by Thomas Tryon
Minutes later I was still following the hatchet marks, pushing my way through a waste of tall pines where, on either side of me, more outcroppings of rock rose in sedimentary convolutions where the earth had heaved them up in wall-like formations. Proceeding toward them, I saw a deep V between the two sections, through which the stream flowed, more placid now as it widened its course and sluiced past.
I paused again, watching the dark flow of water, listening. A bird called, another replied. Then, silence; the rush of the wind. I had the eerie sensation I was being followed, and not by my friend with the shotgun. My imagination began to work. Shadowy shapes, hostile and sinister, loomed. Again I conjured up the figure of last evening, the whitened face, the red grinning mouth, the pale, supplicating hand.
I passed through the gap, footing my way over some rocks in the stream bed, until I could reach the bank again. It was there, standing on a rock in midstream, that I heard the scream.
If it was a scream. Though I thought of it as such, it was utterly unlike any sound I had ever heard. Scream? Cry? Lament? I turned my head one way and the other, cupping my ears, trying to determine its origin. It seemed to come from several directions at once, and I decided this was caused by the shale walls rising at precipitous angles on either side of the stream to form a sort of echo chamber. Was it a moan? It seemed to float along the current of the stream, rising, then dipping, then falling away to nothing, only to return again, a terrible, inhuman sound.
I leaped from the stone onto the bank, advancing through dense growth, while the voice, if it was a voice, always increased in volume. Another few steps brought me to the edge of a wide clearing, where I froze in astonishment.
The trees bordering the clearing were not pines, but white birches, the silvery bark curled in papery spirals, revealing the tan underside. This grove of pale trunks formed a ring around the grassy open space, and in the purplish light I saw at the center of this space another stream issuing forth from a wide pool. It was not the pool that made me stare, but the tree that grew beside it, for it was from this tree, I was certain, that the cries came. It grew above the clearing like some gaunt, storm-twisted Titan, a once-lofty tree, now lifting no more than three or four dead and lifeless branches toward the sky.
Again I heard the cry, and I approached, circling the tree until I was looking at it from the opposite side. From gnarled roots to blasted top, the large trunk was split open, a dark wound where a bolt of lightning had rent it apart and fire had burned its center out, leaving it hollow. A mesh of thick vines grew upward from the base, crawling along the withered trunk, sutures trying to close the gaping wound where the sides lay back like flaps of charred flesh. The wind streamed through the gap, tugging the cuffs of my wet pants, brushing at the grass, tearing at the leaves of the new growth around the tree. Then I heard the cry again, and once more I froze, for I discovered the thing that voiced it, almost hidden behind the moving greenery.
I was looking at a human skull, and it was from behind the parted jaws that the screams came.
There is always something about the slow workings of nature upon death’s victim as it eats away the mortal flesh and reveals the armature beneath that is shocking to the living man, knowing that he, too, must at some time fall similar prey. But to come across a skull staring from the heart of a hollow tree screaming maledictions gives rise to a greater fear; and I was afraid. Still, I found it impossible to run, and I remained where I stood, listening to the monstrous thing as it harried me, now screaming, now sighing demoniacally.
My eye was caught for a second by a black form floating down from the sky, a crow which silently glided to a branch of one of the birches across the grove, watching me as the cries rose in the clearing. Then, the wind suddenly dropping, the cries dropped with it, and I realized what was happening. It was the wind itself that caused the sounds. Pouring through the gap behind, streaming across the clearing, the draft was sucked in through the open base of the tree and funneled upward through this flue to where the skull lay caught in the viselike grip of the new growth; the sound came from the head itself, a freakish woodwind pipe whose stops were the decayed knotholes and whose horn was the gaping jaws.
