The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  It’s really not so bad in the attic, aside from the heat, which was almost intolerable before we set up a little window-unit air conditioner that the Mexicans seem to have left behind. But it’s clean up there, and roomier than I remembered, and Constance seems happy enough with the space. I sat with her a while, and we talked and drank more Narragansett beer while the attic cooled down around us. I don’t think I could ever get used to that single, long V-shaped room, those steeply slanting walls meeting overhead like the hull of a capsized boat. Nothing very remarkable about the conversation, nothing worth putting down here, except that she claims she’s bi, that she’s had a couple of girlfriends, so maybe . . . well . . . I can’t be blamed for wishful thinking. Sure, I was already thirteen when she was born, but what the hell.

  Later, she wanted to take a nap, and so I found myself downstairs again, looking over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript for the umpteenth time. Not so much reading it, as scanning what I’d read already. To be honest, the thing is a mess. There are chapters, but after the first, these divisions seem more or less arbitrary, and there’s almost no effort at presenting any sort of chronological history of the origin and traditions surrounding “the Red Tree” (it would be too kind to call this writing “non-linear”). Also, often, the author veers off into subjects that are, at best, tangential. The nearest thing I can compare it with are the writings of Charles Fort—which, I should note, are mentioned on that page I discovered in the typewriter’s carriage, and are also liberally cited in other portions of the manuscript. I haven’t read Fort since college, but I recall his rambling, unfocused style gave me fits. Anyway, here’s an example of what I mean—the tangents—from Chapter Two (ms. pg. 112). Right in the middle of a discussion of one of the better-documented episodes involving the tree, a series of murders dating from the 1920s, Harvey pauses to discuss an unrelated haunting:Here I should like to mention the purported haunting at Portsmouth Abbey, which is said to have followed from the slaghter [sic] and mass burial of some thirty to sixty Hessian soldiers during the Revolutionary War. The largest land-based battle of the conflict occurred on August 29, 1778, at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, near a stream now known as Barker’s Bloody Brook (or the Bloody Run), a stream that flows through the Portsmouth Abbey grounds. Indeed, the very name of the brook is tied to this battle, as the waters were said to have run red for days afterwards, polluted by blood, so great was the loss of life. The precise location of the Hessian burial is uncertain, though most do agree it was beneath the boughs of a large willow tree, long ago cut down. The dead soldiers are said to rise from a great depression marking the grave site, often referred to as the “Hessian Hole” (again, reports vary on the location of this sunken area marking the grave). Spectral sightings are said to be especially likely on foggy nights. One wonders if director Tim Burton was aware of this tale when crafting his popular 1999 retelling of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). It should be noted that there is no actual archaeological evidence that the mass grave is anything more than legend, and a recent survey of much of the battleground by Salve Regina University (Newport) failed to turn up any burial matching the description of the infamous “Hessian Hole.”

  I will assume Harvey felt justified in making this digression from his discussion of the murders of 1922- 1925 because the Hessian Hole story involves a tree and a bloody brook, vaguely echoing some elements of the “Red Tree of Barbs Hill Road.” Anyway, I realized that I wasn’t really sure how far back the legends surrounding the tree extend—because of Harvey’s haphazard attention to chronology—only that the oldest accounts predate the story of William Ames and his wife by more than a century. I sat down on the floor with the manuscript, and spread the pages out around me, trying not to think about Constance upstairs, napping beneath the air conditioner while I sweated below. Or the possibility that she might be napping in the nude. It would appear that the earliest account Harvey was able to locate regarding something amiss with a tree in the wilderness south of Moosup Valley dates to the years following the “West Quanaug purchase” of 1662 (and I confess that I am almost entirely ignorant of local history, so I’m taking Harvey’s word on this stuff). He writes (Chapter One, ms. pg. 29):It seems to have begun in the decades after the acquisition of roughly fifteen square miles of land from the Narragansett sachems Awashouse and Newecome, generally referred to as the West Quanaug purchase. “West Quanaug” (or, alternately, “Westconnaug” is an English corruption of the Narragansett “Wishquat noqke”). Three men were instrumental in the purchase: William Vaughn of Newport, Robert Westcott of Warwick, and Zachariah Rhodes of Pawtuxet. The Westconnaug Company was organized in June 1678 to see to the tract’s subsequent apportion. A surveyor was not appointed until 1707. The West Quanaug purchase may be seen as the second major acquisition in an expansion authorized in 1659 by the Colonial General Assembly, encouraging Providence settlers to “buy out and clear off” all Indians west of the Seven-Mile Line. Following the resolution of disputes over ownership between the aforementioned Providence Proprietors and the West Quanaug Company (October 28th, 1708), both were eager to place settlers on the new land, largely to help resolve a persistent boundary dispute with Connecticut.

