By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
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 pm 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.