Fiddler's Green, Or a Wedding, a Ball, and the Singular Adventures of Sundry Moss

by Van Reid

  It, thought Sundry. The fellow said, “You’re not letting a stranger drag it up.” Who refers to the remains of a loved one or family member as it?

  Many a tale was told of people stumbling across water-lost bodies in horrible situations. How could it be other than horrible? There was even a ballad or two, conveyed to these shores from the old country long ago.

  These tales and songs were etched deep, pressed firmly in the country heart, concocting a potent brew of horror and melancholy to which Sundry was not callous. The drowned maid was always comely, her lost voice mourned as grace irretrievable, her heart as true and broken. All this made her the more terrifying, were you to peer into the water and see her pale beauty in a shaft of watery light, her long tresses rising in the spring currents as upon an ocean breeze. She was the sharp blade that bid you, “Cut!” and the cliffside that whispered, “Leap!”

  Dutten Pond mirrored the paling sky. Lazy ripples from the boat and the swifter eddies pulled by the sweep of the oars chattered the water, and Sundry started at the glimmers and winks that seemed to rise from below. He thought about what he had learned from Uncle Cedric, but truthfully there are few hard-and-fast rules in the realm of dowsing. Apple tree boughs are among the favored divining rods, but other fruit trees are sometimes used, as well as willow wands and copper rods. Uncle Cedric had tapped the side of his head, laughing, and said, “Go to a place in here that you haven’t filled up.”

  Sundry had laughed, too. That was the larger portion, at any rate.

  “Hold it loosely with the joined end pointing up,” said Uncle Cedric.

  With both hands, Sundry held the apple bough out past the bow of the boat, moving it from left to right and back again as they drifted. It seemed easy to search out that portion of his brain that he hadn’t filled yet; the strangeness of his predicament, his lack of proper sleep, and the focus of his own shadow, cast by the lantern in the stern and slipping against the trees before him, conspired him into a peculiar state of awareness.

  He wasn’t sure that he wanted to find what they were looking for—or if he wanted to find it soon or late. Once he thought the apple bough dipped, and he shifted in his seat so that he could hover the branch over the same patch of water as they passed it. He heard a grunt from behind him, but he shook his head, realized that this small gesture might not be seen, and said, “No.”

  Mr. Normell slowed the boat, however, and Sundry scanned the immediate surface of the pond to be sure. Soon they were moving again. He forgot about the people on the shore and almost forgot the men in the boat with him. The air was cool and welcoming, the animate smell of the pond and the woods mingling bloom with decay. The sky paled in unseen degrees and the last star went out. Light made its way into the brush, articulating leaf from branch and pine from birch, but Sundry watched his apple wand, held loosely in his hands, and waited for something more than its natural weight to pull at it.

  They reached an extremity of the pond, and Mr. Normell turned them about. Sundry took a deep breath, not knowing how long it had been since he’d taken the last one. Shifting in his seat, he cricked his neck and glanced back, when something caught his eye—not in the water but among the trees. He would have thought it was a great pinecone if the appropriate evergreen had been anywhere near that tangle of branches. It was, perhaps, a clump of maple leaves, not yet fully blown from the bud. But Sundry noticed other similar clusters among the birch and oak as well. And there was a pine bough, downshore, hanging over the pond and drooping with some extra load.

  The boat was oared further out on its way back. The crowd at the landing had not moved. In the gaining light Sundry tried to imagine and then to perceive what depended from the trees in ranks along the pond banks. As the boat moved, the reaching branches turned before him like objects on a carousel, and one long arm of maple shifted in his perspective to stand out with its burden in the early-morning light.

  A dead robin hung there by its legs, and in one brief and innocent moment Sundry wondered how it had trapped itself there. But the sight of the bird was like the key to a cipher, and he began to recognize crows and goldfinches, doves, and even a wily jay hanging in scores wherever Normell Acres and Droone land met the water.