  Though the first deed issued by the West Quanaug Company, to John Potter of Warwick, dates from 1714, family tradition has it that Mr. Potter, in fact, took up residence in a small cave along the east bank of the Moosup River as early as 1704, where he then lived until the construction of a house. Though this story may be purely anecdotal, appealing to a romantic ideal of the pioneering spirit, a much later entry in John Potter’s journal (Special Collections, Providence Athenaeum), dated May 15, 1715, makes reference to “the red indyen dread of an olde tree s’d haunted by the divel Hobbamock, an enimy to all good, who appeareth there by night.” Potter then relates a story of the Narragansett’s offerings of freshly killed game left at the base of the tree, as Hobbamock was “s’d by the heathens to be appeas’d above al else by the shadding of blood.” In this entry, indulging his imagination, Potter even supposes that occasional human sacrifices may have been made to “the daemon, so great ware theire fear of this malevolent thinge.”

  In Part 1 of The Origin and Development of Relig ious Belief (1878), the prolific English scholar and folklorist Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould writes, “New Englanders supposed Hobbamock to be the arch-fiend of the Indians, because the myths told of him represented him as malevolent; but, in fact, he was their Supreme Oki, or God.” So, regardless of Hobbamock’s proper place in the pantheon of the Narragansett people (a redundancy, as “Narragansett” translates, literally, as “The People”), it is consistent with the contemporaneous impression of Native American mythology that John Potter would have regarded (and probably distorted) this being to conform to the popular impression of the time, that Hobbamock was an Indian devil. This same being was also known as Cheepie (chippe, meaning alone, separate, secluded, or apart).

  It is also worth mentioning here that “Hobbamock” was a title bestowed upon high-ranking tribal members, such as the case of a Pokanoket sachem called Hobbamock who was sent, in the spring of 1621, to Plymouth Colony by Massasoit, chief of all the Wam panoag. Hobbamock and his family lived alongside the colonists until he died in 1641.

  As we shall see, John Potter’s life would, eventually, become inextricably and fatally linked with the Red Tree, which he first set eyes on, it appears, from a journal entry dated only as August 1716, little more than a year after his first mention of the Hobbamock story. At this time, he notes the presence of an enormous stone believed to have been placed at the base of the accursed oak by the Narragansett and used as an altar. He describes the rectilinear slab as marked by a shallow groove carved into its upper surface, forming a rough circle within which the offerings were placed. This groove, Potter writes, led to a “spout” or opening on the southern edge of the altar stone (which he believed served to drain blood from sacrifices that had collected in the groove). However, though mentioning tha
t the stone was covered with lichen, he fails to make any mention of bloodstains, which one assumes would have been inevitable, unless the Narragansett regularly scrubbed the stone (or Hobbamock’s nocturnal feedings were sufficient to have wiped it clean).

  Such “altar” stones are known from other sites in New England, including one from the Mystery Hill megalith site (“America’s Stonehenge”) near Salem, New Hampshire, and another displayed at the Hadley Farm Museum in western Massachusetts. The latter, which is almost identical to that located at the base of the tree, has been identified as a cider press. The Mystery Hill “altar” is suspected of having been carved in either the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Century by local farmers for use in the manufacture of lye soap. Other notable examples of stones quite closely matching that on the Blanchard property may be seen today at Groton, CT, and Leominster and Westport, MA. In each case, the stones are believed by archaeologists to be of relatively recent, non-Native American origin, and to have been used for production of lye, pine tar, or potash, and even the pressing of grapes. Nevertheless, these artifacts have long fired the popular imagination, and appear in such canonical works of pulp fiction as Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (1929) and Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” (1974).

  In this same entry (see Appendix B for the relevant excerpts from John Potter’s diary in full [A shame Harvey didn’t live long enough to actually write the appendices!—S.C.]) the tree described, along with the “altar stone” perfectly match the tree now identified by locals as “the Red Tree,” and I have little doubt that the two are one and the same. He states that “it has an evil feel about it” and that he has begun to consider cutting it down and having the stone broken up. Obviously, this never happened, and as we shall soon see, John Potter would live to regret not following through with his plan to destroy the tree. Despite his apparent loathing of the tree and his belief that the Narragansetts gathered at the spot to summon evil spirits, Potter built his home, in 1707, well within sight of the oak. Indeed, at the time, one can assume that, the land having been recently cleared by Potter for agriculture, the tree would have been more visible from the house than it is now. Records in the Tyler Free Library, the Foster Preservation Society, and the Providence Athenaeum indicate that Potter’s original house burned in 1710, and that Potter rebuilt directly on the foundation stones he’d lain three years earlier. So, given this chance to relocate his house farther from the oak, he once again acted in a way that, at first glance, seems contrary to his notions and misgivings about the tree. However, I believe that, by studying Potter’s diary, we can arrive at satisfactory explanations for these actions, and that in the beginning they amounted to little more than stubbornness and an unwillingness on his part to be perceived as having been in any way intimidated by native superstitions.

  Yeah, okay, enough of this already. My eyes are giving out. Didn’t I say I wasn’t going to hand copy Harvey’s damn manuscript, that I was going to have it Xeroxed? And here I’ve just transcribed about four pages of the damned thing! But, that said, the upshot is that people have been afraid of this old tree (hidden now, out there in the dark beyond my kitchen window) for almost three hundred years. And the stone I lay down on, and where I almost dozed off below those branches, has (or had) a reputation as an altar used by Indians in human sacrifices. I have to admit, reading back over that part gave me just a bit of a shiver, even if I’m most emphatically not the sort of woman who believes in ghosts and Rhode Island vampires and bog monsters.

