SLEEPY HOLLOW: General of the Dead (Jason Crane Book 3)

by Gleaves, Richard

  We sent our letter, offering Ichabod the schoolmaster position, and waited.

  July 26th, 1850

  I have been sick, and have not been able to write, for bleeding does not actually cure all ills, the doctors now say, and I have been too clotted and choleric to risk drawing ink. I fear that this might be my last illness! I dream of my mother in the slough. I am fevered and agitated, always. I was forced to roast poor Bettany tonight, for spilling the soup. Damn the girl. You were so courteous to bury her for me, Dylan. I must be feebler than I realize, for I’d not ordinarily leave so much bone behind.

  Even now I cannot write, for my hands are too blistered. Yes, I too feel guilt on occasion. I will continue once they have healed. If I live.

  August 31st, 1850

  I have never felt better in my life, Dylan. My work has resumed, and I am fiercely optimistic. I have possessed another! I have slipped from my body and looked through another’s eyes. It is peculiar and thrilling. A pity the girl died from it. I must find a young maid now to step into permanently!

  My Horseman looks so handsome! I have bled him to beauty five times, but cannot remove him from his lantern. Whenever I attempt it, he crumbles back to bone. I must find the answer. By my blood, a necromancer shall be born. Mother Hulda’s prophecy will be fulfilled before I die. I swear it! And if not, you are also my blood, and you must continue. Pass this knowledge to some Deep Witch who can raise me from the dead with my monster!

  For now, I want to finish this tale. I have bled a great bowlful and I shall write until morning!

  Today is your father’s seventieth birthday. How strange it is to see Brom grown feeble, he who was such a jolly brute in his prime. He and Washington Irving are brimming with plans for their ridiculous Halloween frolic at Wolfert’s Roost. (Or rather at Irving’s “Sunnyside.” Ridiculous name. Sounds rather like breakfast!) Brom has invited Ichabod to town, just as Cornelia and I did, long ago. He’s done it over my objections. I have no wish to see Ichabod Pumpkin-Head again. I am living too much in the past already.

  I disapprove of Irving, but I cannot dissuade your father from the friendship. How the little shopkeeps of Tarrytown bow and scrape to that scribbler! Damn him. I could have written a horseman tale, just as well as he. Better, for I was there. I saw. I know the truth. My pen cannot speak, while his can, but in this small book, this first-edition, one-of-a-kind printing, written in its author’s blood, I can divulge those few facts my addled old brain can remember and set certain things straight. Do not believe all that you read in Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, my Dylan. Believe your grandmother. Trust in her. For she was the true author of those events.

  Authorship is a species of magic, is it not? Let me bewitch your head and conjure a spirit with it. Let me conjure Ichabod Crane.

  I call him “Pumpkin-Head,” for that’s what he was. My father had spoken of such a hairstyle, but I’d never seen it on a living man. It was the law, in puritan Connecticut, that men be neatly groomed. To comply, a man’s hair could be no longer than the rim of a standard bowl placed on his head. When such a bowl was not available, barbers substituted the hollowed top of a pumpkin. The entire time I knew Ichabod Crane, I constantly envisioned a little curling stem protruding from his auburn head, and I fought an urge to lift his haircut off and slip a candle inside his noggin.

  Cornelia declared herself his patron, and Crane giddily accepted her praise. He related the tale of Gory Brook, as it had been told to him, and I found it much altered, so that the Hessians were more numerous, the fight more desperate, and William more valiant. I kept silent.

  I was given the “honor” of helping Ichabod establish his new school. He assured us that our children would be speaking the King’s English within a week. For a while, he shared a room with Brom, who took to him as a brother, albeit with gentle ribbing and backslaps. Brom regaled his new friend with tales of hunting in the woods with his Indian girl. Ichabod read pirate stories and Brom acted them out, swinging his thresher in the yard, dueling sea monsters while Ichabod narrated from the porch.

  As difficult as this might be to believe, Ichabod and I also became friends. Despite his father’s crime, despite his mission to scour the Dutch-ness from my Knickerbocker neighbors, despite his airs of intellectual superiority, his ignorance of our manners and customs, his insatiable appetite, his heretical beliefs, his abuse of his Dutch pupils, bizarre habits of dress, ludicrous appearance, and tendency to trip over his own huge feet, I rather enjoyed him.

