The Deacon raised a lean hand of interrogation.
‘Does your husband know we’ve been sent for on this business, Mrs Rutledge?’
Mrs Rutledge signed assent.
‘It was with his consent, then –?’
She looked coldly at her questioner. ‘I guess it had to be,’ she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.
‘Can you tell us, Mrs Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself ... what makes you think ...?’
She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. ‘I don’t think – I know.’
‘Well – but how?’
She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. ‘I seen ’em.’
In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon’s little screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. ‘Him and the dead?’
‘Him and the dead.’
‘Saul Rutledge and – and Ora Brand?’
‘That’s so.’
Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. ‘It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie ...’
‘Friend Brand ... Friend Brand ...’ The Deacon protested.
‘Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and tell him –’
‘Well, here he is,’ said Mrs Rutledge.
The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul Rutledge entered.
II
As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth’s first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from under the ice – ‘self-drowned’, he added. But the snow-light plays cruel tricks with a man’s colour, and even with the shape of his features; it must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before into the haggard wretch now before them.
The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. ‘Well, now, Saul – you look’s if you’d ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague, maybe?’
The feeble attempt was unvailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered. He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the dead.
Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. ‘See her, Saul Rutledge, what’s this dirty lie your wife tells us you’ve been putting about?’
Still Rutledge did not move. ‘It’s no lie,’ he said.
Brand’s hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man’s rough bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rutledge’s look and tone.
‘No lie? You’ve gone plumb crazy, then, have you?’
Mrs Rutledge spoke. ‘My husband’s not lying, nor he ain’t gone crazy. Don’t I tell you I seen ’em?’
Brand laugh again. ‘Him and the dead?’
‘Yes.’
‘Down by the Lamer pond, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘And when was that, if I might ask?’
‘Day before yesterday.’
A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length broke it to say to Mr Brand: ‘Brand, in my opinion we’ve got to see this thing through.’
Brand stood for a moment in speechless contemplation: there was something animal and primitive about him, Bosworth thought, as he hung thus, lowering and dumb, a little foam beading the corners of that heavy purplish underlip. He let himself slowly down into his chair. ‘I’ll see it through.’
The two other men and Mrs Rutledge had remained seated. Saul Rutledge stood before them, like a prisoner at the bar, or rather like a sick man before the physicians who were to heal him. As Bosworth scrutinized that hollow face, so wan under the dark sunburn, so sucked inward and consumed by some hidden fever, there stole over the sound healthy man the thought that perhaps, after all, husband and wife spoke the truth, and that they were all at that moment really standing on the edge of some forbidden mystery. Things that the rational mind would reject without a thought seemed no longer so easy to dispose of as one looked at the actual Saul Rutledge and remembered the man he had been a year before. Yes; as the Deacon said, they would have to see it through ...
‘Sit down then, Saul; draw up to us, won’t you?’ the Deacon suggested, trying again for a natural tone.
Mrs Rutledge pushed a chair forward, and her husband sat down on it. He stretched out his arms and grasped his knees in his brown bony fingers; in that attitude he remained, turning neither his head nor his eyes.
‘Well, Saul,’ the Deacon continued, ‘your wife says you thought mebbe we could do something to help you through this trouble, whatever it is.’
Rutledge’s grey eyes widened a little. ‘No; I didn’t think that. It was her idea to try what could be done.’
‘I presume, though, since you’ve agreed to our coming, that you don’t object to our putting a few questions?’
Rutledge was silent for a moment; then he said with a visible effort: ‘No, I don’t object.’
‘Well – you’ve heard what your wife says?’
Rutledge made a slight motion of assent.
‘And – what have you got to answer? How do you explain ...?’
Mrs Rutledge intervened. ‘How can he explain? I seen ’em.’
There was a silence; then Bosworth, trying to speak in an easy reassuring tone, queried: ‘That so, Saul?’
‘That’s so.’
Brand lifted up his brooding head. ‘You mean to say you ... you sit here before us all and say ...’
The Deacon’s hand again checked him. ‘Hold on, friend Brand. We’re all of us trying for the facts, ain’t we?’ He turned to Rutledge. ‘We’ve heard what Mrs Rutledge says. What’s your answer?’
‘I don’t know as there’s any answer. She found us.’
‘And you mean to tell me the person with you was ... was what you took to be ...’ The Deacon’s thin voice grew thinner: ‘Ora Brand?’
Saul Rutledge nodded.
‘You knew ... or thought you knew ... you were meeting with the dead?’
Rutledge bent his head again. The snow continued to fall in a steady unwavering sheet against the window, and Bosworth felt as if a winding-sheet were descending from the sky to envelop them all in a common grave.
‘Think what you’re saying! It’s against our religion! Ora ... poor child ... died over a year ago. I saw you at her funeral, Saul. How can you make such a statement?’
