It was on a Saturday late in 1865 that I walked by the old Grant place with Scotty Kehoe. It was near dusk, and in front of the building, in the drive, we saw the mortuary’s glass-encased hearse with a coffin inside. At first I was enthralled by the two horses that were to draw the funerary wagon; they were glorious big black beasts, wearing black-feathered headdresses. But Scotty was drawn by the coffin within the hearse. “Come on!” he said to me. “What are you doing?” I protested. Then he called me a chicken. Well, I couldn’t have that. He’d cluck at me every single day at school. So I crept with him through the brush that was kept neatly trimmed around the entrances to the main mansion and the carriage house and then we crawled up on the conveyance to look in. I’d never been to a funeral. I was shocked by the coffin. It was beautifully carved, but there was a glass window above the face. I saw the girl in the coffin. She was young, with beautiful wheat-colored hair, and she had pale skin, like all her blood was gone, but her lips were a bright red. She looked as if she was sleeping. “Look, she’s opening her eyes!” Scotty teased, and I nearly screamed. I did slide from my perch. That was when the elder Mr. Brennan came out on the porch. I had always hated him. We weren’t bad people, not most of us—even if they did call us carpetbaggers. But Mr. Brennan had rather taken over the place before he had bought it. We’d heard tales that the previous owner’s father, Mr. MacTavish, had been a kind man, forced to turn his home into a funeral parlor to survive once his plantations had failed and his son was gone to war. MacTavish had died, and his son had returned from the war only to have his heart broken when he found his father dead and his fiancée gone, so I’d been told. Some people remembered the son kindly, too. He had been dashing, and a valiant soldier. Always charming and kind and caring, especially to children and the elderly. But other people whispered about him, saying that he was really the devil incarnate and a murderer. But at least some people had liked him, and no one liked old man Brennan. I especially didn’t like Mr. Brennan after that day. He was furious; he yelled at us and promised that kids or no kids, next time, he’d have his shotgun out, that we were defiling the dead. We ran. I thought he would tell our parents about the incident, but he never did.
I found out who the girl in the coffin was that night, when my father’s housekeeper was talking to him about it.
“A carriage accident, my foot. That young’un disappeared more’n three weeks ago. It’s something afoot, just like that Madison girl who disappeared in ’sixty-two. She died in a carriage accident, too—so they said. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. Not Miss Della Bentley. It’s them carpetbaggers that run this place that say what isn’t is, and ignore what’s going on. They say one girl rode off with her Rebel lover, and another girl ran off to meet her Yankee lover, and it just ain’t so. They’re just saying it was a carriage accident ’cause poor Mr. Cato MacTavish isn’t around for them to be blaming this on! Why, they’ve even tried to start the rumor that Cato is out hiding in the woods—that he comes back to stalk and hunt women—just in case someone realizes there weren’t any carriage accidents.”
My father was a good man. He tried to soothe her. He said it was a tragedy about the poor girl, but we couldn’t go believing in wild fantasies made up by folks who were bitter about the war and had little else to do.
Our housekeeper walked away, muttering.
My father kept a sharp eye on me after that, though. I wasn’t allowed to walk around town anymore with the other children. But by then, we weren’t really allowed to be children at all anyway. Maybe it had to do with it being the aftermath of the war. I was a child at the time. My father trusted the authorities. I trusted my father.