I came nearer and pulled the vines aside. The skull lay slightly to one side, the rear of the brainpan wedged deeply into the open cleft and locked in place by the growing tendrils. A skull that was large and thick, with a slightly Neanderthal slope to the brow: the cheekbones were prominent, the jaw was large, and what teeth remained were unevenly spaced. A spider had spun a web across one eye socket, while slugs had trailed shiny tracks across the temple. Looking closer, I saw a long cranial fracture, running from the temple to the bridge where the nose had once been. I judged the skull to have been split by some heavy object. I tried to dislodge it, but it seemed to have been forcefully jammed into the hollow interior, which held it fast.
Below the skull, the rest of the skeleton remained intact, reclining backward as though in repose, shaping itself to the angle of the trunk itself, the encroaching vines still giving it human shape. The hands were long and large, the bones heavy and coarse-looking; the man had been slightly under average height. Kneeling, I now examined the lower extremities, which, comparably large, were held pinioned in the tangle of growth.
Again the wind; again the thing gave utterance, finding its tongue as the current swept in around my face and was pulled upward. I stepped back, one foot almost slipping into the pool of water. Making a small circle around the base of the tree, I tried to probe the secret of this grotesque discovery. In that fiercely defiant expression there was both mystery and revelation. Proof of a life snuffed out, obliterated in a moment of denial or protest. Dimly in the distance I heard the fox barking. Once, then twice more. Sly fox, wary enough to know the deceitful heart of man, to know that in these woods lurked both the hunted and the hunters.
The crow made a lonely, plaintive sound, bleak as death. I felt very alone in the clearing. I looked back at the tree again. If this was Jack’s “ghost,” what then was the apparition I had been confronted by last night? Yet if that being was phantom, this was not, this nameless carcass in the tree whose death had been managed in the grimmest fashion. Who beside myself had chanced on it? Were these the bones of the missing revenuer? How long had they lain here?
How many winters had sifted snow through those dead sockets, how many springs thawed the ice that rimed the jaws, summers cured the narrow ribcage, lying snug and sepulchred in its charred catacomb? Free at last of worms and scavengers, mere instrument of the capricious wind that even now rose and caught at the imprisoning vines. Again the skull sounded its doleful lament, while on its perch above, the black crow brooded over the spectacle, that victim of so sorry a plight, warning against trespass in Soakes’s Lonesome.
13
DURING THE NEXT SEVERAL days, I had little chance to dwell on my shocking discovery in Soakes’s Lonesome. Nor did I discuss it with Beth, not wanting to worry her with further distressing tales of grisly woodland apparitions. Though we still rose together and breakfasted together, we usually parted company early in the morning, I to my particular pursuits, she to hers. She would drive Kate over to Greenfarms School, return to do the housework; then, when things were in order, she busied herself organizing a sort of village crafts guild whose products she had arranged to sell in Mary Abbott’s New York shop. These affairs sometimes took her to the kitchen of one lady or another, and often I found our house curiously deserted. I realized that I was still accustomed to the bustle of the city, and though I pretended I was becoming used to the country, the emptiness and silence at times were disconcerting. Still, there was much to be done, and I limited myself to afternoons at my painting, first taking care of the countless chores that needed seeing to.
The windstorm having uprooted a maple in the back yard, earth had to be dug from the meadow to fill the hole, the tree sawed up. Storm windows were ordered. I talked to an insurance man down in the county seat about an appraisal on our new f
urnishings. I sent away for some pamphlets and literature on organic gardening. I looked at station wagons for Beth over on the turnpike. I got myself a bicycle. And I bought Kate a horse.
It was not the doctor but the Widow Fortune who sanctioned this, her discussions with Kate being as effective as her various medicines. Magically, the asthma disappeared. Though I never discovered what the old woman did to effect the cure, a miraculous one it was. And as Beth and I came to trust her, we came more to trust in our own safety and happiness.
As we trusted in the fact of the baby, and that the baby would come as promised. Our daily vitamin doses had been supplemented by a bottle of some pleasant-tasting mixture that the Widow had brought—with directions—to our house. And though we joked about taking it I could see how profoundly Beth wished for the fulfillment of her dream of a son, and how profoundly she believed in the Widow’s power to make it possible. It was not misplaced belief.
