Legend of the Headstones in the Tree

LEGEND OF THE HEADSTONES IN THE TREE

Chapter One

Ripley, Ohio
Winter of 1869

His hand darted about with frenzy beneath the young girl’s nightdress. Dorothy struggled to force him off, but the massive body that pinned her against the wall was too powerful to fight. One swift pull and his other hand ripped the garment open, exposing small, perfectly formed breasts.

         The girl was no more than sixteen; the man was Colonel Nathaniel Hopskins, a decorated war hero who became the plantation’s master after his parents perished in a fire—the only successful attempt by the slave-hunters to wreak havoc against the die-hard abolitionists of Ripley, Ohio.

         Colonel Hopskins, broad-shouldered, muscular and handsome, could have had any woman, but the brutality of forced sex against his servants gave him the ultimate pleasure unlike anything he had experienced in the war. His hands clambered at the ebony breasts, his fingers stabbing her flesh with an animalistic urgency. He squeezed her nipples so forcefully as if he were extracting milk. Dorothy felt they were going to burst. He grabbed her one hand; immediately, she curled her fingers into a fist. He forced her to grab inside his unzipped trousers and stroke him there. . .stiff and throbbing.

         “Oh, dear God, please help me,” the girl cried weakly, her voice drowned by the harsh, grating sound of his excited breathing. She thought of her mother and how upset she had looked when she left earlier. She could not understand why Colonel Hopskins was sending her mother to town in the blizzard. What was so special about the errand that it could not wait till tomorrow? The horror of realization was too much to bear.

         “Mama! Mama!” Again and again, she screamed, twisting from side to side. He slapped her hard at the side of her mouth with a clenched hand. One strike and she fell away from him. For a brief moment, being released from him gave her a sense of relief. . .until her back slammed against the floor. She felt as if her spine snapped like walnut shells. Blood spurting from her mouth, the taste of the fluid gagged her.

         Without mercy, he lunged at her, like a wall falling over and crushing her with might. He battered his knee against her thigh, forcing her legs apart. Her panic escalated and she screamed again. He cupped her mouth and punched her in the stomach. She gasped wildly, but the pain was nothing compared to the sharp laceration she felt when he forced his cruel, blunt instrument into her. The torture was unbearable and she screamed, but her cry had less impact than a flurry of snowflakes.

         Colonel Nathaniel Hopskins, the civilized gentleman of honor, enslaved by the evil desire of his flesh, had returned to the man in the beginning of time: savage, primitive. As he continued to ram himself into her, she felt dragged to the jagged edge of an enormous cliff. She imagined herself jumping and plunging to her death to end the pain, misery and humiliation.

         It was an endless nightmare. . .a slow, painful death.

         The Colonel gave a galloping frenzy, a wild spasm, then a bestial cry followed by a strange whimpering sound. She hoped the beast was gasping for his last breath. It was not to be. She felt his deflation inside her. What had been a formidable weapon that violated the purity of her womanhood had been reduced to a pathetic, jelly-like genital.

         Was she free at last? Better yet, was she dead?

         The crime of Colonel Hopskins against yet another one of his young servants had been executed to his primal satisfaction.

         Lying motionless on the floor, Dorothy sensed some movement in the half light. Someone else had entered the cabin. Just then, she heard a sound behind the monstrous body. The voice sounded so far away, as if it were coming from the bottom of the cliff—the cliff she had longed to paint with her blood, where she wanted to splatter pieces of her flesh and shattered bones.

         Was that her mother grasping a large fire log and frantically flailing it at the Colonel? A struggled ensued between the two figures. Dorothy recognized her mother’s voice now as the woman screamed vitriolic words at her master. The Colonel, who ended up with the fire log, struck the woman in the head with one fierce blow.

         The body of the woman, blood bathing her face, fell in front of Dorothy. For a second, the girl’s eyes stared at the other’s, before total blackness shrouded the last shimmering flicker of her consciousness. . .but not before her mother managed to mouth her last words--words she would not remember for a long time.

         When Dorothy’s eyes reopened, her dress had been changed. Her eyes—the eyes of a frightened small animal—stared, big and round, at the body on the floor. She jolted backwards in terror. Mama! She screamed voicelessly.

         Colonel Hopskins leaned over her with the fiery eyes of a devil incarnate. “I never touched you! I did not kill your mother. Your fingerprints are all over this log. If you talk, I will tell the police that you killed your own mother. Then, I will kill you, too. Do you understand?”

         Hours later, William and Sarah, the Colonel’s teenage son and daughter, found her in the dark corner of her mother’s closet, curled up like a fetus, shivering. Her eyes had the look of someone who had lost her mind. How long was she dead? She did not know. William and Sarah, her dear, sweet, loving friends, cared for her, but she wished she were dead.

         There was an inquisition, but Dorothy disappeared just when the Court was about to declare her sane to be questioned. The Colonel reported that he had seen a colored man talking to the woman just before she was murdered. No one was prosecuted for the crime. The inquisition was over quickly. There were no other witnesses to the crime.

         Or so they thought.

         Someone hiding a couple of runaway slaves had witnessed the terror of that night. It was a secret, an enormous burden that the abolitionist would carry with him till death.

