“All this came upon King Nebuchadnezzar. 29 At the end of twelve months he was walking on the roof of the royal palace of Babylon, 30 and the king answered and said, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” 31 While the words were still in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven, “O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, 32 and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” 33 Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles' feathers, and his nails were like birds' claws.”-

  Daniel 4:28-33

  In the bosom of the tangled forests of leaning oaks and proliferous palmettos, the broad expanse of the Brazos cleaves its serpentine course for the distant gulf. On blistering days, the gulf air hangs thickly and clings to the earth to boil the black clay. It mingles with every step to mark the track of every passerby and drags at every foot until it curdles like the blood of the earth. At a bank of the river, a stone’s throw from the sprawling prairies of James Britton Bailey, there lay a small, roughhewn town. Its population of ramshackle cabins and sheds sprouted incongruously amidst affluent mansions and pitted floodplains. It squatted like a gnarled gargoyle before a ferry crossing and was known as Washington on the Brazos.

  The town was more than a town. In those days, it was the capital of the Republic. The settlers were largely Anglo-American with a small, yet growing population of German settlers. For all its growth, for every painted monolith of wood and brick that sprouted from the clay, the gnarled fingers of roots and moss seemed determined to spread, clutch, and drag the tumorous growths of civilization back into the bosom of the earth. The murky breath of the gulf brought with it persistent rot, and from that rot, like fungus things, sprouted the underbelly of crime, desperation, and dirty secrets. The corners and bars were haunts of foppish opportunists crawling like maggots on the belly of the river trade alongside the bloated delegates that took their cut of the meat. Refugees fleeing the forces of Santa Anna scraped a living on the barges or in the fields and plantations.

  With every fluctuation in trade and spout of refugees from some war-torn corner of the territory, these affluent families came and went. The few plantation owners in the land were firmly rooted in the immutable clay. Yet the flow of generational wealth from the old country was transient. Several moved on to greener pastures in San Antonio or the thriving port of Galveston. These left behind the bones of many a painted mansion or alabaster manors like whitewashed tombs. Between manors and farm plots were scattered family plots, and countless unmarked graves spread throughout the woodlands, marked by simple, wooden crosses or fieldstones if at all. The fungal vapors mingled with the salty coastal air, tinging its putrid freshness with the stench of stagnation.

  Behind some scattered plots to the south, a deep ravine carved a border marked haphazardly by leaning juniper trunks along its edges. Beyond this stretched the tangled, congested chaos of the forest proper. For some six to eight miles into the interior, a man would find himself in a land of black swamps and untamed wilderness. Yet one must not think there was no beauty to be found therein. For just as beauty may be found in the cold chiaroscuro of a moonlit night, or the gold and bronze of dying leaves on an autumn day, so might it sprout with the waving grasses, the proliferous palmettos, and the tilting oaks and beech trees like mossy skeletons.

  Yet what fingers of civilization that found no purchase in the black clay left behind their fading prints in the deeper groves and thickets. Behind the misty veil of palmettos and leaning trunks, the shadows of mossy cabins were strewn broadly throughout the interior. Hither and yon they sprouted like warts from the mangy back of the marshland.

  The last dregs of civilization ended before the vast wall of a gnarled thicket. There, the reek of the land faded also, and a chill hung like a thick curtain beyond. There, the trees leaned so close they twisted together, and their branches laced like interlocking fingers in a dense canopy above. All through the land between the Brazos and the San Bernard, sowed there the seeds of their superstition.

  The people were given to such notions—tales of eerie music and voices in the air calling to no one. The twilight played twisted shadows through the crooked trees in an eerie theater of black shades and bloody crimson. There the sounds of bobcats and cougars shrilled through the night like the wails of children while the baying of coyotes sounded mournfully above it all.

  By the light of the cold moon, these anthropic shadows took on the semblance of sentience and seemed to move with purpose. Every man and child claimed to see the same shades and ascribed to them names. Guilty men saw their sins walk by moonlight and hunch ghoulishly by their windows. The moon held its maddening sway over the hearts and minds of all.