  He loved ghost stories.

  His fascination with them surpassed even my own. He owned Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft and was as hungry for Old Cotton as a tapestry moth. He and I would sit at fireside, sometimes until dawn, theorizing on the powers and origins of the Daughters of the Beast. I invented things for him, drawing upon the folktales of my father. I told him that an acorn on his windowsill would thwart a lightning strike. He dutifully placed one there. I explained that jingle bells drove away demons. Soon everyone in the village knew Ichabod’s approach miles in advance. I whispered in his jug ears that a black dog stalked our cornfield, that it had the face of an ape and the horns of a ram, that it had been tried as a witch and sentenced to hang! Ichabod refused corn for a month.

  It amused me to see him so frightened by my tales, for the man sat not two feet from an authentic witch—with a full four murders to my name, though I might be forgetting a few—and he had no idea. He feared the tapping of beetles against his windowpane more than he feared me, poor scarecrow!

  Yet Ichabod was gentle, as Baltus had been gentle. So despite my misgivings and a fifteen-year age difference…

  He and I became lovers.

  I wish I could have seen the look on your face as you read that. I am jesting with you, Dylan. I found the man physically repulsive and never entertained the notion of sleeping with him. Aren’t I a wicked old witch? Brom didn’t get his sense of humor from his father (from either of them).

  Ichabod did not stay with us always. He slept often at homes in the Overback, as his schoolhouse stood nearer the more prosperous farms. He came back to us every Sunday, for Reverend Smith—a large fellow perpetually covered in snuff—had made him our singing-master. (Smith was tone deaf.) After services at the nearby church, Ichabod and I would walk through the burying ground and he would read headstones to me. I would nod and smile, but I kept my eyes on the shallow indentation of my Horseman’s grave. Why did he not rise? His enemy’s son stood over his very bones!

  (Of Ichabod’s exploits in the Overback, I know of only one incident. He stayed overnight in the hayloft of Martling’s son but was turned out for eating the winter storage. Young Martling went up one morning to find that Ichabod had devoured everything from the cucumbers and almonds to the maple candy sent down from Wappinger’s Falls. In one night!)

  Ichabod was shunned by many of the farmers. He was the first secular schoolmaster in the village, which made him the chief heretic of Tarrytown, as far as they were concerned. They begrudged him every comfort and refused to donate anything to the new school. Cornelia always had more ambition than foresight. She paid for the building but scrimped, for she’d tired of the project. The school was only a single room of rough-hewn logs. Not even four walls but three, with the fourth being the bare dirt of the hillside.

  Ichabod’s method for teaching English was simplicity itself, and rather clever. He gave, every day, to the first scholar who used a Dutch word, a little pewter medal. The scholar would pass his medal to the next child who used Dutch, and so on. The unlucky student who possessed the medal at the close of school received a sound thrashing. No one wanted to risk that fate, and English prevailed in his classroom. He employed “whispering sticks”—branches placed in the mouths of students as a bit is placed in the mouth of a horse—for the same purpose of “gentle guidance.” He dispensed dunce caps, with the words “TELL-TALE” and “BITE-FINGER BABY” or, on one occasion, “PERT MISS PRAT-A-FACE.” And then there was his dreaded birch branc
h, known by the name of Tiptoe Bobby, weighted by a raccoon tail at the end. Oh, the children feared Old Bobby. I was not particularly scandalized. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, and sharp correction is the only cure for their natural pride and intractableness. Still, whenever he heard that a new student was the descendant of a fallen revolutionary martyr, the child was gathered to the schoolmaster’s bosom and given a kerchief of figs and chocolates.

  I spent that summer listening to Ichabod snore, gazing into the eye sockets of the Horseman’s skull as my blood ran into its teeth. “Why do you not rise? What more can I offer?”

  Ichabod had not provoked my Horseman back to life, but I found another use for the schoolmaster, one I did not expect.

