Blackbirch Woods

by Meredith Anne DeVoe

  Last Christmas, her brother told her that Santa Claus was made up. Violet had taken her outraged innocence to her mother, who admitted it. She had told her that she wanted Violet to be sure that she could trust that when her parents told her something was true, that it was really true. Violet believed her mother, because she always trusted her.

  Violet decided that she trusted Willis. She couldn’t say why, exactly, but maybe the way he treated her, and the open look on his face, and the sound of his voice, all seemed to tell her that he was telling a true story, not make believe.

  And anyway, she wanted to believe him. To know someone in a real ghost story was really different. The novelty displaced in her childish mind the pity of his situation.

  As for Willis, when he knew she was sleeping, he ended his song, dropping his knife hand to the ground. He sat with his head on his knees, remembering every word, the look of her sweet face, and the touch of a human hand.

  When the Aubreys arose, no one could figure out how the flashlight batteries had gotten turned around the wrong way, or who had left the marshmallows out, where the bag now swarmed with ants; or who had carved a tiny wooden heart and tucked it into the stones of the fireplace. Violet remembered nothing at all.

  Violet’s brother drilled a hole through the wooden heart and Violet wore it on a black silk cord around her neck for a long time.

  BLACKBIRCH

  2006

  The summer that Violet was fourteen, she and her family camped out at Blackbirch River several times that year, starting as early as spring break, when a dusting of snow had greeted the family in the morning, and the family had huddled by the fireplace drinking hot cocoa. By now, only Jill and Violet were still at home. Dennis and Greta were spending their summers working to pay college loans, and the family had traded the huge, musty old army tent for a brightly-colored vestibule tent that doubled as a screen house. Violet and Jill liked to sleep in the screen section, where they could see the stars and the fireflies winking, and laugh at the mosquitoes that clustered whining on the screening.

  Violet and Jill spent the day checking all their usual special places in the woods. Drawn by danger, they skirted the massive beech that hosted a poison ivy vine, the furred roots embracing the tree and branching out in glistening, wicked leaves that shone red at the tips. They crawled on all fours through the green tunnels between sword ferns, because they had done so as small girls. They found the dead tree with a great, grinning face carved into it. Farther up the creek a driftwood stump had been fashioned into a figurehead, a robed female watching over the water. The face was cracked and almost

  unrecognizable, but the form was graceful, one slender hand lifted to the chest. Once, when they were small, Jill had found a bird carved from pine wood, and Dennis a deer. There were no new finds today, however, and on their way back to the campsite the girls picked up sticks for the fire they would have that night.

  After hours of swimming and exploring, the hypnotic flames of the fire quickly lulled the tired sisters to sleep, stomachs full with chicken kebabs and marshmallows toasted over the flames. They practically sleepwalked to the tent and fell into their sleeping bags.

  Violet rolled over in the night at some point and through the mosquito netting, she could see that there was someone outside the tent. She squinted to see if it was her Dad, but the figure was lankier, the hair longer. She sat up, feeling strangely, beginning to be alarmed, when the person outside called softly—

  “Violet? It’s Willis.”

  Violet smiled in the dark, surprised that again, she had not recognized her friend. “Hold on,” she whispered. She unzipped the screen netting and stepped out into the night, stepping into her flip-flops on the way out. She took his hand as they walked quietly away from the campsite.

  They walked in the woods for hours, to the end of the pine forest at one end, where it opened to backyards of the houses that bordered East Wentham, and the other direction, to where the old sugarbush opened to cornfields, Christ the King Church visible on a rise surrounded by manicured lawn. Willis showed her how to strip the outer bark of the black birch and taste the spicy inner bark, which sweetened the breath and tasted somewhere between root beer and sassafrass.

  She told him about her friends at school, and silly stories about her teachers, and her youth group, how cool the last youth pastor had been and how the new guy was really trying but the rapport wasn’t there yet, and how her Mom had gone back to nursing to help with college for all the kids, and how her new bicycle had been stolen that spring when she was at the park playing softball with her friends, and a million other things about her life. Violet was not normally so talkative, but Willis was always attentive and hungry for stories of life outside the woods, with family and friends.

  She had long accepted Willis’s reluctance to talk about his own family. Those memories were old; the remembered were long gone. Their mossy headstones leaned in the old cemetery on the farm in East Wentham. His brother’s descendants were dwelling in the farmhouse on the hill. They had expanded and mechanized everything on the farm during the nineteen-sixties, after the Rural Electrification Project had come to East Wentham. All the woodlot and sugarbush had been cut down to make room for more pasture and the huge, Quonset-roofed milking parlor. The house where Willis had been born sat in a sea of timothy grass and tarmac, and he had not been near it in decades. It wasn’t even the main dwelling anymore—a modern house had been built farther back from the road, and the old, original house was rented to hired hands. Willis’s stories, when he told them, had to do with encounters with bears and owls, with shooting stars and with moon dogs, with people observed and overheard from afar.

