It will be your intention to take them by surprise, to give them no chance of escape, to seize, at least, the girl, and fight off the boy, if need be. You will have a photograph of him too now; you will know that he is tall, but not as tall as you; in hand to hand combat, if it comes to that, your weak lungs and your damaged heart might be able to hold out long enough to subdue him, and if not…well, you would have tried.
You will poke around in the various cellar holes, you will visit the old dam with thin ice still on the edges of the millpond, you will sneak around the old leaning shanty, Dudleytown’s one remaining building, you will follow the Appalachian Trail as far as the rock which I had styled the Landlocked Whale, you will creep up and down the length of Dudleytown Road, scanning the woods and the walls and the old cellar holes. Dr. Barto would have admired you for all the exercise you will be getting, exploring every path and trail and glade.
You won’t see a soul.
And all you will find, as evidence that anybody had ever been there, except for the cellar holes and stone walls and the shanty, is, in a glade filled with some kind of evergreen shrub (the laurel will not whitely bloom for a good while yet, G, and you know nothing about plant identification, anyway), what appears to be the dark remains of some kind of campfire, or some kind of fire. You will poke about among the ashes and find a small fragment of what appears to be burned cloth of some kind, yellow, some kind of yellow canvas, or duck perhaps, somebody had burned their knapsack, perhaps, or something. From the looks of it, the fire has not been lit for many months.
And you will get out quickly, before dusk, because, as you will say to yourself, the place “gives you the creeps.” The villager in Cornwall Bridge you had interviewed, Miss Mary Elizabeth Evans, an old spinster, who had briefly met Day when he’d been trying to find Dudleytown, will have told you all about the infamous “Curse of Dudleytown,” and you will have no inclination to dawdle longer than necessary, to tempt or disturb any ghosts or presences or whatever, to bring any further bad luck upon yourself. As soon as you are convinced that there is no one in Dudleytown, you will return to your Volvo and drive away.
You won’t have found my father’s grave either.
But you will be more thorough than Day or Diana had been, in attempting to document the existence of my family in Dudleytown. You will visit the Cornwall Town Clerk and the Cornwall Library, where the librarian will be only too happy to give you access to all her material. You will look to her like a genuine scholar, which you are. You will find, alas, no mention of any Montrosses. There will be a “McRoss” or two, but not in Dudleytown proper. You will find records of a family referred to as “Monti Rosso,” but, judging from the various given names, they were all of Mediterranean origin. Ditto the Monterazzis. The Manterussels were apparently Flemish in origin. The Montrusches were German. At last, with a cry of elation which will cause the librarian to put her index finger to her lips, you will discover a “Daniela Latham Mountrose,” but, upon further investigation, will find that she was only an old weaver who had lived in West Cornwall, not Dudleytown, and died in 1834 at the age of eighty. Still, you will think, possibly the descendants of this “Mountrose” changed the spelling of the name, as frequently happens, and moved into Dudleytown. You won’t be able to discount the possibility. But neither will you be able to prove it. There are no records of any Montrosses or Mountroses in Dudleytown.
And now you will be left with a bigger question: Why had Diana and Day left Dudleytown? And where had they gone? You will make casual inquiries around the village of Cornwall Bridge, asking if anyone had seen them. This is how you will meet Felix G. Spofford, the man who had participated in, and will report to you on, the eviction of the “Jesus freaks” from Dudleytown. But no, he won’t have any idea where they might have gone. To hell, he hopes.
This is where we will last catch sight of the eye of your “I,” G. Would you like to have your eye back, your “I” back, G? Would you use it properly? What is more, would you use it honestly? I’m afraid, G, that if I were to give you your “I” back, you might very well do something sneaky, such as having Day killed or disabled during the riot and eviction of the Jesus freaks from Dudleytown, so that you could have Diana all to yourself. That will not do. That will not do at all.
