Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (36 page)

George Grant Bayne, slayer of William Edward Grayston, had managed to strike again, this time without ever lifting a hand, and once again his alibi was perfect, but this one was a fact — he was nowhere near the scene. Yet, across the miles and years, Bayne still managed to get my father’s mother.

9

Dance of the Hobs

T
HE QUAPAW GHOST LIGHT
began showing itself, so claim a few elders, just about the year William Grayston arrived in Joplin. I take the coincident timing as sheer chance, despite one corner of my imagination wanting to see something greater in the connection; it’s that ancient urge in us to find indications of ethereal — cosmic — significance in our lives, a morsel of evidence to suggest our little twin-legged assemblage of atoms is more than a brief inconsequentiality.

The file of articles on the Ghost Light in the Joplin library seemed to establish that the apparition made regular appearances twelve miles southwest of the accursed crux of Fourth and Main. In the clippings were the usual hokum and humbuggery associated with unexplained luminous phenomena across the nation. I went quickly through yarns of a vicious, captured Civil War sergeant — vengefully decapitated by being stood in front of a cannon — who spends eternity hunting his head; of a lady walking moonless nights with a ball of fire where her noddle should be; of a miner following his shaking carbide lamp in quest of a lost you-name-it. My search was for plausible details from people who, unsatisfied with anecdotes about the Light, had gone out into the Spookville Triangle to witness it for themselves.

In a society deprived of the bewitchingly inexplicable, a floating, bobbing, weaving, dancing, hovering, flashing, fracturing light that turns red, yellow, blue, green, and purple, and purportedly has been doing so since the arrival into Indian Territory of the Quapaw dispossessed from the Arkansas Valley — 
that
is a thing to be inspected and maybe even cherished. And so it is among the people of the Three Corners where Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma conjoin less than four miles from the hangout of the ocular confoundment. The hamlet of Hornet, Missouri, is about that same distance away. Spook Light Road, popularly called the Devil’s Promenade and, officially, Ottawa County Route E-50, lies just within the quondam Quapaw Reservation.

I was reading the dubieties because, a half century earlier, a close friend who grew up nearby had told me of smooching with his girl on a dark out-county lane and being accosted by a scintillating ball of heatless fire hovering over the hood of his car. My pal, known to be truthful if gullible, spoke so assuredly and vibrantly of the orb that two years later we went in search of it. We found nothing, possibly not even the correct road.

Perhaps somewhere in Missouri or Oklahoma exists a local newspaper or magazine never to have carried an item about the Quapaw Light, more commonly known in the old mining area, as I’ve mentioned, as the Hornet Spook Light. Even Q, growing up across the state, had read about it, and she insisted on having a chance to see it after my research made one thing clear: down on the Devil’s Promenade, people were truly encountering a most quozzical
something.
As a reporter along the American road, I am bound by duty to explore the veracity of such wayside incidents because, who knows, your very safety while passing through might depend on an alert about balls of fire accosting vehicles after sundown.

Reports, both in print and from people I spoke to, claimed the phantasm sometimes appeared briefly or not at all, and on other occasions would shine till dawn. Generally, it had a constancy rather alien in the realm of ghosts. “It’s reliable enough, especially on cloudy nights,” a librarian told me, “and I never heard of it harming anybody, unless scaring the dickens out of you is harmful — you know, out there in the dark, getting a whack put on your ticker.”

In both Jasper and Ottawa counties, I came upon nobody unaware of the thing, about half saying they’d seen it, and most of them believing it not yet properly explained by science. But one fellow, ignoring the many photographs of it, called it “the Hornet Spoof Light.” I asked had he seen it, and he replied, “How does a sane person see what isn’t there?”

Based upon no physical evidence except declarations written and spoken, and in spite of the sanity question, I still believed in the possibility of something spectral: not a specter perhaps but maybe a manifestation of a spectrum out on the wooded slope above the Spring River on the western edge of the Ozark Plateau. I further believed Q and I would encounter nothing, yet we nevertheless went forth, interested not so much in debunking as merely observing. I’m not a fellow whom ghosts — beyond the hypothetical — seem attracted to any more than a prom queen to the goofball next door. Apparitions snub me, won’t dance with me (except possibly one night in West Virginia — but that’s a story for another book). In their defense, I admit I’ve never been good at having to believe in something before being able to witness it (and that’s a key reason my little tub of traditional theologies always sinks even before I can get it untied from the dock of factuality for a sail into the rising Mare Fundamentalensis).

