Oh Whistle, My Child, and I’ll Come for You

A Short Story

Oh whistle, my child, and I’ll come for you

When the autumn moon shines in the sky

Tho’ the hour be late, and the grave await, and the time of my death be nigh

No fire of hell shall bar my path, nor angels that watch from above

Just whistle a tune by the light of the moon, and I’ll come for you, my love

I was twelve years old when Mr. Lincoln became president, and papa told me that that the election of our sixteenth President was a good omen, for a man so aptly named could not fail to salve the troubles that ailed our Republic. In a way, I suppose, he was correct, for four decades after his passing, the old rail-splitter is rightly seated upon the pantheon of our greatest citizens. From time to time, people ask if I was named for him, and I have been known to affirm it as truth, though my own name was given when Abraham Lincoln was nothing more than a country lawyer. That papa would follow my mama and aunt to the grave, never seeing the end of the great and terrible war that followed Mr. Lincoln’s accession, he could not foresee – but I am getting ahead of myself.

I should begin with Liza Ann, for I tell the story primarily for the sake of her memory. Her mother and my own were identical twins, Kathleen and Clarissa McGregor, though they spoke among themselves in old Gaelic and addressed each other as Caitlin and Caitir. Liza Ann told me that the first McGregors came across the sea after the Battle of Culloden, and they kept coming for a hundred years as the Clearances forced them from their lands. They settled along the spine of the mountains from Maine to Georgia, and though most of them took on the habits of their new home, a few kept to the old ways, holding with the Church in Rome and keeping the old folktales alive. Ma came across the mountains to Tennessee and joined the Methodist church when she married papa, and I never heard her speak of such things as fairies or bogles. Aunt Clarissa, I was to learn later, carried much more of the old country in her bones.

Liza Ann and her mother came to live with us in 1858, after her father ran off to gamble on a Mississippi riverboat. Aunt Clarissa was sick even then, though we didn’t recognize it at the time – the winter air and woodsmoke could give anyone a cough, and by the time we realized that she would get no better, mama was sick as well. They died within a month of each other that summer, and we buried them in the small graveyard behind our farmhouse. Papa read a few verses from the Bible, and when it was over, we stood at the mound of freshly turned earth as Liza Ann.

“Oh whistle, my child, and I’ll come for you, when the autumn moon shines in the sky…”

Her voice was like the sound of an angel, but I couldn’t make much sense of the words, and I knew nothing of music beyond the songs that we sang in church. This tune had high, mournful intonation, more akin to a murder ballad than a funeral dirge. I asked her where she learned it.

“Mama taught it to me before she died. She said it would be my comfort if I was ever in need.”

I found this an odd notion, for I could not understand how a few bits of music could help a soul in time of trouble, but Liza Ann was two years older than me, so I reckoned that she knew more than I did. My cousin was truly a blessing in the dark days that followed, for she became like an older sister to me, a companion during the long hours of summer toil and winter boredom. It was Liza Ann who taught me to read and add my numbers, and she spoke of her mama and aunt with such eloquence and sincere love that I would wake with the rising sun, half-expecting to find them alive and well and sitting by our hearth. Of her father, she said little, save that he had chased her mother into the woods with a butcher knife when Liza Ann was five.

Tennessee held on for a time when the war came, like a man clinging to the edge of a high cliff. She dithered on secession, and when the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, the state was riven from within, with the planters along the Mississippi River and in the heart of the Nashville Basin for secession and the small farmers of the eastern mountains remaining firmly with the Union. Most of them, at any rate – as both state and nation were torn asunder, another war began, and a small brush fire began to smolder at the fringes of the larger conflagration. Though a majority of our county went with the Union, enough men sided with the Confederacy to guarantee trouble, and they were backed by the authorities in Nashville and the armed troops moving east from Arkansas and Louisiana.

Judge Edward was one such man.

