The Hawley Book of the Dead (16 page)

“Good thing you set up here rather than the lawn. Now, how about some tea for a parched old lady?”

Jolon handed the Thermos cap over. His hand shook, just a little. Nan drank the tea down, poured more. “Go ahead, eat your sandwiches.” Jolon looked at me. I shook my head, knowing Nan would tell in her own way. But Jolon said, “Ma’am? Aren’t you going to tell the rest?”

She pointed the flashlight at her own chin again, and grinned ghastly. “Just creating a little suspense, my dears. Well, the townspeople took against that family, wouldn’t buy the father’s grain. Wouldn’t buy the red-and-white calves. Just shook their heads when he asked them why. The mother took to making little dolls and flower wreaths to sell, but no one bought them when she set up her stall at the market. People crossed to the other side of the street to avoid them. Even the daughters, lovely girls of sixteen, were shunned. After a bit, bad things began to happen in the town. The aldermen got gout and stomachaches and inexplicable fevers. Their children became sickly. One child, a comely golden-haired boy, disappeared without a trace after going out to bring the cows home. Now, maybe these things would have happened anyway, but everyone whispered that the woman was a witch and had cast a spell over the town. So, they put their heads together and decided to set fire to her family’s house, then drive them away, if they happened to survive.

“That night, the men who’d drawn the short straws waited in the forest until the father had checked his livestock for the last time, and the last candle had been extinguished. They waited still, until they heard the father’s snores. Then they crept up to the house. They lit their torches made from straw soaked in bear grease, threw them in the windows, and ran back to the forest edge, to watch and wait.

“They did their work well. That little cabin burned to the ground, and not a soul was seen leaving it. Not a sound of distress was heard, nothing but the terrified bellowing of the cows. The men said the witch and her family must have been stupefied by smoke while they slept and died before they had a conscious thought. They hoped it was so. After all, they were decent men, not wanting to cause undue suffering, especially the minister, who’d drawn one of the short straws himself.

“Then a strange thing happened. In the next days, when the fire finally stopped smoldering, when the townsfolk went to examine the devastation they’d wrought, they found blackened pots, beds and chairs turned to charcoal, which disintegrated at a touch. A scorched tea tin. Even the carcasses of those red-and-white cows, burnt up in the shed attached to the house. But they found no human remains. Not a bone
or a tooth. As if they’d fled unseen, all that strange family. Of course, they knew it must not be so. The men had waited the night through and had seen not one soul escape. There were only embers and charred sticks left. Except the lilacs, which bloomed on, which had refused to burn.

“Not a trace was ever found of the family, dead or alive, in that part of the world. Everywhere they went, though, the townspeople smelled not scorched flesh, but lilacs. Where the cabin stood, the lilacs bloomed all the year through. Even today, in the forest that grew up around the ashes of the cabin, those lilacs never cease to bloom, and the scent of them perfumes the air, even in the dead of winter.”

Nan turned off the flashlight, and the tent was filled with the pink and golden light of sunset. The storm had passed. The birds were singing, their last chorus of the waning day.

“That was some story, Mrs. Dyer.”

“If you want more, you’ll have to wait till true dark, now. I’ll tell you some Poe tales, next time.” Nan kneeled and unzipped the tent flap. Jolon grabbed her arm. “But what became of them, that family? Where did they go?”

“Where do you think they went?”

I hesitated, then answered, “They came to Hawley Forest.”

Nan laughed, smoothed my hair. “You ought to know.”

“How could
she
know?” Jolon piped in, caught between fascination and skepticism.

“She bears the name of the woman, the first of the Revelations.”

Jolon seemed dissatisfied with this answer. “But she wasn’t
there
.”

Nan studied him appraisingly. “Suffice it to say there’s more to your friend than meets the eye. Just like her forebears. Best you know now.” She turned and crawled out of our tent. The tang of the lemony-scented soap she used hung in the air.

