“The woods—they’re alive, you know. But they smell funny, like burnt leaves and chimney smoke.”
Ellsworth sniffed but didn’t smell anything. “Of course they’re alive,” he said. “They grow leaves and branches and such. And trees like that dogwood bloom every year.”
“But this bright? And everything at the same time?”
The boy had a point. The trees did look more vibrant than normal. But when Raphael pressed about painting the blooming dogwood, Ellsworth said no out of spite.
“Those trees are called live oaks for a reason, Mr. Newberry.”
“That’s ’cause they hold on to their leaves nearly all year like an evergreen.”
To that the boy shrugged, then asked Ellsworth if he wanted to play a game of catch. Ellsworth said no, and told the boy to quit bothering him. Raphael walked off with his hands in his trouser pockets. A minute later he was in Anna Belle’s house playing the piano. Eliza’s Mozart sonata again, sounding clearly through the open window.
So the boy’s a wise-guy as well as a pest.
The music stopped after a while, but Ellsworth still had a hard time concentrating. It wasn’t just the woods that had come to life; it was the town. Just as he’d feared, Anna Belle had begun telling others about the chapel. Alfred and Linda May Dennison too. Alfred claimed that chapel contained a smidge of heaven and kept encouraging everyone to go see it, especially the war veterans. Now town folk had been walking into the woods all day.
So far no one had gone missing or come back with a patch of white hair. Maybe they were in and out of the woods too fast to feel the effects. “Best not to stand still for too long,” he’d heard Anna Belle warn some of them. Many, though, had returned crying, claiming they’d been in the presence of loved ones who’d died. Said they’d never felt so calm and peaceful as they’d felt inside those walls.
Ellsworth begged to differ. What he felt hadn’t left him peaceful. Not for long, anyway.
The way he saw it, Anna Belle and Linda May and Alfred had jumped the gun, telling everyone about the chapel before they knew if it was a good thing or not. And now the main road teemed with people who’d previously spent their days in their homes, looking out windows, paranoid since the night the town hall burned and death knocked on Bellhaven’s door.
“Ants on an anthill,” mumbled Ellsworth, trying to focus on his canvas again.
After two dreamless nights, his nightmares had returned. His brain had reached down deeper than the war to recycle Eliza’s death and its aftermath again.
The outcome never changed.
He hadn’t told Anna Belle about the nightmares. If he did that, he knew she’d insist he make another trip into the woods to visit that chapel. But something in the way she’d looked at him in the morning made him think she already knew. She and the others had tried to get him to go into the woods with them earlier in the day, but he’d told them no. Insisted he didn’t need to, was getting by fine without it. He had Eliza’s picture to look at, and that was all he needed.
But the truth was he felt the pull like a drug. He’d been given a dose the other day, and now he was jittery from the lack of it. His grip shook. The paintbrush wavered. He couldn’t quite think straight.
Up the hill, Lou Eddington’s house was half painted, a bright new yellow reminiscent of the warblers at the chapel. The cotton field had been cleared and plowed. Eddington stood atop the hill, hands on his hips and smoking a pipe, wearing glad rags no one else in town could afford. According to Anna Belle, he’d ventured into the woods a dozen times over the past three days.
Yesterday Anna Belle had taken their new neighbor a basket of blueberry muffins. He’d let her inside, and she’d later told Ellsworth that the ceilings were high and the doorways wide. The wood was nicely polished, and fancy furniture had been moved in.
“What about a family?” Ellsworth had asked. “Does he have kids?”
“They passed two years ago during the flu epidemic. His wife and two sons.”
“Where’d he come from?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Why didn’t Raphael go with you? To give that man those muffins?”
Anna Belle had paused before answering. “He didn’t feel well, but he’s better now.”
Anna Belle had been hiding something. The boy looked well enough. Raphael watched that big yellow house and the new neighbor just as Ellsworth did—like he didn’t trust the man. It may have only been a thread, but an unsaid bond had begun to form between Ellsworth and the boy because of that shared distrust. How can the man get so rich from selling chess sets?
