The Red Tree
Page 3
The rain is starting again. I suppose this may keep up all damn day.
So, that particular August afternoon in 1977, thirty-one years ago, it must have been about a hundred and two in the shade. I was clambering about the steep, crumbly edges of the quarry, turning over chunks of the hard stone, cracking it open with a brick hammer that had once belonged to my grandfather, but not finding much of interest—seashells, corals, crinoid stems, no trilobites—and probably wishing I had a cold Coca-Cola or a Mountain Dew or something. I might have been thinking about stripping off my jeans and risking the giant catfish of legend for a swim or perhaps giving up, calling it a day, and walking back through the kudzu to the place where I’d left my bicycle.
My bicycle, by the way, was a lot like that town. It had actually belonged to my mother when she was a girl, back in the fifties. It was a mottle of rust and flaking blue paint, and the seat tended to fall off anytime you hit a pothole or went over a curb. I have no idea whatever became of it.
But, anyway, there I was, crouched right down at the waterline, on this narrow, mossy ledge surrounded by cattails and whatnot, sweating like a pig and trying to keep a weather eye out for copperheads and trilobite fossils at the same time. I must have heard something, maybe the sudden splash of a frightened, fleeing bullfrog that I’d disturbed, or maybe something else, and I looked up. And way over on the other side of the pit, directly across from me, which would have been at least a good forty or fifty feet away, I saw this girl standing in the rushes, naked as the day she was born, the muddy water up to her knees. She was staring back at me, and I just froze, the way the deer around here freeze when they get spooked, just before they dash back into the woods. I remember that she had the blackest hair I think I’d ever seen, hair like ink, and I wasn’t so far away that I couldn’t tell she was pretty. I mean, fucking unearthly pretty, beautiful, not what passed for pretty in that little Alabama town. There I was, fourteen years old and just beginning to suspect I might be a dyke, and there she was, and all I could do was stay very, very still and watch. I was thinking, Why don’t I know you? Why haven’t I ever seen you before?, because everyone in that town knew everyone else, at least by sight. And if I’d ever seen her, I sure as shit would not have forgotten her. She might have been smiling at me, but I couldn’t be sure. My mouth was so dry, I still recall that, the dry mouth and parched throat, and my heart pounding like a goddamn kettledrum in my chest. And then she took a step or two towards me, the water rising up to her waist, hiding the ebony thatch of her sex, and she held her arms up and out like maybe she wanted to give me a hug or something.
Back then, I had blessed few points of reference, but now I’d point to any number of the Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian painters. They knew women with faces like hers, knew them or invented them. They set them down on canvas. In particular, I’d point to Thomas Millie Dow’s The Kelpie, which I first saw in college, years after that afternoon at the chert pit, and which still makes me uneasy.
When the water was as high as her chest, she must have reached a drop-off. The pit was at least a hundred feet deep, and the submerged walls were very steep. Most spots, it got deep fast. She took another step forward and just sank straight down, like a rock. There was a little swirl of water where she’d been, and then the surface grew still again. I crouched there, waiting, and I swear to god (now, there’s a joke) I must have waited fifteen or twenty minutes for her to come up again. But she never did. Not even any air bubbles. She just stepped out into the pit and sank . . . vanished. And then, suddenly, the stifling summer air, which had been filled with the droning scream of cicadas, went silent, and I mean completely fucking silent. It was that way for a few minutes, maybe . . . no insects, no birds, nothing at all. That’s when I realized I was scared, probably more scared than I’d ever been in my life, and a few seconds later the whippoorwills started in. Now, back then, growing up in bumblefuck Alabama, you might not learn about Pre-Raphaelite sirens, but you heard all about what whippoorwills are supposed to mean. Harbingers of death, ill omens, psychopomps, etc. and etc. Never mind that you could hear whippoorwills just about any summer evening or morning, because the old folks said they were bad fucking juju. And at that particular moment, waiting for the naked, black-haired girl to come up for air, with what sounded like a whole army of whippoorwills whistling in the underbrush—“WHIP puwiw WEEW, WHIP puwiw WEEW, WHIP puwiw WEEW”—I believed it. I just started running—and this part I don’t really remember at all. Just that I made it back to my bicycle and was at least halfway home before I even slowed down, much less looked over my shoulder. But I never went back to the chert pit, not ever. It’s still there, I suppose.
