The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I sit down in the hallway, the owl skull cradled in my hands, and I watch them. I wonder how long Helen’s been home, how long I must have lingered at the marshy place and the hemlock. I wonder what would have happened if I’d come back sooner or if I’d never gone out at all.

  The other woman is pretty—prettier than me, I think—and her blonde hair’s pulled back into a tight bun. She’s dressed in a dark green riding jacket, white jodhpurs, and tall black boots with neat little spurs on them. Helen’s naked, or nearly so. She’s wearing a bridle, an elaborate thing of black leather straps and stainless steel. She has a curb bit clenched tightly between her teeth, and her legs have been laced into tall leather boots that come up past her knees and end in shaggy fetlocks and broad wooden hooves. No heels, just the hooves, so she’s balanced somehow on the balls of her feet. The pretty blond woman whispers something in her ear and smiles. Helen nods once and then bends over the edge of the bed, leaning on her elbows now as the woman smears her right hand with KY and works her fingers slowly into Helen’s ass.

  And I’m watching this, all of it. I’m watching this because I know that I’m meant to see it, that it’s a performance, and I can at least not be such a goddamn, ungrateful coward that I refuse to simply see. I watch this because I know I have it coming.This is Helen pushing me off the bed.This is Helen making me bite my tongue.This is me forced to share my dreams.

  The blonde woman is holding something like a severed horse’s tail, glossy chestnut strands hanging all the way down to the floor and attached to a thick rubber plug, which has also been smeared with KY. She eases the rubber plug deep into Helen, who doesn’t flinch or try to pull away, who doesn’t make any sound at all, who remains perfectly still and perfectly quiet until the tail is firmly in place.The blonde woman is wiping her hands clean on a white bath towel, and then she takes Helen’s reins and gives them a firm tug. Helen stands up straight again, not wobbling in those boots, not seeming even the least bit unsteady on her wooden hooves.

  “You know what comes next?” the woman asks her, and Helen nods. “That’s because you’re a good girl,” the pretty blonde woman tells her. “You’re such a good, good pony.”

  And Helen leans across the bed again. But this time she raises her left leg and rests her knee on the mattress, and I can’t help but be reminded of the way she leaned against the stone wall at the edge of the orchard.

  The cold iron flash from her hooves,

  And that’s my heart lost in the night.

  I watch from my spot on the floor while the woman uses a small ball-peen hammer to nail shiny new horseshoes onto Helen’s hooves, first the left and then the right. And I watch almost everything that comes afterwards. I look away just once and then only for a few seconds, because I thought I might have heard someone else in the hall with me, someone walking towards me, someone who isn’t there, and that’s when I realize that the owl skull’s gone. So I tell myself I must have only thought I brought it upstairs, that I must have absentmindedly set it down somewhere in the kitchen or on the table at the foot of the stairs. And then I go back to watching Helen and the pretty blonde woman in riding clothes. . . .

  4.The Paintings (May)

  And this last part, this is only a week ago.

  I wake up from a dream of that night, a dream of wild things running on two legs, wild things in moonlit pastures that seem to stretch away forever. I wake up sweating and breathless and alone. She’s gone to take a piss, that’s all, I think, blinking at the clock on the dresser. It’s almost three in the morning, and for a while I lie there, listening to the secret, settling noises the house makes at three a.m., the noises no one’s supposed to hear. I’m lying there listening and trying too hard not to remember the dream when I hear Helen crying, and I get up and follow the sound down the hall to the spare bedroom that I’ve taken for my studio.

  Helen’s found the canvases I hid behind the old chifforobe and pulled them all out into the light. She’s lined them up, indecently, these things no one else was ever meant to see, lined them up along two of the walls, pushing other things aside to make space for them. I stand there in the doorway, knowing I should be angry and knowing, too, that I have no right to be angry. Knowing that somehow all my lies to her about that night at the edge of the field have forfeited my right to feel violated. Some lies are that profound, that cruel, and I understand this. I do, and so I stand there, silently wondering what she’s going to say when she realizes I’m watching her.

