byChrisWhite – 2025

An original southern gothic scene from my imagination, set post Civil War. A bit too long to use for flash fiction contests. Hope you enjoy.

They drug Old Man Caraway through the dust like a feral hog caught in the coils of a plow mule’s chain, the men’s boots kicking up dead leaves and bloodstains so faint you’d swear the earth had absorbed them out of pure shame. I saw it all. We all did. Us boys up in the ash tree, legs dangling like hanged sinners, eyes wide and not yet ruined but near to it. There weren’t no sermon. No lawman to call it wrong. No mother to shield our eyes.

They’d been coming for him a long while. Maybe it started when that Jamison boy turned up shot in the back outside Robertson’s ginhouse, the blood drying in the red clay like rust in fire. Or maybe it started before that, when the drought stole all the corn, and the cattle began falling like flies to a wasting sickness that didn’t care which man had prayed harder. Or maybe hate was born with this land, thick as the red chiggers and no less persistent.

Old Man Caraway had been a sharecropper, a moonshiner; people say a brave fighter in the War Between the States. They said he carried a Minié ball in his hip like a lodestone, and that it hummed when he lay still too long. He had sons, all dead or gone to hell, and one boy they said was no boy at all but a wolf in trousers who gutted a man in Orchardville for smiling too long at his sister. That sister hung herself off the rafters of the Caraway barn when the summer went dry in ’81, leaving behind a diary no one could read for the water damage, but folks said it told of the doings inside that house. Doings that made God weep and dogs howl.

The Jamison’s didn’t forgive, didn’t forget. They gathered that night in the glow of a dozen lanterns swinging, real eerie like. Looked like a verdict dripping from them hackberry trees. Some were drunk. Some just wore the look of men too tired to be afraid anymore. My daddy among them. He didn’t raise his voice nor his hand, but he didn’t stop ’em either. He stood there, like a scarecrow carved from stone, quietist I ever seen him. And in his silence, I heard the sounds of something rotten.

They tied the rope with more care than I’d seen them give to any bride or newborn. It was the reverence that was so scary. The awful dignity of it. Old Man Caraway spat and cussed and called ‘em cowards, but his voice cracked halfway through, and after that he just looked up at the branches, blinking as if he could still see his daughter swinging there.

When they hoisted him, the branch didn’t crack, though it groaned like it was ashamed of all them men. The old man jerked and kicked in silence. No thrashing, no final words. Just the sound of leather tightening and a wind that hadn’t stirred all night choosing that moment to rise and stir up the oak leaves in a whirlwind. Something in me broke then, partly from horror, yeah, but also from the quiet of it all. How all them grown men didn’t cry or shout or even breathe loud. Just watched, their faces bathed in firelight like men watching a field burn, knowing it’ll take the next one too.

Afterward, we boys scattered, each to his own haunted corner. Me and Theodor and J.W. stayed behind. We sat beneath that old tree until morning yawned its sticky dew across the kudzu. Theodore said nothing but wept into his knees. J.W. swore he’d kill himself a Jamison one day, and I knew he meant it because his voice didn’t shake. But I just stared at the feet that still twitched in the dawn, like they hadn’t yet gotten the message that justice had been done, right or wrong.

We went home and no one spoke of it. Not that day, not that year. But I saw the men who’d been there, in church pews and cattle auctions, and across my family dinner table, and they all had something in their eyes that never left. Like blood on a butcher’s apron no amount of lye could wash.

I don’t remember my mama’s voice anymore, but I remember the rope. I remember the sound of it stretching. I remember the bark peeling as the body swung. And I remember being a boy and knowing, finally and forever, that there are things a man can’t unsee and still call himself whole.

And I remember thinking, 
If there is a hell, it walks in boots, and tonight it came to Caraway Hollow.