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James Courtney Goes Home

By Jamie Grimes

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The personal effects of the late Mr. James Courtney found their way to me some months after his passing, once the stipulations of his will had been addressed and the remainder of his belongings had been picked over by his friends and family. He had made a promise to me long ago, and I to him, and now, some decades after he’d done his part, the rest was mine to fulfill.

His steamer trunk was left like a flag staked in the yard, the ghosts of a former life reminding me of the claim they had on my soul. Inside were a pile of well-worn journals, some wadded papers cushioning a couple of chipped dinner plates, and a few books. In with all of this was a letter addressed simply “To Thomas.” In it, Courtney recounted the better part of the last two decades of his life, during which time he never married, made but a few close friends, most of whom helped him put his meager fortune into “charities benefiting the advancement of our peoples.” He wished me great health and lamented that he could never bring himself to come back to the island no matter how he longed for it.

Underneath the letter, next to the plain brass urn containing Courtney’s earthly remains, lay a troublesome volume I’d hoped never to have the ill fortune to see. I’d heard tell of Henry Barksdale’s Statements and Observations Concerning the American Negro Species. What colored person in learned circles hadn’t? So obnoxious it was in its assertions, in its blanket characterizations of a whole people as nothing more than savages tamed to the brink of enlightenment by their enslavers. I had more than half a mind to burn it on sight, but with that urge came an appalling curiosity, and I found myself thumbing through its overwrought suppositions, its “there can be no doubts” and its “undeniable facts” about “the primitive American Negro.” No wonder the world is as divided as it is. If this is the thinking of one of the South’s allegedly preeminent minds, what hope is there in finding our common humanity?

I cursed Courtney for bequeathing me this nonsense, but I was quick to apologize. Never get on the wrong side of the dead. With Barksdale so fresh on my mind—with his feverish rantings about his last days on Ediwander Island in my hands—I ought to have known better.

---

Of the white men who came and went from the sanctity of the private club their forebears had established on the island in the thickets of oaks and scrub pines out of sight of the locals, James Courtney was a singular sort. He always treated the staff of the lodge with respect and geniality, and, if he was not entertaining visitors, he took with all of us a familiar tone. He’d help out in the yard or in the kitchen or wherever else he could make himself useful. Once, after a storm ripped through the village, Mr. Courtney rode out, put the lodge’s horses to work pulling fallen trees, helped rebuild my momma’s roof, even stayed behind and lost a handful of dollars at dice. His was a warm soul. And yet he stood apart. When we gathered at the praise house on Sunday evenings for feast and fellowship, we prayed for him. But we never invited him to join with us, to know the man as he truly was.

---

The end to Courtney’s time on the island began on a humid August afternoon with the arrival of Henry Barksdale, a self-described “luminary of anthropologic studies,” the only pale face disembarking from the steamer from the mainland. Some of the elders say the unease came with him, but it didn’t wash across the island until later that night. Roosters crowed at the moon. The stray hounds that kept company with the whole village paced, baying and growling. I—and most everyone else, I soon discovered—found sleep nearly impossible, and I rolled around in bed until the first rays of sun struck the old oak outside my window.

Most mornings, I was out of the house before my mother awoke. But the morning after Barksdale’s arrival, she was leaning against the kitchen table, looking out the window, watching for daybreak. In my haste to be off to work, I didn’t notice her red eyes or somber disposition until I’d fixed us up a couple of eggs scrambled with day-old bread.

I slid a plate across to her and asked if she was feeling alright. She said she was, but her response came from that faraway place she went sometimes, when she thought too deeply, or when she felt too deeply. She was fumbling with a matchbox.

As I set about gathering myself for the long workday ahead, she became more alert. “Thomas, wait.” She followed me to the door, held out an unlit match. “Take this here.”

“Momma, what am I supposed—”

“You know full well what you sposed to do wif it,” she said. “An I know you don’ believe nunna what I say. But juss this one time, do it fuh me anyway.”