  Finally they wound up within sight of the campsite again, where they paused. “I better go to bed, Willis,” Violet yawned. Unaccountably, she burst into tears. “I’ll go to bed and wake up in the morning and not remember anything we said or did or saw, and I don’t want to forget you again—what if we move away and never come back here? And I won’t even know I forgot you, and you’ll be walking around here looking, and trapped in the ground as soon as the sun comes up—”

  Willis’s arm went around her shoulder, pulling her against his chest. She felt the lamb’s wool of his waistcoat, the polished antler buttons bumpy against her cheek. The surprise of it, and the unexpected pleasure of being close to him, subdued her crying. His calloused, woodworker’s hands stroked her hair, his chin laid over her head, shushing softly.

  She was soon sniffling and dropped her arms from his waist to rub her face. Before he let her go, he tilted her face up to his. “How old are you now, Violet?”

  “Fourteen,” she said, a little defensively.

  Willis smiled as if to himself, his hand still on her cheek, his thumb tracing her still-damp cheekbone. Then he pressed his lips to her forehead and let her go.

  “Violet, I’ll be here when you come back. And I have faith that you’ll come back to me. So don’t worry. Go on back in the tent. It’s nearly dawn. I’ll wait while you fall asleep.”

  “Okay, Will. Bye for now.” She went to the tent and unzipped the screen flap. Before climbing inside, she turned back to him and waved. She mouthed “good-bye” again. Inside, she lay softly next to her sister. In the corner of the tent was her journal. In the dark she unclipped the pen from the spiral binding, and while Willis hummed almost inaudibly, she wrote in the dark.

  Remember Willis. I can’t forget him!!!!! He needs me, he has no one else. And besides that I really love him!!!!

  She closed the journal and snuggled down in the sleeping bag. She thought vaguely that she should try to stay awake until dawn. Maybe she wouldn’t forget… but she was so sleepy. She listened to him singing softly the song he always sang. If I stay awake… it can’t be much longer until the dawn…

  She couldn’t see that she had written her note over a page that was already filled with writing, and was unreadable.

  MOONSHADOW

  The next day brought heavy rain, runni
ng down the windows of the car as the Aubrey family drove home. Violet watched the trees go by in a yellow green blur.

  Something had happened in the night. What was it? Her heart remembered, but her mind refused to come up with anything. No images, no words. Only feelings. No, more than just emotion: a knowledge that was beyond words. The knowledge was forgotten, but the aching sense of ‘beyond’ remained.

  There was a shape in the night, bathed in moonlight which limned only darkness. For the shadow in her heart, there was no name. She desperately wished there was a name.

  THE DEATH OF WILLIS WOOD

  2007

  “Violet,” Willis was calling, softly.

  Todd Aubrey was awake in the tent, and there was someone outside. He quickly slid out of his sleeping bag and out of the tent.

  There was a form in the darkness, and it was not expecting Violet’s father to come out.

  “Who’s there?” he barked as loudly as he could without waking his family.

  The figure in the dark took a hesitant step backwards.

  “Sir, my name is Willis Wood. I am a friend of Violet’s.”

  “A friend of Violet’s? I don’t recall her ever mentioning you. Did she invite you to come camping?”

  Todd’s voice was still rough with sleep and suspicion. “It’s the middle of the night, young man.” Now his eyes were beginning to pick up details—rather shaggy hair and odd clothing did not ease his mind.

  “Uh… let me try and explain.” A few awkward moments passed, during which Todd Aubrey decided at least that the young man was not dangerous, anyway. Still, coming to see his daughter in the middle of the woods, in

  the middle of the night… Todd crossed his arms and waited.

  “Sir, I mean your daughter no harm. I live here, and sometimes I have come by when you are camping, now and again, and we’ve talked. If she’s never mentioned me, it’s because she doesn’t remember me. It’s not easy to explain. I am… something of a ghost, I suppose you might say…”

  “Hold on a minute. You’ve been here before, and talked with my fifteen year-old daughter, and you’re saying that she remembers nothing? Ghost? Are you on drugs, or just crazy?”

  The boy looked genuinely pained, and Todd almost regretted his harsh words. Still, what rational person would say such a thing?

  “Just a minute, young man. Don’t go anywhere.”

  Todd crawled back inside the tent, past his sleeping daughters, and gently shook his wife awake.

  “Jess, Jess, wake up,” he whispered. “There’s some guy outside. I think he’s harmless, but call the police just the same.”

  Jessica Aubrey was a nurse, one of those people who slept soundly but woke up sharply, ready for any night emergency. Without a word, she found her cell phone and called 9-1-1. Todd heard her voice speaking softly with the dispatcher while he crawled back out of the tent, where the young man was waiting as instructed.

  Todd decided to act casual rather than confront the boy. “So, Willis, how long have you known Violet?”

  “Seven years—no, eight.”

  “Do you come here often?”

  “I live here, sir.”

  “I mean, Willis, do you often come and visit my daughters in the night?”

  “It’s only Violet—Mr. Aubrey, is it? Her father?”

  “Yes, I’m her Dad. You understand—“

  “Yes sir, I do understand that you are probably very affronted with me, and wish me to make some account of myself.”

  Todd waited.

