The Hawley Book of the Dead

by Chrysler Szarlan

  The weather was almost sultry. I put Zar into a gentle but ground-covering trot. There had been an old mill on the road to Hawley Bog, and the cracked stone foundations stood by the rushing stream that ran from the bog and mirrored Middle Road. The trail branched off, and the stream coursed beneath it. A mist rose before me there, hanging over the water. I turned Zar up the Bog Trail, a steep and winding track, deep with small loose stones. When the rains came in April, the water would run over the trail, making it another streambed, but now the path was dry and skittery. Zar picked his way carefully. Mist hung like a curtain around us. Near the top it wisped and thinned. Then when the stream widened again, it became almost solid, a gray quilt of murk. I heard a tinkling of bells and Zar jumped under me, braced his front legs, ready to spin around and run to safety if required. I saw forms then, not the two-legged forms of human hunters I expected, but swaying four-legged ones.

  A herd of red-and-white cows appeared out of the mist, tossing their wide heads and lowing. The white of them was milky, translucent, very clean. Their red patches seemed bright in spite of the dusky light. Some wore brass bells around their necks, sounding sweet and muted in the air. They were coming straight for us, then swerved and made a run at the bank edging the road. They cleared it with no problem, like grand prix jumpers, like cows jumping over the moon. Then they melted into the forest again, the bells sounding fainter and fainter. A good thing, because if there’s one thing Zar does make a fuss about, it’s a cow. He trembled beneath me, and when we went on, he sidestepped by the bank the cows had jumped. I stroked his sweat-lathered neck. “It’s only cows, kiddo.” I looked back and wondered, though. What were cows doing in the forest? There had been maybe seven or eight. I hadn’t precisely counted; they seemed to flow together and apart with such fluidity they were like a school of big fish. Did some farmer let them out to eat mast in the forest once the grass had gone? But then they were so clean. And there was still good grass, to the horses’ delight. I added the stray cattle to my growing list of mysteries.

  The hill up to the bog was steep and shaley. Stones rattled behind us as Zar’s hooves ground in for purchase. I leaned forward over his withers. We’d just gained the top of the rise when I heard voices. Men’s voices. Maybe they were coming for the cows. I rode around a sharp bend, nearly stumbled into a circle of men standing near three pickup trucks parked in the road. Ten or twelve men. Again, the mist seemed to befuddle me. I thought they might be hunters—almost without exception they sported orange caps. But they had none of the other paraphernalia of hunting. No bows, no camouflage jackets or pants. I saw no six-packs or liquor bottles, either, and I was grateful for that. Most were in coveralls, some in jeans and T-shirts. They stared at me as I came on. Not one smiled. A few touched their cap visors. An older man, with a face brown and wrinkled as a walnut, said, “Mornin’.”

  I nodded, suddenly feeling apprehensive. Zar felt it, too, and tensed. I knew he was longing to bolt back down the hill to home. I tucked two more fingers over the reins to steady him, made fists with my hands. We would go on.

  The men saw my intention, but did not make way for me. I cleared my throat and asked, “Are you here for the cows? I just saw them go hurtling into the woods, about fifty feet back.”

  The wizened man stared at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Cows?” Before I could respond, a fat man in a Red Sox T-shirt said, “Bill Scott used to fence near here, but didn’t let his cows wander round the bog.”

  “Yut. But that was years ago, when you was a kid,” said the walnut man.

  “Bill Scott’s in the nursin’ home now down Northampton. Don’t keep no cows no more,” a man with black hair told him.

  “Maybe them cows she talks about is the ghost herd.…”

  “Shut your trap, Mike,” the black-haired man told the fat one.

  “I’m Reve Dyer,” I told them. “I just moved to the Five Corners.”

  They all looked away. The black-haired man spat. Even though they seemed to want me gone, they did not move to let me by. The walnut-faced man spoke. “We know who you are, missus. And we know where you live.”

