The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You saw what happened last night,” I replied. “What else is there you need to know?”

  “Yeah, but that was only a little one, you said. Right? So what if there’s a really bad seizure? What then? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help you. I mean, should I take along a spoon or something, to keep you from swallowing your tongue?”

  I laughed at her, which didn’t help the situation, and said, “Only if you want to watch me break the few good teeth I have left.”

  “It’s not fucking funny,” she growled and stuffed a whole handful of granola bars into her bag, enough granola to keep a troop of Boy Scouts hale and hearty and regular for a couple of days.

  “No,” I said. “It’s not funny at all, which is probably why I make jokes about it.”

  “Well, it’s not funny, and the jokes won’t help, if something happens.”

  And so I told her what she could do, which really isn’t very much—that she should try to make sure I don’t hit my head on anything hard or sharp, and that she should roll me over into the recovery position, if possible, so I don’t strangle on saliva or anything. It seemed to help, just telling her that stuff, and at least she didn’t cram any more granola bars into the bag. I guess I’d taken the edge off the sense of helplessness she was left feeling after last night.

  “How would I know if it’s bad enough to call an ambulance?” she asked.

  “Constance, do I look like I could afford whatever it would cost to get an ambulance and paramedics all the way out here?”

  “Jesus,” she sighed. “I’d fucking pay for it, alright? I would pay for it before I’d let you lie there and die in the woods.”

  I lit a cigarette and stared out the screen door towards that huge red oak, silhouetted against the cloudless northern sky. “If it ever lasts more than five minutes,” I said. “Now, are we going to do this, or stand here talking about my fits all day?”

  “I’m ready when you are,” she replied. And that’s what was said before we left, as best I can now recall. There wasn’t much else said until fifteen or twenty minutes later, when we realized that we were lost. Or, rather, when we began to admit aloud to one another that we were lost. At first, I think it was more embarrassment than anything, embarrassment and confusion, and I’m sure we both thought that whatever had gone awry would right itself after only another minute or two. We’d simply gotten turned around somehow, that’s all. People don’t like to admit when they’re lost, not only from a fear of looking like a horse’s ass, but also because the admission entails an acceptance that one is in some degree of trouble. And, in this case, I spent half my childhood and teenage years in the woods back in Alabama and know well enough how to walk less than a hundred fucking straight yards from Point A to Point B, plus I’d already visited the tree once. Constance is a local and, despite her time misspent in Los Angeles, is also no stranger to walks in the woods. So, we were both fairly, and not unreasonably, reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, that something was wrong.

  Near as I can tell, it started when we reached the break in the fieldstone wall and the deadfall of pine branches and had to leave the path to cross the stream running out of the pond in order to make our way around that impenetrable snarl of rotting wood, poison ivy, and greenbriers. We were both sweating by this time, and I paused at the stream to wet the bright yellow paisley bandanna I’d brought along before tying it once again about my throat. Constance crossed before me, and stood there staring in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool, talking about catching salamanders and turtles when she was a kid. I made some joke about tomboys, and then followed her across, noting how very dark the water was. I didn’t remember this from before—the somber, stained water—but it made sense, thinking about it. All that rotting vegetation surely produces a lot of tannin, which leaches directly into the stream. Where the water was moving, it was the translucent amber of weak tea, and where is wasn’t, here and there in deeper, stagnant pools, it was the rich, almost black brown of a strong cup of coffee. I associate this sort of “blackwa ter” with bayous and with the Southern coastal plain, and it seemed oddly out of place here on Squire Blanchard’s farm. Also, it brought to mind Dr. Harvey’s mention of the Bloody Run in Newport, that stream supposedly painted red with the blood of so many slain Hessian conscripts during the Revolutionary War.

