by Jeff High
“Meaning?”
He gave me a quick glance as if he hadn't meant for me to hear his last remark. His response was dismissive. "Oh, nothing. It's just that, I've got baggage.”
“Well, if you need your luggage sorted, I think there’s a waiting list of volunteers.”
“Not helping.”
“Just saying.”
“Anyway, how was the band?”
“Loud.”
“You know, did I hear this right? It was Sheriff Thurman’s band?”
“Yup. Warren and the Blue Lights. Watervalley’s finest.”
A slight air of annoyance nested into Matthews’s voice. “Yeah, well...Sheriff Thurman is not high on my Christmas list right now.”
“Why is that?”
“He gave me a ticket the other day for going twenty-eight in a twenty-five zone.”
“Really?”
"Sure did. My kids were in the car. It was a little embarrassing. I mean, Warren's talking to me with that big smile of his, and I'm sitting there thinking the whole thing is a joke. Then he hands me the ticket. Meanwhile, all these teenagers are blowing by in their pickup trucks with expired tags and boom-boom music blasting out the neighborhood. Half of them were probably drinking beer and smoking God knows what. Not that I'm bitter or anything."
“Doesn’t sound like it.”
“Anyway, I’m not going down without a fight.”
“So, what are you going to do?”
“I’m taking it to court.”
“You’re not going to just pay the ticket?”
“Nope. I’m putting together an intricate legal defense plan.”
“Oh, yeah? And what does that look like?”
“The main strategy is called groveling.”
I laughed, and we walked on in silence. The day was thick and rich and green, full of warmth and fragrance. The June air brooded with a drowsy lethargy. But with each step, the expanding heat of the day brought the sweltering breath of the Southern wind. We crossed the long field behind the house and saw some thick woods in the near distance. But along the way we passed by an iron gated enclosure that was some twenty by thirty feet in size. It was a small cemetery of about twenty or so small markers.
Instinctively, Matthew volunteered an explanation. “According to Lida, Hiram set aside this small plot as a burial site for the men who helped build the place and continued to work for him. Their families maintain it, so it’s fine by me.”
I gave the small enclosure a fleeting glance as we passed by but spoke under my breath. “As if this place wasn’t already creepy enough.”
In time, we arrived at the edge of the woods. Here the terrain began to fall sharply. We found a drainage washout and more or less followed it as we descended cautiously into the deep hollow before us.
The farther we journeyed into the tumbling depths, it seemed that Matthew’s mood darkened. He seemed consumed with a strange disquiet; his face a carefully drawn mask that gave nothing away. Unlike myself, he had an accomplished ability to weather silence.
Finally, our efforts brought us to a narrow ravine that flattened to a level plane only forty or so feet wide. We came to a stop to get our bearings. The opposing slope was thick with trees and undergrowth that rose sharply like a nearly impenetrable wall. To our right the ravine continued, gradually winding into the distance and shouldered on both sides by the steep rise of woods. Only by careful observation of the trees could it be discerned that there had once been a road cut through this narrow gulch. But the signs were there. It was while studying the remnants of the lost lane that I noticed something odd.
“Matthew, does it seem strange to you that almost every one of these trees are maples.”
He un-shouldered his pack, walked to a nearby branch and pulled off one of the leaves. “I think you’re right. This is a sugar maple. In fact, most of these are sugar maples.”
“You say that like you’re surprised.”
"I am a little. Tennessee is the extreme southern edge of where sugar maples grow naturally. Red and silver maples are more the norm." He paused, surveying the surrounding terrain. "I think these were planted intentionally. There should be a broader mix; more oaks, black gum, locust, walnut.”
“So, what do you make of it?”
“Not sure.”
We stood for a moment, waiting for the other to offer an insight that neither of us had. Finally, Matthew broke the silence. "Come on; the spring house is this way."
