Temperance in the Reversed

Abigail Wash had seen the mafia push a beat-up Model T into the lake. And she had told the town about it for five days. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe her; it was that they didn’t know what she wanted them to do about it. She would insist on pulling the car from the lake and her daddy said he only needed a few good men to help with the wrenching. But no few good men wanted to know what the mafia didn’t want them to know.

Men cut from a less moral cloth told Abigail to keep silent. And after those five days, she fell silent on the topic of the car. Although for the next six years until her daddy lost the house she could be found gossiping with the other school girls or baby talking that mutt of hers, it would go down in local folk lore that the mafia cut out her tongue.

For five days the car was the topic of the town. After five days, they laid the topic to rest in a shallow grave. And it stayed there for the next ten years. Some government project was interested in putting young, good men—no longer so young and no longer so good—to work building a bridge across the lake to connect the town better to something or another.

Cheryl Lee’s momma said it was only to make the men think they were doing something. But Cheryl went anyway nearly everyday to watch the construction. She didn’t have much better to do. So little Cheryl Lee was sitting on a fallen tree when the withered men found a hunk of metal in the way of a support column. She was standing as close as she could safely get as the men hauled it out of the water one slow inch after another.

Sixty-two years later, she would recount the story to children and grandchildren and say, “I stood with my hands braced over my heart and I knew… I knew this was why I was drawn to the lake in the first place. I was meant to bear witness.”

Of course, she probably didn’t understand this at the tender age of seven. She just stood on the edge of the lake with her hands braced slightly right of her heart as something that might have been a Model T was dumped on the shore. And she was still standing there when the men began to shout about the body in the front seat, though Cheryl would learn soon that it wasn’t much of a body—just a bunch of bones strung together.

None of them had yet to notice the bottles of moonshine still waiting in the backseat. Most were intact, though the crates were rotted and the straw was long gone.

It wasn’t the moonshine that drew Cheryl to the car. She’ll say when she’s older that someone had to bear witness to the body, to the man lost in time. All the men could say was that one moment she was twenty feet away with her hands pressed to her chest, then the next she was reaching through the window. And then she was screaming.

A couple of hours later, Widow Lee showed up at the police station with her hand wrapped around Cheryl’s wrist. Widow Lee wasn’t known as the most reasonable woman in town, but everyone knew not to argue with her. So when Widow Lee declared that Cheryl knew who the dead man was, Officer Jenkins decided to humor her. So he took Cheryl into an interview room, sat her at a plain table, and gave her a cup of Coca Cola that someone had managed to find. It was flat, but Cheryl had never had a Coca Cola in her life and didn’t know any different.

She sipped the soda as she related her story. If Officer Jenkins hadn’t already decided to disregard everything that came out of her mouth, he would have done so immediately after he heard the little girl’s first sentence. “The dead man looked at me,” she said. And Jenkins doodled instead of taking notes.

“The dead man looked at me,” she would repeat sixty-two years later.And even though over half a century had passed, the story remained relatively the same—only her perceptions of it changed.

“He looked at me,” she said again, leaning forward.

“And what does he look like?” Jenkins asked as he shaded in a circle.

“At first he was bones, but then he was bones and more. He had yellow hair and brown eyes. And he was scared, sir, very scared. And I was scared too because he was talking.”

“And what did he say to you?”

Young Cheryl had to pause, to sort through her thoughts, but in sixty-two years she would launch right into it. “I don’t think he was talking to me,” she’d say. “I think he was reliving his death.”

“The dead man was reliving?” Both Jenkins and some sassy grandchild would ask. At seven, Cheryl would pause and blush, but at sixty-nine, she would keep talking with eyes glazed over.

“Yes, sir, he was talking about some girl named Ethel. ‘What about Ethel? What about Ethel?’ he kept asking. “Are ya gonna do this to Ethel?’ Then he went silent and leaned out of the window. He looked like…” She would always pause here. “He looked like that dog the Hemming brothers were beating, like Momma before Pa would raise his fist. Boy was scared. I was scared.” Another pause here, then… “Charlie. He was talking to someone named Charlie. He said, ‘Charlie. Charlie, don’t let him…’ But then his body kinda shuddered. And there was blood, sir, and that’s when I ran.”

By this time, Jenkins wasn’t bothering to pretend to take notes. He was leaning back in his chair with his eyebrows raised. “And did you catch his name?”

Later she would think it a silly question. Of course, she hadn’t asked the dying corpse his name. She was too busy trying to control her bladder. She wasn’t even wearing the same undergarments she put on that morning. (Not that she told her descendants this little fact.) Instead of giving him a name, she looked down at the table to hide her pink cheeks.

“No, sir,” she said. “I forgot to ask.”

The officer sighed and remarked about how she didn’t actually know who the man was after all even though he already knew that. He let her sit there for another few moments in awkward silence before sending her back to her momma. He didn’t escort her, no. No, that would result in Widow Lee insisting on him taking the girl seriously, and you don’t argue with Widow Lee.

If he had followed her out though, he would have found a woman with wide brown eyes and yellow hair holding a long deck of cards saying that she was told to come here. Or he would have found Widow Lee asking the air who told it to come here and why. Either way, he had a collection of bones and neither the resources nor the interest to investigate. He was prepared to put the river junk in storage and the body in a pauper’s grave. There wasn’t much more he could do when his only leads were a girl’s wild imagination and the possibly-related story of Abigail Wash’s missing tongue.