Sleepy Hollow: Rise Headless and Ride

by Richard Gleaves

  When he grew up and read the report, Jason doubted that conclusion. The retaining walls were four-foot-high, foot-thick masonry walls, hemming two lanes of traffic across the dam. Sightseers had complained that the walls were too high for drivers or passengers to see the Kensico Reservoir. The police had found no sign of a second vehicle, no one who had witnessed the event, and nothing the car might have struck that could have flipped it. They found no marks on the stone. Had the car been lifted, end over end, and thrown over that wall? And why had his parents driven there, anyway? It wasn’t on their way home to him. But the case had been closed. About a year after the event, the road had been closed as well. The mayor of New York closed it, citing concerns about a terrorist attack on the city water supply.

  His parents had left him with his grandmother, just for the weekend. Eliza received the news of their death on Halloween morning, but she kept it from Jason for two more days. She sent him out trick-or-treating. He was a vampire. His step-grandfather John Dawes (Eliza’s fifth husband) made a contraption for him to wear. The string went around his neck, suspending a little square of wood over his heart. Grandpa John sawed the handle off a hammer and nailed the pieces together. When Jason put on his shirt, the handle poked out of a little hole. A dollop of fake blood, and Jason the Impaler was convincingly staked through the heart. They finished him off with a widow’s peak of eyebrow pencil, some dime-store fangs, and a black and orange polyester cape that Eliza had sewn upon for weeks. He spun around in the living room, eyes wild, shouting “I am the living dead!” and wondering why they didn’t laugh.

  He bat-winged into the night, in search of Kit Kats and Milk Duds and chocolate kisses. An hour later, he mummy-shuffled home with tears that had eroded the greasepaint from his cheeks. A werewolf had scoffed at his costume. He’d ripped the stake from Jason’s chest and howled with laughter. Jason hadn’t been able to reattach the hammer handle, so Halloween was ruined.

  The next day, November first, was his seventh birthday. Two local kids, strangers, came over for ice cream and cake. They all watched Return of the Jedi, and the kids ate candy out of a plastic pumpkin.

  On November second, after school, Eliza told him.

  His parents were dead. He wouldn’t be going back to his school in Connecticut, and would be living with her and Grandpa John in Maine.

  Jason had never experienced death. He’d never lost a pet, and wouldn’t until years later when Pokey, his little white terrier, broke her back falling off the porch. Eliza had brought Charley the poodle home afterward, but Charley was instantly her puppy. Jason didn’t want a replacement.

  Andrew Crane’s parents had died long before Jason was born. So had Arthur Pyncheon, the love of Eliza’s life and Dianne’s father. Eliza’s later husbands, the ones Jason knew, were temporary grandfathers that lasted a few years and then scrammed, never to be spoken of afterward. Grandpa John achieved the longest run. She threw him out after four years, for drinking.

  Jason didn’t attend his parents’ funeral. He didn’t want to, and the adults felt he was too young. Eliza flew down to New York and made arrangements at a local funeral home, and his parents were buried in Westchester at Valhalla, just a mile from the dam where their lives had ended. They never came home.

  It was a bleak time. Jason felt that little piece of wood still covering his heart. He grew numb and shuffled around the house, not listening when he was spoken to. He would walk into a room and switch the television off. He wanted silence. He wanted darkness. He wanted to be hungry. Sometimes that little piece of wood transformed itself into a stake again, and he would scream and rant and throw shoes at Eliza’s face. He would beat his fists against Grandpa John’s chest. He refused to go to school. He cried great rolling tears.

  In early spring he ran away from home – which means he stole five dollars, put a box of Cheez-Its in a pillowcase and walked seven blocks. He stayed out all night. He slept in a field, glad to be miserable. He wanted to freeze to death, to be with his mom and dad, to not feel anything.

  His grandmother found him at a playground near the river, fallen in the dust with his shoulder against the slope of a teeter-totter, the other end riderless, suspended. He saw her trudging up the hill. She looked twice her usual size in her winter coat, and frightening.

  “Let’s go home, Jason,” she said.

