I’m on my third espresso of the night and my eyes hurt from deciphering reams of cramped text for hours on end, so I’m not terribly coherent, but this needs to be shared. You don’t need to know much about me besides the fact that I’m an undergrad studying history at a university in Georgia. This was all kicked off by a simple assignment for one of my classes, “Introduction to Genealogy and Local History”. Over the course of the semester, each student was to research a period of their personal family history, piece together a narrative of events, and give a class presentation relating that narrative to the sociocultural landscape of the time. Might sound boring to some, but for me it was a dream come true: a missive to spend hours delving into archives both personal and public, losing myself in that surreal, just-out-of-reach world of days gone by.
The moment we were assigned the project, I knew I wanted to investigate the story of my great-great grandfather, the cotton millionaire Abel Adair. I can’t stress enough how big of a deal Abel was back in the day, or how large his legacy looms in our family. Growing up in the Deep South, much of my childhood was spent listening to stories that had outlived their progenitors three, four, five times over—some, ah, more questionable than the rest—and practically every story ran back to Abel in one way or another. The man was American royalty. I won’t lie, I’ve had a privileged upbringing, but the way my parents tell it, we’ve fallen tragically far from the glory of Abel’s reigning days.
I know you read the words cotton millionaire and Deep South and your eyebrows are probably at your hairline right now, as they should be. My interest in Abel was of a critical and academic nature; I never sought out to lionize the man. It’s the reason I couldn’t shake the bad feeling I got when I first stumbled onto the article about Jebediah.
No one in my family had ever mentioned a man by the name of Jebediah before, and we’re the type of people who keep tabs, trust me. Going by the official documentation, Jebediah was less than a footnote in Abel’s life. He was a phantom. It would’ve been easy to miss him altogether, for there’s just a handful of documents that prove he ever existed compared to the veritable ocean on Jebediah. Once I caught on to the phantom’s presence, though, I was hooked. The past month has been a flurry of poring over digitized newspaper archives and digging through corners of attics that have gone undisturbed for decades. You don’t want to know how hard it was to restore a certain water-damaged document to a state of readability.
What started out as homework has taken on a life of its own, and at some point I realized this isn’t a story made to be submitted for scrutiny by my professor. I’m a rational person through and through, but now that I’m looking at the bigger picture, I honestly don’t know what to make of it—maybe you can help me out in that regard. All I know is that I’ve unearthed something awfully strange.
I present to you the facts in the case of Jebediah Presley.
The Southern Star, August 28th, 1914
CHATHAM COUNTY’S FAVORED SON: ABEL ADAIR & THE RISE OF MAGNOLIA COTTON CO.
It is a proud moment for the residents of Chatham County as one of their own, Abel Adair, owner and managing director of Magnolia Cotton Co., has secured a major deal with national department store Montgomery Ward. The terms negotiated by Mr. Adair are highly favorable to Magnolia Cotton Co., securing its role as Montgomery Ward’s sole supplier of the staple textile and as undisputed king of the South’s cotton industry.
As the patriarch of the Adair clan, Mr. Adair has steered the family business from the rocky waters of post-Emancipation hardship to dizzying new heights of success. He is a man with a storied past, belonging unmistakably to that league of charmingly coarse, larger-than-life moguls who constitute much of the crème de la crème of Southern society.
Born to Abel Sr., an inept businessman under whose leadership Magnolia Cotton Co.’s earnings plummeted into the red, the young Abel seemed to show a similar disinclination towards business in the days of his youth. Upon coming of age, Adair shucked the responsibilities of the family plantation in favor of joining the Navy. In four years he worked his way up from lowly ensign to lieutenant, and after three more he returned to Georgia to take the helm at a critical moment for the plantation: Abel Sr. was weeks away from declaring bankruptcy, having sold off huge parcels of land to pay his outstanding debts.
In a near-unbelievable turn of events, the young Adair’s preternatural business acumen restored Magnolia Cotton Co. to its antebellum glory and beyond. It was this acumen that earned him the moniker “The White Hound” and permitted him to succeed where so many of Magnolia’s peers floundered in the aftermath of Emancipation. Indeed, any of Adair’s colleagues or rivals would tell you that more than tenacity, grit, or a certain ruthlessness of disposition–all of which Mr. Adair possesses in spades–it is his startling savvy for numbers that has buoyed Magnolia Cotton Co. up from the brink of failure.
