Mariah Of The Spirits: And Other Southern Ghost Stories

Mariah walked the sandy coastal back road with quick, long strides. Her coarse black braids hung wild down her neck; her homespun dress hung limp on her body. The air was so damp and thick she felt like she was swimming through it. She wished she could run like the wind, the way she could when she was a young girl. That's what her name meant, her Mama had told her a long time ago-Mariah: the wind. But she could only walk as fast as she could walk. She had a long way to go before sunrise.

Mariah was frailer than she once had been. Her back was worn as an old pack mule's, though she was not yet forty. Her feet were worn like the shoes she'd flung off two miles back. Time was she could work "from can see to can't see, and into the night if need be." She could carry big sweetgrass baskets on her head-baskets heavy with pecans she'd gathered up from the grove, blackberries she'd picked from bushes by the roadside, herring she'd caught with a net in the river. Mariah, when young, could carry a heavily laden basket on her head with such grace that the field hand, Loomis, would drop his hoe, would risk the whip, just to stop and watch the long, strong muscles in her back working like a panther's. Mariah had big dreamy eyes and dreamy ways, but she could work like a horse. On her back Mariah had carried sheaves of rice, bales of cotton, and babies.

But that night she could not be burdened. That night Mariah carried only three things: between her breasts-a fistful of cash money to bribe the hangman; in her pocket-a flint rock and a little piece of steel to start a fire with; in the waistband of her skirt-a kitchen knife, with which she had decapitated many a live chicken with one deft flick of her wrist, so quick and clean the beady eyes of the dead chickens had stared up at her dumbstruck. And she would not flinch before using it on her master's patroller if he caught up with her and threatened to hold her back. She had to get to Mosi before they hung him at first light.

Mosi. Nineteen years ago her first-born son, Mosi, had been foretold to Mariah in a noonday dream. She had been out in the field picking cotton on a white hot day. Mariah, with child by Loomis, felt sick and faint, and fell down in a swoon. She sank right down in the high cotton, and fell spinning down into a deep dark place. The roll of thunder roused her out of sleep. She sat up, opened her eyes; the sun had darkened; the wind had picked up. White dust blew like snow off the cotton. Down the furrow, about as far away as she could throw a rock, stood a little boy, not quite a year old she guessed, his shirttail barely covering his naked bottom. What a picture he made standing there, his brown face with white tufts of cotton all around it. He had one arm stretched out, feeling of a cotton boll with his fingers while he watched her. She had never seen a boy so pretty. Something wild, teasing, ticklish about his eyes. She knew all the field hands' babies, but this one she did not know. She sat there hugging her knees, watching him, smiling. He winced when the sharp boll pinched his fingers. He jerked his hand away but didn't cry. He looked at it, saw it had drawn blood, and stuck his fingers in his mouth. "Come here, sugar," she said, waving him toward her, but he turned, toddled off, and disappeared in the high cotton. Mariah ran all through the fields looking for him, calling for him, even after the lightning and thunder had started, even when rain came down hard and heavy and all the other field hands went running for shelter under the shed roof. Loomis ran high-stepping through the fields and through the rain after her, had picked her up and hauled her, legs kicking, to the shed. "Ain't been no child out in the field today," he said. "You crazy, Baby."

Come January that next year she gave birth to a boy, to that same boy. She knew it was the same one from the minute he opened his eyes, even if Loomis and Old Shoog didn't believe it. Everybody from the quarters came to see Mariah sitting by the fire in her cabin, holding that baby. It was something to see. They'd never seen a girl such a fool over a baby. Even the Missus came from the big house, said she'd never laid eyes on such a pretty child. Mariah named him Mosi. The name meant firstborn. And when he was nigh on a year old she could see, not that she had ever doubted, that he was that same boy she'd seen in the cotton field that day, every inch of him. He had been foretold to her in a dream.