The Red Rope: A Ghostly Love Story

Ordinarily I travel by rail and have no need of those hospitable families that take in travelers on country roads. In the summer of 1890, however, my appointment as a census agent took me "dead in the country," as the saying goes, where the setting sun caught me miles from the nearest hotel.

On one occasion, with an overcast sky and rumbling on the horizon, I came upon an impoverished settlement on a hillside by the road. Six or seven cabins--some of them built, I would guess, before the Indian Removal--overlooked a roadside field of weeds. In the semicircle of ruts that was the village's street, I met barking dogs and ragged children. A bearded man stood in the door of one cabin, his thumbs hooked in his belt, his capacious belly overhanging it with the grace of one who knew his place to be large enough to accommodate his girth. He regarded me in the gray light and extended his arms.

"Sir," he called out, "would you be needing lodging for the night?"

My host's cabin had been one room in Indian days, I saw, remodeled with ceiling boards, a loft above and a lean-to in back. I would sleep in the loft. The lean-to was the bedroom of my host and his wife. The cabin had no separate kitchen, but it was far from primitive. The woman served our supper from an iron stove, and there were books, a painting, an organ, a brass lamp, and even a sewing machine. I had fallen in with the gentry of this mud settlement.

"Ossahatchee was always small," he told me after supper, "the only good farmland hereabouts being in the bottom yonder, but in the old days before the War, the world came to us. That field out yonder, that was the Ossahatchee Campground with a big brush arbor of logs, bigger than any town church, and all around were shelters of families that came here every fall, circling the arbor like an Indian camp. That's what it once was, council ground for the Creeks. After folks ran the Indians off, it was hymn-singing instead of heathen dances. Not much changed, I reckon, but the complexion of the heathens. Until the War, of course. The War changed everything."

We both looked to the window at the sound of thunder. The panes were black.

"I'm much obliged," I told him.

"Well, a stranger shouldn't be left to spend the night out of doors, not with lamps in the windows around him. By God, it ain't civilized. The stranger at your door might be an angel, the Good Book says. Not that I suspect that in your case."

He refilled my glass. I became aware of the muffled clanking of dishes, muted as if through fog. His wife was subtracting her presence so well that, in spite of common sense, I felt that she could not hear our words, as if she were outside a window. Of course, she heard us, every breath.

"They tell strange stories about this place," he said. "Not surprising with what all goes on at camp meetings--fights and friendships, deaths and, well, not so much births as the process set in motion. People lived more here in one week than they did at home the whole rest of the year. That was before the revivals moved to town. Before the railroads. The War. The War finished us. The arbor rotted, the sheds too. During Reconstruction, as they called it, nobody reconstructed Ossahatchee Campground. Folks out here just worried about eating. But they had stories."

"What kind?"

He fixed me in his left eye as if surprised I'd picked up on the hint he'd dropped twice before. But I didn't get on in politics without knowing what people want. He had a tale rammed and capped, my host did, and aimed to bang it my way. He took a long sip of whisky and pretended to think.

His woman scraped out the last dish. She was his age, possibly older, gray salting the bun of her hair, but time had been kinder to her. She kept the after-bloom of a figure that might even now turn a young man 's head.

"Well, since you ask," he said, "there is one they tell, happened early in the fall of '64, late in the War when things had soured for Lee and Tennessee and Mississippi were in Yankee hands. The Confederacy was turning inward, looking to keep its heartland. But folks out here in Ossahatchee hadn't cared much for the war to begin with, owning no slaves and feeling they hadn't been consulted. They had no love for uniforms of any color, and when this Macon County corporal came through bound for Columbus, rode up just like you did about dark, no family would take him in. They just pointed to the old camp arbor and told him he could sleep there.

"What choice did he have? He was out for adventure anyways, being the youngest son of a planting family with an education at the Macon Academy but no more future than a dog. No land, no slaves. All dressed up and nowhere to go. The War gave him something to do while he considered medicine, law, politics, and other disagreeable options. Well, this corporal tied up his mule, swept off some spiderwebs, and curled up for the night on one of the benches, watching stars through what was left of the roof.

"He was almost asleep when he felt a wind like an open door to an ice-house. He didn't get up, just opened an eye and saw her. She was a young thing in a white dress with flowing sleeves and her hair loose over her shoulders. Her face could've been pretty, but there was a twist in it, a cruel look, and it was as white as flour. Hanging out one of her sleeves was a red rope. She was the ghost of a girl that had hung herself, he knew because he'd heard of her kind. She was a hung girl's ghost hunting for a substitute.

