by John Hart
“I’ve seen this place.” He touched a drawing of the waterfall and the tree. “I can’t remember where, exactly, but I’ve seen it and it scares me. People have gone lost in that swamp. People have died, and I’m looking for answers. I’m hoping you can help me.”
“With the old stories?”
“The stories, yes. And I want to find this waterfall. Tomorrow, I’m going to look for it.”
“You say people have died. You mean outsiders?” He nodded carefully. “Start at the beginning,” she said. “Tell me everything.”
The telling took a while, and Cree got more than she’d expected. She learned of the trapper found frozen in a creek bed, and of the surveyor who’d stumbled into a rattlesnake den and suffered thirty-seven bites, including nineteen in the face. He spoke of boys lost in the swamp, of so many people dead or missing that Cree was disbelieving. But he showed her the articles, the old write-ups.
“I’ve never heard these stories,” she said.
“Few have.”
“What about your friend?”
“Don’t be bitter.”
“About the lawsuit?” Cree looked away because bitter was not the right word, not after the dreams. She could close her eyes and see John Merrimon in the summer of 1853: his face above the dying wife, the same face yellow with fire and shadow. She knew the dream as if she’d lived it. That meant she hated him, couldn’t help it. How much of that hate went down the line to land on Johnny? She wasn’t sure, but saw him at the gate, his blood in the dust. She was afraid but not sorry. There was too much history between their families, too much slavery and blood and betrayal. “This was a mistake. I should probably go.”
“It’s the middle of the night.” Cree glanced at the window, and at the city beyond. “There’s just the one bedroom,” he continued. “But you can take it if you like. The door locks.”
The same distrust haunted Cree, but she had nowhere else to go. Not to her mother. Not to the Hush. “Maybe the sofa—”
“Stay right there.” He retrieved sheets and a pillow. “I’ve slept on it before. It’s comfortable.”
Cree nodded her thanks, and when he was gone, she sat alone on the sofa, her back very straight. She studied pictures on the wall, the dark marks, the careful use of empty space.
Crossing the room, she removed a sketch from the wall, tilting it against the light before stepping back to take in as many of the drawings as she could. After a moment, she removed another sketch, then six more. Some were perfect, she realized, but many were not. Cree turned a slow circle, feeling hints of wrongness, like an instinct. In that first hour, she cleared two entire walls and began again. It took most of the night to find what the artist had hidden. The darkest sketches gathered in the center. Corners touched corners. In places, they overlapped. Thirty of them together formed a single picture that covered most of the wall. Cree felt cold looking at the darkness, the glints of light.
She saw the swamp of her childhood.
Saw black eyes, watching.
* * *
When light broke over the city, Cree was still awake. It was the drawings, the fear of dreams. Turning from the window, she watched pink light play on the sketches. Thirty of them combined to make the great, black eyes. Eight feet long and five feet tall, the charcoal was shiny black except where it was not: the white glints in the pupils, the crease between the eyes, and then the brows, like leaves and branches and twigs.
Sitting on the sofa, Cree folded her hands in her lap. She wanted to take down the drawings and wasn’t sure why. They were just drawings. But when she paced again, the eyes followed her, and she wanted to rip them down so badly, it hurt. When the lawyer stirred behind the door, she thought about it a final time. She had time to do it. Tear them down. Run. But when the door opened, she was still on the sofa, and she felt him behind her: the sudden stop, the deep breath.
“Sweet Jesus.” He sat beside her. The shoes he wore were shined, the suit pants creased under a bright blue tie. “How…?”
“I rarely sleep these days.” It was no answer, but he accepted it. They sat for a long time in a difficult silence. “You’re going to work?”
“What?”
“The suit.”
She pointed, and he looked down, as if dazed. His hand moved to the lapel. “Just a minute.” He disappeared into the bedroom, and returned in jeans and boots. The dazed look was gone, his features pale but grim. “I need to find my friend.” Cree stood, and he picked up the keys. “I need to find him right now.”
* * *
They rode in a car as nice as any Cree had ever seen. The metal gleamed. It smelled new. When they got to Hush Arbor, he stayed in the car as Cree opened the gate.
The same gate …
She watched him pull the big car through, and almost left him then and there. It was real now, all of it. They’d find Johnny dead. Maybe they’d find what killed him, or it would find them.
“You coming or not?”
Shit …
Cree got back in the car, and the lawyer took them deeper into the forest, then over a causeway with water on both sides. He stopped only once, at the old sign. Pointing, he said, “I was thirteen, the first time I saw that.”
The sign was faded wood, half-rotted and covered with honeysuckle. HUSH ARBOR, it read. 1853. Cree rolled down her window and smelled the mud.
“Why are you doing this?” the lawyer asked. “You don’t know me. You have every reason to hate my friend.”
“Why are you here?” She turned in the seat, defensive. “You’re terrified. I can tell. What’s in this for you?”
“Just my friend.”
She said nothing after that, and the lawyer took them past the sign and into the gloom.
The hanging tree was there.
Just through those trees.
“We’ll go to the cabin first, and get Johnny. Then you can show us the waterfall.” They parked at the abandoned village, and got out of the car. He went left, but she stepped into the old church, feeling the heat and the stillness.
