Last Promise

When I was 14 years old Living in a very small town, where everyone knows everyone, I took Piano lessons from Mr Hamill, an elderly widower living down the road from me.

Mr. Hamill had the very odd past time of walking next to the cemetery beside the church and watching the ghosts (of course I thought he was either joking or losing it), and I always scoffed at him about it.

One day I told him that there was no such things as ghosts and when you die you're just fertilizer. So He made me this promise to prove his beliefs, by letting me know he was still around after he passed on. No matter where I was he said he would find me.

Mr. Hamill passed away the following year and was laid to rest in the church cemetery. At this time in my life being a whole 16 and one half I was quite busy and never gave him or his promise a thought, until the day his sister finally got around to cleaning out his house so she could put it on the market.

She found some of my old piano books with my name and number in the inside cover, along with a page filled with notes about my progress and a reminder to give me a statue that I had admired.

She called my number to see if I was still living in town, my mother answered and accepted the gift for me because I was out horseback riding, so I knew nothing of this until after I got home.

As it turns out I was riding on some old logging trails that circled around the cemetery and for the millionth time I cut across the cemetery on my way home. My horse was doing his usual, cropping mouthfuls of grass as we walked between rows of gravestones, when out of the blue he freaks out and starts rearing and crowhopping around. It wasn't too long before he managed to unseat me and I landed with a thud right in front of this gravestone, knocking the wind out of me. I couldn't really move and I remember praying that my horse wouldn't kick me or step on me, when all of a sudden he calmed down.

I regained my breath and I immediately started checking him over thinking maybe a bee stung him. Finding nothing wrong with him, I started looking at the ground for sharp objects he might have stepped on. When I suddenly got the breath knocked out of me again, but this time it was because I realized where I landed. You guessed it Mr. Hamills grave.

Now the weird part and what made me a believer was when I got home my Mom told me about my books and the statue. The time Mr. Hamills sister dropped off these items was the exact time I was on his grave, and the statue was of a bucking Horse.