Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (7 page)

“Idiot,” Indri whispered about Brave John.

Ms. Manchester's eyes drifted in Indri's direction, and Indri clamped her mouth shut. “His fraternity brothers went halfway to the graves with him,” Ms. Manchester said. “But they stayed back, respectful and scared.”

“More like smart,” Indri whispered.

I nodded.

Ms. Manchester's eyes narrowed.

We both got very still.

“After a time, the night moved on, and the fraternity brothers fell asleep.” Ms. Manchester let us imagine that, then leaned into the flashlight's beam again. Her voice dropped. “The first brother woke hollering and ducking, saying he heard rifles shooting right over his head. The second woke running away from the ear-bursting boom of cannon fire. As for the third—”

She shifted away from the light, so far back I could only see her mouth moving.

“The third brother said he heard something screaming . . . but it wasn't human. More like a war horse, maddened from battle, bellowing as it charged. He heard hoof beats, then they
all heard hoof beats, hammering the ground, coming straight for them, thundering down the unmarked graves, and they ran, and they ran, and they didn't look back.”

Ms. Manchester moved.

I couldn't see her face at all, just the flashlight beam blaring in a column all the way to the ceiling. When she spoke again, she was nearly whispering. We had to lean toward her to make out the words.

“Come the morning, when Brave John didn't show up at the fraternity house, his friends went looking for him, and what do you think they found?”

She waited.

Nobody said a word.

“BONES!” she cried, and we all yelped and shrieked. “BLOOD AND BONES!”

The flashlight clicked off, pitching us into total darkness. Up turned to down and down turned to up, and I almost fell backward because I couldn't figure out where I was. Indri started giggling like a psycho nutjob in a bad horror movie.

“Might have been sharp hooves that did him in,” Ms. Manchester said, each syllable slow and quiet in the cavelike nothingness. “Might have been splintering wagon wheels. And maybe, just maybe, it was the rough heels of seven hundred pairs of war boots.”

Pictures flickered to life on the cinder block walls around us. A black-and-white photo of a stone monument. An oil painting of a Civil War battle scene, complete with
blood-stained grass and a sky blackened with smoke. A surreal digital picture of a Confederate officer riding a huge black stallion with devil-red eyes, its mouth wide and steaming. A graying, grainy shot of Oxford's town square and its courthouse, surrounded by dozens of white tents and covered wagons. The pictures faded, until only the last one remained.

“Is that real or Photoshop?” Indri whispered to me too loudly.

“Real, I think,” I told her.

The classroom lights clicked back on, blinding me as Ms. Manchester said, “This is the only known photo of General Grant's occupation of Oxford, Mississippi, during the Civil War.” She stood by the picture, and the gray light covered half her face. “So yes, Indri, this picture is real, and not Photoshopped. What's also real is the cemetery with seven hundred unmarked graves, and the fact that the campus closed for the Civil War because almost all the students were fighting as the University Grays—and those boys never came home.”

“What happened to them?” Mavis Simpson asked.

Ms. Manchester favored her with a smile. “On the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the University Grays reached the farthest point in Pickett's Charge up Cemetery Ridge and established what became known as the high water mark of the Confederacy. That achievement came at the cost of one hundred percent casualties. Every single soldier was either killed or wounded.”

My mouth came open. Indri squeezed my hand, and her
brows pulled together. She really didn't like to hear about military men getting killed in battles. I wanted to grab her and hug her and tell her not to listen, that everything was going to be fine with her dad, but she wouldn't like that. It would make her go all weepy in public.
Soldiers' kids don't cry
. She had told me that a hundred times. I didn't think that was true, or even good for her, but it was what Indri wanted. So I just let her murder my fingers until Ms. Manchester moved on with her storytelling.

