Part 2 - Guardian of the Dead

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From JD -  Endorsement for Forever Cry.
Forever Cry was a great read. Not only is it an entertaining, heartwarming, and at times gut wrenching story of a family in the 1860's, it has fascinating history lessons woven throughout the book. 
Gillum has an incredible way of making history come alive. There is not much written about the post civil war days and the hardships experienced following the end of the war, especially for blacks in the south. It was heartbreaking to read about their plight to find work, land and dignity in the midst of their new found freedom. 
I came away with a new understanding of this very important time in history. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

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      This all happened years before my family moved to Arkadelphia, and I’m not really sure what happened to the guys who caused all this. I did not hear the first part of this story until many years later.

     My wife Barbara and I have two children, Corey and Kinley. When we moved, our son Corey was starting into the eighth grade, and our daughter Kinley would start into the fourth grade.

     We knew this might be our last move, if things worked out with the business we had just bought, a photography studio.

     Barbara ran the business, and I found a job teaching at Arkadelphia High School.

     We finally found just the spot, and bought five wooded acres out west of town about four miles to build a house on. It was heavily wooded, and I cleared out just enough trees initially to build the house.   At the back of the property was a very old cemetery, and just across the fence from it, on our land, was a very old shack. Strangely, it had a rail around the top, broken in one place.

     Corey and Kinley were young children when we built our house. They were curious about that old shack. We could never figure out why anyone would build it there. I went down with them through the woods to check it out. They wanted to use it for a playhouse. I decided that was all right if they would stay off those stairs and off the top. Some of those boards were getting very old, and it might be dangerous. They spent a lot of time playing in that old shack with their friends when they were young.

     Our children grew up in that house in the country. A few years later, Corey chose OBU. A few years after that, Kinley preferred HSU. Right after Corey started to OBU, he brought a couple of his buddies out for the weekend. All being adventurous, the boys wanted to camp in that old shack by the back fence.

     They were back home by midnight. A plank had fallen from the ceiling, seemingly for no reason at all, and raised a large knot on Corey’s buddy’s head. They all swore they heard a woman moaning in agony right outside, then they swore they could hear a woman screaming, a very high pitched scream, way out in the woods.

    That made up their mind. They headed up the trail toward our house. One of the boys just seemed sure he saw blinking lights inside the shack when he looked back, but you know how young guys are. Get a little scare and the imagination begins to work overtime.

     Both our children and their friends seemed to shy away from that old shack after that, and I didn’t discourage it. It had to be getting a little dangerous by now, being so old and partly rotten. I think by now the kids and their friends were building on that “haunted house” thing. Both of them began to tell stories of someone moving around upstairs in our house, while they were home alone. On top of that, Corey and his buddy claimed they once accidentally stepped on a grave when crossing that graveyard, and in the distance, they could hear a woman’s high pitched scream. Way off in the woods.

     My wife Barbara was getting tired of being a country girl. That dirt road kept her car dirty, and she was wanting back in town with cable TV and city water. The kids, well, they were about grown now, but were anxious to get away from that place. So, I put in ten months at hard labor, building our third house I have built. Right before we moved, I tore down that old shack at the back. Some of that lumber was still solid, and I might need it to build the grand kids a playhouse, someday, so I carried a couple of loads of it to our new house in town, stacked it in the edge of our woods, covered it up to save it.

     The years were flying by, and Barbara and I found ourselves with six grandchildren! Four boys and two girls. I still had not gotten around to building that playhouse.

 Kinley and her husband, Mickey, bought our studio in Arkadelphia, then moved to Little Rock and bought a Sports Photography franchise, which they continue to this day. Corey, also, followed in Barbara’s footsteps and became a photographer in Little Rock. I always thought kids usually followed in the father’s footsteps, but no, it was not to be. Corey soon decided to build his own studio in West Little Rock, and I helped supervise his contractors, living on site in my camper for several months. When finished, he had a lot of scrap lumber left over and gave it to me in payment for my time.  He said I could use it working on our rent houses.

     In the end, I decided to use it to build that playhouse for my grandchildren. I went one step farther, and built a tree house in the edge of our woods. When I was finishing up, I decided to check through that very old lumber. It had been stacked in our woods for many years, and maybe there was enough of it still sound enough to use. There was. I decided to build an addition to the top. I wound up building a second story, mostly from that very old lumber from out by the cemetery.

 My grandchildren loved it. For a year or so. I had made it so that the second floor could be reached only by climbing a knotted rope, to keep the small children from getting up to the second floor, maybe falling and getting hurt. Actually, it pretty well turned out that my older grandchildren couldn’t reach that second floor, either. That upstairs room has sat, empty and deserted, for many years now.

     Over time, I started noticing that strange things started happening, seemingly in that upstairs room of the tree house. CONTINUED IN FOUR DAYS.