The Ghost of Tillie Jean Cassaway by Ellen Harvey Showell

CHAPTER ONE
    Back in the hills there is a river town called Mauvy. Once it was a lively place, a center for the lumber industry. Loggers cut down the great trees and set them afloat down the river to the sawmills. Trains came through every day and there were stores, a bank, two hotels, and a picture show. But the forests became used up and the big companies moved on. Stores went out of business, the bank closed. Most of the people left.
    As the years passed, those who stayed watched the forest return as new trees covered the hills and brush crept up on worn-out, abandoned farmland. They lived in white wood houses that lined narrow streets or in trailers on hillsides or in tumbledown shacks. Children could grow up there almost as free as birds, at home in the woods, learning the secrets of the rivers, caves, and hollows.
    Twelve-year-old Willy Barbour, who lived in a yellow trailer at the edge of Mauvy, was a thin, pale boy—deaf, his mother said, because he did not seem to hear half of what she said to him, but just stood there with a faraway look in his eyes. Sometimes she had to tell him three times that supper was ready.
    When other children laughed at him for looking long and close at dandelions or rocks, Hilary, his eleven-year-old sister, told them Willy was an artist and had to know things better, so he could draw and paint them. She also claimed he could hear a cricket a mile away. Hilary never missed a call to supper and always made sure Willy got there too.
    The story of Tillie Jean Cassaway—be she ghost or not—might well begin with one hot day in summer when Willy, with his paper and paints, rode his bike along the dusty streets of town, wishing he were elsewhere. Children were playing barefoot on the cracked pavement, old men were sitting on benches in front of vacant stores, old women in sunbonnets were hoeing their gardens. Willy turned down by the river and railroad tracks, wanting to get away from Mauvy, from the cramped trailer and the sameness of everything, glad to be near the river which forever rushed away but never left.
    He followed the dirt road that traveled with the tracks along the river, twisting and turning. Weeds hid the rails in some places. Trains did not come by anymore. He rode until there were no more houses, only rocks, river, tracks, and hills.
    After a few miles, he stopped to rest. The air was still. No birds sang, no leaves rustled. Even the rushing of the river seemed more like a tune in Willy’s head than an outside noise. He laid down his bike, sat on a rock by the water, and looked about. The river disappeared around a bend. A little ways from the bank rose a hill almost bare of trees. “Probably a fire there sometime,” thought the boy, as he gazed upward.
    At the top of the hill, two leafless trees stood side by side, their black limbs pointed like human arms, reminding Willy of two soldiers standing guard. He squinted his eyes so that they became spindly shapes against the sky and put a frame around them in his mind. He was thinking about sketching them when a movement at the bottom of one tree caught his eye, something shadowy sliding away.
    Curious, Willy climbed the hill, but at the top could see no animal or person. Looking back toward Mauvy, he saw the curling river, distant farmhouses, and fields. The other way he could see an island in the river and a footbridge strung across to it.
    â€œMust be Craig’s Island and that old swinging bridge,” he thought. “Didn’t know I’d come that far.” He knew about the old man who lived like a hermit on the island. Once some boys had broken windows in his house and since then, the man chased away any children that came around. Willy and Hilary were told not to go near the place.
    Willy looked down the other side of the hill. It had escaped the fire, for growth was thick and tangled. The hill helped form a ravine, or small hollow, down below. The place seemed like nowhere to the boy,