r/southerngothic • u/Uncle-Dave3 • 3h ago
[Short Story] Whispers in the Kudzu
Chapter One: Lost Fork
Some memories dry up and blow away. Others cling to the ribs like a second skeleton. The worst of them stay sharp long after the names have gone dull, and the kind ones thin to smoke whenever I reach for them. Age has been no help in sorting one from the other. Still, there are days I remember all too well, and I have lived long enough to stop pretending I would rather not.
I was born in Lost Fork in 1950, to loving parents and a town that held its children close. My early childhood was easy in the way childhood ought to be. Doors went unlocked. There was not a traffic light for miles. Everyone was more family than friend, or so it seemed to me then. But a place is always more than what a child can see of it, and I did not learn how far Lost Fork's story ran until I had fallen a long way into it.
There are people who would not approve of my setting this down. I find myself glancing over my shoulder as I write. Some things have a way of watching. Still, someone ought to leave a record, in case a stranger someday needs one. I cannot say how it might help, and I have no answers to offer. I can only tell what happened and how it looked to me.
Lost Fork is like any small Southern town: quiet, comfortable, slow. It sets God, family, and country on nearly equal pedestals. The old people said the town was founded on a gravel pit and a salt mine, though the timber has always been the real wealth. The population hovered around seven hundred when I was a boy. Now there may be four hundred left, every one of them descended from families that have been here for generations. Newcomers do not settle in Lost Fork, and they would not be welcome if they tried. The rare outsider who did arrive seldom stayed.
Billy Morgan was one of them. He was the first to teach me that some of our ways did not want explaining. But I am getting ahead of myself, and I should begin with him.
Summer, to a small boy, is something close to enchantment. It runs on without end, gold and slow, and everything in it seems possible. The Morgans moved into the house across the street during the last week of school, a family of four, friendly and warm, the kind of neighbors a mother hopes for. Billy's older sister, Susan, if memory serves, had dark hair and freckles. She was a couple of years ahead of me, and she was my first love, though she never knew it.
Billy was a good boy, a little loud and brash but never unkind. He liked to bend rules rather than break them and had nearly mastered the art. I took to him at once, and from the first day we were partners in every sort of trouble. We explored the abandoned buildings in and around town. We rode our bikes down WPA Road to pick blackberries and honeysuckle. We set off firecrackers during choir practice and bore the consequences together. It was the best summer a boy could have asked for, and as it began to wind down, I never suspected what it was winding toward.
Chapter Two: The Hollow
It was a Monday. Billy had heard from some older boys at church about a stand of trees in the pasture behind the building. They had called it creepy, which was all the invitation we needed. Nothing in Lost Fork had ever been truly creepy, only old and bad-smelling. We had already explored the mansion across the railroad tracks and even camped in it. A clump of trees seemed a poor rival.
We rode to the church and set out across the pasture. The grove could not be seen from the building, but walking straight back would bring us to the creek, and the trees had to be somewhere along it. Billy fairly hummed with excitement. To me it was only trees and another field. To him, everything was an adventure, and the world looked enchanted through his eyes.
We crossed like boys who had not yet learned to count hours. Halfway over, the ground rose into a gentle swell before sloping toward the water. We climbed it and stopped.
It lay off to the left and below us, and at first it looked like nothing at all. A hollow where the creek cut through, with trees on both banks drowned in kudzu. The vines hung in a thick, green blanket that seemed to swallow light and sound. I remember that the afternoon had been full of noise, locusts and wind and our own breathing, and that standing there, I could no longer hear any of it.
Then a breeze stirred the leaves, and I thought I heard a whisper. I told myself the heat was playing tricks, that it was only wind in the foliage. I looked at Billy, and he was already looking at me. Neither of us said a word. Neither of us needed to.
The wind turned and began to blow from behind us toward the trees, and the whole hollow seemed to draw a breath, the way a person gulps air after too long underwater. The hair stood up along my neck. It was the feeling of being noticed for the first time by something that had been waiting very patiently to be.