So you will go on. You will continue the search, following your “hunch,” which will be based, albeit weakly, on that information Mrs. Whittacker has given you about the false lead of gun-wounded “Mrs. C. Day Whittacker” in the Woodstock Hospital. You will assume, for the moment, that Diana could have been that victim, and you will surmise that the couple had chosen, or stumbled upon, a ghost town in Vermont somewhere in the vicinity of Woodstock. You are, I must admit, quite familiar with the state of Vermont. You know it has an abundance of ghost villages, if not ghost towns, and you will now be faced with the relatively easy task of making a map of these in order to determine which one of them is closest to Woodstock. Their very names are poetry to you: Green River, Halifax Center, Concord Corner, Goose Green, Greenbank Hollow, Waitsfield Common…and Five Corners. When your research is completed, you will discover that Five Corners is much closer to Woodstock than any of the others.
Early April will find you, at last, driving your Volvo merrily up Hale Hollow Road into the place where five little roads come together to mark the spot of a bygone community. But in early April, if the snows have gone (and they won’t all have), the back roads of Vermont become quagmires, and you will bog your Volvo hopelessly in the center of what had been the Main Street of Five Corners, right out in front of where Glen House Hotel had stood. Undaunted, you will abandon your car and set out on foot to find our couple. Your disappointment in not finding them there will somehow be greater than your disappointment in not having found them in Dudleytown. It will be as if all your knowledge of Vermont ghost villages is for nothing. You will find Day’s lean-to, collapsed beneath the snows of yestermonths, on the slope of the McLowerys’ back yard. You will find other evidence that they, or somebody, had indeed been there and gone: their campfire (you will sift nothing of consequence from its ashes), the trench of their latrine, their clothesline still stretched between two trees. You will take note of their ecological consciousness: they didn’t litter, they didn’t leave any trash behind. You will get down on your knees and peer underneath the collapsed lean-to. It is dark under there. You will strike a match. Back in one corner you will see something. You will fetch a long stick and rake it out. It will be a portable cassette tape recorder, with one tape in it. The floor of the lean-to has sheltered it from the winter snows, and its batteries are still fresh. You will push a button, and listen, fiddling with the controls of your hearing aid; but without the benefit of lips to read, you won’t be able to make out the meaning of the words. It will be a man’s voice, though, you can tell. Not a boy’s voice. An older man’s voice.
And then, searching further around the camp, you will find the mound of earth. Obviously, from the shape of it, a grave. Obviously, from the looks of the dirt, rather freshly dug. You will not have any digging tools with you. Even if you were to have a shovel, you will not be able to dig into that grave. You will not have the nerve. If your Volvo weren’t stuck in the mud, you could rush right back to Woodstock and notify the authorities, and have one of them excavate this grave. But even if your Volvo weren’t stuck, you’ll not be able to do this. You will be afraid to. You will not be able to face up to reality if it should develop that the body buried in that grave is your beloved Diana.
Staggering farther around the camp, in near-panic and despair, you will come across the long rope dangling from a maple tree, one end of it tied to the uppermost branches, the other end tied neatly in a hangman’s noose. Only a good Boy Scout could have tied such a knot. And unless he had tied it for the unlikely purpose of hanging her with it, he must have used it on himself. He’d tried to hang himself once before, remember? Perversely almost, G, you will rejoice at this thought. Day is dead and buried, and Diana is yours.
If only you can find her.
You will keep the tape recorder and take it back to your car, wanting to get out of there and find someone who will listen to the tape for you and tell you what it says, in hopes of finding further clues. The penciled-on-paper poem you will have found resting on the grave is interesting, but offers no clue. I’ll be a sylphan sylphid if I can. All right, but where? Where has your sylvan sylphid gone?
You will heave and strain your bulk against the car’s fender, with the wheels in gear and spinning, trying to get it out of the mud. You will fetch large flat rocks and jam them under the tires of the car, and manage to inch the car a foot or so backwards, but, even so, you will begin to see that it is hopeless. In a last expenditure of desperate energy, you will take a deep breath and thrust your back up against the front grill of the car and push for all you are worth. Suddenly something will give…in your back: a sharp pain in your spinal column. You idiot, G; why must you always be attempting tasks that are too great for you? Now you will not only be without the use of your car but also without the use of your spine. It will pain you to move. Night will be coming on; you will not be able to walk three or four miles to the nearest house. You will have to spend the night in Five Corners.
