Mary Jane's Grave

          Doug and I were the last two customers at the bar and we’d been drinking for some time when the bartender decided it was time to close the tavern for the night. We didn’t want to go home, but there were no after-bar parties to attend on a Monday night, and we weren’t nearly done drinking yet. So, Doug bought a twelve-pack of over priced beer-to-go from the bartender and we stumbled to my car. For a half an hour we engaged in a futile debated about where we should venture next, when it struck me: Mary Jane’s Grave.
          “Excuse me?” Doug spouted with one eyebrow raised and beer dripping down the left side of his black mustache.
          It was perfect. No one would bother us because the locals, as a general consensus, thought that visiting Mary Jane was just begging for trouble.
          The history books say that sometime around 1793, almost one hundred years after the witch trials, Mary Jane was accused of witchcraft. She was given a trial of sorts by the local uneducated, superstitious country folk, and consequently “hanged by the neck until dead.” Ironically, she was buried under the same tree in which she was hanged. But that’s where actual history stops and the fantasy begins.
          Now, the way I see it, the scenario of Mary Janes's final hours is liable to make any body a little cranky. And according the older folks around here, her vindictive nature was superior even to her miscreant status. The legends varied from the cliché story of highschool students who venture to her grave on a bet and were never seen again, to the cheating lovers who rendezvoused near the grave only to be axed to death by Mary Jane herself during some torrid sex act.
          As the story goes, one night some of the locals, tired of the unexplained deaths and missing teenagers, carved a cross into the tree. They believed that only the power of God himself would keep her at rest – only the power of God would finally imprison her in her own grave.
         “If the stories are true,” I explained to Doug in between slurps of beer from the top of a longneck, brown bottle, “then the cross must have finally worked because there haven’t been any new tales of Mary Jane for over a hundred years.” I burped a rather smelly beer-burp into my hand and wrinkled my nose. “Skuze me.”
         “Oh, bullshit.” Doug spittled at me in protest. His black curls twisted into their own profusion and danced, defiantly, in his face. “You telling me you actually buy that crap? You know that’s just a bunch of shit that our parents made up, a long time ago, to scare us when we were kids. They did it so we wouldn’t screw each other in the graveyard when we were teenagers.” He snickered. “A lot of good it did.”
         "That shit don't scare me anyway." This was the point where Doug admitted to me that he worshiped Satan. Now, I’m not sure if he chose this point as a good time for confession because it would have amplified shock value or if he intended to frighten me - both points were valid ones. He boasted that he and the “supreme one” had quite the rapport. I didn’t ask him how. And he assured me that we would be safe wherever we went because He would be “watching over us.” All puffy chested by now, “He made me infallible when I gave myself to him, and I can prove it…let’s go.” He ended his rather disturbing disclosure with a frothy drunken hiccup.
         He was frightening me - much more so than the thought of going to Mary Jane’s grave had ever frightened me. It isn’t that I didn’t believe in ghosts and demons, it’s just that I’ve never been afraid; fascinated but never afraid. I guess that’s why I made the suggestion in the first place – it sounded like fun. Besides, I was a bit marinated and I just wanted to drink a little more beer and perhaps get a little adrenaline rush at the same time. A little drunken ghost-busting fo sorts. Doug, on the other hand, took the whole situation to a dark place within himself - a place I didn't care to visit with him. He saw our trip to Mary Jane’s grave as a challenge of his faith.
         He claimed that he could prove to me that with the strength of Satan behind him he could defeat even the strongest, oldest, and most infamous spook – Mary Jane. No, spooks didn’t scare me, but stupid people who worship malevolent beings did scare me…just a little.
         The company of Mary Jane was looking preferable to the company of my insane drunken friend but I couldn’t back down now. If I backed out I would never hear the end of it. Besides, there was a morbid curiosity nagging at me to go along with his melodrama. So off we went.
         The drive took a good twenty minutes. Plenty of time to drink down two more beers…each. By the time we arrived at the graveyard, at the end of the very long dead-end country road, we both had to relieve ourselves quite urgently.
         I left the headlights on but turned the car off with the key turned back so I could power the radio. Then I chose my picturesque port-o-pot as a spot behind the car and Doug, of course, chose a spot much more antagonistic. The headlights shown directly on him – a spotlight for his masterful performance. What he did next looked like a line-dance gone wrong. He stood in front of the tree that Mary Jane was buried under, staggered backward two steps while pulling out his overrated manhood, "here it is," staggered two steps forward and began to pee on her tree. Like a little boy writing his name in the snow, he traced the cross that was carved into the tree with his stream of beer-polluted urine – and taunted her to come for him.
         Doug threw his head back to laugh and nearly lost his footing. “See I told you Satan was watching over me. The hag is scared to come out and play.” Then he propped one hand on the tree to steady himself while he finished his business.
         Doug didn’t notice, he was too busy being insolent and too drunk besides, but I saw her – I saw her long bony fingers reaching up from under the dirt that he was pissing on. Her dirty fingernails gouged hard into his ankles and his blood ran down her pale fingers. “Where’s your Satan now boy?” she gurgled as she drug him down into the cold earth. “How ‘bout you come stay with me for a while and I’ll introduce you to Him.” Doug, for the first time that night, didn’t have much to say. His eyes were huge and round, his mouth was agape, and a horrible squeak expelled from deep in his throat as he reached out for me – I think he was trying to scream.

I snickered with a toothy half-cocked grin and one raised eyebrow. “Now, Auntie Mary, that wasn’t very nice.”

I finished the twelve-pack alone.