A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  Below me, down the hill, there were several outbuildings and what might have been a stream. To the left, there might have been a marsh. I let my eye wander in that direction and spotted what looked like might be a well house.

  I was certain that the woman had gone the other way, but if the water for which I was searching was to the left, what was the point of following her? I told myself that she was going back to the office to change and go home.

  I walked along the path that led to the gazebo behind the house. Huge blue hostas lined it on one side, and a perfectly manicured lawn bounded it on the other. I had a momentary vision of the grandeur of the place in its prime: stunning gardens, hilltop view, hot and cold running water in a time when most people didn’t bathe. Nothing but a very strong curse indeed could cause such beauty to come to such desolation.

  The gazebo may have been a more modern touch; it looked to be in very good shape, but it was hard to tell in the moonlight. Beyond it, there were steps that descended to a large reservoir and an old stone building—clearly, the well from which the house had once gotten its water.

  As I made my way down the stone steps toward the well house, I was certain I heard someone else in the surrounding woods. In a sudden shift of cloud and wind, the moon revealed a moving shadow in the trees. I moved more cautiously, hyperalert to every sound around me and every motion in the corner of my eye.

  By the time I was standing on the rim of the water, every muscle in my body was tense.

  I paused for a moment, feeling the crush of my heartbeat, hearing how loud my breathing sounded, wincing at the thump of blood in my temples. I had no idea what to do with the cross.

  The sudden snap of a twig not ten feet away from me made me whirl around, and I saw the man in the darkness between two trees. I couldn’t see a cricket bat, but I was certain I knew who was there.

  My lungs exploded with an involuntary noise, and my first reaction was to get to a more tenable position for a confrontation—one where I wasn’t backed into a black pool of water.

  I leapt across a small channel and down onto a docklike walkway that led to the stone house. I thought if I could find a big loose stone, I might have something to threaten the man with.

  I was holding so tightly to the cross that my hand started cramping. The pounding of my feet on the wooden walkway thundered. I thought I heard the man mumbling something, but I couldn’t understand what it was.

  I made it to the well house just in time to turn and see him coming down the slope toward the water. The moon backed him, so he was only a silhouette, but he was moving fast.

  Light on his feet for such a big frame, I thought giddily.

  I looked around for a rock or a branch, anything to use against him, but the place was tourist-clean. There was a cast-iron plaque on the well house that likely told its story. I stepped inside.

  It was black as pitch. I could smell the water, not an unpleasant scent, almost verdant. I thought perhaps I could hide from the man, but as my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I realized it was a dangerous place to be: little foot room and lots of water in which to drown. There was an exit on the other wall, and I made for it.

  I could hear the man on the wooden walkway outside just as I cleared the exit and began to run into the woods.

  The way sloped up again, and there was a path, both sides of which were incredibly lush, and I realized it was a woodlands garden. I couldn’t make out anything but the ferns and hostas, but it was so thickly planted on both sides with specimens I didn’t recognize that I couldn’t help but think how much attention had been paid to it. I remembered Andrews’s strange revelation that one of the Barnsley sons had been murdered while he was on an expedition to find exotic plants for these gardens.

  I was sweating, despite the chill in the air, and I was beginning to tire from running uphill. The path went through a darker part of the wood, through tall trees, and I destroyed three spiderwebs, feeling their sticky irritation on my face, fearing their poisonous residents.

  But I kept running.

  At last, I came to the top of the slope. It opened onto a small family graveyard.

  Ten or twelve grave markers stabbed through the mossy earth, reaching for, but failing to gain, the sky. There was a bench at the end of the path, and another plaque that clearly said BARNSLEY. I thought that perhaps a spot of more open ground might provide more light, and that I could see my attacker.

  I set the cross down on the bench and looked around for a weapon. If I could have pried loose one of the sections of rusty iron fencing that surrounded the cemetery, I would have done that, but I was afraid it would take too long.

  I frantically cast my eye about for a sturdy branch. I suddenly caught sight of a shovel leaning against a tree close by. It didn’t even occur to me that this would be the second time in a single night I would use the grave digger’s tool to fight for my life. I merely raced for it.

  Surely, I thought, no one has been buried here in over fifty years. This must be an gardening implement.

  Dizzy from the running, a parallel occurred to me, a warning about my state of mind: Plant a seed, grow a flower; plant a body, grow a ghost.

  Just as that thought was boiling in my brain, I saw the man lumbering up the path toward me. He didn’t seem to see me.

  I positioned myself in the darkest shadow I could find near the top of the path, hoisted the shovel over my shoulder, and waited. I was afraid that my gasping would give my position away, so I concentrated on slow breathing.

  The man was grumbling in such an incoherent manner that it removed any doubt from my mind. This was not a security guard. This was the man who had murdered someone in my house and had just tried to kill me. He’d waited in the shadows behind my house and followed me to this spot.

  I bent my knees, tensed my forearms. A strange rage, born of terror, clamped my chest, and I realized I was capable of killing the human being who was coming my way. That realization only added to my madness.

