Garthie was my best friend. He’d be waiting in front of his house every weekday morning for me to come by, and we’d walk to school together. Then we’d walk back after school and usually play till dinner and sometimes after, depending on what we had to do. Sometimes another kid or two would join us, but we lived pretty far down a country road that ran alongside of a creek, and there were not many houses up that way. 

Garthie’s dad had been killed in a coal mine, and he lived with his mom and grandma and younger sister. World War II was over, but the mines were still going strong, and just about all of the people we knew worked for the coal companies or had jobs that depended on them. Most of us lived from paycheck to paycheck and took life at face value.

So, when Garthie’s mother told us that spring that she had seen a flying saucer, we knew she had. We had heard about them, read about them, and seen what was supposed to look like them in the movies, but we had never seen a real one. We hadn’t seen a real submarine, either, but we didn’t doubt they existed. She said she saw the flying saucer the evening before, just as it was getting dark. It suddenly swished in and then hovered above a sycamore grove along the creek about a hundred yards away.  It was circular and sparkled. She couldn’t tell how big it was but figured it was about the size of a barn, though flatter. She thought it must have been coming at night, so as not to be seen, but perhaps had arrived a little early that time. She was very excited about it.

Garthie and I were excited, too, and hoped it would come back so that we might get to see it. He came up with a plan that as soon as school was out for the year, we would sneak away and meet after bed time, and then go up the creek beyond the end of the road to where there was a clearing in the woods. The family that owned it had taken out the trees and brush to make a new ground for growing corn and potatoes.  Garthie and I roamed the woods a lot and so had found it the year before.  In early summer when the potatoes had set on the vines, we’d pulled some of them up and had a potato war, and once the corn had soft ears, we’d had another war.

We thought the clearing would be a good place to watch for the flying saucer to come back. It might even land there, since there wouldn’t be anybody around—except for Garthie and me and we’d stay out of sight. So, at night when it wasn’t raining and we could get away, we’d meet and go up to the clearing and sit at the edge of it for a couple of hours, watching for the saucer to appear.  Sometimes we’d see a shooting star or the lights of an airplane passing high overhead and get our hopes up, but no flying saucer ever came. Eventually, the nights began to cool, school would soon be starting up again, and we were losing interest, anyway. So, we gave up.

That fall a revival came to the area and set up a big tent on the ball field across from the company store. It lasted all week, and Garthie and I went every night with his grandma, who belonged to the church that was holding the revival. There was a band and several different preachers, some from close by and others from a distance. They’d take turns preaching. One of them could really get the crowd going. I couldn’t understand much of what he was saying, but I’d watch him work himself up into a wailing, sing-song rhythm, holding a hand over one ear and bending and swaying at the waist, as the music kept pace, getting louder and more urgent. Pretty soon people would be leaving their seats and running down the aisles with their arms uplifted to join others in front of the stage. They’d stamp and shake and babble words that I couldn’t understand. I knew that it was called shouting or speaking in tongues.

Garthie’s grandma sat between us, so that we wouldn’t get to talking or horsing around. She’d be completely absorbed in the goings on, leaning forward and sometimes swaying in her seat. On the last night toward the end of the service, she suddenly leaped up, made for the aisle, and joined the others who were shouting in front of the stage. She danced up and down, her arms uplifted and her eyes open but rolled back in her head, babbling in a loud shrill voice. She had been wearing every night a kind of turban that some older women wore then, especially when dressed up. It fell off her head, and she trampled it underfoot, unaware it was gone. Then someone else happened to kick it, and it went spinning across the ground, the sequins sewn to it sparkling in the light, till it partly unraveled and came to rest blinking occasionally against the leg of an empty chair. I kept glancing over at Garthie, but he just stared at his grandma as if he had never seen her before.

When it was all over and the meeting was breaking up, she came back our seats and said it was time to go. Other than being sweaty and winded, she seemed the same as usual. I got her turban and gave it to her. She said she hadn’t noticed that she’d lost it.

As we walked back home, Garthie asked what had happened to her. She said the Holy Ghost had moved her. She had felt it every night tugging at her and tugging at her, and then suddenly she was one with the spirit. “What were you saying, Granny?” he asked.  She said she didn’t remember, that it was the spirit who was speaking through her, but at the time, she understood what she and everybody else was saying. “But if you don’t remember, how do you know?” I asked. She looked at me like it wasn’t my place to question and said that you had to believe, and if you believed then all would be revealed to you.

Garthie and I talked about it next day and decided we’d try to concentrate on believing and maybe the spirit would enter us or at least one of us. We even turned on the radio and danced around to the music, hoping that we might get the spirit to come, but nothing happened, and so we had to conclude that perhaps we weren’t able to believe hard enough.

It was only a few weeks after the revival that Garthie’s mother died. She had complained about not feeling well, but nobody thought she was going to die. Garthie told me later that he had heard his grandma screaming that morning, and when he ran into the bedroom, he saw his mother lying there face up, stiff and cold. He said he thought the spirit must have moved him then, because he was out of his head and screaming stuff that he couldn’t remember. In fact, he never seemed the same after her funeral.  Having lost his dad, he was very close to her, and before long he starting saying some strange stuff.

About a month after she’d died, we were walking home from school, talking about this and that as usual, when he suddenly said, “They took her.  They came back and took my mother with them.”

“Who took her?” I said.

“The creatures from the flying saucer. The aliens.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because I saw her before the doctor came. She was lying there looking up, and her eyes were wide open.”

“Your eyes stay open when you die. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody? I’ve seen dead people in caskets, and their eyes are closed.”

“That’s because somebody closes them—after the person is dead.”

“Have you seen any dead people with their eyes open?”

“Well, I’ve seen them in the movies, and I know that it’s a fact.”

“If you die in your sleep, do your eyes pop open?  If they did, that would mean you woke up. You woke up to die—which doesn’t make any sense.  You hear about people dying in their sleep.  That means their eyes were closed.”

“I’ve heard of people having their eyes open when they are asleep. They may walk or even talk but are still asleep and don’t remember anything about it the next morning.”

“But they aren’t dead, are they! Because if they were, their eyes would be closed. So, I know that flying saucer must have come back and took her—took her and left her body. Maybe they realized that she had seen them or maybe they just wanted her to be with them because she was so happy she had seen them.”

I didn’t know how to answer, so I just let it go. If believing that somehow helped Garthie to deal with the loss of his mom, I wasn’t going to argue with him.

One morning Garthie wasn’t waiting when I stopped at his house on the way to school. His sister said he wasn’t anywhere to be found that morning and their grandma had walked into town to tell the sheriff and try to get help in looking for him. The weather had turned cold by then, and his sister said his winter coat was still hanging by the door.

I went on to school, but Garthie never showed up.  By the time school let out, I knew where I had to look, but I didn’t tell anybody. They’d ask why I thought he might be there, and I didn’t see any point in having to answer that question if he actually wasn’t. So, after I got home from school, I headed up the creek to the clearing.

The corn and potatoes had long been harvested, and the corn stalks had been cut and gathered into shocks to dry and be used later for fodder. A few inches of stalk were still sticking up in each row, sharp pointed from being sliced off with a hawk-bill knife. The stubble would be plowed under in the spring, so that a new crop could be planted.

Garthie was lying on his back between two rows in his shirt sleeves. Frost from the hard freeze over night was still visible on his upturned face, and his eyes were open.