Adair’s life is not one unblemished by tragedy, for his wife Margaret passed away shortly before the family’s turnaround in fortune, leaving their three young children without a mother. Yet the future is bright, and the cotton keeps on growing. When not hard at work, Mr. Adair spends much of his time as many a red-blooded American would aspire to: fishing on his custom 20-foot Herreshoff, hunting alongside his purebred griffon, Baxter, and regaling his children with colorful stories of his time in the Navy. The hard work and dedication of Mr. Adair has paid off in spectacular fashion, and we at The Southern Star offer our hearty congratulations.
scrap of letter from Abel to an “Anatoli”, undated
…and inquire how the missus is doing. Her cooking gotten any better? I hear it tends to go the other way, what with the tongue getting fat and dull like all the rest of it, har har. I’ve got three little tikes running around these days, two boys and a girl. God knows I love them, but sometimes I get to thinking what I wouldn’t give for one more day back on that deck with the crew, just the open water all around and the sun at our necks. We had some good times then. Even Cap’n, that old bag of hot air… yet there I go still calling him captain. Never did get to tell him to stick it where the sun don’t shine, the way I wanted to when he’d get to spittin’ and barkin’ in my face… I could do it now, with all this money behind me. I sure could.
Well, Anatoli, I was thinking I never did thank you properly for telling me the secret. I owe it all to you and there’s not a soul in this world that knows it. If this letter finds you, Anatoli, and it better find you—I’m paying a pretty penny for this here P.I.— I want you to know that if you ever need anything, my door is open, just as long as you remember that door goes both ways…
Letter from Charlotte to Abel November 2nd, 1920 // Recovered from envelope without postage; never sent
Dear Father,
I write this letter with not just a heavy heart but a burden of rage formerly unknown to me. Believe me when I say that whatever anger and betrayal you feel towards me is returned in triplicate! I can hardly reconcile your recent actions with the person I once thought you to be—once, but no longer, for this debacle has illuminated clearly the empty void in your chest where most men have beating hearts.
It would have been one thing to reject Jebediah when he asked you for my hand, but to behave toward him as you have is nothing short of primitive. Perhaps when mother passed, the Lord rest her soul, she took your last trace of humanity with her. You and mother hoped that I would marry a gentleman, yet you proved yourself to be the farthest thing from one when you stooped so low as to threaten the man I love.
Jebediah is a simple man, but a good one. Wouldn’t you rather I had a good man than one of those insufferable dandies you have tried time and time again to pair me off with? After all you always told me it wasn’t books or titles that made a man, but character, and I tell you Jeb has got more character in his little finger than you have in your whole body. Why can’t you see that money has never meant a thing to me? I could do without the dresses and diamonds and galas, but never without love. I’m going wherever Jebediah goes and we’ll have a real family.
You say that you would rather see me dead than married to Jebediah—well, father, I’m pleased to say you won’t have to suffer either, as you’ll never see me again. This letter will be our last correspondence.
With deepest convictions, Charlotte Camellia Presley
** The Southern Star, May 17th, 1932**
MYSTERIOUS DEATH AND DISAPPEARANCE IN BLACK ROCK
The rural town of Black Rock, Georgia has been set abuzz by the bizarre death of local farmer Jebediah Presley. Presley, 41, was a smallholder farmer who had been a resident of Black Rock for over ten years. He and his family lived in a two-bedroom farmhouse situated on the banks of the nameless river that feeds into the Okefenokee swamp.
On May 15th, revenue agent Elias Spalding arrived at the farmhouse with the intention of collecting overdue property taxes from the family; Spalding notes that heavy flooding had made it impossible to reach the Presley residence until recently.
When his knock was met with silence, Spalding entered through the unlocked door and made his way through the house until he reached the attic, where he discovered Presley’s body seated in a chair, hunched over a writing desk. The Star’s sources tell us that Presley was found with a note, which has been taken into possession by the Sheriff’s Department.
According to Sheriff Buford Johnson, Presley’s cause of death is as of yet unknown and an autopsy is being conducted to determine the circumstances. Johnson is urging anyone with information on the incident to come forward.
The mystery is deepened by the troubling disappearance of Presley’s wife, Charlotte, and their two sons, ages 12 and 9. The family’s wagon and single horse were still on the property, as were all the family’s personal effects.