  She suggested we follow the west bank a little farther, as there was considerably less in the way of briars and underbrush on that side of the creek. And since we could still plainly see the upper boughs of the red tree from the broad gully the stream had carved, it made sense to me. The ground was a little muddy, and maybe the gnats and mosquitoes were worse, but the air was cooler down there in the leafy shadows of that hollow. We could always cross back over, scale the steep bank, and then the stone wall, when we were even with the tree. And now, typing this, another (rather obvious) literary parallel occurs to me, “Little Red Riding Hood” and the mother’s instructions that her daughter not dare stray from the path leading safely to her grandmother’s house. The Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,” and also, of course, Angela Carter’s retellings in The Bloody Chamber. Constance and I had strayed from the path, like mannish Miss McCraw and the four doomed students who followed her up Hanging Rock, or . . . digression, digression, fucking digression. Tell the story, Sarah, or don’t tell the story, but stop this infernal beating around the bush (and no, I shall not here initiate yet another digression regarding that unfortunate choice of words).

  I think we’d walked for about ten minutes, when Constance noted how odd it was that the tree did not seem to be getting any closer. Or rather, that we didn’t appear to be getting any nearer to it. I laughed it off, said something about optical illusions or mirages, and we kept going, slogging more or less northwards towards the tree, which was still clearly visible. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, there was no longer any denying the fact that, somehow, the red tree had become a fixed point, there to the northeast of us, and that we should have already long since passed it and reached the edge of the pond. By then, it should have become necessary to turn 180° and look south to see the tree, but it remained more or less precisely where it had been, relative to our position, when we’d climbed down from the path to the nameless little stream.

  “This is sort of fucked-up,” Constance said, not exactly whispering, but speaking very softly, as though she might be afraid someone would overhear.

  “No,” I replied. “This is bullshit,” and I turned right, sloshing back across the tannin-stained water, getting wet to my knees and hardly caring. I scrambled up the bank, and over the fieldstone wall, and there was the path, and there was the far side of the deadfall, standing between me and the house, even though the pile of branches is, at most, only ten feet wide, and we would have passed it immediately, as soon as we began following the stream towards the tree. I stood there, out of breath, a stitch in my side, tasting my own sweat, and I shouted for Constance to get her ass up there.

  After she’d seen it for herself, she shook her head and said, “It’s a different one, that’s all.” But the uncertainty in her eyes didn’t even begin to match the intended conviction of her words.

  “Constance, I was here less than a week ago. Trust me. There was only one deadfall.”

  “Well, then this one’s new,” she said, her voice taking on a frustrated, insistent edge. “These limbs fell later, after you came through here, okay?”

  I took the bandanna from around my neck and watched her while I wiped at my face with it. The stream water had long since evaporated, and the only moisture on the yellow cotton was my own perspiration.

  “Fine,” I said, because I could see she was scared, and I know I was getting scared, and nothing was going to be accomplished by arguing about the hurdle of vines and rotting white pine blocking our route back to the house. “But how long have we been walking, Constance? How long have we been following that creek, with the tree not getting any closer?”r />
  She looked at her wristwatch, and then looked towards the oak, and then looked back to me.

  “I’m guessing at least half an hour, right?” I said, and, before she could reply, I continued, because I really did not need or want to hear the answer to my question. “And even if you take into account the time needed for us to climb down to the stream and back up here again, and the few minutes we spent by the water, talking about salamanders and tadpoles and shit, even if you take all that into account, why aren’t we at the tree? How the hell does it take half an hour to walk three quarters the length of a football field?”

  “We’ll clear it up later, I’m sure,” Constance said, turning away from the deadfall and towards the tree. But the way she said it, I was left with little doubt that she’d prefer I never even mention the matter again, much less try, at that safely unspecified, but later, point in time, to puzzle out what we’d just experienced.

  She started walking along the narrow path, and because I had no idea what else to do, I followed her. All around us, the trees were alive with fussing birds and maybe a chattering squirrel or two. I still have a lot of trouble telling angry birds and angry squirrels apart. There was a warm breeze, and, overhead, the branches rustled and the leaves whispered among themselves. Constance walked fast, and so I had to move fast to keep pace. Before long, she was almost sprinting, her footfalls seeming oddly loud against the bare, packed earth of the trail.