  Oh, speaking of Constance, she came down about five this afternoon, looking refreshed from her nap, and offered to fix dinner for the both of us. I never turn down a home-cooked meal, so long as someone else is doing the cooking. She scrounged about in the kitchen and somehow came up with the ingredients for a couple of cheddar-cheese omelets, with French fries on the side (I had a pack of Ore-Ida frozen shoestrings). While we were eating, she asked about the manuscript pages scattered all over the floor, and I told her about the “altar” at the base of the tree. I said that I wanted to make a second trip out to the tree, as I didn’t recall seeing the groove and spout mentioned by Harvey, and she asked if I’d mind if she went along. Like I was going to say no, right? So, it’s a date. We’re planning to pack lunch and have a proper picnic on the stone, dubious past or no, bloodthirsty demons or what have you. Okay, so maybe it’s not a date, strictly speaking, but at least it’s not me sitting here on my ass, smoking too much and drinking lousy beer, moping about the novel that I’m not getting written while I obsess over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.

  July 5, 2008 (10:27 p.m.)

  The best-laid plans of mice and men and bored writers, as they say. Or as they ought to say. The heat was exceptional today, the sun like a searing hole punched into the sky leading straight up to Hell. By one this afternoon, the mercury had reached 93F, and Constance and I decided to put our plans for a picnic at the red tree off until another, cooler day. The meteorologists (whom I’ve noticed are even less reliable here than back in Atlanta) are promising cooler weather soon. I suppose the proximity to the sea complicates matters, adding a greater degree of uncertainty into that already dubious undertaking of predicting the future course of cold fronts, high- and low-pressure centers, the whims of the polar jet stream. But, the long and short of it, the day was dangerously hot, and, in lieu of our picnic, Constance invited me up into her garret to partake of the air-conditioning. The little window unit was hardly able to keep up, what with the hot air rising from below and the sun blasting down on the roof, but the attic was still a far sight better than being downstairs.

  Earlier in the day, before the heat got so bad, I’d gone with her up to Foster, to return the rented PT Cruiser. On the way home, she talked, mostly, and mostly she talked about growing up around here. There were questions I’d wanted to ask, about her painting and California, and about what taking classes from Charles Harvey had been like, but I’d kept them to myself. Then, up in the attic, I saw that she hasn’t yet begun painting, which I suppose is hardly surprising. She has begun stretching two canvases (the stretcher bars were Brazilian white pine, she informed me), and the place already smells like oil paints and linseed oil and gesso. She sat on her air mattress, me in a metal folding chair, and we smoked and drank Narragansett and listened to the window unit chug and wheeze and try to keep up with the heat. She has a little portable stereo, and something by Lisa Gerrard was playing on repeat. I can’t now recall everything we talked about, and I won’t try. The stuff two people from different parts of the country talk about. The things two artists working in completely different media talk about. But, there was one thing I wanted to get down here, and as I prepare to do so, I realize that I have developed a certain relationship with this typewriter and the journal I’m using it to keep (instead of writing my novel)—it would appear that I have taken it into my confidence, and I’m going to have to stop leaving these pages lying about where Constance could easily come across them and be tempted to read things I would really rather she didn’t.

  “You asked if I believed in ghosts,” she said, and I think maybe we’d been talking about Henry James, for whatever reason, and so it didn’t seem strange to me that she had returned to the unanswered question.

  “And you said it was complicated,” I replied, and sipped at my beer.

  “I wasn’t trying to be coy. It is complicated. The answer, I mean. But, if you’re still interested, I’ll try to explain.”

  “I’m still interested,” I said, not adding that I strongly suspected she was being coy. “If you want to tell me, sure, I’m interested.”

  “Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” she continued, wiping beads of condensation off her own bottle with a corner of the sheet. “At least, not in any traditional sense. I don’t believe in the soul, or that the mind is capable of surviving death, so a logical consequence is that I can hardly believe in restless spirits and the like. See what I’m saying?” and she scooted a few inches across the air mattress and a little closer
to my chair.

  “Sure,” I said. “It sounds like maybe it’s not so different from my own reasons. The physicalist approach to monism and the so-called mind-body problem. Thought is merely a function of the brain—”

  “—no soul,” she said, cutting in, and I think that, in retrospect, I’m a little embarrassed at how I was trying to wow her with my knowledge of things that I really know very little about (I’m not much better with psychology than I am the weather). Constance tapped at her head with an index finger. “Just my brain, and my mind exists no more independently of my brain than my chewing exists independently of my teeth. Thought, mind, whatever . . . it’s just what the brain does. The dichotomy between that which we call mental, or spiritual, and those things we call physical, is merely an illusion. It’s all physical.”

  “No arguments here,” I told her, hoping that the conversation was not about to step off into some hard-core philosophical waters much too deep for me to follow. I’d already pretty much used up my bag of jargon with physi calism, monism, and the mind-body problem.