  Helen glances at me over her shoulder, her eyes red and swollen and her face streaked with snot and tears. “You saw what I saw,” she says, the same way she might have said she was leaving me. And then she looks back at the paintings, each one only slightly different from the others, and shakes her head.

  “You asshole,” she says.“You fucking cunt. I thought I was losing my mind. Did you even know that? Did you know I thought that I was going crazy?”

  “No,” I lie. “I didn’t know.”

  “How long have you been painting these?” she asks me, and I tell her the truth, that I painted the first one only a week after the night we walked through the orchard.

  “I ought to have them framed and put them on the walls,” she says and wipes at her eyes. “I ought to hang them all through the fucking house, so you have to see them wherever you go. That’s what I ought to do. Would you like that?”

  I tell her that I wouldn’t, and she laughs and sits down on the floor with her back to me.

  “Go to bed,” she says.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt you,” I tell her. “I wasn’t ever trying to hurt you.”

  “No. Don’t you dare fucking say anything else to me. Go back to bed and leave me alone.”

  “I promise I’ll get rid of them,” I tell her, and Helen laughs again.

  “No, you won’t,” she says, almost whispering. “These are mine now. I need them, and you’re not ever going to get rid of any of them. Not tonight and not ever.”

  “I was scared, Helen.”

  “I told you to go back to bed,” she says again, and I ask her to come with me.

  “I’ll come when I’m ready. I’ll come when I’m done here.”

  “There’s nothing else to see,” I say, but then she looks at me again, her eyes filled with resentment and fury and bitterness, and I don’t say anything else. I leave her alone with the paintings and walk back to the bedroom. Maybe, I think, she’ll change her mind and destroy them. Maybe she’ll take a knife to the paintings or burn them, the way I should have done months ago. I sit down on the edge of the bed, wishing I had a drink, thinking about going downstairs for a glass of whiskey or a brandy, or maybe going to the medicine cabinet for a couple of Helen’s Valium. And that’s when I see the owl skull, sitting atop the stack of books beside her typewriter. Bone bleached white by sun and weather, rain and snow and frost, those great empty, unseeing eye sockets, the yellow-brown sheath still covering that hooked beak. I looked for it after that night in February, three months ago, the night Helen brought the blonde woman home, but I never found it. So maybe, I told myself, maybe that was just some other part of the dreams. I lie down and do my best not to think about Helen, all alone in my studio with those terrible paintings of the thing from the field. And I try not to think about the owl skull; too, too many pieces to a puzzle I never want to solve. And before Helen comes back to bed, as the sky outside the window begins to go dusky shades of gray and purple with the deceits of false dawn, I drift back down to the orchard and the stone wall and someone has turned the ponies out again.

  16 July 2008 (1:43 a.m.)

  I am so sick of this typewriter, and right now, sitting here pecking at these fucking black keys is the very last thing I want to be doing. And yet, I will not even try to deny that I need this, the outlet of writing, the words, the pages, the goddamn typewriter. As surely as I need the Tegretol and Klonopin and sleep, as surely as I need to stop drinking again and stop smoking so much and write another book, and while I’m mak
ing this little wish list, as surely as I need to take an ax to that goddamn wicked tree out there. As surely as I need all those things, so, too, do I need to reduce the day to mere nouns and verbs and adjectives. It has been entirely too strange and frustrating, this day, and that’s after fucking Constance and after the inexplicable fact of “Pony.” I mean, it seems now, somehow, that the worst of it began after Constance returned from Foster, though, truthfully, very little has happened since she got back to the farmhouse.

  Whether I’m actually talking in circles or not, I feel as though I’m talking in circles. Reading back over that last paragraph, it seems like nothing so much to me as the Ou roboros of my consciousness struggling futilely to consume itself in toto. Maybe in the hope that the act of consumption, of self-annihilation, would lead, finally, to peace and an end to this fear and confusion. I’ve never really thought much of (or on) the whole writing-as-therapy line of reasoning—James Pennebaker and the curative virtues of self-disclosure. I say that, and yet I need this. Right now, I think my ability to “write it out” might be the only thing holding me together. Well, that and the pills and the beer I shouldn’t be drinking.

