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and the barn that had once been home for some of the finest blooded walking horses in the South. The roof sagged in several places. Alice and I had spent a lot of the past summer exploring around the barn. It had been vacant for about two years. Mama Betts said everyone who moved in there fell on hard times and couldn’t stay.
    “Mama Betts says it is.” A ghost story would help pass the last half hour. The driveway was lined with chinaberry trees, and I squatted down in the shade of a big one for a few minutes. My feet were burning hot from the sand and clay of Kali Oka. It was June 8. Our twentieth day of summer vacation. Daddy had said the cities were even hotter, especially this summer when Negroes and whites were eyeing each other like hungry dogs.
    “Hey, do you want to take a minute and go look in the barn? Remember last summer we left some soft drinks hidden in there.”
    “They’ll be hot.” I leaned against the tree trunk and closed my eyes. I didn’t want to move, but I could hear Maebelle V. frettin’ and gurglin’. She was bound to be half starved, and a little hot Coca-Cola would tide her over until we got home.
    “I know you’re not afraid of the Redeemers, but you might be afraid of old Sheriff Sidney Miller.” Alice nudged me with the toe of her shoe. She was already standing up, and I could hear Picket breathing at her side.
    The McInnis barn did bother me. It was big, with a loft and twenty stalls, and doors that were locked but were said to lead down to underground living quarters. Mama Betts said it was all a crock of bull. At one time the McInnis place had been the premier plantation in Jexville. Rathson McInnis, the original, had arrived in Jexville in theearly 1800s, along with his slaves and family, and started the farm tradition in the county. We’d studied about Rathson McInnis in Mississippi history. He was famous for his ideas in farming, and later for getting himself killed in the Civil War.
    He carved out more than three thousand acres of the best land in the county and built a plantation house and the old barn. The plantation had been burned by the Yankees after the war. Mama Betts said that a cease-fire had been negotiated when a band of Yankee troops rode through and burned the house to cinders while Mrs. Rathson McInnis stood in the yard with a portrait of her husband, the only thing she’d been able to save before the fire was set.
    After there was nothing left of the house, the Yankees ran their swords through the portrait as Mrs. McInnis held it. The story goes that one blade cut her palm, and as the blood dripped onto the ground, she cursed anyone other than a McInnis who would ever attempt to live on their land.
    But it wasn’t the Rathson McInnises, either the mister or the mistress, that made me feel ill at ease in the old barn. It was Sheriff Sidney Miller. I was eight years old when he lost his mind, shot his wife and two children and hung himself from a chinaberry tree. It was his ghost, the sheriffs badge glinting in the sun, that I’d seen in the barn. He’d been holding the end of his rope in his hand.
    “Hey, come on.” Alice nudged me with her toe.
    It was pointless to hang back any longer. My eyes were sun-blinded for a moment as I stood. Behind me a soft breeze ruffled the chinaberry leaves. An old sign, hung by rusty chains, creaked a warning.
    “Let’s just go on home,” I said.
    “Maebelle needs the sugar. We left those Cokes behind that old tire, remember? It won’t take but a minute. Last year you weren’t too scaredy cat to even walk in the barn.”
    Last summer Arly had dared me to go into the barn alone. Alice and I had been in every stall and even climbed into the loft where the old bales of hay smelled like dirt and Mama Betts’ herb plant, that curly purple-leafed one that she said smelled like an angel’s armpit. “Last year I hadn’t seen old man Miller.”
    Alice rocked back and forth on her toes. Maebelle V. was shaking her fists