Thinking back, I suppose those first weeks of early autumn in Cornwall Coombe were the happiest we had ever known together. We seemed to have undergone some subtle transformation that had drawn something to ourselves, both separately and as a family, from the land and the people, who daily were more inclined to accept us as part of their lives. And daily I would see the changes wrought in Beth. She slept better, the smudges under her eyes disappeared, and the lines in her forehead. The brisk air did something to her appetite; she ate sitting down, for a change, and started putting on weight. Her skin took on a fresher look, and I began calling her Peaches because her cheeks reminded me of one, with that same rosy glow.
Kate, too, seemed to be enjoying the beneficial effects of country life. It was a pleasure to see her able to enjoy animals, having been denied them so long. Fred Minerva had steered me to a man in a nearby town who was selling his farm and moving to the city, and had several horses for sale. The mare I ended up buying was large for Kate, but I decided she would soon grow to the proper size. The farmer had warned me that the horse was inclined to be headstrong, and when I presented her to Kate I cautioned her not to get carried away.
It was inevitable that the mare, whom Kate named Trementagne—a French word for north wind she had found somewhere that she shortened to “Tremmy”—would assume an important place in her life, but she seemed interested in sharing her love for the horse with us, and eager to show off the skills she was rapidly acquiring in Greenfarms’ “equitation” classes.
Not since the Agnes Fair had she evidenced any symptoms of her tormenting illness. She was healthier and happier and never appeared in the morning with the out-of-sorts expression I used to dread. Watching her, I thought I could discern small but obvious changes in her. She was becoming a young woman. She was losing that gangling, knobby look, and, perhaps because of her association with Worthy, she seemed less shy and diffident.
A frequent visitor to our house, the Widow Fortune might stop by, usually late in the afternoon, to watch Kate ride her horse in the field below the stables, or I would hear her and Kate talking in the kitchen, and I knew she was helping Kate allay the fears that brought on the asthma attacks. After a cup of tea, she would take her splint basket and hurry away to nurse old Mrs. Mayberry; then Kate would come out to the studio and watch me paint until Beth returned home.
In the evening, the weather remaining fine, we would barbecue steaks on the terrace, often joined by Worthy Pettinger, for whom Beth and I decided Kate was developing a strong attachment.
Viewed in the light of what occurred later, it was a fool’s paradise, but I could not have known that then. Fool’s paradise in those weeks was still Heart’s Desire, and it seemed nothing could possibly happen to spoil the idyll of our new existence. Above all, and very real, was a profound sense of belonging not only to my family but to the villagers, to the countryside, and, though I did not till it, to the land.
Yet while I worked about the house and at my easel, the grisly souvenir in the hollow tree remained in my thoughts, that and the “gray ghost,” as I had come to regard that other, even more puzzling apparition. If I failed to fathom the unfathomable, it was perhaps not so much due to my lack of mental agility as that I did not feel I could confide my thoughts to anyone. I did not want to tell anyone I had been seeing ghosts, nor did I want people saying I was a fool. Whatever I said, and to whom, it was bound to be repeated, and I hated the thought of these farmer people thinking I was as moon mad as they, and as superstitious.
There were, however, two with whom I was anxious to talk: Robert Dodd and Jack Stump. Robert, with Maggie, was out of town—visiting his university, with which he kept up considerable contact. And the peddler had not as yet finished his territory circuit, for nowhere in the village was his tin-pan clatter to be heard, and I listened in vain.
The only other shadow darkening my existence at that period was the boy, Worthy Pettinger. In its quiet but firm way, the village was adamant on the subject of his “accepting the honor,” as the phrase was couched. Worthy must and would be the Young Lord in the Corn Play. Though he came regularly to our house after school to do the chores, he was now invariably late, invariably offhand, and, when I asked him what was troubling him, invariably reticent.