  The man drew nearer, and I could barely hear his babbling for the pulse pounding in my ears. Thorns of sweat burned my hairline, and my fingers began to shake.

  At last, he gained the top of the path, and with an explosion of breath I swung the shovel directly at his head.

  Effortlessly, he ducked, my shovel flew from my hands, and the man rushed me, palm to my chest, foot behind my right ankle. I went down on my back with a bellowing thud.

  Before I could scramble up, eyes squinting to see his next move, I realized he was calling me by name.

  “Fever!” It was his third attempt to engage me. “God damn it, what the hell are you doing?”

  I blinked. The buzzing cloud of berserk adrenaline that had rampaged my brain began to dissipate. I strained to confirm that the face matched the voice I fancied I’d heard, but it was the Hawaiian shirt that gave him away.

  “Dan?”

  He reached out his hand to help me up. I took it.

  “You could have killed me.” He was breathing hard. “That shovel. It could have took my head right off.”

  “I thought—”

  “I know what you thought.” He grasped my hand and got me to my feet. “You thought I was the man who murdered that Mr. Shultz in your house the other night. I don’t blame you. But didn’t you hear me calling your name?”

  “All I heard was some kind of incoherent mumbling.” I made it to my feet. “What was that?”

  “Yeah, that would be prayer,” he chided. “You don’t recognize the sound of praying, you heathen?”

  “You’re calling me a heathen?” I couldn’t stop shaking. “What were you praying about?”

  “I was scared!”

  “So what are you doing here, exactly?”

  “Me? I came straight here after you left my house. I’ve been waiting for you. You looked so weird when you left, I could tell you’d figured out where the water cross needed to go. I was pretty sure you’d come here tonight.”

  “How did you—wait, how did y
ou know about Shultz’s murder?”

  “You can’t be serious.” He headed for the bench where I’d set the cross. “Everybody in Blue Mountain knows about that. That kind of gossip? Travels faster than the speed of light in our little town. Damn. I have to sit down. You really gave me a start.”

  I followed along behind him. “But how did you know where the cross was supposed to—”

  “Once again I say,” he told me, sitting down on the bench that faced the graveyard, “you have to be kidding me. First, lots of people, especially the Cherokee that still live in these parts, know about the curse. And most of us know about your great-grandfather’s buying the cross. It’s common knowledge.”

  “Not common to me.” I joined him on the bench.

  “Well, you’ve heard the thing about how you can’t tell the forest for the trees? It’s even harder if you’re one of the trees.”

  “You mean other people can see my family history better than I can.”

  “Something like that.” He coughed for a moment. “Damn it. I need to exercise more. One little chase through the woods and I’m hacking up a lung.”

  I commiserated, panting. “I know.”

  “You don’t know,” he countered. “You’re not sixty-seven years old.”

  “Neither are you,” I insisted.

  “June ninth.” He sighed. “I’m a Gemini.”

  “You are not sixty-seven.”

  “You want to argue about my age?”

  “No,” I said, getting my wind back. “I want to know what you’re doing here.”

  “Same as you.” He was just on the edge of being irritated. “Only I came to make sure you put this thing back the way it belongs, the Cherokee way.”

  He tapped the cross.

  “Yes,” I shot back, “exactly why do we have to do that? I’ve just figured out that all the Barnsleys who were cursed by this thing have been dead for over fifty years. The curse has done its work—it killed them all.”

  I indicated the nearby graveyard as proof positive.

  “Typical.” Dan patted his thighs with his palms. “Absolutely typical.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The curse, ignoramus, is on the water, not on any person in particular.”

  “It wasn’t intended to kill the Barnsleys?”

  “Well, yeah.” He shrugged.

  “And by the way, why was that, exactly?”

  I may have asked him that just so I could catch my breath.

  “You want to do folk research now? Let’s take the thing down to the well house and I’ll tell you the whole rigmarole while we do the ceremony. I think I got my breath back now.”

  He grabbed up the cross and stood.

  “Ceremony?”

  “I got to take the curse off the water now, and we need the cross to do that. I have to explain everything? Like you said, the curse did its work, so let’s get it off the water and go back to my place for a nightcap. What do you say?”

  “I’d say I’m speechless, but the fact that I’m talking—”

  “Are you coming with me or not?”

  “I don’t know. My first thought was that you were a security guard. I’ve seen other employees around here. I’m not sure I want to get arrested for trespassing and vandalism at my age. Especially not with a sixty-seven-year-old man.”

  “Shut up and bite me,” he explained calmly. “And by the way, there aren’t any employees around at this time of night; there’s only the kid in the business office, and he’s asleep in the back room there.”

  “No,” I told him, “I saw a woman dressed in—”

  “Shh!” he commanded with superhuman force.

  He’d also stopped dead in his tracks. I thought he saw someone in the woods, and I strained my eyes to see if I could discover where the person was.

  “Don’t talk about that,” he whispered.

  “Don’t talk about what?” I glared at him, confused.

  “Don’t talk about the thing you saw. I saw her, too, but you can’t pay her any attention. None. I’m serious. She wants attention; that’s her food. The more you give it to her, the more she bothers you.”