To loyal readers of The Southern Star, the name of Charlotte Presley, née Adair, may ring a bell. A figure of salacious local interest many years back, Charlotte Camellia Adair is the only daughter of cotton baron Abel Adair–“The White Hound”–and stirred a tremendous upset among Georgia’s upper crust when she eloped with a young Jebediah, then a penniless tramp who had been hired to work on renovations for the Adair’s summer estate.
It appears that in the interim, Mrs. Presley has lead a quiet and achingly unglamorous life in the mosquito-ridden swamps of Charlton County. Our reporters found that locals were loath to discuss her, or perhaps Mrs. Presley has lead a life so out of the view of probing eyes that there was nothing that could be said with veracity on the subject.
Unease and distrust are wreaking havoc on neighborly camaraderie in the rural community, with some speculating that foul play may be involved, while others believe that the family may merely have fled the recent flooding and will return once the waters recede.
Those who knew Presley expressed their shock and distress at his passing. Known to be an honest and hardworking man, it is said that Presley became more withdrawn over the years, retreating into the demanding rhythms of farm life and labor. Whether Presley is being considered a suspect in his family’s disappearance is yet to be known. The Star will continue to cover this story as it develops—as always, you heard it here first!
May 10th, 1932
Note penned by Jebediah
I couldn’t think of where to start so I’ll go to the very beginning. The day I met Charlotte.
Me and a couple fellows were hard at work that day on the Adair estate. They were paying us to dig out a pit for an Oriental pond to go next to this brand new pagoda on their front lawn. The Adairs called it the front lawn, but really it was the size of a field, with a driveway that stretched a quarter mile and weeping willows marching down either side from start to end. There I was practically up to my neck in dirt when Charlotte came out on the green, holding a tray of glasses filled with ice cold lemonade. She was wearing a blue dress and a big hat, but in the shade of the brim I could see her face, and what a face it was. She handed out the lemonades and gave the last one to me. Was the best, sweetest drink I’d ever had. I didn’t mean to ask for her name, but it slipped out before I could stop myself.
The next few months we snuck around like kids, her finding time between her lessons and lunches and whatnot, me playing truant till the jig was up and I was handed the pink slip. I was still in disbelief that a girl like Charlotte could want anything to do with me, but I wasn’t dumb enough to go tearing up a good thing to get a closer look at it. There was a lot I didn’t get about her but I loved her still, and she loved me too. After six months of this we both decided we couldn’t keep carrying on like we were, and it was time for me to meet her folks.
They called Charlotte’s father the White Hound and I understood why once I met him. A hound with his teeth hidden behind fine tailoring and lofty ways. The night Charlotte introduced us, he took me aside after she’d gone up to her room, keeping one hand on my back, all paternal-like. He wrote out a check for a thousand dollars, put it in my hands, and told me to make myself scarce. Said he knew people, knew how to make things happen, and if I didn’t take heed I’d regret it.
I looked around at their grand house and thought maybe the old man was right, and there was no future for us. But as I was walking down the driveway with my tail between my legs I saw Charlotte looking down at me from her bedroom window, and let me tell you all that resolve melted away in an instant. The very next day I took Charlotte to her favorite park and got us under the shade of a great oak tree. The ring was my nana’s: three-quarter carat with a band yellower than butter. If I hadn’t a proper ring I wouldn’t have proposed, and that’s the truth. And wouldn’t you know it, it fit her just right.
Charlotte went to break the news to her folks. She wouldn’t let me come with her. When she returned, she had a suitcase in her hand and she was red in the face, her eyes all puffed up, but she kissed me and said, let’s go down to city hall and get this done right.
Turns out her mother’s wedding dress was in that suitcase. I borrowed a suit from one of my pals, and Charlotte wore her hair in curls like spirals of copper and she held a bouquet of twelve red roses. We joked, one rose for each of the babies we’re going to have. A whole litter, six boys and six girls.
She’d stashed away a few fine things in that suitcase, pieces of jewelry and whatnot, but we couldn’t go toting them around in Adair’s own country, so we hopped a train to the next town over and spent a day going pawn shop to pawn shop. I hadn’t a clue what any of those things were worth but Charlotte did, and she didn’t let those brokers fleece us for a cent.
We talked about where to go next. We both wanted the same thing: a quiet place to call home and raise up a family, somewhere her father wouldn’t bother us. My brother Otto was living down south in a town called Black Rock, and he said the land was going for cheap there, so off we went. The money was just about enough to buy us three acres and the ramshackle farmhouse it came with. Piney woods up behind us, a river down front. I knew I could fix up the farmhouse and clear the land, and Charlotte walked a big circle round the plot and said it was perfect.