I wasn’t about to. Call it youthful hubris, a lurch against the hand that feeds, a need to stand apart. No matter the hurt in her eyes, no matter the pleading, I didn’t believe in none of her nonsense, and I wasn’t about to start. “Yeah, Momma.” I brushed past the matchstick, kissed her on the top of the head. Her hair smelled of sulphur and sage.

She gave me a hug, held on too long. She must have thought she was being sneaky, sliding a whole box of matches into my pants pocket. “You was born wif yo head in a sack,” she said, tiptoeing to kiss my cheek. “If you wasn’t so smart I’d swear it made you dumb.”

“Thanks, Momma.” I kissed her forehead again and was out the door. She shouted out to me, something about a get-together that night, and I pretended I was too far away to hear.

---

My walk to the Nimrod Club—Mr. Courtney’s lodge for those mighty few who came to the islands fancying themselves adept hunters and outdoorsmen—was a lonely two-mile stretch of pitted dirt paths that gradually smoothed into something less treacherous on the approach to the lodge. I always brought with me scraps of whatever I’d managed for breakfast, and I’d feed whatever poor cur limped my way. There were one or two that kept regular company with me, battle-scarred things that were part retriever and part something-or-other, kindly beasts soothed by the slightest affection. The morning after Barksdale’s arrival, though, I was the lone creature on that palmetto-lined road. So tranquil was the world that the dawn chorus didn’t usher in the morning, and the creatures of the nearby marshes didn’t stir.

On the way, I bid my ancestors good morning. Hope Point Cemetery wasn’t much more than a half-acre stand of young pines and old oaks overlooking a narrow strip of beach and the sea beyond. But under the moss and fallen branches lay the last several generations, put near the water so its currents might carry their resting souls back to their ancestral lands. My father lay in there, and his father, and every free Pritchard there’s ever been.

“Y’all stay resting,” I said, nodding my head in respect, just like every other day, the ritual of a young man who’d been listening to his elders’ haint stories from an impressionable age. My words met with growls. Nearly a dozen dogs crept from the shade opposite the makeshift gate to the cemetery. Some bore fresh wounds. Some showed their teeth. “Alright, goddamnit,” I said, fishing from my pocket bits of breakfast wrapped in a handkerchief. “I don’t have a lot for all y’all, but—”

They barked up a racket that sent roosting birds to flight. I fumbled my offering and it landed in the dirt at my feet, and I left it there. Something told me making sudden movements wouldn’t end well for me. “Okay then.” I pointed at the ground, trying to hide the fact that I was real close to pissing myself. “I’m going to leave this right here for y’all. I’ve got to get to work.”

But attention was not on me but on the great oak at the heart of Hope Point. They padded past me, their heads lowered, tails between their legs, teeth clenched and exposed, forming a line between me and the dead. And that way they remained until I was a fair ways down the road, at which point the pack relaxed and went back into the shade. A bedraggled terrier mix shuffling over to the handkerchief and dragged it away. In the thickets of graveyard shadows, something shifted. A cold wind turned summer to fall.

---

At midday, Mr. Courtney found me taking a break from the unyielding heat of a humid Carolina summer, propped up against a haystack in the stables, several pages in on a pulp magazine my mother’s friends had brought back from the mainland. It was the sort of thing with scandalously underclad women imperiled by hideous creatures and dastardly gentlemen, and it had absorbed me so utterly that I didn’t hear his approach.

He cleared his throat. “It must be a mighty fine book you have there, Thomas, to keep you from your work.”

Startled, I scrambled to my feet, rolling the magazine into a thin tube that fit snug in my pocket. “I sho is sorry, suh,” I said, glancing over his shoulder to see if we were alone, then directing my eyes subserviently to his finely polished shoes in case we weren’t. “I juss tek a minute t’catch muh breath is all. It sho hawt dis mawnin.”

