The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  She showed up around two, driving a rented PT Cruiser, and the car was almost the same color as the summer sky. Almost that exact same shade of blue. I walked down to meet her at the footbridge that fords the creek from Ramswool Pond, and, I’ll admit, at the time, I wasn’t thinking about much more than how maybe I should at least make an effort not to be a bitch. Fake it. Affect a neighborly attitude, because it wouldn’t kill me, and the last thing I need right now is Squire Blanchard deciding I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For all I know, this woman can actually pay her rent on time, and maybe she’ll up and decide she wants to lease the whole damn house out from under me. So, yeah, stuff a cork in it and play nice.

  She had a bunch of cardboard boxes and some mismatched suitcases, along with an assortment of stuff you’d expect the artist who’s going to take up residence above your head to arrive with. Two huge wooden easels, for example. I introduced myself, and then helped her lug some of her things back to the house, things she didn’t want sitting out in the hot car—paints and art supplies, several rolled canvases, a plastic milk crate of old LPs. I quickly showed her around the first floor, including the bathroom we will now be sharing, and ended up at the steep, narrow flight of stairs leading to the attic.

  “Bet it’s hot as fuck all up there,” she said, squinting into the gloom gathered at the top of the staircase, the gloom and the heat crouched so thickly you could almost see it, and I think I just nodded.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve got beer?” she asked me. “A cold beer?”

  “I think I probably can fix you up,” I said, and we left her things at the foot of the stairs and backtracked to the kitchen. I’m trying to develop a taste for Narragansett, and there was a whole six-pack in the icebox and two bottles left over from another. I opened one for her, and a second bottle for myself, and pointed at the table and chairs by the window.

  “Try to excuse the mess. Try hard,” I said, and she laughed.

  I don’t exactly recall now what it was I’d expected from this woman, whatever preconceptions and images I might have formed of her in my mind’s eye. But whatever it was, Constance Hopkins entirely defied and negated my expectations. I think I’d call her striking even if I weren’t a lesbian. And I think I’d call her beautiful, too. Not the sort of beauty you see these days, touted in magazines and on television. That calculated, cookie-cutter glamour of the dull that so many people seem, increasingly, to gravitate towards. Hers is not the sort of face that would ever get lost in a crowd, and sitting here now, I’m not at all confident I can explain what it is about her that leaves me with this impression. Her eyes have some odd, drowsy quality about them—unfocused, distant—but it’s nothing that suggests a lack of alertness. They’re a very particular shade of reddish brown. Maybe I’d call it cinnamon. Or rust. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes like hers before. That color, I mean. Her complexion is pale, but not at all pasty. Her hair is jet black and straight, and she was wearing it pulled back in a long ponytail. Sitting there, drinking beer with her, talking, I noticed there’s a very small chip out of one of her upper incisors. I wanted to ask her how that had happened, but I didn’t. Maybe later.

  “You smoke?” she asked, and nodded at the ashtray on the table, near Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. It was half-full of butts and ash, because I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of days.

  “Yeah, well . . . I was quit, you know, but now it seems like I’m not so quit anymore.”

  “So you don’t mind if I smoke?”

  “No, I don’t mind in the least,” I replied, and she fished a pack of Camels out of the bulging leather shoulder bag she carries for a purse. The Camels and a pink disposable Bic lighter, and she offered me one of the cigarettes, which I gladly accepted. She lit it for me, and then sat staring silently out the kitchen window for a minute or so. It was a silence that was beginning to grow uncomfortable, when she said, “I like your books. The novels. Your short stories are better written, though. But, I never would have guessed that you wrote anything on something like that,” and, with her cigarette, she pointed at the antique typewriter. Suddenly, I was flustered, disarmed, whatever you want to call it, left feeling as though I ought be simultaneously thanking her for the compliment (as it happens, I like my short fiction better, too), apologizing for the old dreadnaught of a typewriter, and explaining that I normally work on a laptop. Instead, I just nodded and took another long drag on my own cigarette.