‘What else can he do?’ thrust in Mrs Rutledge.
There was another pause. Bosworth’s resources had failed him, and Brand once more sat plunged in dark meditation. The Deacon laid his quivering fingertips together and moistened his lips.
‘Was the day before yesterday the first time?’ he asked.
The movement of Rutledge’s head was negative.
‘Not the first? Then when ...’
‘Nigh on a year ago, I reckon.’
‘God! And you mean to tell us that ever since –?’
‘Well ... look at him,’ said his wife. The three men lowered their eyes.
After a moment Bosworth, trying to collect himself, glanced at the Deacon. ‘Why not ask Saul to make his own statement, if that’s what we’re here for?’
‘That’s so,’ the Deacon assented. He turned to Rutledge. ‘Will you try and give us your idea ... of ... of how it began?’
There was another silence. Then Rutledge tightened his grasp on his gaunt knees, and still looking straight ahead, with his curiously clear unseeing gaze: ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I guess it begun away back, afore even I was married to Mrs Rutledge ...’ He spoke in a low automatic tone, as if some invisible agent were dictating his words, or even uttering them for him. ‘You know,’ he add
ed, ‘Ora and me was to have been married.’
Sylvester Band lifted his head. ‘Straighten that statement out first, please,’ he interjected.
‘What I mean is, we kept company. But Ora she was very young. Mr Brand here he sent her away. She was gone nigh to three years, I guess. When she come back I was married.’
‘That’s right,’ Brand said, relapsing once more into his sunken attitude.
‘And after she came back did you meet her again?’ the Deacon continued.
‘Alive?’ Rutledge questioned.
A perceptible shudder ran through the room.
‘Well – of course,’ said the Deacon nervously.
Rutledge seemed to consider. ‘Once I did – only once. There was a lot of other people round. At Cold Corners fair it was.’
‘Did you talk with her then?’
‘Only a minute.’
‘What did she say?’
His voice dropped. ‘She said she was sick and knew she was going to die, and when she was dead she’d come back to me.’
‘And what did you answer?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Did you think anything of it at the time?’
‘Well, no. Not till I heard she was dead I didn’t. After that I thought of it – and I guess she drew me.’ He moistened his lips.
‘Drew you down to that abandoned house by the pond?’
Rutledge made a faint motion of assent, and the Deacon added: ‘How did you know it was there she wanted you to come?’
‘She ... just drew me ...’
There was a long pause. Bosworth felt, on himself and the other two men, the oppressive weight of the next question to be asked. Mrs Rutledge opened and closed her narrow lips once or twice, like some beached shellfish gasping for the tide. Rutledge waited.
‘Well, now, Saul, won’t you go on with what you was telling us?’ the Deacon at length suggested.
‘That’s all. There’s nothing else.’
The Deacon lowered his voice. ‘She just draws you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Often?’
That’s as it happens ...’
‘But if it’s always there she draws you, man, haven’t you the strength to keep away from the place?’
For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head towards his questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. ‘Ain’t any use. She follers after me ...’
There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there? Mrs Rutledge’s presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed hopelessly to revolve the matter. At length he spoke in a more authoritative tone. ‘These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul. Have you tried prayer?’
Rutledge shook his head.
‘Will you pray with us now?’
Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual adviser. ‘If you folks want to pray, I’m agreeable,’ he said. But Mrs Rutledge intervened.
‘Prayer ain’t any good. In this kind of thing it ain’t no manner of use; you know it ain’t. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you remember. Lefferts Nash – did praying help him? I was a little girl then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That’s what cured him.’
‘Oh –’ Orrin Bosworth exclaimed.
Sylvester Brand raised his head. ‘You’re speaking of that old story as if this was the same sort of thing?’
‘Ain’t it? Ain’t my husband pining away the same as Lefferts Nash did? The Deacon here knows –’
The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. ‘These are forbidden things,’ he repeated. ‘Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we that the ... the dead woman ... is the spectre of that poor girl?’
‘Proof! don’t he say so? Didn’t she tell him? Ain’t I seen ’em?’ Mrs Rutledge almost screamed.
The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: ‘A stake through the breast! That’s the old way; and it’s the only way. The Deacon knows it!’
‘It’s against our religion to disturb the dead.’
‘Ain’t it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband is perishing?’ She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took the family Bible from the what-not in a comer of the parlour. Putting the book on the table, and moistening a livid fingertip, she turned the pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand like a stony paperweight. ‘See here,’ she said, and read out in her level chanting voice:
‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’
‘That’s in Exodus, that’s where it is,’ she added, leaving the book open as if to confirm the statement.