Mr. Courtney looked not to be in the mood to suffer my shenanigans. His hair was mussed, dry, curling over on itself rather than slicked back and shining with so much pomade. “Come now, Thomas. You know how I despise these affectations. It’s just you and me here. Our guest is not so accustomed to early mornings as you and I. He likely won’t be up until well after breakfast.”

“He could stand to skip a meal every now and again,” I said under my breath, however unwisely. Thankfully, Mr. Courtney gave no formal rebuke. Rather, he turned his attention to the clouds. The corners of his mouth may have tilted toward a smile.

“Miss Maddy said she found two chickens torn apart this morning when she went out to get eggs. Figure there are foxes about again?”

“Might be that.” I thought of the dog pack, snarling, tense. “I didn’t see any holes in the coops, but I’ll give them and the perimeter fence a good look before the end of the day.”

Courtney nodded. He lingered a while, sometimes ran his fingers through his coarse hair, played idly with the straps of a saddle hanging on the wall. He didn’t speak again until I excused myself to go deal with the yard, and then he asked, “Are your studies going well?”

I shrugged. “It’s summer, and I’m working, but I fit in some reading where I can.”

“I see that.” He smiled. It was genuine and broad, his smile, not his usual tight-lipped smirk, and it made his lips fuller, made the inch-long scar at the corner of his mouth stretch and darken. “You’re still going to go through with it, then?”

I’d let slip, once upon a time, that I intended to leave the islands, at least for a little while, in pursuit of higher education. At the time, he’d seemed excited for me, spoke of the importance of broadening one’s horizons. Since then I’d drawn the attention of a few schools and had my heart set on Fisk University. “Saving up what I make here so I can travel well,” I told him. “End of summer and I’m gone.”

“Looks like you’ve got it figured out. But why go all the way to Fisk? Shaw’s a great deal closer to home and they have a hell of a medical program. You could make a real difference around here with that kind of schooling.”

Honestly, I hadn’t put much thought into it. My grandfather, for the few years I’d known him, spoke highly of Tennessee, of the advancements they seemed ready to make in the name of equality, and that Fisk University had been at the fore, had graduated some of the first and finest Negroes in the southern states. But, aside from that and motivation to establish my own identity, I had no real designs for my life, no plan I could consider anything but impetuous.

“How’s your momma feel about it?”

“I don’t think she believes it’s going to happen.”

I expected him to monologue about the importance of family or a mother’s love or something like that. Instead, he said, “Well, you’ll have to make your own way sooner or later, and there are more enlightened places in this world than here. Places where people see you as your own man, rather than as a product of the people you were born to.”

I don’t think he was aware of his mounting agitation. He fumbled absently with the chain of his pocket watch. He glanced repeatedly at the lodge. He chewed at the inside of his cheek.

“How did you do it?” I asked.

Mr. Courtney sighed, chuckled to himself, and then he waved the conversation out of existence. “I should let you get back to work. And I should take care of some things myself, before Barksdale wakes. Maybe we will have the occasion to speak more frankly about adulthood once our guest has disembarked.”

---

It took the rest of the day to find and fix the issue with the fencing, a small gash that was hidden by scrub brush. It didn’t appear to be the work of foxes or any other animal, and there were no signs of rust that would have weakened the chain links, but to think that someone in the village might have done something like this was beyond me. We had neither desire nor need to risk running afoul of the Nimrod Club.

When evening came, I made my usual rounds, made sure the animals were where they needed to be, fed and watered, then accompanied the club’s cook on her walk home. My momma told me it was the gentlemanly thing to do and Miss Maddy was always appreciative to have someone help her tote sacks of linens she meant to wash overnight. This time, though, there were none.

She wasn’t much of a talker, Miss Maddy. I got the feeling she might have been, in her younger days, if she’d ever been young. But as we walked, she regaled me with stories of the club’s past, of how it wasn’t always as kind a place to work and how Mr. Courtney turned it around and how now she wasn’t so sure what would become of the place because of the stank Barksdale was putting on it.

