One October Moon

A distant scream woke me up.  Barely audible, I could tell it was a girl.

A few minutes later I heard another desperate yell, much louder now.  This was the shrill, piercing wail of a woman much older, and much closer.  It came from just behind the barn on the other side of the fire road.

The wood floor was ice cold, as the Coleman pot-bellied stove had burnt out hours earlier.

I slithered out of a feather bed onto bare feet and tiptoed through the freezing darkness to the back porch where I found my grandfather, resting on the steps where he sat, holding his double-barreled shotgun, butt down.  Silent.  Still.  He was looking through the night air, towards the barn.

The next howling screech was on the other side of the garden.  The thing was traveling slowly, making its way from left to our right.  We waited.  The final scream echoed away off in the distance.  Then silence.  Heavy silence.  After a few quiet minutes, Granddaddy stood up, unloaded his shotgun, and rested it against a wood stack.

When I asked him about the screams, he said he had heard it once before.  Long ago.

Then he stared out at the blackness and recollected a story.  I was a young boy and hung on his every word as he told me all he knew of it.  He said it happened on one October moon, when he was young.

Years later, with a tape recorder, I asked my ninety year-old grandfather to tell me the the story of the October moon.  Here are his exact words.

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“It were a cold night.  Tommy, Johnny’s wife had colic, headache, or somethin’, she had the grunt I guess.  Jess and Johnny come down to my house together want’n to borr’y some aspirin for Tommy to take for her headache.  We didn’t have none, I don’t know if we ever kept it or not back then, that was year 1915 about.  So, I told’m Sherman prob’ly had some.  That was Eula’s brother.  They started on down toward Sherman’s on Ridge Road… The moon was shining’ some, not too bright.  And they got off a little piece up the woods there from the house, and somethin’ screamed.  Sounded like a woman.  I heard it.

But they used to, through that woods in the fall of the year, they was some animal or somethin’ go through there and it would squall like that.  People called it’a haint, but it wadn’t I don’t guess.  So anyhow, that thing squalled at Johnny and Jess, and Jess he come running’ back to the house and he just fell in at the door you know.  I don’t even know if we had a porch there at that time.  He fell in at that door and said, ‘They’s a woman squalled up there!’  And he run back and forth, scared.

Well in just a minute Johnny come on down and he come to the door and asked me, quiet you know, “Edgar,” says “If you don’t mind.” Says “get your lantern, and your gun, and go with me back up there and let’s see if we can find out what it is.”

Well, I had an awful good dog - called him Rover.  And when I got that gun and started out, we had to go the road up there where it was at, and that dog stayed in the road as long as we did, course if we’d ever walk in the woods, wye, he’d start hunt’n possums.

But we got up there about to where Johnny thought that thing was that squalled.  The dog was in front of us a little piece, and he’s still in the light of the lantern, and I happen to be a’watchin him.  And I seen him stop, and put his nose down to the ground and scent a time or two, and he made a few leaps out to the edge of the woods out of that road and bayed that thing, whatever it was.  He put in to barkin’, and course we didn’t have no flashlights back then, everything was lit by lantern, coal oil lantern.  So, we walked out that way.  The closer we’d walk towards that thing, wye, it’d lope off down the woods a little further.  It walked sorta like a calf.  And I finally told Johnny, I had the gun.  I says, “I can make Rover jump on that thing, and we’ll get up on it close enough that I can shoot it if it starts running’ off.  And we decided to do that.  Well, that dog would do just about anything I told him to do, and I hear that thing walkin’ around out there, you know, kinda like a calf, a young calf.  And finally, I told him, the dog, I says, “Get it, Rover.”  And the dog stood right there where he was at and barked a time or two, and I says, “I said GET IT!”  When I did, he jumped on that thing… and you never heard a dog squall so in your life.

And it run off further on, stayed out of sight.  We followed it a little piece, and finally it just left there and went down by Charlie Smith’s place, and way out across a big field into the bottom back there, Timberlake bottom we called it.  And that dog followed it, and he bayed it back there, or treed it one, I don’t know which, but we didn’t go to him.  But that dog shore did squall… and when he got loose from it, he didn’t jump on it no more.  He’da done it if I’d made him, but I didn’t try.  Cause I didn’t want to lose that dog… he’s the best dog I ever had.”

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Aside from the episode we shared together that night on the back steps of his little farmhouse, the screams were never heard again.

~RIP, James Edgar Rhodes

my grandfather

(November 20, 1895 - May 9, 1996)