The Dead Hand of Sweeney County Read online

  “That ain't your family's graveyard, son. That's... that's...” he peered through the fence.

  “Looks like the big one here says Conley,” I said. “I see a couple of Thorntons on the left, whoever they were. Hmm. Conley and Thornton.” I checked the map again. “Hey Mike, dig this. We came in on Thornton's Ferry Road. Meet the Thorntons.”

  “Yep, I thought you'd like it. Well, I'm getting hungry. Let's head back to the truck. You will have plenty of lunch hours to figure it out. Off the clock.”

  We stopped for Mike's favorite lunch, a Snickers bar and a Coke, then carried on in our usual fashion until sunset, which is to say that he drove every bit of that thirty seven miles twice, talking nonstop about what the job would require; I looked out the window, constantly relating the map in my lap to the world whizzing by, making location-specific notes when necessary. An hour after sunset he finally convinced himself that I was actually capable of doing the job for which he'd hired me and, after picking up our GPS base unit from the county airport and reminding me for the third time to charge all the equipment every night, we returned to my motel. I transferred the Igloo cooler to my truck, and he left for Atlanta.

  The following morning, I greeted the first group. Randy and Jack I knew from the Alabama office; they were experienced men accustomed to getting things done. From the Atlanta office, Steve came out to assist me in setting up a network of control points using the GPS equipment. Randy and Jack began performing the general topo survey from two control points Mike and I had set the day before, and Steve and I began our job of staying ahead of them.

  Surveying is the king of all blue-collar trades. As good as any one craftsman might be, from 'dozer operators to wallpaper hangers, nobody does a thing until the surveyor tells them where. Surveying once served as a school for engineers and military leaders. Along with demanding great physical endurance and outdoor skills, surveying requires one to read, write, and cipher in circles and angles. To understand its applications requires some familiarity with history, law, engineering, and business. Many a great man's career once included surveying. Mount Rushmore is just three surveyors and some other guy.

  Nowadays anyone not a registered moron knows GPS means global positioning satellites, and far, far more people think they know what that means than actually do. These satellites whip around the world in orderly, criss-crossing orbits, the idea being that at any one moment at least two of them will be somewhere above your horizon, wherever you are on earth. Now, these particular satellites are orbiting 12,000 miles out, twenty-four to twenty-eight of them at a time, and every one of them, every second, at the exact same moment, sends out a radio signal that says, “beep!” From the difference in time it takes for those beeps to be recorded by GPS receivers on earth, locations can be calculated over great distances with astounding accuracy. In our work, the points we set must prove accurate to within two-hundredths of a foot, a sphere smaller than the hole inside of a Life Saver. It is an astonishing scientific achievement, just the sort of thing we Americans take for granted.

  The basics of how it works are complicated enough; the how of setting up a tight little GPS network is pure geek-droolery, but understand that we stayed busy for two days before the rain moved in. That sent Steve, Randy, and Jack back to their respective offices, and it sent me to the courthouse.

  During our two hours in the White Horse, Eleanor Hubbard had filled me in on the general history of the area. This was frontier land before the Revolution, and when Patriots needed to escape Redcoats in Savannah, this is where they came. The White Horse itself, she told me, was built at the intersection of two stagecoach lines sometime around 1800. Over the years it had been a school, a family homestead, and in its latter years, a boarding house. Run down by time and overloaded with additions and “improvements”, by the early 1960's the place was in danger of being demolished when local citizens bought it and, with the help of a local architect, stripped the old girl down to her original plainstyle design and made the effort to have it named to the Historic Register and to maintain the building in keeping with its historical significance. I learned all that during our first meeting, but taken as I was by Eleanor herself, I completely forgot to ask if she knew anything about the Thorntons or Conleys.

  What one doesn't learn from the Historical Center, I have found, one might learn in a liquor store. After work that night, I stopped in for a bottle of Jamesons and asked the two gentlemen behind the counter if they'd ever heard of the Conleys or Thorntons.

  “And why would you be asking about the Conleys?” The older one asked.

  “I'm a surveyor. I have to count their trees.” I smiled and extended my hand. “I'm Addison.”

  “Trees?” asked the young man. “Whose trees?”

  The older man took my hand. “I'm Fred McSwain, and this is my son Butch. What did you say you're looking for?”

  “Well, like I said, I'm a surveyor, and the county is widening the highway between here and Reynoldston. The County Arborist wants me to count all the trees on this piece of property, and it has a cemetery out in the back--”

  “Daddy, he's talking about the haunted woods. You need to stay out of those woods at night. Crazy Isaac will chop you in two!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The boy's talking about a local legend, Addison. The last Conley to live there was Old Miss Elizabeth. She was really old, man, and she lived out there all alone except for her nurse and handyman. She died when I was a kid, and people started going there at night to drink, fool round, and have a good time.”

  “Still do,” Butch inserted.

  “I'll bet,” his dad rolled his eyes. “Well, people out there after dark say they've seen a ghost--”

  “Big black Crazy Isaac. And he's carrying his ax, looking for another white man to kill,” Butch interjected.

