Otherworldly Maine

by Noreen Doyle

  Flashlights in hand, they retraced Leo’s path. Along the way, they saw the cheesecloth bags hanging in the trees. Nobody knew what they meant, but everybody agreed they looked pretty sinister, like little ghosts that had snagged themselves in the branches. Then they found some smoking candles lying in the forest duff. But what clinched it was when they heard, from deep in the recesses of the night woods, a horrible racket of breaking branches and snorting animals and demonic cursing, as if a bunch of people were running away. It sounded like a coven of witches!

  There’s no telling where in the human mind the switch is that, if thrown, turns on mob mentality, but Leo, groping around in there for anything to throw some light on his experience, managed on that memorable Friday night to trip it.

  The whole campus lit up in a frenzy. It was like a kindergarten game of telephone gone haywire, or an adult game that politicians used to play called the domino effect. Whatever it was, it was nuts and it was fast. As Westphal describes it: “Next thing you know there’s two hundred guys with baseball bats and hockey sticks pouring out of the dorms and heading for the woods. God help anybody they found out there. I think they killed a couple of black cats, I’m not sure, but a lot of those guys were already drunk and pissed off that the football team had lost, so when they couldn’t find any witches, they started beating each other up. That witch-hunt was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, and it went on all weekend.”

  It was as though the campus had sent up a weather balloon into Cloud Cuckoo-land. It stayed up there for a day and a half. In the meantime, the Witch Hunt was big news and almost everybody was taking it seriously.

  Since Leo was the first one to spot the trouble, he became a hero of sorts, as well as the de facto spokesman for what was going on. He was now the Cotton Mather of UMaine, demanding the purge of baneful influences. He thought people would be interested in what he had to say, so he set up a makeshift press room in the dorm lounge.

  At first it was just a single reporter from the campus newspaper, but as the scope of the events widened, press from off campus started showing up. In eastern Maine, any fuss is big news. Soon there were rumors that TV cameras were on their way and maybe Huntley and Brinkley, too. Lucky for Leo, those who knew the real story, including the fine points of his special dream, had their own problems and were lying low.

  With Leo at the helm, all kinds of fools started making report. Stories came in about strange mounds of earth discovered out in the forest. “It must be where the witches buried their victims,” exclaimed one sociology major on Sunday morning. For the rest of the day you saw guys heading off into the woods with shovels. Then came the psychology major who said he saw a bunch of naked people, obviously witches, darting among the trees. “And if you don’t believe it, here’s a shirt I found out there!” This sent even more people out into the woods; nobody wanted to miss out on a chance to lay hands on these witches. Finally, there were several UFO sightings that weekend, and one thoroughly besotted philosophy major claimed to have been abducted by the aliens, vicious beings who—he insisted—had robbed him of everything. “I can’t even remember my name,” he sobbed over and over to the reporters, as Leo stood there with a comforting arm around the poor scholar’s shoulders. “We must recover this good man’s name,” Leo intoned for the record.

  Monday morning was when that weather balloon came crashing down. It dropped in the form of a graduate student in forest entomology who came bursting into Leo’s “press room” with a bug up his ass. He said he had been away for the weekend and just gotten back. He had this big experiment going for his dissertation research on spruce budworm. It involved setting up cheesecloth traps out in the forest to catch the insects. When he went out to the site this morning, he found all the traps had been ripped from the trees. Three years of research down the drain. Or up in smoke as the case may be, because he learned that students from one of the Christian organizations had pulled them down and burned them in a ritual bonfire out in the forestry school’s stump dump.

  “They thought my traps had something to do with witchcraft!” the bewildered grad student declared, as reporters busily scribbled down notes. He also said something about finding a badly charred bear’s head nearby. “What the hell’s going on around here?” he demanded.

  “Oh shit,” said Leo, as he bolted out of there before the grad student could grab him or any TV cameras showed up.

