*WARNING: mentions of racism and violence*
Pap and I had a schedule back then. We woke early, before the sun rose, and crept over to Long Creek with the barrels and the water without saying a word to each other. I knew he had always wished for a son. He knew I had always wished for a mother. Instead, we were stuck with each other, and that was just the way things were. We made due.
Now, they have shows on the History Channel about it like it isn’t a crime. Now, you can find it in the liquor store or at beach restaurants at the bar for 13.99. When I was coming up though, moonshine was dark business, and it was a serious thing to get caught doing, but it was a serious thing to get foreclosed on, too, and Pap had the blood in him. Yes, that old South Carolina blood that ties you the land and the water and all the bad things your ancestors done.
So we made moonshine in the small hours of the morning in the woods by Long Creek, me and Pap. We’d work until it was time for me to walk back to the trail and catch the bus to school, and Pap would work a few more hours and then trudge back home, and I’d always check the barrels when the bus dropped me off in the afternoon. My teachers in school were surprised I did good in chemistry (on account of I was pretty mediocre in all other subjects) but moonshine is pure science. You boil the mash, you let it sit, you trim the foreshots. One wrong step and you blow yourself up, make your neighbors blind. I saw myself as a kind of doctor then, looking out for the drunks of my town. I was a scientist.
So on that May afternoon, cooler than it should’ve been that time of year, it was a sense of duty that lead me towards Long Creek when the bus dropped me off. I tossed my backpack into the moss at the bottom of the raspberry bush about twenty steps into the woods, for lighter weight. Like I’d done all my life, I let the rush and gurgle of the creek guide me.
They say lots of things about Long Creek, and they did even then. Generations back, they’ve been saying that the creek runs with blood and bones and bad intentions. Before the Civil War, the place was a slave plantation, run by a man named Jack Long. He had 45 slaves. Jack Long had 45 human beings who belonged to him, and now, there’s no such thing as a good slave owner but Jack long was a mean slave owner. The legend had it that he worked a pregnant woman named Addie Rae and she started to go into labor, and when she asked to go inside and have her baby, he had the overseer whip her so she and her baby both died, from infection, a few days later.
I thought about that often as I walked along the water- just her and her baby, wailing to death in fever.
So they say that the ghost of Addie Rae and her baby haunted the area. They say it was her that set fire to the plantation, the fire that killed Jack Long and his family, but not a single slave. They say it was her who kept the soil useless for centuries after, who let the land loose back to the woods, and roamed up and down the creek looking for revenge ever since. This is why I walked along, a 13 year-old southern girl gone to check on the mash, and thought over and over “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This is your creek. This is Addie Rae Creek.”
At the still, I checked the mash. I checked it by smelling…that’s how the real shiners know if it’s coming along or not. Of course the smell makes your head spin and your eyes water, but it had to be done. I was about to throw the tarp over the barrel and head back to Pap and the cabin, when I heard a sound in the woods that didn’t belong.
It was a moan, like someone dying.
I jumped, pulled the tarp down, wary of cops. When I looked out over the black creek water though, there was no cop. None of the kids had followed me with nosy intentions from the bus either. I felt a cold wind go up the back of my neck, and thought of Addie Rae. Her baby.
I didn’t see anybody, but the water in the creek right in front of me was going around something. You know how it does when somebody’s standing in the water? Makes two forked paths around the person’s legs, then keeps running. Well that’s how it went, right there in front of me, even splashing up a bit like the water was hitting something solid, only nobody was there.
With wide eyes, I left the still and started to walk back towards the road, a 15 minute walk through the woods. As soon as I turned my back, I heard the water splash up behind me, the unmistakeable sound of something large and lumbering moving through the stream.
I turned around, mouth hung open and ready to spit threats and curses, to warn whoever this was that my Daddy’d come after them with his shotgun and that this was our still, but nobody was there. The water run in two paths as if around two legs again, a few steps from where it was before.
Now I was scared. I’m not ashamed to admit it, though I stood in front of burning stills and poisonous fumes and angry rattlesnakes many a time without fear. This was what scared me. The evil that lived on this land.