  Sundry was appalled. “There must be a hundred of them!” he said, and then he realized that there were a hundred of them, without exaggeration, and more, and that there would be a dead bird for every Droone and Normell watching and waiting by the shore.

  He was a farmer by birth, and there are practical matters that lie between livestock and the larder, but few can despise senseless killing as much as a man who must sometimes do so to feed his family.

  “I don’t know what it is that you must have from this water,” said Sundry to the other men in the boat, “but if I were you, I would doubt any need that drives you to this.” Perhaps, he thought, it is better to have it done with. He looked from his boat fellows to the people on shore, watching, waiting, growing more visible. He wondered where Melanie was and could imagine a dozen misfortunes that a little girl could stumble upon, alone in the countryside. He only hoped that he had given her enough time to get away.

  It was time to have done with it. He glanced once more at the birds hanging from the trees.

  No wonder it’s so quiet on this side of the water.

  He looked back at Mr. Normell and said, curtly, “Take us out to the center of the pond.”

  49. An Elf from the Woods

  Emery Swamp was not really suited to Robin Oig’s great long oar or even the bulk of his haversack hanging from the back of Cram’s saddle. The branches were never high enough, the paths straight or long or wide enough. Robin Oig himself was ill matched with the snagging creepers and tripping underbrush. Mosquitoes, roused from a pre-dawn slumber, found the sailor’s great swatch of unprotected neck and ears an obliging feeding ground. Mr. Cook’s fly ointment made little headway against such swarms. So the pastoral quiet of the moon-haunted swamp and the surrounding acres, usually counterpointed by the gentle frog or lonely night bird, was for a time broken by the invective of a vexed and land bound sailor. There were no mosquitoes at sea (he vowed) or (he trusted) at Fiddler’s Green.

  The lantern he carried was necessary to navigate these tracts, but it also drew more insects; its glow described a series of rooms from the stages of swamp and marsh, branches of grasping alder and willow forming walls and ceiling, spaces separating hummock from grove of spidery brush invoking doors and corridors, with mosquitoes filling everything in between.

  Life on a farm breeds early risers, but that does not go far enough to explain how Abijah Cook came to be leading Robin Oig and two horses by way of a little-known shortcut long before dawn. Accountability, as Robin had expressed it, must answer.

  From the time he was old enough to be told ghost stories, the vicinity of Dutten Pond had always meant mystery and possible danger to Ab. He had seen the occasional Normell and Droone when he went to market in China, and these strangers had seemed normal enough, but he had been impressed by their apartness. People dealt with them, behaved in a polite manner to them, but they did not “share the day” with Normells and Droones.

  Different is what different does, or what is treated differently, or perhaps what imagines itself as different. The Normells and Droones had not disabused people of their distinction, and Ab had caught a suspicion of them, as someone might catch wind of a tale that did not quite vary as it passed from ear to ear. The stories sounded preposterous and felt like truth, and he was not anxious to approach their estates; but he worried that he and his father had not warned Mr. Moss clearly enough about the perils of doing so. He had wakened in the small hours of night to an apprehension that had not left him since the previous afternoon.

  Robin Oig had experienced his own restlessness and had not been quiet falling out of the hayloft with his oar. Neither oar nor man was broken, however, and he banged his way past the stables and almost clipped Ab over the head with the blade of the sweep as he emerged fro
m the barn. The farmer had decided not to allow another innocent to go blithely down to Dutten without the requisite warnings and possibly his own company to the very door of Normell Acres, and Robin Oig, for his part, was glad of the company and pleased enough to be shown the shortcut till he was in its midst.

  “Are you sure they couldn’t just pick us up and fly us there?” asked Robin while they walked a log bridge past a pool rippling with the retreat of a hundred frogs. “These mosquitoes?” he added.

