A sisters love for her younger brother even after death.
The Big Sister
By Raymond Mayotte
Copyright 2006
The tires of Neal Carlson's Ford Explorer hummed smoothly along the rain soaked pavement as he drove along the strange country road looking for the particular farmhouse of a new client.
"Once you pass the Four Corners look for the mailbox with my name on it," the client had said.
Of course the client didn't tell him how narrow and dark this road was and that on most nights, especially when it rained, that the road would be fog bound. Still Neal felt lucky because there was only patches of the fog that he had to drive through, but these patches were so thick that he had no idea where the road was as he passed through them. More than once he came out of the fog barely in time to find the Explorer headed for the ditch beside the road.
Thinking he must be near the Four Corners he came out of another patch of fog when the headlights of the Explorer illuminated the figure of a young girl in long pigtails, standing in the middle of the road.
The last thing Neal remembered as he swung the steering wheel around was how the fog seemed to incase the girl but not touch her, then he a saw the huge tree the instant before the explorer slammed into it.
The next thing Neal was aware of was waking up in a hospital emergency ward with a crew of doctors and nurses working over him.
"You are one lucky guy," a Maine State Trooper told him. Once the crew of medic's finished with him and said he was only shook up a bit.
"I am not sure about that, Neal said, putting his hand to his aching head.
"Listen," the Trooper said. "When you see the condition your Explorer is in you'll understand what I mean. Now can you tell me what happened so I can put it in my report?" he asked.
"You're saying she was a young girl about eight or nine, in pigtails and wearing a yellow dress. Are you sure about this," the Trooper said, a strange look coming over him.
"Oh I am sure," Neal said. "The image of the girl standing in the middle of the road is burned into my brain," he went on. "Why? I didn't hit her did I?" He asked in a panic.
"No, no," the Trooper assured him, slipping a small note pad, on which he was writing, into his shirt pocket.
"Then why the strange look?" Neal persisted.
"Okay, this is kind of strange, but under the circumstances I'll tell you, but you have got to know that if you tell anyone that I told you I will deny it. Fair enough?" He asked.
Then when Neal shook his head in agreement, the Trooper started.
"You're not the first person that has seen a young girl, just as you described this one, standing in the road near the Four Corners at night. In fact in the last year we have had a dozen reports. Three other Troopers and I have spent hours looking for her, we have even canvassed the neighborhood."
2
"Believe me she doesn't live around here and no one has ever seen anyone like her."
"Well she's not a ghost, she must come from somewhere," Neal said, trying to make a joke of it. That is until he saw the look on the Troopers face.
"What? What is it?" Neal said, reaching out to lay his hand on the Troopers arm.
"Look I can't say anything, but if you are that interested go and see old Charlie," he said, taking out the pad again and writing a name and address on it for Neal. "When you do, ask him about the old cemetery at the Four Corners."
"There's a cemetery there," Neal asked.
"Yup!" The Trooper said. "Its very old, maybe from the early eighteen hundreds, with only about a dozen old slate gravestones. If you didn't know that it was there you would go right by it, what with all the grass and weeds grown over the place."
"You mean that it is so old the town doesn't take care of it?" Neal asked.
"No, it is on private land," the trooper started, "and no one seems to know who owns it. No one even thought much about the place until last year when some teenagers that had been drinking, went there and pulled all the markers out of the ground and took them home," he said, shaking his head in disgust.
"The neighborhood was up in arms about it and we spent a lot of time rounding up the stones and trying to put them back on the grave they came from. Of course we had no idea where each of them came from so we done the best we could."
"Do you think that has anything to do with the little girl?" Neal asked, now more than interested in what the Trooper was telling him.
"Well let me say this," the Trooper said, nodding his head a few times. "Before the incident there was never a report of anyone seeing the little girl on the dark road by the old cemetery."
A few days later Neal again drove along the road looking for Old Charlie's house. He was surprised to find it was the last house on the road before the Four Corners. In fact it was diagonally across from the corner lot where the old cemetery was. When he slipped from the seat of the rental car he was driving, he could look across the road about thirty yards and see the tops of the gravestones.
Charlie turned out to be quite a character and Neal liked him right away. A short time later they sat on Charlie's front porch, from where they could look across and see the cemetery, sipping on a cold drink while Neal told Charlie his story.
"Ain't never seen no little girl or ghost," he said, shaking his head back and forth, "but it wouldn’t surprise me after what those kids did last year. Imagine disturbing those graves after all of these years. Ain't no call for it at all," he ended.
"I can see that the grave markers are replaced, but maybe they missed one or two," Neal said, as he and Charlie left the porch and crossed the road to the cemetery to look around.
"Nope! There are fourteen of them," Charlie said, after he had counted them one by one, pointing his finger at each one as he did. "That's exactly how many there were, I know because when I was a youngster I use to play in this corner lot. Of course at the time it was all grass and no trees or weeds, and a split rail fence always cordoned off the section where these graves are. Somewhere I have a picture or two of it my mother took when I was a little scrapper," he ended.
3
"I don't suppose you know anything about a little girl being buried here do you?" Neal asked.
"Yup! That would be her gravestone there," Charlie replied, pointing to a small piece of slate with something unreadable on it. "Esther, was her name, and next to her is her younger brother Henry. When I was a boy my grandfather often told me stories about the few farms around here and the people that ran them."
"Esther here was only about eight years old when her younger brother died of consumption. The two were very close and when she knew that Henry was dying, she told him not to be afraid because she would come and be with him every day and take care of him."
"She did just that, and everyday when her chores where done she would come here and bring wild flowers for Henry's grave and sit and talk to him for hours. All went well until winter came, still Esther came here every day no matter the weather and that was how she caught Pneumonia and died shortly after."
"The last thing she asked of her father was to be buried next to Henry so that she could look after him," Charlie ended. The two men now crossing back across the narrow road toward Charlie's house, each deep in their own thoughts.
"Wait a minute," Neal suddenly exclaimed, turning in the middle of the road to go back to the cemetery where he studied the grave markers for a time.
"Do you think you could find those old pictures you were telling me about?" He asked Charlie, who had followed him back and now stood beside him.
"I believe I know just where they are," he said, turning back to cross the road and enter the house.
About twenty minutes later he returned with three browned pictures and handed them to Neal, one of the pictures showing the, then neat, little cemetery behind a small boy in knickers.
For a short time he studied the pictures, glancing from them to the markers in the weeds before them.
"Look here," he told Charlie. "See this is the little girls grave and her marker, and this," he said, pointing to the open space beside it, "must have been where her brother Henry's marker was, but as you can see it is now missing."
With this he stepped in among the gravestones until he found another stone similar to the young girl's and knew it must be the boys. Knowing the stone was in the wrong place, he reset it beside Esther where her younger brother laid.
Later Neal said goodbye to Charlie, promising to come back soon to visit.
Since that time there has never been another report of a young girl in pigtails seen standing in the road near the Four Corners again.
End.
Chris has been fostered at the Crowley boot camp since he turned seven. At sixteen, he is finally ready to run away because his foster father is an abusive person who works Chris and the other children to the point of exhaustion. All he has left of h
Grab those side-irons, saddle up and join former Civil War sharpshooter Luther Henry for a ride into pure terror, western-style…think ‘Wild Wild West’ meets ‘The X-Files’.
The Big Sister
