The Visitors

1

If you ever find yourself at Hollow Pines Plantation, the first thing you’ll notice is how quiet it is. No birds singing. No crickets chirping. No frogs croaking. It’s like they were all scared off by something—something invisible. Invisible, but everywhere. Kind of like God, but also not like God at all.

It’s not a peaceful kind of quiet either. It’s more like an everything-here-is-dead kind of quiet. Every once in a while, though, we get visitors. They can make a ton of racket, and they usually end up being real sorry for it. Hollow Pines doesn’t like being disturbed. Hollow Pines likes the quiet. And Hollow Pines always gets what it wants. I should know. It wanted me.

I used to be one of those noisy visitors. Back when I lived just down the road a ways, I would sometimes ride my bike to the deserted plantation. I thought it was a pretty cool place back then. It was like having my own huge secret hideout.

There’s a sign at the turnoff on the highway—crooked, dingy, and rusted, like it doesn’t want to be spotted too easily.

Hollow Pines

Est. 1718

Once you turn at the Hollow Pines sign, you’d go down a dark mile-long dirt road that snakes through a forest of soaring pine trees so tall they look like they’re racing one another up to heaven. Pine trees grow like weeds around here, and that’s why a lot of folks in Georgetown County work at the paper mill. My daddy, my uncle, and my granddaddy—they all worked there. Daddy probably thought I’d grow up to work there too, but I had other plans. I always wanted to be a TV news anchor, like Mr. Walter Cronkite. It’s a real job. But, like Grandma sometimes said, That’s neither here nor yonder now.

At the end of Hollow Pines Road, two crumbling stone columns at least three times as tall as I am stand guard on either side of the road, with huge old oil lanterns mounted on them. Vines choke the lanterns, and bright green moss has near about swallowed the stone columns whole. I always wondered what the gates of hell looked like until I saw what’s left of the Hollow Pines Plantation gates for the first time. Not really come-on-in-and-sit-a-spell-looking so much as come-on-in-because-this-is-your-last-stop-forever-looking.

Just beyond that, you’ll find Live Oak Lane—a long, straight-shot sandy driveway of sorts that runs all the way up to the manor house. It’s lined with rows of massive live oaks on either side, which I reckon is how it got its name.

Spanish moss drips from the sprawling branches like fat clusters of dried-up Silly String draping the road, looking a little creepy and kind of beautiful all at the same time. I always thought live oak was a funny name for the trees. Aren’t all trees live somethings? I mean, we don’t go around saying live magnolias or live maples. But I guess in a place like Hollow Pines, it’s best to call out the living things whenever you can.

After you pass through the stone columns and onto Live Oak Lane, you’ll find yourself smack-dab in the middle of the old slave village. Only a handful of run-down cabins are left, their roofs dipping low as if their load is just too heavy to bear anymore. A small chapel stands in the center of the village, but for the life of me I can’t think what them enslaved folks had to be praising Jesus about. But Grandma used to say, Hope dwells in peculiar places. And I guess she was right about that.

Even though there’re only about six cabins left in the slave village, Grandma said there used to be dozens upon dozens of them lining Live Oak Lane, clear up to the manor house. She said that a long time ago, half of the rice crop in the entire United States of America came from the plantations right here in Georgetown County. Of course, America wasn’t nearly as big back then as it is now, but still, that’s a heck of a lot of rice.

“Why’d they put those cabins right up there in the front yard for everyone to see?” I asked Grandma one time. “Weren’t they ashamed of themselves for owning real live people and making them work for no money?”

Grandma shook her head and lowered her voice. “No, they weren’t ashamed none. The folks who owned all the plantations ’round here wanted their fancy guests riding up to the manor house to see how well-off they were. Black folk were treated like property back then, and the more of them a man owned, that meant the more money he had.”

That’s one of those things about the plantations around here that they never taught us in school.

“I’m glad people ain’t slaves no more,” I said to her.

Grandma huffed a little at that and spat chewing tobacco juice into an empty Campbell’s soup can. “One kind of slavery goes away, and another takes its place.”

I’m not sure what Grandma meant, but that’s all she had to say about that.

There’re all kinds of crazy ghost stories about Hollow Pines—some true and some just plain old foolishness. People say the spirits of the hundreds of men and women who were forced to work the plantation and died here roam the grounds at night, looking for lost loved ones or for a way to escape their miserable existence. That one is only partly true. I’ve never seen hundreds of them, but there’re a few lost souls still around, like Retha Mae, Emma, and Cousin Cornelius. As ghosts go, they aren’t scary at all—at least not to me. But then there’s Culpepper, and that’s a different thing altogether.

The story goes that one of the owners of Hollow Pines Plantation by the name of Jackson Culpepper the Third—a pure devil of a man, from what I know of him—strangled his wife, Rebecca, with his bare hands right there in her bedroom on the second floor of the manor house. Folks say she can sometimes be spotted at night, up in the far-left window. That story is definitely true. I’ve seen Miss Rebecca with my own two eyes—up close. Most of the time, she just stands there in the window of her bedroom, holding a candle with one hand and her neck with the other, staring out into the pitch-black night.

Nobody has lived up in the manor house in a whole lot of years, not since way before I came to be stuck at  Hollow Pines. But that don’t stop the visitors from coming. People, mostly good-for-nothin’ teenagers, sneak onto the grounds now and then, looking for adventure or some mischief to get into. Cousin Cornelius scares most of them off before they get too far. He hasn’t ever scared me, though. Maybe it’s because I’m only twelve and not a good-for-nothin’ teenager. And I never will be.

The last time I ever rode my bike from our house to Hollow Pines—I can’t be sure of how long ago that was, because time is slippery here—something bad happened over at the winnowing barn. I don’t remember exactly what happened, because I’ve spent about every day since then trying to forget the bad parts of the story, and I’ve gotten real good at the forgetting after all these years. Sometimes I wonder if the not-remembering has something to do with what’s keeping me here.

All I know for sure is that a boy was hurt, and it was my fault. I don’t know exactly how he was hurt or what my part in it was, though. Those memories are gone, and I say good riddance. Ever since then, I haven’t been able to leave. So I try my best to carry on like the other lost souls around here, wishing for the day when we might all find a way to move on. But wishing is easy at Hollow Pines.

It’s the being stuck here that’s hard.