Wildwood

by Farris, John

  "Well, Arn's in for a shock," she said softly. "If and when." She looked back at Terry, the storm in her eyes cooling and whirling away, leaving her face a little squarish and rigid until she managed another, fainter smile. "Did you just get here?"

  "Yeah, little while ago."

  "Where's your father?"

  "He's using the phone at the store."

  She nodded. "I want to meet him. Maybe you could give me a hand with something first."

  "Sure.''

  Faren Rutledge opened the back of the wagon, which was loaded with digging tools, a rolled-up tarpaulin, and several of the five-gallon cardboard drums that ice cream for stores came packed in. But these drums were old and contained damp clay.

  "I'm a potter," she explained. "Don't want this stuff to dry out before I can use it." Apparently she had dug the clay herself. Her hands looked a little beat-up, the nails all broken off to the quick, the only thing about her that wasn't exceptionally attractive. She still had traces of the red clay ground into the minute whorls of her fingertips, outlining the abused nails. Now that she was standing next to him, Terry could tell she was about five-six: half a head shorter than he. Her jewelry was silver, handcrafted, it looked tribal. Terry remembered what Jewell had said about her going down to the reservation, and he wondered—

  Faren pulled two clay-stained butcher's aprons out of a sack and handed one to Terry. "This will protect your clothes. Clay stains worse than pulcoon root."

  "What color is that?"

  She laughed. "The color of my skin," she said.

  "Are you—"

  "I'm Cherokee, yes. Full-blooded."

  "Oh. You don't—"

  "Don't talk like an Indian?" She was busy tying her apron behind her back. "How are we supposed to sound? I only say 'ugh' when I step in some chickenshit. Cherokees were a literate people a hundred and thirty years ago, with their own syllabary. I have a master of fine arts degree from East Tennessee State."

  Terry's cheeks were hot; she knew he was embarrassed without having to look at him. She picked up one of the drums of clay and leaned it against her chest, sighing a little from the effort.

  "That was kind of a put-down. Everybody tells me either I run off at the mouth or I don't talk at all. I'm sorry. Why don't you grab one of these things and follow me?"

  Faren led him past a covered cistern at the back of the house and along a path to the door of the iron shed that was her workshop.

  "What's a syllabary?" Terry asked, when he began to regret her silence.

  "It's a list of characters, like Chinese writing, that stand for the syllables of a language. An alphabet—sort of. Our written language was invented by Sikwa'yi, or Sequoyah, a mountain Cherokee who didn't read or understand English. But he took characters from an old spelling book, turned some of them upside down, any which way, added little curlicues and symbols he thought up. The result was eighty-six different signs, one for each syllable of Cherokee speech. He spent twelve years doing this because he wanted to preserve our heritage. There were Cherokees who thought he was possessed, and ought to be put to death."

  "What happened to him?"

  "Annihilated with the rest of the nation. I guess, in 1838."

  "Annihilated?"

  "Better not get me started," Faren said. She put down the drum she was carrying and opened the workshop door. "Once we were a nation; now we're a poverty pocket in no-man's land."

  The workshop was illuminated through a makeshift plastic skylight covering a hole cut in the sloping iron roof. There was just enough space for some deep shelves knocked together from packing crates, an electric kiln, a sink, her potter's wheel and worktable. Examples of her art, painted and glazed bowls and storage jars, lined the shelves. She liked earth tones, speckled tans and off-whites, crudely drawn geometrical designs into which she'd worked barely recognizable totem shapes: bears, birds, deer.

  They made three trips with the cartons of clay. She covered each with wet sacking, then pulled a handkerchief from a sleeve of her sweater to dab at perspiration on her forehead.

  "Gets fierce in here in the summer," she said, "even with that little air-conditioner going. Thanks for the help, Terry. You know, you look a lot like your daddy, pictures of him I've seen. But it's been some time since Arn pulled his wartime album out."

  "Where did you learn to make these?" Terry asked, looking at her pottery.

  "Oh, I took a couple of courses at school; after that it was just trial and error. Need to get back to work, the big buying season's June till about Labor Day, when the tourists come swarming around the reservation."