  I’m not sure what I expected from Constance this afternoon, only that I expected something. I know that last night she said, “No strings attached.” In fact, I’m pretty sure that she said it twice. And when she said it, it was no doubt exactly what I wanted to hear, the little push necessary if I was to follow her up those stairs, the promise that we could share this thing without commitment or emotional baggage or whatever. Just sex. Just the physical release and the comfort of having another woman’s body against mine for the first time since Amanda’s death. Looking back, I know that was all she offered and all I agreed to, all I thought I wanted or needed. But . . . she’s acting like it never happened.

  And what? What the fuck am I whining about? I’m upset because she meant what she said? Did some desperate recess of my mind allow itself to believe that, regardless of what we said and what we thought we meant, last night would be the beginning of something more? That Constance Hopkins would be the end of my mourning for Amanda, and the floodgates would open wide, and I’d be free to shit out the book that Dorry and my editor are waiting for, and we’d all live happily ever after? Is that what this is all about?

  She came back from Foster and, almost immediately, retreated to the sanctuary of her attic, and I’ve hardly seen her since. She’s come down a couple of times to use the toilet, once to get something from the fridge. She’s been perfectly pleasant with me, and I’d be lying to say that she’s behaving differently towards me (and isn’t that the problem, Sarah, that she isn’t?). There was the usual small talk, but no suggestion that tonight would see an encore of last night’s tryst. I’m forty-four years old, and I’ve had more one-night stands than I can even recollect. I’m not supposed to act like this. I am ashamed that I feel so rejected or betrayed or ignored simply because Constance meant “no strings” when she said “no strings.” I am more than ashamed that I can’t stop thinking maybe I just didn’t do it for her last night, that I was invited into her bed and found wanting.

  And maybe what’s eating at me isn’t even so much Constance’s inattention as the mystery posed by the “new story,” which, try as I may, I can’t stop suspecting is somehow her doing. And that’s not to say that I think she wrote the thing. Having been over it so many times now, there is genuinely no way left for me to attribute the authorship of “Pony” to anyone but myself. It’s my voice, my handwriting, me exploring my own very personal concerns, and, most damning of all, a set of line edits that includes several proofreader’s marks that, so far as I know, are entirely of my own invention.

  Even if I were to go so far as to imagine that Constance could have mimicked my style, forged my handwriting, and had these sorts of insights into what happened between Amanda and me—and all those things are at least not beyond the realm of possibility—I still cannot account for the proofreading marks. I brought no finished or unfinished manuscripts with me from Atlanta that she might have cadged them from. All that shit’s locked up in a storage unit back in Georgia. So, when I stare at those pages and see there six or seven of the “operational signs” of my own invention, I’m left to conclude that either an elaborate conspiracy exists between Constance Hopkins and one of the handful of people familiar with my peculiar editing tics (my lit agent, my editors and copy editors past and present, and a couple of exes), or she’s clairvoyant, or I wrote the story myself and subsequently blocked having done so from my mind (purposefully or unintentionally, consciously or unconsciously). And I find that even when faced with so unsavory a proposition as my own insanity, I cannot simply abandon lex parsimoniae. That the simplest explanation here is also the most unsettling is irrelevant, if I am to at least remain honest with myself.

  I wrote the story, and I must admit that I wrote it. I just don’t remember having written it. All evidence would indicate that I composed it sometime between July 8th and July 13th, the span of time during which I produced no journal entries. Four days, and the story comes to about 3,850 words, which is about (actually just under) what I would normally be able to produce in four days. I have spent a great deal of the afternoon and evening trying to distract myself from thoughts of Constance by trying to clearly recall everything I did over the course of those four days. My memory is decent, despite the drugs, and I’ve not come up with any apparent “missing time” or blackouts. I know my memory’s seen better days, but everything appears to be in order. There is one last avenue of investigation open to me that I have not yet pursued, and that is simply to ask Constance if she heard me at the typewriter on those days, or if she ever actually saw me working on the story, or if I talked about it with her while I was working on it. I just haven’t found the courage to do that yet. I’ve promised myself that I will do it tomorrow, and then I’ll call my doctor in Atlanta and see what she thinks.