  “I—” There were no words that could express my bafflement.

  “It must be a Barnsley.” He said it staring at the graveyard, and so softly that I almost didn’t hear him.

  “What’s a Barnsley? That woman?”

  “The thing you saw! Damn, you surely can be slow for a bright boy. It wasn’t a woman; it was a spirit. And it wants attention, and that’s just what we’re doing by talking about her, so shut up, come down to the well with me, and have this thing over with so we can get the hell out of here before one of us gets dead.”

  Without another syllable, he set off down the path, through the moonlit wood, toward the cursed black water.

  Nineteen

  I didn’t quite know how, but the well house seemed even darker than before. By the time I got down the slope and into the cold stone room, Dan was already out the other side and sitting on the dock walkway.

  I approached him as quietly as I could. He was obviously concentrating—or praying again.

  “Look at this water.” He stared across the surface of it.

  “Yeah.” I sat beside him.

  “No, I mean, look and see can you tell where it’s bubbling up. I’ll be damned if I can.”

  “What, you mean the ground source of the spring comes up right here?”

  “Right. And that’s where we have to—Wait a second.” He leaned forward.

  “You see it?” I tried to look where I thought he was looking.

  “Over on the bank. Should have thought of it myself. Does that group of stones look familiar?”

  “Group of stones?”

  I scanned the bank, but I couldn’t find any stones, let alone tell if they seemed familiar in any way.

  “There.” He pointed impatiently. “Right next to that horsetail reed.”

  I could barely make out, just above the black water, five or six small rocks. They were only a jumble in the mud to me.

  “You have to kind of squint,” he whispered, “and cock your head, but don’t that look a little like a syllable from the Talking Leaves?”

  I would never have thought of it myself, but when he said it, so hushed, it seemed obvious.

  “It does.” I didn’t even try to cover my astonishment. “Can you make out what it is?”

  He straightened up, turned his face my way, grinning.

  “Hard to explain.” He was beaming. “But it’s a little like the old ‘X marks the spot.’ My tribe—they surely could be arrogant in those days, huh?”

  “What do you mean?” I could find absolutely no reason for amusement.

  “Well,” he groaned, getting to his feet, “think how many years those rocks stood there telling everyone who passed by them, Here it is, stupid. It’s a double curse, really. If Barnsley or any of his brood had taken the trouble to learn the Cherokee language, they would have known this thing was a curse. They could have taken it out in a second. They probably just thought it was a nice Indian decoration. But it was like saying to them that their own ignorance was as much of a curse as anything we did to the water. That’s a pretty good joke.”

  A joke that, if you believed that sort of thing, had taken the lives of every Barnsley who had ever lived there. I didn’t think it was quite right to mention that the Barnsleys would not have believed in a Cherokee curse and would never have been looking for it in their water.

  “Let’s get to it.”

  He headed across the walkway and onto the far bank.

  I got up, trying to understand what the Barnsleys had done that was so much worse than other families to provoke all the deadly curses they’d acquired.

  “So,” I began, coming across the walkway, “I gather that the Cherokee at the time didn’t like the Barnsleys’ being here. But why was there so much ire?”

  He stopped.

  “Are you kidding me?
” He turned. “Know much about the Trail Where They Cried?”

  The way he said it made me shiver. Suddenly, every plant and every insect, all the night birds; even moonbeams seemed filled with a wailing silence, a welling of soundless tears.

  “Treaty of New Echota,” he said with some difficulty. “One of the few documents the United States government signed with my tribe that they honored. It gave all our land to the whites, and it took us away.”

  A sudden massive rain cloud took away all moonlight, everything went silent around us, and the gardens and the ruins weren’t real. They were a stage set that had been hastily constructed long ago on a much more permanent, ancient, and ultimately more beautiful stage.

  “In 1830, the Congress of the United States passed what they called the Indian Removal Act.” Dan’s voice was filled with rocks and wind, lightning and roaring waterfalls. “Almost everyone in America—I mean whites, now—was against it, but President Jackson signed it anyway. We fought it. Took it the Supreme Court and tried to establish an independent Cherokee Nation. In 1832, the Court ruled in our favor. In our favor. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign, and that made the Indian Removal Act illegal. They only way they could make it work then was if the Cherokee would agree to be removed, which, of course, we would never do. So we won.”

  He stared out across the water, up the hill, to the ruins of the Barnsley mansion.

  “So what happened?” I sounded like a small child.

  “The Cherokee—I mean, like any other nation, we didn’t all believe just one thing. We were a diverse bunch. Your people, your history is filled with disagreements. You have two basic sides, as far as I can see: the more conservative people and the more liberal people. We were divided, too. Most of us liked Chief John Ross. He fought the whites. A smaller group, fewer than five hundred out of maybe twenty thousand Cherokee in north Georgia, went with Major Ridge, who—for reasons of economic greed and demon possession—advocated the removal. He actually wanted his own people to be taken from this world and rubbed out. The Treaty of New Echota was signed by Ridge in 1835. It was completely illegal, but it gave Jackson the paper he needed to remove us.”