I said, “Come on now, Miss Maddy, he can’t be as bad as all that,” and she looked at me like I’d said something unforgiveable about the good baby Jesus. After that, she was quiet for the rest of the walk.

At the door to her cabin, she told me how thankful she was to always have someone like me to help her out. “You a good man, Thomas. Lil ignant sometime, but smart, and you heart in a good place.”

I knew better than to cross my elders, so I simply said, “Thank you, Miss Maddy,” and left her to her evening.

---

The trek home from Miss Maddy’s took me a long way from Hope Point, from the dogs and whatever had them on edge, but an uncomfortably cool breeze blew from its direction. Closer to the village, the way grew more congested, folks I rarely ever saw coming out of their homes dressed in fine clothes, ladies in their pastel dresses with fresh flowers ringing their hats, men in their best suits.

“Y’all look like you’re on the way to church,” I said when I came upon them.

“Might as well be that,” one of the men said. “Gramma Dee called a get-together. You best go wash the barnyard outcha hair and catch up.” This set the girls around him to giggling. Fine as the group of them looked, each man and each woman wore a single unstruck match behind an ear.

---

Gramma Dee lived near the shore, her land marked by a perimeter hedge of various bushes, half-dead trees, and steel constructs adorned with upside-down blue bottles. Her house sat well off the road, nestled deep in her wild garden. She had a use for everything grown there, from the elderberries to the hot peppers to the sage and the plants only she could identify, and she shared her bounty openly. Once, I’m told, even Mr. Courtney sought her help when one of his guests suffered a rattlesnake bite. She’d just sent him out to strip some bark from her angelica tree. By the time her patient left the islands, you couldn’t tell he’d brushed up against death at all.

In her backyard, oil lamps were strung between trees, forming a boundary of soft yellow light against the coming night. Enough tables and chairs to accommodate the whole village lined the way to a whole hog feast. Gramma Dee herself sat in a chair beyond the reach of the light, against the stone walls of a praise hall long ago rendered hollow by flame.

I threw together a plate of pork and greens and sweet potato pone, my stomach tied in knots after a long day of work, and sat in the seat my mother had saved for me. I ate quickly and quietly, while my mother talked with what felt like the whole of Ediwander Island. They went on about weather and work and health and the food—how good it was and how the Lord did provide!—until Gramma Dee came off her roost, took up a hickory branch she used as a walking stick, and stood behind the remainder of the hog.

“I bin prayin,” she said. “Fuh all y’all, but speshly Miss Serena since she juss move back an I think we all gree she be needin all the prayin she kin get.” At that there were mumbles of agreement. My mother and a couple of others gave a kindly, “Amen.”

Gramma Dee continued. “I tink we all kin use some prayin right nah.” Several more amens and a “praise Jesus.” She launched into an overlong prayer, and didn’t break off until the congregation’s recital lost its verve. Then she raised her branch and brought it down on the table. She lifted it again and brought it down. And again. And again. The table shook with a mighty rhythm. A low humming started in her breast. After a couple of bars, the gathering mirrored the melody. Even I, with my disaffection with religiosity, found myself moved to join the call and response. Somehow, no matter how our voices swelled, the rhythm resonated above all. How so slight a form could keep up for so long, I’ll never know. But go on she did, well into the night, only stopping for an occasional sip of water or to lead us all in prayers of protection for our immortal souls.

---

As we broke apart for the night, we were all of us instructed to keep to the village for the next few days, and we did as instructed because when Gramma Dee insisted, we all listened, ramifications be damned. So I was sitting on a stool outside my house, watching buzzards circle but never dive for prey, when Mr. Courtney came calling. He was even more disheveled than he’d been the previous day, and in the clouds of dust his charger kicked up, he looked more like one of us than of the Nimrod’s elites.

“When are you coming to work?” he huffed. “The day’s half done. And there were more dead hens about when I walked the yard this morning.”