"Then he really lay still and watched her pass." My host's hands floated in front of him. "When she climbed in the window of one of the cabins, he jumped up to follow. He knew she was up to something, and it wasn't missionary work. He was a young hero, I reckon, this Macon County corporal.

"When he got to the cabin and looked in the window--one of those old cabins from Indian days with bare pole rafters--there was the ghost girl on the rafter, her toes curled around it like a crow humming and mewing and dangling her red rope down into the room with a noose tied in it.

"But something else in the room caught the young corporal's eyes. It was a beautiful woman with tears pouring down her cheeks, alone with a baby at her breast. She would look down at the baby and listen to the hung girl's mewing, look at her baby again and cry. Finally, she tucked the little thing in a cradle and, standing in the middle of the cabin, the most lovely and pitiful thing the soldier from Macon County had ever beheld, she covered her face with her hands and sobbed like a lost child. He stared in the window, bursting to comfort her.

"Then the woman, the living one, began to speak, not even looking up. You say it's best, she sobbed, to die, but how can I leave my little girl?

"The ghost in the rafters only dangled her red noose in the poor girl's face, one end tied to the rafter, swinging it back and forth and humming a song like a distant camp meeting. Yes, sir, and the woman stood up and, not knowing the man was at the window, undressed before his eyes. Standing, heartbreakingly naked, she sighed, 'Well, that's it.' Then she combed her hair with long strokes and pinned it back behind her head and put on a white dress, making herself more lovely even than before. All this time, the ghost in the rafters mewed and dangled its red rope.

"The woman found a long sash in her cedar chest, a purple sash that looked like silk. She climbed up on a chair and tied one end over a rafter, and on the other end she made a noose and pulled it tight round her neck. This was too much for the Macon County corporal. He drew his sword and smashed the window. She was already hanging, but he cut the sash and gathered her in his arms. His tears wet her face, and her eyes opened. You've only got one life, he told her, one precious life, by God! She sobbed again, but a softer kind of sob, so he knew she wanted to live.

"The baby was crying. The neighbors stared in through the smashed window. The hung girl was gone, but she'd left her rope on the rafter. The corporal unbarred the door, but first he cut down the red rope. He walked back toward his bedroll in the old arbor, not saying a word. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeve, and coiled the rope around his arm. Not a minute too soon.

"You see, the hung girl was waiting for him, blocking his way. I must have a word with you, soldier, she said, her face a chalky mask of politeness. For years I have searched this desert place for a woman to to take my rope and give me peace. And tonight, sir, I almost succeeded, but you spoiled it all. I'm not complaining, sir. You can have her for a time. I know she is lost to me. The ghost smiled. But in my haste, sir, I left behind a trifle that is mine. I must have it back.

"The rope slipped out of the soldier's sleeve, just the tip, and she hissed an icy wind.

''No, ma'am, he told her. You'd just get another poor girl in the same fix.

"Her face turned blue as gaslight. Her eyes glowed, and her hair stood on end. She reached for the corporal. He swung at her, but ghosts do funny things to the air around them. His fist bounced back to his own nose, but it turned out to hurt her more than it hurt him. When the blood splashed on her, the living blood, she screamed like a scalded cat and ran into the ground.

"The neighbors found him the next morning, blood down jacket. They thanked him for saving the woman, the young widow of a soldier killed in the War, ashamed of neglecting her. And now that red rope--"

"It disappeared," I guessed.

The bearded man smiled at me. One eyelid flickered as if about to wink.

"Well, in a manner of speaking, sir, yes. You see, the corporal, when he was getting back on his mule, he noticed a stinging on his arm and rolled up his sleeve. The rope had grown into his skin like a snake of welts, the way a vine grows into a tree. It didn't worry him, though, because it reminded him of what he had done, a badge of honor as he rode off to a hopeless war."

"And never returned?"

This time my host did wink.

"Well," he said, "he did ride off, this young corporal, sure enough." My host was unbuttoning his sleeve. "But I had to come back after the War. I had no choice, sir. I couldn't abandon her, not the way I'd come to love her."

On his bare arm I saw a line of welts, a little blurred perhaps and faded toward brown, but very much like the imprint of a red rope.

                                                                            Paul Toomer, 1898