Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry by Susan Vaught Page A

Confederate Army was formed, leaving only four students at Ole Miss.” Ms. Manchester held up four fingers, wiggling one at a time. “Four. That’s all. The college closed, but was soon forced to open its doors again as a hospital for the wounded and dying. They came on horseback, carried by friends, carried by wagons. Two by two and three by three they came, dozens, and dozens more, and then hundreds. The Lyceum filled to capacity, so the wounded spilled into other buildings, like this one.
    I choke-gripped Indri’s fingers until she yanked her hand away and smacked me on the shoulder.
    Ms. Manchester’s eyes traveled slowly around the circle. There were twelve of us, and she looked each of us in the face as she spoke. “Nurses and townsfolk did what they could, but most war wounds don’t heal. Moans echoed through these walls. Men suffered, and men died. Bodies lay stacked in the fields outside. Back then, nobody burned the dead. They put them in the ground.”
    She lifted her arm and pointed one finger over our heads, like she could see the exact spot where the bodies got planted. “Hole after hole, prayer after prayer, those men were buried right over there, behind our football stadium. A hundred. Then two hundred. And it wasn’t over, no, not even close. Before the year was out, General Grant himself pitched a tent in Oxford’s town square, a few feet from Square Books where I work now. There were more battles, and more wounded, and Union dead joined Confederate dead until the cemetery held the remains of more than seven hundred soldiers.”
    Indri glanced at me, eyes bigger than a Madagascar lemur.
    â€œSouls of the dead killed in battle, now they’re restless at best,” Ms. Manchester said. “Townsfolk brave enough to walk by the graves at night told tales of whispering and moaning and distant screaming. Some said they heard cannon fire and rifle shots. And then in 1900, workers sent to cut grass and weeds moved the markers. Once the cemetery had been cleaned,nobody knew where to put the gravestones, and seven hundred soldiers lost their names.”
    Well, that about sealed it. That graveyard would so totally be haunted. Judging by the way Indri squeezed my fingers, she thought the same thing.
    â€œHow would you feel if you died for your country, got buried in strange ground—and then somebody went and lost your marker so your people couldn’t even pay their respects?” Ms. Manchester looked at each of us again, and she nodded at the frowns on our faces. “That’s right. Angry. And sad.” She leaned into her flashlight, turning her cheeks almost translucent. “And restless. ”
    She paused. The air conditioner rattled in the background. My own breathing sounded too loud, so I held the air in my lungs until the darkness around Ms. Manchester seemed to pulse.
    â€œAll that remains is a single monument, put up later to list as many names as we could find.” She shook her head. “But I don’t think that monument appeased the offended dead. I heard tell once of a student, we’ll call him John Smith. Brave John, he took it on himself to show his fraternity brothers that Ole Miss’s cemetery ghost stories were nothing but tall tales. So he dragged his sleeping bag out to that monument, to spend the night.”
    Stupid. Why were people in scary stories always so dumb? I’d have glued my feet to the floor before I went to a graveyard in the middle of the night—for any reason, much lessto prove there weren’t any ghosts. People who tried to show ghosts didn’t exist always got eaten by something fanged and nasty. The second anybody in a spooky story laughed at ghosts, you knew blood was gonna flow.
    My teeth ground together as I waited for the worst to happen.
    â€œIdiot,” Indri whispered about Brave John.
    Ms. Manchester’s eyes drifted in Indri’s direction, and Indri clamped her