  “We don’t have to talk about it, Sarah, not if you would prefer not to,” she said.

  “Well, then,” I replied. “In that case, I would prefer not to, thank you.”

  “I know how it goes,” she told me, and sort of half smiled. “Or, how it doesn’t come, as the case may be.”

  “So, you drove all the way from Los Angeles?” I asked, changing the subject, though I’d already asked her that same question outside, and she’d already answered it. And never mind that Blanchard had told me she was driving; it was something to say, words to fill in empty space, misdirection, and the only thing I could think of.

  “I like to drive,” she said. “I hate planes. Even before 9/11 and all this security crap, I hated planes. When I go somewhere, I want to see where it is I’m going, all the places I pass through on the way there. You know what I mean?”

  I told her that I did, even though I suspected I actually didn’t understand, at all. I’ve always despised long drives, ever since I was a kid and it was my father’s idea of Sunday afternoon recreation. Just driving. Driving nowhere at all. Back before the oil crisis in ’73, when gas was, what, thirty or forty cents a gallon. Constance Hopkins smoked her cigarette and watched the window, watched the bright, shimmering summer day outside the window, and I smoked mine and watched her, trying hard not to be too obvious about it. Trying not to stare. Trying hard. I asked her how it had gone, the drive from LA, and she shrugged and smoke leaked from her nostrils.

  “Fine, except for the fucking breakdown in Gary.”

  “Indiana?” I asked, immediately wishing that I’d said nothing at all, becoming all too acutely aware that my questions and replies were suffering from my unexpected fascination with this woman whom I’d expected would be nothing but an inconvenience.

  “Yeah, Indiana. Only Gary I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Car blew a head gasket or cracked a cylinder or something of the sort, and there was a mix-up getting a replacement. Added an extra day, waiting around while they sorted it out.”

  “But otherwise?”

  Constance looked away from the window, those drowsy red-brown eyes shifting towards me, and she nodded. “Fourteen states in less than a week. My second grand tour of Flyover Country. May I never, ever have to do it again.” She crossed herself, then smiled and took another sip of her beer, before setting the bottle down on the table. And, turning back to the window, as though the unexpected had become the order of the day, she said the very last thing I was prepared to hear.

  “So, I suppose you know all about that old tree out there?” and she smiled again and jabbed an index finger towards the kitchen window. I laughed out loud, a nervous, somewhat unsettled laugh, I suppose, and realized that my bottle was empty, and my mouth had gone very dry.

  “Not like it’s some sort of big secret,” she said, sounding amused. “Just part of that whole local legend scene, the crap you know by heart ’cause you grew up hearing it all the time. Well, if you grew up around here, I mean,” and she paused long enough to tap her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. “Mercy Brown and the plague of consumptive vampires, all the phantoms, witches, ghost towns, shunned pastures, the haunted cemeteries, and whatnot. The usual New England spookfest. Hell, there’s even supposed to be some sort of swamp monster lurking about in a bog up around Gloucester or Chepachet.”

  “Chepachet?” I asked, and she shrugged.

  “Sure. Not all that far from here.”

  “Well, okay, but the tree was news to me. Want another beer?” I asked her, and she glanced at her bo
ttle, still almost a third full, but gone warm, and she nodded. I stood and walked across the room to the icebox.

  “Old man Blanchard didn’t bother mentioning it, before you signed the lease?” she asked.

  “No. Must have slipped his mind,” I said, opening the bottles and returning to my seat, handing one to her. “I had no idea I’d rented a house on a haunted farm. Or that the last tenant here was writing a book about the tree, then went and hung himself from it.”

  “Ah, yeah. That would be Chuck Harvey,” Constance said. “Took a couple of classes from him, when I was an undergrad at URI. Again, not exactly a big fucking secret. I always did think the dude was, you know, sort of out to lunch.”