  Fred shook his head.

  “Who's this Crazy Isaac? Who'd he kill?” I asked.

  “Well, he didn't really kill anyone,” Fred answered, “but he tried. He swung an ax on the white man he worked for-- Old Miss Elizabeth's daddy, actually--, and severed his spine. Didn't kill him, though. Paralyzed him from the chest down, I heard, made him a cripple for life. Crazy Isaac ran off, the story goes, and they tracked him down to the river where he got away, or drowned, I can't remember. Something like that.”

  I thought about that one. “So Crazy Isaac haunts the place with his ax, looking for white kids to kill?”

  “I guess that's pretty much it, except that when you say it like that, it does sound pretty dumb.”

  “Sorry, Fred. I didn't mean anything by it. I do like your community here.”

  “Thank you. We like it.”

  “And speaking of community, what can you tell me about Mrs. Eleanor Hubbard?”

  “Who?” asked Butch.

  “She works at the White Horse Tavern.”

  “Ah, the History Lady,” said Fred.

  “Oh, the History Lady!” Butch perked up.

  “Yeah,” I nodded enthusiastically. “The History Lady. That's the one.”

  “Well, she's married,” said Fred.

  “I got that.”

  “Not from around here,” he continued. “Vermont, Wisconsin, one of those, I think. Someplace with cheese.”

  “Who's she married to, do you know?”

  Butch spoke up. “He's a heart doctor in Augusta. He's from here, but he met her when he was up north. He's in his forties. I think she's only about thirty or so.”

  “Now there's news I can use,” I said. Butch smiled. “Thanks for the ghost story, gentlemen. I'll see you around.”

  I returned to my room, where I drank a couple of shots watching improv comics on television and drifted off. I dreamed I was standing in front of the wooded tract again. Suddenly Crazy Isaac ran out of the darkness holding an ax, except it was Wayne Brady. Behind him ran Drew Carey before he lost weight-- or rather, it was Drew's body, which was bleeding from where his head should be--, trying simultaneously to catch Brad
y and to pick up his own severed head off the ground. His head was still cracking wise and demanding to be returned to its rightful place, but the blind body kept kicking the head out of reach, each kick eliciting more hilarious wisecracks. You know how dreams are.

  The forecast for the next day was for spotty rain throughout the morning, so I kept busy by doing sky plots of potential control sites. Control, in surveyor speak, is a set of known points that can be used as a reference. Master control for a job means determining the coordinates of the start and end points of the project, as well as setting multiple points along way that survey teams can check into to keep their work accurate and minimize mistakes. That's why the GPS work has to be so accurate. To create a sky plot, you drive a nail into the ground and set up an instrument over it. Then you pull out an old fashioned compass, turn your instrument to look due north, and set that as zero degrees. Next you raise the instrument until you reach the horizon, wherever that is: treeline, building roof, whatever. Now make a note of the angle, turn the instrument ten degrees to the right, and repeat the process thirty five times. That data, plugged into the right program, creates a model of the available sky at the desired location and spits out a schedule of precisely when to expect satellites over the area, which satellites they'll be, and where in the sky they'll be beeping.

  Now, not all control is set directly on the path of the survey. Think of a five-mile stretch of road from A to B. Calculating the distance from A to B is fine, but adding C a couple of miles off to one side creates a triangle, and the software can more accurately calculate AB by calculating AC and CB, too. Remember: the maximum deviation in accuracy of any point in the whole network can be a sphere no wider than the inside of a Life Saver, calculated by measuring split-second differences in beeps from twelve thousand miles away. You'll want to maximize your ability to hear beeps, so an ideal spot for GPS control is on a hill with lots of wide-open sky. Often, an old, well-kept graveyard next to a church offers everything you need including a quiet place to work away from traffic. Newer churches, which tend not to have graveyards, have huge parking lots that are just as good. In my room I had circled every church on the map, and I was checking them out one at a time, making sky plots at likely locations.

  The Mount Zion Baptist Church sat on a hill about two miles west of the project at a wide bend in the road. I pulled into the driveway and stopped. The building was a red brick structure of the classic long box design, but lacking a steeple of any sort. In my mind I picked a likely spot, a good twenty feet off the pavement, and as soon as the rain stopped, I set up my instrument and began plotting the horizon. I had completed thirty measurements when I heard a voice behind me.

  “You're not bringing the interstate through here, are you?”

  Surveyors hear certain standard questions all the time, usually when we're trying to concentrate on something else, and most surveyors have standard answers they throw out to entertain the citizens. I threw out mine.

  “No sir,” I answered without looking. “It's a Walmart,”

  I heard a burst of laughter. “Lord help us, son, not with these demographics!”

  I turned around to see a neatly trimmed black man in a dark blue suit. “I'm Brother John McElroy, pastor of Mount Zion.”

  “I'm Addison Kane, surveyor.” I handed him a company business card. “I love your little hilltop location here. It would be great if I could set up my equipment and establish a couple of reference points.”