I stared him down. Poor Mr. Courtney, he was a sweet man and undeserving of his part in all of this. I stuffed my tongue into my cheek. “I gots de toot ache, baws. Cain’t git ober dere fo t’morrah.”

The hurt in Mr. Courtney’s eyes crushed me. He nodded his understanding. “Miss Maddy is suffering a similar ailment. Must be something going around.”

“Muss be dat, baws.”

“Barksdale is an imbecile,” said Mr. Courtney after a fashion, “but he’s not worth falling out of good standing with the club. There are only so many good jobs on this island, and the goddamned white man is eating up more of this place every day.”

That was a peculiar thing to say, I thought, and I looked him up and down like he might not realize what sort of man was saying the words that were coming out of his mouth.

He checked his watch. “I need to get to the mainland and back before the last ferry sets off. I hope your ‘toothache’ isn’t a symptom of some more concerning malady.”

“Wait,” I said when he turned his horse around. I got up and handed him a match from the box my mother had given me. He took it and nodded. I think he understood.

I hoped he understood.

---

That day, and for many days after, not one of us set foot outside the village. It stung all of us at least a little, for even those that weren’t on Mr. Courtney’s payroll benefited from the commerce it helped to stimulate. Each sunset brought with it a gathering at Gramma Dee’s, every one more impassioned than the last. It was a time of great fellowship, while it lasted. We were one people, whole and hearty, and the pressing unease, the sleepless nights, the unseasonably cold winds, none of it had power over us there. Some nights we hung about longer than we ought to have, got more inebriated than Gramma Dee cared to see—though she never banned the passing of liquor. Only when tongues were so well lubricated did the stories of strange happenings come to light. Some reported the pack of curs taking to the roads, trailing them to their homes. Some saw only one dog, a massive black thing more wolf than mutt, silent, padding circles between the village and the cemetery gates.

I encountered no such oddities, but then I lived closer to Gramma Dee’s than most. But every night, once I settled into bed and I was ready for sleep to claim me, the world took on a curious gravity, drawing darkness down from the heavens, muting the shine of the moon and stars, casting the island in a hazy pallor.

---

Times were tense. Gramma Dee had been doing quite well instilling in all of us a healthy anxiety regarding all things unworldly, but otherwise we went on about our days as we had since the boycotting of the Nimrod Club began, tending late season crops and hiding from the hottest part of the day.

After almost two weeks, at our gathering, when Gramma Dee got up to pray for us, she looked around at all our tired faces, she asked, “Weh Maddy?”

The congregation mumbled. We’d taken for granted the rhythm of our gatherings, never considered that someone might not show, that someone might opt to do something else with her evening. And given the looming unease, her absence didn’t bode well.

Gramma Dee caught my eye, waved me up to her side. “Go see t’her,” she whispered in my ear. “Ain’t like Maddy not t’be yuh.” Remembering the concern with which she sent me on my way, I wonder now if she didn’t know more than she bothered to share with the rest of us. I wonder if she knew what she was sending me to face.

---

By the time I got to Miss Maddy’s house, constant rolls of thunder threatened rain. At my approach, half a dozen mangy curs crept out onto the road, a couple of them limping my way and, seeing that I meant them no trouble, turned toward the cabin. The front door was open, and shadows shifted inside. I heard low weeping, the sort that comes from the fearful when terror has taken the last of their strength.

Out of her house crept…something. My young mind struggled to make sense of the writhing black thing that exited through her front door, and I’ve struggled to find the words in the decades since. It bore resemblance to a person pulled too thin, too-long arms terminating in taloned fingers grabbing at the dirt. The sight of it sent the dogs yowling. It turned its attention my way, a single, red-rimmed eye where there ought to have been a face.