Jolon looked at me, but I just shrugged, passed him a bag of gummy worms. He bit the head off a yellow one. I started wrapping them around my wrists, where they stuck, like snakes biting their tails. Then we played badminton in the wet grass until we couldn’t see the shuttlecock anymore.
We played gin rummy in the tent, cozy with lanterns dispelling the deep dark around us, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke when I felt eyes on me. Jolon’s. His eyes reflected the moon as he studied me. His face was inches above mine, his cheek smooth as a plum, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know why,” he said. And his mouth pressed against mine. Soft as berries, sure as if he’d been kissing me forever, all our lives, and always would.

The sun came out. My daughters and I rode on to Moody Spring, then looped around toward home. I didn’t smell the lilacs again, and I tried to put it from me. I tried to put any further thoughts of Jolon from me, too. I felt the weight of every act that had brought me to that moment, balanced on the verge of something large and mysterious and frightening. If Jolon had stayed in Hawley, I wouldn’t have met Jeremy at all, wouldn’t have my three precious girls. But if we hadn’t met, Jeremy would still be alive. Then I couldn’t help but think that I was being unfaithful to Jeremy, just remembering that first kiss. Jeremy was under the ground, with a gravestone over him. My Jeremy. The twists of fate had worked their spell on me, for sure. As we rode, though, the magic of the forest lulled me, banished my gloomy musings. Grace and Fai were happy and smiling, their sunny, excited faces shining.

When we rode up to the barn, Caleigh ran out to meet us. She helped us untack and bathe the horses, bubbling over with news about the big pumpkin and the Chinese restaurant where they’d had lunch. “What did your fortunes say?” Fai wanted to know.

“Mine was good. It said I’ll be lucky in money matters. But Gramps’s was funny. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. Something about what is dearest to him would be lost. Weird, right?”

I didn’t want to think about fortunes. Neither the past nor the future
seemed important that day. We had an early dinner, then played a noisy game of Bananagrams. No one mentioned the headstones, or my father’s not-funny fortune, or Jolon. It was a fine day, without distressing dreams or strange discoveries. I wanted the spell to remain unbroken, wanted there to be many more days like this.

It was the first real day of reckoning for my daughters. I left them huddled over textbooks with Nathan, in the schoolroom he’d set up for them. Life had to get back to normal sometime. As normal as life without Jeremy could be.

Mrs. Pike arrived in her rusty chariot, and was busy scouring inside the kitchen woodstove when I walked by in my riding clothes.

“Off riding, missus?” It was the first time she’d spoken to me unbidden.

“Only to Hawley Bog and back.” It was also the first day I wasn’t cleaning or cooking right beside her. I thought she might resent it, and I resented her for her resentment. Even if it was only in my own mind. “Then I have to get to work. Upstairs, in my office.” I wasn’t going to apologize for the work I had always done. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Hey, I’m just askin’. But you want to be careful in those woods.”

“I’ve known Hawley Forest since I was a girl. You don’t have to worry I’ll get lost.”

“It was worried about what you’d
find
, I was.”

“And what might that be?” Her cryptic insinuations unnerved me.

She rose creakily, pulled off her stained rubber gloves one by one. They looked like they came from a crime scene, red with rust rather than blood. “Hunting season, you know. Got to be careful.”

“It’s only bow now. I’m not fussed. I have blaze orange everything, anyway. As you can see.”

She put the gloves down, smoothed back her pewter hair. “Well. You know best, missus.”

“My name is Reve,” I snapped. “Call me by it. Or ‘Mrs. Dyer,’ if you absolutely have to.”

She nodded impassively. “All right, missus.”

I slammed the screen door on my way out.

I saddled Zar and headed toward the gate, past the buildings that once comprised the town center of Hawley Five Corners. The Warriner house, the King house, then the church across the wide street that was my driveway. Except for the strange abandonment of the town, no notable events had taken place here, no Revolutionary War battles, not even any dinosaur tracks or ancient Indian villages discovered. No famous person had grown up in the shadows of these trees. Quiet lives had been lived here.

I knew a little of the history of the buildings, courtesy of Carl Streeter’s e-mail missives about the town. The Warriner house was once the schoolhouse for the town, had a stark center, two up two down. But then, as was often the case in New England, the house was added on to as families grew. Ethan Warriner bought the schoolhouse from the town when the South Hawley schoolhouse was built, added on a rambling connector to his blacksmith shop so he wouldn’t have to go out in the rain and snow, and the deep porch, covered with wisteria vine.