Bosworth continued to glance anxiously from one to the other of the four people about the table. He was younger than any of them, and had had more contact with the modern world; down in Starkfield, in the bar of the Fielding House, he could hear himself laughing with the rest of the men at such old wives’ tales. But it was not for nothing that he had been born under the icy shadow of Lonetop, and had shivered and hungered as a lad through the bitter Hemlock County winters. After his parents died, and he had taken hold of the farm himself, he had got more out of it by using improved methods, and by supplying the increasing throng of summer-boarders over Stotesbury way with milk and vegetables. He had been made a selectman of North Ashmore; for so young a man he had a standing in the county. But the roots of the old life were still in him. He could remember, as a little boy, going twice a year with his mother to that bleak hill-farm out beyond Sylvester Brand’s, where Mrs Bosworth’s aunt, Cressidora Cheney, had been shut up for years in a cold clean room with iron bars in the windows. When little Orrin first saw Aunt Cressidora she was a small white old woman, whom her sisters used to ‘make decent’ for visitors the day that Orrin and his mother were expected. The child wondered why there were bars to the window. ‘Like a canary-bird,’ he said to his mother. The phrase made Mrs Bosworth reflect. ‘I do believe they keep Aunt Cressidora too lonesome,’ she said; and the next time she went up the mountain with the little boy he carried to his great-aunt a canary in a little wooden cage. It was a great excitement; he knew it would make her happy.
The old woman’s motionless face lit up when she saw the bird, and her eyes began to glitter. ‘It belongs to me,’ she said instantly, stretching her soft bony hand over the cage.
‘Of course it does, Aunt Cressy,’ said Mrs Bosworth, her eyes filling.
But the bird, startled by the shadow of the old woman’s hand, began to flutter and beat its wings distractedly. At the sight, Aunt Cressidora’s calm face suddenly became a coil of twitching features. ‘You she-devil, you!’ she cried in a high squealing voice; and thrusting her hand into the cage she dragged out the terrified bird and wrung its neck. She was plucking the hot body, and squealing ‘she-devil, she-devil!’ as they drew little Orrin from the room. On the way down the mountain his mother wept a great deal, and said: ‘You must never tell anybody that poor Auntie’s crazy, or the men would come and take her down to the asylum at Starkfield, and the shame of it would kill us all. Now promise.’ The child promised.
He remembered the scene now, with its deep fringe of mystery, secrecy and rumour. It seemed related to a great many other things below the surface of his thoughts, things which stole up anew, making him feel that all the old people he had known, and who ‘believed in these things’, might after all be right. Hadn’t a witch been burned at North Ashmore? Didn’t the summer folk still drive over in jolly buckboard loads to see the meeting-house where the trial had been held, the pond where they had ducked her and she had floated? ... Deacon Hibben believed; Bosworth was sure of it. If he didn’t, why did people from all over the place come to him when their animals had queer sicknesses, or when there was a child in the family that had to be kept shut up because it fel
l down flat and foamed? Yes, in spite of his religion, Deacon Hibben knew ...
And Brand? Well, it came to Bosworth in a flash: that North Ashmore woman who was burned had the name of Brand. The same stock, no doubt; there had been Brands in Hemlock County ever since the white men had come there. And Orrin, when he was a child, remembered hearing his parents say that Sylvester Brand hadn’t ever oughter married his own cousin, because of the blood. Yet the couple had had two healthy girls, and when Mrs Brand pined away and died nobody suggested that anything had been wrong with her mind. And Vanessa and Ora were the handsomest girls anywhere round. Brand knew it, and scrimped and saved all he could do to send Ora, the eldest, down to Starkfield to learn bookkeeping. ‘When she’s married I’ll send you,’ he used to say to little Venny, who was his favourite. But Ora never married. She was away three years, during which Venny ran wild on the slopes of Lonetop; and when Ora came back she sickened and died – poor girl! Since then Brand had grown more savage and morose. He was a hard-working farmer, but there wasn’t much to be got out of those barren Bearcliff acres. He was said to have taken to drink since his wife’s death; now and then men ran across him in the ‘dives’ of Stotesbury. But not often. And between times he laboured hard on his stony acres and did his best for his daughters. In the neglected graveyard of Cold Corners there was a slanting headstone marked with his wife’s name; near it, a year since, he had laid his eldest daughter. And sometimes, at dusk, in the autumn, the village people saw him walk slowly by, turn in between the graves, and stand looking down on the two stones. But he never brought a flower there, or planted a bush; nor Venny either. She was too wild and ignorant ...
Mrs Rutledge repeated: ‘That’s in Exodus.’
The three visitors remained silent, turning about their hats in reluctant hands. Rutledge faced them, still with that empty pellucid gaze which frightened Bosworth. What was he seeing?
‘Ain’t any of you folks got the grit –?’ his wife burst out again, half hysterically.
Deacon Hibben held up his hand. ‘That’s no way, Mrs Rutledge. This ain’t a question of having grit. What we want first of all is ... proof ...’
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