A ripple of agony tore through me, made my head spin, my nose bleed, my eyes almost quit on me, and in that pain I saw what the thing sought out, a glimpse of a glass flask laying at the foot of a marker in Hope Point lifted from its place of prominence by thick white fingers. The thing’s anger bristled along my spine, filled me with a dreaded certainty as to the lengths it would go to retrieve this prized possession. So petrified was I by what transpired between this creature and I that I hadn’t realized that the dog pack had moved to form a barrier of arched backs and gnashing teeth between me and it. For a moment, the thing seemed to contemplate the situation, tilting toward the canines, that one eye blinking, flitting from dog to dog. And then it was gone, flowing into the far shadows like ink lost to river rapids.

Just as quickly, Miss Maddy was at her door, tears in her eyes, a shotgun in her hands.

“Miss Maddy,” I said, but her focus was off in the direction the creature had departed. Her bosom heaved. “It’s gone, Miss Maddy, you can put that gun down.”

She didn’t. “You seen that thing?”
“Yeah, I seen it.”

“I ain’t never seen no dog big as that. Run up on me when I was bout to head over to Dee’s. Chased me inta my’own house. It ain’t get up off me til you come round. Then I went an got this here to put it down fore it hurt somebody.”

“Miss Maddy, that wasn’t no dog.”

She finally dropped her firearm, rubbed her eyes. “No no no no no. No. I ain’t up fuh no foolishness. This—”

Shouting from the direction of the Nimrod Club, indistinct over the distance.

“I know what it wants, Miss Maddy. It—it told me.”

“Boy, you bettah take that foolishness home,” she said, and she meant it, even as her demeanor suggested she understood the truth of it more than she was willing to admit. And that was the end of it. She shouldered her shotgun and went back into her house, leaving me to fend for myself.

The creature was headed for the club, for the flask. Were it not for the caliber of Mr. Courtney’s character, I would have left their fate in its hands. But after all the times he helped us out, it felt like leaving a relative caught in a riptide to drown.

---

At the lodge I found Courtney in the yard, wholly disheveled, shouting for Barksdale. Some other white man had shown up since our boycott began, this one the antithesis of Barksdale in description and disposition, and he was running off into the trees, into whatever unholiness lurked there. Courtney was not far behind, but he stopped when he heard me on the approach.

“I don’t think he took it with him.” Had he had his own encounter with the creature? Had it shared with him as it had with me? If that had been the case, then he was a sterner man than I, for, aside from the lack of polish about his appearance, he kept his wits about him, whereas I, if I’d been given a chance, would’ve ranted my way through the entirety of my brush with madness. “Check his room. We’ve got to track the damned fool down before he gets himself killed.”

“Maybe we should let the demons have him,” I suggested.

“You want a white man dead or gone missing on the island? You think that’s going to fare well for any of us?”

How many times had I—had any of my people—wanted men such as Barksdale to find oblivion? A dark and greedy part of me wanted that now. But what if? It would undoubtedly draw investigation from the mainland, and it was a roll of the dice as to whether those whose attention would be upon the island were likely to be sympathetic to the locals’ view of events. “No,” I sighed. “I suppose not.”

Courtney scrambled out into the night, leaving me to do what I could. The window in Barksdale’s room had been drawn open, and a persistent gale brought the rain. I found his room buried in his writings, damp pages scattered everywhere, plastered against the walls, the ceiling, the floor. His bed was soaked, as was the lovely carpet beneath the drawing table in the corner. The window was stubborn and I fought with it, taking the brunt of the wind and rain until it unstuck and slammed shut, cracking a pane. Outside, the dog pack paced.

After a few minutes of frantic searching, I found the flask under his bed, laying in a soup of carpet fibers and rainwater. Given the severity of the situation, I should have run out into the night, but instead I stood baffled by the innocence of the rounded glass bottle half-filled with an odd black syrup, the front embossed with a simple palmetto and a single X. What someone so purportedly enlightened as Barksdale could want with so shabby a thing confounded me.

