The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  On that first midsummer morning we went to the pond at the bottom of the garden, where we splashed somberly, looking warily for snappers, finding only a big wrinkly box turtle and armies of delicate green frogs. Jolon didn’t think them any replacement for the owl, but when I asked him to come to lunch, he shrugged and followed me when I ran up the hill to the house.

  I thumped onto the porch, leaving black footprints. Jolon stopped in the yard. The screen door banged behind me, and I turned.

  “Well, come on,” I called through the screen. “Don’t you want to?”

  He looked down at his legs, caked with mud, dripping pond water.

  “Come on.” And he did.

  Before he met me, Jolon spent most of his time alone, too, following birds to their nests, tracking foxes and other wild creatures. When he came upon me in the garden that day, though, things changed. As soon as he got to the campus, he’d kick off his sneakers, crawl through a culvert, skin his knee, and fight his way through brambles—always arriving at my house in a dire state of disrepair. He never would knock on the door. Instead he stood in the garden, out of sight of the house. All he had to do was think of me, he said, and I would always then skim around the wall in a flowered cotton dress, shining like a bright penny, only for him.

  “Hey,” I’d say, and tap him, touch his arm, then run from him, not looking back. To the meadow, the snack bar, to the sculpture garden, or the ice cream parlor at the edge of the campus. And he would follow, hanging back until I’d reached the morning’s destination. He’d help me pick flowers for a crown, take the hot dog or the pistachio double scoop I offered. Mostly, we did not speak. Mostly, we knew everything we needed to without speaking, as if we were young animals playing together.

  Jolon lived on the border of Hawley Forest, with his parents and fairy-tale goats and pinto ponies, one red and white, one gold and white. The first horses I’d ever ridden, bouncing on their backs while Jolon laughed. The riding was like flying. It was our magic.

  We grew up together, inseparable. By the time we were ten, we knew we’d be married. We talked about where we’d live, what the names of our children would be, names from the books we loved. Aladdin and Crusoe, Lucy and Aravis. But when we were adolescents, the cough that troubled his father became worse. It turned out to be lung cancer, advanced and so virulent he was dead in three months. After that, everything seemed to fall apart, in the slow-motion drift that accompanies sudden disaster.

  Jolon gripped my hand all through his father’s wake and funeral, as if he’d never let me go, as if I could save him from a sea of grief that would drown him. We were both thirteen, the years overlapping. Soon he would be fourteen and pass me again. Although I knew he was sad, knew to tread lightly, I was certain nothing had really changed.

  Two months later, just before the Fourth with its extravagance of sparklers and corn on the cob and staying up way past our bedtimes, Jolon came over for a tenting sleepover. Nan’s idea, to give him a respite from his mother’s stony sadness. I overheard my parents and Nan talking. “They’re getting older,” my dad said. “It might not be such a great idea.”

  “Are you afraid for your daughter’s virtue?” asked Nan. “She’s just a child.”

  “But children grow up so suddenly now, Mother,” my own mother said.

  “Are you telling me she could have a baby?”

  My mother hadn’t been squeamish about telling me the facts of life, but this embarrassed me. I felt myself turning lobster red, even though I was hidden in the coat closet I’d whisked myself into when I realized they were talking about Jolon and me.

  “No. Not yet. But maybe it’s better that at least they don’t have sleepovers anymore.”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous. The boy’s just lost his father. They’re together every day, anyway. You can’t stop a moving train, is what I say.”

  Then the talk turned to Jolon’s mother. How she might go to her sister in Fitchburg for a while, or stay and work for the college, cooking in the student center, but no one really knew. She spoke so rarely. When Nan had stopped by their house to ask about the sleepover, she’d merely nodded. Nodded and walked away into another room.

  So Jolon rode over on his bike, with his tent and his flashlight bound behind him, and a sack of wild strawberries he’d picked. Nan helped us set up the tent on the porch, in the mosquito-filled late afternoon, as the sky roiled and darkened above us.

