You’d be walking home after Sunday evening church. The road goes through the holler and has never been paved. A few minutes past the golden hour, to the mauve hour, when the sun shafts are gone, but the sky is still lighter than the tree trunks. Woods on the right, the creek down the hill on the left side, and far across the creek and beyond the fields, the occasional twinkle light from a house. The trees are close in on this right side, and shifting like a living roof over your head..
You have long memorized the bumps of the road; you’ve walked it all your life. For anyone not from here the footing would demand squinted, searching eyes, but you don’t need to look – except that the shadows at your feet are moving.
Far off through the trees there’s a light that doesn’t belong, moving from trunk to trunk, gently, neither hiding nor hurrying, but coming your way. It’s a cool light, toward blue. The blue shimmers like a northern light, with an internal dance that reshapes the flame second by second.
When the flame reaches the road a stone throw ahead of you, it stops. It waits. For you. You feel it. After you also stop and collect your puzzled thoughts to study the blue flickering point, the flame stops dancing, contracts into its own center, then stretches four arms back out into the unmistakeable sign of a Baptist cross, like the one atop all the country churches. There it stands for a dozen long breaths, in a brighter, steadier blue glow. It stands, you stand. Then it contracts again back into its own center, and is gone. The dark returns. The evening is quickly normal.
You wait for something else but there is nothing else. Then, when the frogs timidly start again in the creek and the owl resumes her roll call, you notice how quiet the woods had become.
It’s always on a road like this and a night like this. It’s always after evening church service. Never across open ground, never near graves. This is not the cemetery wisp. This is no ghost sighting and you feel no fear. This is no prophecy; no knowledge is offered and there is nothing asked of you.
You’ll only see the blue cross once in your life. You’ll hesitate to tell anyone, because you’re not sure what it meant. But then, always, and within a few days, a death of someone you know. You’ll wonder if the blue cross was to warn you – that’s natural – but it doesn’t feel like a warning.
Later, as you casually ask around, you’ll realize there is no-one you know who has seen the blue cross, but many of them have known someone who said their grandmother did. .
I’ve never seen it. But I heard about it from my ancient aunts, none of whom were interested in offering an interpretation. But you know how a meaning can emerge from words and tones, a meaning indefensible but made up of words that triangulate their way along, or maybe circle round and round a spot they can’t see ? Something, then, like this:
“I start your mornings and I count your evenings. When the old ones leave the church building to walk their dirt roads toward home, I count their steps. And as the road and the woods and the steeple-bells age, to tell them all their time runs old, I watch, till death – death, who is not our friend, but is an acquaintance. And I number his dark steps too.”