Stop it!” yelled Deanna. “You’re scaring me!”

“Listen!” said Jimmy Thompson. “Did you hear that?”

The sound of something stirring in the high weeds on the far side of the fence reached their ears. “It’s
them!”
yelled Butch in bogus panic. “It’s the dead babies! They’re in the woods already, Deanna, and they’re heading straight for your house!”

“Stop it!” sobbed the girl. “Do you hear me? Just stop it!”

The Waller twins squealed and giggled with a mixture of fear and delight. The sounds in the forest grew louder. It sounded as though something was in the thicket, crawling on hands and knees.

“Mama!” wailed an infantile voice from out of the high weeds. “Dadda!”

“Gaah, gaah! Goo, goo!” cooed another from the same vicinity beyond the bordering fence.

“Run, Deanna, run!” called Butch, stifling the laughter that would come later when the grand deception was over and done with. Then his buddies, Hank and Jason—who had beat them there on their bikes by five minutes—would come out of the woods and they would all enjoy a big bellylaugh at the new girl’s expense.

And the seven-year-old girl did run…through the open gate, across the graveyard, and past the old church to Pear Tree Road. By the time she reached home, the heavens had opened and delivered a drenching downpour. She met her mother at the doorstep, soaked to the skin and crying, the laughter of her playmates cruelly ringing in her ears.

She had seen one once before…a dead baby.

That disturbing experience had taken place at the funeral of Grandpa Hudson a couple of years before. Deanna had gone to the bathroom and, upon returning, lost her way among the many mourning rooms, the places where the deceased were displayed before the casket was moved to the chapel for the final service. She had entered an empty room very similar to the one her grandfather was in and, at first, she had the sinking feeling that her family had up and left her. Then she saw the difference in the flower arrangements and in the coffin that sat upon the shrouded pedestal at the head of the room.

The casket was very small, not over two feet in length. And it was the prettiest shade of baby blue that Deanna had ever seen. Although she was frightened, her curiosity was much stronger than her fear and she had climbed upon one of the folding metal chairs to get a better look. She nearly lost her footing and fell off when she saw what lay in the open box.

It was a baby boy, about the same age that her little brother Timothy was now. It was dressed in a blue jumper, its head covered by a knitted cap of the same pastel hue. Tiny hands clutched a blue rattle in the shape of a sad-eyed puppy dog. It was the round, little face that scared Deanna the most; a face devoid of color, despite a touch of undertaker’s rouge at each chubby cheek. A face that was coldly deceptive in its peaceful slumber, an endless sleep that would never be disturbed by a middle-of-the-night hunger for warm milk or the discomfort of a wet diaper.

As Deanna climbed off the chair and started for the door, she had heard—or thought she had heard—the dry sound of the plastic rattle echo from the casket behind her.

Deanna thought of that as she lay in her bed that spring night and listened to the storm’s fury rage outside her bedroom window. She drifted into a fitful sleep, then awoke to a violent clap of thunder and a flash of lightning that illuminated her entire room, if only for a second. She clutched her Raggedy Ann, cowering beneath her bedsheets at the awful thrashing of wind and rain. She tried to fall back to sleep several times, but her thoughts were too full of Butch Spence’s nasty prank and the baby blue casket at the Milburne funeral home.

Then, when the disturbing images finally did begin to fade, something else sent her into a fit of near panic. It was a small sound, a sound nearly swallowed by the bass roar and the cymbal crash of the thunderstorm in progress.

It was the sound of a baby crying. Outside. In the woods.

Deanna pulled the covers up over her head and tried to wait it out, but that dreaded creature curiosity once again prodded her.
Go and look out the window
, it told her.
You will never know what it is until you do. Maybe it is just a lost kitten or the howling of the wind.

Despite her better judgment, she climbed out of bed and did exactly what the little voice suggested. She padded in bare feet across her toy-cluttered room to the big window and peeped through the lacy curtains. And she saw exactly what she was afraid that she would see…but, no, it was much worse than that.

At first there was only darkness beyond the rain-speckled panes. Then a bright flash of lightning erupted, dousing the wooded thicket with pale light. There in the weeds down below, things moved. Initially, she couldn’t quite make out what they were. Then a double dose of electrical brilliance revealed the startling tableau and she clutched at the curtains in horror.

Small, hairless heads bobbed through the tall grass and honeysuckle like dolphins cresting the waves of a stormy sea. The pale, hairless heads of a dozen lifeless babies.

She began to scream shrilly. Soon, the bedroom light was on and her mother was there to comfort her. Through her tearful hysteria, she tried to explain the awful spectacle she had witnessed. Her father, his hair tousled and his eyes myopic with sleep, peered through the darkness at the yard below. “There’s nothing down there, sweetheart,” he said, kissing her on the forehead before creeping back to bed. “Nothing at all.”

Her mother tucked her back into bed, wiping her tears away. “You just had a nightmare, honey. A bad dream,” Mom said. “Now, you just relax and this time you’ll have a nice one.” The girl followed her mother’s advice and, before long, she was fast asleep.

She was awakened a few hours later, again by a baby’s cry, but this time it was only her brother in the nursery, wailing for his three o’clock feeding.

***

In some Southern communities, Memorial Day is also known as “graveyard day.” That had always been the case in Milburne.

It was a day of remembrance, a day reserved for respect of the dearly-departed; the recently deceased, as well as those long since past. At the Baptist church it began as a day of work and ended as a day of fellowship. The men would mow the grass and trim around the graves with weed-eaters. The women would tackle the stones, scrubbing away grime and bird droppings with Ajax and warm water. The children also contributed in their own special way. Armed with baskets of plastic flowers, they removed the old arrangements and replaced them with the new. On the graves of veterans, they placed American flags.

After the congregation had finished sprucing up the cemetery for that year, they would spread blankets and patchwork quilts upon the grass and sit down to eat dinner on the ground. The Hudson family found a spot near the wrought iron gate of the children’s cemetery and, despite Deanna’s protest, they laid out their picnic lunch. After the pastor’s prayer, they began to enjoy a meal of hot dogs, potato salad, and cold iced tea.

It was during the churchyard meal that the town handyman, Old Redhawk, pulled his rickety pickup truck into the parking lot and staggered up to where the congregation sat eating. Redhawk was a full-blooded Cherokee, once a proud member of a local tribe that had made Glover County its home. But he had fallen on hard times and turned to drink. When he wasn’t cleaning out someone’s drainage gutters or roofing someone’s house, he could be found down at Boone Hollow Tavern, indulging in his favorite pastime. From the looks of him that May afternoon, it appeared that he had downed a few shots of sour mash whiskey before arriving to speak his mind.