STRAIGHT SCARED

From the Chapter "The Stuff Of Legends"

It is midnight and it is pitch black in the barnyard.  The only sound is an occasional chirp from a cricket that can’t sleep.  The quietness of Mr. Cleve’s farm in 1934 is disturbed by the almost imperceptible shushing sound of a Model-A Ford, coasting with its motor shut off, across the barnyard and under the corn shed on the side of the barn.  My sixteen year old father gets out of the car and gently closes the door, making nary a sound.  He is very late and wants to do nothing to wake Mr. Cleve, who will be furious at my dad’s tardiness. 

He stands absolutely still in the silence, listening for any irregular noises.  The soughing of the gentle summer breeze through the chinaberry and pine trees comforts him.  He is totally alert, and can see very little in the murky gloom, even though he has a flashlight.  A large sow inside the barn rustles through some dry corn shucks, sounding to the boy like someone sneaking up on him.  His heart leaps into his throat as his blood pressure soars to a dangerous level.  Everything he has that can stand up stands up.  He feels like a human porcupine.  He is scared to death.

My father was no coward, but when he was a young child Mr. Cleve would hold him up to the window after supper, describing the haints and booger men that came out after dark, and how they would torture and kill him if they caught him outside.  He also taught the young, impressionable boy that the sometimes invisible haints would pull him down into hell, where he would be stuck forever.   Miz Lula Belle joined in the training by putting a sheet over her head and hiding in the side yard after dark.  His father would then gleefully hold the frightened young boy up to the window and show him the haint waiting to get him.  Naturally, the young boy grew up deathly afraid of the dark. 

The young man, by this time scared out of his wits, is caught in a “fight or flight” quandary.  Since staying and fighting whatever was in the barn was out of the question, he chooses the flight option.  He takes off on his tip-toes at a dead run to the house to escape the booger men and haints that are waiting to tear his head from his body.  He has a flashlight but is too scared to turn it on because of what he might see.  He covers the distance to the front porch, streaking right past the window in his father’s front bedroom, in record time.  All he had to do now is climb up the porch steps and sneak down the thirty foot-long front porch to the door to the back bedroom and he would be home-free.  So he thinks.

Just as he is about to climb the steps to the front porch, he hears a voice from inside the house say, “Git back out to the barn, turn the car lights off, come back to the house and git your ass in bed.” 

In his effort to sneak inside without getting caught by his father, my father failed to turn off the car lights!  Now he is totally screwed.  He has to go all the way back to the dark barn with a haint inside, turn off the car lights, and return over the same dark foreboding route that is filled with demons and bugger-men.  Lord, have mercy.  Leaving the car lights on was not an option, haints or not.  Also, there were not enough haints in the netherworld to make him disobey his father.  He bravely runs full bore on his tiptoes again, back to the barn, not using his flashlight.  He runs so fast there is some doubt that his feet actually make contact with the ground.   A local would describe it as, “he flew back to the barn.”

The boy reaches the barn, and turns off the car lights. He begins his return trip to the house, not realizing that the barn door has slowly swung open on its own accord, and Raymond the mule is softly and quietly following him across the yard.  This time the young man ambles along at a slow shuffle with his flashlight turned off, trying to avoid his father saying anything else to him on this night from hell.  He sneaks across the yard and is about to put his foot up on the bottom step on the front porch.  He has heard nothing else from his father, and so breathes a big sigh of relief.  He is careful to not make the step squeak when he puts his weight on it.

He has no idea of the gigantic, Olympic record-breaking, free standing broad jump he is about to make across the front porch.  Raymond the mule, silently standing right behind the bedraggled young man, gives out a combination bray and snort, sort of a “bro-o-u-u-g-g-h-h” sound while nudging the boy in the back with his nose. That’s all it took to open the valve on the three hundred gallons of adrenalin that had built up in the young man’s pituitary gland.  The flashlight flies from his hand as if shot from a gun; he emits a single, guttural scream of absolute terror, and jumps as if propelled by a rocket engine.

Some say his loud, piercing scream of extreme and total shock and horror was heard as far away as the nearest town of Leslie , making it a six mile scream.  With this single, historic scream, he jumped clean to the back bedroom door, with only one foot making any sort of contact with the wooden front porch in between.  Consider that the porch was two or three feet off the ground, and you can begin to understand the raw power of the fear coursing through his body.  This was the action of a young man who has truly had the dog squeeze scared out of him.  Sensing there was no way he could make his son go back out into the dark a third time, Mr. Cleve got up and put Raymond the mule back in the barn, deciding that his son had had enough adventure for one night. 

Several farmers come by the next morning to ask Mr. Cleve if he knew anything about the strange and hideous noise that woke up their chickens and set their dogs to barking in the middle of the past night.  He commiserates with each and every farmer, and tells them his very own farm animals had indeed also been awakened by the same strange noise.  He joins them in their puzzlement, describing the noise he heard as a shout or scream that surely emanated from the bowels of hell.  There is some talk of asking the county sheriff to investigate the strange occurrence by searching the woods and swamps in that area for some sort of prehistoric, gorilla-like creature on the loose, but the idea fails to gain enough momentum to go forward.  My dad never came home late again.  His flashlight was never found.

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