The Reunion

She scoots along in a walker that supports her heavy frame , and her ankles are swollen from scars she later tells me resulted from her diabetes. Everywhere she walks, she is tailed by a young teenager, whose expression is rather dour. We are at a place where there are very few people of color so the fact that the teen is black is noteworthy.  It's the Camp Hadley reunion.

“Hey," calls the big woman, “HEY! Was that you whistling over there?" I had indeed been whistling and so I respond in the affirmative . My response is the opening of Pandora's box.

“My name is Sara and this here is my niece Stacy." Stacy has conspicuously turned away from me (and from her aunt).

“Stacy,"commands the older woman, “come meet the young man. He won't bite." Turning back to me , Sara adds “her mother don't make her meet enough people, so she's real shy, but I won't just let her slink around. I tell it like it is see, but her mama don't do that." Before I can respond, Sara launches into a story.
“I came to camp in 1978 for the first time. My sister was the camp nurse at the time so I was visiting her. Fell in love with the place right then and there."

“Oh, how wonderful," I say, not quite sure what to make of this bizarre encounter.

"STACY," shouts the big woman, heedless to my meaningless platitudes, “stand in FRONT of me. You know I don't like it when I can't see you."

As the teenager grudgingly trudges in front of her aunt, Sara adds this nonsequetor “my whole family is big, all of us except my nephew. He's six feet tall and 130 pounds"

“Wow,"I chirp aimlessly.
"He's a stick," she continues, whimsically, and stares out onto the field in front of us.

“Well," thunders Sara, breaking out of her pensive moment, “this place is just so spiritual. I keep telling Stacy that she ought to be more talkative here. Everybody here is one big community."

“People are nice..." I lamely offer.

“So so so much spirit," she adds sitting heavily in her walker. “There are spirits right now. Indians right here."

"Indians?" I ask beginning to feel the hair on the back of my neck raise up. I look at Stacy who is still working hard to ignore me.

“Oh yes honey. Dancing on the field as we speak. They're celebrating ."

My crazy meter is going off , but I cannot help myself as I ask “So....are there MALEVOLENT spirits here as well?"

She nods her head very slowly and for once is silent. Stacy shifts her weight to her other foot and stares wordlessly at her aunt. She's interested. So am I.

“Down at the boathouse. When I first got here in '78, I was doing a tour of the place. As I got close to the docks, I froze and told my sister I wouldn't go any closer. Intense pain went up and down my spine. When I got back to the cabin, I took off my shirt and I had huge scratches up and down my back, mmhmm yes I did. Do you know what it was?"

I shake  my head, enraptured.
“It was the claws of Satan that got me. Straight outta hell. Oh yes. Let me tell you something.  Before camp was camp, the Indians used to live here. Well, one day, a white  man came while the men were hunting.  He raped all the woman and girls of the tribe and strung up all the boys. When the men came home and saw what had happened they found the white man, dragged him to where the current boathouse is, and did the Indian equivalent of ‘drawing and quartering.’ So now, that spirit lives in the boathouse, and for what he did, he became a conspirator of Satan's. Now, I'm not sure that spirit is still there. But I ain't never been over there since, no way."

She was nuts, I realized. But I was nervous all the same. I wondered how she had come to know the back story of the boathouse ghost but I decided to avoid this question. What did she want me to DO with this information? When, a few moments later she offered to tell me who my guardian angel was, I declined vehemently. 

"Your loss," she said casually, slowly scooting away.

I stared after her with the paradoxical urge to beg her to tell me more and to flee from her as fast as I could.