Sunset Walk with Ghosts

Every evening when we're at Pigeon Hole we go for a walk and find ourselves accompanied by various groups of kids. On our most recent trip, there had been quite a bit of rain, and the track was still pretty wet (hence our getting bogged on our way out the next day, but that’s another story).

We walked down the thickly muddy road, Justin and I trying to step where our boots wouldn’t sink to the ankle, some of our companions (four or five girls between nine and eleven years old) purposely stepping into mud pits with their bare feet, making thick-soled mudboots, reminiscent (for me, at least) of the Creepers worn by my New Wave friends in the nineteen-eighties.

“Why do white people always wear shoes?” asked one girl.

“Because our feet are not tough,” I said, immediately wanting, though, to take my boots off and walk barefoot, but also remembering meliodosis, a disease caught from bare feet in the mud.

Justin said, “Every time I try to go barefoot, I hurt my feet and then I cry.” This cracked the girls up—I wasn’t sure if it was the thought of Justin crying or the thought of having such tender feet that was so funny.

After the sun had set, our companions suggested turning around because it was getting dark. I think I may have asked about animals that come out after dark, but it turned out to be devil-devils that come out at night.

One girl had seen a devil when she was a little girl.

“Were you afraid?” I asked.

“Nah. It was my friend. It was a friend-devil.”

A couple of the girls (they were always talking at least two at a time) brought up that the little sister of one of the girls with us “has a devil-devil. It is her friend.” I started to wonder if “devil-devil” was the same as what we might call an “imaginary friend,” but then they told the following story:

“See that red house there? Some people were sitting in there playing cards and a devil came in and stole beef from the freezer. The devil looked like [so-&-so], but it wasn’t her because she was over there on the other side [of the village].”

There was another story about a devil who—I think (neither Justin nor I was sure of the story afterwards as it was told, again, by several girls talking at once)—enticed a girl out into the woods “over there” (the girls pointed across the open field to our left) and made her cut her “arms” (wrists?), or maybe the devil actually did the cutting. The people had to go and bring her back.

“Is she okay now?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

Then we were at the turn-off where the girls were going back to their houses and we were going back to the school, so we all said good night.