  Ab was no more happy to have come this way, but he felt most guilty about leading old Cram and their other horse, Bolt, through this ambush. He would have turned them around at that point if they weren’t already halfway through the swamp. But stars reached them through the brush in increasingly frequent sparks and glimmers till entire constellations rose out of the places between branch and leaf and finally a quadrant of the speckled sky loomed over a long field and a ridge beyond.

  Ab mounted Bolt when they reached the end of the swamp’s watery grasp and after Robin had clambered atop Cram, they climbed the hill from which they could see the sheen of the sky reflected in Mud Pond and perhaps a light or two in China Village. Descending the farther slope, they left a dark trail behind them in the fields. Robin Oig rode pretty well for a sailor—that preposterous, quixotic oar perched upon one shoulder. Ab might have left the man at the top of the hill with a point of the finger and the requisite directions, but he felt his honor was at stake and so went forth.

  They met no one on the road to China and didn’t think they met anyone in the town itself, though they had the impression of a man—some drunk, perhaps—standing in the shadows of a storefront, watching their progress.

  It was beyond the further limits of the village that Robin Oig began to hum and then to sing.

  Ab knew the words, though to a different tune, but he was not long in picking up Robin’s melody and joining him.

  There were more verses, and they sang them all, and when they were done, they started over again, for they almost seemed to be singing daylight into being. The east paled, and the stars along its border weakened and winked. It must have been an hour before dawn, but a soft glow buffered the distant hills from the night, and the first birds of morning had joined the farmer and the sailor in their song.

  They had long left the sleeping town, and were only just reaching (for the second time) “Each throat and warble sing what can, / Each child of God sing out the Child of Man” when they came to the place in the road below the hill that Sundry and Maven had climbed for a view and supper. Ab brought Bolt to a lumbering halt, and Cram trudged some yards farther before he realized that he had left his fellow horse behind.

  “What is it?” wondered the sailor, who had lost his accompaniment.

  The farmer didn’t quite know. He pointed toward the fields northeast that bordered the treeless southern shore of Dutten Pond. The first blink looked like a firefly and not so far away, but Ab soon picked out several similar glimmerings, as from distant lanterns, that lined the eastern banks and at least one spark that skimmed the surface of the pond itself.

  “What is it?” wondered the sailor again, but more specifically.

  Lights glittered down at the geographic source of local gossip, and Ab was not as sure about going there as he had been while he and Robin had been harmonizing in the predawn. He had not expected that the Normells or the Droones would be up and pursuing their mysterious designs.

  Robin, too, appeared uncertain. It was curious to see evidence of waking life—or at least so much of it—along the banks of a rural lake before sunup, and he had been impressed by the stories he’d heard about this place at the Cook kitchen table. “What do you suppose they’re all up to?” he wondered.

  “Odd, isn’t it,” said Ab. What the lights betokened, he couldn’t guess, but he suspected there was trollcraft in the works. He had heard tales of midnight rituals and of strange spirits roaming those shores.

  It is human to particularize fear, to imagine that the finger of premonition or the evil eye is pointed at oneself. Robin and Ab might be standing half a mile from those lights, but they had the strong notion that they were anticipated, perhaps even watched from the shores of Dutten Pond. The silent portion of the night had arrived—that moment when the world and nature hold their breath for the sun, and though the lights were far away, it was eerie to see them and hear nothing.

  All about the two men suddenly seemed watchful and expectant, and when they spoke, it was in near whispers.

  “I wonder if Mr. Moss is down there,” said Robin.

  “Hard to say,” said Ab. He was pretty sure they could wait till the day was well established before they went to find out.

  Robin was pretty sure that he didn’t know why he had to catch up with Mr. Moss in the first place. “You’re sure he didn’t change his mind?” he said, straining his eyes toward the pond.

  “He might have bedded down in China, I suppose,” said Ab. It did seem sensible to go back and inquire.