  They walked to the grocery store. Whit was off the phone, sitting on the top step of the porch looking at one of his maps.

  "Where do you go to school, Terry?" Faren asked him.

  "L'Ecole du Sacre Coeur. That's in Paris. I live there with my mom."

  "Paris? Lucky you. I wouldn't mind seeing Paris. Maybe I will someday." But as she spoke she was shaking her head slightly, as if the possibility seemed ludicrously remote.

  She went striding ahead of Terry to the porch steps, and introduced herself to Whit.

  "If Arn has a hero in this life, I guess it would be you, Colonel Bowers."

  "I've been retired from the army a long time, Mrs. Rutledge. So if you'd just call me Whit."

  "And nobody at all calls me Mrs. Rutledge."

  "Fair enough. How is Arn?"

  She smiled, at the same time drawing up her shoulders, clasping one hand briefly over the back of the other, as if the casual question was, too abruptly, in a sensitive area, like the prick of an unseen needle.

  "I expect you'll find him changed a good bit. After all, it's how many years?"

  For the third time that morning he had the impression that there was something difficult in Arn's character, a difficulty that people were reluctant to step right up and name. What was he doing, drinking too much? Helling around? Or was it darker than that, perhaps criminal?

  "Fourteen years," Whit said.

  "We've been married since '53." She fell then into a bracing posture, arms across her breasts, perhaps obliquely expressing an opinion of the marriage. "I know Arn'll be tickled you're here. Wish there was some way I could get word to him. But there's no track where he goes when the mood takes him. How long can you stay? Are you here on vacation?"

  "No. The company I work for owns a big piece of land—"

  "Wildwood," she said, dark eyes widening, her pupils suddenly odd, as if their polished density had been heated and then fractured by an overload of light; there was something at once stem and mystic in her lovely face. "Arn's there. He just won't ever give up—but you shouldn't have come—" She blinked and looked confused, like someone trying to sort out signals from a distant flashing mirror, tension building in her slim body. She dropped her hands and leaned forward, and he sensed that she wanted to take hold of him, to communicate, words having failed her.

  "What's wrong, Faren?"

  A prewar Buick pulled up to the gas pumps and a woman hailed her. Faren shivered almost imperceptibly, lowered her eyes, glanced back up at Whit sharply, turned to the Buick with a wave of her hand, called, "Jewell! Gas."

  He came out of the store at a lope, excusing himself as he squeezed past them and went to the car.

  Faren said pleasantly, "'Morning, Mr. Dryman. Good morning, Wilty. How's your new grandson?"

  "Right fair chunk of a boy," the old woman replied. She had tiny black eyes. Her face was softly circular and mottled, like a plump snake curled up in a basket. "Where's that rascal Arn?"

  "Oh, he's cooterin' around somewhere. Mr. Bowers, here, he'd be a friend of Arn's from the war. And this good-looking boy is his son Terry."

  "Mighty pleased," Wilty Dryman said, looking the two strangers over with a toothless smile that was like a dimple in the body of the snake. When they had their two dollars worth of Good Gulf and Jewell had checked the oil level ("Believe I'll add a quart next time," said Mr. Dryman), the Buick grumbled sooti
ly uphill.

  Faren said, "Willy's a long-tongued woman, so it's always a good idea to get straight with her who's who and what's what before she can think of a more interesting story to tell."

  "'Long-tongued,'"Terry repeated, grinning. "What's that?"

  Faren put an arm around him and gave him a rough hug. "Means she's an ole gossip, and you better get used to the way we talk around here." Terry's grin was bigger and his cheeks were reddening again. "Now, tell me how long you'll be staying," she insisted, addressing Terry, her back to Whit.

  "A few days, I think—" Terry glanced at his father for confirmation. "I have to be back at school the thirtieth—"

  "Well, until then you're staying right here with us. Wouldn't have it any other way."

  She released Terry and turned to Whit. She looked wryly embarrassed and avoided his eyes, almost as if he were a lover whom she had met in the dark, was unsure of what face to put on the affair now that their passion had been spent. She kicked fiercely at the head of a dandelion, scattering tufts. He sensed fear in her.