  I let my eyes stray towards the window, towards the huge green canopy of that tree moving slowly in the afternoon breeze, recalling my walk the day before and how I’d found absolutely nothing the least bit out of the ordinary about the oak. How I’d almost dozed off on that big flat stone at its base.

  “He was writing a book about it when he died,” I said again.

  “Really? I never heard that part of it. I don’t think it made the news.”

  “So this happened before you moved out to LA?”

  “Yep,” she nodded. “I only went out there late last summer, near the end of August. No idea what I was thinking, really. I knew someone from college who wanted to split the cost of an apartment in Silver Lake, and there really wasn’t anything here tying me down. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I swear to fuck, Los Angeles is the worst. It’s like someone decided to build a concentration camp for ass-holes or something, hoping the earthquakes and wildfires would clean up the gene pool.”

  I told her I’d never been very fond of the place myself, and she started in explaining to me about the friend from college, another painter, and how this girl had gotten mixed up with a heroin dealer, how it turned out the roommate was a junkie herself. After all manner of drug-related Sturm und Drang, Constance had decided it was time to get out, and so here she was, drinking Narragansett Beer with me at the kitchen table. “I think they’re all probably in jail by now,” she told me. “In jail or dead. I’m just glad to be away from there, clear and free of that bunch of jerk-offs and needle freaks. Maybe now I can get back to work.”

  And here she stopped and squinted at me through a gray veil of cigarette smoke. “So, he was writing a book, yeah? About the red tree? I wouldn’t have guessed there was enough material there for a whole damn book.”

  I shrugged and pointed to the manuscript box. “Well, he seemed to think so. I found it in the basement. Rather, I found what there is of it. He died without finishing it.”

  She took a last puff from her Camel, then crushed the butt out in the ashtray. “No shit? I thought that was maybe something you were writing. It just got left here, after he died?”

  “That would seem to be the case, though I’ve talked with someone at the university who’s taking it off my hands next week. Someone who used to work with him, I think. He has a daughter, but she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with him.”

  “Didn’t know that, either,” Constance said. “In school, we always assumed he was gay.”

  “Maybe he was. He was certainly divorced.”

  “Weird shit,” she sighed, and sipped at her beer. “So, Sarah Crowe, tell me. Are you the sort who believes in ghosts and cursed trees and the like?” she asked. “Does it make you nervous, all these skeletons in the closet?”

  “No, I do not believe in ghosts,” I replied. “Or Rhode Island vampires, or swamp monsters. I’d be lying, though, if I said learning about Harvey’s suicide didn’t . . .” and I trailed off, searching for words that wouldn’t be taken the wrong way, because suddenly I found myself caring about this stranger’s opinion of me. “It was unsettling,” I said. “And then, finding that manuscript, hidden away down in the basement . . .”

  “You think Blanchard intentionally hid the manuscript?”

  “Sorry, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a figure of speech,” and see there what I mean about being careful of the words I choose, because I hadn’t meant that at all.

  “Don’t you wonder, though, why he didn’t just toss it out, burn it or something?” Constance Hopkins asked, and now there was a faintly mischievous glint in her lazy eyes. “I mean, why save it? Why go to the trouble to stash it away in the basement?”

  “You got me,” I said. “I don’t write mystery novels.”

  “No, that’s right. You don’t, do you?” And as quickly as it had appeared, the glint faded from her rusty eyes. She lit another cigarette, and offered another to me, but I declined.

  “How about you?” I asked, and, with hindsight, I see that the question was not merely an act of reciprocal curi ousity, but a response to what had felt like a challenge or taunt from a woman almost fifteen years my junior.

  “What about me what?”

  “Are you, Constance Hopkins, the sort who believes in ghosts . . . or cursed trees, for that matter? Are you the sort who goes in for all this Fortean nonsense?”

  She peered back at me through a thick cloud of smoke, looking confused. “Fortean? You just lost me.”

  “You mean to say, you’ve never read Charles Fort, king of the cranks, archenemy of all that is rational, self-professed defender of so-called damned phenomena excluded by orthodox science? Rains of blood, fish and frogs falling from the sky, unexplained disappearances, mystery animals, and what have you?”