“The buildings at Ole Miss actually did serve as an infirmary to the wounded and dying from Shiloh and other battles,” Ms. Manchester said. “And the campus didn't reopen for classes until 1865. Now, as for Brave John, him and his tale are all my creation.” She tapped her chest and grinned. “Local legend has it that on dark, dark nights, you can hear hoof beats in the cemetery, as the ghost of a general rides his patrol—but he's never killed anybody.”

Indri let go of my hand before my fingers went totally dead, and we clapped along with everyone else as Ms. Manchester gave us a deep, courtly curtsy. I knew she was around the same age as my mom, but she looked younger somehow. Maybe it was working in a bookstore instead of cutting up dead bodies.

When we settled back on our mats again, Ms. Yarbrough switched off her iProjector, shutting down the creepy picture of the town square full of little white tents. Then she turned back to us with her hands clasped in front of her.

“So who can explain why people tell ghost stories?” she asked.

“To scare themselves silly,” Indri muttered.

“That's right.” Ms. Yarbrough smiled at her. “For entertainment. A good scare can be fun, and that's the primary purpose for many spooky tales—excitement and entertainment. Why else do people tell ghost stories?”

“To explain things they don't understand,” Sheila said, and Ms. Yarbrough nodded her approval.

Bobby came up with, “To warn people about evil, and bad choices. You know, scare them into acting right.”

That got approval from Ms. Yarbrough and Ms. Manchester, too.

Indri poked her hand in the air and said, “To help themselves not be afraid of what happens after death, 'cause if there's ghosts, then there's something, and we don't just disappear.”

Ms. Manchester gave her the thumbs up.

I wanted to say that people told ghost stories to make sense out of what really was their circus and which monkeys they should worry about, but I figured all that would get me would be a trip to the campus infirmary. So I raised my hand, and when Ms. Yarbrough pointed to me, I said, “People tell ghost stories so they don't forget the past.”

Or their grandmothers
.

Double nods for me, and then Ms. Yarbrough said, “Who can tell me what story-telling elements and techniques Ms. Manchester employed to make her tale dramatic?”

Hands went up, and the discussion took off again until Ms. Manchester had to go back to work.

Ms. Yarbrough told us another campus ghost story about a fraternity boy who got killed in a car wreck in the 1960s coming back to campus from the LSU–Ole Miss football game. Apparently, he was mad about dying, so he haunted Saint Anthony Hall, the Delta Psi frat house. Ms. Yarbrough didn't use a flashlight, and her story wasn't that scary. She wasn't as good as Ms. Manchester at making all the words sound interesting.

People started doodling on papers and reading other books and fidgeting with their phones while Ms. Yarbrough talked. I felt a little sorry for her as she blabbered out a third tale that started in the 1960s, about screams coming out of the Lyceum part of the old steam tunnels that ran under the campus. Could I tell a story as good as Ms. Manchester? I could write a little bit, like poems and short stories, but I didn't think my writing was smart like Grandma's had been, and definitely not like Avadelle Richardson with all her awards.

According to Mom and Indri, I had an “expressive face.” Maybe that would help me scare the snot of people if I decided to tell spooky tales.

I had a sudden image of Grandma, asleep at home in her hospital bed, her thin fingers gripping the white sheets like they were all that kept her from floating up to Heaven. My throat tightened. Grandma always thought I was smart and
special. My parents said that stuff to me, but Grandma really made me feel it, whenever she looked at me and smiled at me. Back when she remembered me, anyway.

I really, really missed her, even though she was still alive. Sort of. Jeez, even thinking stuff like that made me feel guilty. I slid my pack into my lap, and carefully eased out the page from Grandma's packet that I had been reading this morning.

. . . On your second birthday, I gave you a magnetic alphabet board with big purple letters, and your daddy about had kittens when you threw those letters every which place and they kept wrecking his vacuum cleaner. You were running ninety miles an hour up and down the halls, and you could say so many words, but NO and WHY were your favorites. By the next year, you were spelling all kinds of things on that alphabet board, and I told everybody how you'd take after me and write for a living. . . .

“Earth to Dani.” Indri poked my shoulder.

