“Listen,” Constance whispered, and her voice pulled me back to myself, and I was only standing on a path in the woods again, staring at her sweat-streaked face, the dread and terror shimmering brightly in her eyes. “Did you hear that, Sarah?”
“We’re going to be fine,” I told her, not acknowledging the question I’d only half heard. “We have to stay calm, that’s all.”
And she held an index finger to her lips, then, shushing me. Speaking so quietly that the words were almost lost in the background murmurs of the forest, she said, “I heard voices. I heard . . .”
But then she trailed off, and I could have been sitting at the kitchen window, watching one of the deer, its every muscle tensed and ears pricked. I could have been sitting at the table, waiting for the deer to bolt at whatever I could not hear.
And I realized that Constance was holding my left arm, her hand gripping me tightly just above the elbow.
“I don’t hear anything,” I whispered back to her, despite her silencing finger, despite my head so filled with the view of that awful, dizzying wickedness sprouting from the stony soil.
But then I did, though it was not voices or anything that could be mistaken for voices. From our right, past the fieldstone wall, came the undisputable commotion of something large splashing through the stream. And despite the prickling hairs at the nape of my neck, despite the gooseflesh on my arms and the rush of adrenaline, I opened my mouth to tell her it was only a deer, only a deer or a dog—a wild dog at the very worst. But she had already released my arm, was already off the path and running, and helpless to do anything else, I followed. I cannot say how long I chased her through those woods, the greenbriers ripping at my exposed face and arms, branches whipping past, my feet tangling in the wild grapes so that it is only by some miracle I didn’t fall and break my neck. As we ran, I was gradually overcome with the conviction that I was not so much trying to catch up with her, as fleeing some unspeakable expression of the wickedness I had seen manifest in the red tree. All I had to do was look over my shoulder to see it. But I did not look back. Like Constance, like the frightened does and fauns, I ran.
And then we were through the last clinging wall of vines, the last bulwark of poison ivy and ferns, dashing wildly across the weedy yard surrounding Blanchard’s farmhouse. I was shouting for her to stop, that we were safe now, that it was over, because that sense of being pursued had vanished, abruptly and completely. She did stop, so suddenly that I almost ran into her, though I know now it wasn’t because of anything I’d said. Constance stood a few feet away, drenched in sweat, wheezing so loudly I might have taken her for an asthmatic. There were tears in her eyes, and blood from what the briars had done to her face, and she was laughing uncontrollably. She pointed at the house, and at first I didn’t see what was wrong with it, what it was that she wanted me to see, what she needed me to see. For a time, I saw only the house, and the house meant only that the ordeal was over and we were safe, and neither of us would ever be so foolish as to go wandering off towards that wicked, wicked tree again. But the relief washed away, rolling easily out from under me, like pebbles on a beach before the towering clouds and indifferent winds of an advancing hurricane.
We were standing on the south side of the house, not far from the front door, despite the fact that we’d been walking, and then running, south, bound for the back door. And sure, later we would tell ourselves that, obviously (there’s that word again), in our panicked flight and having forsaken the path, we’d wandered in a half circle, passing east of the house, and then doubling back again without having realized we’d done so. Never mind the questions left unanswered, the inexplicable events that had led to that pell-mell dash.
And now I look at the clock on the wall and see I’ve been sitting here the better part of three hours. My eyes hurt, I have a headache, and I feel like every bone in my body has been pummeled using a sock filled with pennies. No more of this tonight. I’ve set down the broad strokes, and I probably shouldn’t have done even that much. I’m going to have another beer, a handful of ibuprofen, and go the hell to bed.
July 7, 2008 (8:33 p.m.)