I took a step back, and that was when the smell reached me. Honeysuckle first, thick and sweet, and beneath it blackberries and blueberries, a whole collage of sweetness, too much of it, too ripe. It was so strong that I realized I had stepped forward again without deciding to.
Behind us, a man's voice asked what we boys thought we were doing out there.
We spun around. It was Pastor Jones, who must have seen us from the church and followed us out. He looked from one of us to the other and asked again.
Billy answered for us, saying we had only come to see the hollow of kudzu. The pastor's eyes stayed on us a few seconds longer, then moved to the hollow. His expression was not angry or disappointed. It was discerning, as though he were weighing something I could not see. After a long silence, he told us gently that we ought to go on home. He said it with the quiet patience of a man who knew something we did not.
I asked, not understanding any of it, whether we might take a little of that fruit with us. It smelled so good.
He looked down at me then, and I shuddered in the heat. I have shuddered at the memory many times in the decades since. Then his face softened, and he told me the fruit was not good for me. He smiled when he said it. Even as a child I could tell the smile was a thing he had put on.
When we hesitated, he laid a hand on each of our shoulders and turned us back the way we had come. I looked behind me only once. The sweetness was gone from the air, and so was the strangeness, as though someone had closed a door. I do not remember whether Billy looked back. I have since come to believe he did.
We rode home in silence. We said our goodbyes, or perhaps we did not. I cannot remember.
I spent the afternoon at chores and helping Mama with supper: sweet cornbread, fried chicken, lima beans, and cream corn. I had all but forgotten the hollow by the time Daddy came home. He came in more serious than usual, kissed my mother, and sent me out to take out the trash and check the mail. I had already done both. In those days a boy did not say so, and my father knew I had, which meant he wanted a word with my mother alone.
I went out and played with our German Shepherd, Max, until Mama called me in. We said grace as always and began to eat, and it was some time before I understood that I was the only one eating. My parents were watching me.
I have never been able to describe the look on their faces. There was love in it, and concern, and something that might have been fear.
After a while my father said, very calmly, that I was never to go near that hollow again, and he asked if I understood. I did not answer at once. I was thinking of the whisper, the smell, the pastor's hands on my shoulders. He asked again, and this time there was something close to desperation underneath the calm. I said yes, sir, and heard my voice stumble. I looked to my mother, but she was studying her plate as though she meant to hide behind it. I would have sworn she was holding back tears.
I asked him why. I had not meant to. The word was out before I could stop it.
My father was a loving man, but in our house a child did not ask why. Yet that evening, for the first and only time in my childhood, he neither corrected me nor grew angry. He only looked at me and drew a long breath. He said I was too young to understand, that all I needed to know was that it was not safe for me there, that I could get hurt.
It was the pause before that last word that raised the skin on my arms.
He said there would be no more talk of it. Then his voice lightened, and he said I should finish my supper and take my bath, because he meant to take the next day off work and carry me into the city. A smile crossed his face. It seemed genuine, but something moved behind it, and I could not tell what.
I ate. I bathed. I went to bed far too early, excited, because we almost never went to the city, and when we did it meant ice cream or baseball cards. I fell asleep thinking that in the morning I might ask if Billy could come along.
I never got the chance.
Chapter Three: Magnolias
The years between boy and man are tumultuous ones. They bring a flood of change to the mind and body and spirit, and a confidence worn proudly and warily at once. Lost Fork seemed to sense this in its young and, at times, used it against them. The town had a way of drawing a person inward rather than outward, and by fifteen I had learned to accept most of its silences without question, though I had begun to keep a few of my own. What I had yet to learn was that Lost Fork kept traditions, and that they were best left to themselves.
In early April, I stumbled into one.
I was out past dark, against my better judgment and my mother's wishes. A girl named Darlene Pruitt had taken to smiling at me in a particular way, and I had taken to walking past her house at hours when I had no business passing anyone's house. That night I was headed home along Creek Road, cutting across the old Tatum property, when I heard something.