So there, that’s my only “true-life” ghost story or whatever you want to call it. My Wednesday morning confession to this drugstore notebook. No doubt, I must have come up with all sorts of rationalizations for what I’d seen that day. Maybe the girl was from another town—Moody or Odenville or Trussville—and that’s why I’d never seen her before. Maybe she was committing suicide, and she never came back up because she’d tied concrete blocks around her ankles. Maybe she did come back up, and I just missed it, somehow. Possibly, I was suffering the effects of hallucinations brought on by the heat.
And it’s raining even harder now. I can hardly see the slaty smudge of Ramswool Pond anymore. It’s lost out there somewhere in this cold and soggy Rhode Island morning. Days like this one, I have a lot of trouble remembering why the hell it was I left Atlanta. But then I remember Amanda and all the rest, and this dreary goddamn weather seems a small price to pay to finally be so far and away from our old place in Candler Park. Yes, I am running, and this is where I have run to, thank you very much. I put out a housing-wanted add on Craigslist, and one thing led to another, connect the fucking dots, and here I am, crappy weather, sodden groundhogs, and all. No regrets. Not yet. Boredom, yeah, and nightmares, and a dwindling bank balance, but life goes on. And now I have a hand cramp, so enough’s enough. Maybe I’ll just stick this notebook back in the bag from the drugstore, dump it in the trash, because right now, I truly wish I’d been content to sit here and drink my coffee and wait for the deer to come out.
9 May 2008 (Friday, 8:47 p.m.)
The thing I can’t seem to get around is the boredom. Or maybe I mean the solitude. Perhaps I am not particularly adept at distinguishing these two conditions one from the other. I didn’t have to plop myself down in the least populated part of the state. I could easily have found something in Providence or some place near the sea, like Westerly or Narragansett. Coming here was, I suppose, an impulse move. Seemed like a good idea at the time. And there’s TV and the internet (by way of two different satellite dishes, I’ll note), and I have stacks of DVDs and CDs, my cell phone and the books I brought that I’ve been meaning to read for . . . well, some of them for years. But I’ve been here two weeks, and mostly I just wander about the property, never straying very far from the house, or I drink coffee and stare out the windows. Or I drink beer and bourbon, even though that’s a big no-no with the antiseizure meds. I’ve taken a couple or three long drives through South County, but I’ve never been much for sightseeing and scenery. Last week, I drove all the way out to Point Judith. There’s a lighthouse there and picnic tables and a big paved parking lot, though, fortunately, it’s early enough in the season that there weren’t tourists. I understand they are like unto an Old Testament plague of locusts, descending on the state from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, other places, too, no doubt. The siren song of the fucking beaches, I suppose. I saw a bumper sticker during one of my drives that read “They call it ‘tourist season,’ so why can’t we shoot them?” And yet, I expect that all of South County and much of this state has, sadly, become dependent on the income from tourism. The curse is the blessing is the curse. But, yeah, I sat there at one of the tables at Point Judith, and I watched what I suppose were fishing boats coming and going, fishing or lobster boats, a few sailboats, headed into the bay or out to se
a or down to Block Island. The gulls were everywhere, noisy and not the least bit afraid of people, and that made me think of Hitchcock, of course. The tide was out, and there was a smell not unlike raw sewage on the wind.