  One shade in particular was seen by all in the community. Denizens took to dubbing him Black Jack and adopted him as a sort of local bogeyman. His haunts were seemingly confined within the stretch from the river to Hollandale, yet it was generally agreed that his origin was from somewhere within the thicket. Theories abounded as to his identity, and gossiping housewives often lodged suspicions at local ne’er-do-wells or the more private plantation owners or itinerant ministers for imagined sins and clandestine sorceries. Some claimed to have seen his face. One portion claimed it was a hollow, eyeless mask of waxen flesh gaping at them from the trees. Others claimed Jack had no face, but only a pair of black eyes staring owlishly from an empty mask of flesh. His face, for all the contradictions, was the most agreed upon. His stature stretched, shrank, hunched or crawled depending on the witness. All agreed generally that he had a mess of tangled hair like moss and long fingers, describing him recurrently as spiderlike.

  Such is the general purport of this local bogeyman which established for itself a glorious reputation in the wild stories around campfires or before the fireplace of the local tavern. His renown even spread in the nightly routines of local households from the lips of bustling housewives and stern fathers to instill some incentive for obedience on the impressionable minds of their progeny. Thus, it made its way even to the affluent household of Austrian merchant Gabriel Blackwood to enchant the ears of his only daughter, Ada.

  The only daughter is ever the jewel of the household, but Ada was the jewel of the town. A diamond in the black Brazos clay. A radiant gal of fresh sixteen, plump and freckled, crowned with curls of dazzling red hair. Not given to coquettishness but conscious, as all girls are at that age, of her budding beauty, she moved proudly and freely among her peers. Not vain but blessed. While not a bookish girl, she was enamored of tales and legends, preferring the seasoned oral tradition of sunburned wayfarers and calloused old codgers, gnarled and tough as the oaks they hewed to lay the foundations of their town. She heeded eagerly the daring accounts of Indian scrapes and captivity, sensational ambushes and terrifying encounters with savage wolves and mountain lions. She laughed giddily at the tall tales of fearsome critters and rustic tricksters who lassoed the moon or rode a gator to the fair.

  Naturally, the tales of her town’s local bogeyman enthralled her and gave her a sense of local pride. When you admire and imbibe regularly in the tales and goings on of the exotic outside world, one thrills at the notion that your own home could make a marker of equal significance. She looked for him often, staying up on moonlit nights to stare out the window, eagerly scrutinizing the shades and impermeable fog.

  She inquired often of the local elders. These were more than obliged to tickle her ears with first or second-hand accounts of sightings and near scrapes with Black Jack.

  Old Ewan Bell spoke of a nocturnal perambulation amidst the bogs—coon hunting as was his wont. He had hunted hogs in his heyday, but pushing seventy-seven summers, it was decreed by his wife that coons were a safer quarry. Grumble as she might about his fading eyesight, she couldn’t well argue that night was the chief time for coon hunting. She felt some measure of comfort that he brought his old bloodhound, Jasper, on these excursions. Old as he was, she placed more faith in old Jasper’s nose than Ewan’s eyes. It made her worry all the more that he might fire upon some unfortunate on a dark night, mistaking his silhouette for a hog or buck or other such beast.

  It was a sultry summer night in August when the moon hung clear amidst the black tapestry of shimmering starlight. Fog crept thickly over the forest and grasslands, and the night noises were unusually dim and far between. Rather than a feeling of sleepiness, the general atmosphere of the land was of a million breaths held in unison. This was the setting, the ambiance craftily molded and shaped by Mister Bell beneath tones hushed in reverence with a voice like bending willows in an autumn breeze.

  Some gave little credit to the sight Mister Bell beheld that night, citing age and a fading, feeble mind. The schoolmaster, Mr. Tolliver, often shook his head at the mention of the old fellow and quoth he solemnly, “It is the very error of the moon. She comes more nearer earth than she was wont and makes men mad.”