The Old Ripley Cemetery
One Hundred Years Later

         Michael and Claire walk down the winding narrow path around the side of the hill toward the old Ripley Cemetery. Feeling the breeze ruffle the trees like a restless spirit, Claire’s heart beats faster with each step.

         Old graveyards have always fascinated Claire. She is drawn by the aura of ancient mysteries that pervade them, and as a photographer, she enjoys taking pictures of the markers and tombs while weaving tales of unfulfilled dreams and shattered lives that lay buried deep within them. The vintage charm of this historic river town in Ohio captivates and intrigues her.

         This is Claire’s second visit to Ripley since she met Michael a month ago during the town's annual Tobacco Festival. He was covering the story for the Cincinnati Tribune, featuring Marge Schott -- the Cincinnati Reds’ owner and a cigar smoking advocate. For the past five years since she became the baseball team’s owner, she had been the Festival Parade’s Grand Lady. The 70-year old chain-smoking friend of Claire’s parents had requested Claire to be her personal photographer for the event. .

          Having worked for a tobacco farm for years before becoming a journalist, Michael had developed a physique fit for a muscle magazine cover. Michael is a native son of Ripley. But all his life, this town, known as the country's Abolitionists' Hell Hole during the Civil War, has been nothing to him but a hell hole town from which he can’t escape. Then he met Claire--the girl from Indian Hill, the most affluent section of Cincinnati. Her immediate fascination with Ripley opened his eyes, and he began to appreciate his town and its rich history under a different light.

         The graveyard looks forlorn and gray from years of abandonment and neglect. Weather-tortured, broken and shattered tombstones, large and small, most with indiscernible inscriptions, lay misplaced everywhere. Michael pointed to the tree at the center of the graveyard. "There’s the tree I’ve been telling you about,” he says.

         Claire's face shimmers with excitement. Her gaze travels from top to bottom of the massive tree, fixing at the lower trunk where she finds the mysterious headstones half-buried in the tree. “This is quite awesome,” she says under her breath, and rummages through her large leather bag. She pulls out her Minolta, removes the lens cap, brushes back a lock of auburn hair as she squints with one eye and presses the other to the viewfinder. She overrides the automatic setting and manually sets the aperture to 30 then presses the shutter. But the camera does nothing. She tries again . . . and again, but to no avail. She straightens a curvaceous body hardened by years of tennis, and mutters, “how strange.” Disappointed, she restores the cap over the lens and restores the camera in her bag.

         "How did the headstones get swallowed up by the tree like that?" Claire asks.

         “Nobody really knows for sure. Some say it was probably nothing more than a seed that was carried by the wind and planted between two graves. And as the tree grew . . . well . . ."

         Taking a few steps closer, Claire leans over the tree and lays her hand on one of the headstones. She jolts back, as if electrocuted.

         “What's the matter?" Michael asks. "You look like you've just seen a ghost."

         "Static electricity," she says.

         From the cemetery, Michael and Claire drive up to the top of the hill to visit the Rankin House Museum. Finding it closed for the day, they settle upon the grass overlooking the panorama of Ripley, the Ohio River, and Augusta, Kentucky. The wind wails around them. Claire feels something ethereally beautiful and enchanting about the sound, like a freedom song chanted by the thousands of slaves the Rankin family had helped free from bondage. She cannot believe that she is sitting on the same ground where the Reverend John Rankin--the Father of Abolitionism that inspired the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin -- hid the slaves in the secret rooms in the house.

         As the twilight dies, Michael and Claire watch the outline of the immense hills across the river fade slowly until the river and the sky are merged into one empty gray canvas. Claire notices a stately white architecture in the distance. "I didn't know there was another house on the hill," Claire says. "Who lives in that house?"

         "Ah, that's the "Hopskins' Ghost Manor," Michael says. "No one has lived in that mansion for over fifty years."

          "Intriguing. Please tell me more."

         “Well,” Michael begins, “the Hopskins came to Ripley in the early 1800’s, about the same time the Rankins did. They were rich and respected ... and die-hard abolitionists. They died in a fire while asleep. Half of the house was destroyed. People suspected that plantation slave owners sent their spies to kill them. They had two sons, who were both fighting in the Civil War at the time. Only one of them, Colonel Nathaniel Hopskins, returned home.”

         Claire cannot help noticing that the warm glow of the setting sun accentuates the greenish tint in Michael’s eyes. “Did he have any family?”

         “A wife who drowned in the Ohio River. They had a son. They also raised an infant girl they found at their doorstep. They both died in their teens, and what’s strange is they died on the same day. The Ripley Historical Museum would have the complete story on this. I’ll take you there next time.”

         “I would love that.” Claire says, feeling mesmerized at the emerald ocean in Michael’s eyes. “Whatever happened to Colonel Hopskins?”

         “No one really knows. People say he went crazy. He neglected his estate and let all of his businesses go. Then he disappeared, and was never seen again. But there are those who believe that he never really left the mansion and that he probably died there. Sometimes, when the wind blows hard, or when it’s storming, you could hear howling sounds coming from the mansion.”

         Feeling a shiver run down her spine, Claire folds her arms over her chest.

         “Will you take me inside the mansion someday?” She stuns herself with her request and wonders what prompted
her to even say such a thing.

         “Are you kidding? No one has enough courage to even get close to that house, much less enter it.”

End of Chapter One