South of Haunted Dreams Read Free Page B

broken out, not yet boarded up. The house, now a shack, is overgrown with weeds and consumed by the undergrowth. Saplings and vines creep through the walls and climb through the gaps in the roof. Nature has staked its claim on all that once seemed it would last forever. But nothing is permanent. All eventually passes away.
    When the road bends, the trees end. Cultivation runs on from there, the fields owning lines of sight from here to the horizon.
    There ought to be a huge plantation house up on the hill, these fields of corn should be fields of cotton perhaps; old Negro laborers stooped over their hoes and baking in the hot sun should be happily singing their woes in these fields, for this is the South and that is the image, and down this road is the Coon Hunters’ Club.
    I expect that when I arrive there I will find a bunch of big-bellied rednecks sitting around an old wood-burning stove. They will be chewing tobacco and wearing caps advertising seed corn, tractors, and transmission companies. And they will be drinking beer, of course, telling stories and dreaming about the good old days, dreaming about lynching niggers.
    Up on a hill a farmhouse does rise, but a modern one. Big metal silos glimmer in the sunlight. At the foot of the hill there is a sign for a school bus stop.
    A car approaches and passes. The driver throws up a wave, does not stop, but goes on. From the yard surrounding a house on another hill, a child, awed, I suppose, by this big blue bike I ride, waves and runs down to the edge of the street. And I, not knowing how to take this waving, these friendly gestures, toss up my hand and continue on.
    A couple of miles farther on, there is a right turn. One sign on the corner says GOD IS THE ANSWER , another sign promises GOD ANSWERS PRAYER. Just beyond the signs, the Coon Hunters’ Club. Not much of a clubhouse, just a concrete box made of cinder blocks, a squat building only one story tall, four small windows on the front. But there is indeed a wood-burning stove inside, revealed by an exhaust pipe coming through a hole in the wall. An air-conditioner unit sticks out of the opposite wall and promises relief from the intense autumn heat. And perhaps there is beer inside to help with the same relief, but at this I can only guess, for the place is deserted. No one answers my knocking at the door. I will not this day get to see the inside of the Coon Hunters’ Club, nor talk to any of the coon hunters. I will have to wait until some other time to be glared at, threatened, turned away, called names, and made afraid.
    Some other time, of course, will be soon enough.
    The motorcycle revs to its highest-pitched whine and continues on, following the road over these rolling hills and around every bend, leading me on. I have no idea where the road will go.

II
    I … turning about in my saddle took a farewell look in the direction from which we came, conscious of having reached the dividing line.
    â€”William Johnston
    I too turned around in my saddle and long I looked in the direction from which I had come, not knowing then that my backward glance, like William Johnston’s so long before me, also would be a farewell one.
    The road behind bent in the distance and disappeared in the trees; ahead it ran straight like a time-line into the haze of future. It ran to the horizon and got lost in the glare, shrank near the faraway limits of my sight and was gone. I faced forward on the machine, toward tomorrow, toward the unknown. I put the bike in gear. Spurning the fear and apprehension that vibrated through me, I rode on, into the labyrinth of time, the ultimate purpose of my mission and its final significance as hidden from me as the future, as unknown to me then as William Johnston’s was to him.
    William Johnston was an overlander with the Lewis and Clark expedition who in 1804 left St. Louis to explore the upper reaches of the Missouri River and the newly purchased Louisiana Territory. Their