She was right. It was perfect. Won’t say it was like a fairytale but we were happy. So happy. We had our hands full setting the place right, and within a year we had the house as neat and cozy as you could get it, a vegetable garden, a coop of chickens, even rosebushes for Charlotte. Otto and his wife Maria had a few horses and he insisted on giving us a foal—said it was a runt he’d never have any use for but I saw right through him.
Charlotte took to farm living like a duck to water, and I never heard her utter a word of complaint. She told me she didn’t care about of the things she had to give up, but sometimes her eyes said otherwise, so for months I scrimped and saved and took every odd job the neighbors had to offer. At the end of the year, when Charlotte was off at Otto’s helping out with their newborn, I went back to Chatham for the first time since we’d eloped. Made me nervous as hell, but it was the only place I knew that sold nice things.
It was in this fancy store on Burbank Lane that I finally found what I was looking for. Two swans whittled out of crystal, with their necks craned together to make a heart. I paid up, painful as that was, and the clerk packed the swans into a pretty blue box that I liked because it was the same color as Charlotte’s dress the day we met.
Something funny happened before I got to the train station. I had the box in my hands, so I had my head on a swivel in case of any shadowy types, and I saw this man looking right at me from under the awning of a barbershop. He was a ways down the street and he had a hood pulled down over his eyes, so I couldn’t get any sort of look at him, but he was turned in my direction, no doubt. I had half a mind to go ask him what his problem was, but then a clock came chiming from inside the station and I had to be on my way.
When I brought out those swans and saw the smile on Charlotte’s face, I forgot all about the hooded man. Fact is he only tickled my recollection just now, as I’m writing this all down. Anyway, Charlotte was so happy there were tears in her eyes, and she put the swans on the mantle where we could see them every day. One day I came indoors after a long afternoon of planting and there was something new: a little paper swan, folded with care, sitting right up on the mantle alongside the crystal ones. Over dinner that night Charlotte took my hands and said she was going to have a baby, that she felt it in her bones.
For a while, everything was perfect.
But a year passed and no baby came.
And then another, and another, another. And there was no baby and I could see it was eating away at Charlotte piece by piece. She started spending more time in bed, sleeping all through the morning, skipping dinner in the evenings. Said she couldn’t bear to be awake and feel the emptiness in her belly. She found a strand of white in her hair one day and she looked me and said, Jebediah, you give me a baby or I’ll die. Don’t you think that I won’t. A baby, Jeb, give me a baby! God damn it where’s my baby! Her voice scared me with how brittle and high it sounded, like it was coming from someone else.
The truth was, and I’ve never told this to anyone, I didn’t care whether or not we had a baby. I only needed Charlotte. But Charlotte needed the baby and I couldn’t see her in that sorry state any longer.
Now, sometimes we get travelers coming through Black Rock. There was this man who showed up one of those days when Charlotte was sleeping through the daylight hours. He told me his name was Anatoli and he was looking for a place to rest his head, and the Southerner in me can’t stand to let a man go cold and hungry if I’ve got a fire going and food on the table. Now Anatoli was a funny kind of man. Foreign, of course, but there was more to it than that. He was all filthed up like he’d been mucking through the swamps for days, but he wore clothes that might’ve been fit for a prince under all the grime. Tall and bony with flesh that looked tough as boar gristle, and a man of few words, only muttering ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘thank you’ in a deep gravelly voice. He could’ve been thirty-five or sixty, you couldn’t tell.
With Charlotte sleeping her unnatural sleep, it was just me and Anatoli sitting at the table, and over a bowl of stew I found myself telling him everything. All our troubles with the baby that wouldn’t come. I’m not a man who airs out his business wherever he goes, but there was something about Anatoli that made me want to tell him. Maybe I figured he was only a passing vagrant and it wouldn’t matter either way, so might as well get a load off my chest.
Anatoli listened without saying a word. When I was through, he looked at me real serious and said he there was a way if I wanted it badly enough, and I better listen close because there was nobody else around who’d give me the secret.
He said to get myself a teapot and to fill it with these things: a pinch of tobacco. A handful of rice. A lock of Charlotte’s hair. And her wedding ring. He told me to bury the box down by the riverbed, close to the water and in as deep a hole as I could dig, and when I was done to cut my hand and drip six drops of blood into the river, no more and no less.
