Half in Shadow

by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

  "Not going!" Mark snapped. "Sally Lindsay yapping in my ear, and Jay handing out those dishwater cocktails like they were champagne...!”

  Sherry looked at him, temper sparkling in her eyes. She compressed her lips, fighting for self-control, then burst the dam:

  "Maybe you're not going. But I sure am! Jeb will take me, and Liz can go with that drip of a Joe Kimball who keeps trying to marry her off. She’s too smart, though! Marriage is... a bog hole! Ours is, anyhow!... Come on, Liz!” she whirled and swept out of the room to run upstairs. "I'll take some clothes, and dress at Jeb’s with you. Mark can sit here and drown in his cheap rye. I’ll spend the night at Aunt Millicent’s!"

  She came running down again with a lavender tulle dress, slip, and gold sandals, and stalked out to the car with no further word to Mark. Jet and I mumbled something to our cousin; but he was already gulping down several slugs of whiskey in white-lipped anger, and did not reply. We followed Sherry out to the car, and drove away, not blaming her, only wishing Mark would find his way again and return to his old self.

  On the way to Aunt Millicent’s, Sherry became contrite, but covered it by chattering about the' letter she had' found in the attic.

  "Oriental potentate!" she laughed. "With a turban oh his head, and a dowered robe! She really dreamed that one up, didn’t she? It’s not so fantastic, though. The window didn’t predict the date, by any chance? Say, December 7th, 1941...?"

  We fell in with her mood and began to kid each other about the Japanese Invasion of Stuartsboro that might have actually come off in 1941, but hadn’t quite made it. At noon I discreetly called -Mark on the phone, but he sounded very drunk when he answered. Sighing, I hung up, and went ahead with our plans for the dance.

  What I had forgotten to tell Sherry was, it. was a masquerade ball. She was disappointed, for she had a lovely little Pierrette costume at home. She would not go back’ after it, however, so. I promised to get her

  some kind of costume if I had to lend her my own “Colonial belle” outfit—inherited from Grandmother, complete with powdered wig and hoop-skirt.

  Meanwhile, Mark was sulking in the big cool parlor, with a mystery novel held upside-down in his hand and a half-empty decanter beside him on the floor. He was in pajamas and dressing robe, as usual, with a two-day growth of beard on his puffy face. He also had a splitting headache, and had tied a rubber ice-bag on his head. I could picture him when I phoned—a tragicomic figure, sulking there in the semi-gloom.

  He sat there, pretending to read, until the sun sank below the Blue Ridge foothills. Then, still muttering things, he wished he had thought to say, he fell into an alcoholic doze...

  ABOUT midnight, he awakened with a start. His head was pounding. The dim light from a lamp in the hall, illuminated the high-ceiled, room palely. Mark heard a faint scraping noise to his right. Somebody was prying at the window that faced on the garden, trying to open it, trying to get in.

  Dizzily, his heart pounding, Mark slid out of his chair and made his way over to a cabinet where his father had kept a collection of pistols and knives. His fumbling hand found one weapon, a blunt automatic. Mark could not remember whether it was loaded or not; but, he thought, it might scare the prowler. He waited, motionless in the half-dark, eyes glued to that window across the room. Beside it, locked as always, the green window —the prophetic green window—gleamed back at him like a shadowy mirror.

  The window raised slowly. A figure in slouchy pants and a patched white. shirt climbed up stealthily, shinnying up the trellis outside. A tweed cap was pulled far down over the intruder’s eyes. A knife held between the teeth, a knife that had been used to pry open the window, gave the lower part of the face an evil distorted look.

  Mark took careful aim, and pulled the trigger. No one was more startled than he was at the deafening explosion that rocked the room, filling it with the acrid stench of cordite.

  The intruder, screamed—a high-pitched cry of anguish and pain—then toppled forward over a chair, knocking it to the floor. Mark quickly switched on the light, aiming at tire marauder again. But a gasping cry stopped him.

  "Mark! Don’t shoot—it’s me! I left my latchkey! Thought you were in bed.’’

  Then Mark cried out, throwing himself to his knees, beside the still figure lying face up on the rug. It was Sherry—in an old pair of Jeb’s pants, a shirt of mine, and someone’s borrowed cap: the "Bowery thug” costume she wore to the masquerade dance. Moaning, Mark gathered her up in his arms. He rocked back and forth, crooning to her as her blood flowed out over liis dressing gown.