  The next day the campus newspaper headline read: “Witch Hunt Proves a Witch Hunt. Campus Bugged by False Report.” Many humiliating details found their way into that story, but somehow Leo was spared public exposure of his special dream. At least he still had that. Also, there was no mention of the Magician, Crilly Fritz, Peter Snell, Animal, or any of those other mischief-makers from the dorm.

  Even today very few know about Virginia Dare’s role in all this. For Leo’s sake, I’m glad. I hope he forgives me for invoking her one more time, but I think these things can now be laid to rest. Everybody should know that the Witch Hunt wasn’t really Leo’s fault; he was just caught up in a swirl of circumstances. Once that story broke, his reputation on campus was ruined. Nobody called him a hero after that. They didn’t even call him Leo anymore. Instead, he was simply “the Bugman.” And the Bugman he remains.

  There’s a mawkish pleasure one takes in calling to mind events such as these. Sometimes I think my college years were misspent in pulling pranks and cutting classes so I could sit around and write stories like this to entertain my friends. Then I comfort myself by thinking that nothing that happened back there, no matter how silly, was far removed from anything else going on in the world. It was the Seventies and everybody was doing this kind of thing. Call it the “spirit of the times.” Every age has one.

  “What a waste!” people say when I tell them the kinds of things we did in those days. “How did you ever make anything of yourselves?” Well, maybe it’s like the millions of seeds a cottonwood tree flings out into the world each spring, those tiny, feathery parcels of hope that float together in the air for a while, just drifting around in companionable oblivion. Only one or two of them might ever come down to earth and find a nurturing spot to take root, someplace where they might indeed “make something of themselves.”

  After all, while we were sitting around a University of Maine dorm on that Friday evening a quarter century ago, concocting schemes to animate a statue and put a love spell on it, at the same time, on the other side of the continent, there were others with names like Jobs and Wozniak sitting around conjuring up a computer that would be named for a fruit that comes from a tree in Eden; a computer small enough and friendly enough that everybody in the world might own one, a magical box to be connected to millions of other boxes all over the world, so that in the end, no matter whatever else might be said of any individual, each would be a node in some infinite web, each an electric sparkle in the eye of Indra.

  And thus my wayward college days are redeemed—because they were never lost in the first place, never removed from the center of things in this center-less universe. In fact, so far as this story goes, they are the center. It’s mind boggling to consider: whatever it is that causes one idea or name to gain purchase in the wider world while another fades away just may be what ultimately distinguishes a college prank from true magic. Or, as some are inclined to see it, history from myth.

  In any case, you may be wondering how it came about that I should now have all these details. Perhaps you’re curious as to what happened to the people who appeared in this sketch, or maybe you’d just like to check out these places for yourself, much as literary tourists do when they rummage around the Catskill Mountains looking for Rip Van Winkle’s bed, or when they scour Wall Street trying to find the building Bartleby worked in. There’s no going back to such places, except by the way we just came. But if you insist on historical accuracy, I’ll do my best, though this particular bag of tricks is nearly empty.

  First of all, the Magician. He did graduate from UMaine and went on to Harva
rd Law School. After that he got a job with some Big Eight accounting firm and got busted in the Eighties for insider trading. Last I heard he’s selling furniture in Farmington, Maine. The rest of those guys from the dorm I haven’t seen or heard about in years, but with names like Crilly and Animal, you can be sure they are well known in their respective neighborhoods, wherever they may be. As for the Bugman, he dropped out of college after one semester, to chase his special dream elsewhere, maybe in Croatoan.

  Speaking of Croatoan, for several years after these events, lovers and other visitors to the heart of the Hollow Tree were baffled by this odd word they found carved there. It became part of the campus folklore. There was even a story about a young couple who, not long after graduation, had a baby they named Croatoan, no doubt because she was conceived in the Hollow Tree.