  At dusk, Nan brought us ham sandwiches and iced tea just as the first drops started to fall. Thunder rolled over us slowly, lingering like church bells on a Sunday morning. The sky turned the color of the crayon in the box I used to mispronounce “violent.” And violent is what it seemed to me, purple-gray and threatening. I didn’t want to admit I was afraid in front of Jolon, who was calmly making bird and rabbit shadows on the tent walls. Lightning streaked white hot, made spangles behind my eyelids, and that decided me.

  “Nan!” I yelled. Jolon flashed me his what-a-baby look, but I called until I heard the whoosh of wings that accompanied my Nan everywhere, then the thump of one of her hawks landing on the porch railing. My grandmother thrust her head between the flaps of the tent, her eyes keen, her braid swinging like a pendulum.

  “Climb in and tell us a story.”

  Jolon scrutinized me as if he could smell my fear, then said, “Yeah, Mrs. Dyer. Good night for a story. Tell us a scary one.” Nan was a terrific storyteller, and he knew it. I’d heard most of her stories, maybe all of them. I’d heard all the Revelation stories, and knew they were reserved for family. That night I thought Nan would tell “The Hook,” or “Spanish Tom,” one of her scary non-family stories. The thunder cracked and boomed in our chests. She placed the flashlight under her chin. Her bony, disembodied face, just like mine but with wrinkles and spots, was thrown into harsh relief. “A long, long time ago, a family lived in Mount Holly, Pennsylvania,” she began and I gasped, dropped my sandwich. No one outside the family, not ever, was told the story of the first Revelation.

  “What is it, Reve? You’ve heard this all before.”

  “But …”

  “We’re entertaining your guest, young Jolon, here.” Nan gave me a stern look, one she usually saved for misbehaving hawks. “As I was saying. They lived in Mount Holly. A mother, a father, and two daughters, twins with long, long hair. They owned a spread of land by a river, grew turnips and corn and winter wheat. Planted a row of heady lilacs before the cabin, which bloomed from spring until autumn. Their cows were penny red and milk white, maiden white. The girls wore white everywhere, even when they dug in the garden. The mother grew herbs, dyed her own clothes a heavenly blue never before seen in Mount Holly. When she was asked which plants she used for her dyes, especially that color like sky, she just smiled. Only the father made his way in the world with forthrightness, selling his cheese and grain, meeting the other men in the tavern of an evening. He, at least, was liked generally. But it wasn’t enough to save them.”

  A ragged bolt of lightning cracked above our heads, slashing through the darkened sky. Nan’s hawk flapped and cried its alarm. It was her Swainson’s hawk, I could tell by the long, piercing kree. Suddenly rain sluiced down in silvery curtains beyond the porch rail.

  “Good thing you set up here rather than the lawn. Now, how about some tea for a parched old lady?”

  Jolon handed the Thermos cap over. His hand shook, just a little. Nan drank the tea down, poured more. “Go ahead, eat your sandwiches.” Jolon looked at me. I shook my head, knowing Nan would tell in her own way. But Jolon said, “Ma’am? Aren’t you going to tell the rest?”

  She pointed the flashlight at her own chin again, and grinned ghastly. “Just creating a little suspense, my dears. Well, the townspeople took against that family, wouldn’t buy the father’s grain. Wouldn’t buy the red-and-white calves. Just shook their heads when he asked them why. The mother took to making little dolls and flower wreaths to sell, but no one bought them when she set up her stall at the market. People crossed to the
other side of the street to avoid them. Even the daughters, lovely girls of sixteen, were shunned. After a bit, bad things began to happen in the town. The aldermen got gout and stomachaches and inexplicable fevers. Their children became sickly. One child, a comely golden-haired boy, disappeared without a trace after going out to bring the cows home. Now, maybe these things would have happened anyway, but everyone whispered that the woman was a witch and had cast a spell over the town. So, they put their heads together and decided to set fire to her family’s house, then drive them away, if they happened to survive.

  “That night, the men who’d drawn the short straws waited in the forest until the father had checked his livestock for the last time, and the last candle had been extinguished. They waited still, until they heard the father’s snores. Then they crept up to the house. They lit their torches made from straw soaked in bear grease, threw them in the windows, and ran back to the forest edge, to watch and wait.