  And the green window began to glow with a weird radiance, mirroring the room as it had many times before, according to my parents and grandparents. A picture began to take shape in its shadowy frame, like a dim movie. My cousin Mark raised his head, holding his dead wife in his arms and watching the pattern of the future unfold in those green panes'.

  The day before the funeral, Jeb left Stuartsboro abruptly. Even Aunt Millicent could not explain his sudden departure, following a decision to join a law firm in New York. I was there, standing beside Mark as a loving sister might uphold a bereaved brother. He seemed stunned and vague. Now and again I caught him staring at me all during the service. There was a deep bewilderment in his piercing gaze, a look of horror that transcended even what I expected him to feel. Was it only his great sense of loss?

  "Mark dear,” I whispered. "Get hold of yourself: I’m still around.”

  After the interment of pretty shallow little Sherry, we were riding back from the cemetery. At my words, Mark broke his sober silence abruptly.

  "Liz,” he said quietly, "I have a hunch she was running away with Jeb, that night after the dance. He must have been waiting for her. She just came back for her clothes, probably—though I let Jeb believe it was to make up with me... She wasn’t. You see, I know. I lost Sherry, not by death,” he said heavily, "but a long time ago, to Jeb. Didn’t you suspect?”

  I stared at him, amazed. "Sherry? I knew he was in love with her, but... Whatever gave you the idea that she . .? Why, Sherry adored you!”

  "No.” Mark’s smile twisted. "She didn’t,” he said heavily. "She told me over a year ago that she’d married me for a meal-ticket, one of those war marriages. If Jeb would have taken her, she’d have left me long ago... but I played on his sympathy, let myself go to seed, just to keep her. Out of loyalty to me, he held out against her... until the night of the dance, is my bet. He blames himself for the whole mess, but of course I should have given her up to him long ago. Well...” He straightened his shoulders with an effort. "That’s all over now. Think I’ll go back into the Army. And, Liz...’’ He hesitated queerly. "It might be well for you to sell the old place. We must never go back there, the three of us. I told Jeb if we did, there’d be tragedy. That I saw murder in the green window that night...”

  MY EYES widened.

  "Mark!” I took his hand in both of mine; he stared oddly at our entwined fingers. "You told him that? No wonder he left so suddenly! He must have thought you meant you were going to kill him, or he you!... Oh, Mark!" I sighed. "The, three of us grew up together. We’ve been so close, I couldn’t bear this town without you both. Look here!” I laughed. "Are you forcing me to marry Joe Kimball and move to Idaho with him? No sir! I won’t do it! I'll stay here with Aunt Millicent and grow, into a lonely old maid like Aunt Lucy, without you and Jeb around... Mark, I’m ashamed to confess I’ve rather resented Sherry barging in and taking both my... my best beaux! So now, please, I’d like to have you back! With a little teamwork, we could make the old Place into a tourist hotel. Call it The Three Cousins’...”

  Mark did not respond to my attempt at levity.

  His dark eyes were still searching my face. with that bewildered expression... He shook his head slowly, and patted my hand.

  "No... we’ve got to board it up. Don't... don’t ever open it, Liz... How little people really know about each other!” he muttered. ”I about Jeb, or he about me, or both of
us about... Only the green window really knows . . He passed a shaky hand over his forehead. "I wonder. If I'd been forewarned by that letter, could I have prevented the accident to Sherry? Do you think...? Liz, if we never go near the old home again, the three of us together, how can it happen, the thing I saw...?”

  I shivered at the peculiar look of dread on my cousin’s face. The car had rolled to a Halt in front of the old Dickerson home, built by our great-great-grandfather nearly two centuries ago. The murky green window stared out at us like a blind eye, seeing not the present but the future—the incredible future, like that strange trick of fate which had caused Mark to shoot his adored wife and Jeb to leave his hometown forever.

  "Mark,” I demanded, "What did you see in the window, the night poor Sherry...? Mark, she’s gone now, and you and Jeb must forgive each other! We three have to stick together, as we did when we were children. Blood is thicker than water, Mark, and...”

  My cousin looked at me, and all at once he began to laugh harshly.