An awful night. A terrible night. You will recline the seat of your Volvo as far as it would recline, not quite horizontal, and you will ease your ruptured back into it. You will lay there and smoke your Pall Malls and take sips from your flask of Old Grand-Dad, until the flask, a pint, is empty, but you will not be drugged enough to sleep or even to ease the pain in your back. You will make sure that all the doors of the car are locked from inside. You will leave your aid turned on, so high it sometimes will whistle in feedback and snap you out of your long reveries. You will grow cold and have to turn on the engine to heat the car, apologizing to the Things of the Night for the noise. And when you turn off the engine, the tinnitus in your ear will keep roaring.
Will you sleep at all that night, G? You must, because the dreams you will have are too strange to be the dreams of non-REM sleep…odd jumbled images: a schoolhouse stove, a two-hole privy, a Hermit at a Mine, Red Hair in the Water of a Pond. At the first peep of dawn your swollen bladder will force you out of the car.
During the night the mud will have frozen, the quagmire hardened, and you will find that it is relatively easy to back your Volvo out of it and make your getaway from that god-forsaken place. Your first pressing business will be to have your back attended to. You will return to Woodstock and, after breakfast, you will wait for the Woodstock Clinic to open for the day. There you will be treated by the good Dr. Henry Fox [copyeditor: again the shade slips, but doctors are hard to libel], who will have you X-rayed, examine the X-ray, and declare that you have a slipped shade—I mean, a slipped disk. He will ask you how you have slipped it. You will tell him. You will tell him that you were trying to find a couple of lost kids in Five Corners. He will smile. The nature of his smile will cause you to ask him if he is familiar with Five Corners. Oh yes, he will say, he knows of the place. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about these kids?” you will ask, and show him the two photographs. The doctor will hesitate, long enough for you to guess that he does know something about the kids, but all he will say is, evasively, “Well, I may have met them.” You will press him further, but he will say, “I’d rather not talk about it.” “All right,” you will say, “just tell me if you have any idea, any idea at all, of where either of them might have gone, north, west, east, south.” “South,” he will say. You will press him. “I don’t remember exactly,” he will say. “There was a time when the boy had been thinking about going south during the cold weather. Virginia, perhaps, or the Carolinas. But that was before—” “Before?” you will say, “before what?” He will change the subject. “Your slipped disk, Mr. G, needs attention. You must take care of it. You must stay off your feet as much as possible until it mends and stops aching.”
Since, as you well know, your own home is merely a drive of less than two hours from Woodstock, you will decide, albeit reluctantly, just to “drop in and check on things.” So you will go home. The house will be as you had left it, in fine disorder, sealed in snug but cold hibernation. Despite your aching back, you will find yourself lighting a fire in the fireplace. You will discover yourself hauling a bucket of water from the cistern in the cellar, because the plumbing is disconnected. You will not reconnect the plumbing. But you will stay.
“I’m just going around in circles,” you will say to yourself. “I’m right back where I started from.”
12
My dictionary is an old one, and well worn; it was one of only three books I owned in my last years in my final town; there were a number of words I had never learned from Henry Fox [not your Woodstock physician, G; it must be a common name; and, as you’ll discover, I had my own Henry Fox] and there is a word which I had never heard, much less learned, from him:
tin · ni · tus/te-nīt-es/n [L. ringing, tinnitus, fr. tinnitus, pp. of tinnire, to ring, of imit. origin]: a sensation of noise (as a ringing or roaring) that is purely subjective.