A crash of thunder sent me bolting out into the storm, the dogs at my heels, and, not knowing where else to turn, for the creature had left no instructions, I made for Gramma Dee’s. But I didn’t get far before she found me. She was a stout figure in the dark, soaking wet despite the parasol she shouldered, standing in the middle of the muddy road, an oil lamp hoisted like a lighthouse on a rocky shore.

She held out a hand to bring me out of my sprint, looked me over with her rheumy eyes. “Yuh git it, den?”

I nodded, and that was enough for her. She ambled away, and I followed.

“Gramma Dee, this—this thing I saw…” The words were hard to find. “It almost got Miss Maddy. It told me—”

She held up her hand but kept her attention on the road ahead. “Maddy, she okay. She say a dog come up in huh house. She know bettuh dan dat. Ain’t no dog I ebbuh see come up inna house wid pussonul grievances.”

“You know what it is then?”

Gramma Dee nodded. “We all know wuh it be. We juss don’ wanna say. But we gwine mek it right all de same.”

---

The storm went as quick as it came, and by the time we got to Hope Point Cemetery, it was little more than a rumor told by distant, strobing clouds. Gramma Dee led the way through the narrow passages between grave markers. Near the great oak, where the smells of wet moss and damp earth were strongest, her light did not wash out the shadows, and the closer we got to it, the more they congealed, until the thing from Miss Maddy’s house loomed over us, its single red eye flaring its discontent.

“Oh, you hush, nah.” Gramma Dee said dismissively, shaking the rain from her parasol before tucking it under her arm.

Below the creature’s eye, the darkness tore apart, protruded into jagged points, a smiling canid snout. The noise came from it curdled the air, turned the night thick with foreboding. And Gramma Dee just shooed it away.

“Hush, I say!” She took me by the hand, pulled me forward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the dog pack bristle. It must have taken her a moment to gather that I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, because none of us moved an inch for an awkwardly long time before she whispered at me, “Leddown befo’um.”

I fumbled the flask and it fell, landing on the short grass carpeting the burial plot in front of which we found ourselves. A newer headstone, only beginning to take on weathered edges, and the creature perched upon it like a demon upon the chest of a sinner. One wraithlike arm extended, lay a sharp finger upon the etched sigil of the flask. On contact the rest of the creature followed, melting down into the grave soil, which drank of it greedily.

In the minutes after, not even the nighttime animals made a sound. The dogs surrounded me and Gramma Dee, rubbed up against our legs. Gramma Dee absently scratched behind the ears of one. “Dat be d’end uh dat. You gon be okay?”

She didn’t wait for my answer. Off she went toward home, a few of the dogs breaking off and following her, while the remainder scurried off toward the Nimrod Club.

---

I stayed behind well into the thin hours of the morning, trying to make academic sense of what had transpired, finding no hope of a reasonable explanation.

On the way home, I was met by Mr. Courtney. He’d come from the direction of the marsh and the fine fabric of his pants were pasted to his calves.

“I take it the deed is done, then?” he said.

I nodded. “Barksdale?”

“He’ll have one hell of a story, but he’ll pull through. Sinclair took him back to the lodge by motorcar. I could do with some air.”

He made for the Nimrod Club. After all that had transpired, the company of another person was preferable to solitude, so I walked with him a while. We kept a comfortable silence for a good long while. And not until we approached the cemetery did he say anything.

“I’m going to close the club, I think,” said Courtney. “Once my obligation to Barksdale has been met.”

The shock of this was nothing after our dealings with the otherworldly, and my response was a dull, “Uh huh.”

“I thought I could do it, you know? Live out my days here. Maybe be accepted here, in time. My family’s roots are in the islands, did you know that? No. Why would you? I’ve been a fool keeping it to myself all this time.”

Descendant of a plantation owner, I assumed, come back to claim what he saw as his birthright.