According to Anna Belle, Eddington’s hands and shirt had been covered with dust when she dropped off the muffins. He’d been sculpting—“furiously sculpting,” he’d told her—ever since he’d entered that chapel. He’d never worked so fast, so focused. Never had his creative vision been so clear. He’d worked through two straight nights without sleep and still felt the energy to do more. He’d embraced her, kissing both cheeks before she retreated, giddy herself, down the hill to Ellsworth’s house.
“You should have seen him, Ellsworth.”
“I’d rather not.”
“He said he heard the voice of his wife in that chapel. And his little children. He said it’s true what they say, that the woods are magical.”
To that, Ellsworth had grunted and closed the door.
Eddington now puffed on his pipe and blew out smoke like a steamer, watching the crowd filter in and out of the woods. He spotted Ellsworth watching from afar and waved.
Ellsworth didn’t wave back. Instead he uncapped a tube of fresh red paint and spilled a dollop on his thumb. He smudged a line across the center of the canvas and thought of blood.
Ellsworth stepped back to view in full what he’d done on the easel.
It’s a little violent. But at least his hands no longer shook.
Once he started painting, the canvas had entranced him. He’d been at it for close to two hours now, and his hand was cramping. But what a mess! He’d never painted a picture before, and it showed. He’d set out to paint a war scene—a French village at sunset, with scorched trees and land pocked with bomb craters and a soldier with an arm blown off pulling another soldier across no-man’s-land. But what showed on the canvas looked more like a multicolored paint spill. Stick men would’ve looked better than this. Why did Eliza ever think I’d be good at such a thing? Even so, he felt better having painted it, as if some poisonous toxin had been purged from his system.
Town folk were still roaming the street with tears and smiles and laughter, and their voices carried—even seemed to be magnified somehow.
Dr. Philpot was sitting on the brick rubble in front of the town hall, and Ellsworth could hear him telling Carly Jennings that he’d been to the chapel and spoken with his little brother, who’d died from polio in 1908. And Carly, with tears in her eyes, confided to the doctor that she’d heard her father’s voice there. They’d had a falling out, and she’d told her father she hated him—an hour before he collapsed from a heart attack. She’d never had a chance to tell him she hadn’t meant it. But now she related in wonder that “he said he knew I loved him and I was forgiven.”
Ellsworth stepped closer to the veranda railing. Some of the town folk eyed him just as they had the night he took a steel pipe to the noggin and barely wobbled—with curiosity and a bit of awe. Jonah Livingston walked down the sidewalk with his wife, Mildred. They held hands and smiled. He’d never seen them show any affection before on their walks. Typically Jonah walked a step or two behind his wife. Their only son had drowned in the lake five years prior, and they’d stopped talking to one another after his burial. Now, as they passed, Jonah said something to Mildred and she laughed, squeezed his hand, and blushed.
Behind the town hall and near the edge of the woods, Ellsworth saw Gabriel hugging Donald Trapper, the town barber, pressing his face into the bosom of her overalls and patting his back. She dwarfed the little man, who sometime
s had to stand on a stool to clip hair. They both looked like they were weeping, and Ellsworth wondered what the story was there.
Father Timothy exited the woods, his face pale. He kissed the cross around his neck and then motioned the sign of the cross over his forehead, neck, and shoulders. He passed Gabriel and Donald Trapper, staring at the tall woman as if in some strange new light.
Twenty yards away, Rabbi Blumenthal stood at the edge of the trees as if afraid to enter. Reverend Beaver from the First Methodist Church took the rabbi by the elbow, and the two men entered the woods together just as Reverend Cane from First Baptist walked out crying and eyeing all the birds.
Down the road, in the front yard of the recently claimed worship house for the Pentecostals, Brother Bannerman knelt in the grass and stretched his arms to the air, preaching about heaven and hellfire to a small crowd gathered around him on the sidewalk.