Well, I went and I got those things and I put them into our old teapot. It was easy to get the ring. Charlotte had gotten thin and it didn’t fit her any longer, so she kept it in her bedside drawer. The hair was just as easy. I went down to the river, dug a hole deep into the dark black loam till it got too wet and muddy to dig any further, and there I stashed the teapot. I filled the hole up and I cut my hand with my harvest knife and dripped six drops into the river, no more and no less. When I got home Anatoli was gone, and Charlotte was still asleep, like nothing had ever happened.
Not long after that Charlotte’s stomach began to swell, and in no time at all she had her baby. She came red and crying, the farthest thing from an angel, but Charlotte was so happy holding her for the first time.
She named her Brooke. I wish I could say that we made one happy family, but after Brooke was born, Charlotte started to slip through my fingers and I couldn’t understand why. She was talking less, eating less, and she’d get up and go on these long walks by the river when she should’ve been taking care of Brooke. Sometimes she wouldn’t come back until after sundown, and I just wanted to grab her and shake her out of the dream she was living in.
I had an inkling then, that something went wrong that night I buried the teapot in the riverbed.
And then something happened that scared me so bad, I’ve never felt fear like it before or since. One night I woke up and Charlotte wasn’t in bed. And I had this feeling in my gut, this sour curdled feeling, and a cold one too, though it was a summer’s night, I had to put on my coat just to brace myself for going outside. The front door was open on its hinges so I knew she’d gone outside and I followed. I didn’t head anywhere but the river. It had to be the river. And I walked down there with my good flashlight and I was shaking so bad it’s a miracle I didn’t drop it into the water. I shone my light onto the water and my heart just leaped out my damn throat. Charlotte was in the water and her eyes were closed and there was this dreamy smile on her face, but she was naked and her skin was so white and I thought she was dead. And I can’t ever get that image out of my head, the way Charlotte looked down in the water with her hair streaming out behind her, and all the swirls of algae and sawgrass and spatterdock around her like some sort of strange harvest.
And the other thing is, I couldn’t see the bottom of the damn river. It’s not a deep river. I’ve waded in it before and it’s not deep. But right then and then with that flashlight shining down into the water—and I know this doesn’t make any sense because you can’t see things clear at night—but I’m telling you the way that water looked, it was like it had no end. Like it just went down and down and down to the ends of the earth.
I must’ve screamed my head off even though I didn’t know I was doing it at the time. I know this because after, my throat hurt like someone had raked their nails down the inside and I could hardly speak for days. What I do remember is that I flung myself down into that river and I swear it felt colder than ice, it knocked the breath right out of my lungs but I kept on going. Put one foot in front of the other till I got to Charlotte. Up close I could see that the weeds were wrapping around her, curling up her arms and legs, and in the moment I remember thinking that it looked like jewelry. Like this one time I was a boy and my pop took me to see a museum in the city and they had all this ancient Egyptian junk in glass cases. That was what it looked like: circlets and necklaces for a queen, just made out of weedy stalks instead of gold and silver. I don’t know why I had a thought like that. Must’ve been my brain going numb with the rest of my body.
Next thing I know I had my harvest knife in my hand and I was slashing at those vines. They didn’t come off easy, and a few times I might’ve cut Charlotte on accident, but if I did the water carried away the blood so quick that it was impossible to tell. Finally I got all the vines off and Charlotte was as quiet and still as a dead woman, and I made to pick her up and get out of that hellish river. But when I had her in my arms I felt something was wrong. After the baby Charlotte had got thin as a rail, whittled down to a slip of a woman. But when I lifted her from that water it was like lifting rocks. Her nightgown was wet but there wasn’t any way it could’ve been that damn heavy. I chalked it up to my muscles being putty from the cold and the shock. Somehow I managed to scramble back up the riverbed and get her back into the house, and the farther I got from the river the more my strength came back to me.
I set her down in bed. I couldn’t feel any breath when I put my hand over her mouth, but I did see her eyes darting about under her eyelids. Put a blanket over her and took off my wet clothes and laid down, but I couldn’t sleep. When the sun came up a little color had come back to Charlotte’s face, and I thought, she’s going to be alright.
But when she woke up properly, she wouldn’t speak on what had happened that night. How she’d ended up in the river. She was as riled up and nervy as a cornered dog. I asked, believe me, I asked, but it was a dead end.