The Honorable Edward Ambrose served as a circuit judge in Greeneville, and though he was not the county’s richest man, he carried the added respect of one dedicated in service to the law. His farm was not the largest, but his land was fertile, four hundred acres of rich limestone soil that adjoined our own sad plot. Why he hated my father so, I could not understand, though as I matured and the beauty of the fairer sex drew my attention, I began to suspect the truth. After all, Judge Edward always wanted the best for himself, and Kathleeen Woolsey was a beautiful woman – that she married a poor farmer, his neighbor and social inferior, must have cut deep. My aunt was equally beautiful, and the sight of the two women together must have driven the judge to fits of apoplexy. Every month, the church invited a citizen of prominence and good reputation to deliver a sermon, and Judge Edward chose to preach the story of Jezebel from the book of First Kings. He named no names but spun a dark warning of those who come from the far side of the mountains, “where men pray to the Devil rather than the Savior,” and bewitch the menfolk into carrying out evil deeds. It should surprise no one that with papa solidly for the Union, Judge Edward became an equally steadfast Confederate. And when his youngest son took a fancy to Liza Ann… but again, I am getting ahead of myself.

They came to arrest papa that fall, for the bridge burners had been about their work. Two men were hanged at the charred remains of the Lick Creek bridge and another three in Knoxville, and if Judge Edward had found a shred of evidence for papa’s guilt, then George Woolsey would have died with the others. Instead, orders came down that any man suspected of bridge burning was to be imprisoned without trial, and thus, on a spring night in 1862, papa shook me awake.

“Abe – there’s soldiers outside. Get your cousin and take her into the woods.”

Papa kept a pair of loaded rifles and an old fowling piece by the door, and I went for those instead – Lord knows I was scared of dying, but I couldn’t let papa to face the soldiers alone, and I was halfway to the door when a hand caught me by the scruff of my nightshirt.  “Abraham Woolsey!” Papa’s whisper was like the hiss of a copperhead, and it scared me more than whatever lay beyond the door.  “You do what I tell you, or I’ll hide you ‘til you can’t sit down! Now go get your cousin.”

I crept to the loft and tried to control my fear, for I could hear the movement of the soldiers outside as they surrounded the house. My voice was beginning to change, and sometimes it broke into a high quaver – a sound that I hated – when I was excited, so I whispered in a low voice as I shook her arm. “Soldiers outside – we need to get to the woods!”

A Worm Moon, bright and full, shined outside her window, and though I could see the outline of her face, I could make out no features, and I could not comprehend why Liza Ann seemed indifferent to the noises outside. I pulled at her arm to drag her out of bed, already doubting our chances of escape, for the soldiers were mere yards away, and we could scarcely hope for concealment on a moonlit night. Liza Ann sat up, still unconcerned by our peril, and pressed her face against the glass.

And with God as my witness, she began to sing.

“Oh whistle, my child, and I’ll come for you, when the autumn moon shines in the sky; Tho’ the hour is late, and the grave awaits, for the time of my death is nigh…” She pursed her lips, and the song turned into a low whistle, and though Papa called out for us, I could not discern his words, for he sounded as one speaking from a great distance. Then from the space between the woods and the sad little cornfield that fattened our pigs, something answered. It started low and grew to a high pitch, a squalling cry that froze the blood in my veins, its call rising and falling with my cousin’s mournful whistle. Liza Ann wrapped an arm around my neck and buried her head in my shoulder, but her voice never wavered, and outside, the stamping of horses’ feet fell silent and the men’s voices were stilled. I had a final thought that the cry was coming from the old cemetery, but I must have fallen asleep soon afterward, for I remember nothing more of that night.

There was a knock at our door the following morning, and though papa gave me a stern look of warning, I joined him as he stood at the door with a rifle. The voice on the far side spoke with an odd accent, vaguely southern but with a soft lilt that held none of our mountain drawl.

“Would you open the door, please? One of my men is injured.”

The men were dressed in Confederate uniforms, and the officer in charge was adorned with a long mustache and wispy beard. One of the gray tunics was stained with blood, and a pair of men held him upright by the arms.

“Boy –” papa never called me Abraham in the presence of the soldiers – “get something to bandage this man’s wounds. What happened to him?”

“It would appear that he was mauled by a panther.” The officer shook his head. “I was unaware that such beasts still roamed the countryside.”