  Robin thought it sensible to return to his original purpose and hike west with his great long oar, which would also entail hiking in the other direction. He was on the cusp of announcing this intention when he first saw the figure of a child cresting the next hill east and walking in their direction. It was a curious sight at that hour—a lone child walking in a pale blue dress and yellow coat before the dawn—and uncannily reminiscent of the song they had been singing but moments ago.

  “What is that?” wondered Ab, loud enough for Robin Oig to hear.

  Robin almost pronounced the vision a child of God, sung up like the coming day, but decided to wait till more evidence was gathered. The little girl did not hesitate when she saw them, but only hurried her approach. The rugged, hard-handed farmer and the giant sailor with the loom of an oversized oar propped over his shoulder, the both of them mounted on massive Percherons—these men might have been daunting to a small child but she seemed anxious to reach them.

  A breeze gathered with the first glow of dawn, and her short brown hair wafted about her head. Her dress and coat were bleached to white in the strange illumination, and Robin held the lantern to one side to see her better. She was a pretty creature, and her eyes shone as if he and the farmer were just what she had been looking for. She almost ran up the short slope between them. She wore odd shoes for a little girl, and the collar of her dress, visible as her coat flew open with the wind of her motion, had the appearance of being on backward. Robin had heard of folk who wore things backward when they came in from twilight fields (he had, in a sense, been searching for just those sorts of folk), but he never guessed that he would really see one.

  Ab had heard as much himself and had never wanted to see one.

  The little girl stopped in front of Cram’s broad nose and considered the horse with a thoughtful smile. She reached up and stroked the velvet muzzle, and Cram let out a low, appreciative snort; Bolt, a jealous one. Then she turned her attention to Robin Oig and, specifically, to the great long oar over his shoulder. She looked at the oar—looked it up and down—her mouth hanging open, her eyes pondering the device as if she had never imagined such a thing. Then she turned to Robin himself and smiled.

  “What’s that you’ve got there?” she asked.

  50. The Dowse

  “Don’t ever doubt that it’s your eye and not the bough that knows,” Uncle Cedric had said, and that was the most important lesson of all. “We’re animal creatures,” the old man maintained. “Yes, we have souls, no doubt, and minds above a horse or a dog, but I think the old people long ago might have peered over a field and picked a likely water spot without a witch stick or an apple bough to guide them. There might be something to it, I suppose”—and this from a man who was famous in his parts for dowsing—“but I wonder if there’s a memory or a recollection or a sense of smell I’m not aware of, or a sense of shape in the land that pulls my feet and twitches the stick.”

  Certain matters (as little Melanie Ring so wisely understood
) may be hidden in plain sight, and Sundry knew that people often tend toward landmarks, even when they are not aware of doing so. To begin with, Sundry had to tell Mr. Normell three times to take him to the center of the pond, and then the man shouted to the shore for Charles’s authority.

  “What’s this all about?” asked Mr. Droone in the boat.

  “It’s out there,” said Sundry, nodding toward the middle of the pond.

  “How do you know that?” asked the man, looking wary.

  “I don’t, really. It was a feeling I had last night. That’s what you have, isn’t it? Feelings?”

  There seemed to be some agreement on shore, and Charles Normell shouted, “Take him out there.”

  When Sundry called back that he wanted to dowse the reflection of the elm on the other shore as seen from the Normells’ landing, there was a visible excitement among the crowd, and anxious voices began to direct them to the spot. Mr. Normell rowed them back and forth while the people on the shore took turns correcting their course. Sundry situated himself at the bow with renewed purpose—that is, to have done with it—and left the memory of Melanie and dead birds behind to skim his thoughts over the cool veneer of water.

  He did not find it directly. A person would have had difficulty rowing to such a place without guidance from land as Sundry had, but someone’s impulse, if not an eye, had pulled that other boat toward a landmark in the broad clarity of the pond’s surface and a shadowy place in the midst of the water that must have hinted, however accurately, at depth. Mr. Normell paused in mid-stroke, then set one oar as a drag to correct their drift.