A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  “Jackson just put it into law? On the basis of such a flimsy document? Without Congress?”

  “No.” Dan’s voice had grown soft, a volume without hope. “It had to be ratified. People spoke out against it.”

  “Davy Crockett.” I remembered talking with Andrews about it, and I felt a sudden pang of guilt for leaving him behind at my house without an explanation of where I was going. Clearly, I wasn’t in my right mind.

  “And Daniel Webster.” Dan sighed. “But it passed anyway. It passed by a single vote.”

  “What?”

  “The irony there, of course,” Dan said, managing a wry smile, “is that if your friend Davy Crockett hadn’t left Congress all mad and hurt before that, he could have cast the tying vote and Jackson might not have gotten his way. But he did. In 1838, the United States invaded my country and began to take us to Oklahoma. Without a thought for our houses or our things, we were supposed to leave the land we’d lived on since the beginning of time and walk from Georgia to Oklahoma. You’re not in terrible shape—how do you think you’d fare if you had to walk that far?

  “Not well.”

  “Now imagine if you had Hek and June with you, trying to help them along.”

  The very thought of June Cotage being forced to abandon her house, walk though the mountains, across the desert, and into Oklahoma—it churned my stomach.

  “We weren’t allowed to forage for food, so a lot of us starved on army half rations. Those of us that made it got to Oklahoma just in time for the killing winter of 1839—still the worst on record in that state. Over four thousand of us died on the way, and an unrecorded number died right when we got to Oklahoma. It’s a tough mixture: winter and despair. It ensured the death of my country. Only a very few of us stayed put in Georgia, hiding out, blending in. Kind of like these rocks.”

  He stared down at the Talking Leaves arrangement of stones near his feet.

  “We went unnoticed for decades by the whites, who walked right by us,” he concluded. “And now I’m a tourist attraction. Just another way for whites to make money. But I can’t look in these woods, or walk though them, without seeing a ghost by every tree, a spirit standing in this very water, silent—cold.”

  I fought the urge to look into the water.

  “So here’s the punch line to our story,” he said, rallying. “Julia Barnsley didn’t like Savannah because it was too hot and there were too many bugs to suit her, so her husband, Godfrey, found this piece of land—high on a hill, cool even in summer, way above the gnat line—and he wanted it. The trouble was, it belonged to us, to the Cherokee. So Mr. Barnsley, a wealthy cotton magnate, and his father-in-law, a rich Savannah gentleman, went to Washington and had dinner with Andrew Jackson. They made a sizable contribution to his reelection campaign—which went into Jackson’s private account, of course—and the next thing you know, we have the Indian Removal Act.”

  “Godfrey Barnsley,” I began, dumbfounded, “was responsible for the Indian Removal Act?”

  “The irony gets deeper. He wanted this particular plot of land because of this very spring. It was exactly what he needed to make his modern house with hot and cold running water and flush toilets. But this was a sacred spring, like a Cherokee church. What would you do if someone wanted to use your church for a bathroom?”

  “I don’t have a church,” I stammered, “but if I did—”

  “So everyone told Godfrey not to build here, not to screw with this water. He didn’t listen. So we put this in his water supply.”

  Dan held up the cross.

  “Hard to believe it’s held up all these years,” I said, staring at it.

  “Not really.” He looked at it as if it were made of jewels. “It’s treated. We had a way of—it was kind of like creosote: sap and a tar-like gunk that you use to seal a thing like this. It’ll most likely survive the nuclear holocaust. We knew it would outlast the Barnsleys. And it poisoned their water—every time they drank it, washed in it, cleaned their clothes and their dishes and their faces and hands, they were smearing the curse onto themselves. It got into their genes. It passed from generation to generation, and lived on in their blood even if they moved away from this land.”

  “Jesus,” I whispered.

  “I thought you didn’t know what praying was.”

  “That wasn’t a prayer.”

  He shrugged.

  “Let’s do this.”