  Mad, it seemed. For who could credit the visions of a feeble mind and fading eyes on the misty woods, where the moon bent every shade to lean and flutter through gnarled branches? Nevertheless, like a grim prophet, he ever recounted the sight—swinging his rifle at the skittering feet of a fat coon darting away through the palmettos. He parted his teeth to give a whistle, signaling old Jasper to take the plunge. The blur of a white body darted like a snake from the palmettos, and the whistle died in his throat. He saw it spring for an instant, carrying the coon abruptly through the ferns and palmettos. There was a shrill noise that abruptly ceased, and the air was still. It all happened so quickly that Mr. Bell found himself quite dumbstruck, as if the whole thing were a dream he had only just awakened from.

  The public reaction to Mister Bell’s tale was initially regarded with unanimous skepticism and profound amusement. It was agreed that spirits of his sort were readily contained in a bottle and imbibed of his own volition. Possessed by such spirits, the mind required little labor from external stimuli to produce these remarkable visions. If anything, the only anxiety produced by his tale was that shared with his wife—that his inebriate imp should direct Brown Bess to an unintended quarry.

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  Yet other sightings gradually thronged about his tale, usually from the outskirts of the town. As several gone hunting claimed to witness Black Jack vanishing at a certain bend beyond the river, his source of origin, or haunt if you will, gradually took shape. It was decided by old timers and gleefully corroborated by giddy and anxious youths that his lair lay somewhere behind the wall of the thicket.

  The proliferation of such marvelous accounts of Black Jack became a kind of local pastime. Even scrawny juveniles like young Barnabas Beasley claimed to have encountered him at night. His mother and father conceded his terror on the night in question, lending some credence to his account. Indeed, she recalled with what shrieking terror he had burst into the house, stained in slick clay. She recalled too with what terror she had awakened realizing his departure had gone hitherto unwitnessed. The boy had been sleepwalking and awakened with a terrible fright in the deep woods. He had wailed and called out for his mother and father, but his distance was too great to hear. What little could be heard could be easily disregarded as the cry of a bobcat or screech owl. It had been when the boy had run frantically around screaming his throat raw that he fell against a tree in terrified exhaustion.

  “That’s when I heard him,” the child would recount with awed reverence and no small hint of terror. “Or, well, I heard him first. Lil’ boy, he says, Lil’ boy, no good kicking up a row like that. Hungry things don’t sleep; they wait. I says, Mister, I wanna go home. Daddy says injuns roam round here, and there’s some eats people! That’s what Daniel says. You ain’t no injun, are ya, mister?’ He kinda laughs and says he ain’t no injun. He says he’ll take me home. So, I follow him. It was so dark I couldn’t see him too good except as a shape. Anyway, I saw the schoolhouse ahead. I got excited and I says, Thank you, mister! Thank you! And I jerk on his jacket. He leaned down to look at me, and that’s when the moon hit him. I seen him then plain as day!”

  “My cousin says he’s all bone—that he ain’t got any eyes, just holes,” chimed in one of the other children, a blonde foundling by the name of Jakob.

  “Naw, he’s got eyes. Awful eyes! I tell ya, I seen him when he leaned into that light—”

  “Was his face all rotted, then?” chimed in another, eager to contribute to the guessing game that was arising amongst them. The childish desire to try to piece clues together and paint the face themselves was an exercise in imagination almost more enthralling than the eerie truth of the tale itself. “I hear it’s all peeling away like old paint.”

  “Naw. That’s what I’m trying to tell ya,” Insisted the storyteller. His hands jittered in front of him in a motion both a call to silence and an unconscious attempt to shape with hands what the voice could not. “He ain’t got a face!”

  “Aw, c’mon, Barney,” scoffed another child. “Everyone’s got a face. Even animals got faces.”

  “But he ain’t. I’m telling ya! It was just nothing. All white skin and smooth like wax. A face with no mouth, with these black eyes just staring at me! He had moss for hair, and long, thin fingers like spider legs!”

  “Maybe that’s why he talked to ya, Barney,” suggested another hurriedly as if rushing some great discovery. “Maybe—Maybe he wanted your face!”

