Free The Dirty Parts of the Bible by Sam Torode Page B

this land,” Red said. “One night a cow got separated from the herd and wandered into the river. The bed of this here river’s like quicksand, and that cow sunk down till the water was up to her neck. Coyotes came and took her in the middle of the night. Picked her bones clean and carried off everything but the skull.”
    I pulled away from Red’s eye long enough to look around the bonfire. All the other hoboes were in rapt attention to the story. Craw was gone—he must have stepped out to relieve himself.
    Red went on. “Now, some nights you can hear a clanging bell, or a cow moaning from the middle of the river. I even seen it once—a cow’s body, all pale and glowing, walking around with no head. That’s why I hung the skull on that tree—so when she comes looking for her head, she can find it easy.”
    I glanced over at that white skull and a shiver went down my spine. Red had me scared out of my wits, and I didn’t even believe in ghosts. This world is all there is, I tried to remind myself. Since there’s no afterlife, nobody—human or cow—can return to haunt the living.
    Then Craw returned, laughing. “Aw, not that ghost cow bullshit.”
    The veins in Red’s neck swelled up. “You shut up, Craw. I seen him with my own eye.”
    “What were you drinking?”
    Red spat in the fire and it sizzled. “You don’t believe in spooks?”
    “Course I believe in spooks,” Craw said. “If, by that, you mean the shades of departed souls. But I don’t believe in headless heifers.”
     
    + + +
     
    As the fire died out, we settled into our separate shanties. Craw showed me how to make a bed out of newspapers—Hoover blankets, he called them. Before he left me alone, I asked whether he’d ever seen a ghost.
    “Certainly. In fact, I’m looking at one now.” I looked back over my shoulder. “Why, you’re a ghost,” he said, “and so am I. We’re spirits haunting these bodies of flesh and blood, just as spooks haunt houses of wood and stone.”
    “You believe in haunted houses?”
    “All houses,” he said, “wherein men have lived and died, are haunted houses.
     
    Through open doors, the phantoms
    on their errands glide,
    With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
     
    We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
    Owners and occupants of earlier dates
    From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
    And hold in mortmain still their old estates.
     
    The spirit-world around this world of sense
    Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
    Wafts through these earthly mists
    and vapors dense
    A vital breath of more ethereal air.
     
    One of the perks of being an atheist—or so I thought—was that I didn’t have to be afraid of ghosts anymore. Growing up, I was so scared of ghosts that I could hardly sleep some nights. I’d tremble every time a branch scraped across my window, and shake at every creak of the hallway floor—just waiting for a spook to burst in. This was because Mama used to tell me her family’s ghost stories.
    Mama even claimed to have seen a spook with her own eyes. “When I was a little girl, I had a baby brother who drowned in the river. Papa made a gravemarker for him, but somehow it got broken in two. Papa didn’t want to throw it out, so he put that broken gravestone under my bed. One night, I woke up to someone tickling my toes. There was a fat little boy—white as a sheet—standing at the foot of my bed, smiling. He didn’t say anything at all, just smiled. I know it was my little brother, come back to tell me he was happy in heaven.”
    But Father always cut off Mama’s stories. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he’d say. “When you die, you either go to heaven or hell. Nobody returns to this earth.
    “But,” Father was quick to add, “there is such a thing as demons. The Bible says they’re fallen angels. When people think they’ve seen a ghost, it’s really a demon sent by Satan to torment them.” That didn’t help comfort my night