Speaking In Tongues

3

One hundred and thirty years ago the Dead Reb had wandered through this field.

Maybe shuffling along the very path this tall, lean man now walked in the hot April rain.

Tate Collier looked over his shoulder and imagined that he saw the legendary ghost staring at him from a cluster of brush fifty yards away. Then he laughed to himself and, crunching through rain-wet corn husks and stalks, the waste from last year’s harvest, he continued through the field, inspecting hairline fractures in an irrigation pipe that promised far more water than it had been delivering lately. It’d have to be replaced within the next week, he concluded, and wondered how much the work would cost.

Loping along awkwardly, somewhat stooped, Tate was in a Brooks Brothers pinstripe beneath a yellow sou’wester and outrageous galoshes, having come here straight from his strip mall law office in Fairfax, Virginia, where he’d just spent an hour explaining to Mattie Howe that suing the Prince William Advocate for libel because the paper had accurately reported her drunk-driving arrest was a lawsuit doomed to failure. He’d booted her out good-naturedly and sped back to his two-hundred-acre farm.

He brushed at his unruly black hair, plastered around his face by the rain, and glanced at his watch. A half hour until Bett and Megan arrived. Again, the uneasy twist of his stomach at the thought.

He glanced once more over his shoulder-toward where he’d seen the wisp of the ghostly soldier gazing at him from the cluster of vines and kudzu and loblolly pine. Tate returned to the damaged pipe, recalling what his grandfather-born Charles William Collier but known throughout northern Virginia as “the Judge”-had told him about the Dead Reb.

A young private in the bold experiment of the Confederacy took a musket ball between the eyes at the first battle of Bull Run. By all laws of mercy and physiology he should have fallen dead at the picket line. But he’d simply dropped his musket, stood up and wandered southeast until he came to the huge woods that bordered the dusty town of Manassas. There he lived for six months, growing dark as a slave, sucking eggs and robbing cradles (the human victuals were legend only, the Judge appended in a verbal footnote). The Dead Reb was personally responsible for the cessation of all foot traffic after dusk through the Centreville woods that fall-until he was found, stark naked and dead indeed, sitting upright in what was the middle of Jackson’s Corner, now a prime part of Tate Collier’s farm.

Well, no ghosts here now, Tate reflected, only a hundred feet of pipe to be replaced..

Straightening up now, he wiped his watch crystal.

Twenty minutes till they were due.

Look, he told himself, relax.

Through the misty rain Tate could see, a mile away, the house he’d built eighteen years ago. It was a miniature Tara, complete with Done columns, and was white as a cloud. This was Tate’s only real indulgence in life, paid for with some inheritance and the hope of money that a young prosecutor knows will be showered upon him for his brilliance and flair, despite the fact that a commonwealth’s attorney’s meager salary is a matter of public record. The six-bedroom house still groaned beneath a hearty mortgage.

When the Judge deeded over the fertile Piedmont land to Tate twenty years ago-skipping Tate’s father for reasons never articulated though known to one and all of the Collier clan-the young man decided impulsively he wanted a family home (the Judge’s residence wasn’t on the farmland itself but was eight miles away in Fairfax). Tate kept a two-acre parcel fallow for one season and built on it the next. The house sat between the two barns-one new, one the original-in the middle of a rough, grassy field punctuated with patches of black-eyed Susans, hop clover and bluestem, a stand of bitternut hickory trees, a beautiful American beech and eastern white pines.

The eerily balmy wind grabbed his rain slicker and shook hard. He closed two buckles of the coat and happened to be gazing toward the house when he saw a downstairs light go out.

So Megan had arrived. It had to be the girl; Bett didn’t have keys to the house. No hope of cancellation now. Well, if you live three miles from a Civil War battlefield, you have to appreciate the persistence of the past.

He glanced once more at the fractured pipe and started toward the house, heavy boots slogging through the untilled fields.

Like the Dead Reb. No, he reflected, nothing so dramatic. More like the introspective man of forty-four years that he’d become.

An enthymeme is an important rhetorical device used in formal debate.

It’s a type of syllogism (“All cats see in the dark. Midnight is a cat. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”), though the enthymeme is abbreviated. It leaves out one line of logic (“All cats see in the dark. Therefore Midnight sees in the dark.”). Experienced debaters and trial lawyers like Tate Collier rely on this device frequently in their debates and courtroom arguments but it works only when there’s a common understanding between the advocate and his audience. Everybody’s got to understand that the animal in question is a cat; they have to supply the missing information in order for the logic to hold up.

Tate reflected now that he, his ex-wife and Megan had virtually none of this common understanding. The mind of Betty Susan McCall would be as alien to him as his was to her. Except for his ex-wife’s startling reappearance seven weeks ago-with the news about Megan’s drunken climb up the water tower-he hadn’t seen her for nearly two years and their phone conversations were limited to practical issues about the girl and the few residual financial threads between people divorced fifteen years.

And as for Megan-how can anyone know a seventeen-year-old girl? Her mind was a moving target. Her only report on the therapy sessions was: “Dad, therapy’s for, like, losers. Okay?” And her Walkman headset went back on. He didn’t expect her to be any more informative-or articulate-today.

As he approached the house he now noticed that all of the inside lights had been shut off. But when he stepped out of the field he saw that neither Megan’s nor Bett’s car was in the drive.

He unlocked the door and walked into the house, which echoed with emptiness. He noticed Megan’s house keys on the entryway table and dropped his own beside them, looking up the dim hallway. The only light in the cavernous space was from behind him-the bony light from outside, filtering through the entryway.

What’s that noise?

A wet sound, sticky, came from somewhere on the first floor. Repetitive, accompanied by a faint, hungry gasping.

The chill of fear stirred at his neck.

“Megan?”

The noise stopped momentarily. Then, with a guttural snap of breath, it resumed again. There was a desperation about the sound. Tate's stomach began to churn and his skin prickled with sweat.

And that smell… Something pungent and ripe.

Blood! he believed. Like the smell of hot rust.

“Megan!” he called again. Alarmed now, he walked farther into the house.

The noise stopped though the smell was stronger, almost nauseating.

Tate thought of weapons. He had a pistol but it was locked away in the barn and there was no time to get it. He stepped forcefully into the den, seized a letter opener from the desk, flipped on the light.

And laughed out loud.

His two-year-old Dalmatian, her back to him, was flopped down on the floor, chewing intently. Tate set the opener on the bar and approached the dog. His smile faded. What is that? Tate squinted.

Suddenly, with a wild, raging snarl, the dog spun and lunged at him. He gasped in shock and leapt back, cracking his elbow on the corner of a table. Just as quickly the dog turned away from him, back to its trophy.