HAINTS

I was thirteen years old the first time I seen the haints. Before then, I just always thought Uncle TB was pullin' my leg when he talked about them. I'd heard it so many times, I knew the stories before he was finished telling them.

Uncle TB lived in an old house, no one knows exactly how old, just a small wooden thing.The family thinks it used to be the preacher's house at some time way back. But that's only a guess. It only sits a little bit aways from the Gravel Hill Baptist Church. The church has been there forever, too. We were General Baptists.

I been going to the church ever since I can remember. I thought it was just like any other church; one building, a small chapel, a few rooms to the back and front for Sunday school. There wasn't a paved road for at least 10 miles. The membership was nearly fifty. The preacher was the same preacher that was preaching when Dad was just a boy. Dad said so. And before he was preaching, the preacher's Dad was preaching.

Times change, I guess, I sure don't reckon his boy will be preaching--not with what I seen him doing every other Saturday night. Course, Mawmaw, my Great Grandma, thought if the Lord came on Sunday morning before you had a chance to say you're sorry and ask for forgiveness and all, that you'd go straight to hell. I think that's the part that made for the "General" in the General Baptists. Other Baptists I know say that once you're saved you're always saved. None of this falling from grace stuff. I always thought I'd like that better.

But Gravel Hill church sat in the middle of a graveyard, Gravel Hill graveyard. Supposedly the graveyard was started during the Civil War. There was a fight a few miles up the Saint Francis River, now they call it the Battle of Chalk Bluff, and a handful of soldiers died. Well, the Yankees pushed the Confederates off the hill, over the Missouri/Arkansas state line and sent them running down toward Rector, Arkansas. Content with the victory, the Yankee General made camp on the hill where Gravel Hill is (he got to stay inside the church, the soldiers slept on the ground), and they just buried their dead where they wanted, scattered around the church.

At least part of it must be true, because I've walked around the graveyard several times and in the oddest of places you can see a Union Army grave marker, marking the place of final rest for the couple of Yankees. Everyone figures they were buried where their battalions made camp.

Uncle TB's house was on the upslope of the hill, the northernmost beginnings of what is known as Crowley's Ridge. It was mostly farming land then and still is today. There are big open clearing for crops and for livestock, set apart by large acres of woods or gullies or fence rows. The hill wasn't good for much other than livestock and woods (good hunting in the woods by the church, though--I've killed lots of rabbits there) and there was lots of woods and wooded area around the church. You could stand on top of Uncle TB's barn and look over a small portion of the valley toward the Saint Francis River.

He had the same type of house that everybody around there did; a wood house that looked like it'd blow away in a big wind. (We knew it would stand, though. In 1916, a tornado came and snatched one of Mawmaw's newborn twins out of her hands while the family was trying to get to a ditch and take cover. The twin was killed--it's buried at Gravel Hill--but the house stood.) The doors and windows all had screens on them so you could keep them open for the breeze and still keep out the bugs--especially the mosquitoes.

It was his house that Uncle TB said the haints always came to. He swore up and down that if he was ever gone from his house over night, no matter what he did to the front and back door, they would always be undone and open when he returned.

I reckon I've asked everybody in the family why Uncle TB calls them haints. All other people call them ghosts or spooks. None of them know. Mawmaw just laughed when I asked her. She might have known...but she didn't tell. Besides, haints sounded so funny, though, that it just kinda stuck with the family.

Uncle TB would swear up and down, and even threatened to swear on his grave (wouldn't do it, though, said it was too close to home!) that what he was telling was the truth. Most of my Aunts and Uncles just laughed at him and told him to shut up. They didn't believe him, and that was what ticked him off most.

Uncle TB would sit on his porch at dusk, and about the time the sun went down, the haints came out. He said most of them would just walk along the road up to the church. Uncle TB couldn't see the church, it was around a bend in a road, a clump of trees in the bend. Said the haints came in all shapes and sizes...but you could surely see them.

Every sane person thought Uncle TB was just a drunkard, especially when he got to talking about the haints. But he never touched a drop of alcohol in his life. Said he came close one time, though.

It was before World War II. His uncle (Uncle TB is not really my uncle, but is my Dad's uncle--thus making him my Great Uncle, my Grandfather's brother, and Mawmaw's son) had passed on. The family only had one car then, don't know what kind, but I've seen pictures and it was one of those old kinds. As was family practice in Clay County, Arkansas back then, the family sat up with the dead uncle. No funeral homes yet. The corner bedroom--doesn't matter whose it was, it had two windows--was the visiting and sitting up room.Uncle TB's uncle was laid in the room and one member of the family was to sit with him the whole night, kinda watching over his spirit, I guess.

Well, Uncle TB wasn't more than a high school kid himself then, and this was the first dead person he'd ever really seen up close. He'd wanted to take a turn setting with his uncle because he thought it was the grownup thing to do.

And he did. But about one or two in the morning, he dozed off. But he woke up suddenly and all the hair on his body stood on its end. There was at least a dozen cats all scratching and clawing and screaming at the windows. Uncle TB thought they was trying to get in and do Lord knows what. Well, he yelled like the devil had got him and he peed his pants right then and there, and he wouldn't go home until the sun came up the next day. The preacher came in the next morning and told him that those cats had the devil in them and that Satan was trying to steal the spirit away from the Lord. The rest of the family had a good laugh at his expense.