I sat down after dinner and read back over what I’d typed out last night. I even read a few bits of it aloud to Constance, which was, all things considered, rather ballsy of me, I think. She listened, but didn’t offer much beyond the occasional frown or shrug. Since yesterday, her mood has seemed to grow increasingly sour, and tonight she is distant, uncommunicative. I can’t be sure if she’s angry at me, or angry because she’s embarrassed, or just plain angry. Maybe some combination of the three, and understandably freaked out, in the bargain. Anyway, after I read the pages, I considered trying to make a more detailed and more coherent account of the experience. But, on the one hand, I don’t think I’m up to it, and on the other, what I wrote last night—for all its considerable faults—is likely far more honest and interesting in its immediacy than any carefully considered, reasoned version of our “lost picnic” (Constance’s phrase, and I take it as a reference to Lindsay’s novel) than I would produce tonight, more than twenty-four hours after the fact. I’ve had too much time to think about something that seems pretty much impervious to explanation. I mean, to any explanation that does not assume or require a violation of the laws of physics or recourse to the supernatural. And I think our stroll through the woods has taught me how deeply committed I am to a materialist interpretation of the universe, even when the universe deigns to suggest otherwise.
I woke this morning to find Constance sitting on the porch, smoking and staring into the trees and undergrowth at the edge of the front yard. There was a sketchbook lying open in her lap, and an old coffee mug of charcoal pencils on the porch rail. But the paper was blank. Near as I could tell, she’d drawn nothing. She didn’t seem to notice me until I said her name, and repeated it a second time; even then, when she turned and looked at me, there was something about her eyes, something about her expression, that made me wonder if she understood I was addressing her.
“How about some breakfast?” I asked, yawning and scraping together half a smile or so.
Constance blinked at me, like maybe she was having to work to remember my name. After a few seconds, there was a faint glimmer of recognition, and she turned away again. She took another drag from her cigarette and looked back towards the yard and the woods beyond.
“Sarah, I don’t feel like cooking for you today,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant,” I replied, caught slightly off guard and determined not to begin the day with an argument. “How about I cook something for the both of us. I think there are still a few eggs in the fridge.”
“I’m really not hungry,” she said.
I started to go back inside and leave her alone with her thoughts, whatever they might be. I’m sure that’s what I should have done. There was nothing I had to say that she wanted to hear, and I’m not quite so dense that I couldn’t see that. But, just as our inexplicably failed bid to reach Dr. Harvey’s red tree seems to have caused Constance to withdraw, so it has left me somewhat less content with my own company than usual.
“So how about I make you a cup of joe?” I asked. “Or tea? Or, hey, fuck it, what about a beer? A cold Narragansett wouldn’t be such a bad way to start things after yesterday.”
“I’m fine,” she said, grinding that last syllable and sounding anything but, and she stubbed out her cigarette in a ginger Altoids tin she’s taken to carrying around with her. She popped the butt inside and snapped the tin shut.
“Constance, you know, some things, no matter how long you sit and stare at them, they just stay weird. You don’t always find a library book—”
“Don’t you patronize me,” she said, and, looking back, it was probably for the best that she interrupted me when she did. I just wish I’d have had the presence of mind to keep my mouth shut to start with. Constance glared at her Altoids tin, clutched tightly in her right hand, and I was beginning to think she was going to turn aro
und and throw it at me. I suppose I’d have had it coming.
“Don’t you fucking dare,” she continued, slipping the tin into a pocket of one of the black smocks she wears when she paints. “And don’t try to tell me there’s no point obsessing over it, because I know you’re doing the same goddamn thing.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to.”
“You know what I think?” she asked, and then told me before I could reply. “I think you could go inside and pack yourself another picnic lunch right now and head back to the tree alone. I think you could do that, Sarah Crowe, and you wouldn’t have any trouble whatsoever finding it, or finding your way back here again, afterwards.”
I shrugged, wishing I hadn’t left my own cigarettes inside, but not about to ask Constance for one.
“You know,” I replied, getting a bit pissed, but doing my best not to let it show. “Me not patronizing you, that would have to include my telling you how crazy that sounds, right?”
“Yeah? So why don’t you try it, Sarah? If it’s crazy, what have you got to lose?”