And up there on the hill, Lou Eddington still stood outside his house, viewing the town from above as Ellsworth did from below.
Ellsworth couldn’t shake the picture in his mind that the whole foundation of the town was shifting, loosening—like a porch board that was sturdy now but could give way underfoot at any moment. And it was all because of that chapel. Most who visited it went just the one time, but Ellsworth noticed others had begun to enter the woods daily, sometimes multiple times a day. Anna Belle had told him just a few hours ago, after she and Linda May came back from the chapel after lunch, that she’d probably not go for a couple days—give her mind a break and let the rest of the town have their turn. But there she was again, entering the woods for the second time of the day, and Ellsworth felt the need to stop her.
The town’s been plugged into an electrical socket.
And now he, too, felt the pull again.
The solace he’d found after painting the picture had faded. He craved the woods like the rest of them. Craved Eliza’s voice. Craved the air that had felt like a warm embrace.
He turned away from the railing and then stopped abruptly. Old Man Tanner stood two feet away from him on the veranda, chewing the inside of his mouth. Ellsworth had never seen the old man up close, and now he saw that Tanner’s eyes weren’t old at all, though the skin around them was pinched and wrinkled. His back was hunched and his head bobbed as if palsied, but somehow he’d walked right up onto the veranda without Ellsworth hearing him.
“My place,” said Tanner. “Not the towns’.”
By the time Ellsworth realized what the old man was talking about, Tanner had raised the knife high and brought it down in a quick arc toward Ellsworth’s chest. The blade punched through his shirt, and he felt warm blood around his heart.
The handle protruded from Ellsworth’s chest. His vision swirled too much to pull it back out. His heart twitched. He spat blood and stumbled back into the easel, spinning his painted canvas to the floorboards where it probably belonged. He heard Gabriel’s voice screaming his name as he hit the floor, landing on his back.
At the corner of the veranda a small yellow birdhouse with a red roof and blue arched door spun, breeze-blown, from a ceiling hook.
Every house in town had one. For all the birds.
His vision darkened, and Old Man Tanner’s voice echoed across the void.
“Sorry, Ellsworth. The devil made me do it.”
CHAPTER 11
Ellsworth floated through the woods on his back, shivering.
He was being carried on a stretcher like after his leg was blown. Anna Belle gripped his right hand. Dr. Philpot applied constant pressure to the wound, his thoughts readable across glazed eyes: This man shouldn’t be alive.
Father Timothy and Reverend Cane gripped the handles at the foot of the stretcher while Gabriel walked backward, carrying the head by herself. Her overalls were stained from the smithy, her blond hair uncombed to the tops of her bulky shoulders. Her blue eyes were pretty—didn’t match the rest of her. A copper-colored light surrounded her face like a halo.
Was this it? Was he finally dying?
Anna Belle squeezed his hand, pleaded for him to fight. Part of him now wanted to. Where are they taking me? Birds circled above, red and blue birds. Yellow warblers and rainbow butterflies. Ellsworth squinted against the sunlight. Flower blooms flew windblown across the sky.
No, don’t take me in there.
The door creaked open. Raphael held it.
Gabriel ducked under the threshold, looking less confident than the others. She doesn’t like this either. Ellsworth lifted his head to see that half the town had followed them into the woods—concerned for him. Lou Eddington was among them, watching from afar, fidgety.
He wants to come in too. But he can’t. It’s too full.
Something shrieked in Ellsworth’s brain. Tiny bee stings. He tried to scratch at his face, but his arms were restrained by someone’s hands.
“Keep your head down,” said Dr. Philpot.
“Relax,” said Gabriel, backing into the chapel.
The chapel air’s warm embrace soothed his shivering. They placed the stretcher on the mosaic floor, and he did relax. Light beamed down from the hole in the roof. Dust motes. Stained glass casting rainbows. Angels and demons in combat along the walls, swords clanking on shields across fields of fire and snow, sunlight and dark.