  Ah, the Hollow Tree. Sad to say, but even mythical giants must fall. Sometime after I left Maine, the Hollow Tree came down. I can only hope that it wasn’t rudely toppled as if it were just another piece of timber, sliced up into logs, and hauled off for target practice in the stump dump, where junior lumberjacks fling axes at old carved hearts and one mysterious word—or worse, carted away to the Old Town mill and pulped into the paper you’re reading this on. I would hate to think that this book is all that remains of a million “I love yous” and one special dream. Whatever, the Hollow Tree is gone from UMaine. I wonder if anybody there even remembers it anymore.

  As for that old black bear mascot that disappeared—his name wasn’t Croatoan. As far as I can determine, he never had a name. Nor did he ever stand up from his pedestal and stalk the campus. Turns out that on the Friday evening before the disappointing football game, the Alumni Association had held a little ceremony. The old bear was being retired. The president of the university said some gold-watch words, then a crane hoisted the crumbling bear onto a flatbed truck that carried it away and unceremoniously dropped it off in the stump dump, for lack of a better paddock. Given the mayhem of the next few days, it’s not surprising that nobody ever asked about its mysterious disappearance from the stump dump. But there’s an aging entomology grad student—still trying to repair the damage to his career after the disastrous spruce budworm experiments—who could tell you a thing or two about that bear’s fate.

  So if you had your heart set on seeing a bear at the University of Maine, don’t fret—they replaced it. The new mascot is a bit smaller—“leaner and meaner” as the Alumni Association likes to say—and it’s made of cast bronze. Some say bronze was chosen so as to prevent the rotted-out destiny that overtook its predecessor. But there are a few—and you know their names—who believe that using heavy metal was the only way to ensure that if this mascot should ever come to life, its own weight would keep it from going anywhere. Thus this bear is now fixed in place more firmly than most treasured beliefs.

  At long last, there is the mystery of the growl. As I said, I was only able to pick up the threads of this story thanks to Westphal. I paid him a visit over Christmas down on Mount Desert Island and we got to talking about our college days. The Witch Hunt came up, as it sometimes does when we get together. This time he provided all of the details of the events at the Hollow Tree and I wondered how he came upon this expanded version. I knew he hadn’t gone along with the Magician and company that fateful night. I pressed him.

  “So what gives?”

  “Come on down in the cellar with me.” He grinned impishly, an expression I know all too well.

  Westphal lives in an old house. Cellars in these places are spooky. They’re dimly lit and smell like the earth’s dirty laundry. As he led me over to some dark shelves on a back wall, he said, “Hey, O’Grady—that growl? It was me. I beat those guys to the Hollow Tree and was hiding inside, up in one of those dark places you can’t see from below. I scared the shit out of them—you should have seen it.”

  “No way!” I said.

  “Well then, how do you explain this?” He reached up to the highest shelf and brought down an old blue denim bag, clattering with stuff inside. He handed it over to me. We were a couple of bank robbers and here was my share of the loot.

  And that’s all I got.

  ECHO

  Elizabeth Hand

  This is not the first time this has happened. I’ve been here every time it has. Always I learn about it the same way, a message from someone five hundred miles away, a thousand, comes flickering across my screen. There’s no TV here on the island, and the radio reception is spotty: the signal comes across Penobscot Bay from a tower atop Mars Hill, and any kind of weather—thunderstorms, high winds, blizzards—brings the tower down. Sometimes I’m listening to the radio when it happens, music playing, Nick Drake, a promo for the Common Ground Country Fair; then a sudden soft explosive hiss like damp hay falling onto a bonfire. Then silence.

  Sometimes I hear about it from you. Or, well, I don’t actually hear anything: I read your messages, imagine your voice, for a moment neither sardonic nor world-weary, just exhausted, too fraught to be expressive. Words like feathers falling from the sky, black specks on blue.

  The Space Needle. The Sears Tower. LaGuardia Airport. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Millennium Eye. The Bahrain Hilton. Sydney, Singapore, Jerusalem.

  Years apart at first; then months; now years again. How long has it been since the first tower fell? When did I last hear from you?

