O P I N I O N
By Keith Howard
Proof That I Existed, Kind Of
The woods behind my house smelled of pine sap, wet moss, and the metallic tang of mud. To me, they weren’t woods but a travel hub for everything extinct or imaginary. Dinosaurs stomped through sandy patches. Crocodiles blinked from rocks that weren’t rocks yesterday. The Cherokee whispered peace terms in the wind, smoke from their fires mixing—somehow—with the neighbor’s leaf pile.
Every twig snap under my sneaker was a gunshot. Every gust a drumroll. By late afternoon my T-shirt stuck to me, my nails were packed with dirt, and at least one villain of unspecified evil had been executed behind a log.
And somewhere beyond all that play waited William Beard.
Not his skull—that was famous already, impaled on a stake in 1694 like a grisly lawn ornament. No, I wanted the rest. His ribs. His boots. His mystery. My math was solid: Beard’s Landing at the end of our street, Beard’s Creek below, the stake exactly where the Keeseys’ lamp now hummed with June bugs. Which meant the body—logically—was in my woods.
Other kids swapped baseball cards that still smelled of bubblegum. I collected false alarms: rib-shaped roots, skull-shaped rocks, and once a shoe that stank of mildew and despair. Beard became my ghost coach, smirking from the trees: Not today, kid. Try again tomorrow.
If Beard was the puzzle, Fanny was the punch.
At the end of the creek, cattails rattled in the wind like dice in a cup. I found a collapsing graveyard, stones moss-smothered, names softened into green. And there at the back:
Little Fanny, 1861. Aged 3 months.
That was her whole résumé.
Her parents, Charles and Victoria, lay nearby, Charles beneath a granite obelisk compensating loudly. The iron fence around them sagged like it had given up. To my six-year-old brain, 1861 was practically the Ice Age. Anything pre-television collapsed into “the olden days,” all smelling of kerosene and porridge gone cold.
But three months—that I could understand. The warmth of milk on a baby’s breath. A laugh that might have existed, or not. Linen that still smelled of soap.
I pressed my fingers into her carved name until grit filled my nails. Then I scolded myself: You’re five years older than Fanny ever was. What have you done with your life?
Answer: Spotted dinosaur tracks. Made peace with the Cherokee. Shot a villain of unspecified evil.
Not much. But it was almost dinner.
A Ghostly Conversation
In my head, Beard and Fanny met often in those woods.
Beard stank of leather gone sour, hunting shirt stiff with dried blood, hair damp as rope. His voice scraped like bark. He slouched on a mossy log.
Fanny darted between trees, quick and giggling, her laugh a windchime rattled by storm.
“Still waiting for someone to dig you up?” she teased.
“Patience,” Beard muttered. “Not everyone gets a tidy little stone. Some of us end up as lawn décor.”
“Leave a finger bone,” she chirped. “A breadcrumb.”
“And ruin the kid’s fun?” Beard grinned, teeth chalk-white, axe-sharp. “Then he’d have to play baseball.”
At night I lay in bed, fan creaking overhead like a gallows, cicadas sawing through the dark. I imagined Beard’s bones tangled in oak roots, gnawed by foxes, or pressing up through the dirt beneath my sneakers.
One afternoon, sugared on Popsicles, I staged an excavation. A rusty trowel. A canteen that tasted of hot rubber. The woods heavy with pine and damp earth, every twig snap announcing destiny.
By dusk, my hands blistered and filthy, I’d dug up a handful of rusted bottle caps, glass sharp as candy, and a pottery shard that looked ancient until Made in Japan winked up from the bottom.
No Beard. Just his laugh, low and mocking: Nice try, kid. Better luck next century.
Beard and Fanny became a permanent vaudeville act in my head. He was the body that never showed. She was the body that never lasted. And the woods were their stage, mosquitoes thick as applause.
The Legend of Beard’s Landing
Later, the cul-de-sac filled with kids. Twenty-five of us, barefoot and feral, smelling of sun- baked tar and honeysuckle.
Brad had the headquarters: a treehouse with lumber that still smelled of sawdust, a tar-paper roof baking in the sun, and, inexplicably, a firepit that made even marshmallows taste like smoke.
One humid night, hair crunchy with sugar, faces sticky with ash, I leaned across the fire.
“Do you know why it’s called Beard’s Landing?”
“Because of Beard’s Creek?” Brad said.
“And why’s it called Beard’s Creek?”
He shrugged.
“Because of a massacre,” I whispered. The fire popped, sparks like startled fireflies.
Brad froze. The night closed in: mosquitoes whining, frogs croaking, sap hissing in the flames. I gave him the story: Beard trudging home, wolf carcass stinking on his shoulder. House in flames, smoke greasy and thick. A war party at the water, torches dripping resin. His wife facedown, blood soaking the dirt. His daughter captive, crying like a bird in the reeds.
Beard lifts his musket. An arrow rips his chest. He drops. The chief steps forward and chops his head clean off—one wet blow, like slicing a melon. If melons screamed and paid property taxes. Brad gagged and laughed, which was the point.
Then he narrowed his eyes. “Wait. If Beard and his wife were dead, who told this story?”
“Fanny,” I said smoothly. “Carried north. Escaped. Wrote it all down.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I read the town history, dummy.” A lie that tasted like burnt marshmallow.
And that’s how Little Fanny—a Civil War infant—became, in my mouth, a nine-year-old survivor of a 1600s massacre.
The cul-de-sac didn’t just have kickball anymore. It had a legend.
And I had proof that history is whatever story you can tell with a straight face while your friend chokes on marshmallow.
Publisher’s Note: This is a new series of columns by Keith Howard – you know him from his Tiny White Box series, and as former Executive Director of The Liberty House and Hope for NH Recovery. You can read his previous column here. His new memoir, Unclaimed, But Loud: The Memoir of a Shy and Retiring Boy Who Was Neither, is available for purchase on Amazon.