“Ms. Freemantle?”
Inside, things looked as they had for years: the sconces and tumbled benches, the layers of dust. The lawyer appeared in the door behind her, but was little more than a shadow himself. She ignored him, drawn instead to the stone baptismal font. It was small, on a carved pedestal.
Only it wasn’t a baptismal font.
How do I know that?
As a child, she’d been kept from the weekly gathering, but she’d gone to the window once. She’d stood on a stone block and seen … what? She remembered her fingers on the ledge, ripples in the glass. Inside, candles burned in sconces on the wall, and Grandmother stood at the baptismal font. People were cowed and bent.
It was nighttime.
It was raining.
“Ms. Freemantle?”
“Shhh.”
She’d been four or five, soaking wet and afraid of being caught as her grandmother lifted her arms to show the withered skin, the map work of fine, pale scars. People swayed on the benches, shoulder to shoulder, eyes squeezed tight.
“May I be alone for a moment?”
The lawyer stepped outside, and Cree shut the door as an image came, unbidden. She saw the bright knife and people lined at the baptismal font. They offered a hand, an arm …
Cree touched the inside of the bowl, which was stained and dark. She pictured nighttime and rain. She had the sense of black stone moving.…
“Ms. Freemantle…”
When she pushed on the baptismal, the stone bowl rocked on its pedestal. Lifting it from the base, she put it on the floor, feeling something very much like superstitious awe. Reaching into the open pedestal, she found the knife inside. It was unchanged from childhood: a small bone handle; a rabbit-skin sheath. Drawing it, she saw an edge as bright as ice. On her palm was a thin white scar from her first day in the Hush, her first time at the tree. How many of her people had the knife cut? How much blood had it spilled?
Outside,
she said nothing about her discovery. Her past was a secret. So was the knife. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“It’s fine.”
“Are you ready?”
“I am.”
She glanced at the old church and thought of blood in a black-stained bowl. “Tell me what we’re doing next.”
* * *
He took her deeper into the swamp than she had ever been, and she shrank under the scale of it. She’d been arrogant, she thought, to think she knew this place. They followed trails only the lawyer seemed to see, and when the view opened up to show a cabin across still water, Cree stopped and stared. It was beautiful. The isolation. The stony hills.
“We found this spot when we were fourteen.” The lawyer led her to the right, picking his way from island to tussock to dry land. “He won’t be happy I brought you, so let me do the talking.”
The cabin, though, was empty.
“Damn.” Jack closed the door, then stared across the clearing and out into the wilderness. He called out Johnny’s name, then tried the cell. “He could be anywhere.”
For Cree, it was a relief. The swamp was different since the dream, and more so since she’d found the knife in the old church. Strange things moved in the back of her mind. She felt shadows of memory that were not entirely her own. She knew the knife as if she’d held it a hundred times. She saw people she’d never met, and remembered things she should not, things like power, and the blood of hanged men, and how to skin a wild pig. Stooping, she let damp soil run between her fingers.
“We could wait,” Jack said.
“I can’t do that.”
The lawyer held his palm above the dead fire. “Still warm.”
“We need to leave.”
“I really think—”
“If you want to see the waterfall, we’re going back now.”
He didn’t argue after that. Maybe it was her voice, or the way she stared. She needed to move, and needed it now. Ten minutes took them back to the first island, and Cree paused a moment to look back, feeling an ache of recognition. She knew the movement of the hills, the yellow light and broken stone.
In 1853, she’d known the land. She’d hunted it, owned it, lived it.
Cree closed her eyes, and in her mind, a fire was burning. She heard the creak of rope and felt bits of men. She knew screams and frightened slaves. A red sheen was on the same small blade.…
“Ms. Freemantle.”
She felt the joy and satisfaction. Her arms went up and a hundred silent faces waited. Black faces. Bright, wide eyes. They swayed in the night, and John Merrimon was there, too. Blood pooled in the dirt. The bodies twisted.…
“Ms. Freemantle, please.”
Cree opened her eyes, and the sun was shining. The lawyer was staring, his face very close.
“You went away for a minute.” His hand was on her arm. “You don’t seem well at all.”
Cree shook off the hand, and for a while he was right. She watched her feet, and kept her thoughts rigid.
My name is Cree, short for Creola.
It’s a family name.
My name is Cree.…
At the car, he gave her water and she kept her eyes on the ground. “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.
She wasn’t. “The waterfall is that way. Not far.”
Cree took the lead, and for a while the dislocation faded. They followed game trails to a lone hill that rose as if cast off from those to the north. Cree remembered the first time she’d seen it. There’d been snow on the ground, a low, dull sky. “This is what you want.”
The stone face was twenty feet tall, the waterfall loud in the silence. The lawyer shrugged off his pack and dug out one of the drawings. He held it up to make a comparison. It matched. “Now what?”
“I don’t see any great, black eyes.”
“Don’t be flip.”