  “She don’t know, does she?” the fat man semi-whispered.

  “Better she don’t,” the walnut-faced man replied.

  “Better I don’t know what?”

  “The old town at the Five Corners, how …” began the fat man. He stopped when the black-haired man shot him a look.

  “You mean when the town disappeared?” I asked. “I’d heard something about that. Maybe you all know more, can tell me.”

  They fell silent again. The fat man shuffled and kicked a rock.

  “Never mind, missus,” the walnut-faced man called. “You’re all right. You just go on with your ride, now.”

  They parted then like the Red Sea, let me pass, touched two fingers to visors again, watched me ride on.

  2

  I looped around the bog, saw no more men or cows. When I got home, I checked in on Nathan and the girls, who were involved in a spirited debate about Greenpeace. I went upstairs to try to do some of my own work, but the encounter with the men in the forest troubled me. There were secrets in Hawley, past and present, that I wasn’t privy to, secrets I wanted to know. Maybe I could find something in the book I’d gotten at the fair that would shed some light on the past of Hawley Five Corners.

  I went to the bookshelf, pulled out the Hawley history. At first it seemed like any small-town history, beginning with the founding of the town by a man named Everett Rice and his brothers in 1771. The name Hawley was thought to be in honor of Joseph Hawley of Northampton, a famed legislator. There was no mention that Revelation had settled here in the 1740s, named the town after Mount Holly. Revelation’s part in the founding of the town was buried by time, and the fact that she was only a woman. But there were oddities about the book, written by one Howard Stark, in 1932. Mr. Stark was a religious man, who liked to sprinkle Bible quotes throughout his text. Even though he never once mentioned my ancestor, every quote was from the book of Revelation. They were not attributed, but when I consulted my Bible concordance, it was always Revelation. Mr. Stark had used the quotes as epigraphs to every chapter. Among them was “I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance.” It was as if my ancestor Revelation’s history was hidden, but he couldn’t altogether suppress her influence.

  I found some interesting facts. The first slave in Hawley was white, a Frenchman captured during the French and Indian War. But there was precious little about the Five Corners. Just a passing reference to the tavern, and one tale about the disappearance of a young man during the Civil War.

  After an hour, I gave up reading and went to my laptop for an e-mail check before I turned to my work on the script. I scrolled past e-mails from Restoration Hardware, Bed, Bath & Beyond. Nothing urgent. But then a smiley face in a subject line caught my eye. An address I didn’t recognize, eyeforaneye@aol.com. I was tempted to hit the delete button. But something compelled me, a faint premonition, maybe. When I opened it, there were only two lines: “It doesn’t matter where you are. I’ll find you, disappeared or not.” And a photograph. Of Maggie. Maggie dead, her eyes glazed, staring and empty.

  I’d had a sickening déjà vu feeling since Jeremy’s death. I’d been trying to believe it was just coincidence, desperate to push away the nightmarish memories that the scorched photos of my family sent shivering through me. But what happens in Vegas doesn’t always start in Vegas. I knew now, beyond a doubt, that the Fetch had haunted me before.

  I felt a flood of panic. Memory surged over me like the crash of icy sea water.

  3

  It is impossible to make sense of some things that happen. In my line of work, this is easy to forget. The magician must be in control of every moment. And offstage, most events from the mundane to the remarkable have some identifiable reason for their occurrence. Even my vanish seems normal to me now, easy, just a part of who I am. But there are times in our lives so bizarre that the rational mind ca
nnot account for them. I’d experienced it years before I met Jeremy, before I turned my life to magic. When I was in college, when a girl named Maggie Hamilton had been my friend. I always hoped to be able to make sense of what happened to Maggie, but the facts were intractable, stubbornly impenetrable.