We turned to the left and made our way carefully. The remnants of a wet weather creek bed threaded to the side of the ravine. All that remained of it in the June heat was the occasional small muddy bog. The strong, dank smell of stagnant water rose to meet us. About a hundred feet ahead the ravine ended in a u-shaped bowl. Rising rudely from the thick, untamed tangle of trees and undergrowth was a brick structure about twenty by twenty feet square. As Matthew had mentioned from his earlier visit, the metal roof had suffered a long-ago blow from a falling tree, creating a sliver opening from which rain and leaves had likely penetrated the old structure over the years. But the ten-foot-high brick walls showed no such compromise. Covered in an untidy profusion of ivy, they stood solid, timeless. Our progress toward it was painfully slow.
The thick foliage of the trees crowded out all but the occasional slender shaft of sunlight, leaving the air still and the heat thick. The atmosphere was like a bath. We made our way through the briars and tangles, occasionally chopping the thicket with the machete. And for some reason, the closer we came, a strange unease crept over me. Something wrong was pressing in, smothering away the air. The place seemed dark, decayed, unhallowed.
Matthew’s temperament had grown ever murkier, his focus intense, his face a twist of impatience. It seemed that now we only spoke in muted undertones. Having finally reached the old building, we instinctively walked around one side and then the other. The back half of the structure was cut into the hillside, covering nearly the first five feet of the rear wall. The large wooden door on the front looked heavy and solid, hanging on three sets of rusted but stout hinges. The vintage padlock was of similar definition.
By elusive measures, it seemed that in the last few minutes, the small tuck of ravine had grown ominously darker. I gazed upward, searching for some fragment of sky amidst the thick cluster of limbs and the high shoulders of the steep ridges above. The previous pale blue had been replaced by a leaden gray. A sudden gust of air stirred, a harbinger of changing weather.
Then distantly, I heard it again. I heard the myriad chanting of voices that had encircled me in the frozen darkness outside Matthew’s house back in December.
“Do you hear that?” I said anxiously.
Matthew halted, holding himself silent. “What is it?”
“I hear singing. A woman’s voice. Or more likely, several women. They’re all singing at once. But not the same tune. Do you not hear it?”
He stared at me blankly, waiting, listening. Long seconds passed. His eyes made a slight twinge of acknowledgment. "Maybe. I'm not sure. Could just be the wind."
I wasn’t quite so dismissive. “That’s not the wind, Matthew.” I paused, slightly irritated, straining to listen. “You do hear it, don’t you?”
He pressed his lips together in anticipation. A few seconds later, the voices faded away. He spoke reluctantly. “I might have heard something. But, seems like it’s gone now.”
“If you know it’s gone then you knew it was here.”
“Yeah. Okay, fine. I heard it. I heard some voices.”
“So? What gives?”
Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know. Around here you just hear stuff like that from time to time.”
I gawked at him incredulously. "That's it. I mean...the Ghoul Glee Club sings an aria, and we treat it like traffic noise?"
He said nothing. Despite my alarm, the matter seemed to warrant only a passive deliberation on his part. He shook his head indifferently. “I don’t know what to tell you.” Having said this, he refocuse
d his attention on the padlock.
Just that quickly, it seemed that a door had closed between us. I was startled and dumbfounded, but Matthew was undeterred. A spark of higher purpose seemed to flicker in his eyes.
Conversely, I was anxiously unnerved. The chorus of cryptic voices, the strange and eerie presence of the deserted structure, and the entrapped closeness of this cramped and gloomy basin served to swallow me in an involuntary fear; of what, I could not rightly say. But at that moment, it seemed that I could have poured all of my courage into a thimble. I had nothing to prove here and was content to simply leave. Matthew’s hardened face said otherwise.
He dropped his pack and removed the bolt cutters.
“So, what’s your plan?” I inquired.
He looked at me, confused. “My plan?”
“Yeah, you know. A plan.”
“What did you have in mind?”
"Well, we don't know what we're up against here. So, I thought that after you snap the lock, I'll kick the door open and you could rush in with your 9mm. You know...guns a blazing style.”
