The Night Maples Talked

Today, Mark Kolke tells a haunting, evocative tale that beautifully balances a small-town feel with universal themes of mystery, mortality, and connection. (Guest Author Series)

By Halloween of 1933, our town had learned to keep secrets.

Ashfield sat ninety miles from Chicago, a place far enough to miss the parades and close enough to hear the trouble. You could smell winter carrying through the corn stubble. Storefronts wore paper pumpkins in the windows, smiling because the grumpy grocer Earl Stamm could not. Men traded news at the rail siding as if hope came in on the morning freight. The Works Progress crew had painted a bright harvest on the courthouse wall. Nobody believed it, not really, but the colour felt polite.

We had four of us that night, too restless for a church social, too young to sit quiet in a living room where the radio hummed the same songs. May Abbott pulled her scarf tight the way a person ties off a thought. Walt had a harmonica and the unfortunate habit of trying it in places better suited to silence. Leon, who had the shoulders of a farm boy and the ideas of a dog that spotted a gate left open, brought a lantern. I brought a pencil and a habit of looking at things until they looked back. Ruthie Hart, nearly eighteen, sworn reporter for a paper that did not exist yet.

“The maples will talk after midnight,” Leon said.

He liked to start with nonsense, then dare us to prove him wrong. “They say the leaves whisper the names of the folks buried under them.”

“Leaves whisper because air moves,” May said. “Names do not. Also, my mother thinks I am at Mrs. Riley’s, and Mrs. Riley thinks I am at my mother’s. So, if you plan to see ghosts, see them quickly.”

Walt raised the harmonica. May lowered his hand without words.

Maple Grove Cemetery sat beyond the grain elevator, past the split-rail fence that kept cows from believing grass was better on the other side. The gates, iron and too proud for a town where hunger liked to sit down and stay, stood open. The caretaker liked his evenings, and the dead had never wandered off. We walked past the angel with a chipped wing and into a geography of names. There were German stones from before the war, plain slabs with dates like bookends, a lot for soldiers and a lot for infants, two rows where the town had put the hard year of 1918. Somebody had tried to cut the grass after the last frost. The ground looked shaved and ashamed of it.

“You know,” Walt said, voice low, “I heard Mr. Hicks buried empty boxes in the paupers’ field. No families to check, just a ribbon and a prayer.”

“Mr. Hicks is a carpenter who moonlights as the undertaker,” May said. “He buries what he is paid to bury.”

“Sometimes he is paid in carrots,” I said.

A train blew far off, one long note and two short. The lantern showed our breath like we were small engines ourselves. Leon set it high and tramped on ahead. He had been the captain of nothing and leader of us on every night that went sideways. We followed the path that bent toward a stand of maple trees. Their leaves made a sound like skirts on a church aisle. I decided the maples were talking after all.

We threaded between stones that read Jenks, Talbot, Perez. My pencil tapped my palm; I intended to remember every odd thing and sell it to the Ashfield Chronicle once I printed the first issue in my head.

“Leon,” May said, “why are you walking toward the part with the fresh dirt.”

“Because that is where it will be interesting.”

“That is not a word the living and the dead agree on.”

He was right about the fresh dirt. By the light you could pick out a rectangle, dug that afternoon or the day before, bordered by a neat fringe of turves. The hole itself had a board laid across it as if that would keep a person from stumbling into the next world. The headstone was not set; a wooden marker waited in its place with a painted name. KLARA PIKE.

Klara had sewn dresses in the shop on Main and taken them home when people could not pay. She had vanished two nights earlier. The sheriff said she might have gone to a cousin near Joliet for work. The shopkeeper said nothing and counted buttons.

I did not say her name. You learn to respect a painted board.

“Somebody is sleeping,” Walt whispered.

We looked where he looked. Not twenty feet away, tucked in the shadows, lay a man on his side with his hat over his face. He wore a suit good enough for Sunday and shoes that did not belong to a laborer. For a moment I thought he had chosen the cemetery to drink in peace, then I saw the line of his body and the stillness of it. The night has its own kind of still, the kind that wraps a field and lets mice run. This was the stillness of furniture.

“Leon, do not,” May said.

Leon had already gone. He bent, set the lantern on a flat stone, and knelt beside the man. He took the hat and put it down. The face was town-known. Harris Bleviss, the banker whose door had a second lock and whose wife came to church in a coat that made people turn and consider if they were happy for her. The sight of him changed the air, as if the maples had stopped mid-sentence.

“Check if he is breathing,” May said. She was the only one of us who could give an order to Leon and have it land.

Leon put the back of his hand near the man’s mouth. Then he put two fingers under the jaw where a pulse should live. He shook his head once.

Walt took two steps back, then one forward again, the way you do when running feels both wise and useless. I wanted to write it down and tore a page from my notebook instead. The sound was loud enough to flinch at.

“We go to Sheriff Albright,” May said. “Now.”

Leon did not move. He crouched there like a person who had finally discovered that curiosity has a price. “There is dirt on his shoes,” he said. “Wet. Fresh.”

I looked at the rectangle with the board across it. Walt looked everywhere but there.

“We will not look,” May said, which meant every one of us looked. The wooden marker with KLARA PIKE seemed to watch us as if letters could hold eyes. The board creaked a little on its cinder supports, a sound as thin as a lie.