But that’s how Cree was when she got scared. She was dismissive and raw and rude. Otherwise, it was too real. Otherwise, she ran. “As a child, I was told to stay away from this place. Are you sure you want to be here?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
Cree said nothing in return, but this is why she wanted the lawyer here. So she wouldn’t be alone. So she wouldn’t run. They started across the glade, and he was going on about the dead deer, and how this was the place it happened … the exact spot, just like the drawings and the newspaper story, Jesus Christ, exactly the same. He was a talker when he got scared, and that was okay. They both felt it: the static in the air, the expectation.
Ten minutes later, they found the cave.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Johnny knew Jack was coming—he’d felt him for an hour—but he’d missed the girl until she actually appeared at the cabin. It was the second time he’d missed her.
No, he thought.
It was the second time he knew about for sure.
Johnny didn’t like any of it. The invisible girl. Dreams of John Merrimon. A month ago, life had been as simple as preparing for winter. Now wood lay unsplit; the garden drooped under its own weight. Watching Jack fiddle with his cell phone, part of Johnny wanted to step from the trees as if it were a step through time instead. They’d open a bottle of something. Johnny would worry about the girl, but pour a glass for her, too. He’d be civil; maybe learn something about the past of this place. He’d not forgotten his manners. He could hold a conversation if he tried. But something about the girl made Johnny cautious. He wanted her off his land, wanted her gone.
Turning away, Johnny worked up into the hills, stopping at the tree where he often slept. From high in the branches, he looked down on the Hush, and had a sense of Jack making his way back to the old village. Between the two of them were miles of swamp and rough country, but Jack was his oldest friend, and Johnny would know the feel of him anywhere in the Hush. The girl remained hidden, but Johnny faced larger questions at the moment. After days of reflection and sleeplessness, it had come to this. Verdine had warned Johnny of the past. She’d been emphatic, and he’d experienced enough to know the dangers of it. That life felt as real as this, and though there was darkness there, there was beauty as well. A wife. A child. Even now he felt the pull, and wondered if he could lose himself in all that lushness. It was the past—his family’s past—and he thought maybe there were answers there.
Stretching out in the hammock, he peered through the leaves and into the same sky Marion would have known. Did she die so the child might live? Had John cut the baby out? As questions, they were worn beyond their age, but Johnny could think of little else: Marion and the child, this life that was not his own. Settling deeper, he drew one of Verdine’s cigarettes from his pocket.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then he lit it.
* * *
John Merrimon was delirious with exhaustion and grief, but not so far gone he doubted word of the hanging would spread.
His foreman would swing. A white man.
John didn’t care.
Kneeling at Marion’s side, he smoothed her soaking hair. Her eyes were open, but unseeing. “Is the doctor here yet?”
“Word came from the river. He’s at the ford. His horse is balking.” Isaac hovered in the bedroom door, his big hands open.
“Send another horse, for God’s sake! Drag him if you have to!”
Isaac left the room to deal with it. When he returned, he nodded. “It’s done. Your fastest horse.”
“And the lawyer?”
“Downstairs. He doesn’t like it.”
John nodded slowly. What man would? “Give him dinner and a bottle. He doesn’t leave until I say.”
“We have to move fast,” Isaac said.
People would not stand for it: a white man hanged with slaves.
“Where are they now?”
“The foreman’s in the cellar, bound and gagged. The slaves are outside, under guard.”
“What’s the mood?”
“People are grim. They’re scared.”<
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It was bad business, and they both knew it. Not a single name had been spoken, as if somehow that made it less real. It was the foreman, the slaves. “What about the girl? She understands the map?”
“She wants the swamp and the northern hills, the most inaccessible places you own.”
It was six thousand acres, but John didn’t care. He touched his wife’s face, and when he looked up, his eyes were burning. “It’s murder, Isaac.”
“She says they raped her, hurt her.”
“Do you believe her?”
“Does it matter?”
* * *
When the doctor arrived, John met him on the stairs. “I need to know if you can save her.” He dragged the doctor upstairs and pushed him at the bed. “I need to know if she will live or die.”
“Calm yourself. Please.”
“Damn you, man! Tell me!”
“Very well.” Displeasure deepened the doctor’s voice, but he checked her temperature and pulse, then opened her gown and listened for the baby. When he stood, his face told the tale. “A fever this high would have killed most people by now.”
“But?”
“There is no ‘but.’ Her pulse is weak, her breathing so thin, it’s barely there at all.”
“The baby?”
“Still alive, though I consider it a miracle. Have there been any changes since my last visit?”
John thought of the girl, and how she’d touched his wife, and how his wife had opened her eyes and said his name.
“No,” he lied. “None.”
“I can still take the baby—”
“Don’t say that!”
“Mr. Merrimon. John…” He put a hand on John’s shoulder. They weren’t close, but he’d delivered John nineteen years before. He’d stood beside John’s father as he’d breathed his last. “I urge you to consider the larger picture.”
“Not if it kills my wife.”
The doctor sighed and nodded. “May I at least take a look at you?”
“I’m fine.”
“No, Mr. Merrimon. You’re not.”
John knew it was true. He’d not eaten in six days. He’d not slept or bathed or left his wife’s side. “Is there any reason for hope, any reason at all?”