  I can’t remember.

  This morning I took the dog for a walk across the island. We often go in search of birds, me for my work, the wolfhound to chase for joy. He ran across the ridge, rushing at a partridge that burst into the air in a roar of copper feathers and beech leaves. The dog dashed after her fruitlessly, long jaw open to show red gums, white teeth, a panting unfurled tongue.

  “Finn!” I called and he circled round the fern brake, snapping at bracken and crickets, black splinters that leapt wildly from his Jaws. “Finn, get back here.”

  He came. Mine is the only voice he knows now.

  There was a while when I worried about things like food and water, whether I might need to get to a doctor. But the dug well is good. I’d put up enough dried beans and canned goods to last for years, and the garden does well these days. The warming means longer summers here on the island, more sun; I can grow tomatoes now, and basil, scotch bonnet peppers, plants that I never could grow when I first arrived. The root cellar under the cottage is dry enough and cool enough that I keep all my medications there, things I stockpiled back when I could get over to Ellsworth and the mainland—albuterol inhalers, alprazolam, amoxicillin, Tylenol and codeine, ibuprofen, aspirin; cases of food for the wolfhound. When I first put the solar cells up, visitors shook their heads: not enough sunny days this far north, not enough light. But that changed, too, as the days got warmer.

  Now it’s the wireless signal that’s difficult to capture, not sunlight. There will be months on end of silence and then it will flare up again, for days or even weeks, I never know when. If I’m lucky, I patch into it, then sit there, waiting, holding my breath until the messages begin to scroll across the screen, looking for your name. I go downstairs to my office every day, like an angler going to shore, casting my line though I know the weather’s wrong, the currents too strong, not enough wind or too much, the power grid like the Grand Banks scraped barren by decades of trawlers dragging the bottom. Sometimes my line would latch onto you: sometimes, in the middle of the night, it would be the middle of the night where you were, too, and we’d write back and forth. I used to joke about these letters going out like messages in bottles, not knowing if they would reach you, or where you’d be when they did.

  London, Paris, Petra, Oahu, Moscow. You were always too far away. Now you’re like everyone else, unimaginably distant. Who would ever have thought it could all be gone, just like that? The last time I saw you was in the hotel in Toronto, we looked out and saw the spire of the CN Tower like Cupid’s arrow aimed at us. You stood by the window and the sun was behind you and you looked like a cornstalk I’d seen once
, burning, your gray hair turned to gold and your face smoke.

  I can’t see you again, you said. Deirdre is sick and I need to be with her.

  I didn’t believe you. We made plans to meet in Montreal, in Halifax, Seattle. Gray places; after Deirdre’s treatment ended. After she got better.

  But that didn’t happen. Nobody got better. Everything got worse.

  In the first days I would climb to the highest point on the island, a granite dome ringed by tamaracks and hemlock, the gray stone covered with lichen, celadon, bone white, brilliant orange: as though armfuls of dried flowers had been tossed from an airplane high overhead. When evening came, the aurora borealis would streak the sky, crimson, emerald, amber; as though the sun were rising in the west, in the middle of the night, rising for hours on end. I lay on my back wrapped in an old Pendleton blanket and watched, the dog, Finn, stretched out alongside me. One night the spectral display continued into dawn, falling arrows of green and scarlet, silver threads like rain or sheet lightning racing through them. The air hummed, I pulled up the sleeve of my flannel shirt and watched as the hairs on my arm rose and remained erect; looked down at the dog, awake now, growling steadily as it stared at the trees edging the granite, its hair on end like a eat’s. There was nothing in the woods, nothing in the sky above us. After perhaps thirty minutes I heard a muffled sound to the west, like a far-off sonic boom; nothing more.

  After Toronto we spoke only once a year; you would make your annual pilgrimage to mutual friends in Paris and call me from there. It was a joke, that we could only speak like this.

  I’m never closer to you than when I’m in the seventh arrondissement at the Bowlses’, you said.