  He accompanied Brom and I to Wolfert’s Roost to dine with Baltus and his wife. The Roost was without peer among the Tarrytown farms. Baltus had inherited it upon the death of old Petrus, just as he’d expected. I felt nothing but pity for Margaretha Van Tassel, Baltus’s wife, who we called “Greet.” How miserable must she be, married to a fat man? Baltus had grown even wider in prosperity, though he had the same twinkle and love of ghost stories.

  He and I had never spoken of our night in the wagon, or our broken engagement. He’d been married already when I returned from New York. He gave me courtesy and politeness, but not warmth. I answered in kind. I had no use for him, though I had use of his daughter.

  Katrina Van Tassel was sixteen that year, and ready for marriage. She was a pretty thing and knew it. Useless for anything but flower-growing and wardrobe selection. A Cornelia in miniature, and I despised her, truly. Yet I’d chosen her to wed Brom. I wanted my quarry, and I could see no means other than a profitable inheritance. I could not remarry, not so long as Hermanus was safely protected behind bars, and so I resolved to yoke Brom to a rich wife. Brom knew not to defy my wishes, but he delayed. He had fallen for his Indian friend, and would have married her had I permitted it, which was out of the question.

  I despaired at dinner. Little dimpled Katrina fluttered about the table, waiting on her father. Brom’s table manners did not impress, and she often rolled her eyes. Twice I kicked my son under the table for his uncouth finger-licking.

  After our meal, Ichabod enchanted Katrina with compliments and graceful language, while Brom sulked in a corner. I lectured him privately. “Why can’t you be more like Ichabod? Women prefer men who are soft-spoken. That could be you, if you only tried.”

  Oh, we all become our mothers, do we not?

  “She knows I have intentions,” Brom muttered. “I’m not ready to marry. I have time. It’s not as if any other man would dare steal her from me.”

  I decided that Brom needed a rival. One who would whet his competitive nature, yet have no chance of succeeding with Katrina. I whispered in Ichabod’s ear on the ride home. “Katrina couldn’t take her eyes off you.”

  Then I sat back and watched the fun.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  “Agathe’s Tale ~ Part Nine”

  September 1st, 1850

  My whispered words to Ichabod might have been the Shot Heard Round the World, for they started a great war. I told Brom that Ichabod had secretly taken posies to Katrina, and the boys’ fine brotherhood came to an abrupt end. Brom dropped his Indian girl and went a-wooing Katrina, just as I’d hoped. Nothing whets a man’s appetite for courtship like fear of embarrassment in the eyes of his friends.

  Brom inflicted innumerable pranks on our schoolmaster. He and his Sleepy Hollow Boys stripped Ichabod nude, tied him up, and left him in the tree fort overnight, so that his wailings might be mistaken for a banshee in the hills. They snuck into his schoolhouse and drew lewd pictures on all the slates. They beat the schoolmaster bloody behind Carl’s Mill. All in good fun, of course. I remember one admirable prank. Ichabod needed money, and so, in addition to his position as our singing-master, he petitioned Reverend Smith to be named our Aanspreecker, the funeral-inviter. Ichabod wore a gloomy black coat and wide hat fluttering with streamers of crepe and his job was to go ’round informing the neighborhood when someone died. For example, when I burned Dietrich Storm to death for depositing half my quarry-savings in an unsafe New York bank, Ichabod walked overland from the Penny Bridge to Davids’ Hill, full of somber self-importance, acting as a human obituary notice at twelve guilders a corpse. Brom and his boys took advantage of Crane’s ignorance of barnyard Dutch and sent him door to door gravely announcing the death of Debiel Oelewapper, or “Moron Nincompoop.” No one told him, and when he arrived for the funeral he found an empty church and a scarecrow laid out in a pine box, with Tiptoe Bobby tucked under its arm.

  Yet Crane persisted in his courtship of Katrina, for he trusted my counsel.

  “My son is jealous. You’ve won her heart.”

  “Katrina admires courage. You must fight dragons for her.”

  “The beatings will cease, once she accepts you.”

  I flattered Ichabod. I exaggerated the Van Tassel wealth. I denounced the constant pranks, while helping Brom devise new ones. I was the true coquette manipulating those two, not some farm girl. I resolved that once Brom had succeeded, I would murder Ichabod and that would be that. A happy ending all around.