Next came the King house, a tall saltbox that might or might not have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. It also had the distinction of carrying the rumor that a murder had taken place there, a wife poisoning her husband. But it was never proved, and Ida King lived on into old age, dying in 1843 and joining her husband on Cemetery Road, never having remarried. I felt a certain kinship with Ida, had looked for her during our visit to the boneyard the previous day, but hadn’t found her gravestone.

It seemed strange to think that less than a hundred years before, this had been the center of a bustling little town. There had been stores and a tavern nearby. Children had played here, young people had courted, carving their names in trees that bore the scars of their old love to this day. People had lived and worked and died here. Then something had happened, that was clear. But what? Was it only because it was abandoned, left
empty for so long? Maybe there was a real basis for Carl Streeter’s and Mrs. Pike’s insinuations that the town was haunted, but I didn’t feel anything amiss. I felt only the weight of history. The church might hold answers, as the historical society woman had implied, but that was for another day. My Nan might, as well, but there was no guarantee she’d ever tell me. I’d just have to be happy with what I could glean on my own. I rode out the gate, making sure it swung closed behind me. What happens in Hawley stays in Hawley.

The weather was almost sultry. I put Zar into a gentle but ground-covering trot. There had been an old mill on the road to Hawley Bog, and the cracked stone foundations stood by the rushing stream that ran from the bog and mirrored Middle Road. The trail branched off, and the stream coursed beneath it. A mist rose before me there, hanging over the water. I turned Zar up the Bog Trail, a steep and winding track, deep with small loose stones. When the rains came in April, the water would run over the trail, making it another streambed, but now the path was dry and skittery. Zar picked his way carefully. Mist hung like a curtain around us. Near the top it wisped and thinned. Then when the stream widened again, it became almost solid, a gray quilt of murk. I heard a tinkling of bells and Zar jumped under me, braced his front legs, ready to spin around and run to safety if required. I saw forms then, not the two-legged forms of human hunters I expected, but swaying four-legged ones.

A herd of red-and-white cows appeared out of the mist, tossing their wide heads and lowing. The white of them was milky, translucent, very clean. Their red patches seemed bright in spite of the dusky light. Some wore brass bells around their necks, sounding sweet and muted in the air. They were coming straight for us, then swerved and made a run at the bank edging the road. They cleared it with no problem, like grand prix jumpers, like cows jumping over the moon. Then they melted into the forest again, the bells sounding fainter and fainter. A good thing, because if there’s one thing Zar does make a fuss about, it’s a cow. He trembled beneath me, and when we went on, he sidestepped by the bank the cows had jumped. I stroked his sweat-lathered neck. “It’s only cows, kiddo.” I looked back and wondered, though. What were cows doing in the forest?
There had been maybe seven or eight. I hadn’t precisely counted; they seemed to flow together and apart with such fluidity they were like a school of big fish. Did some farmer let them out to eat mast in the forest once the grass had gone? But then they were so clean. And there was still good grass, to the horses’ delight. I added the stray cattle to my growing list of mysteries.

The hill up to the bog was steep and shaley. Stones rattled behind us as Zar’s hooves ground in for purchase. I leaned forward over his withers. We’d just gained the top of the rise when I heard voices. Men’s voices. Maybe they were coming for the cows. I rode around a sharp bend, nearly stumbled into a circle of men standing near three pickup trucks parked in the road. Ten or twelve men. Again, the mist seemed to befuddle me. I thought they might be hunters—almost without exception they sported orange caps. But they had none of the other paraphernalia of hunting. No bows, no camouflage jackets or pants. I saw no six-packs or liquor bottles, either, and I was grateful for that. Most were in coveralls, some in jeans and T-shirts. They stared at me as I came on. Not one smiled. A few touched their cap visors. An older man, with a face brown and wrinkled as a walnut, said, “Mornin’.”

I nodded, suddenly feeling apprehensive. Zar felt it, too, and tensed. I knew he was longing to bolt back down the hill to home. I tucked two more fingers over the reins to steady him, made fists with my hands. We would go on.