Nathaniel would never say what it was like down there, not even to his children or grandchildren. All he would say is that the Bible only got it half right: there were demons aplenty, but no fire at all.
The mist rose high that night, licking white up the bank, and the next morning the oldest Gravely was found bloated and blue in the Mud River. The men he owned, or thought he owned, were long gone.
Only Nathaniel Boone was still in Eden. He wasn’t sure why; there was a missing place in his memory, as if he’d fallen asleep and dreamed dark and lovely dreams for days. When he woke he was climbing back toward the light, his hands slick on limestone and pale roots. He emerged from a crack in the earth and found himself in the low, wet woodlands to the north of town. He could have run then, but he didn’t want to, or didn’t want to have to, or maybe he just didn’t want to leave Eden to thrive behind him, without any comeuppance at all.
So he took work on the riverboat that brought dry goods from Elizabethtown. And spent his days courting a freedwoman from Hardin County. She wanted to settle up north, and Nathaniel promised they would—but they lingered a long time after their wedding. They needed to save up a little more, he said. Or wait for the winter, or spring, or for her cousin’s second baby to be born. Every night when they climbed into bed his wife dreamed of brick row houses and electric streetcars, and Nathaniel dreamed of the Gravelys.
He dreamed them falling down stairs and choking on chicken bones, drowning, dissipating, taking ill and never rising. He dreamed of himself, sometimes, riding the steam train out of Eden with his wife beside him, leaving behind nothing but gravestones.
But the Gravelys kept on living, the way men of their station always seemed to. Nathaniel was considering taking matters into his own hands, despite certain promises to his wife, when he saw a different possibility standing at the very edge of the Mud River: a white girl in a gray dress, the hem black with water.
He recognized her, of course. Miss Eleanor had turned up at the Gravelys’ a little while back, big-eyed and thin, like a sickly songbird, and they’d taken her in. People said they did it out of the kindness of their hearts, but Nathaniel, who knew the Gravelys didn’t have hearts, was less sure.
Now here she stood, looking down at the river like it was her long-lost lover. She took a single step forward into the water, and Nathaniel said, softly, Wait.
She looked up at him with a distant, harassed expression, as if he’d interrupted her hanging laundry on the line. He asked her what she was doing, and she answered that it was her wedding day. She said it as if that were a perfectly sufficient explanation, and Nathaniel supposed that it was; hadn’t he himself dug a hole to Hell to escape the Gravelys?
He tied his flatboat to a leaning birch and waded ashore. He pulled Miss Eleanor back from the water and drew the stones gently from her pockets, not because he pitied her—in his calculation, every bite of food and stitch of clothing the Gravelys gave her had been bought with his blood—but because he thought the two of them might briefly share a common purpose.
He asked Miss Eleanor if he could tell her a story, and if she still wanted to walk into the river after he told it, he swore he would not stop her. She agreed, so Nathaniel told Miss Eleanor a story about the hole in the world, and the place beneath it, and the things that lived there. He’d told this story once before, to the freedwoman he would one day marry, and she said if he loved her he would never go back to that place. But Miss Eleanor didn’t love anybody, and nobody loved her.
She listened very carefully while Nathaniel spoke. When he was done, she did not walk back into the river.
Thus Nathaniel was not surprised to hear of John Gravely’s death or the footprints they found in the mines. He was not surprised when the widow was found laughing among the sycamores on the north end of town, and he was not surprised that she built her great, mad house there.
He was only surprised once, many years later, when he came home to find a note slipped under his door, which advised him to leave Eden as quick as he could “in memory of an old kindness.” It was signed with a small bird drawn in harsh black ink. A grackle, maybe. Or a starling.
Nathaniel left. When his wife asked him why, he told her there was no longer any reason to stay. Eden’s comeuppance had finally arrived.
TEN
The town seems different the next morning. All the details are the same—the crooked awning of the pawnshop, the sour smell of the river, the faces staring out at me from behind cracked windshields, lips pursed—but now it all strikes me as purposeful, perhaps deserved, like the punishment for some grand sin. I know that part of the story must be made up, because there’s no such thing as curses or cracks in the world, but maybe that’s all a good ghost story is: a way of handing out consequences to the people who never got them in real life.