  “Very well, sir. The long and short of it is that I am under a curse. I cannot leave this wood, nor am I alive in the daytime. I entered the forest in 1817. You may still find my name in church records. I was born 1797 in East Wentham. My family still owns the farm up there, but I’ve not been in contact with them for, well, several generations.

  “I met Violet when she got lost in the woods one night. I—I befriended her, thinking no harm in it. In the morning, she forgets even my name, and thinks it was all a dream. As will you, sir.”

  Crazy as a loon, or high as a kite, thought Todd, speechless with alarm. Yet Willis’s presence was not threatening, just odd. His white shirt was long with complicated tucks down the front, with a long vest hanging open over that, and he wore handmade-looking brogan shoes, and his golden-brown hair was rather long. Just some hippie kid who is too high to judge any better, he thought. His alarm abated and he began to feel sorry for him.

  “You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “I was born here. My parents were Scottish. I spent most of my childhood on the farm with them, so I sound a bit like that.”

  “Willis, do you live with your parents?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you have a job?”

  “No sir. I used to work on my family’s dairy farm. Also I used to carve wood. I even spent a year in Portsmouth Shipyard, carving figureheads and scrollwork and such, for ships. And I went to sea for a time. But I came home and made furniture with my uncle after that.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “As I said, Mr. Aubrey, I live here in these woods.” His manner had become somewhat dejected, Todd noticed. “Sir, I understand it is impossible for you to credit what I am saying. But it is God’s honest truth.”

  “Well, son, I can see that you seem to believe it, at least right now. But it can hardly be true. No one can live for two hundred years, cursed or not. So maybe when you have a few hours to come down off of whatever you’re on, you’ll be ready for truth.”

  Willis sat silently. After a few minutes he said, “Well, I’ll take my leave now, sir.”

  “No, son, I’d like you to stay here. There are some people coming who I’d like you to meet.” And who’ll get you off my property and away from my family, with maybe a nice restraining order to nail things, thought Todd.

  Willis seemed to shrug slightly and settle in to his seat. Todd relaxed a little.

  They sat for a long while in a tense silence. Todd prayed about what to say next.

  “Willis, do you believe in God?”

  “I do, sir. My family attended Valley Wesleyan Church, but that one burned down in the 1920s or so. They built the East Wentham Methodist Church on the site.”

  He has local history down pretty good, anyway. Consistent, for a crazy, thought Todd. He decided to let that pass. “Church membership doesn’t guarantee heaven. Jesus didn’t die on the cross just so that you could join a church.”

  Willis looked interested and wasn’t objecting. And he wasn’t trotting out the usual granola philosophy about many-paths-to-God, either.

  “Christ’s death on the cross was to pay for your sins and mine. He rose again to demonstrate that the price was paid, and to give us hope of having eternal life by believing in Him. It doesn’t come by church or anything we do, it is a gift of grace.”

  “I believe all that, sir. The thing being… I’m not sure but what I’m not already dead.”

  Todd quoted, “‘You were dead in trespasses and sins…’”

  Willis filled in the rest for him, in pure King James English. “‘Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience.’” Willis lowered his head to his knees. “That spirit holds me captive, and I am a child of disobedience, that I know right well. That is exactly what got me into this situation.”

  “Then maybe you recall how the rest of that passage goes,” Todd went on. “‘But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in sins, has made us alive together with Christ—by grace you are saved.’”

  Willis was silent for a time. “Can God still love me? Can grace save me? I cry to the heavens, and no answer comes. I search for my release, but find only darkness and loneliness. I die every morning, and wake to darkness. God knows, I am so lonely.”

  Willis lifted his head and looked Todd in
the eye, seeming to have collected himself.

  “If I worried you by coming here, sir, I am sorry. It is only that I see your family, the companionship that I have missed for so long. It was never my intention to disturb that. And I am sorry to have bothered you. Friends are hard to come by, when you’re a ghost.”

  This last was said, not pitifully, but matter-of-factly. Todd sought vainly for a reply, but then Jessica Aubrey was crawling out of the tent, cell phone in hand. “They want to talk to you,” she said. She handed him the phone, and sat eyeing the stranger who was sitting quietly a few feet away, near the faintly glowing embers on the hearth.

  “Yes, he’s still here. No, but he is trespassing, and he seems…” he walked few feet away, talking in low tones on the phone. Then he came back, and handed the phone back to his wife. “Willis, let’s walk out and meet some folks, all right?”

  Todd murmured a hurried “Don’t worry” to Jessica.

  Willis stood with a resigned expression and followed Todd meekly away from the tent.

  They walked by the light of Todd’s flashlight and met the county sheriff and Frank Cronin, who lived nearby, coming down the trail. Willis winced away from the brilliant beam of the outsized flashlight the sheriff carried. Terse introductions were made and the sheriff examined the young man’s face, muttering that his pupils were normal. He performed a drunkenness test on Willis, who submitted quietly and passed with flying colors. Willis carried no identification, but a turn of his pockets revealed no drug paraphernalia, either. The sheriff took his knife, bow and quiver, which Willis handed him without objection.

  Sheriff Amundsen told Willis, “Well, son, you’re trespassing, and you will be escorted off this land. After that where you go is your business. Do you have any personal items back there in the woods you need to fetch?”