“My grandmother is buried here. In the back of Hope Point, near the water. My momma got away from here, made a comfortable life in Baton Rouge. Whole other world there. Lots wrong, sure, but a little more forgiving of some things than people in these parts. Made me think I could be my own man. Without…

“Anyway, Barksdale put some things in perspective. Ediwander Island is not immune to the hate this country has to offer, no matter how much like Paradise it looks. And I can no longer stand the ruse. I’m going to tell him who I am—who I truly am, and I hope to God that knowledge haunts him the rest of his days. He calls me friend. Let’s see what he calls me then.”

We walked on. I only half-listened, for what else might the island hold, if it could conceal so dark a thing as that monstrosity? Later, when I turned his words over in my mind, I felt no small amount of shame for having nothing more to say at the time.

---

“I promise on my life that I’ll have no part in bringing any more despicable men to this place,” he’d said. A little while later, he chuckled. “Who knows if our paths will cross again. But if they do, maybe I can earn my way into Hope Point.”

“It’s not my place to say. But I’d argue for you, sure enough. As much as you’ve done for the people here…”

I let the thought hang there. Courtney had a mournful happiness about him, like the backhanded joy that comes with a loved one moving on to their eternal reward. “Careful, Thomas. I might take you up on that.”

---

As promised, Courtney shuttered the Nimrod Club a week after Barksdale’s departure, and we left the building to be reclaimed by the land. Without our presence, sweetgrass spread across the yard, blooming in tufts of silken purple. Magnolia saplings and young palmettos took hold too near the lodge’s foundations, weakening the walls until they started folding in on each other. Only the dogs cared to tread there, hunting the small game that proliferated in the overgrowth.

College came and went—Shaw, in the end, was the better fit for me—and I made a comfortable living as a physician traveling the Carolina coast, never too long from Ediwander Island. I took momma’s house when she passed, fixed it up and filled it with books I lent to anybody who wanted—or needed—one. I thought of Courtney infrequently, sometimes wondering how he was getting on, sometimes wishing he could see the man I’d become. He would have been delighted. So all of that I tell his ashes as I dig the hole for his urn and inter the brass canister containing him. I had a simple granite plaque etched with his name and some dates I took an educated guess at, and I lay that over the basketball-sized plot, hoping the currents of the great ocean guide him to a lasting peace.

---

Host Commentary

 

‘Y’all stay resting.’

 

So much of this story, for me, is wrapped up in those three words. A pragmatic acceptance of the supernatural as part of the everyday, a deep love and respect for the people who have come before you and a refusal to accept that they’re word is inviolate. The past is the only thing that’s concrete but that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing that’s real and this story does a stunning job of embracing the uncertainty of change and using it as a lens rather than a shield.

That uncertainty is wrapped up tight in James Courtney himself and Jamie does some of his absolute best work in a story full of excellence, in slowly peeling the layers of the man away. An outsider, a white man, a club owner, a coloniser. Everything we see of Courtney adds in more detail and none of that detail is good. Very little of it is detail he knows too, and there’s something tragic in the man if you want there to be. He can’t see the terrible irony of his family’s past. He can’t see how the kinship he thinks he feels is rather a sense of ownership. He is the definition of liberal guilt, of colonizer’s regret. He’s a threat because he doesn’t think he is one. He’s a problem because he doesn’t see that the solutions he offers only work for him and people like him. He is unrest, chaos, in a world built on the careful negotiation of stasis.

It’s also interesting that the actual monster in this story is actually a smaller threat. My favourite beat here is that the community are brought together by what’s happening rather being driven apart. They’re in terrible danger, and the story makes no bones of that, but it’s a know danger, a known threat. Unlike Courtney, weaponizing his outsider status even as he’s desperate to abandon it.

If there’s reassurance here, and there is, right alongside the horror, then it comes from one of the most practical, elemental tenets of horror: survival. The islanders outlast the problem. They outlast Courtney. Courtney, on at least some level, has enough self awareness to know how much of the problem he is. Nothing stays the same, even change and in 2025 that’s both a horrific realisation and a comforting one. The monsters are at our door. But the monsters are known and that, if nothing else, is a good start. And a fantastic story. Thanks to all.