Primal Fear [Stumbling Onto A Corpse]

Besides the solitary confinement of writing, I cut myself off from the
world in two places. Hard-to-reach wilderness areas and forgotten churches
where a haunting takes over when
I see pews, a pulpit, and the occasional piano. A hymnal now and then too. My
haunting? The old congregation. Their bodies sleep nearby, and that brings me
to my
primal fear. Stumbling onto a corpse.
In our photo-journalism adventures, Robert
Clark and I go to remote places frequented by mosquitoes, ticks, gators sometimes,
snakes, and perchance two-legged snakes. We see no dead people and we hope to
keep it that way.
In my solo pursuits I explore forgotten
churches where primal fear dogs me … seems an abandoned graveyard in the
middle of nowhere would be a good place to bury a corpse. At times Cormac
McCarthy’s terrible passage comes to me … “The mummied dead everywhere. The
flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taut as wires.”
That doesn’t stop me from visiting lonely
churches, though. A few years back I decided to put several forgotten churches
in a magazine. Hearing of my project, retired forester Ken Leach of Greenwood,
told me a fellow he worked with forty years ago visited an old, abandoned
church near Newberry on Monument Road. “It had an old piano in it and it was
there he taught himself basic piano skills,” said Ken.
How easy to envision a ranger in green and
khaki sitting on a three-legged stool, notes ringing out to a congregation of
cedars, birds, wasps, and mice. Finding this old church turned one-man
conservatory proved elusive. Frustrated, I stopped at an old home with five
chimneys. The friendly owners gave me directions.
Toward Monument Road I drove where I came
across something I would have never imagined, a place where two World War II bombers
collided midair.
From the Newberry Observer: “On Feb. 5, 1943, several B-25 bombers on a
navigational training mission departed from Tampa, Fla., en route to Greenville
Army Air Base, now Donaldson Air Force Base. At around 5 p.m. three of these
bombers passed over Newberry in a tight V-formation. The day was overcast and
when these aircraft approached a dark cloud bank, the lead plane suddenly
veered to the right to avoid a flight path where visibility would have been
extremely poor. In doing so it collided with the plane to the right in the
formation and both aircraft plummeted to the ground, killing all 14 crew
members aboard.”
Ought to be ghosts in those woods behind
the monument I thought. I drove down a lane in the woods and thought of walking
into the woods. Something told me not to. As for the old church, finding the
site was the best I could do. The church was nowhere to be seen. An overgrown
grassy lane led to a flattened area littered with pieces of ceramic and blue
glass. At the site’s edge sat a polished piece of granite, a memorial of sorts.
No graveyard that I could fine.
Back on the highway I stood in front of
the monument. I had stumbled into fifteen deaths—the men and the church, but no
corpse. I thought of piano music and the sound of wailing engines followed by crashing
metal. I tried not to think of men with arms flailing like shot-gunned doves,
but I caught myself looking into the blue with its cottony clouds. That gave me
a haunting of a different
kind.
RIP, vanquished church. RIP, airmen.
Neither Robert nor I have come across a corpse and I don’t believe
we ever will, but abandonment keeps calling and the world is a dangerous place
that gets more dangerous with each passing day.