Matthew responded dryly. “I doubt anything in there is packing heat.”
My unease had exasperated me. I promptly held up my hands, placing the fingers of the right into the palm of the left...the clear signal for a timeout.
I spoke bluntly. “Look. You’re my friend, Matthew. But, cut me some slack here. I don’t deal with whole ethereal world stuff quite so casually. This whole business is creepy. And I mean real darn creepy. Let’s face it. You didn’t need me to come along. You could have come down here by yourself. But you wanted someone with you, just in case. So, don’t tell me that you’re not just a little bit rattled by whatever kind of weirdness may be behind that door.”
He pursed his lips together and nodded, a gesture of appeasement. He looked down for a moment, endeavoring to find his words. “It’s not the creepiness, Luke. It’s me. I just want answers. I guess I’ve been kidding myself, trying to think it didn’t matter. But it does. I asked you to come along because you’re a smart guy. You don’t miss much. And what I’m afraid of more than anything is overlooking something. I thought that between the two of us if there is any clue here that offers any solutions, we’d find it. This is the last place to look, Luke. I just have this feeling that if we don’t find anything here, then I’ll probably never know...never understand what Emily was trying to tell me.”
I tucked my hands under my arms and nodded. I understood. His earlier comment about baggage now struck me with resolute clarity. It wasn’t just his wife’s request he was trying to understand, it was her absence as well. Despite his assertions to the contrary, Matthew wanted to make sense of a senseless loss. I nodded and exhaled deeply. “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”
He angled the bolt cutters around the old lock and squeezed hard. It snapped and fell to the ground. After taking one last look at me, Matthew turned the handle and pushed on the door. Surprisingly, it swung open easily, availing a full view of the inside.
Chapter 42
THE SPRINGHOUSE
WE WERE IMMEDIATELY hit with a palpable wave of putrid air. The rank smell of desertion, of years of decay and neglect, had fermented into the walls and floor. The room was a chaos of dirt, rusted metal, rotting leaves, collapsed wooden boxes; a disarray of piled and forgotten junk.
The daylight ebbing through the door and the small crack in the roof offered only modest visibility. Matthew retrieved two flashlights from his backpack, handing one to me. We endeavored to make our way inside, both of us filled with a cautious, curious anticipation.
Despite a thick layer of filth, it was soon apparent that the floor was brick, the same as the walls. We moved to the center of the room and began to take inventory. A disarrayed and rusted collection of five-gallon metal cans littered the wall to our right. They bore the same Frontenac label as those found in the basement. I lifted a few of the intact ones. They were empty.
The remnant of some half-rotted wooden shelves lined part of the left side wall. They were cluttered with tarnished oil lanterns, boxes of antiquated hand tools, grease cans, containers of rusted bolts, nuts, and washers of various sizes, and a myriad of other small items sorted in vintage glass jars with corroded lids. Beside all this was another of the bow-back, four-wheel dollys like the one we had seen in the wine rack room.
Matthew broke the silence. “What do you make of this place?”
“Well, for starters. It’s definitely not a springhouse. There’s no pump, no pipes, no nothing.”
“Yet it's built into the hillside like you would expect a springhouse to be. So, if not that, then why is it even here?”
The question hung in the air between us. I made my way toward the rear wall where a decades-old pot-bellied iron stove sat in the far-left corner. It was blanketed in rust and grime and its flue extended only three feet and left open to the room. But upon further inspection of the rear wall, I noticed a spot about eight feet high where the brick had been filled into a circular pattern. No doubt, at some point, the flue had elbowed and extended through that opening. But for some reason, it had been closed.
Matthew had made his way to the other rear corner where two small and decaying wooden crates sat under a covering of muck and leaves. Dropping to one knee, he brushed off the top one. Then, he took his knife and pried away the lid. Inside were twelve bottles neatly separated by thin pine partitions. They were unlabeled and empty with no metal cap...apparently, undisturbed from their day of manufacture. Matthew retrieved one for closer inspection. It had a narrow three-inch neck that beveled out to a squat, cylindrical body. By all appearances, it was an unused whiskey bottle.