  “Shut up, Tom!”

  “Black Jack wants your face!”

  “Nu-uh! Nuh-uh!”

  “So, what’d you do?”

  “I started screaming. That’s when he put his hand over my mouth. I swear his eyes started glowing, and he started hissing like a snake!”

  “That’s Old Scratch! Damn, Barney, you done met the Devil, and he was set on dragging you to hell!”

  “But I done nothing wrong!”

  “You snuck out.”

  “I was sleepwalking! It wasn’t my fault!”

  “Maybe he was calling ya, and that’s why you came walking. Old Scratch was gonna drag ya away!’

  “Yeah. Drag ya all the way to hell!”

  So, Black Jack’s legend proliferated like a contagion amongst the masses. An itinerant specter bearing a lantern searching for a new face. Some said that if you stared at Black Jack for a while, he’d show several faces, cycling through them like one of the magic lanterns they sell in the big cities. They said if you stared long enough, Black Jack would have your face, and you’d wander the prairies faceless and blind forever. Soon, the rumor arose that the only way to ward off the ghost was with a mirror, for Black Jack couldn’t stand his own reflection. On dark, stormy nights or crimson dusk, children, young men and young women would shutter their windows or set out mirrors in their rooms to frighten him off if he should peek in.

  Some regarded these accounts with horror, others with amusement, but the lovely Ada regarded them with wonder. A romantic spirit and boundless curiosity inspired her with feelings of pity and sadness at the thought of the ghost. He was, to her, as the tragic figures of so many novels, and she concocted for herself many stories of what he could be. A doomed lover crying out for his lost lady in the night? A lost boy drowned in the river ages agone? A soul done in by foul murder crying out for justice?

  “Mein Gott, you’re so morbid, Ada!” her mother would exclaim with a wag of her head.

  “But of course she is, my dear,” her father always laughed in rejoinder. “After all, what German isn’t?”

  Eccentricities aside, Ada was an obedient child. She enjoyed the luxuries afforded her and attended local festivals and gatherings as a born socialite. In late October, the harvest season, her family attended the barn dance hosted by a local sugarcane farmer, Herman B. Cooper.

  The barn was a gaudy affair, decorated with cornstalks and cotton branches along posts and rafters. Woven, decorative quilts lay draped over the benches, and tables were lined with pumpkins and gourds. The scent of cider mingled sweetly with the scents of smoke and tallow hanging in the night air. The air itself was alive with the staccato trill of rollicking fiddle playing to the percussive beats of dancing feet. Men traded jokes and bawdy anecdotes over jugs of whiskey while women traded tittering gossip by candlelight. Outside the barn, the clearing was ringed by wagons. Horses were tethered to hitching posts nearby, their snorting breaths turning up clouds of argent mist in the cool air. The flickering candlelight and iron lanterns cast a crimson chiaroscuro of bending, dancing shadows along the walls. The dance was a masquerade of light and shadow, eyes gleaming in the infernal shade, their faces hidden by the flickering lanterns. The rhythmic clatter of dancing feet quickened in rising timbre like the beating heart of the community. A flurry of colored skirts and petticoats twirled in pivots, leaps and joyous gyrations.

  Amidst the garden of bright colors and flickering lights bloomed Ada, like a lily in her white dress. Her rosy curls tumbled and swayed as she turned, her rippling ringlets breaking and reforming like waves of a roiling sea. Her waving locks, like a waterfall, caught the lamplight and cast it back into the night. As if no shade could cling to her. The desire for so lovely and graceful a dance partner was a contest of wills that brought the savage spirit of competition out in many young men. Yet the blush and indecisiveness of youth was a contagious fever, and its chills set their knees knocking like a newborn foal’s. So rather than make any advance, it was enough that no other rival should pursue that conquest. It was enough to watch, to admire, to fancy that her limpid eyes caught one in their stray and beckoned them siren-like to join her jubilation. How often the youth content themselves to dwell alone in their minds, thrilling in silent revelry with the thought—just the thought—of possibility.

