Dead Echo

  *

  The new century offered little respite. On January 1, 1901, a dog-handler in search of his prize Catahoola bitch broke through a magnolia copse and into the light of what was known for the next thirty years as the Hill of Blood. After retching up his breakfast and arming himself with a stout red oak branch, he managed to stumble to the summit of the small rise.

  Around him, scattered in haphazard piles and even a few to their own spaces, lay the remains of what was eventually identified as thirty-seven bodies. Men, women, and children. Four were identified; two, a forty year old farmer and his nine year old son, having disappeared in a fishing boat four years earlier on the other side of the state, and the other two, unrelated fieldworkers, one white, one black, both middle aged, identified by their families, owing to the fact they appeared only to have died very recently.

  And the other thirty-three? A mystery, thirty-three dead ends. For those not too far gone in decomposition, photos went out in the paper, black and white grainy shots to be sure, but photos nonetheless. The others were buried at parish expense, immediately, some said to make the nightmare end. That grisly circus of lost bodies.

  And of the photographed few?

  Not one word, not one single inquiry from the entire limit of the newspaper’s influence. Some fearful townsfolk hinted the dead were the derelicts of Heaven, others the rejects of Hell.

  And there it stayed.