Yesterday, I drove up to Moosup Valley, which is a little ways north of here, much closer than either Coventry or Foster. I saw the library, but only went in long enough to grab a photocopied flyer about its history. I don’t like being in libraries any more than I like being in bookstores, and I haven’t liked going into bookstores since my first novel came out fourteen years ago. Here’s a bit about the library from the flyer: “The History of the Tyler Free Library began when the people of Moosup Valley acquired Casey B. Tyler’s private collection of about 2000 books and therefore needed to build a structure to house it. The Tyler Free Library was formally organized in January of 1896, and a Librarian was hired. The Library opened and fifteen cards were issued on March 31, 1900. Local residents organized the books and the Library was open on Saturday afternoons.” The flyer goes on to say that the rather austere whitewashed building was moved from one side of Moosup Valley Road to the other, north to south, in 1965. And why the hell am I writing all this crap down? Oh yeah, boredom.
I also stopped at an old store on Plain Woods Road, to buy cigarettes and a few other things. I’m smoking again, and that wouldn’t make my doctor back in Atlanta any happier than would all the whiskey and bottles of Bass Ale. Like just about everything else around here, the store is ancient, and like the library, it, too, bears the name of Tyler. I always heard all that stuff about how closemouthed and secretive New Englanders are, especially when you get way out in the boonies like this, and especially towards outsiders, but either the stereotype is false or I keep running into atypically garrulous Yankees. There was an old woman working in the Tyler Store, and she told me it was built in 1834, though the west end wasn’t added on until 1870. Most of what she said I don’t recall, but she did know (I don’t know how, some local gossip’s grapevine, I suppose) that I was the “lady author boarding out at the old Wight place.” And then she said it was such a shame about the last tenant, and when I asked her what she meant, she just stared at me a moment or two, her eyes huge, magnified behind trifocal lenses.
“You don’t know?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Then it’s not for me to tell you, I suspect. But you ask Mr. Blanchard. You got a right to know.”
I told her that Blanchard, the landlord, is away on some sort of farm-related business, a fertilizer convention or sheep-dippers’ conference or something of the sort, and that I wouldn’t be seeing him again for at least a week, and probably longer than that (he lives up in Foster and hardly ever comes out this way). But, no dice. She wouldn’t say more, and returned, instead, to the history of the old store, and a cider mill that used to be somewhere nearby, and something about the cemetery where her father is buried, and all that sort of thing. Local color. And I listened politely, deciding I shouldn’t press her regarding the former tenant, whatever it was about him or her I should know, that she felt I had a right to know. All Blanchard ever said was that a professor from URI rented the place before I came along, but I know it’d sat empty for more than two years.
Not long after I got back to the house, there was a phone call (because I forgot to turn off my damned cell), Dorothy wanting to know if I was settled in, how I was getting on out here, was I homesick, and, finally, when she could no longer put it off, had I made any progress on the novel. I almost hung up, because she knows I have not even started the goddamn novel. But, Dorothy is a good agent, and those don’t grow on trees, and I might still need her someday. She reminded me, tactfully, but unhelpfully, that publishers who have paid out sizable portions of sizable advances eventually expect manuscripts in return, no matter how much money I might already have made for them on my previous books. I could have lied and said the writing was going well and not to worry. But where’s the fucking point? The deadline is only six weeks off now, and that’s not the original deadline. That’s the extension on the original deadline, and so then we talked about the feasibility of a second extension, say six or eight months. Dorothy gets this tone in her voice at times like that, and I feel like I’m a kid again, talking to my mother. But she said she would call my editor next week. At least she didn’t ask about my health. At least that’s something.
Oh, I finally unpacked my Waterman pens. I’m using the “diamond-black” Edson I bought in Denver last year. I have consigned the yellow pencil stub to a drawer. On a whim, I seriously considered burying the damned thing, but then I started worrying over whether the graphite (a form of carbon, I believe) would be bad for the earthworms and moles and such. I think I read somewhere that residual graphite is harmless, but I’ve already got enough on my conscience without having to worry about whether I’ve poisoned the grubs. I’ll do my best to keep making entries in this notebook. The pens make it much easier, and it’s not like I’ve got a hell of a lot else to do, is it?