  “They did their work well. That little cabin burned to the ground, and not a soul was seen leaving it. Not a sound of distress was heard, nothing but the terrified bellowing of the cows. The men said the witch and her family must have been stupefied by smoke while they slept and died before they had a conscious thought. They hoped it was so. After all, they were decent men, not wanting to cause undue suffering, especially the minister, who’d drawn one of the short straws himself.

  “Then a strange thing happened. In the next days, when the fire finally stopped smoldering, when the townsfolk went to examine the devastation they’d wrought, they found blackened pots, beds and chairs turned to charcoal, which disintegrated at a touch. A scorched tea tin. Even the carcasses of those red-and-white cows, burnt up in the shed attached to the house. But they found no human remains. Not a bone or a tooth. As if they’d fled unseen, all that strange family. Of course, they knew it must not be so. The men had waited the night through and had seen not one soul escape. There were only embers and charred sticks left. Except the lilacs, which bloomed on, which had refused to burn.

  “Not a trace was ever found of the family, dead or alive, in that part of the world. Everywhere they went, though, the townspeople smelled not scorched flesh, but lilacs. Where the cabin stood, the lilacs bloomed all the year through. Even today, in the forest that grew up around the ashes of the cabin, those lilacs never cease to bloom, and the scent of them perfumes the air, even in the dead of winter.”

  Nan turned off the flashlight, and the tent was filled with the pink and golden light of sunset. The storm had passed. The birds were singing, their last chorus of the waning day.

  “That was some story, Mrs. Dyer.”

  “If you want more, you’ll have to wait till true dark, now. I’ll tell you some Poe tales, next time.” Nan kneeled and unzipped the tent flap. Jolon grabbed her arm. “But what became of them, that family? Where did they go?”

  “Where do you think they went?”

  I hesitated, then answered, “They came to Hawley Forest.”

  Nan laughed, smoothed my hair. “You ought to know.”

  “How could she know?” Jolon piped in, caught between fascination and skepticism.

  “She bears the name of the woman, the first of the Revelations.”

  Jolon seemed dissatisfied with this answer. “But she wasn’t there.”

  Nan studied him appraisingly. “Suffice it to say there’s more to your friend than meets the eye. Just like her forebears. Best you know now.” She turned and crawled out of our tent. The tang of the lemony-scented soap she used hung in the air.

  Jolon looked at me, but I just shrugged, passed him a bag of gummy worms. He bit the head off a yellow one. I started wrapping them around my wrists, where they stuck, like snakes biting their tails. Then we played badminton in the wet grass until we couldn’t see the shuttlecock anymore. We played gin rummy in the tent, cozy with lanterns dispelling the deep dark around us, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke when I felt eyes on me. Jolon’s. His eyes reflected the moon as he studied me. His face was inches above mine, his cheek smooth as a plum, his brow furrowed. “I don’t know why,” he said. And his mouth pressed against mine. Soft as berries, sure as if he’d been kissing me forever, all our lives, and always would.

  3

  The sun came out. My daughters and I rode on to Moody Spring, then looped around toward home. I didn’t smell the lilacs again, and I tried to put it from me. I tried to put any further thoughts of Jolon from me, too. I felt the weight of every act that had brought me to that moment, balanced on the verge of something large and mysterious and frightening. If Jolon had stayed in Hawley, I wouldn’t have met Jeremy at all, wouldn’t have my three precious girls. But if we hadn’t met, Jeremy would still be alive. Then I couldn’t help but think that I was being unfaithful to Jeremy, just remembering that first kiss. Jeremy was under the ground, with a gravestone over him. My Jeremy. The twists of fate had worked their spell on me, for sure. As we rode, though, the magic of the forest lulled me, banished my gloomy musings. Grace and Fai were happy and smiling, their sunny, excited faces shining.

  When we rode up to the barn, Caleigh ran out to meet us. She helped us untack and bathe the horses, bubbling over with news about the big pumpkin and the Chinese restaurant where they’d had lunch. “What did your fortunes say?” Fai wanted to know.

