Free Those Who Went Remain There Still by Cherie Priest Page A

different as a ghost. Probably, he’d be even worse. Maybe he’d even take to haunting people he didn’t like, just out of a mean spirit.
    No. Better to leave all that alone.
    If it occurred to John to ask the dead for any assistance, he didn’t do it while I was listening—and he didn’t tell me anything about it.
    ***
    Granny Gail was waiting on that porch, still standing up straight and holding real still with that cane in her hand. She made me think of Moses, standing in front of the Red Sea, holding his hands out
and parting the water. Only Abigail was so tough she didn’t have to lift a finger to hold the Coys and Manders apart; and I swear to you this much, if Moses had to contend with these two families, he couldn’t have held them back any better.
    “Ma’am,” I greeted her, and John said the same.
    “Fellas,” she greeted us back.
    She leaned forward on that cane and placed herself in the center of the porch, between the two groups. She balanced herself there so careful, like a tightrope walker I saw at a circus once. Not too far on this side, not too far on that one. Everything falls down if it leans.
    She said, “Now we got everybody here.”
    John and I found ourselves in the center of a widening circle.
    Not all the family members would fit on the porch, so they were spilling out and down the stairs, and into the front yard where we’d brought the horses. Titus was saddled up too, and he gave me a nod that said ‘hello’ without committing to anything more than that.
    Two men were also mounted on horses beside Titus, and there was another man—somebody I didn’t recognize right away—who stood beside a horse, and a bit apart from the Manders.
    “This is how it’s gonna go,” Granny Gail announced, and there wasn’t a soul alive who’d have argued with her. “John Coy, you’re the oldest man going, but that don’t put you in charge of nothing. You’re going to the Pit on behalf of your daddy and your brother, ‘cause neither one of them’s living no more. Meshack Coy, you’re riding for your mother who ain’t here no more. Carlson Coy, you ride for yourself, and for nobody else.”
    Carlson Coy, yes. He was a cousin, and not one too close, I didn’t think. He pulled himself up into the saddle and nudged his foot against the flank of his spotted white pony. He was older than me, not by much; but sometimes it was hard to tell. I’ve heard that hard work will age a man, and maybe that’s true. Living in the valley, though—that’ll age a man like nothing else. His clothes were clean but old, and he was wearing shoes that hung a little loose on his feet.
    He adjusted his hat, tipping it our way and moving the pony over to join me and John.
    “Titus Mander,” she continued, “You ride for your parents, since neither one of them’s with us no more. Jacob Mander, you ride as Heaster asked; and your son Nicodemus rides for your father, who ain’t well enough to go.
    “All six of you, now—you’re doing this for your families and for yourselves, and if you want to do it right you’ve got to set your old gripes down. Put them aside, or God damn the lot of you.”
    The way she said it, it sounded like she was finished. But Jacob Mander stopped her from walking away by asking, “Granny Gail, where do we go once we get inside? Ain’t nobody been in there for years, or not nobody who’d admit it.”
    “And I ain’t either,” she snapped back at him. “I’ve done told you all there is I know. I don’t know where he put it, and I don’t know why he wanted you all to go down there together. I think the whole thing’s as stupid as a shit-pie, but if it don’t happen, then that’ll just mean more fighting, and that’s even stupider. I’m sick of it. And if any one of you had a lick of sense, you’d admit you’re sick of it too.”
    “Ma’am,” Uncle John tried to interrupt her.
    She ignored him, and didn’t let him talk any. “Maybe you folks deserve each other,