Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

It was like that in Hanover. They were awful strict but just as much love-making went on there as anywhere else, only they made it nasty in Hanover.

His mother and father wanted Homer, their only son, to be a preacher, and Homer thought he wanted to be one. He took it all seriously and talked a lot about purity and the devil. He used to harangue me a good deal. We had a kind of Damon and Pythias friendship.

The other night I was thinking back over his story and I remembered a few things, mostly in pictures, the way you remember things when you’re beginning to grow old. There was a swimming hole about three miles from town where we used to go swimming together. It was a clear stream and in the middle of a wide pasture it spread out into a kind of pond.

A couple of hundred feet away there was a low hill with a house on it, but nobody lived in the house and it was falling into ruin. It was partly log cabin and partly clapboard and all the windows were broken and the bushes had grown up high around it.

There was a story about the house which happened before my time. They said that a certain old man known as Elder Sammis had lived there once and that he’d beaten his daughter to death when he found that she’d got into trouble.

He didn’t mean to beat her as bad as that, but when he found she was dead he put her body in a box under the bed and ran away, and they found the dead girl there two weeks later. They tried to catch him but they never did, because about a month later he jumped off a river boat and was drowned.

So nobody lived in the house and everybody was scared of it, so there wasn’t any reason why we couldn’t swim there in peace.

After Homer was hanged, one of the pictures I remembered was that swimming hole on an afternoon in early June when he’d come over from the Theological Seminary to spend Sunday with his folks. The water was clear and the sunlight was hot, and after we’d swum about a bit and splashed at each other like a couple of kids, we got out of the water and lay on the grass and talked.

We lay there almost in the shadow of the empty old home and for a long time we didn’t say anything. It was beautiful, with the sun on our bodies and the soft grass under us and a warm breeze blowing over us.

A calf came up and sniffed at me and went away again, and it struck me all of a sudden how beautiful Homer was lying there in the sun. He was like the ideas some people have about the Greeks, which aren’t true probably but are kind of idealized.

That afternoon he was preachier than ever. He went after me for going on buggy rides at night with old man Fisher’s girl, and for not believing in God. And he began to hash over a lot of ideas about purity that didn’t make any sense, and all the time I wanted to get up and laugh and dance, because it seemed so funny to hear all that claptrap coming out of the mouth of a young fellow, sitting on the grass beside that clear stream.

I wanted to laugh but I kept my mouth shut, and then he said something that made me want to cry. I’m not emotional or sentimental, but I guess it must have been the feel of the grass and the sun and the warm breeze that made me feel that way. He said, “I don’t care for myself, Buck. It’s because when I go to heaven I want to find you there, too.”

And then the sun disappeared. It had slipped down behind the desolate Sammis house and was shining through the empty holes where the windows used to be, and the breeze wasn’t so warm any more and I began to pull on my clothes; and then Homer, seeing that all his talk wasn’t having any effect, began to dress, too.

After we dressed we sat around for a while and Homer said presently, “Let’s go up and look through old Sammis’s house.”

We’d never done it as kids on account of the story that Hester Sammis’s ghost was always in the house. I don’t believe in ghosts, and that afternoon I knew for the first time that it wasn’t really the thought of ghosts which had scared me but something else. I knew that it was because of the sadness that clung to the old house itself.

We didn’t go into the house, but all the way home he kept kidding me about being afraid of ghosts and I didn’t try to explain to him. Lately, I’ve been thinking I was wrong not to have talked about it and that if I’d tried as hard to convert him as he tried to convert me, they mightn’t have hanged him last Tuesday.

The trouble was that I was finding my heaven right here on earth and not worrying much about what happened afterwards, and he was afraid of this earth and worrying himself about the next and he wanted me to be in heaven with him. I guess he cared a lot more for me than I knew in those days.

It was that afternoon that he told me he was going to get married as soon as he was out of college. I was glad, because I thought it would be good for him.