Uncle TB never had any cats after that.

Uncle TB said that if there would have been alcohol in that room, or even in that house, he'd a been a drunk to this day.

He had all but forgotten that day until years later, in his own house out near the Gravel Hill Church, they laid out his Dad, my Great Grandfather. This was before I was born, of course. Uncle TB said that his Dad had died that morning and was brought to his home and that by noon all the family was there. Some time at dusk he stepped out on his porch to get away from the family and to clear his head. That's when he saw the first haint.

The sun had already disappeared over the horizon, but there was still some light to see across the yard and road and to the woods on the other side. From the porch, Uncle TB saw a bedraggled man slowly walking toward the church. He called out to the man and the man stopped in his tracks and looked at Uncle TB. He couldn't see who it was from there, but he told the man that the family wasn't taking visitors until tomorrow and to come back then.

The man just stood there. Uncle TB told him to go on back and to come back tomorrow.

But shortly, the man was joined by a second man walking up the road. The second man looked at Uncle TB and the first man and continued to walk toward the church. Directly, the first man joined him, looking back every so often at Uncle TB. Uncle TB hurried inside and shut the door.

But he said he never did figure out where all the haints were going or what they were doing, but they scared him for all of his adult life. And you couldn't get him to even consider moving out. He'd said his family was there and that was that.

He did a lot of speculating, though. See, he figured they all had to be the ghosts of folks buried in the Gravel Hill cemetery. Why would they be from anyplace else? He figured that, like most buried in the graveyard, they had all been to the Gravel Hill church at some time or another. Like all other Southerners, they were good church people, or mostly, anyway. So, Uncle TB figured they was going to church to say they're sorries and be forgiven. Could be that he was seeing the ones that didn't say their sorries when they were alive, and now they were stuck here.

That, or either they were coming up to pick up some other poor dead soul, like his Dad had died that morning before he first saw them.

It was this conviction that was probably the reason that Uncle TB went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, and never had a mean thought for anybody.

One thing that he never could figure out, though, was why they would always open his door. As he got older, he gave up and just left it open. He had tried nearly everything to keep it closed.

The screen door just had a hook latch on it, but the main door had a key-lock and a deadbolt lock. He had people come look at the house and they told him that he was just leaving it unlocked and the wind was blowing it open. But Uncle TB and the family knew different.

I was there one time when he did all the locks and then proceeded to stack empty soda bottles on a small stool behind the door. If someone came through, they'd wake up everybody in the house when they opened the door.

I woke up about 5:30 the next morning to see my Dad looking at the door (I slept on a pallet in the big room). Uncle TB was just getting up. When he saw the door, he yelled for everyone to come see--his yell scaring us half to death.

The small stool stood just as Uncle TB had set it out the night before...except that it had been pushed against the wall...as if someone had just slowly scooted it over to move it out of the way. From the front door, we all turned and looked straight out the back door--it too, was wide open. Before we could accuse someone of moving it, my Dad just barely touched it and it fell over.

Uncle TB got sick when I was twelve. I spent some time with him that summer that he died--that's when he told me most of the stories. I never did see the haints when I sat on the porch with him. He would swear up and down and point to the road and watch and follow and I never could see them. Dad told me that it was the sickness that was making him do those things, and for a long time I felt real sorry for him. But that all changed when I turned thirteen.

Uncle TB had only been dead about a month when I turned thirteen. I was a teenager, I had made it. I had gotten permission to go camping with some of my friends, and as kids can sometimes do, we got this crazy idea to camp out in the graveyard.

Everything was big fun while it was daylight. When it started to get dark, we started to get a little scared. My friends knew my Uncle TB's house was just down the road and wanted to go there. After he died, my Mawmaw came to live with us (she had outlived all her very own children), so the house was empty. They knew that, too.

So, we ran like scared kids all the way to Uncle TB's, then stopped just short of the house. I knew I was the last one to have left that house. I had helped Mawmaw move out and pack up. She had given me the only key to the house and told me to lock up all the way around. And I did. I checked and doublechecked the windows and doors. They were shut and locked. Period.

However, as I stood there with my friends, the door was swinging wide open, we could see a few feet inside. Even now, the hair on my neck still stands on end when I think of the feeling I got that night. But I turned around with my friends, and saw the haints. There were about ten of them walking up the road. I don't know of any sane way to describe a ghost, but it was there all the same.

As they got closer, one of them turned off as if to walk over to us. And did. But we were so scared that we didn't move. Just stood there. And watched as the haint went up to the house and proceeded to close the front door. He slowly moved to rejoin the others. On the way back, I got the weirdest feeling that he was smiling, and then I realized that it had to be Uncle TB. I didn't tell my friends that, though.

My friends and I vowed to never breathe a word of this to anybody, because we weren't even sure we believed what we saw. I knew I didn't want to end up being called the town scaredy-cat because I told some people I saw ghosts.

I now live in the house with my family. Oh, we've fixed the house up to make it livable in this day and age. We've still got haints, or I guess maybe just Uncle TB. I'm not scared of them like he was. Well, no, I won't go out in the graveyard at night, but that don't mean I'm scared. There's a difference between my haints and Uncle TB's. Uncle TB always complained they was opening his doors--never did know why. Mine are always closing doors. Guess it's Uncle TB trying to make up for lost time.