I thought at first it was singing. It was low and unhurried, the kind of sound felt in the chest before the ears make sense of it. I stopped walking. The night was warm and the frogs were loud along the water, but threaded beneath them was something else. Voices. Women's voices.
They say curiosity killed the cat. It did not kill me, but it did something.
I moved closer, almost against my will, with that same prickle rising along my neck, as though my body had understood something my mind had not caught up to. Upstream from the hollow, the creek ran wider and shallower, and in spring the water was clear enough to count the stones on the bottom. Magnolias crowded both banks, enormous old trees with roots that reached into the current like fingers. In April they hung heavy with white bloom, so low over the water that the place felt roofed over, sealed off from the ordinary world.
There were nine of them, maybe ten. It took me a moment to know them in the dark and the strange pale light. Mrs. Aldridge, who taught Sunday school. Darlene's mother. Hattie Broom, who had to be eighty and made the finest peach cobbler in the county. Clara Tatum, who was perhaps seventeen and whose family owned the ground I was trespassing on.
They stood barefoot in the shallows, dressed in white, some in gowns and some in plain dresses, and each held a single magnolia blossom. They were full flowers, wide and pale, the kind that bruise brown at the edges if looked at too hard.
One by one they set the blossoms on the current, carefully, with something like reverence. And they were speaking, though the word does not fit. It was too rhythmic for conversation and too quiet for a hymn. I could not make out any of it. Whatever they were saying had not been meant to carry.
The blossoms drifted downstream.
Toward the hollow.
I stood there longer than I should have. I know that now. At the time I told myself I would watch a few seconds more, and then those seconds became more seconds, the way they do when a boy is looking at something sacred for the first time. I was not afraid. I felt something else, though I have never found the right name for it, a low, uneasy pressure somewhere beneath the ribs.
I was lost in the sight of them when one of the white figures turned in my direction. It was Clara.
I froze and tried to become part of the brush.
After what felt like a very long time, she lifted a finger to her lips and shook her head, slowly. People talk about blood running cold, but that has never seemed accurate to me. It was more as if the night itself had leaned in. I believe she was smiling. Everything felt wrong at once, and the urge to run became nearly unbearable. Nearly.
Then she turned her face downstream, toward the hollow, and did not look at me again. She never let the others know I was there. I have wondered for sixty years why she did not.
I had overstayed my welcome, and I went straight home.
My parents were waiting. I was scolded severely and confined to the house for a week. I took it all to be about curfew until my mother said, almost to herself, that it was not safe this time of year. It meant nothing to me then. Only later did I understand she had been speaking of what I had seen.
The next afternoon I came in from after-school chores and heard voices in the kitchen. I rounded the corner and stopped.
My mother barely acknowledged me. Her whole attention was on the girl at the table across from her. Clara looked up and smiled, and I still feel that smile in my spine. I am an old man who has seen a great deal, and there was something wrong with it.
She said she had only dropped by to have a word with Mama, to let her know she ought to keep watch over me, because some of the girls around town had taken a real liking to me. I glanced at my mother. Her face had drawn tight. She said she would keep a close eye on me and thanked Clara, but there was no gratitude in it, nothing warm or welcoming. My mother was the kindest woman I have ever known, and in that moment I did not know who she was.
Clara rose, thanked my mother for her time, and walked to the door. There she paused and wished us a wonderful evening, and she smiled again, the warmest smile I have ever seen on a human face. It took me years to understand that some people keep two faces, the one they have and the one they show, and that Clara Tatum wore hers better than anyone I ever met. I saw fewer troubling things in Vietnam than I did in that kitchen.
My mother said nothing. I did not move for a long while. At last I told her I had seen something the night before.
She drew a deep breath, as though she had been holding it all day. She told me, quietly, that I had not. It sounded less like a statement than a wish. I had not seen anything, she said, and I never would, not around here. She asked if I understood.
I nodded and said yes, ma'am.
We never spoke of it again.
I did not understand then, and I am not sure I understand now. But for the second time, and not the last, I learned that Lost Fork had secrets, and that it is best not to go digging in the ones you are not ready for.