  Dan suddenly squatted on the bank and looked down at the stones.

  “The—well, the trouble is,” I stammered, “that curse? It kind of got onto my family, too.”

  Dan froze.

  “What?” He didn’t look up.

  “My great-grandfather, Conner, I believe, had figured out that the Barnsleys and the Briarwoods—how should I say this?—cross-pollinated.”

  “Briarwoods?”

  “That’s my real family name. Conner changed his last name when he came to America because he was wanted for murder in Ireland.”

  “That story’s true?” He finally looked up at me. “I been hearing that one since I was a kid. I thought it was just something the old man made up to keep people from messing with him. You know, get a reputation as a bad ass, but you don’t actually have to be a bad ass.”

  “It’s true.”

  “So how did your kin and the Barnsleys—”

  “It’s a long story,” I interrupted, “but the crux of it is that Godfrey’s mother, in England, dallied with a servant named Briarwood—a gardener, actually—and produced Godfrey. And here’s a bit of gothic coincidence: she put a curse on both families as she was dying in childbirth with Godfrey.”

  Dan sat on the bank.

  “Man.” He shook his head. “What the hell did the Barnsleys do to make God that mad at them?”

  “I was just asking myself that same question.”

  “Double curse.” He looked up. “Was the mother’s husband alive or dead?”

  “Alive.” I didn’t know why he’d asked that.

  “Well, at least it wasn’t a widow’s curse, then.”

  I didn’t bother to tell him my thoughts on that subject.

  “So I believe Conner came here in 1942,” I said hesitantly, trying to get us back on some sort of track, “because he was trying—in his own weird and probably misguided way—to remove the curse from his family. I don’t think he much cared about the Barnsleys one way or another.”

  “How’s that for the Web of Life?” He smiled.

  “I’ve heard the term, of course, but I’m not exactly certain, in this context—”

  “Look,” he told me impatiently, “I don’t want to get all hoodoo on you, but the universe is like a spider’s web, and at every junction there’s a bright bead of water, and in every bead of water there’s a life—yours, mine, everybody’s. You can’t touch one part of the web without making something happen in every one of those beads of water, because they’re all connected by the web.”

  “That doesn’t sound—Is that Cherokee philosophy?”

  “Well, I saw it on one of those Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell. You know Joseph Campbell.”

  “He’s my spiritual father, and a hell of a folklorist, but you can’t—”

  “God Almighty, Doctor,” he shot back, “could we please take the curse off this water so we can go back to my place for a nightcap? We can talk world philosophy all night if you want—but I’d very much like to get away from here. This place give me the willies.”

  Again, I thought of Andrews.

  “What do you want me to do?” I tried to sound a bit more contrite than I actually was.

  “See, to take the curse off the water,” he began, his tone almost scholarly, “you have to remove this cross thing in the right way. You can’t just pull it up out of the ground and sell it at an auction to raise money. The curse is still on the water that way.”

  “So you figured out that Conner came here for the auction.”

  “I’d heard stories about this wa
ter curse since I was a little boy.” Dan was distracted, staring down at the arrangement of rocks, looking for something. “Everybody knew that the sacred—Hey, look.”

  He fit the cross down into the middle of the rocks, a hidden cavity, and it stayed perfectly upright, like Excalibur in the stone.

  “Now what?” I whispered.

  Dan took out a pocketknife, opened it, and held up the blade for me to see.

  “Look at how the nexus of these two pieces of wood,” he said softly, “is kind of like that web thing I was just saying. The place where these two sticks cross is the place where the living thing is. If I take away the junction, the circuit is broken and the energy is dispelled—the magic is gone.”

  He slowly began to cut the reed-colored cloth that held the sticks together. He was mumbling something—so low, I could barely make out the sounds, but they weren’t English.

  As he cut, the cross lost its structural integrity and began to fall apart. I realized as I watched, transfixed, that the process somehow mimicked the gradual ruination of the mansion on the hill above us.

  A final cord was cut and the crosspiece fell, rolling into the water.