“They don’t,” papa said. “There ain’t been any panthers in East Tennessee for forty years.”

The soldiers gave us no more trouble, for papa’s good deed was noted, and the Confederates repaid us in kind. Still, I marveled at the scratches that adorned the torso of that Louisiana boy, and when my curiosity got the best of me, I asked Liza Ann.

“What do you reckon it was that scratched that Rebel?”

“That ain’t no mystery.” My cousin gazed at me as if I were daft. “I reckon the cat-sith got hold of him.”

“Cat-sith?”

“You don’t know about the cat-sith?” She looked upon me with such incomprehension that I blushed at my own ignorance. “The cat-sith was one of the fey folk of the old country, a stealer of souls. On the far side of the mountains, the Cherokee call him the Ewah and say that he puts a curse on anybody who crosses his path. The white folk call him the Wampus Cat and say he has six legs, four for runnin’ and two fightin’… but that ain’t really true. You remember I told you how my own papa chased ma into the woods with a butcher knife? He was drunk and claimed she had eyes for another man. We spent the whole night on the mountain, and if the cat-sith hadn’t watched over us, ma and I would both have died that night.”

I sat with this for a while, chewing over her story. I had heard of the Wampus Cat, but I knew nothing of fey folk, and I couldn’t wrap my head around my cousin’s tale.

“Liza Ann?” I put a hand on her shoulder. She was family, and I was bound to her through love and loyalty, but I had to know the truth. “Your pa didn’t run off to Mississippi, did he?”

Another year passed. I grew taller, though I remained thin as a rail. The partisans of Jefferson Davis took heart from the victories in Northern Virginia, but there were darker portents, such as General Grant’s bloody victories at Shiloh and Vicksburg, and the Louisiana men, fated for slaughter at distant Gettysburg, moved onward. Liza Ann grew tall and pretty, and though the soldiers troubled us no more, we found misfortune of a different sort. Harold Ambrose, Judge Edward’s youngest son, turned seventeen that year. He claimed to be named for Light Horse Harry Lee, father of the Confederacy’s greatest general, and if so, it was a great irony, for Harry Lee was a wastrel who squandered his family’s legacy. Harold was like his namesake in that respect, for he inherited a double portion of Judge Edward’s haughtiness and coupled his father’s sins with an intemperance that, had the nation not been at war, would have seen him ridden out of town in shame. Instead, we lived in an evil time, and Harold began to linger on the dirt track that ran past our farmhouse.

“Hello there, Liza Ann.”

“Hello Harold.”

“You and I should take a walk together.”

“I reckon not. I have chores to do.”

“That’s a shame – a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be stuck in a wore-out shack with an old man and a half-bright cousin.”

“Well, Harold, if anyone knows about half-bright, I reckon it would be you.” For such a sweet girl, Liza Ann could cut like a razor, and though Harold was more than a little slow, his brow would darken, and he would stammer in anger as he caught her meaning,

“You know what I heard? I heard your family was all witches from Black Mountain, and they pray to the Devil.”

“Maybe I do at that – you should go home before I turn you into a toad.”

It went on for half a year, and Harold started carrying his rifle when he walked by our house. He had one of them new Yankee rifles – a Henry repeater that used copper shells instead of powder and ball – but I only needed one shot, and I told papa that I was going to lie in wait for him with our old musket. Papa slapped me and called me a damned fool, for if I killed Harold Ambrose, they would swing me from the end of a rope – boy or not. I went to Liza Ann instead.

“I reckon Harold Ambrose wants to court you.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Liza Ann managed a smile, but there was a somber edge to her voice. I understood well enough the doings between men and women, and I saw how men’s eyes lingered on my cousin, so I caught her drift. Harold Ambrose sought not courtship, but something more brutal and transactional in nature.

“Are you afraid?”

“Afraid of Harold? No… I reckon not.”

“Because of the cat-sith.”

“No Abe.” She took my hand in her own. “I’m not afraid because worryin’ don’t make your troubles go away – it just makes you feel small and afraid. Besides, why would I be scared when I got you to watch out for me?”

