LETTERS: TALES OF THREE HAUNTED HOUSES

To the editor:

That must have been in September 1962, before I had unpacked my suitcases, when I went one Saturday to the yard sale in Cape Girardeau. I have gone to a few since then, but I have still memorials of that first excursion. I bought a number of children's books in German and a complete set of Mark Twain, all for a buck or two. The cheap set of Mark Twain fit well on a top shelf, where it remained for several years. One night I looked closely and saw that only one appeared to have been read. That was, of course, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." This I opened, looking for clues not about the story, but about the previous reader. The book opened to a terse, handwritten note: "We are at the friends next door playing cards. Come as soon as you get home. May 24, 1941." It was not addressed. I fear someone missed a card game. But there was also a neatly addressed birthday card of the same year ready to be mailed. I stamped it, and it went away with the morning mail carrier. I have not yet looked at all of the German books.

Just this morning I picked up one new to me which bears the penciled name of Alfred C. Wilder. One of the tales is "Als ich das erste Mal Komodie spielte." The second, more appealing, is an anthology of short Christmas stories with an illustration of Schutz Engel leading two kids through the snow. These books were printed in America and used by Lutherans and others anxious for their children to learn German. Possibly some of these books contain other handwritten notes or invitations to card games and just possibly might contain a hand-painted Fraktur with gold edges worth $10,000. But I won't look now.

The second haunted house I entered only yesterday. I turned around and drove back a block or two to follow the signs on Pacific. I went again look for marked books. Everything about the house was asking for the absent resident. An upstairs room was filled with books, and as I looked at the pages, a picture emerged. He had lots of the same things I had read in my college days. He was strong on Thomas Wolfe and Hemingway and Alexander Woolcot and especially fond of James Thurber. I bought for 50 cents a collection of Thurber stories, and although it was not marked, it held a half-dozen newspaper clippings about Thurber. Other books revealed that the absent tenant had studied biology and nutrition. When I paid the attendant, she said, "Now I will give you a book free." This resident had written a book about nutrition and exercise, supporting a kind of devil advocate's position, which I too find appealing. "Japanese men smoke twice as much as Americans but have no heart attacks." I don't smoke, but I will feel better now if I start.

Nancy is now asleep upstairs, and Sadie is next to me in the kitchen, snug in her cardboard box. I am fumbling through my new investment and begin thinking about Charley Armgart, whose name is written deeply in the concrete on the back steps. The very name, in German, probably means "I will protect you with my strong arm." So I was not afraid when there seemed to be a shuffling on the bottom inside cellar steps. Did Sadie stir? Did I hear footsteps coming up the closed stairway? Only last week a strange woman (stranger to me) stopped me in the grocery story to tell me that she had known Charley Armgart and had once lived in my very own house, built in the exact year I was born. If Charley did not wish me to remember him, why did he write in the concrete? Will he -- she, it -- speak to me in German? Did I hear the cellar door begin to open and rub against the bulge in the linoleum floor? But no, that was the floor in our farm house, which I tore down 40 years ago. I look out on Bellvue Street for the forms of Alfred Wilder and Charley Armgart as they walk away, their backs turned.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau