“Nothing, sir.”
“What are your plans for tonight? Are you staying in the area?”
Willis looked ahead to where the trees gave way to goldenrod and meadowsweet, alive with fireflies in the night, backlit by lights from the Cronin’s house and the Sheriff’s car.
“I’ve no place to go.”
The Sheriff looked dissatisfied. “How about I take you down to the station where we can have some hot coffee and answer some questions.” It was a statement, not a suggestion, and they all turned to go.
Willis walked, Todd noticed, with quiet dignity next to the Sheriff. He and Frank Cronin followed behind a few paces.
In a few moments, they reached the edge of the trees. Willis stumbled but kept his feet. Couldn’t keep faking forever, Todd thought. Sheriff Amundsen’s light revealed his pale and stricken face. His hands were on his thighs, and he was trying to keep marching ahead. His breathing became labored. Todd caught up and took Willis’s left arm and the Sheriff grabbed his right. Between the two of them they hauled him, stumbling, up the lane.
Gradually, Willis ceased struggling ahead and his feet were dragging. Frank Cronin called to them, “Shall I call an ambulance?”
“By the time they got here, we might as well run him to the E.R. ourselves,” huffed Sheriff Amundsen, cursing under his breath.
They dragged him to the sheriff’s car and got him into the back seat. The dome light shone on a white face and open mouth. Todd leaned into the car and put two fingers to his neck. “I can barely find a pulse, and he does not look too good. Maybe I should get my wife, she’s a nurse.”
“No, let’s just get him to the E.R. quick,” said the Sheriff. They said goodbye to Frank, and Todd jumped in the front seat of the car. The sheriff radioed ahead as he pulled onto Blackbirch Creek Road that they had a possible drug overdose coming in, e.t.a. 20 minutes. After that Todd explained briefly what he and Willis had talked about in the woods. After muttering “nut job”, the sheriff made no reply and the remainder of the breakneck ride was quiet. Todd glanced into the back seat, which was partitioned from the front with expanded steel, but there was no sound or movement from the young man.
The Sheriff’s flashlight was on the seat next to him and Todd picked it up after a few minutes and switched it on, to see how Willis was doing.
“What the--!! Sheriff, stop the car!!” Amundsen looked at him in disbelief. “Seriously, stop the car now!!” The Sheriff pulled the car to the side of the road quickly and turned to look at the back seat of the car.
Where a strange young man had lain was a withered corpse with only shreds of ragged raiment falling away from the leathern skin. Yellowed bone protruded at the nose, the wrists. The parchment mouth was pulled back in a grimace over long teeth.
The Sheriff bolted from the car, leaving a string of colorful expletives in his wake. He yanked the back door of the car open. Todd came around to his side of the car and shone the flashlight in, although the dome light was bright enough. The men stood there for several minutes, no idea what to say.
Then Sheriff Amundsen turned on Todd. “What the heck kind of joke is this? Where is the boy?”
Todd was speechless, and Amundsen went on, his voice gaining rapidly in volume. “I know you out-of-towners think the whole ‘Wentham Ghost’ thing must some kinda big joke and the local yokels are all a-quiver in their beds every time the wind picks up—”
“Sheriff, I had nothing to do with this! My grandparents told me the ghost stories, but I’ve been staying here every summer since I was a kid and have nothing but respect for the local people—my grandparents and my parents were local people. All I know is, some random guy shows up at my family’s tent in the night, claiming to be a couple hundred years old and what would you do?? He wanted to visit my teenage daughter, for crying out loud! I just thought he was some local kid, wasted on homegrown. Maybe he’s playing a joke on us both, but I’m just as freaked out as you are!”
Amundsen looked back at the car. “Well, that ain’t no joke in there, that there is a genuine dead guy, and I’m darned if I know how that got in there and where the live fellow got to. These doors can’t be opened from the inside.”
“What about the trunk? Does the seat open to the trunk?”
“Nope, no access from the car.” The men stood staring. After a moment the Sheriff began aimlessly scanning the surrounding trees and fields with his powerful flashlight, running through his inventory of expletives once again.
The radio started squawking with ten-codes, wanting to know what was the status of the possible drug overdose.
Sheriff Amundsen swore some more, and went to answer the radio. “Ten-sixty-six, E.R., this one’s for the coroner… Absolutely positive, this guy is dead. We’ll bring him around to the morgue door. E.t.a., seven minutes. Out.”
Todd closed the back door and got back in the passenger side of the front seat. The sheriff sat silently, and finally put the car in gear and moved back into the road. “I’ve seen some weird things in my time in this county. But…cripes…” He took a last glance into the back seat of the car, and Todd was sure that he shivered slightly before accelerating to an unnecessary speed.
Todd had no idea what to say or think. The car arrived at the back side of the hospital at a utilitarian carport by a blank double door with only a small sign that said “MORGUE”.
Amundsen cut the motor, left the car without a word, and went to the door. Todd smelled a rank and musty smell that could only have come from what was in the back seat. He got out and stood by the sheriff’s car, bent slightly over a hollow and horrified feeling in his stomach. The night was hot and insects swirled under the harsh fluorescent lights of the carport. The morgue refrigeration compressors churned away noisily, but Todd could still hear katydids in the tall spruce trees that lined the parking lot.
Two men in scrubs rolled a gurney out of the plain door, accompanied by the sheriff. They opened the back door of the car and stood there, staring. They joked grimly with the Sheriff about how he ought to bring them in a little sooner. Todd turned away while the professionals handled the remains.
Amundsen came to Todd’s side. With a motion of his head, he indicated that he wanted a private conversation. They walked a few yards away from the car.
“Look, uh, Mr. Aubrey, Todd, isn’t it? I have absolutely no way of explaining this, so if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you let me do the talking. I’ll give you a ride back to your family in about an hour. Let’s just treat it like you didn’t have much to do with this. I’ll smooth things over with the E.R. and all that. Meanwhile, they have a coffeemaker in the E.R. nurse’s station, and if you ask for Nancy and tell them Bob Amundsen told you she was good for a cup, she’ll get you hooked up.
“If anyone asks, you found that corpse in the woods. Guy looks to have been dead for a hundred years.”
“You want me to lie?”
“Todd, look at this way. If we give the full story, you think anyone will believe us? And trust me, it’ll be nothin’ but aggravation for you, me, your wife, and anyone that’s involved. I’ll handle dispatch, and I’ll talk to Frank Cronin first thing in the morning.” He reached into a pocket inside his jacket and handed Todd Aubrey a card. “If you see that Willis Wood character again, call me personally. But I doubt he’ll show his face again after a stunt like that. He has to know he’d be in a world of trouble.” Amundsen looked angry and tough, but decidedly freaked-out as well, in the cold light.
Todd glanced over at the car. The morgue attendants were gingerly handling the crumbling bones, shifting them by clumps from the car seat onto a white sheet. A breeze stirred, and much of what remained began to blow away. Simultaneously, he and the sheriff blew long breaths.
Although he was uncomfortable with the deception, he could see no helpful alternative. He turned away from the crumbling remains and walked to the E.R. waiting room door.
It was after three in the morning by the time he slipped back into the tent. Jes
sica was still sitting awake. He begged her to let him explain in the morning, he was exhausted. After laying awake for an hour, the events of the night still buzzing in his head, he drifted off for a while.
Dawn comes early in the northern summer, and Violet and Jill were giggling and tussling by 5:30. He groggily wondered why he was so tired. He usually slept like a log on camping trips.
Jess turned over next to him. “Weird dreams,” she groused.
“Me too,” said Todd.
SPRING
There was a sensation both of pain and delight in awakening.
Through a veil of late snow, moonlight gently probed the sleeping biotic life of the earth. The snow surrendered to increasing sunlight and became only a skin of ice which dripped with bracing cold water, distilled of earth and winter sky. It was light, and chilblains, that stirred the dark traces of his dreams.
The sweet rousing of sap into sunlit branches trickled down into the rootstocks and rootlets, gripping the earth like embracing hands. But the sweetness was marred, for with it roused the murmurs of discontented things that dwelt among the rhizomes and sleeping cicadas. Impatient things, but not the impatience that longs to spring forth and grow, the way the mosses and ferns longed; but rather a bitter wanting to be shed of the hindering frozenness. These too entered his slowly waking consciousness.
His own pain at the cold and darkness was consoled greatly by the sensation of awakening life, of the hope of blue sky and clear sunlight, sweet warm rains and caressing breezes, that all the green life of the woods shared. The trees could speak from wisdom of storms and long summer days golden with sun; the seeds with childish fervency for blessings not yet known. These
unheard voices Willis chose to listen to, and pay no heed to those other, wraith-borne mutterings.
Even in finally waking to find his body yet unchanged and alive and clothed and above ground, Willis chose to savor those daily changes in the earth’s condition that composed the cyclic song the earth’s Creator had taught it to sing. She sang it faithfully, year by year, and it gave him no little courage to himself keep faith. For that was not always easy. His life returned inexorably to yet another night, another spring, another season of growth and burgeoning, and then slow resignation to another time of cold sleep.
Especially Willis savored the month of May, when the wildwood flowers bloomed beneath the budding trees, enjoying the face of the sun before the canopy leafed out and cooled the forest floor with shade. Even under the moon, the mayflowers and speedwell and bear berry opened sweet faces to the woods. They spoke of sunlight, and Willis listened well, for he would not see it for himself.
As the years passed on, some things did change. The night smell of wood smoke gave way to coal, and then to oil. The roads grew hard and acrid with tarmac, and the whine of motors changed the night. The scrape of the fiddle, or the banshee cry of bagpipes, was replaced by radios playing in the night, and the drone of airplanes high overhead. The locomotive’s churning became the hum of the diesel train.
Houses rose and fell. Farms were cleared and reverted to second growth forest. Factories arose by the rivers, jammed with machines and workers who lived and died by the poisoned waters; and the brick factory buildings moldered with broken windows, home to sparrows and rock doves who bathed in the clear shallows of the forgotten brooks. Tracts were timbered, flourished with raspberries and bunchgrasses the deer loved, then grew up again with poplars and firs that gave way to oaks and maples. What would happen if he were trapped under a grove that was cut and left open to the sky, Willis was unsure, so he migrated to thick woods when the jeep roads edged near.
But the stars overhead, the Leonid showers, the faithful moon, the night moths fluttering at the river margin, the white-crowned sparrow crying sweet sweet charity-charity-charity at all hours of night—these never changed. The Great Bear arose to claim the summer night, and in the autumn Orion returned to signal that winter was coming to claim the land again.
And Willis did not change, at least in appearance, unless one could see the mark in his gaze, how he saw the world with a look older than any man, or the way he stood when he was still—more still than trees. For he had learned to live without any of the kind of hope that keeps most people going. If he had any at all, he could not have named it.
Therefore on occasion he had yielded to the darkness and cast himself into the roiling spring flood of Blackbirch River, or run headlong out of the woods into an open field, to find a dreamless quiet of death. But in vain, he knew. There was no hope there.
He had a name, although he almost forgot it from time to time. He had experiences and memories and loves, even if those who shared them were gone. He was strong and alive, and his hands were quick. He could carve, and sing, and walk, and dream.
And while he might have denied it even to himself, he still looked for a way into daylight, and never stopped believing in that. Walking in darkness could not be all there was. The moon’s reflected sunlight seemed to promise him that, and the swelling of green leaves confirmed it, and the white-crowned sparrow’s cry prayed for it.
THE WENTHAM GHOST
1962
Reverend Peterson woke well before dawn and hiked along the creek with his shotgun, looking for deer. He had had the spot chosen for weeks—a well-used deer path along a side hill that led to a drinking spot at the river with good cover. Come dawn, he was almost guaranteed a clear shot at a good-sized buck. Yet another reason he was thankful he had recently been called to Wentham, fresh out of seminary.