11 May 2008 (7:29 a.m.)
I have been awake maybe twenty minutes, and the nightmare is still buzzing about my skull like a hungry swarm of mosquitoes. Nothing, though, that I can conveniently swat away. Also, I have misplaced my glasses, and, no matter how hard I squint, the blue college-ruled lines on this page shift and sway, grudgingly resolving for a few seconds at a time before they fade and blur again. Still, fuck the coffee, I’m going to get this down before I lose it. Last night, I read back over my two previous entries, and hell, they don’t even sound like me. They sound like some pale ghost of my voice. Not even a decent echo. What does a writer become when she can no longer write? What’s left over when the words don’t come when called? What did Echo become after she was slaughtered for spurning Pan, or after her collusion with Zeus was discovered and so she was punished by Hera, or after her rejection by Narcissus? Those pages seem, at best, my own echo, a waning, direc tionless cry in this wilderness to which I have exiled myself. But, the dream. Write down the dream and save the rest for later. Write down what you can recall about the dream.
I was at the kitchen table, just as I am now, smoking and staring out at the shadows gathering as the sun set, the afternoon melting into twilight. I could see the dark smudge of Ramswool Pond, and the low, rocky hills around the farm, the trees pressing in, new-growth trees where once there were fields for grazing sheep and apple orchards and whatever else. I was sitting here, smoking, and the longer I watched, the more unnerving the shadows became, as the coming night drew them ever sharper. I felt as though they were becoming substantial, corporeal things, and that the sun’s retreat westward was releasing them from unseen prisons, below the ground or from out of unseen dimensions which exist, always, alongside this visible world. There were no lights on in the house, I think, and it had already fallen into darkness around and behind me, and that darkness seemed inhabited, populated by dozens of muttering men and women. I would try to make out what they were saying, but always their words slipped away from me. And all the while, I suspected the murmuring was meant to distract me from all that lay outside the kitchen window. With hindsight, I might even be so reckless as to guess that this intent was merciful. But, since I could not make head nor tails of the murmurers’ attempts at communication, I watched the window, instead. I realized here that I was not sitting in the kitchen of Mr. Blanchard’s old farmhouse, but in a small screening room, a movie theater, and the window was, in truth, a screen. It’s a cheap fucking trick, the kind of unimaginative, low-budget legerdemain at which dreaming minds seem to excel or in which they only compulsively indulge. I sat in my theater seat and stared out the window, which was now, of course, merely the projected image from concealed mechanisms hidden somewhere behind me, flickering moments fused to celluloid. The muttering voice had become other members of the audience, though I could not actually see any of them (and I am not certain that I tried). I don’t often go to the movies. But Amanda liked to, so she usually went without me. Th
at was something else we might have shared, but I couldn’t be bothered.
On the screen, I see the kitchen’s window frame, and the fallow, overgrown land beyond, and I see the shadows growing bolder. And then I see you, Amanda, and you’re standing with your back to me, but, still, I know it’s you. You’re standing at the first of the stone walls, staring out towards the flooded granite quarry. Your shoulders are slumped, your head down, almost bowed, and you’re wearing a simple yellow dress, and even though you are too far away for me to make out such details, I can see that the fabric has been imprinted with tiny flowers of one sort or another, a yellow calico. Your long hair hangs down as though you wear a veil, and it’s matted and tangled, as if you haven’t combed it in days and days. That’s so unlike you, and I began, here, to suspect I was only dreaming, because you’d never be out with your hair in such a dreadful state, not out where someone might see you.
And then the deer are coming out of the shadows gathered beneath the trees, and there are other animals, though it’s hard for me to be sure what they are. Animals. Things smaller than the deer, things that move swiftly, mostly creeping along nearer to the ground. I think the deer are all coming to you, that possibly you have called them somehow, and I think, for a second or two, I am delighted at the thought and wonder why you never told me you knew how to call deer. I think back on the stories you told me about your childhood in Georgia, that your father was a hunter, so I consider that maybe it was a talent you learned from him. And it occurs to me now that, a page or two back, I shifted fucking tense, past to present. I fucking hate that, but I’m still so asleep and afraid I’ll forget something important—that I have already forgotten—if I wait and try to wake up before putting this down.