I told Otto what had happened, and he told me to put my foot down as the man of the house, so that’s what I did. I told her she wasn’t to go within a hundred paces of that river ever again, and I’d stop her if she tried. But Charlotte was wrong after that. The doctor said what she had was hysteria, and I needed to make sure she got a month of bed rest, maybe more. The doctor couldn’t see how bad it really was because he didn’t know the real Charlotte. My Charlotte, the liveliest girl this side of the Mississippi, with her fierce loud laugh, her face like a blooming rose—there was nothing left of that Charlotte. My Charlotte didn’t wail and shake until she was all wrung out, nothing left inside, and I couldn’t even look at her without feeling sick.
My Charlotte was gone and some wild woman in her place, a wild wailing Charlotte who wouldn’t mother her own child, and I didn’t know what to do. And little Brooke, well, she was never any blooming rose, she was a shaking crying puking baby and she’d never felt like mine. And as bad as Charlotte’s hysterics were, what came after was worse, when she stopped talking altogether and would only stare out the window towards the river.
Sometimes Charlotte would come back down to earth for a few precious hours, and in those times she tried her best to be a mother to Brooke, but I tell you Brooke wasn’t like other babies. Brooke was getting stranger with every passing day. Her eyes—her eyes frightened me. Charlotte and I, we both have blue eyes but not like she did. Such pale eyes. There wasn’t anything deformed about them but you’ve never seen eyes like those on a child, let alone a baby.
That was when I got the news. Otto had been up patching the shingles on his roof when he’d slipped and fallen off the ladder, and that was it—my brother, gone before his time. Maria was the one who found his body, and she hanged herself from the rafters before the week was up. They’d left behind their two boys, one of them barely out of diapers. And I’d lost a brother, but I’d gained two boys, and they were mine now. And they could be Charlotte’s too, if she wasn’t so sick and so mad.
I brought the boys home but Charlotte barely noticed they were there. Didn’t look their way. There came a day when Charlotte and Brooke were both wailing and I felt something snap inside of me like a wishbone pulled in two. The answer came to me like a voice whispering in my ear, real soft and sweet.
I waited for the both of them to wear themselves out crying. When it was quiet I swaddled Brooke up in her blanket and set her down in an old wicker basket, soft and careful as to not disturb her sleep. I took the basket to the river, about the same place where I’d buried the teapot, and set it down on the water. I watched as the current carried her away.
After that I went back home and told Charlotte that her baby had died in her sleep, and I’d gone and buried her so she wouldn’t have to see the body, and there was no way we could have seen it coming and nothing we could’ve done to change it. And I was sorry, but we could start over, and there were my brother’s boys to take care of now.
Oh how she screamed and cried. It sounded like she was shattering on the inside, like a heavy boot coming down on those crystal swans. But weeks turned into months and slowly, slowly, Charlotte got to be okay again. Otto’s boys were with us and that helped. They were young enough that they could’ve been anyone’s, and now they were ours.
Some people get in their heads about what they done and it gets on them like a rot. But I didn’t. You get through those first few days and it only gets easier from there, not thinking about it. There was lots else to think about. The boys were getting big and Charlotte, my sweet Charlotte, was happy.
We had six good years. You can fit a lifetime into six years if you know what you’re doing. It was long enough to forget about the bad times we’d gone through. There was plenty to keep us busy. Planting and growing and raising up the boys. I taught them how to farm and hunt and fish, and I did it well. Long as they have themselves a patch of soil and a handful of seed they’ll never go hungry. Charlotte I still doted on. She wasn’t quite the same as the girl who brought me lemonade on the lawn all those years ago, but she was close, and life was good.
But in the seventh year, a girl with pale eyes came knocking in the night.
I was born a light sleeper and it was me that opened the door and saw her standing there in the moonlight. Those eyes. My god, those eyes.
She said, I’ve come home. Will you take care of me? Her voice barely more than a whisper. Like she’d hardly ever used it. She didn’t have no accent or nothing but she took a long time to get out every word. I let her come in and sit by the fire, and she looked around the place like she’d never been inside a house before, taking in everything with those terrible eyes.
She had no answers to anything I asked. I was scared. Scared of this girl who’d come claiming she was our daughter—our blood. Scared of what would happen to Charlotte and the boys. If she was our blood she was bad blood, rotten blood.
I poured myself a drink and watched her sit by the fire, and the longer I looked at her the more she looked like an animal and the less like a little girl. Drank more than I’d planned to, and I got things mixed up in my head, or maybe I got them just right. I thought about the river and the teapot, Charlotte and the baby, things taken and things given away.