Another thing they say about Long Creek is that it wasn’t Addie Rae that started the haunting. Some people say Jack Long was only so mean because he was possessed by a spirit, the likes of which comes up from the ground and takes a hold of your holy soul. Way back before the Longs every set up a plantation on this land to work humans to death on, it all belonged to the Waccamaw people. When the white men came, they got into conflict with the natives over the creek and its fresh water supply, and the white men snuck in on them in the middle of the night and slaughtered everyone they could find. They say the Waccamaw left a curse on the land, in revenge. They say the men who built the house that would one day be Jack Long’s built it right on a sacred burial ground, upsetting the spirits.
All these things I remember thinking as I stood frozen and watched the two forked spots in the water move closer to me, step, by step, by step.
I started to run. The only way I knew to get back was to follow the creek, so I stuck with the water in sight and bolted as the thing splashed behind me to give chase. Fifteen minutes, but closer to ten if I really sprinted. I remember the primal sound of my breath huffing through the air, the way my clothes hung heavy on my skin.
About five minutes in, I felt something heavy and solid collide with my back and knock me down. It made a feral, growling sound, then rolled towards the creek with me in its grip. The way it met with the ground sounded like bones smacking together, or antlers hanging on a string in a souvenir shop, clicka-clattering against each other. The parts that touched my skin were dry as sun-baked rocks, no sign that it had been in the water, and hot like pokers.
I screamed and put my hands up to claw at the thing, to pull it around so I could at least see its face, but it was powerful. It dragged me easily to the banks and under the rushing black water of Long Creek, and I caught a glimpse of gray fingers, long and skinny as string beans, wrapping around my upper arms.
But now my mouth was underwater and I couldn’t make any sound when I screamed. I could only let up bubbles, and those were all I saw in the murky darkness, because everything else was broke-up plants and the mud that got kicked up by my frantic kicks, and its hooves.
I started to pray. That’s what we southern girls do when we’re in trouble, only I didn’t pray to Jesus or the Virgin Mary or the Holy Ghost - I prayed to Addie Rae.
Please, I thought. Please help me. I’m sorry about you and your baby. I’m so sorry for what they done to you. Please don’t let it kill me.
And I fought, because that’s also what southern girls do when we’re in trouble. I fought so hard that I felt my ring finger snap as it clawed at the deformed hands that held me under, and I managed to push up against it, just enough to shimmy my shoulders back and arch my head up so it broke the surface of the water. The stream roared in my ears too loudly to make out anything that came from its mouth- opened too wide like a snake swallowing its prey -other than a constant clicking and chattering like the sound that a swam of insects makes when it rushes by too close to your ear.
Its eyes were just sockets, flesh colored and smooth, like it had just been born without the rest of them. On its head, it had stringy black hair that had patches missing, and its breath in my mouth had the sweet, cloying smell of rotting flesh. The teeth were long and yellow, but thin, like hairs. Thousands of little hairs. When it saw that I saw it, it leaned in close and set those hairy teeth close to me so that I gagged at the rotting flesh stench of it.
“You’re late for the harvest,” it hissed, in its clicking insect voice.
It pushed me under again but I was facing up now, looking at it and the yellow threads spilling grotesquely from its mouth, the way its hair fell over its shoulders in greasy strings. As I watched, the hairs came out of his mouth and fell into the water and turned into worms, I swear to you, worms. The worms moved towards my eyes in a writhing mass, flooded into my open, screaming mouth, and I thought I was a goner, another victim of this awful land and its worse water, until another pair of hands grabbed me from under my arms and pulled me up.
These hands were wet. They were cold. These were creek hands.
I coughed out the worms on the banks where the hands left me and screamed…and screamed and screamed and screamed. I scratched at my face to get the worms off, to get that stench off. When I finally got the nerve, I looked up and saw the White monster shielding its face and screaming a chorus of clicks and buzzes into the May afternoon. Its skin was dusting off in clouds, falling back into the stream and getting swept away from me until it was nothing but a cloud of gnats in the South Carolina air. The Black water saved me.
Across the creek, a woman stood with her nostrils flared and a bloodied rag pulled over her chest. She had a baby bundled in a cloth over her shoulder, sleeping peacefully with his tiny hands pulling at the black coils of his mother’s hair.
I took a long sip of the black water of the stream to clear my gullet of the worms, then looked up again to make sure she was still there. She was, standing at the banks of Long Creek with her hard stare.
“Run child,” she told me, so I did. I got up and ran and drank a half bottle of my Daddy’s finished moonshine from the shed out back when I came home, and I never set foot in those woods again.