“Look, I’m going to make a pot of coffee, and maybe when I’ve had three or four cups, when I can see straight, maybe then we’ll continue this conversation.”
And I was already stepping across the threshold, back into the house, already pulling the door closed, when she said, “You won’t do it, and you won’t do it because you’re scared. But I wish you would, Sarah. I wish you’d try going back without me.”
“Okay. So, maybe I will,” I said, knowing full well I wasn’t about to do any such thing. “But first, I’m making coffee, and getting something to eat. And you are more than welcome to join me, if you should happen to get tired of sitting out here not drawing whatever it is you’re staring at so intently.” And I shut the door, quickly, before she could get another jab in or possibly raise the stakes of her silly little dare. Hey, old lady, I’ll even screw you if you’ll just try to find the tree again without me. Sure, give it another shot, and, if you make it back, I’ll throw a pity fuck your way. I went to the kitchen and wrestled with the temperamental old percolator that came with the place, and I listened to NPR and had a bowl of stale Wheat Chex without milk, because the carton of “Rhody Fresh” had gone over. Constance didn’t join me, though halfway through my second cup of coffee, I heard the front door slam, heard her stomping upstairs to her garret. When I was done, I tried valiantly to occupy my mind by doing a half-assed job of cleaning the kitchen and the bathroom. Both badly needed it, though the work did little, if anything, to distract me. I kept stopping to stare up at the ceiling, wondering what Constance was doing overhead in the air-conditioned sanctuary of her attic, if she was painting or sketching or just lying on the futon beneath the chugging window unit, worrying at her memories. Or I’d find myself sweat-soaked and gazing at a sink filled with dirty dishes and sudsy water, or at the toilet brush, and realize that I’d spent the last five minutes standing there, thinking about the tree, playing back over the events of the day before. No less guilty than my housemate of trying to see past what had happened to anything else that would make more sense and not leave that cold, hard knot in my guts.
When Constance finally did reappear, it was late afternoon, and I was lying on the sofa in the den, intermittently dozing and trying to concentrate on Alice Morse Earle’s unutterably dry Customs and Fashions of Old New England (1893), which I’d brought home from the library in Moosup a few days before. She slipped into the room without a word and sat down on the floor not far from me. There were a few fresh-looking smears of paint on her smock, and she was accompanied by the pine-sap smell of turpentine. There were motley stains on her hands and fingers, too, several shades of blue and green and red.
After a moment, she cleared her throat, so I closed my book and dropped it to the floor beside the sofa.
“We still on speaking terms?” she asked.
I rubbed at my eyes, and watched her a moment or two before answering. “It would be damned inconvenient if we aren’t,” I said.
“Good,” she smiled, guarded relief creeping over her face. “I shouldn’t have said those things. I know I shouldn’t have.”
“Yeah, well, we both saw some seriously freaky shit. Not exactly the sort of thing you tend to forget overnight. And, besides, I really should have had enough smarts to leave you alone this morning.”
She picked up Customs and Fashions of Old New England and stared at the spine. “You were actually reading this?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “Not actually.”
Constance set the book back on the floor between us and, with her left index finger, traced invisible circles and figure-eights on the black cover.
“I’m never at my best when I’m afraid,” she said.
“Not many people are,” I replied. But it sounded trite, maybe even condescending, and I sighed and shut my tired eyes. Orange and yellow ghost images floated about in the incomplete darkness, a swirling, leftover smutch of four-thirty sunlight generated by my confused retinas.
“What I said about you going back out there alone, I know I wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“It’s okay, Constance. Really. Don’t worry about it.”
“But I want to try to explain,” she said, and I opened my eyes. “I don’t like people thinking that I’m scared, but it’s worse when they think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I said, and she lifted her finger off the cover of the library book and glared up at me, looking more confused than anything else. “You know what I meant,” I said, and there was undoubtedly more exasperation in my voice than I’d intended there to be.
“I know what you said.”
“I say too much. You’d think anyone lives this long, she’d have figured that out by now. Regardless, you don’t need to explain anything to me. I don’t think you’re crazy. I was half asleep and just mouthing off.”