And I knew, if this girl came back to us then I’d lose Charlotte. I knew it. I can’t explain but I felt it as strong and sure as I’d ever felt anything. So I said to that girl, come on, let’s go on a walk. Let’s go play a game outside, won’t that be fun. I took her hand and walked her behind the house. Headed north, as far from the river as my legs would take me. We got to the edge of the woods with her little hand still in mine, and God forgive me, that’s when I >![indecipherable; the remainder of the sentence has been blacked out with ink].!<
I hear wolves howling in those woods, time to time. But that night there were no howls. There was no sound at all.
In the morning I carried on, the way I’ve always done. We were talking about adding rooms to the house, what with how big the boys were getting. Planting saplings out back so we’d have apples for cider a few years down the line. Months went by, and the memory of the girl was starting to fade.
But in the spring it rained, and the rivers flooded all around. Elsewhere they had to climb up onto their roofs, I heard, and the rain drowned all the season’s first crops, all that sweating labor gone up in smoke. Here we were luckier. Here we only had the river overflow and swell up and turn the woods into a swampy flooded marsh.
I had nightmares then about all the water and the soil mingling. There’s no separation with water, that’s the thing. It all gets swept up into one great big mass and there’s no stopping it or slowing it. Water spreading all over everything like a shadow. Nothing staying dry or hidden. Those nights I held onto Charlotte tight as I could without scaring her, and instead of the rain comforting me the way it used to when I was a boy it made me feel jumpy.
When the rain subsided, the good times were no more.
There came a day when our boys went out fishing on their own, and they came back with a few spotted bass. When I cut one open the insides were this tarry black ooze that looked like it would’ve killed you before it reached your stomach. And all the rest were like that too. I marched down to the river and threw them right back in, and I told the boys they weren’t to go fishing ever again.
The boys obeyed my orders, but that didn’t stop the fish from coming to us. One night I woke up to a crazy thumping on the roof, and I looked out the window and sure enough there were dead fish falling from the sky, bass and trout and catfish, splattering on the roof and the ground, leaving splotches of black guts all over the place.
Charlotte didn’t know what to make of it, but she kept her wits about her and said that surely there was a rational explanation, so there was nothing to be scared of. The boys, well, they’re too young to be proper scared and so they were laughing and playing as the blood painted our walls black. Out of us four I was the most terrified.
The rain’s started up again. It’s coming down so fast and hard I can barely hear my own thoughts over the din. Slushing down over the attic window in a sheet, making it impossible to see more than the roughest shapes of what’s outside. Been hearing odd sounds in the night too. They’re coming from down the river—I could convince myself they’re nothing but rushing water but for the pained undertone in it, like a scream trying its damndest to break the surface.
The water’s rising again, faster than it did with the first round of floods, but it won’t get to us. Cross my heart. We’ll wait it out no matter how long it takes. I’ve got the four of us gathered in this attic, and at the first the boys were griping about wanting something to eat, but it’s been long enough now that they’ve gone quiet. Now they’re looking at me like I’m a man who’s gone and lost his head, but soon they’ll see why it had to be done. It’ll only get easier from here. I’ll be damned if this flood breaks us. I’ll be damned if one drop of water makes it up those stairs. I’ll be damned.
The Southern Star, May 22nd, 1932
AUTOPSY RESULTS CONFOUND GEORGIA AUTHORITIES
A week after the death of farmer Jebediah Presley and the disappearance of his wife and two children, mystery continues to cast a dark cloud over the small town of Black Rock. Any glimmer of hope that the autopsy report would provide answers has been extinguished, as the results only deepen the enigma surrounding the tragic case. The coroner’s office has found that Jebediah Presley’s cause of death was none other than dehydration, a fact that has confounded authorities and residents alike. It is noted that Black Rock is a town which receives an average of 56 inches of rain a year, and that recent flooding has turned the area into a veritable Atlantis of the South.
The note penned by Presley, deemed the linchpin of the investigation, has reportedly been lost after a series of flash storms wreaked havoc on Black Rock and its neighboring communities; Sheriff Buford Johnson explains that the deluge caused severe water damage to the records room in which evidence was being stored. In the absence of any substantial leads, Jebediah Presley is to be interred in the local cemetery and the case relegated to the back cabinets of the Sheriff’s Department. The men and women of Black Rock mourn the loss of an upstanding member of their community and pray for the safe return of his family.