“Lantern,” I said.

Leon lifted it. The light threw shadows into the open grave that made it look deeper than sense. There was a white shape in the bottom, not cloth, not bone. My mind offered a dozen answers and liked none of them.

May set her palm flat on my sleeve. “If that is a sheet,” she said in a voice that had already decided to be steady, “we fetch adults. We fetch the sheriff. We do not poke the dead.”

“We have already found one banker,” Walt said. He was trying for a joke and failing, which is how you know a boy is frightened.

The wind shifted. The lantern flame bent. Leaves rubbed together and tried to sound like weather. Something cracked close by. We turned as one to find the caretaker standing in the path, a rake over his shoulder like a soldier’s rifle.

“You should not be here,” Mr. Ellis said. He was small and made of work. His face had the careful look of a man who spent his days pretending delicate tasks did not break his heart.

“Mr. Bleviss,” May said, and stepped aside so Ellis could see. “He is gone.”

Ellis took one look and stepped in as if he had been waiting on the edge of that decision for years. He knelt where Leon had knelt, then closed Bleviss’s mouth with a gentle hand. “I will fetch Albright,” he said. “You three wait by the gate. Leon, you wait with him.” He pointed at Bleviss as if the banker might get bored and wander off out of habit.

“We should go all together,” Walt said.

Mr. Ellis did not raise his voice. “You will do as I say.”

He trotted off with the rake like a staff, straight down the path toward town. The lantern made our circle of light small and friendly. Everything beyond it turned into the idea of trees.

Leon looked at the painted board again. “If Klara is down there, why is Bleviss here. If Bleviss is here, why is there dirt on his shoes.”

“Do not count the mysteries before breakfast,” May said.

We waited. The waiting felt like school held outdoors. Every sound pried at us. The harmonica in Walt’s pocket seemed to weigh ten pounds. I could see breath on the air from three living people and wanted, almost, to see a fourth who did not belong there. It was an ugly wish. I folded it up and set it aside.

When the sheriff came, he came with Ellis and with Mr. Hicks, the carpenter, who carried a coil of rope and the face of a man who understood that his skill would be asked to do something that would wake him in the night later. Sheriff Albright had a coat that looked borrowed and a mouth that read pain like it was a newspaper. He listened to May in full, then asked no questions at all. He lifted the board and set it aside. He knelt and dropped the rope into the hole as if kindness could be lowered on a line.

“It is not a body,” Hicks said after a long minute. “It is a mannequin from the dress shop. The one Klara put in the window.”

“Then where is Klara,” I asked, and heard my own voice as if it were a stranger’s.

No one answered. Ellis crossed himself, which in Ashfield passed for breaking a rule only when the rule did not matter.

Albright stood and looked at Bleviss with the sort of long thought a man has when he adds columns in his head. “Dirt on the shoes,” he said. “Ellis, fetch two more boards.”

“We did not push him,” Walt blurted, which made everyone look at Walt. He blushed into his scarf.

“No one said you did,” Albright said. He did not smile, but the corner of his mouth allowed the notion to visit. “Ruthie Hart, go home and tell your father I sent you. May, same to your mother. Walt, you walk May to her door. Leon, you stay with me.”

“Because I am strong,” Leon said.

“Because you ask fewer questions,” Albright said. He bent and set his hand, briefly, on Bleviss’s shoulder the way a person reads a language he has not practiced since school.

We obeyed because we were young and because the trees had finished their sentence and fallen quiet. On the path out I looked back and saw Leon planting his feet near the grave like a man bracing a door. The lantern lit his jaw and the sheriff’s borrowed coat and the white face of the shop window’s empty girl. Behind the maples, far off, the train gave one soft note that could have been a sigh.

In the morning Ashfield would tell a version. Some would say the banker came to make a deposit he did not plan to report. Some would say the caretaker had mixed up graves with the efficiency of poor pay. Some would say Klara had caught the early bus and left us a mannequin to stand in her place until the town learned how to fix what could be fixed.

I wrote it down as it happened, in a hand that trembled after the fact. The paper in my head needed its first front page.

I put the headline on the top line, neat and certain.

The Night Maples Talked.

Under it I wrote the only truth I could swear to. We were there. We saw what we saw. The air lifted, then settled, and for a few long minutes, the living and the dead felt very close, like neighbours who finally admitted they had always heard each other through the wall.

Copyright 2025 - Mark Kolke / Waterglass Press

Halloween Guest Author Series

Halloween Candy | Spooky Season | Homecoming | A Dark and Dreary Night | Blood Moon on Halloween | Day Dreaming | Seven Year Itch | Dead Undead | Spoiler: Mr. D.B. Dies | The Night Maples Talked

Author’s Note

Every morning for more than 22 years, Mark Kolke has published his daily column, Musings+. His writing covers an emotional range of relationships and personal responsibility, as well as chance occurrences. He also provides a bright, inspiring 100-word start to your Monday with Monday Morning Minute, accompanied by an inspiring quote. When Mark writes about the news of the day, politics, or local issues, his voice is genuine and sincere. It’s sharp at times, but fair. Subscribe to his Substack by clicking the button near the end of this page.

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