“I never should have come back here,” she said. “I should have stayed in Los Angeles.” And this time I didn’t reply. I lay there on the sofa, rubbing my eyes and waiting for whatever it was that she would or wouldn’t say next. There was a noise outside, the wind or an animal poking about, but nothing unusual. Still, Constance turned her head away, turning towards the direction from which the noise seemed to have come. It wasn’t repeated, and after a while, she asked, “Have you read the whole thing? All of it?”
“Lord no,” I said, assuming she meant the library book. “I’ve hardly started it. Frankly, I don’t know why the hell I brought it home. Good Housekeeping in the age of Cotton Mather.”
“I wasn’t talking about this,” she said impatiently, and tapped the cover of the library book with her knuckles. “I mean Chuck Harvey’s manuscript. Have you finished reading it?”
“He didn’t even finish writing it,” I replied.
“Yeah, I know that, but have you read everything he did write?”
“No,” I told her, sitting up, and wondering if she’d be up for a drive to the beach, thinking it would do us both good to get out of the woods and away from this house for a little bit. Hell, I even thought about volunteering to spring for a room in Stonington or Mystic (because, after all, that’s what credit cards are for). “I haven’t. I’ve read, I don’t know, maybe half of it.”
“But you do intend to finish it before you take it to that woman at URI, right?”
“Maybe it would be better if I didn’t,” I sighed, not sure where she was headed, but already pretty certain she’d say no to a night away from the house.
Constance had gone back to drawing her invisible curlicues on the cover of the library book. “Well,” she said, “that’s up to you. But I need you to promise that you won’t get rid of it before you let me read it all.”
“You think your answers are waiting in there somewhere?” I asked, trying to remember if we had anything for dinner or if I’d have to drive into town.
“Just promise me that, alright?”
�
��Sure. No problem. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die,” and after that, she seemed to relax a bit.
“Scout’s honor?” she asked.
“Not fucking likely,” I laughed and had a go at combing my hair with my fingers.
“Oh, I was a Girl Scout,” Constance said. “Troop 850. I had my first taste of weed on one of the camping trips.”
“No shit? The Girl Scouts have a marijuana merit badge?”
She laughed, but we didn’t talk very long, and after a while she vanished into her garret again, saying that she wanted to get back to work. She came down for dinner (Velveeta grilled cheeses and Campbell’s Soup; at least I didn’t have to go to the store), but didn’t stick around long afterwards. Maybe I’ll do the beach thing by myself tomorrow, and hope that the tourists aren’t as bad on Mondays, that their numbers have declined since the Fourth.
July 8, 2008 (2:24 p.m.)
Earlier today, I was going through one of the boxes of books I brought up here with me from Atlanta, one of the few that didn’t go directly from the old apartment into storage. Comfort books, I call them, a hodgepodge of familiar volumes that I’ve read again and again and again, some of them since childhood. My personal take on Linus van Pelt’s blue security blanket, I suppose; the bookworm’s dog-eared solace. So, I was sorting through the box, only half remembering having packed most of what was in there, and at the very bottom was a big hardback, The Annotated Alice, with all Martin Gardner’s marginalia and John Tenniel’s illustrations. It was a Christmas gift when I was only eight years old, and I guess that would have been 1972. Yeah, ’72. I didn’t own many books as a child, and certainly not hard-backs. My father, a high-school dropout, said it was a waste of good money, paying for books when there was a library right there in Mayberry (though I suspect he himself never set foot in it). Anyway, my mother found a used copy of The Annotated Alice at a yard sale sometime in the autumn, and then gave it to me for Christmas that year. You can still see where $1.25 was penciled in on the upper-righthand corner of the title page, and she tried unsuccessfully to erase it. The book was printed in 1960, so it was already, what, twelve years old when she gave it to me. And Jesus, how I loved that book. There are long passages that I committed to memory, that I can still recite.
The Red Tree Page 14