  Dan pulled the other piece back out of its rocky cradle and tossed it into the water as well, along with the cloth.

  “Let the water have what’s left,” he said, a benediction like a burial at sea. “The water will eventually absorb the wood and the cloth, and everything will be washed clean. It’ll take a little time, but the water will run clear someday.”

  He nodded, a button on his pronouncement.

  “Now,” he said, leaning over, “help me pull out these stones. I think we’ll take them up there to that graveyard and put them onto some of the graves. Seems right.”

  I didn’t quite know how it seemed right, but I knelt on the bank beside Dan and began to help him pry out the stones.

  The moon was out again, and a kind of Latesummer Night’s Dream seemed to wash over the landscape. Night doves called out, calming the air around us; a black lace sound of crickets patterned the wind.

  I have no idea how both of us failed to hear footsteps in the dead leaves behind us.

  Twenty

  I saw the cricket bat, blond lightning, out of the corner of my eye just as it connected with Dan’s skull. The cracking sound made every cell in my body sick. Dan went down face-first into the water, oozing thick burgundy blood from his head.

  I turned just in time to see the bat coming my way. I twisted right, my muscles flexed automatically, and the bat hit my forearm. I was certain I felt the bone crack.

  One of the rocks we’d been working to pull loose was in my hand, and I threw it toward the drooling, vacant-eyed face above me. It struck a glancing blow, enough for me to push myself backward into the water, clutching a fistful of Dan Battle’s shirt collar.

  The pool was deeper than I had imagined, nearly up to my shoulders. I struggled to turn Dan over onto his back and drag him across the water to the opposite bank.

  The maniac with the bat recovered quickly but did not pursue me into the black liquid. He moved instead with great staring deliberation onto the wooden walkway, not six feet away from me, and watched to see what I was going to do. He would simply wait for me to come to land, move to that spot more quickly than I could through water, and finish me.

  Dan’s eyes were closed. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. My feet struggled with the slimy bottom of the well pond; the water was cold.

  Without thinking, I began to yell. Surely the woman I had seen in the ruins or a security guard would hear me. I bellowed.

  “Help!”

  The man with the bat gargled several inarticulate words but did not move.

  I knew I couldn’t stay in the water with Dan long. I had to get him to a place where he would, at the very least, not drown.

  I began dragging him away from the man, toward the reedy shallows that were the likely source of the spring.

  The man with the bat moved slowly, apparently wary that I might be deceiving him and feigning one direction, moving another. I used his doubt to my advantage, remembering something Hek had told me when I was a boy: “Dealing with a liar, trick him with the truth.”

  A man who uses subterfuge will sometimes mistake the truth for a trap.

  I headed directly for the spot I wanted, doing my best to keep the murderer in my sight but not look at him directly.

  The water got shallower fast, but I stayed low, shoulders below the surface, so as not to give that fact away. I could feel reeds snapping my back.

  The murderer determined, at last, that I was going through them to the far shallows, and he headed around the walkway. He was perhaps twelve feet away at that moment.

  I got my feet under me and my hands in the middle of Dan’s back.

  As the murderer stepped off the walkway and onto the bank, coming toward me, I took in a monstrous breath. Without warning, I roared, stood straight up, and shoved Dan’s body as hard as I could toward the mossy bank opposite the one where the killer stood. I was in water only to my thighs, and Dan’s head and shoulders were securely on something like dry land. It happened in a single move, in a single second.

  The murderer was startled, and the sound that had come from my lungs had even frightened me—not human, filled with rage.

  He stood frozen for an instant longer, enough for me to slush through the water to the bank where I’d thrown Dan. I had it in mind to drag Dan up onto the land more securely, but the murderer had recovered and was loping my way, back across the walkway, bat cocked over his shoulder.

  I scrambled across the moss, slipping and desperate, toward the pine straw–thick edge of the wood. I jumped, and got a more solid footing, grabbing hold of a smaller pine tree, the bark scraping the palms of my hands.