With God as my witness, I wish that she had been right. Had I known what would happen, I would have taken my chances with the hangman.

“George Woolsey? Come out!”

The riders gathered at sunset, five men assembled in a half-circle that blocked our path to the road. Harold Ambrose sat atop a bay mare with that Henry rifle draped over his arm, and I reckoned the others for Confederates, though with hindsight, I doubt they adhered to any particular cause – they were common ruffians who went to war for plunder and  surrounded our farmhouse not for the glory of secession (for by then, all knew the Confederacy to be living on borrowed time), but for a simple act of envy and retribution. A harvest moon, large and bright, rose over the treetops, and with a stab of fright, I realized that Liza Ann had not returned home – she had spent the afternoon at her mother’s grave. Perhaps she emerged from the woods at that fateful moment, for Harold Ambrose spurred his horse past the farmhouse and rode up the hill. 

Our weapons, two flintlock rifles and a fowling piece, stood by the door, but papa must have figured that he could talk his way out of trouble with the remaining men, for these were his neighbors, and no matter what bloodshed and bitterness had been birthed by the war, surely they could see that he was nothing more than a poor farmer trying to make his way in a hard world. Papa opened the door and raised both hands, showing himself unarmed even as they aimed their weapons. In my lifetime, I have seen more men leave this world than I care to remember, but papa’s death is the one that will follow me to my own grave. A pair of bullets caught him in the chest, and he fell backward as a red stain bloomed across his linen shirt. His mouth was open and his eyes were wide with surprise, and I knew immediately that he had been shot through the heart.

The riders must have believed the house empty, for their horses surged forward as I snatched up the flintlock rifle. One man went down, thrown from his mount as the bullet struck home, and the others shied away as I took up the second rifle. I fired again, striking one of the horses, and as the assailants retreated another hundred paces, I took up the fowling piece. The outlaws were out of range now, but my true enemy stalked the ridge behind us, and I ran through the door and up the hill, breathing heavily as I waited for a bullet to strike my own back. The shot never came, and instead, as the full moon brightened the evening sky, I heard three gunshots in rapid succession – the sharp report of a Henry repeater.

Dear God in heaven, I thought. Liza Ann.

The hillside itself was pasture, too steep and rocky for cropland, and a thin belt of woods marked the line between our own land and Judge Edward’s farm. I stumbled about in the darkness, desperate to find my cousin as Harold crashed through the woods on the big horse. The fowling piece was heavy in my arms, but I kept the muzzle in a ready position, for I would have only one shot. From Liza Ann, I heard no sound.

I angled up the hill to the northwest, moving toward the cemetery and pausing every few minutes to listen for the horse. Darkness aided me now, for Harold Ambrose could not see through the tangled branches, and I was safe from his bullets as long as I maintained a proper distance. Eventually, he would close in, and I would wait in silence behind the trunk of a tree, allowing him to close the distance to no more than ten paces before I ended his life.

“Liza Ann?” A shadow lay draped over the rough-hewn headstone, and I approached with my heart in my throat. I could see little in the moonlight, but the blood from her wounds had begun to congeal, and as my fingers brushed her arm, I felt ill at the sticky layer that adhered to her skin. She was breathing, though just barely, and as I cradled her in the crook of one arm, as her dying hand squeezed my own, I became insensate, unaware of the shadow that gathered over us both.

“Well ain’t this something.” Harold Ambrose loomed over the graveyard, impossibly tall. “I’m sad for the loss of such a fine lady, but I’ll ease my sorrows by hanging her fool cousin.” He gestured to the noose that hung from his saddle, but I was already moving. The fowling piece came up as I placed the stock against my shoulder, and I drew a perfect bead on the ugly face of Harold Ambrose as I squeezed the trigger…

… and heard only a slow fizzle as the gun misfired.

He tied my wrists and feet, then threw the noose over a sturdy branch. The proper way to hang a man, Harold explained, was to place him on the back of a horse, so that the resulting fall would break the neck. I, of course, was not worth sullying a mount as fine as Harold’s. “A little shit like you, I’ll just pull you up by hand and tie off the other end. When the rope starts to bite, I imagine you’ll have a good long time to think about what’s coming, then you can join the witch and your no-account daddy in hell.”