  "What is it you don't like about Wildwood, Faren?"

  "Everything. You name it." Head down, she located another dandelion to demolish with a swing of her foot. "Nobody goes there if they don't have to. Hunters have met with some pretty strange accidents. Even moonshiners, who truly like their privacy, they stay clear of Wildwood."

  "Why?"

  "Oh—well—I expect since you work for the Langford people, you know Wildwood's history. Since the disappearance, the tall tales have taken on the stature of Holy Writ. It's superstition—but, maybe not entirely superstition—"

  "What disappearance?" Terry asked.

  Faren looked at Whit. "Haven't you told him anything about Wildwood?"

  "Not much."

  "Has he heard about Mad Edgar's Revels and the enchanted cottage?"

  "What's this going to be, a fairy tale?" Terry asked skeptically.

  Whit laughed, and Faren looked briefly amused.

  "Sort of," she said. "The story's about a mean old wizard who took a beautiful princess away from her rich family and made her live down here in the wilderness while he built his cottage—"

  Terry groaned. "Come on."

  "You tell it," Whit said to Faren. "I can't do half as well."

  "Terry, I'm only pulling your leg a little bit. First of all, Wildwood starts up the road there about half a mile; then it's eighteen square miles of virgin forest and mountains and a couple of pretty little lakes, Arn says. I wouldn't know; I've never set foot in those woods. Anyway, it was all owned at one time, long before they thought of having a national park in the Smokies, by a man named Edgar Langford. He was one of the sons of—" She looked to Whit for help. "What was his name again?"

  "John Alvin Langford," Whit said.

  "The old man, if I've got this right, was a crony of Cornelius Vanderbilt and, later on, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould, and the same kind of highbinder. That's another word for a rich man who steals and gets away with it. He made a ton of money from other people's misfortunes, merging railroads, forming cartels to fix prices, forcing competitors to go broke by busting the stock exchanges during the financial panics that caused the Great Depression of 1873 to 1896."

  Terry said patiently, "What disappeared?"

  "Coming to that. When old man Langford died, he left his railroads and all the rest to the sons who were of the same stamp as himself, and not likely to lose back what he'd gobbled up during the Depression. His other son was Edgar, who was no businessman. All Edgar got was money. About a hundred million dollars. In those days, that much of an inheritance made him richer than some nations."

  "Uh-huh," Terry said, fidgeting, trying to keep his interest alive; it sounded like a history lesson to him.

  "Edgar Langford was born in Paris in 1863, where his father took the family so his oldest sons wouldn't have to fight in the Civil War. Edgar was the last of his children, his mother must have been close to forty then, and you know children born that late sometimes turn out to be the runts of the litter. Edgar never enjoyed good health as long as he lived. But he was a scholar; had Latin and Greek down cold before he lost all his baby teeth. Have you heard of Mesopotamia?"

  "No."

  "Mesopotamia was the Greek word for Iraq, which the Bible tells of in Kings and Isaiah and Revelation. If you've studied your Bible, then you must know about the Babylonian Captivity. Anyway, that's all Edgar cared about, ancient civilizations that go back, oh, five thousand years. He spent a lot of time and money digging up old cities—places like Ashur and Nineveh and Babylon itself—and unearthed all sorts of valuable relics. There were statues of gods and kings, the chariots they rode in, jewelry, gold daggers, and better bowls than I know how to make. Some of them carved out of big blocks of obsidian, which is brittle stuff to work with, or so I've heard. They had wonderful craftsmen, even that long ago. Well—it was Edgar's money, and he wasn't about to hand over the treasures he found or bought from other diggers who were swarming over the ruins to any government or even a museum. By the time he was thirty Edgar had spent a couple of summers in the Asheville area, recovering from lung trouble—all it does is blow dust in Iraq—and he began to buy the parcels of land that make up Wildwood. He'd already determined he was going to build himself what the rich people in those days called a "cottage," build it high up on Tormentil where, I imagine, the view is second to none. And build it big enough to hold all the beautiful things he'd brought back from his digs and stored in warehouses. He had a chateau designed like some he'd seen and admired in Europe, and set to work. That was in 1904. The cottage, which covered twenty-four acres of ground, wasn't finished until 1916. Just a couple of weeks before it vanished, along with Mad Edgar and all the guests he'd invited down for a housewarming."

