The New Bicycle

My father was born in rural North Carolina in 1933. He was the eldest of nine children, seven of whom lived to adulthood. He had four brothers and four sisters. One brother died as a toddler, and another died around the age of ten from a ruptured appendix. That was just how life worked back then. People didn’t always make it, and the world didn’t pause long enough to mourn the way we think it should now.

Life was hard for his family. That word gets thrown around a lot, but in this case it actually fits. They all crowded into a one-room farmhouse with a dirt floor. There was no electricity, no running water, and no indoor plumbing. Everything that needed doing required effort. Everything that needed fixing stayed broken longer than it should have. Comfort wasn’t something they expected. Survival was the goal.

His father drank too much and worked too little. His mother carried the weight of the household, but with that many children and that little margin for error, she was focused almost entirely on getting through each day. Keeping track of nine kids with that kind of setup wasn’t really parenting in the modern sense. It was occasionally controlled chaos.

Having met my aunts and uncles over the years, I can say with confidence that this was a recipe for trouble casserole, with spicy trouble gravy poured on top. Nobody in that environment was coming out polished.

Dad worked hard his entire life. He had flaws, plenty of them, but laziness was never one of them. I don’t remember a time when I saw him idle without purpose. Even sitting still, he was usually fixing something, planning something, or thinking about what needed to be done next.

I didn’t know him as a child, obviously, but I grew up on the stories. They came out at family gatherings, at dinner tables, and sometimes out of nowhere when something reminded him of those days.

One of those stories centered around the first and only brand-new, never ridden by another kid, bicycle he ever owned.

He was thirteen years old when he got it. In a house full of poor kids, being the oldest usually meant you were first in line, but the next kid's source for hand-me-downs. It also meant you rarely owned anything that was truly yours, untouched by someone else’s use. That bicycle was different. It was new. It was his.

And, as it turned out, it was never going to be handed down to anyone else.

They lived about a mile down what was called a “two-rut road,” which is exactly what it sounds like. Two worn tracks through pale gritty Carolina sand and nutrient poor dirt, carved out by tractor wheels and early trucks, cutting through hundreds of acres of farmland. Their house sat a few hundred yards past a small wooden bridge that crossed a creek. Water brings life, and life brings growth, so that stretch of land around the creek was thick with trees. They crowded in tight, forming a natural tunnel over the road.

This was before electricity reached places like that, and long before light pollution softened the edges of darkness. Night didn’t fade in. It arrived all at once, thick and complete. The kind of darkness that didn’t just surround you but felt like it pressed in.

My father had been itching all day to ride that bicycle. He pestered his mother relentlessly, asking for permission to ride it to the local high school to watch a basketball game. It wasn’t close. To get there, he’d have to ride that mile-long dirt road, then turn onto US 13 and pedal another six miles along a narrow two-lane highway lined with trees that leaned over the road like they were trying to close it off.

It wasn’t just a ride. It was an expedition.

Eventually, my grandmother gave in. She told him he could go, but she added one condition. He had to be back before dark. If he wasn’t, she warned him, a haint would get him.

Now, a “haint” isn’t just a ghost. In Appalachian and Gullah folklore, a haint is something worse. It’s a malicious spirit. Something that doesn’t just linger but actively seeks out trouble. It doesn’t just scare you. It gets you.

There are old traditions tied to this belief. You’ll still see porches painted a soft blue-green color in parts of the South. It’s called “haint blue,” and the idea is that it mimics water. Since haints don’t like to cross water, the color is supposed to trick them into staying away.

Whether you believe any of that or not doesn’t matter much when you’re thirteen years old, raised on those stories, and about to ride home alone in the dark.

He went anyway.

He made the ride to the school, watched the game, drank his RC Cola, and got caught up in the moment. Time slipped. By the time he realized it, the game was over and night had already taken hold outside.

There was no easing into it. He stepped out into full darkness.

That’s when the problem hit him.

He was going to have to ride home through it.

He told me many times what that felt like. I wish I could hear him tell it one more time.

He climbed onto that bicycle and took off, pedaling as hard as he could from the start. The road felt different at night. The trees along the highway didn’t just sit there. They leaned. Their branches reached out over the road, forming a tunnel that swallowed what little light there was.

To a thirteen-year-old boy with a head full of haint stories, those trees weren’t just trees. They were something else entirely. Something watching. Something waiting.

He said it felt like riding through a corridor where anything could step out at any moment and take him off that bike.

By the time he turned onto the two-rut road leading home, he was already pushing himself beyond what his body wanted to give. He pedaled so hard the back tire swayed left and right in the sand. There was no coasting. No pacing. Just raw effort.

If anyone had been watching, they would have seen a skinny farm boy riding in near silence, the only sounds being the grind of tires in dirt and the sharp, uneven rhythm of his breathing. He was running on fear and adrenaline, pushing himself into a place his body didn’t normally go.

Then he reached the bridge.

And everything stopped.

The bicycle slammed into something standing in the middle of the narrow path. The impact threw him forward, over the handlebars. His feet were already moving before they hit the ground, instinct taking over. He stumbled once, twice, caught traction, and launched forward at full speed.

As he ran, he caught a glimpse of it.

A shape in the dark. A face, or something like one. And a sound. A deep, rough grunt that didn’t belong to anything friendly.

That was enough.

He ran the rest of the way home, about a quarter mile, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Ma! Ma! Help me! I just hit the Devil!”

The house came alive. Family members poured out into the yard as he came charging in, trying to explain between gasps what had happened. In his mind, there was no doubt. He had hit a haint. It had tried to get him.

Shotguns were grabbed. Lanterns were lit. The family forced themselves into something resembling courage and started back toward the bridge.

When they got there, they found the truth.

Lying in the middle of the bridge was Tilley.

Tilley was my grandfather’s prized sow. Five hundred pounds of stubborn, foraging pig. She had wandered out in the dark looking for something to eat and happened to stop right in the middle of that narrow crossing.

The bicycle had hit her square in the side.

The impact had been enough to ruin the bike. The front fork was bent. The tire was warped beyond repair. And Tilley, apparently so startled by the whole experience, had fainted right there on the bridge.

After a few moments, she got back up, gave a grunt that suggested she did not appreciate the encounter, and wandered off into the darkness like nothing had happened.

The haint, it turned out, was a pig.

The bicycle was destroyed.

And for the rest of his life, my father never owned another new one.