Bethany Campbell - Whose Little Girl Are You?

Cawdor, Oklahoma, 1968

EVEN DEAD, she was the prettiest girl Hollis ever saw.
The doctor’s flashlight shone down on her steadily, like a spotlight. One of her eyes was open. It
was blue as the bluest sky, and it stared, unblinking, off into the shadows.
The doctor leaned over and with his sure fingers pushed the blue eye shut. He straightened again,
keeping the ray of light trained on her face.
Her eyelashes were long and cast still shadows across her cheeks. Her nose was small and straight.
Her full lips were open enough to that Hollis could see the white rim of her upper teeth.
She lay there with her head tilted at an angle as if she were puzzled. The doctor put his foot against
her face and nudged her head straight. His shoes were Hush Puppies, and the thick rubber sole left a
mark on her jaw.
A sick feeling jiggled the pit of Hollis’s stomach.
“A shame,” the doctor said. “A damned waste. Did you boys bring what I told you?”
Hollis made himself nod.
“Yessir,” said Luther. His voice did not sound scared, but it did not sound like ordinary, either.
They had been waked up in the middle of the night. They had been handed two old horse blankets
sewn together with strong thread. Their orders were to get the half-blind mare and take her to the
cellar door of the clinic and not to say anything to anybody. The doctor would be watching for them,
they were told.
Even then, Hollis had a terrible feeling that something bad was happening and it would get worse and
he could not stop it no matter what. It was like being caught in a nightmare that was stronger than
you and would not let you go, no matter how hard you fought.
When they reached the clinic they’d hitched the mare in a grove of cedar trees where she couldn’t be
seen. The doctor had opened the door of the cellar and Luther and Hollis to come in. The only light
was his flashlight.
“I got something,” he’d said. “I want you to get rid of it for me.”
Somehow Hollis already knew: It has happened at last. There is somebody dead.
But he had not expected a girl so pretty. Or so young. She looked no more than sixteen years old.
She lay on her back, next to the basement-floor drain. Her hair was blond-like and must have hung
past her shoulders, but now it was tangled and stringy and looked all dirty, like before dying she had
sweat a lot.
She wore a little white gown-thing. It had blood on it. It was hitched up so high, Hollis could almost
see her privates. This made him feel ashamed, so he forced himself to keep his eyes on her face
instead.
Her skin was fine and smooth like a girl in a magazine picture. It was very white. Hollis wondered if
she had always been that pale, or if that’s what being dead had done to her.
“I want you to take this into the woods to the fire pit where the old still used to be,” said the doctor.
“I want you to burn it.”
Hollis made himself nod again. But he thought, Lordy God. Set fire to her. Set her on fire. Lordy
God.
“Yessir,” Luther said.
But Hollis thought, This is a sin what we are about to do. It is a sin and a crime. He swallowed
hard. He knew right then that this girl would come back to haunt his mind and curse his soul.
They wrapped her in the horse blankets and carried her out into the darkness and slung her over the
back of the mare. They each took a ten-gallon can of gasoline.
It was nine miles into the pine woods to get to the cave where the still had been. Every step of the
way Hollis wanted to cry like a frightened child. He thought of God, hell, damnation, demons, spirits,
and haunts. There was no moon and few stars, hardly any light. He could barely see where he was
going except deeper into the tangled darkness…
They say you cannot completely burn up a human body unless you are a mortician and have the right
sort of furnace in which to do it. They say that if you try to burn a body, it would take you days and
days, and that the black smoke is greasy with fat, and it has a special sickening smell that tells the
world what you are doing. People are sure to notice such a long, hot, stinking fire, they say.
But this was not true. Hollis and Luther took the girl to the cave and laid her in the fire pit, still
wrapped in the horse blankets…
When the fire died down, they waited for the cave to cool, but even so, when they made their way
back inside, it was hot as a chamber of brimstone.
Only bones were left of the dead girl, gray and shriveled-looking in the glowing coals. The lower jaw
still grinned with a few blackened teeth, but the part that had held the eyes was gone.
“This ain’t good enough,” Luther said.
Hollis had feared that. They had to tend the fire and feed it, and poke the remaining bones into the
hottest part of the flames. It took them thirteen hours, well past the clear sky of noon the next day.
At last all that was left of the girl was a few handfuls of ash. They threw the ashes in the creek, and
Hollis watched them drift away and disappear.
If anyone ever noticed the smoke that night or that morning or that afternoon, nobody ever said.
People in Baird County knew better than to ask about such things.
No one did ask. Not for over thirty years.

New England, 1999

A pinpoint of fire stabbed the darkness.
The temperature had dropped with such violent speed that the car door’s lock had frozen shut.
During winters she carried the lighter for such emergencies.
It was a cheap butane lighter of plastic, but it had an expensive gold slip-on cover. The cover was
engraved:
To J.
You are the B-E-S-T
Best
Love, P.
Her heart felt more frozen than the night. She got into her car, started the reluctant motor, and set
out. At first she could not think. She just drove.
That evening the blizzard had blown in with supernatural suddenness. It came shrieking down from
the northern Atlantic like a thousand banshees who spun and whirled in their blinding robes of snow.
Radio announcements had been ominous with traveler’s warnings; she ignored them and headed into
the heart of the storm…

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