It's a powerfully gruesome image, a band of hoary figures like Titanic victims, frozen solid, one just inches from the Haley home, his arm raised stiffly toward the cottage door. Okay, that's probably not how it happened, if it happened at all, but poets and columnists take license with facts to hold their readers' gaze. Sam Haley, she insists, buried the bodies, but his tombstone nearby proves he died two years earlier in 1811 at age 80. The record accounts for 12 bodies. Celia says 14.
Old records can be as faulty as old spelling.
So we're forced to consult the usual gang of Isles experts for clues. He sticks to his sister's version, but counts 16 Spaniards, three of whom survived a short while in the night. Celia is confused, he writes, because there were two Sam Haleys. It was the son, Captain Haley, who discovered the bodies. Then Ruttledge lobs a curve ball.