It was hard to know what to do; how could we help when we didn’t really know what the problem was? My own assessment was that the boy’s dark distress stemmed from a reluctance to commit himself to Cornwall Coombe for a seven-year tenure as Harvest Lord—no matter what honors or wealth accrued from this—when it was his desire to be quit of village encumbrances and old-fashioned ways. Who could blame him for being “newfangled”? But if the father continued to hold to his parochial attitude, forcing him to “accept the honor,” there seemed little to be done.
One noontime, having left Worthy using a chain saw on the uprooted tree, I decided to pay a visit to the Hookes. I found the sketch I had done of Sophie at the Widow’s Sunday sociable, put it in a little frame I dug out of a box, and drove out to the Hooke farm.
When I got there, I left the car on the road and walked down the drive circling the house, having learned that the back door was where Cornwall Coombe folk paid weekday calls. Approaching the open Dutch door at the kitchen steps, I was greeted by a flying object, a great squawking feathered projectile, which came flying through the opening. I watched the chicken land, then, wings flapping, run off into a patch of nasturtiums. In another moment, Justin’s smiling face appeared.
“Come in, come in,” he said heartily, reaching to shake my hand and opening the lower half of the door for me.
“Anybody home beside the chickens?” I asked, mounting the steps.
“Tossing a hen through the door brings good luck. Sophie, look who’s here.” Sophie rose from the table where she had been working on some ledgers and offered me a cup of coffee. When she had moved the ledgers aside and set the cup on the table, I presented her with my gift. She took the package and looked from me to it and back again.
“Go ahead, Sophie,” Justin urged, “open it.”
A little gasp escaped her lips as she undid the paper and saw the sketch under the glass. She looked at me gratefully. “Nobody ever drew me before,” she said simply.
Justin came around the table to see. “Why, it’s Sophie to the life.” He pulled out a chair for me to sit. I put sugar in my coffee, and cream from the pitcher Sophie had brought from the refrigerator. Justin asked where she would like the sketch hung.
“In the living room, I think.”
He went to find a hammer, and Sophie led me into the front room, where she picked out a spot for the drawing. “Sophie,” Justin said when he had tapped in a hook and hung the sketch, “take him and show him the upstairs. When you’ve done, Ned, come have a look around the place. I’ve got to get back to the men or they’ll be sitting on their hands.” He clumped down the hall in his heavy boots and Sophie preceded me up the stairs.
I glimpsed a crisp white bedroom with a large four-poster bed similar to the one Beth and I slept in. Sophie took me in and showe
d me the crocheted counterpane her grandmother had made, pointing out the fine workmanship. “It’s called popcorn stitch.” The room had a serene but solid look to it, with printed curtains at the window, and at the foot of the bed a blanket chest painted with flowers to match the curtains. When I admired it, she blushed, saying she had done it herself.
“You’re very talented, Sophie.”
“But not like you.” A thought suddenly crossed her mind, and she stepped to the window, looking down at the barnyard. A hole had been dug along a strip of lawn between the house and the cornfield, and beside it stood a young tree, ready for planting. Justin came with a shovel, bent to set in the tree. Sophie turned back and said, “Could I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“I have my egg money put aside, and I was wondering—How much would you charge to do a painting?”
“I’d love to paint you, Sophie.”
“Not me. Justin. I’d like a picture to hang over the mantel while he’s still Harvest Lord.”
I said I thought that was a fine idea, and that I would be happy to execute the commission. “It’s the first I’ve had.” But I added that since I did not enjoy doing studio portraits, I would want to find a natural spot, revealing of his character, to pose Justin in. She grew more excited at the idea and asked when I might begin.
“Well—I’ve got some commitments I’ve got to finish up for my gallery in New York first.”
Her face clouded. “How soon could you start?”
Since it seemed important to her that I paint it while the Harvest Lord was still in office—so to speak—I said I would begin some preliminary sketches as soon as possible.
She brought me back downstairs and into the kitchen again where the ledgers lay stacked on the table.
“Do you keep the books, Sophie?”