  He shook his head. He knew he was in trouble. He knew what “home” meant. It meant a paddling or worse. Eliza never spanked him, but this time he thought he deserved it, and he was afraid that they hated him.

  “Jason?” she said, not raising her voice.

  She might have seen the tears on his cheeks. Maybe not. The light was dim. The sun was just peeking out between some low hills in the distance. His teeth were chattering. Eliza opened her big winter coat and, straining, slipped down into the dust next to him. She drew him in to her warm body, wrapping him in the coat. She flipped the collar up, rubbed her hands together, and cupped them over his ears.

  “Brr,” she said. “You’re an ice cube. But it feels good, kinda. It’s good to get really cold sometimes. Wakes you up.”

  They were cheek to cheek, against the teeter-totter, bundled together, as the sky turned from grey to orange. The ground stung, but they sat a long time.

  “Why?”

  The word was just a tiny puff of vapor that slipped from his lips and into the wind. But it was also big. Big and heavy.

  She didn’t ask “why what.” She didn’t evade his question. She knew what his little-boy heart had asked. She understood the universe of longing and confusion and hurt in that one whispered word.

  “We all die, baby.” She said it oh-so-gently, just a puff of vapor herself. “In all the long, long, history of the world, there’s not been one of us who didn’t.”

  “I’ll die,” he said. It wasn’t a question. But it was.

  “Yes. And I’ll die. A lot sooner. And the why is just… it’s just there. It just is. We’re not around to see what was before us, and we’re not here to see what happens after.”

  The trees on the edge of the playground shivered with dawn.

  “But we’re here now,” she said, and pulled him tighter, until his cheekbone felt sore from pressing against hers. “And it has to be enough. It has to be. Look at all we have now. Really look.”

  He really looked.

  It was just a small playground off the main road of an unimportant New England town. But in the distance he could see the wide Kennebec River, and the sky was pink above it. He saw small ships moored, trimmed in red and baby blue, rocking against the current. He saw a robin on the railing of a dock, toes pointed inward, making occasional hops that were also flight. The town was waking up. There was a light in the bakery and one in the grocery. There was an empty can of beer on a picnic table and wildflowers by the road. There was wind, and trees swaying gently. There was his own breath in his own lungs. There was a car passing on the road, going somewhere.

  There was his grandmother, her body, her heartbeat against his back as he leaned against her chest. There was his own life, and hers, and a world to live them in.

  And it was enough.

  He went back to school the next day.

  Jason and Eliza shared a bond after, born of that sunrise on the playground. He knew a secret about her: for all her morbidity, for all her obsession with genealogies, with cemeteries, with graves and mysteries, Eliza Merrick harbored a passionate and reverent love of this earth and of living on it. She appreciated every one of her long years.

  And that was the treasure she passed on to a boy of seven who had, for a short perilous time, given up on life.

  Jason heard a flush. The bathroom door downstairs opened and closed again. Eliza must have stubbed her toe. He heard muttered curses and Charley yipped.

  He smiled.

  His thoughts came back to earth, down from the tunnel on his bedroom ceiling. He sat up in bed. Outside his window, the lights of Philipsburg Manor had gone dark.

  That was
good.

  He stepped to his dresser, picked up his phone and, without reviewing his pictures, deleted all files.

  6 THE LAST OF THE BONES

  The Tarrytown Caller reported the death as a suicide.

  Franklin Octavius Darley, age 47, senior risk officer for a Manhattan brokerage firm, had been in town for a jazz performance at the Tarrytown Music Hall. His body was found by Annie Baxter, a local resident. His wrists had been cut. His wife could not be reached for comment.

  The eye wasn’t mentioned.

  The fish took it, Jason thought.

  He put the paper down and that was that.

  By the end of his first week in Sleepy Hollow, Jason had forgotten about the body in the millpond. He’d stored the white face somewhere alongside the zombies of George A. Romero films. Unreal, toe-tagged in the mental morgue with everything else Jason had seen of death, from Bambi’s mother to Darth Vader and Boromir.

  Jason focused on organizing the house.