He threw the noose about my neck, but no thought of fear crossed my mind, for as he pulled the slack from the rope, pausing for a lingering glance at my dead cousin before drawing me upward to my death, I began to whistle. What happened next was noise and chaos and confusion.

My tune was cut short as Harold Ambrose pulled at the rope, and as flashes of red and green swam before my eyes, my final thought was that I had failed – I was about to die, and I would soon be with my father and mother, my cousin and aunt, in whatever world lay beyond this one. Harold Ambrose would never answer for the night’s bloody deeds, and in due time, perhaps, he would become as respectable as his father. Judge Harold, I thought, trying the name on for size as my feet left the ground and the air was squeezed from my lungs. Then in the next instant, I fell to earth, skinning my head on a rock even as the pressure on my throat eased and I found that I could breathe.

And Harold was screaming.

I can recount little of what happened next; there is a vague impression of green eyes and flashing claws, the sound of a wild gunshot, and a moaning which, had it emanated from the throat of any other man, would have moved me to pity. Instead, I watched with a heart of stone as I worked free of the bonds that secured my hands and feet. The cat-sith turned once, gazing upon my prostrate form with luminescent eyes, then departed, dragging its prey in massive jaws.

From the valley below, the first whiff of smoke drifted to my nostrils as the remaining bandits set fire to the house. I felt no sadness for its loss, for once I buried the remains of father and cousin, there would be nothing more to which I cared to return. I caught the horse and picked up the repeating rifle from the dirt, for my father’s killers sauntered about the valley below.

They expected Harold Ambrose but would meet an altogether different man.

The preceding tale was told by my grandfather, Abraham Woolsey (1848-1917), the famous Marshall and Old West gunfighter.  I need not recount his life in detail, for the reader will doubtless be aware of his exploits from Texas through the Arizona Territory, and ranging as far west as the Sierra Nevada. I will note (and I pray the reader will not take these words as impugning my grandfather’s honesty) that his version of events might leave a few things unsaid.

The great valley of East Tennessee, which runs between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the rolling expanse of the Cumberland Plateau, was mostly a footnote to larger conflict of the Civil War, with few battles of significance –the war was fought not in a great clash of armies but in clan feuds and skirmishes between neighbors. So it was with the remains of the family Ambrose, for nearly all were dead by the spring of 1865. Judge Edward petitioned Richmond for aid against the “brigands” who roamed the countryside, but the Confederates were fighting a desperate rearguard by that point, and no relief was forthcoming. Five brothers of the Ambrose family were killed, one after another, and the only clue to the identity of the perpetrators was the report of a young man, scarcely more than a boy, who wielded a repeating rifle of a type little-used at that time. The fate of Judge Edward himself is even more poignant, for he lived onward until 1871, grieving and in failing health and dying violently in his own home. I can find no confirmation of the events, but local rumor claims that his body was marked with a series of deep scratches, such as those observed from the attack of a large puma or jaguar.

As for Abraham himself, he ranged widely, returning to Tennessee as an old man and dying on the threshold of America’s entry into the Great War. His final wish was to be buried with his family, but the property has passed from our family’s hands, and his resting place is at the cemetery of the United Brethren, about a mile distant on the Kingsport Road. As his last surviving descendant, I accompanied him eastward, and we settled in a fine house. It is located in a wide, fertile valley that provides a good view of the mountains beyond. There is only one oddity about the place.

At night, I hear strange cries, like the yowls of a wildcat.

Abraham Woolsey III, 1924

Author’s notes:

1.     The title of this story is an homage to M. R. James’s tale, Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.

2.     The events in this story – of pro-Union sentiment in East Tennessee, the bridge burners, and the low-intensity conflict that continued for the duration of the Civil War – are broadly true. Indeed, the Woolsey farmhouse is based on an actual location near the site of my own upbringing, and both the murder of George Woolsey and the retribution that followed are based upon real events.

3.     The cat-sith, Ewah, and Wampus Cat are actual tales from Scottish, Cherokee, and Appalachian folklore.