  I knew Brom would succeed with her. He was handsome and strong, the picture of a perfect groom. The schoolmaster was a comedic grotesquerie. So I was naturally flummoxed and bewildered when Brom came home one afternoon, full of vexations, and announced that Katrina and Ichabod…

  … were in love.

  The moment I heard this news, I mounted Daredevil, Brom’s favorite, and took off, galloping across the burying ground, thumping over the Church Bridge, cursing at the schoolmaster. I would kill Ichabod. I would throw his broken body from the top of Davids’ Hill. I plotted tortures and mutilations all the way to the schoolhouse. I leapt from the saddle and barged inside. A dozen children spun in their seats. I strode up the aisle and grabbed the ruffled collar of the incredulous schoolmaster.

  “We must talk, my dear.”

  Ichabod dismissed the children. As their gleeful cheers trailed down the hill, I took a seat on a pine bench, my back against the rough logs, and crossed my arms. “Have you won the Van Tassel girl?”

  “Are you not glad for me?”

  Despite my anger, I was not prepared to drop my mask, at least not yet. Ichabod might let some vital detail slip. “Of course, but why such secrecy? Brom tells me she loves you.”

  He sank onto a bench, grinning like a lovesick codfish. “Oh, my friend. A thousand thanks and blessings. You believed the impossible and steeled my will. Without your encouragement I might never have approached her, let alone pursued her. I have never been successful with the fair sex. You may not have noticed, but I am no Adonis.”

  “You are too modest.”

  “I am honest. Even in boyhood they ridiculed me. My father thought I should apply myself to rigorous exercise and try to become more… rustic. I envy Brom. I do. I could never be such a…”

  “Brute?”

  “Oh, Brom is no brute. He has a tender heart, when he shows it. He only treats me ill because others encourage it, and because he is too proud to concede to any rival, even his friend Ichabod. I hope that, once our contest is over, you will tell him I bear no ill will. For all my discomforts, I have rather enjoyed our games.”

  “I shall. But explain. How did you win her?”

  That codfish look returned. He drew his knees up and hugged them, as if his stockinged legs were a paramour. “It was the music. I dared not hope that she would accept my invitation to sing at church, given how distant her farm is. We shared a songbook one day. ‘In linked sweetness long drawn out’ was the tune.” He hummed it. His voice was very nasal, rather like a rusty hinge. “We turned the page together and our fingers touched. I dropped the music. Katrina and I reached down for it at the same moment and our foreheads struck.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “So you knocked the sense out of her.”

  He grinned, kissed his fi
ngertips, and pressed them to the precious noggin-spot. “She had a terrible goose egg the next day, and covered it with a sweet little bonnet. Do you mind if I eat, by the way?”

  He fished through a basket and withdrew a half chicken wrapped in oily paper. He nibbled a drumstick as he spoke. Ichabod habitually substituted swallowing for punctuation.

  “I was dreadfully concerned when it happened, thinking I had given her an injury. My skull is uncommonly thick. I rushed her to the millpond, where I produced this very handkerchief. I wet it and pressed it to her forehead, like so. And I… held it there. She allowed me to soothe her. What magic waters that millpond must contain. We sat on the grass and spoke of music and the meaning of the words. They are from Milton: ‘In linked sweetness long drawn out.’ May I recite it to you?”

  By the end of the poem, he had finished the chicken and had raised a vine-ful of green grapes. He lay on his back and fed them to himself, sighing as if each morsel came from his lover’s hand. “We whisper in linked sweetness. And each Saturday, after our rehearsal, Miss Van Tassel and I walk in the sun together, and I read to her.”

  “Reading is wasted on farmers’ daughters.”

  Ichabod sat up and actually threw a grape at me. “She is an educated girl. Her father has quite a library. Baltus and I tell ghost stories to each other.”

  I had heard enough. I seized the basket and emptied it on his head, staining his shirt with honey. “How dare you throw a grape at me!”

  He peered meekly from beneath the basket. “Have I offended you?”

  I composed myself. “It’s not like you to waste food.”

  He laughed easily, thinking it a grand prank. He bounced another grape off my forehead. I retrieved it from the floor and threw it back at him hard. He caught it in his mouth. I left him honey-covered, lying on that bench, kissing a bright red apple as if it were his beloved’s lips.