  Five or ten minutes later I was breathless and sweating like a pig, and I shouted for her to please stop before I had a goddamn coronary. And she did stop, but when she looked back at me, there was an angry, desperate cast in those brick-red eyes of hers. Those irises not unlike the tannin-colored water of the stream.

  “Look at it,” I gasped, leaning forward, hands on knees, gasping for air and hoping to hell I could get through the next couple of minutes without being sick. “Jesus Christ, Constance, just stop and fucking look at it.”

  And she did. She stood there in the muttering woods, while I struggled to catch my breath, while my sweat dripped and spattered the dirt. She stared at the red tree, and then she asked, “Why doesn’t it want me to reach it? It let you, but it won’t even allow me to get near.” I am moderately sure these were her precise words, and I managed a strangled sort of laugh and spat on the ground.

  “Let’s go back,” I said, doing my best to conceal my own confusion and fear. “Like you said, I’m sure it will all make sense later. But I don’t think either of us is in any shape to keep this up.”

  “What if it’s me, Sarah?” she asked. “What if doesn’t want me getting close?”

  I stood up, my back popping loudly, painfully, and I took her arm. “Let’s go back,” I said again. “It’s just a tree. It doesn’t want anything, Constance. We’re hot and confused and scared, that’s all.”

  She nodded slowly, and didn’t argue. I held her arm and softly urged her back the way we’d come. She took a bottle of water from the canvas tote bag, twisted the cap off, and when she was finished, passed it to me. The water was warm and tasted like plastic, but it made me feel just a little better. I remembered the sandwiches and apples and all the damned granola bars she’d packed; if we were lost, at least we wouldn’t starve right away.

  “Come on,” she said, returning the water bottle to the tote. “I don’t want to be out here anymore. I need to be home now.”

  “That makes two of us. But, please, do me a favor, and let’s not try to make a footrace of it, alright?”

  “Fine. You go first,” she replied, and the tone of her voice, her voice and the circumstances combined, there was no way I could not think of some adolescent dare. An abandoned house, maybe, a door left ajar, hanging loose on rusted hinges, opening onto musty shadows and half light. You go first. I dare you. No, I double-dog dare you. I was always a sucker for dares.

  “If you keep your head, when everyone about you is busy losing theirs,” I said, and began walking south again, following the trail back to the house.

  “Who said that?” she asked, and pulled her arm free.

  “I’m paraphrasing,” I replied.

  “So who are you paraphrasing?”

  “Rudyard Kipling,” I told her, though, at the time I was only half sure it was Kipling and not Disraeli.

  “The same guy that wrote The Jungle Book?” she asked, and I knew Constance was talking merely to hear her own voice, to keep me talking, that she was busy trying to occupy her mind with anything mundane. “Mowgli and Baloo and Bagheera, right?”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “But my favorite was always ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. ’ My favorite story by Kipling, I mean. You know, the one about the mongoose and the two cobras—”

  “I never read it,” she said. “But I saw the Disney movie when I was a kid. I don’t remember a mongoose.”

  “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi wasn’t in the Disney film.”

  “I never read it,” she said again.

  And the conversation went on like that for a while, I don’t know exactly how long. Kipling and Disney and what the hell ever, until she stopped and checked her watch, and I stopped and waited on her.

  “So, where’s the deadfall?” she asked, and laughed a brittle, skittish laugh, looking up from her wrist and staring down the trail winding on ahead of us. “We should be back to it by now.”

  I didn’t answer her, and I also didn’t ask how long it had been since we’d turned back towards the house. I didn’t need to ask to know that we should have already reached the deadfall. I glanced off to my left, and the fieldstone wall was exactly where it ought to be, sagging in upon itself with the weight of all the centuries that had passed unnoticed since its construction, the long decades since the last time this land was farmed and anyone had bothered with the wall’s maintenance. I could hear the little stream mumbling coolly somewhere beyond it.