  He stacked dishes. He had the cable installed. He hung the blinds. He arranged Eliza’s pictures in places of pride – pictures of himself, of his parents, of his grandmother on trips around the world (only two of these had the husbands cut out). Daguerreotypes of well-loved ancestors went up in the downstairs hall, along with Eliza’s framed pilot license from 1964, token of a long and interesting life.

  Eliza couldn’t help much. She gave “opinions,” and Jason carried them out. She busied herself with the organization of her genealogy materials. Boxes and boxes hid the threadbare Persian carpet. Filing cabinets stood in an arc around the sofa like an incomplete Stonehenge.

  She spread genealogical charts the size of architect’s blueprints. She spent long hours at these, a professor preparing herself for a lecture or presentation. She made notes to herself on a little laptop. Tap-tap she went, two knobby pointer fingers hunting and pecking happily into the night.

  Jason did some painting in his room, and the wall with the windows became a shade of sky blue that made a continuation of the Hudson. He played music while he worked, and the house rang with everything from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony to Fountains of Wayne to a geek band called Ookla the Mok. He danced around with his paintbrush in a way that, if filmed and put on YouTube, would ensure his virginity for the next thousand years.

  And so they settled in.

  On Sunday morning – their fifth day in the house – a buzzing noise stirred Jason out of bed. The buzz was almost human, but it sounded like a radio caught between dials, a mix of static and speech – a low, unnerving growling sound, yet somehow singsong. It came from downstairs, and Jason wondered if the TV was on. But tuned to what? A lumberjack competition? He plucked some shorts from the floor and grabbed a T-shirt.

  On the stairs it was louder.

  “Eliza? What’s that sound?” he said. “I’m hearing some crazy weird buzz.”

  It stopped. “What the hell was that?” he said. He reached the living room.

  His grandmother roosted on the blue davenport, a porcelain teacup raised to lips pursed so tightly she might have been drinking pure lemon juice. In an armchair, her back to Jason, a woman with short-cropped black hair raised a palm.

  “It’s okay. He didn’t – know.”

  The voice was inhuman: deep as a man’s voice, but labored and breathy as if spoken through scuba gear. The woman turned. She had a tracheostomy valve in the front of her neck.

  “You must – be Jason,” the woman buzzed.

  Her features were dark, Lebanese or Iranian maybe, with laugh lines and crow’s-feet. She wore pearl earrings, a white jacket, white skirt, and white Mary Janes (her ankles demurely crossed). She wore a rigid tube around her neck, inhaling through a small valve in front which, when closed, directed exhaled air to her vocal cords. This apparatus was also white and somehow flattering, like a Bakelite necklace from the twenties.

  “I’m so sorry. I – I – ” Jason stammered, scrambling.

  “Please. I’m – ” (breath) “ – used to it.” (breath) “ – Join us.” (valve pop).

  He considered sitting by Eliza, saw her face, and chose a straight-backed chair.

  “Jason, I’d like you to meet my very good friend Valerie Maule.”

  “Ma’am,” he said.

  “Please. Valerie.” Her eyes were bright, her smile contagious. Her voice was a penny stuck in a vacuum cleaner. “Eliza has told – me so – many good – things about you.”

  She hasn’t mentioned you once, Jason wanted to say, but opted for a nod.

  “My friends were courteous enough – ” (Eliza put particular emphasis on the word courteous) “ – to bring our car down from Augusta.”

  Jason glanced out the bay window. The silver Mercedes sat parked in the drive.

  “Our pleasure,” said a low, smooth male voice.

  A man leaned in the dining room archway, hands in pockets. He wore a stylish black Armani suit with a red tie that looked like the incision on a heart patient.

  “It drives like a dream,” he said. “Beautiful car. You’re lucky I gave it back.”

  “I made him,” Valerie buzzed.

  “If you can afford the gas,” said Eliza.

  The man walked over, bent down and gave Eliza a peck on the cheek. His hair was blond, his eyebrows thin and almost nonexistent. He was handsome, his smile toothpaste-commercial bright. He put an arm around her thin shoulders and brought his lips to her ear, his voice husky.

  “Maybe you and I can go parking later.”

  Eliza swatted at the man and covered her face, reddening.