  "Why did you call him 'Mad Edgar'?"

  "He started out in life a little eccentric; a genius more or less. But when he was still a young man, on one of his first trips to the Middle East, he got bit by some kind of poisonous insect, a centipede or scorpion. He was partially crippled from that bite, and almost died. It seemed to affect his mind as well as his body. From that day on they say he was never free from pain. You have to feel sorry for somebody in that state, but he really did act like a madman at times. He liked to play mean jokes on people. He thought he was a greater magician than Houdini, and claimed he learned the secret of making himself invisible from inscriptions on some clay tablets he'd found in Mesopotamia."

  "So he made himself disappear?" Terry asked with a slightly wary frown, as if he anticipated Faren had a joke of her own in mind.

  "No, no, that's not what happened. It was just a freak of nature that brought down the cottage and all the people in it. Like I said, this was the summer of 1916. Ole Mad Edgar invited about five hundred guests to a week-long party; his Revels, he called them. A lot of big shots, the upper crust from New York and Boston. They came by special trains, in sixty-five deluxe Pullman cars, the fanciest private varnish anywhere. His party was written up in all the newspapers and the magazines at the time; created a sensation. When I was in college I did a term paper on Langford and the Wildwood mystery, so I've read most of the old accounts. A masquerade ball was supposed to be the highlight of the Revels. But the night of the ball a storm the old-timers still talk about hit the mountains. And we do get some incredible electrical storms around here. A fire started that burned off part of Tormentil. Then it began to rain, and Lord, it poured down for two weeks straight, real freaky weather. You couldn't get in or out of Wildwood; nobody had the least idea of what happened to the cottage and all those people. The truth is, not a single soul who took the train to Mad Edgar's Revels was ever seen or heard from again. Imagine that! Some of his guests had survived the sinking of the Titanic. It's my belief you only have so much luck in this life, and when that's used up, well—"

  "Did they all die in the fire?"

  "Maybe. There's another explanation. Some of them could have been trapped when part of Torm
entil gave way during the rains and tons of mud and rock piled on the cottage. Mad Edgar and his enchanted cottage and the rest of those poor people were buried, just like one of those Mesopotamian civilizations a long time ago."

  "Why didn't somebody dig down and try to find out if—"

  Faren shrugged. "You need to understand just how difficult it is to go tramping around deep in Wildwood without getting yourself bad lost. To this day nobody's been able to say for certain there ever was an avalanche on Tormentil. Nobody in this part of the country had airplanes to fly up there and take a look. The railroad spur line was the only way in, and the trestles flooded, beginning way up by the mountain; one span would go and wash downstream, taking out the next one, and so on. After a few weeks the War Department in Washington ordered the North Carolina State Guard cavalry to go in and look for survivors. But there was something in the air for years after that big storm, kind of a will-o'-the-wisp that burned the skin and seared the lungs and lit up the whole mountain at night, surrounding it with a fierce blue flame. Wilty Dryman remembers it well: she could tell you how the flame looked from her front porch. And there're old-timers who claim they still see traces of the will-o'-the-wisp on summer nights, when the air's charged a certain way."

  "All those people were killed?" Terry said. "But nobody ever did anything?"

  "There's always been some interest in Wildwood and the cottage. Could be tens of millions of dollars worth of valuable jewelry buried up there on Tormentil. Now and then little groups of fortune-hunters show up with metal detectors and the like. But they never make it as far as the mountain. They have accidents, or get so sick they can't walk and have to be carried out. Arn says there's sinks and vapors in Wildwood you need to be careful about."

  She looked hard at Whit.

  "Maybe not a good place for what you have in mind."

  "I don't think I told you what we have in mind for Wildwood," Whit said with a perplexed smile.