Arguta Schoolhouse

There's a road that runs from west Barbour County all the way to Ozark. In autumn, the air there's so thick with peanut dust, you can hardly see beyond your car's hood as you drive down the road. And on chilly nights, you'll see green eyes leering out at you from the blackness on either side of the ditches. You might get a glimpse of dun pelt before the deer whirls around, waving its white tail like a flag in retreat.

The community there's called Arguta. It has a little white schoolhouse, primly Victorian for all its age – it hasn't been used in 50 years, probably, by humans at least. Bats and owls use its attic and the little garter snakes like to sleep off the winter in its basement. It's one of those schoolhouses that was closed down when the county district consolidated, but the country people living around there (some of the old-timers attended school there, I'll bet) still knock down the spider webs in its crevices and cut the grass around the place in the same way they do cemeteries.

One old-timer in Arguta was a man by the name of Arthur. He'd had a curse on him since the day he was born, folks said. He loved music, but couldn't sing a note nor play one on any instrument and not from lack of trying. He'd picked up just about every instrument as could be blown, picked or struck but to no avail. But old Arthur wouldn't give up. His last breath was used trying its damnedest to sing and his last act was wrestling his bony old hands to pick a banjo.

When old Arthur died, his fellow codgers in Arguta took more of an interest in his death than they might have someone else's. They prayed fervently that he'd rest easy in his grave as any respectable dead person should – for Arthur had died uneasy and what he couldn't get in life, he might still seek in death as a Heat Spirit.

Heat Spirits are common to the South. You'll feel them as you walk down a lonesome road on some summer night and the heat of the day is still rising, steaming off the asphalt. They feel like a cloud of steam reaching around you and wrapping you up in an invisible pillow of heat. And, if you wear glasses like I do, you'll be blinded and disoriented for a second. Then the air will turn cool and pleasant and the crickets will sing on again like nothing ever happened.

Like most spirits, Heat Spirits aren't considered malicious as a rule. A brief singeing is the most harmful thing someone will usually get by walking through a Heat Spirit. But some old people will tell you that Heat Spirits are the ghosts of folks who died uneasy. Uneasy Heat Spirits have the tendency to "suck breath" out of the unfortunate people they cross paths with. And some say Heat Spirits don't just suck the breath out of you either, but all your hopes, dreams, fortune and talent, leaving you nothing but an empty shell on the grass verge no better than road kill.

One morning shortly after Arthur's funeral, a sign appeared outside Arguta Schoolhouse reading "Music Saturday Night!" Well, weren't the people surprised. No sound except that of a lawnmower had been heard coming from that property in the last five decades. Everyone wondered as to who put up the sign. Old Man Hinson asked Great Aunt June if she'd done it, but she said maybe it was old Laura Thompson who put it up there. Then Grandpa Jake pointed out it might have been the Danner boys who'd posted it there as a joke.

In short, nobody knew for sure.

But when Saturday night rolled around, people within a 20-mile radius flocked to the old schoolhouse because what in the world is there to do in this area on a Saturday night but watch reruns of "The Lawrence Welk Show?" Scores came. There was little Nelson Smith with his fiddle, Robin Senn with his steel guitars, old Charlie Watkins with his dulcimer, Dan Adkinson with his mandolin and dozens more. The musicians walked down the road to Arguta Schoolhouse laughing and talking and generally having a high old time until they felt the heat rising up off the blacktop and the steam billowing up around them like that from a boiling pot. Dew beaded on the slick wooden tops of their instruments and made cool clammy sweat on their faces and wrists.

Then the Heat Spirit passed and the cicadas and screech owls called to one another like on any other evening and the night seemed very blissful and still except for the piles of clothes and instruments scattered on the road to Arguta Schoolhouse. The musicians had vanished into the cool night air like steam themselves.

The sign out front Arguta Schoolhouse still reads "Music Saturday Night!" But you won't see cars and trucks parked on the side of the road to the schoolhouse or musicians with battered guitar cases climbing the steps up to the porch. But on Saturday night, sweet music will pour from every window in the schoolhouse, every window which is lit up like Jack-O-Lantern teeth. You'll hear instrument strings plucked as if by the fingers of angels, not some human beings. But peep through the windows and you'll see not a soul in the building.

But if you pass by Arguta Schoolhouse on foot on a Saturday night, you’ll hear folks talking low from their front porches. As they listen to the music, they’ll murmur things like: “Don’t that fiddle sound just like little Nelson Smith’s?” or “Listen to that gee-tar! I’ll declare if that ain’t Robin Senn playing!” or “You know the sound of that dulcimer does remind me of old Charlie Watkins. What did become of him after that one Saturday night?” and so on.

The people in Arguta do all sorts of things to stop the Saturday night ruckus and to explain the music made by no one.They’ll board up windows, warn the neighborhood kids against pranks… Don Grace even paid a security company to watch after the old place, but the music of mandolins and guitars can still be heard pouring out of the old schoolhouse.

But the old-timers – Old Man Hinson and Grandpa Jake and Great Aunt June and all their friends – say the same thing: Old Arthur finally got what he wanted and yet he still can't rest easy.

Not on Saturday night at least.