  “As long as no bulldozers are involved, you may suit yourself, sir. What exactly is this for?”

  “The state's widening the highway down in the valley. I'm establishing reference points like this all over, on both sides of the project.” I went back to measuring angles. “I'm collecting data and ghost stories, so if you know any good ones, let's hear 'em.”

  “Data? Well, this church was founded in 1865, in a clearing marked by a tall hickory tree. The congregation met under that tree. The first tent went up a year later, and the first building was built between 1870 and 1871. It burned in 1879 and was rebuilt by 1883. Every beam and brick of the original church was hand-crafted by church members, and church members have done all the repairs and maintenance. The graveyard was actually begun before the church, and many of the oldest headstones are in fact carved from granite that had to be cleared to bury the dead.”

  I wrote down a measurement and looked around. “That is all impressive data,” I said. “I know it may sound weird, but I like old cemeteries and old headstones. This is a very nice place you have here, and some of the headstones are more like monuments, aren't they? Do I see a couple of Masonic obelisks out there?”

  “All carved by church members.”

  “Wow. That's a lot of work and a lot of talent.”

  ”Our people have long been noted for their labors and talent. Baptists, I mean. So tell me, Mr. Surveyor, what ghost stories have you heard?”

  I returned to my notebook and instrument. “I've heard Crazy Isaac will get me with an ax if I don't stay out of the woods.”

  There was silence while I recorded the last two angles. I picked up the instrument. “Have you heard the Crazy Isaac story?” I asked.

  “I may have heard some stories, yes. When you put away your equipment, I would like to show you something.”

  I locked up the truck and followed him to the church's front doors. They weren't gigantic, but they were big, about eight feet high and three feet wide, each made of eight thick panels set in a solid frame, and the casement in which they were set and its facing trim were just as impressive, without being gaudy. He swept his hand toward the door, inviting me to open it. When I turned the knob, both doors swung open as easily and smoothly as if they weighed nothing at all. I entered a sanctuary designed to accommodate two hundred or so faithful. The pastor led me down the center aisle and up two steps to the podium there. Behind the podium to stage right was a bench that I knew from my own childhood would hold a couple of deacons; an identical bench at stage left would hold any extra musical personnel-- guest soloists, perhaps--, and it would also handle overflow deacons and visiting dignitaries should the need arise. In the rear behind the pastor, pews on risers made up the choir loft. Everything exhibited the same sturdy-yet-elegant Craftsman aesthetic as the entrance doors.

  “This is fantastic woodwork; I'm sure you know that,” I commented. “Just gorgeous, all of it.”

  “As we say in the preaching business, Isaac Cooper was one hell of a carpenter. Does it look like the work of a crazy man?”

  “I'm so sorry,” I said. “I am so ignorant. Not to mention rude. I was only repeating something a man and his son Butch told me in a liquor store, and only right now have I even thought about how sketchy that sounds. Fred and Butch. In a liquor store. I do apologize, Brother John. So Isaac Cooper is Crazy-- no wait; why is Isaac Cooper called Crazy Isaac? And why is he carrying an ax?”

  “These are good questions. The story is that he attacked a white man with an ax, then ran off to the river and disappeared. Some say he just fled the county, some say the state. Some say he went to Atlanta and became a famous pimp; some say he died on a chain gang. All his family knows is that on the first day in June of 1900 he went to the Conley place to do some work and never came home and never contacted them again.”

  “Isaac Cooper,” I repeated. “Was he actually a cooper?”

  “Very good deduction, sir, very good, indeed. He was early on apprenticed to a cooper, which is where they say he first picked up a saw. He made everything: chairs, tables, fine furniture, even musical instruments like violins, which he learned to play. He made his own steam press for bending wood, too, and he made a couple of very fine buggies for some of the richest men in the county, including Fin and Colonel Conley, the father and grandfather of the man he allegedly attacked.”

  “He made buggies, and he built his own steam press? With enough time, he would have built his own automobile. It really makes you wonder what went on, doesn't it?” I said. “I mean, what m
akes a contractor snap and attack one of his best customers? Was it over some work performed or payment, or … what?”

  Brother McElroy sighed. “The victim, Mr. Thornton Conley, claimed that he caught Isaac in a barn with his fourteen year-old daughter, and that Isaac was forcing himself on the girl. Conley said that he turned to go get his shotgun from the house, and when he did, Isaac hit him from behind with an ax. When he screamed, it alerted a group of men who were repairing a chimney, and they all said that when they came outside, Isaac ran down to the river and jumped in and was never seen again. Then sometime in the Sixties the daughter, by then an old lady, died, and we started hearing these stories of Crazy Isaac, the ax-wielding ghost who kills whitey. So much for Isaac Cooper, the father, musician, craftsman, and immensely beloved member of his church and society.”

  “Now that, Brother John, is much, much better than any ghost story. As always, the facts of a person are much more interesting than the legend. Prominent black man attacks prominent white man, then disappears? Probably better than sticking around, considering the time and place. And now we'll never know. Too bad they don't write history books about ordinary people, eh?”