  "Blood?” he said queerly. "That’s what I saw, Liz! Blood all over the room, that shadow-room inside the window, our parlor as it will look... I don’t know when. Next month. Next year. I don’t know: Jeb and I were lying there on the floor, hacked to pieces. And someone was standing over us with... with an ax. Still... still chopping... That's what I saw.”

  I shuddered and hid my face against his shoulder. "Oh, Mark! How awful! But it couldn’t ever happen, of course,” I laughed nervously. "Jeb has gone, and you’ll be gone next week... D—did you see who it was? I mean, the face? Did it look like anyone we know?”

  "Yes,” my cousin held my hand tightly for a moment, then answered quietly. "Yes, I saw the face. Liz... it was you.”

  The Tree’s Wife

  NOT only gods, but lesser spirits haunted the forests. Sometimes they are portrayed as nymphs who occasionally marry mortals, only to die when their tree form is cut down. Sometimes the wood spirit is particularly vindictive. To strike at it invites an attack of sudden weakness; to some who approach it with an ax it brings instant death.

  These old legends come from very ancient agricultural customs when man and the plant and animal life around him were mutually interdependent. Today, when the despoilers of our land are cutting down our forests and ruining our environment, a story such as “The Tree's Wife’’ seems particularly pertinent in its portrayal of a primitive belief reawakened in modern times.

  I smiled at my companion, Hettie Morrison, County Welfare investigator for the Bald Mountain district. When I dropped into her office that morning, mostly to dig up nostalgic old memories of our college days at the University of Virginia, I found her arguing over the telephone with a local mechanic. “But I have to make a field trip this morning!... WHY can’t you get the parts? Take them out of somebody else’s car!... Oh, the devil with what you think wouldn’t be right! This family may be starving... !”

  Hettie had hung up, still sputtering, a gaunt severe-looking old maid with a heart as big as the Blue Ridge Mountains. She glanced up then, to see me grinning at her, jingling the car-keys of my new club-coupe by way of an invitation. We were such close friends, no words were needed—Hettie merely jerked a nod, slammed on her hat, and started out the door with me in tow.

  “You’ll be sorry,” she warned me. “The road I have to take is an old Indian trail—and if they had to get back and forth on that, no wonder they’re called the Vanishing Americans! You’ll break a spring.”

  I looked so dismayed, pausing to unlock my first new car in ten years, that she closed one eye in a craft)’ look I knew so well, from days at college when she was about to ask the loan of my best hose.

  “It’s a dull trip, just routine field work. Of course you wouldn’t be interested,” she drawled casually, “in Florella Dabney—the girl who married a tree. We pass right by the Dabney place. No, no, dear; you’re liable to scratch up that nice blue paint. And Holy Creek crosses the road four times; we’d have to drive through it, hub-deep. I always get stuck and have to—”

  I scowled at my old friend, familiar with all her clever tricks of getting her way, but still unable to cope with them.

  “Tree?” I demanded. “Did you say—? Married a —?”

  “That’s right,” Hettie nodded with a smug grin. “It’s a strange case—almost a legend up around Bald Mountain. Although,” she added, blatantly climbing into my car, “it’s not without precedent, in the old Greek legends. Zeus was forever turning some girl into a spring or a flower, or some inanimate object, so his wife Hera wouldn’t find out about his goings on. Even as late as the fifteenth century, there were proxy weddings, where some queen or other married her knight’s sword because he was off at war. Then, there’s an African tribe in which the men are married, at puberty, to some tree.”

  I grimaced impatiently, climbed into the coupe, and started it with a jerk. Hettie had aroused my interest, and well she knew it. She would get her ride over the wild, bushy crest of Bald Mountain—or I would never find out about that girl who married a tree.

  An hour later, bouncing over a rocky trail pressed closely on both sides by scrub pine and mountain laurel, she began to tell me about Florella Dabney—and the bloody feud that, a trained psychiatrist might explain, had left her a mental case with a strange delusion.

  The Dabneys (Hettie related) had built their cabin and begun to wrest a living out of the side of Bald Mountain about the time of Daniel Boone. Six generations of underfed, overworked mountaineers had lived therein, planting a little, hunting a little, and raising a batch of children as wild as the foxes that made inroads on their chicken supply. Florella was the youngest daughter, a shy willowy child of fifteen, with flowing dark hair and big luminous dark eyes like a fawn. Barefoot, clad in the simple gingham shift that all mountain girls wore, she could be seen running down the steep side of Old Baldy, as nimbly as a city’ child might run along a sidewalk. Her older brothers and sisters married and moved away, her mother died, and Florella lived with her father now on the sparse farm.