He looked at me curiously. “Is this what I think it is?”
“I think so. Looks to be a booze bottle. Although, I guess you could put maple syrup in it.”
Matthew scoffed. “Not likely.” He held it out at arm’s length. “It looks big.”
“It’s probably quart size which is thirty-two ounces. Whiskey used to be bottled on the Imperial measurement system. You know, quarts, pints and so forth. These days it’s on the Metric system which is 750ml. That works out to about twenty-four ounces.”
He nodded his understanding but continued to regard me curiously. "I still don't get it, Luke. None of this fits together. We already knew Hiram was probably into bootlegging. But this building and these few bottles...none of it makes sense.”
I heard Matthew’s words, but I wasn’t completely listening. My attention had been drawn to something odd on the center of the back wall. It looked like a patch had been made in the brick similar to the one where the flue had been. The telltale signs of broken mortar joints revealed a repaired area just above the floor measuring about two feet square. I scrutinized it for a moment. Then, an idea struck me.
I found an old hammer among the box of tools and began to stoutly beat against the area of the patch. Surprisingly, the brick quickly crumbled and broke away easily. After two minutes effort, I had completely removed the last of the patched area. As the dust settled, I bent down and aimed my light beyond the small pile of rubble, revealing the opening of an eighteen-inch pipe.
Matthew knelt beside me. “That looks like the pipe coming out of the wall in the wine rack room. Why would it end up here?”
I stood and scratched my head. Piece by piece I began to link everything together, to figure out just what the wily Hiram Hatcher had been up to when he had built all of this over ninety years ago. Matthew saw the broad smile spread across my face.
“Tell me what you’re thinking, Bradford.”
I shook my head and laughed. "Okay. Keep in mind that some of this is just spit-balling, but here's what I got."
“I’m all ears.”
"I think Hiram Hatcher not only knew how to make money; he liked making money."
“Okay. Not sure I see your point.”
“What I’m trying to say is this. I don’t think Hiram particularly loved the phosphate business, or the real estat
e business, or even the bootlegging business. But he liked living large, and he liked doing things that made him money. He's already a wealthy man when he comes to Watervalley. But as he's building his house on Bootlegger Hill, he sees an opportunity. Even in the twenties, whiskey is being illegally made all over this region. Hiram's got his own fleet of trucks and his own railroad line up to Nashville. He's not interested in making whiskey. He's interested in distributing it. So, he networks with his old childhood buddy Capone to cover himself politically and dives in. I'm guessing that he got Canadian whiskey shipped here in the maple syrup cans. As well, he became a collecting point for bootleggers making bourbon and rye in this area. That’s why he immersed himself in the local social and political scene. His activities were probably well cloaked, but it’s a small town. People would know.”
“So how does this place tie in?”
I stepped around the five-gallon cans strewn across the floor and grabbed the old metal dolly. I returned and placed it on the floor and loaded four of the cans on to it. Then, kicking the rubble away, I rolled it into the end of the large pipe where it fit easily with a couple of inches to spare.
"I remember you telling me that the bricked-in room had an old fuse box and wiring and a large spool of cable. I think that at one time, there was an electric motor in that room. That’s what the wiring was for. So, here’s how it worked. Booze was brought here in the five-gallon cans, probably at night and by a single truck. Or who knows, maybe even during the day. It was probably just a logging road. So, seeing an occasional truck come in and out would have seemed normal.
Anyway, using the pipe, it was smuggled up to the basement room where it was then put into bottles and boxed up. The dumbwaiter you saw was used to lift the boxes to what we thought was the coal room. As I mentioned, Hiram lived large, always throwing one big party after another. So, trucks coming and going making deliveries wouldn’t really stir much notice. Besides, even if people did know, they probably didn’t care. Hiram was good for the local economy.”