Purely subjective, yes, G, but nonetheless audible, distinct, constant, and maddening. Yours had begun when meningococcal meningitis, contracted from an unwashed peach, had burned out your auditory nerves at the age of twelve, but then the tinnitus had been a not altogether unpleasant chorus of crickets, cicadas, katydids, tree frogs, and occasionally a distant cowbell; these still remain, but now are cacophonously overlaid by a wild contrapuntal syncopation of throbbing instruments without earthly comparison, which, as the search for Diana Stoving has intensified, have become faster and louder and more urgent, a demented choir and brass band of devils each playing or singing in his own feverish tempo to drive you loose from reality…or to drive you to the end of your long, long search.
It is a wonder to me that you will have managed to keep your cool and to remain, so many weeks, throughout the month of April, alone in that house again. You will not resume chair caning, to give the devils the words of a commercial to accompany their music. One of the first little things you will do is weigh yourself, on the bathroom scale, and smile to see that you have shed six pounds already, down now to 219, where you haven’t been for years. The next thing you will do is make three copies of a letter: “Gentlemen: In preparation for an investigation I have been making into the whereabouts of certain American ghost towns and ghost villages, I would very much appreciate being informed if there are any of these located in your state.” You will mail these three copies to the Departments of Conservation and Development in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the State of North Carolina, and the State of South Carolina.
Your ruptured back will gradually mend. You will take up a kind of primitive living, not in emulation of Diana and Day but out of your reluctance to relight your antique furnace, reconnect the plumbing and electricity, and restore the house to its former functions. You will be tempted, for a while, to see if Cassandra Laigle is living at the Huddlesons’, and to invite her to move in with you if she wishes, or at least to ask her to listen to your tape recording for you and tell what it says. But you will be able to share neither your house nor your tape recording with anyone.
Eventually you will receive replies to two of your three letters. South Carolina will not answer. Perhaps they have no ghost towns. The Commonwealth of Virginia will appear to be off ended that you would think such a progressive state might harbor any ghost towns, but they will inform you of one—“not to mention, of course, Jamestown itself”—the old city of Warwick, on the James River, once the rival of Richmond as Virginia’s largest town, but now passed utterly into oblivion. It will sound like an interesting place, you will think, but it had obviously been a tidewater town, that is, a flatland town, and you will suspect that this “Daniel Lyam Montross,” or at least whichever of the two was following him around, had been a lover of hills, and thus would have eschewed the flatlands. How right you are, G. So you will turn to the other, the last, l
etter.
Which is from the State of North Carolina. “Dear Dr. G: In response to your letter of April 9, I am enclosing material describing Lost Cove, a mountain settlement near Burnsville, North Carolina, which is now unpopulated. I know of no other such communities in this state which would be suitable for your investigation. Most of the dwellings of Lost Cove are still standing, although I learned, only last week, that one of these dwellings burned recently, perhaps struck by lightning or ignited by vandals. Thank you for your interest in North Carolina.” Enclosed will be Xerox copies of various newspaper clippings about my beloved mountain aerie.
How very curious, G, that you will never go there! I think you would have liked it. I’m sure the four-mile hike along the Clinchfield railroad line to reach the place would have been good exercise for you, although in your physical condition the final mile up the mountain could have severely winded you, could probably have given you a heart attack.
Is that why you will not go there? Do you have some premonition that the great effort of trying to reach the place will kill you?
Or is your “excuse” simply a recognition that Lost Cove, if you would have failed to find either one of our couple there, will be your third strike? Three strikes and you’re out, is that it? Or have you managed to see a “pattern” emerging in what is actually only a coincidence: the seasonal migration of our couple: summer in Dudleytown, autumn in Five Corners, winter in Lost Cove, and now spring in—? It will be spring now; Lost Cove will be empty; after all the effort you would have to make to reach that place, even if it didn’t give you a fatal heart attack, you would have been defeated to find no one there.
Or will you decide that you do not want Lost Cove to be the place where you will find Diana, that it isn’t the right place, that you must look for her in some other place? I do not know why you will not go to Lost Cove; I am not, after all, merely your puppeteer (although I’ll confess to being in a hurry, now that you will be so close to finding me).
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 70