  It started when I was a freshman in college. I was a faculty brat at Williams. I saw Maggie in the dining hall our first day. A black girl dressed all in denim and plaid with a smiley-face cap perched on her head. She drummed a knife on a metal folding chair for attention, then stood right up on it and announced that she was having a record sale in her room. Duke Ellington, Afro-Cuban jazz, Beatles, the Go-Go’s, Roxy Music. I was mesmerized by her. I tried to imagine myself being as bold as she was, as much of a performer. I guess I wanted to be her. Why she chose me as her friend is still a mystery to me.

  I went to her sale, sat on the floor, and watched her bargain among all the milk crates stuffed with albums. I stayed to the end, reading her books: The Wizard of Oz, Petrarch, Emma Goldman, Zora Neale Hurston. Her taste in books was as eclectic as her taste in music. The cool kids bought up the retro and popular records. Maggie counted her money after they had all gone. I wasn’t even registered on her consciousness, sitting in the corner. I may even have disappeared. I still wasn’t completely in control of the disappearing in those days, and it sometimes happened without my realizing. Maybe it happened that day in Maggie’s room.

  “Hey,” I said, and startled her.

  She whirled to face me. “Oh, man, you scared the shit out of me!” She narrowed her eyes. “Hey, what?”

  “Why are you selling your records? You must like music. Or did you inherit them or something?”

  She shrugged. “Not that it’s any of your business, but I need money for books. You know how much a biology textbook costs? I’m dumb broke after buying books for one class. And I haven’t got enough yet for them all. Your friends got no taste, left the jazz.” Two milk crates were full, merely picked over, a few albums scattered on the industrial gray rug of Maggie’s dorm room.

  “Those are the ones I want,” I told her.

  “You like jazz?” She sounded skeptical.

  “I’ll find out.”

  “I’m no pity case, little white girl.”

  “I like the covers.” I did. Watercolors of Havana, beautiful black women in shimmering evening dresses, flowers in their hair. “Didn’t you ever buy a book because you liked the cover and it turned out to be the best book you ever read, changed your life?” She smiled then. Took my money and helped me haul the records to my house. She stayed for dinner. From that day, we were inseparable. I liked the jazz, but it didn’t change my life. Maggie did.

  One day in early spring, as we sat in my mother’s garden after dinner, Maggie told me she wouldn’t be back for sophomore year, that she was transferring to the huge state college in Amherst.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  She pulled apart a dark red tulip that had drooped to the grass. “I don’t feel right here. You know I don’t. There are too many rich kids, kids who wouldn’t think of going to a state college. No one in my family ever even went to college before, and here I am among the children of the rich and famous. It’s too … I don’t know. Jarring, I guess.”

  “But that’s all the more reason for you to stay! You got a scholarship because you worked hard, you’re smart. You belong here more than all the ones whose families went here for generations. You belong here more than I do, that’s for sure.”

  “Come on, Reve. You know what I’m talking about. I’m not here just because I’m smart. I’m here because I’m black. And I don’t want to be some poster child for smart black people, the popular minority.”

  I could say that didn’t matter, but she’d just huff and tell me I was naive. So I said, “You’re not the only one.”

  She looked at me appraisingly, her eyes narrowed. “I thought so. You can’t even say the word. Yeah, there are other black kids here. Their parents are surgeons, or performers. Oh, and there’s that guy who’s some kind of African prince. They went to prep schools. As in, they are prepared to live in this fishbowl. I fit in real good, as my mom’s a hairdresser, and my father made and lost millions at the dog track. Mostly lost.”

  “Maggie, that’s not fair. You’re not being fair to yourself.”

  “At Bay State, there’ll be about ten thousand kids from what the powers that be call ‘the inner cities.’ ” She made quotation marks in the air. “Loads from Springfield, kids I went to high school with. They’ll know who I am.”

  That stung. “Are you saying I don’t?”

  She got up, dropped the mangled tulip, and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’m saying nobody could have a better friend. I’m saying you are my good friend, and I don’t want this to be the end of our friendship. But I’ve got to go. Or I’ll feel like I’m on the edge of screaming, all four years. And I know my good friend Reve wouldn’t want me to feel that way.”