So, on that rainy Tuesday after I’d begun pursuit of a murderer, Q and I headed south as the sky was clearing just enough to reveal a frail, crescent moon setting beyond the prairie of eastern Oklahoma. The Devil’s Promenade, the name linking to Devil’s Hollow, was a wooded vale dropping down to the Spring River to the west. The lane was less forested than formerly but yet woodsy and remote enough, despite a couple of tumbledown dwellings and a farm near the river, to create good darkness for a light show. Still, steady electrification had recently caused a few visitors — those managing to find the proper lane — to watch some electrical radiant and entirely miss the Ghost Light. Or so we were told.

The customary accounts concurred on the phenomenon earlier appearing in another location not far distant, but for the past half century it had taken its shine to E-50. “She jiggles around a little, but she don’t go straggling across the county,” said an old fellow tottering through the library. “She’s a homebody. You just got to sit real quiet like you was in Granny’s parlor.”

At Halloween, he’d often known the road to be lined with cars, but on the March evening Q and I drove to the hollow, no one else was around, and our expectation was tempered only by a sense we’d not be lucky enough to glimpse the whatever. I rolled us along slowly over the new asphalt running as straight west as a surveyor’s transit can lay a lane down, the engineered perfection having relief only in its rise and fall over low hills of blackjack oaks. Melodious calls of toads roused the darkness, and the damp air smelled of spring. The isolation was less deep than in years past: Interstate 44, the Will Rogers Turnpike, angled across the end of the Promenade where the two-lane stopped abruptly as if afraid to enter the hollow, although a little beyond the river the road picked up again to continue westward into Quapaw, Oklahoma, about four miles from the vale. Except for a couple of breaches in the woods, the trees and hills made the turnpike and Quapaw invisible.

Right after we crossed the Missouri line and entered the Promenade, a small light appeared in the distance on the left of the road. My anticipation apparently got the better of me, and I blurted out something to which Q said, “You’re seeing some kind of vehicle way ahead of us,” and a pickup did pass by soon after. I pulled to the side, shut off the engine, got out of the car. In a darkness so deep I could see down only to my knees, I began walking as if I were wading the night. When I returned, my sudden emergence from the thick obscurity caused Q to jump.

In a whisper, as if the Powers of Spectral Illumination have ears, she asked for explanations I’d read that afternoon: ball lightning, will-o’-the-wisp, marsh gas, mine gas, fox fire, Saint Elmo’s fire, sunspots, glowing minerals, static electricity, ionized plasma; headlights from automobiles, billboards, a water tower, a landing field, a farm; and, of course, those ectoplasmic souls in search of craniums — theirs or yours.

“No Lucifer anywhere?” I forgot: a telepreacher claimed the glow was a sign from Satan that our souls would soon be his unless we renounced sin (and sent in a check). And another pulpiteer, thinking differently, contended the Light was notice of the Second Coming this time next Thursday, or maybe it was a Wednesday a year ago. More credible allegations mentioned pranksters sneaking from the woods to pop an electronic flash at a car or wave an illuminated plastic pumpkin over the windshield of entwined couples. And, to be expected, a small contingent claimed the phenomenon was entirely imagined and of even less substance than a virgo gloriosa appearing in a water stain on the wall of a chapel or bordello. A clerk had said, “Why do you think it’s called the Spook Light? Maybe because it’s as real as spooks?”

Thirty minutes passed, and no emanation of any sort appeared, so I drove back eastward to a higher spot with a longer view. A van had arrived, with four intent faces staring into the west. I stopped far enough away not to block their view, then walked to them. A woman of middle years and three teenage girls glanced at me only to ascertain I was possessed of a more or less standard head lacking any luminescence and in the accustomed location.

Had they seen it? Without looking my way, the woman murmured slowly, uneasily, “It’s there right now.”

I turned to the west. Blackness. Soot, pitch, ebony, the inside of a crow. Otherwise, zilch. She whispered, eyes still fixed forward, “In thirty years, this is the best I’ve ever seen it.” I looked again. Nothing. Spoof Light.