“Now what?” someone asked.
Ellsworth didn’t hear an answer. He’d closed his eyes. His heart barely thumped.
Where am I?
“Ellsworth . . .”
Who am I?
“Michael Ellsworth Newberry.”
Mother . . .
He’d insisted on sitting alone in the train car.
Told his mother he needed space, some time to think on the ride back to Charleston. And she’d obliged, although not without that hurt look when she turned away.
The Brooklyn Dodgers were officially interested in signing him. He’d just pitched for their scouts in Florida, and they’d shaken his hand and talked to him like he was a man. Not a boy, he thought, glaring ahead at his mother, who’d taken a seat four rows up. By the tilt of her shoulders, she might have been crying.
Maybe he shouldn’t have told her to butt out of his life, especially now that he was so close to achieving his dream of pitching in the big leagues, but the way she’d asked all of those questions of the scouts had embarrassed him.
“Michael here is prone to accidents, so when the time comes I’ll have to know he’ll be watched over.” How many times did he have to tell her not to call him Michael anymore?
“And we have to make sure he eats proper and stays away from the giggle juice. And the broads.” Broads? Where had that come from? But she just wouldn’t stop.
“I know how those ballplayers are, and I know how the women who follow them can get—on the road and whatnot. Michael here has been at death’s door more times than you know . . .”
The two scouts had thanked him and moved on, promising to be in touch when he got another year or so of pitching under his belt.
She shouldn’t have come anyway. He was seventeen, after all—old enough to catch a train by himself. Calvin and Alfred and Omar had wanted to make the trip with him, but she’d said boys their age didn’t need to be gallivanting across state lines without chaperones.
She just didn’t want him leaving Bellhaven, clear and simple. Didn’t want him leaving her. Father would have been more supportive had he been alive. He’d been the one to plant that pitching seed in the first place, and those Sunday games of catch had fertilized it to grow.
Up ahead, mother rested her head against the window and watched trees zip by.
Ellsworth felt the urge to hug her. Ten more minutes, and maybe he’d join her up there, tell her sorry for what he’d said. He smelled the baseball glove on his lap, inhaled the scent of leather, and imagined pitching in front of big crowds while they ate hot dogs and sipped suds.
And then his mother suddenly stiffened in her seat, as if she’d seen something out the window to startle her. T
he train shrieked and squealed. She held her ears and looked over her shoulder with fear in her eyes. He stood as if to run to her, but then the windows shattered and the train car folded in on itself.
Everyone was screaming. Everything spinning. Ellsworth shouted for his mother but couldn’t see her.
Arms enveloped him. A soft voice told him to get down. A woman’s voice, but not his mother’s. He turned to look. She had pretty blue eyes, a curtain of auburn hair, and a face meant for a painting.
She told him he’d be safe.
And he believed her.
“His pulse is stronger,” said Dr. Philpot.
“Mother . . . I’m sorry . . . Mother . . .”
They told him not to talk. Anna Belle told him to close his eyes and rest. So he did, but he held on to her hand for dear life.
His mother lay red-faced and straining on the operating table, her knees propped up beneath a white sheet stained with blood.
The day I was born? But how?
Was the chapel somehow filling him with memories that couldn’t have been his own?
A gray-haired doctor pulled a baby from the tented folds, and his eyes narrowed in concern.
The baby boy didn’t cry. He lay blue-faced and limp, the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around the neck. The doctor worked quickly, cut the cord, waited.
Mother assumed her miracle baby was dead. She wailed.
But then the baby’s fingers twitched. The right hand then the left.
The doctor felt for a pulse. Color returned to the baby’s face. A minute later he cried.
Almost died the day I was born.
That’s when it started.
“How long do we leave him here?” someone asked.
“Until his color returns,” said Raphael.
Gabriel hovered above him, her presence giving him strength.
A yellow warbler landed on her shoulder, and she didn’t move it.
All Things Bright and Strange Page 10