  About the only aspect of the story that might argue against my having written it is that I am rarely so transparently autobiographical. Especially when it comes to details. For example, the chipped Edward Gorey coffee mug. I’ve had that mug for years (but it’s also in storage, so there’s no way that Constance could have seen it), but it’s the sort of thing I almost never borrow from my own life and insert into my fiction. Doing so has just always sort of given me the creeps. But, it’s hardly legitimate grounds for dismissing myself as the story’s creator. Oh, and the ruby-stemmed wineglasses. Amanda bought those somewhere, and I got rid of them after she died.

  It’s late, and I just want to go to bed. My eyes are beginning to water, and the words are starting to swim about on the page. But I did want to mention one other thing, lest, looking back on this entry, however many years from now, I allow myself the luxury of believing that I was, on this night, being haunted by nothing more than the specter of free love and a story I can’t recall having written. Lest Dr. Harvey’s typescript and the red tree begin to feel neglected. Any other day, this final item might have struck me as so strange and portentous as to have formed the matter of an entire entry. But tonight, it seems somewhat inconsequential by comparison. I went into my bedroom this evening, after dinner (alone), and found three leaves lying on the floor at the foot of my bed. They were quite fresh and not the least bit wilted, so I think they could not have been lying there very long before I discovered them. I knew, without a doubt, what they were as soon as I saw them, but, still, I carried one to my laptop and looked it up online. It (and the other two) are dead ringers for Quercus rubra, the Northern Red Oak. I could pretend to pretend to find comfort in the precise language of botany. Doesn’t science always scare away the monsters? I have these notes I made: upper surfaces of fully developed leaves are smooth and glossy dark green, contrasting with yellow green undersides, with either smooth or hairy axils. Stout, frequently reddish petioles measuring one to two inches long; stipules caducous. Mature leaves usually possess seven to nine lobes (oblong to oblong-ovate) t
apering from a broad base and measure five to ten inches in length, four to six inches wide; leaf margins repandly denticulate; conspicuous midrib and primary veins; second pair of lobes from leaf apex largest. There. I copied that word for word from my handwritten notes, putting it down like a prayer or incantation. There are only a few words whose meanings escape me (“caducous,” “petioles,” axils,” etc.), and I’ll look them up later. But no, I do not feel all better now. I do not feel any different at all.

  I threw two out and kept the third, pressing it between the pages of Harvey’s manuscript.

  CHAPTER SIX

  16 July 2008 (10:45 p.m.)

  The sky was already beginning to turn the purplish gray shades of dawn before I finally managed to get to sleep “last night.” Though in my last entry I made much less of the three oak leaves I found on the bedroom floor than I made of “Pony” and the whole mess with Constance, as soon as I’d shut off the light and was lying there, waiting for the Ambien to kick in and send me tumbling away to whatever nightmare was waiting, I could hardly think about anything else. What I’d first accepted as just another—and rather humdrum—consequence of living here, next door to that tree and old Hobbamock’s sacrificial stomping grounds, seemed suddenly a threat, an insult, a gibe.

  What the hell am I trying to say? The words are not coming to me easily tonight. I’m exhausted, and it’s been a long damn day. What I’m trying to say is that I began to seriously consider the possibility that Constance placed the leaves there, that there was nothing the least bit preternatural about their appearance.

  And, so, I was suddenly back at the gaslighting scenario. I got angry, and I lay in bed, sweating, trying to find some way to absolve her, but kept coming back around to the things I’d written about parsimony and the provenance of “Pony.” I began to mull over the implications, that Constance might have visited the tree to get the leaves (though I can hardly rule out her having acquired them from a different red oak, possibly one she encountered on her recent trip into Foster, and that’s probably much more realistic). It was all I could do to stay in bed. I wanted to get dressed and march up those attic stairs and pound on her fucking door. I wanted to see the look on her face when I confronted her and called her on pulling such a sick fucking joke at my expense.