  At the fever pitch of merriment, with the sharp trill of the fiddling crescendo, broke forth a shrill scream as if summoned. A flutter of gasps thrummed throughout the throng of revelers, punctuated by the shatter of a dropped wineglass. Eyes flickered towards every corner, every rafter and window. Every collision or bump with a befuddled reveler induced each guest to recoil as if from a snake. Every bending shadow in the hypnotic candlelight took brief and passing shapes of things too terrible to be described.

  Over the tumult of voices, the resonant bellow of their illustrious host cut like a trumpet call to revelry. “Ho, then, by God! Calm, calm! What is it? What’s the matter? Oh! Make way, please!” The startled guests slowly parted to admit the imposing form of the barrel-chested Irishman. “On then. Let’s have it out. Do make way. Anyone hurt?”

  The scream had come from petite Rebekkah Craven, who had been sitting at one table nearest the door. She had recoiled back, practically throwing herself across the table, her face pale and eyes wide and fixed on the darkened corner at the end of the table. Her sister beside her gently restrained her in a comforting embrace, stroking her dark locks with a hand.

  Naught appeared but a flickering shadow that seemed to flee from the glare of the lantern cast towards the barren corner. Only a small stretch of hay filled the space of floor against the red wall. A couple of other girls near the door insisted they felt a disturbance in the air. As of a form passing closely beside them beneath the shadows of the lanterns.

  “Were only a rat, I say. That fat ol’ tom is slacking off, I reckon,” surmised one of the older hands that tended the barn.

  “No! No rat! That face!” cried out Rebekkah, digging her face into her sister’s shoulder.

  “What face, Becky?” queried her mother soothingly as she approached.

  “Hideous!” she whimpered. “All white and smooth like wax. No mouth, only eyes—enormous eyes just staring at me! Just a face floating in the dark.”

  “Hush, hush now. Look, see? There’s no one there.”

  “I heard the door swing a bit, yonder. Only the wind, as like, throwing shadows around,” suggested John Mason, the carpenter, with a laugh. “Naught but a draft and a bit of candle to make smoke and mirrors, missy. Look ‘ere. It’s empty enough.”

  “Or a barn haint wantin’ a reel! What ho! Avaunt, thou cream-faced loon!” guffawed another patron, raising his glass to a chorus of laughter. “And I say we oblige him. It’s harvest time, ain’t it? Play on, I say! We’ll spook the shades with such a row! Play on!”

  So, the revelry struck up again and continued unabated. The air of jubilation was restored. Little Rebekkah was soon soothed enough but spent the rest of the evening by the hearth. Yet the children attending were galvanized by this dramatic encounter and determined that they should see the sight for themselves. Already the murmur and excited whispers shuddered amongst their huddled companies.

  “Black Jack! Black Jack!”

  “No fair! I want to see him too!”

  “Not me!”

  “Black Jack’s here?”

  “He’s looking for a face!”

  “He’ll have his pick of the town, alright.”

  “I want to go home!”

  Ada excused herself from dancing. Her mind was a whirl of frantic imaginings. She trotted quickly over to her mother and leaned eagerly over her. Her fingers twitched and grasped at air as she hurriedly requested, “My bag!”

  Her mother gave a somewhat exasperated sigh. “Oh, dear heart, now?” At the hurried nods and emphatic flex of her daughter’s fingers, her mother rolled her eyes and passed her an embroidered velvet reticule.

  Ada hastily thanked her mother and darted back to join her sister by the fireplace. There she sat on the floor, spreading the skirt of her dress around her like a blooming flower. Her fingers fumbled excitedly with the drawstring. Finally, she withdrew a small, leather-bound notebook and pencil and furiously scrawled on the pages.

  The barn was a gaudy affair, decorated with cornstalks and cotton branches along posts and rafters. Woven, decorative quilts lay draped over the benches, and tables were lined with pumpkins and gourds. The scent of cider mingled sweetly with the scents of smoke and tallow hanging in the night air…