Today, I lifted the book out of the box, and it fell open to pages 184-85, a little more than halfway through, just past the beginning of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. On page 184, the Tenniel woodcut shows Alice entering the mirror above the fireplace, and on the opposite page, she’s emerging from that other mirror in the reversed world of the Looking-glass House. Hidden in between these two pages—and Alice’s act of passing from one universe into its left-handed counterpart—was a folded sheet of wax paper, and pressed between the two halves of the wax paper were five dried four-leaf clovers, and also a tiny violet. I removed the wax paper and closed the book, setting it aside. Seeing the pressed clovers and the single faded violet, there was such an immediate flood of memories. I don’t know how long I sat there holding those souvenirs and crying. Yeah, crying.
Amanda and I used to joke that it was her superpower, finding four-leaf clovers. I’ve never been any good at it myself, but she could stand over any given patch of clover, and, within only a minute or two, without fucking fail, spot at least two or three. And here were five from some spring or summer afternoon that I could not recall, only that she had found them for me. I picked the violet. I can’t even remember now what led to the preservation of these particular clovers. I mean, if I’d saved every four-leaf clover Amanda ever found and gave to me, I’d have hundreds of the things. I didn’t even put them in the book, so I can only assume that Amanda did. For some reason lost to me, or never known to me, these were special. Maybe if Amanda were still alive, she’d know why. I could have picked up the phone and called her, and she would have laughed and told me, would have described that morning or evening, the circumstances that made these matter so much more than all the others.
I’ve spent so much energy casting Amanda as the villain, even though I know perfectly well that’s bullshit. It’s easier to recall the constant bickering, the minute wounds we inflicted upon each other, her low blows and my cheap shots, and incidents like her taunting me outside the Morewell Tunnel, than to tell the truth. The truth is so much more inconveniently complicated. But here were these five clovers and the violet stashed inside this book I’ve cherished since I was a kid, undeniable evidence that it wasn’t all hurtful, no matter how “toxic” her therapist might have deemed our relationship. Here was proof that a moment had existed when she loved me enough to put these tokens of good luck, which came so easily to her, but always eluded me, where she knew I would always have them.
I sat on the living room floor, and held the wax paper, and cried until my sinuses ached and there was nothing in me left to cry. I was terrified that Constance would come downstairs, and I’d have to try to explain, but she didn’t. And then I put Amanda’s keepsake back between pages 184 and 185, closed the book, and returned it to the bottom of the cardboard box.
July 9, 2008 (5:33 p.m.)
In Chapter Five of Harvey’s manuscript, he relates an apparently well-documented incident from 1957 that bears an unnerving similarity to what happened to Constance and me on Sunday afternoon. An unnerving similarity, or a remarkable similarity, or both. This is new territory for me, and so I’m not entirely certain what adjectives are most appropriate. In all honesty, I’d pretty much resolved to stop reading the manuscript. I’d decided, before Sunday, to let Constance read it and satisfy whatever morbid curiosity motivates her, then deliver it to the sociologist in Kingston. The thing has begun to make me nervous, and before Sunday, I would have said it makes me nervous in no way that I can lay my finger on. Now, I can lay my finger on page 242, and point to the precise source of my unease—or one of the sources, as I am beginning to see that it all fits together somehow, even if I cannot yet fully articulate the extent of the nature of this interconnectedness.
On page 242, Harvey writes:The odd case of Olivia Burgess bears discussing in detail, in part because it was reported in numerous newspapers, not only in Rhode Island and New England, but all across the country. Here we do not have to rely upon the frail pages of antique diaries or local folklore or turn to urban legends where the only sources that can be cited are the inevitable FOAFs. In my files, I have forty-seven separate newspaper and magazine accounts of the Burgess incident, all of them printed between October 17, 1957, and May 2, 1974, including a number of interviews with Ms. Burgess. Though a few of the periodicals in question may rightfully be considered suspect (the December 1963 issue of Fate, for example, and a particularly sensationalized piece in the September ’71 issue of Argosy), most of the reporting is straightforward and often outwardly skeptical of Ms. Burgess’ claims (many of the later accounts appear as “seasonal” Halloween-related pieces, neither taking the story seriously nor bothering to get the facts straight).
On the morning of Thursday, October 10, Olivia Burgess, a widowed 45-year-old native of Hartford, Connecticut, was visiting the Wight Farm as part of research for a book on the history of agricultural practices in pre-Revolutionary War New England. Having been told that there were remains of an old cider press located within easy walking distance of the house, at the base of a large tree somewhere near Ramswool Pond, Ms. Burgess set out on foot, alone, to see if she could confirm or deny the report. By all accounts, in the fall of 1957, the land between the farmhouse and the flooded quarry was still being kept clear, and the walk would surely have seemed a simple enough detour. However, the story she would eventually tell a friend back in Hartford, who urged her to repeat it to a local reporter, was anything but simple.
