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| Dim trail leads to top of Kill Devil Hill. |
My grandfather picked his way up the dim trail to the top of
Kill Devil Hill. Even in the daylight, the trail was hard to see, and after
about five steps, he stopped. He was ahead of me and turned to look me full in
the eyes, almost as if he’d read my mind.
“I know the trail is hard to see,” he said. “Just step where
I step.”
Without another word, he continued up the trail. At the top,
he turned and put up his hand to stop me.
“Turn around and look down the slope,” he said.
I did and saw that the trail was more visible from this
vantage point, like some strange type of optical illusion.
“This trail is old, packed down by hundreds, maybe
thousands, of feet over the centuries,” he said. “Some say that the Indians
salted it to keep plants from overgrowing the trail. Others say they salted a
big circle around the entire hill with urns of salt they carried all the way
from somewhere around McIntosh.”
I looked down the slope but didn’t see any sort of mysterious
circle around the bottom of the hill. “Why would they do that?”
My grandfather reached into his shirt pocket, produced a
half-empty pack of Steamboat cigarettes, shook one out and light it. “Some say
it was to keep bad spirits out,” he said. “Others say it was to keep something
in. Maybe it was both.”
He exhaled a breath of smoke and continued to the top. I
reached his side a few moments later. From the top, I could see for miles in
every direction, especially far to the west, across the Alabama River and deep
into Clarke County.
My grandfather pointed north towards Claiborne. “At night,
you can see Claiborne easy from here and most nights you can see the lights
from Jackson. A bunch of home guard men camped out here in 1865 and signaled Claiborne
town with a bonfire when they heard the cannons firing at Mount Pleasant.”
The top of Kill Devil Hill was maybe 50 feet in circumference
and there was a narrow trench that divided the hilltop in half. “What’s the
deal with this ditch?”
My grandfather stepped deftly into the trench, which was
littered with small rocks, bits of dead pine limbs and dry grass. “This was
here when I was a boy,” he said. “My paw brought me here just like his paw
brought him. Long time ago folks got the idea that this was an Indian burial
mound and during the Depression folks dug around up here because they thought
they’d find gold or buried treasure.”
I looked around and imagined piles of gold and dead Indians bones
beneath our feet. “Did they find any?”
My grandfather glanced at his watch and peered grimly north
towards Claiborne. “Not sure,” he said. “No one can say. Lightning put a stop
to it all as far as I know.”
“Lightning?”
“Yep,” he said. “You don’t want to be up here on a cloudy
day. This hill gets struck by lightning all the time. Struck a bunch of hobo diggers
up here in ’35. Killed them all. They’re all buried in one mass grave at
Manistee.”
He took another drag on his cigarette. “I was a little
fellow then, about 10 years old,” he said. “I saw the bodies. The lightning
messed them all up. That lightning was so hot that some of their metal tools
was fused into some of the bodies - pickaxes, shovels and all. It was beastly.
My paw and my uncle helped dig the hole they were buried in.”
He pulled hard on his cigarette, and the cherry glowed blood
red. “I was little, but I heard the men talk,” he said. “Little pitchers got
big ears. Some of those men were deacons and Masons and said there was nothing
natural about that lightning. The diggers called down something bad and paid with
their lives. All sorts of rumors went through the community after that and that
was the last digging up here that I ever heard tell of.”
(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or
locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)
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