Then, as if I’d suddenly regained lost vision, the dark got punctured — a white-hot poker thrust through a black tent. The whiteness rose above the distant road, waxed brighter, dimmed, then again brighter, its edge tinged bloodred. A not-of-this-Earth gleaming seemed to float a mile or two away, slightly shifting laterally, like an animal moving its head side to side as it fixes on its quarry. Great Caesar’s Ghost!

After fifty years, I was at last seeing the Quapaw Light! I started off down the black road to tell Q, but I couldn’t keep from turning around to assure that nothing was coming up from behind. Holy Willie! A Nodgort had found a crack in my rationality, and the pesky hob was dancing, mocking. I forced myself to stand still for a moment to prove reason yet prevailed, even if a bit equivocally.
There,
I thought,
that’s a moment, that’s enough.
But I had to restrain an impulse to quickstep back to the safety of the car. (Oh, reader, do you shake your head? Well, consider this: a jokester jumping out of the scrub at that moment could have put a whack on my ticker.)

“What’s wrong?” Q asked, and I nodded westward, and she looked that way. “What am I supposed to be seeing?” The road was black again. “I don’t see any — oh! Is that it?” It was it: waxing, pendulating, waning, throwing out a bubble of redness, sucking it back in, vanishing only to show itself again, making a tiny zig to set up a zag.

I watched Q’s unblinking countenance. Though she rarely takes names in vain, her face was exclaiming in other ways, “Ye gods!” Nuns had taught her the only real ghost is the
Holy Ghost
 — never mind the Witch of Endor summoning up the wraith of Samuel. But those earnest sisters never faced the Quapaw Ghost Light. Ha! Let Mother Mary Michael debunk this one. Jumpin Jehoshaphat!

The thing glimmered and shimmered, twinkled and blinked, flickered and fluttered, glistened and winked. We stared so long I began to believe our eyes were playing tricks, so we corroborated what the little dazzler was doing: Tell me what you’re seeing, I said, and Q answered, “It just moved left.” Yes. “Coming back the other way.” Yes. “Getting reddish again.” Yep. “Oops, just disappeared — no, it’s back — and brighter.” Exactly.

It was doing the pixy peekaboo. “The thing’s playful,” Q said. “No wonder people are fond of it — it’s a Tinker Bell.” In my satanic voice I rasped, No, my pretty — mistake not a tool of the Devil. Then, changing to a falsetto, I repeated the librarian’s wisecrack: “Around here, we take it lightly.”

Spooky, as it’s sometimes called, resembled an evening star low in the sky on a clear night, but it upended astrophysics in its shifting from a red dwarf to a white giant, although it was never bigger than a bright planet seen with moderate-power binoculars.

A farm truck came from behind and passed, and we watched to see whether it would spook the Light, but the globe bravely continued its performance. I started the engine and went slowly forward to get closer; I was an infant reaching out to touch the first star he ever sees. At our approach, the gleaming kept its distance as does a rainbow or mirage, then it winked out. We turned around to go back to where we’d been, and again there it was, hanging above the lane. If we couldn’t close the distance on it, then that eliminated explanations like will-o’-the-wisp or lights from a tower — anything with a fixed location. Q: “It’s not a figment of the imagination. It’s actually there — or somewhere. Something’s somewhere. It’s real as a rainbow. Maybe not as beautiful, but a lot more lively.”

We gaped at it for nearly two hours because it was what we had wanted to find: an authentic optical phenomenon reportedly unexplained by science. A merry spectral puzzle. Observing it was like stepping back into the Dark Ages when nature was full of phantasmagoria, when mysteries overwhelmed explications and ignorance transcended illumination, a time when superstition could extinguish enlightenment, when priestly obfuscations manipulated folk into blind faiths where charms and potions, spells and incantations, holy relics and amulets, were defenses against hobgoblins going thumpity-bump in the night or rising in the woods to flicker their mischief. It was a time of ignis fatuus, fool’s fire, burning in the forest; of corpus sanctum dancing across chimney tops; when fox fire was the Devil’s footprint and spontaneous ignition of marsh gas the restless dead returned to exact vengeance. And even in Oklahoma, Ottawa County E-50 ran west only to the edge of Devil’s Hollow before stopping until it could safely resume three miles west.