According to Ms. Burgess, she found the large stone situated at the base of the old red oak, just as it had been described to her by the landowner’s wife. She reported photographing the stone from several angles using a Brownie Bull’s-Eye camera. It was only when she’d finished and had headed back towards the house that her visit to the Wight place took a macabre turn. Olivia Burgess claimed to have become immediately disoriented, though she was certain from the position of the sun and the fact that the tree was visible behind her, that she had to be heading in the right direction. Also, she noted, she soon lost sight of the farmhouse, though it should have lain directly ahead of her, to her south.
“The longer I walked, the farther away from me the house appeared to get. It literally grew smaller as I approached, as though I were experiencing an inversion of parallax or stereopsis. The effect was not only frightening, but I soon became nauseated, almost to the point of vomiting.” Finally, the house vanished from sight completely and Burgess grew “very afraid, because I could still see the tree quite well whenever I looked back towards the pond.” After almost half an hour of trying to reach the house, she retraced her steps to the tree and tried once again to reach the farmhouse, with identical results.
“It was getting late,” she told The Hartford Courant , “and twilight was coming on. I became terrified that I would be unable to get back to the house before nightfall, even though it lay less than a hundred yards away.”
After a third failed attempt to walk back to the house, Ms. Burgess had the presence of mind to try a different tack. Though it was growing dark, she crossed the stone wall west of the tree and walked in that direction until she managed to reach a farm on Barbs Hill Road. She then caught a ride into Moosup Valley, and did not return for her car until the next morning, and then only with the company of a male acquaintance from Foster, as well as an off-duty fireman, the landowner, and another local (unnamed) farmer. She is quoted in the original Hartford Courant article as having said, “I know perfectly well that all four of them thought I was certifiable, and I told them a lot less than I’m telling you. But I wouldn’t go back out to that tree for a million dollars.”
When the film in her Brownie was processed by a photo lab a few days later, all the prints were returned black, devoid of any image whatsoever, as though the film had never been exposed.
There’s quite a bit more of this. In fact, Harvey devotes the majority of Chapter Five to the episode, to various interviews with Olivia Burgess (née Adams) and to numerous secondhand sour
ces. He claims (and it does appear, from his account) that Burgess stuck to her story, as first reported, until her death in 1987 at age seventy-five. Some of the later versions of the tale, notably those appearing in Fate and Argosy magazines, took considerable liberties and embellished the story, as though it weren’t bizarre enough to start with. The Argosy article states that Burgess found fresh bloodstains on the stone and around the base of the old oak, and the Fate article not only claims that she was pursued by a “large black wolflike animal” during her ordeal, but tries to link the episode to both UFOs and the nuclear accident in Windscale, Cumbria, which happened to occur that same day (and was considered the world’s worst reactor mishap until Three Mile Island).
While certainly not identical to the apparent distortions of space and time that Constance and I experienced on our “lost picnic,” the parallels are unequivocal. I have packed the unfinished manuscript back into its box and left it at the foot of the attic stairs for her to read. I think I’ve had enough. Enough of those pages and enough of this place, enough of that wicked tree that I have to see every time I forget not to look out the kitchen window. Enough, period. If someone had told me Olivia Burgess’ story a week ago, I’d have called them a crank or a liar. Now, I’m wondering if it’s possible to sue that bastard Blanchard for neglecting to mention that he was renting me a house built on Hell’s doorstep?
CHAPTER FIVE
July 14, 2008 (11:43 p.m.)
I thought perhaps I’d made the last entry to this journal, if you can even call this a proper journal. Dr. Harvey’s typewriter has sat here on the kitchen table, neglected, untouched (at least by my hands), for the past four days. So, I was hoping I’d kicked the habit. No such luck. Clack, clack, clack. And I’m not entirely sure what has brought me back to these clangorous keys, whether it is today’s events or merely force of habit. If I claim the former, I can feel as though I am compelled, and so what I am saying has some importance. If I plead the latter, well, then this is really no different than the nicotine, and perhaps nothing happened today that was any more remarkable than the nothing that happened yesterday, and the nothing from the day before that. But, because I need a fix—the motion of my fingers, the syllables spilling from my mind, the “sound” of my own goddamn droning voice talking to myself—I’m willing to inflate the significance of the afternoon to give me an excuse to write.
For the most part, Constance has kept to her attic, and, for the most part, I’ve passed the time downstairs reading and watching old movies. Mostly, I suspect we’ve both been trying not to think about whatever happened when we tried to reach the tree last Sunday. I have avoided the manuscript, and I have also avoided glancing out the kitchen window. I know she’s been painting, because she tells me so when I bother to ask. And the variegated stains on her hands and the smocks she wears change from day to day. The smells of linseed oil and turpentine leak down to me. Before today, we weren’t talking very much, mostly only when we happened to share a meal, which has been less frequent than before. She’s either got some food squirreled away up there, or Constance has simply been skipping meals. I would guess the latter. I can tell she hasn’t been sleeping well. Her eyes are bloodshot and the flesh beneath them looks bruised.