When I looked at her, I realized she was getting to her feet. Everyone was. Reality seeped back into my brain, and my legs felt like concrete. Worse than that, I had a seriously
bad case of mat-butt. I tucked the pages back into the envelope and put it in my pack.

Indri yawned and stretched. “Lunch time. And then we're going to the Grove to draw or take a break if you don't want to sketch.”

I pushed myself off the mat and stomped my feet to wake them up. Indri was good at sketching, not me. But my grandmother thought I'd take after her and write books. That made me happy. She was telling me again how smart she thought I was, even though she couldn't really talk to me anymore.

How awesome was that?

Excerpt from
Night on Fire
(1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 163

“I took a class in peaceful resistance,” Leslie Marks told me a few weeks later as I held a dropper over a cut on her right shoulder and dripped Mercurochrome on the broken skin, staining her bright red.

“Ouch!” she hollered. “That stings.”

I blew on the cut just like I blew on my son's skinned-up knees, to lessen the ache, then I covered the spot with a Band-Aid strip. “Well, they should have taught you to duck when people's throwing rocks.”

“I can't believe that happened,” she said. “He had on a business suit. I think he works at the bank where I put my money!”

“Honey, you're a White woman walking out of Mt.
Zion. He knows why you're here. He knows what you are.” I glanced past her to the door to the bedroom where my mother lay sleeping, fighting off cancer as best she could. When I was young and fresh back from Chicago and college with all that I thought I knew, did I try her patience like Leslie tried mine?

Leslie frowned. “He called me some of those names, yeah. He told me exactly what he thinks I am.”

I put my first aid kit back together and closed it up with my red-stained fingers. “Just being at my house on this side of town, you know that can earn you a lot worse than a rock to the shoulder.”

“I'm not scared of those people, CiCi.”

“You should be,” I said.

T
HE AFTERNOON BREEZE FELT WARM
on my arms as Indri and I sat at our wooden picnic table in the Grove. The rest of the class had scattered to the other tables, and Indri had a case of pastels open in front of her. She busily shaded the devil-horse she had drawn on her sketchpad, using first black, then a dark, dark red for its eyes and the blood dripping from its mouth. I didn't want to bother Indri while she drew, and I didn't feel like writing, so I kept looking at the canopy of leaves over our head, watching how the shadows danced on the table when the branches moved, and thinking.

The whole friendship ending thing—I hadn't considered it much before Worm Dung pulled his trick at my locker. I
knew from listening to my parents talk that people “drifted apart” sometimes when they get older, but I couldn't see that happening to Indri and Mac and me. I thought we'd go to high school together, and college, and then—well, I didn't know what next, but it never occurred to me that we wouldn't still be friends.

Only now, we wouldn't be, because Worm Dung messed everything up.

So, if I had to make a list of what could make best friends just stop talking to each other like Grandma and Avadelle did, the first thing on that list would be one friend being a butthead to the other one and messing everything up, just like Worm Dung. Only to me, one friend would have to do something so bad that saying “I'm sorry” wouldn't be enough to fix things. And the other friend would have to stay so mad, they didn't care if the butthead friend apologized.

It still didn't make sense though. How could two people who really cared about each other be
that
stubborn? How could anything be
that
bad?

Could something make Indri stop talking to me and stay angry with me forever? Something like . . . keeping a big secret? The thought made me sick to my stomach.

I needed to tell Indri about the envelope and key my grandmother left for me. She might be mad that I waited two weeks, but I'd apologize and everything would be fine.

Right?

I had to work to breathe for a minute. When I finally
calmed myself down enough to talk, I said, “I looked up the definition of
grove
once. It means a little group of trees. So this Grove has to be misnamed, because it's like, what, ten acres of magnolias and gum trees and really old oaks?”

“Forty species,” Indri said, filling in a spatter of blood near her demon-horse's front hooves. “That's what the website said last time I looked. People take tree tours with that map they can print.”