  “Well, we’re going the right way,” I said, peering up through the dappled light, checking the afternoon sun to be sure we were still walking south.

  “Maybe the trail forked somewhere back there, and we were talking and not paying attention, and we went the wrong way,” she said hopefully, and I nodded, because it was a better story than whatever was running through my head. “Maybe,” she said, “we went left when we should have gone right, or something like that.”

  I looked again at the stone wall, those moss- and lichen-scabbed granite and gneiss boulders, and I could feel her eyes following mine.

  “So maybe there are two streams,” she said, and now the brittleness in her voice was edging towards panic. “And those goddamn stone walls are everywhere out here. That doesn’t mean anything, Sarah.”

  “I didn’t say it did,” I told her, knowing perfectly goddamn well it was the same wall, and that I was hearing the same stream. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You’re thinking it, though,” she said. “Don’t lie to me, because you’re standing there thinking it.”

  “You never told me you were fucking clairvoyant,” I said. “Why is that, that you never bothered to say you could read my mind?” the words hard and mean and out before I could think better of it. And probably, at that juncture, I was somewhere past caring, anyway. I had my own apprehensions to worry about, and I was tired of coddling her.

  “We’re lost,” she said. “We’re lost out here, and you know we’re lost.”

  “Seventy-five yards,” I reminded her. “Constance, no one gets lost walking seventy-five yards from their back door to a goddamn tree, walking in a straight line, when you never even lose sight of where it is you’re headed.” And it occurred to me, then, and for the first time, that I couldn’t see the farmhouse, even though I’d been able to keep track of it almost the whole way the first time I’d gone to the tree. Even though, as I believe I mentioned in an earlier entry, a quirk of the landscape had, admittedly, made it harder to keep the house in view than the red tree. I walked a little farther down the trail—another ten or twenty yards—and Constance followed me silently; I wa
s grateful that she didn’t ask what I was doing or what I was thinking. But I still couldn’t see any sign of the house. I stopped (and she did likewise, close behind me), checking the sky again to be absolutely certain I’d not lost my bearings, that we were, in fact, still moving roughly due south.

  “Next time, just to be on the safe side, how about we bring along a compass,” I said, trying once more to make a joke from something that wasn’t funny, something that might become funny—tomorrow maybe, or next week—when we were safely out of these woods. When the inevitably obvious rational explanation had finally, mercifully, become obvious. Predictably, Constance seemed to find no more humor in the compass remark than in my earlier failed attempt to get her to loosen up and laugh about the seizures. She glared at me, a spiteful, how-dare-you glare, and then let the canvas tote bag slip from her arm and fall with a thump to the ground between us.

  “I’m tired of carrying it,” she said, though I had not asked. “My shoulder’s sore.”

  I simply nodded, not taking the bait, if, indeed, she was baiting me. Instead, I stared back towards the red tree, and for the first time since finding Dr. Charles Harvey’s manuscript, hidden away in the basement, it seemed to me more than a tree. It seemed, in that moment, to have sloughed off whatever guise or glamour usually permitted it to pass for only a very old, very large oak. Suddenly, I felt, with sickening conviction, I was gazing through or around a mask, that I was being allowed to do so that I might at last be made privy to this grand charade. I saw wickedness. I could not then, and cannot now, think of any better word. I saw wickedness dressed up like a tree, and I had very little doubt that it saw me, as well. Here was William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch—the frozen moment when I clearly perceived what lay at the end of my fork—and the perfect Dadaist inversion of expectation, something, possibly, akin to that enlightened state that Zen Buddhists might describe as kensho. The epiphanic realizations of Stephen Dedalus, only, instead of Modernist revelations I was presented with this vision of primeval wickedness. And I knew, if I did not look away, and look away quickly, that what I saw would sear me, and I’d never find my way back to the house. I thought of Harvey, then, and I thought of William and Susan Ames, and John Potter’s fears of Narragansett demons.