  On the other side of the mountains lived another such family of “old settlers,” the Jenningses. As far back as anyone could remember, there had been bad blood between the two, starting with a free-for-all over a load of cordwood, which had sent two Dabneys to the hospital and three Jenningses to jail. Both attended the little mountain church perched on the ridge that divided their farms, but no Jennings ever spoke to a Dabney, even at all-day singings, when everyone was pleasantly full of food and “home-brew.” No Dabnev would sit left of the aisle and any baptizing that was done in Holy Creek, after a rousing revival meeting, had to be arranged with Jenningses and Dabneys immersed on alternate days. Reverend Posy Adkins, the lay preacher, recognized this as a regrettable but inevitable condition. And that was the law on Bald Mountain—up until the spring evening when Joe Ed Jennings and Florella Dabney “run off together.”

  When and how they had ever seen enough of each other to fall in love, neither family could imagine. Joe Ed was a stocky blond boy who could play a guitar and shoot the eye out of a possum at fifty yards—but not much else. What astonished everyone was Florella’s regard for such a do-little, since she was halfway promised to a boy from Owl’s Hollow. It was assumed, when a party of hunters saw them streaking through the woods one night, that Florella had been carried off by force, much against her will. She had gone out after one of the hogs, which had strayed. At midnight, when she had not returned, her pa, Lafe Dabney, went out to search for her, ran into the hunting party—and promptly stalked back to his cabin for his rifle.

  He was starting out again, with murder in his close-set, mean little eyes, when a pair of frightened young people suddenly walked through the sagging front gate. With them was Preacher Adkins, dressed either for a buryin' or a marryin’, with the Good Book clutched in a hand that trembled. But he spoke steadily.

  “Lafe, these two young’uns has sinned. But the Lord’s likely done forgave ’em already. Now they aim to marry, so don’t
try an’ stop it!”

  Without preamble, he motioned for Florella and Joe Ed to stand under a big whiteoak that grew in the front yard, towering over the rough cabin and silhouetted darkly against the moonlit sky. High up on the trunk, if Lafe had noticed, was cut a heart with the initials J.E.J. and F.D.

  Solemnly, the old preacher began to intone the marriage ceremony, while Florella’s pa stood there staring at them, his lean face growing darker with fur)’, his tight mouth working. Hardly had the immortal words, “Do you take this man—?” been spoken, when he whipped the rifle to his shoulder and fired at Joe Ed, pointblank. The boy was dead as he crumpled up at his bride’s small bare feet.

  “I’ll larn you to go sparkin’ our girl behind my back!” Lafe roared. “You triflin’ no-account!”

  He never finished, for a second shot rang out in the quiet night. Lafe Dabney pitched forward on his face, crawled across the body of his prospective son-in-law, and fired twice toward the powder flash in the woods beyond the cabin. A moment later, all hell broke loose. It seems that Reverend Adkins had expected just such a blow-up. Someone had carried the news to Joe Ed’s pa. Clem Jennings had also hastened to the spot, to stop the wedding. The old preacher, fearing this, had notified “the law.” The sheriff, with a hastily gathered posse, had showed up at the moment when Lafc and Clem fired at each other, over the body of young Joe Ed and the prostrate sobbing form of his near-bride.

  In a matter of minutes, the posse had both fathers handcuffed and hauled off to jail. But, behind them, they left a tragic tableau—little Florella weeping over the body of her lost lover, with old Reverend Adkins standing dumbly in the background. Two of the posse had stayed behind to help with Joe Ed’s body, which the weeping girl had begged the preacher to bury, then and there, “under our tree.” It was there Joe Ed had first caught her and kissed her, holding his hand over her mouth and laughing, with Lafe not ten yards away. It was there, in the night, that she had first told him she loved him—and promised to slip away with him, into the deep silent woods of Old Baldy, for a lover’s tryst forbidden by both their families. It was there, months later, terrified and ashamed, that she had sobbed out to him that she was with child. She knew there was nothing left but to kill herself. Her lover was a Jennings, and she had expected no more from him than a few moments of wild secret ecstasy.