  “Oh, you.”

  His eyes met Jason’s.

  The boy stood and extended a hand. He felt an urgent impulse to separate this man from his grandmother.

  “I’m sorry, but we haven’t met?” Jason said.

  “No, we haven’t. Pleasure to meet you, Mister Crane.”

  He gave a slight emphasis to the last two words. The hand that clasped Jason’s was small, but strong.

  “Hadewych Van Brunt.”

  Jason must have blinked.

  “It’s the Dutch form of Hedwig, which unfortunately is a woman’s name. Blame my mother. Don’t worry. I won’t quiz you on spelling. Though ’Liza here tells us you’re a clever boy. Top of your class?”

  “Somewhere in there.”

  “Good. Though not too smart I hope. Trust me. The girls don’t like it.” He closed on Jason, invasively. “You do like girls, right?” He slapped the boy’s shoulder. “Just kidding you.” It was a game-show host’s voice: ingratiating, twinkling, inviting his audience to play along from home.

  Eliza lifted her purse from the floor. “Don’t let me forget to write you a check. How much did you spend coming down?”

  “Not that much.”

  Eliza turned to Jason. “Thank Hadewych. He took care of our move for us.”

  “Oh?”

  “He packed our things. He and Valerie did. They made it very easy on an old lady.”

  Hadewych spread his palms, opening a hymnal to sing his own praises. “I had fun doing it.”

  Eliza caught Jason’s eye and tilted her head toward Hadewych.

  “Thank you. Um – we appreciate it,” said Jason.

  But he did not appreciate it. He didn’t appreciate it one bit. He didn’t like the idea of this man going through their possessions unsupervised. What if some bauble of his grandmother’s now glittered in Valerie Maule’s jewelry box?

  “He found us the house too,” Eliza gushed. She put her hand on Hadewych’s arm.

  Hadewych slipped next to her on the davenport, and Jason wished he had taken that seat.

  “How do you like it?” said Hadewych.

  Eliza’s hand went to his shoulder. “It’s just the right size. My old house was too large. And this one has so much history.” She turned to Jason. “It belonged to Hadewych’s family once.”

  Hadewych looked up at the beams. “A long time ago,” he said.

  “Before the – Civ
il War,” added Valerie.

  “Eighteen… fifty?” Eliza said.

  “Eighteen thirty-seven,” said Jason. Eliza’s jaw dropped a little. “There’s a cornerstone out back.”

  Hadewych smiled, solemnly. “Eighteen thirty-seven. Yes. He built it for his mother…”

  “Who did?” said Jason.

  Hadewych appraised the boy from behind his teacup, an antique dealer deciding what to bid on a chest of drawers.

  “Let me think.” Eliza counted off on one hand. “He was your… your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather? You’ll never guess who Hadewych is descended from, Jason.”

  “Let’s not – say too much – just yet.” Valerie looked pointedly at the others.

  But Jason knew. The name thundered in his head. He was descended from –

  “Brom!”

  He blurted the name, without thinking.

  “Very good.” Hadewych said, without smiling. “How did you guess it?”

  “Have you been through my papers?” said Eliza.

  “No. I just…” But he couldn’t explain how the name had come to him. It had simply come. Brom Brom Brom. It was a drumbeat. Brom! Brom Brom Brom! The whole house shouted it at him. How had he not heard it before?

  “He’s read The Legend, hasn’t he? It’s right there, if you pay attention.” Hadewych stood, patting Eliza’s knee. He bounded to the fireplace, turned, and put his foot upon the hearth. The women brightened, knowing what would come next. Then Hadewych Van Brunt began reciting Irving’s tale from memory.

  “Among these the most formidable was a burly, roaring, roystering blade, of the name of Abraham, or, according to the Dutch abbreviation…” here he paused for effect, “…Brom Van Brunt, the hero of the country round, which rang with his feats of strength and hardihood.”

  He made it a Shakespearian oration, posing. Eliza was delighted. The man gesticulated, a ham actor loving every minute.

  “He was broad-shouldered and double-jointed, with short curly black hair, and a bluff, but not unpleasant countenance…”