But she came down to breakfast this morning, seeming a bit more like her old self; that is, seeming a bit more like she did before our “lost picnic.” She made eggs and bacon, and while we were eating I suggested we take a drive. I was surprised when she agreed.
“Have you seen Beavertail?” she asked, and I told her that sounded like a pickup line from a dyke bar. At least I made her smile for a moment.
“It’s over on Conanicut Island,” she continued, the tines of her fork rearranging what was left of her scrambled eggs. “On the way to Newport. There’s a lighthouse, and the tourists usually aren’t too bad there. No real beaches. Just rocks.”
“Sounds good to me,” I told her. “I’m sick to death of this place.”
“You’re not writing,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but I answered like it was.
“No, I’m not.”
Constance frowned and stopped picking at her eggs.
“Have you talked to your agent?”
“No, I haven’t. Honestly, I think she’s about ready to give up on me. The woman has the patience of a saint, but even saints have their limits.”
“I really don’t know much about Catholicism,” she said, and when I laughed, she just sort of stared at me.
“Jesus, girl. I think maybe you need to get out of this dump even more than I do.” And then I told her to get dressed while I saw to the dirty dishes. So, she went back upstairs to change clothes while I washed the plates and coffee cups, the greasy skillet and utensils. Half an hour or so later, a little before noon, we were headed south on Barbs Hill Road. Constance talked quietly while I drove, and as we got farther from the Wight place, her mood seemed to lighten a little, her features becoming gradually, but noticeably, less weary. She told me stories about visiting the lighthouse on Conanicut Island, pausing now and then to give me directions, because I had no map and no idea which roads to take. Her stories were entirely unremarkable, and I was glad for that. No “ghost of the Forty Steps” here, just the sorts of anecdotes that tend to accumulate when someone has gone back to a particular place very many times over the course of a life. The sorts of stories that make a place familiar and comforting. I don’t have a lot of those sorts of places myself, for many different reasons.
As we headed out across the span of the Jamestown Verrazano Bridge, leaving the mainland behind and crossing the west passage of Narragansett Bay, she pointed to the ruins of an older, smaller bridge on our right. It ended abruptly a few hundred yards from the shore.
“That’s the old Jamestown Bridge,” she informed me. “They demolished it a few years back. Shaped charges, TNT, you know, the whole controlled-demolition thing. I don’t know why they left that part standing. Used to scare the hell out of me, crossing the old bridge, ’cause there were just the two undivided lanes, and the grade was so steep sometimes cars stalled, but there really wasn’t anywhere to pull over and get out of the way. And out there is Beavertail,” she said, pointing past the bridge to a low green bit of land a couple of miles to the south of us. The day was clear and hot, hardly a scrap of cloud to be seen anywhere, and the color of the bay wasn’t all that different from the color of the sky.
“It was even worse in the winter,” she added. “The bridge, I mean.” And then Constance didn’t say anything else until we were almost off the bridge, and I asked her about the exit.
I still haven’t quite gotten used to how close together everything seems in New England, compared to the careless sprawl of the South. We stopped at a grocery store in Jamestown, because Constance said she needed to pee and this was our last chance, and when I checked my watch, I saw that it had only been about forty-five minutes since we’d left the house. I’d just assumed the drive would take a lot longer, that it would be late in the day before we reached our destination. But no, here we were, almost there, and less than an hour had gone by. The air smelled like saltwater, and the woods and fields of Moosup Valley seemed much farther away than the thirty or so miles we’d driven. This landscape of picturesque cottages, salt marshes, and sailboats hardly seemed to belong in the same state as Squire Blanchard’s peculiar tract of land.
I followed Constance inside, because my own bladder’s seen better days, and I was getting hungry, and needed a fresh pack of cigarettes. Inside, it was cool, and there was a mix of what Shirley Jackson might have called “summer people” and year-round residents. In the checkout aisle, Constance (who was buying a Hostess lemon pie and a Dr Pepper) turned to me and said, speaking softly enough that no one else would hear, “You never talk about her.”
And, no lie, for a second or two I had no idea who she meant.
“Why is that, Sarah, that you never talk about Amanda?” she asked, smiling for the cashier, who asked if it would be cash o
r debit. Constance told her cash, and then fished a couple of crumpled bills from her jeans pocket.
“We’ve talked about Amanda,” I replied, thinking I was surely telling the truth, that she must have come up at some point since Constance had returned from LA and taken up residence in the attic.
“Nope,” she said. “Not even once. I’ve never even heard you say her name.”
The cashier took Constance’s money, but looked at the crumpled one-dollar bills like she didn’t see such unsightly things very often.
Constance turned her head and looked at me. “If you need to talk about her, Sarah, I don’t mind listening. I’m actually pretty good at listening.”
“I’ve never mentioned her to you?” I asked. “Not even once?” and Constance shook her head.
“Not even once,” she replied.
“Then how did you know to ask about her?” and I realized that the cashier was staring at me, as though she, too, was curious why I’d never spoken to Constance about my dead girlfriend.
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