  “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Not ringing any bells.”

  “No problem,” I replied. “It’s probably for the best. Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.”

  “Do I believe in ghosts?” she smiled.

  “Yes. That’s the one.”

  She continued to smile, and I did my best not to stare at that chipped tooth while she seemed to gaze through me, at least through the surface of me. Finally she nodded, very slightly, her smile widening just a bit, and shrugged.

  “It’s complicated. Maybe we should come back to that question another time,” she said. “I expect I ought to wander upstairs and see just what I’ve gotten myself into,” and she looked at the ceiling.

  “Sure,” I replied. “No hurry,” but there was an odd and unmistakable pang of disappointment, that she hadn’t answered the question. For a moment, I thought she was going to leave the table, but then she started talking again, and the conversation turned to more mundane affairs—just how much she dreaded going up those stairs to the attic, because she knew what a dump it would be. How there was a sleeping bag and an air mattress out in the car that would have to do, as far as bedding was concerned. How she hoped we didn’t both freeze to death when winter came around.

  “I try not to think about the winter,” I said, truthfully. “I’ve never lived anywhere cold in my whole life.”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not so bad. Though it tends to get colder here than it does nearer to the sea. Sometimes, we get mild winters.”

  “Other times?”

  She winked, and then blew a series of perfect concentric smoke rings before replying. “Well, I was born during the Blizzard of 1978. It snowed for thirty-three hours straight, drifts fifteen feet high some places. Hurricane-force winds all across Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but the worst of it was right here in Providence County. It was a hell of a mess, and a lot of people died. My mother used to say, ‘You came in like a lion, Connie, riding on that wind.’ ” She laughed then, and I think I laughed, too. I know I was regretting not having accepted that second cigarette.

  “People still call you Connie?” I asked, preferring not to contemplate all the many ways a person can die in a blizzard.

  “Only once,” she said and winked again. “And now, if you will excuse me, I really should get off my ass and meet my garret. I assume we share the kitchen?”

  “Looks that way,” I said, and then I offered to help with the stuff we’d left sitting at the foot of the attic stairs. She shoo
k her head and told me it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle on her own. She thanked me for the beer and promised to exchange the favor soon, then glanced down at the box containing Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.

  “Before you unload that thing, could I maybe have a look at it?” she asked.

  “Sure, though I’m planning on having it photocopied at the library, so it’s not like there’s a rush.”

  She chewed at her lower lip a moment, then said, “Sarah, if you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to read the original. You know, the actual artifact. Reading a copy wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”

  “Of course,” I replied, because, after all, I haven’t actually worked out when and where I’m supposed to meet the woman from URI to hand it over. “Truthfully, I’ve only read about half of it myself. But yeah, no problem. You can take it now, if you’d like.”

  “Later will be fine,” she said, then thanked me again for the beer, and for helping her carry the stuff up from the car. After she left, I sat here, wondering how long it would take me to get used to the sound of footsteps overhead. And now it’s almost four o’clock in the morning, and the birds are yelling their heads off, and it just occurred to me that the clack from these noisy goddamn typewriter keys might be keeping her awake.

  July 4, 2008 (9:39 p.m.)

  Not much to report, really. I thought of taking the car and driving somewhere there would be fireworks—Foster, or all the way down to Westerly or Watch Hill, maybe even Mystic—not so much because I give two hoots for Independence Day, but just to mark the passage of time, to stay oriented (or reorient myself) to some sort of calendar beyond my own reclusive rhythms and the inevitable progress of the summer towards autumn. I even went so far as to look online for potential destinations, places where fireworks displays were scheduled and so forth. But then Constance asked me to help her with the last few boxes from the rental car, and she started telling horror stories about traffic and drunken tourists and asshole college students, and I dropped the idea. Earlier, just after dark, I did hear some distant concussions, from the south, I think, so I’m afraid that’s it for my Fourth of July this year.