After passing from the church property along several cornfields, the path led into a stately sugarbush, and after that into mixed pine, poplar and ash; young forest. The freshly fallen leaves smelled spicy in the damp air. The river breathed nearby.
The path climbed a knoll, a mile into the trees. Reverend Peterson was hardly winded; even though he knew the path well it was still slow going because of the dark. What moonlight there might have been was obscured by an autumn overcast that might start spitting rain by dawn. So much the better, it would muffle any sounds he might make.
On the other side of the knoll, Reverend Peterson misjudged. A newly fallen tree lay across the thread of path and by the time he worked his way around it he had
lost his way. He stood still for a moment, listening for the river. Then he turned toward it, pointing his flashlight into the dark—and fell out into nothing.
A few feet beyond where he expected to meet the ground, his foot hit between two stones. There was an ugly ‘pop’, and pain stabbed up his leg. He continued to fall forward, the flashlight tumbling away down the hillside. He landed with his face deep in humus, his palms scraped and his ankle broken.
How long he lay there, he wasn’t sure. After a few minutes, collecting his wits, he tried to turn his body so that he could sit up. Immediately he was sliding farther down the knoll in the loose duff. The dampness worked through his woolen trousers and small sticks jabbed. Slowly, he worked his way down the last few feet to a level spot. His flashlight lay there. He brought it nearby him. After several more minutes, he managed to get into a sitting position so he could look at his ankle.
He used his canteen as a support beneath his leg and pulled the trouser leg up. There it was, swollen and angry, and the pain made him mutter words he hadn’t used since before seminary. He wanted to remove the shoe because it was pinching, but couldn’t remember if he should or shouldn’t. “Well, Lord. What the—what do I do now?” He knew no one would be coming along this path any time soon, maybe even for days. He decided to wait until dawn, when he could see if he could find a stick to use as a crutch. Meanwhile, what could he splint the ankle with?
He began rummaging through the small rucksack he had stuffed some breakfast and a vacuum bottle full of coffee into. He had his deer hunting license, his hunting knife, a New Testament, odds and ends. It was while he was thus engaged that he heard footsteps in the woods. Soft and slow, something was approaching.
Well, it was probably t
he buck he would have shot if he hadn’t gone and messed himself up but good. He switched off the light.
He waited until he was sure, by the sound of it, that it was a person. No flashlight, so no wonder they were just poking along—he chuckled in spite of the pain—so they didn’t end up like yours truly. Then he called out “Hallo!” The weakness and strain of his own voice surprised him. The footsteps stopped.
He could just make out a figure. Strangely, it was not on any path the minister knew about. He couldn’t believe how fortunate he was. “Hallo, I’m over here. Please, could you help me out? I’m hurt.” He switched on his flashlight and lay it next to him.
The figure hesitated. “Hello.” It was more of a statement than a greeting. The voice sounded dry and distant, long disused. Then the shadow began to move slowly toward Reverend Peterson.
“I’m Reverend Peterson, the minister over to Christ the King.”
The figure became more solid in the dark and moved toward him with more confidence. “Yes, hello, hello, I’m coming. A-are you all right?” It was someone just a few years younger than himself, thought the minister. He was so relieved and thankful that someone was actually helping him that he couldn’t reply for a moment. The pain in his leg consumed him, seemed to radiate from him like heat. He took a deep breath.
“Thank God you’re here. What’s your name, son?”
In the glow of the flashlight the boy approached. His eyes met Reverend Peterson’s.
“My name is Willis.” It was said in kind of a rush, like a revelation. But not to the minister, to himself. “Willis Wood.” He turned his head away slightly so that the minister would not see him mouth the name again in the dark.
Reverend Peterson picked up the light and aimed it at his leg. It didn’t take a medical degree to see that he was in bad shape there. He could see that the young man was strong and in good shape, good enough for him to lean on for a long ways. “If you can help me get back to the church, I’d be very grateful.”
Blackbirch Woods Page 3