  I could hear the murderer behind me, his animal breathing. His footfalls on the dock were heavy and staggering.

  I pushed myself off from the tree and dug the soles of my shoes into the upward incline. My own breath sounded panicked and rasping. I thought if I could make it to the top of the hill, I would have an advantage. It occurred to me, deliriously, that I was only replaying a moment from half an hour before, running up the same hill, with the same thoughts in mind, away from Dan.

  Giddy, burning flashes of the Eternal Return burst like sweat from my forehead. Despite the fact that I was dripping wet in cool air, I felt my temperature rise, and my forearm was beginning to swell where it had been bashed.

  In the spirit of repeating everything, I realized that the shovel at the top of the hill was my goal—the third time that night I would use such an implement as a weapon instead of a tool.

  The pine straw skidded under my feet, and the trees were small but thick, a younger growth of pines. I was moving fast and breathing hard and my vision wasn’t clear. I knew only if I kept moving upward, I would eventually hit the plateau close to the path that opened on the cemetery.

  A thick wall of rhododendrons lay just ahead, threatening to block my progress. I leaned forward, got my body as low to the ground as I could, covered my face with my forearms, and plowed through the branches.

  I tried to protect my sore arm, but everything seemed intent on slamming against it. The pain was oddly focusing. I had nothing in my mind at that moment except making it through the tall shrubs and into the opening at the top of the hill.

  I had no idea where my attacker was.

  After an endless sequence of moments in the verdant crowd of leaves—it could have been ten seconds or it could have been a quarter of an hour—I fell through the hedge and onto a grassy spot. I landed on my bad arm.

  Wincing and rolling, I managed to get to my feet and turn around to see if the man had followed me through the shrubs.

  There was no one.

  I turned a wild eye toward the graveyard, trying to locate the shovel. I couldn’t remember where I’d been when I dropped it. I thought it must be near the gate, but the light was too dim to see it, even in the clearing
.

  I rushed toward the tombstones, heart exploding in my chest, constantly checking the woods for the man with the bat.

  As I stepped onto the smoother path, I thought I heard him bashing through the pines. I squinted, trying not to give my position away by breathing too hard, and saw the shovel lying where I’d dropped it.

  Thrashing sounds were coming up the path, getting closer.

  I sprinted giant leaping steps to the shovel and had it in my hand when I heard his low growling close by.

  There, at the mouth of the path, he stood hunched, bat dragging the ground, a shudder of dark sounds in a blacker night.

  “Ah,” I said loudly, shaking the shovel in his direction, trying to steady my breath. “Glad you’re here. I hadn’t quite finished taking your head off back at my place….” Then my breath gave out, and my bravado seemed lost on him. I considered that he might be deaf, and that the noises he made were an attempt at speech.

  He did notice the shovel. I had the idea that it kept him from lurching right for me.

  I had a sudden notion, the kind of idea that can only be born of terror. I backed away from him slowly, eyes steady in his direction, and worked my way past the low open gate and into the graveyard.

  He watched but made no move.

  I found myself in the cemetery between two larger headstones, towers really, with half-size statues and ornate designs.

  I took one more step back and suddenly began to slam the shovel back and forth between the low part of the grave markers, like the clapper of a bell, cast iron on granite. It made an ungodly noise, flat, scraping—a sound of the dead.

  The man was at a loss.

  Another lesson from childhood: When dealing with a lunatic, see how much crazier you can be. Unfortunately I’d applied that theory so frequently in my life—under the suspicion that everyone was a lunatic—it had become more a general character trait than an individual ploy. Crazy came naturally—especially out of fear—and it seemed to be working at that moment. The man stayed where he was.

  My hands and arms began to ache from the impact of the shovel on the stone, and I knew I couldn’t keep up the clamor indefinitely. So I stopped abruptly and started digging. I plunged the tip of the shovel hard into the ground between the two graves. I tossed the dirt in the man’s direction.