  “Mine was good. It said I’ll be lucky in money matters. But Gramps’s was funny. Funny strange, not funny ha-ha. Something about what is dearest to him would be lost. Weird, right?”

  I didn’t want to think about fortunes. Neither the past nor the future seemed important that day. We had an early dinner, then played a noisy game of Bananagrams. No one mentioned the headstones, or my father’s not-funny fortune, or Jolon. It was a fine day, without distressing dreams or strange discoveries. I wanted the spell to remain unbroken, wanted there to be many more days like this.

  Hawley Bog—October 23, 2013

  1

  It was the first real day of reckoning for my daughters. I left them huddled over textbooks with Nathan, in the schoolroom he’d set up for them. Life had to get back to normal sometime. As normal as life without Jeremy could be.

  Mrs. Pike arrived in her rusty chariot, and was busy scouring inside the kitchen woodstove when I walked by in my riding clothes.

  “Off riding, missus?” It was the first time she’d spoken to me unbidden.

  “Only to Hawley Bog and back.” It was also the first day I wasn’t cleaning or cooking right beside her. I thought she might resent it, and I resented her for her resentment. Even if it was only in my own mind. “Then I have to get to work. Upstairs, in my office.” I wasn’t going to apologize for the work I had always done. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

  “Hey, I’m just askin’. But you want to be careful in those woods.”

  “I’ve known Hawley Forest since I was a girl. You don’t have to worry I’ll get lost.”

  “It was worried about what you’d find, I was.”

  “And what might that be?” Her cryptic insinuations unnerved me.

  She rose creakily, pulled off her stained rubber gloves one by one. They looked like they came from a crime scene, red with rust rather than blood. “Hunting season, you know. Got to be careful.”

  “It’s only bow now. I’m not fussed. I have blaze orange everything, anyway. As you can see.”

  She put the gloves down, smoothed back her pewter hair. “Well. You know best, missus.”

  “My name is Reve,” I snapped. “Call me by it. Or ‘Mrs. Dyer,’ if you absolutely have to.”

  She nodded impassively. “All right, missus.”

  I slammed the screen door on my way out.

  I saddled Zar and headed toward the gate, past the buildings that once comprised the town center of Hawley Five Corners. The Warriner house, the King house, then the church across the wide street that was my driveway. Except for the strange abandonment of the town, no notable events had taken place here, no Revolutionary War battles, not even
any dinosaur tracks or ancient Indian villages discovered. No famous person had grown up in the shadows of these trees. Quiet lives had been lived here.

  I knew a little of the history of the buildings, courtesy of Carl Streeter’s e-mail missives about the town. The Warriner house was once the schoolhouse for the town, had a stark center, two up two down. But then, as was often the case in New England, the house was added on to as families grew. Ethan Warriner bought the schoolhouse from the town when the South Hawley schoolhouse was built, added on a rambling connector to his blacksmith shop so he wouldn’t have to go out in the rain and snow, and the deep porch, covered with wisteria vine.

  Next came the King house, a tall saltbox that might or might not have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. It also had the distinction of carrying the rumor that a murder had taken place there, a wife poisoning her husband. But it was never proved, and Ida King lived on into old age, dying in 1843 and joining her husband on Cemetery Road, never having remarried. I felt a certain kinship with Ida, had looked for her during our visit to the boneyard the previous day, but hadn’t found her gravestone.

  It seemed strange to think that less than a hundred years before, this had been the center of a bustling little town. There had been stores and a tavern nearby. Children had played here, young people had courted, carving their names in trees that bore the scars of their old love to this day. People had lived and worked and died here. Then something had happened, that was clear. But what? Was it only because it was abandoned, left empty for so long? Maybe there was a real basis for Carl Streeter’s and Mrs. Pike’s insinuations that the town was haunted, but I didn’t feel anything amiss. I felt only the weight of history. The church might hold answers, as the historical society woman had implied, but that was for another day. My Nan might, as well, but there was no guarantee she’d ever tell me. I’d just have to be happy with what I could glean on my own. I rode out the gate, making sure it swung closed behind me. What happens in Hawley stays in Hawley.