  I took her hand off my shoulder, held it, examined her palm. “Of course I wouldn’t want that.… It’s just, I’ll miss you. You’re the best friend I’ve had for … well, for a long time.”

  “You can come visit. It’s not that far.”

  So I did visit. I went most weekends, for a Saturday-night party or Sunday brunch. Bay State was only an hour away from Williams, but it was another world. As Maggie said, there were many kids from her hometown. There were kids from Japan and Bangladesh, too, from every corner of the globe. And Maggie seemed to know them all. She started getting more politically involved. We went to the peace vigils on the Amherst town common, to the protests against military research at the university. We did the usual things politically aware kids might do. We thought the worst that could happen was that we might get arrested, have to call our parents to bail us out, then go on blithely with our lives.

  One day, we were sitting out under a willow by the pond, studying. Nobody was around, just a couple of boys throwing a Frisbee, their shouts and laughter a distant background chorus. It was March and the trees were still bare. Just on the cusp of spring, just barely warm enough to hang around outside wearing only sweatshirts. There had been more activity by the pond, but the clouds had spread a cold gray quilt over us, and rain threatened.

  “Let’s head back to your apartment. I’m freezing.” I pulled my hood up over my hair, tucking in all the wild strands I could. Maggie looked at me, her brow furrowed in a way that I knew meant she’d been mulling something over for a while.

  “What?” I asked her. “You might as well tell me. I know, you hate my leg warmers.” She didn’t laugh, and she usually would have. My leg warmers were a running joke. I was wearing new ones, bright pink, over my jeans. “They are stupid, but it’s cold!” I waited—not even a smile.

  She looked down at the book she hadn’t been reading. “Shit. I hate this. I wouldn’t bring it up, it’s your own thing, but … it might be important.”

  “Just tell me already.”

  “If you say no, it’s all right.”

  “Maggie!”

  “Okay, okay.” She took a breath, then plunged us into something that would change our lives forever. “The disappearing thing you do … can you do it whenever you want? Say, if you wanted to sneak into a place?”

  I must have startled, because she put a hand out to steady me. I shook it off. “You didn’t tell anyone, did you?” I demanded. Hot fury, blended with fear, surged through me.

  “Of course I wouldn’t tell anybody. Do you think I’m stupid? They’d put me away if I started telling people about my friend, the girl with hot pink leg warmers and superpowers.”

  I was able to hide the disappearing from most people. My mom and my Nan had schooled me. One of my regular lessons was Disappearing and Reappearing 101. But I hadn’t learned to control it every moment. With most people I could pass it off as a trick of the light, or laugh away any little glitch in timing. I couldn’t hide anything from Maggie, though. It did
n’t seem to bother her, but I felt vulnerable nevertheless. Outside my family, the only other person who’d known had been Jolon. And that was long before, in childhood, when we believed miracles were common.

  “Hey, it’s okay—”

  “Don’t tell me it’s not bizarre, Maggie. You know it is.”

  “All right, Reve, so you’re a freak. But it’s not so noticeable; you have to be looking for it to really see it.” She made it sound like acne. Sometimes it felt that way, like a blot upon me. My mom tried to reassure me. It would never be an easy power, she conceded, but it would be useful, like all the gifts the Dyer women possessed. In the turbulent years of young adulthood, I found it hard to believe her. Never more than at that moment, when I thought my best friend might have betrayed my secret.

  “Reve.” Maggie touched my arm, and I pulled back again. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “If you say you haven’t told anyone, I believe you. Of course I do. Only it makes me feel … strange.” I curled my arms around my body, tucked my head deeper into my hood. I wanted to disappear right then.

  “I’m sorry I have to hassle you about it, but I need to know. Reve, can you do it whenever you want?”

  “Why? Why is that important?”

  She glanced around. Even the Frisbee players had given up on the day. The sky was the color of battleships.