I thought worse things, too. Furious, vengeful ruminations I’m not going to put down here.
The last time I remember looking at the digital clock beside my bed, it was sometime after five. And when I finally slept, there were the dreams. I might have written those down if I’d gotten to this entry before sunset, but I didn’t, and so I’ll either save them for next time or just let them go. Let them fade, and be forgotten.
As for Constance, I hardly saw her again today, and when I did, I mostly kept my mouth shut. She seems completely consumed in whatever it is she’s painting up there. Maybe meaningless sex with older women is her muse. I made no accusations, and she did nothing the least bit suspicious. I did ask her about her work, how it was going, on one of her trips down to the toilet. I was sitting on the living room sofa, trying to make my way through a story on snow leopards in the June issue of National Geographic. Her hands looked as though she’d given up on brushes; indeed, there was paint, mostly shades of green and blue, halfway to her elbows. There were also smears on her face.
“Do you know anything much about painting, Sarah?” she wanted to know, not a trace of condescension in her voice, and I admitted that I knew very little. She watched me a moment, then stared past me, and I couldn’t decide if she was trying to think what to say next, or if, maybe, she’d forgotten we were talking. That unfocused quality to her eyes, which I believe I noted after first meeting her, seemed more pronounced than usual. Her gaze seemed fixed on something far away, well beyond the walls of the house.
“You’re not familiar with František Kupka?” she asked, at last, and once more I admitted my ignorance. I asked her to please write the name down for me, so I could look it up online, so we could talk about the painter later. She seemed skeptical, and in a hurry to get back to work, but did as I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s not really so much like Kupka, now that I think about it. He’s just the first thing came to mind.”
“Kupka. Is that Czech?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Well, it was still eastern Bohemia when Kupka was born. Later, though, he went to Vienna, and eventually to France, of course. You might recognize some of his work, when you see it.” And she named a few of his paintings then, though the only one I can remember is “The Black Idol.”
“Do you ever miss having other writers to talk to?”
“No, not really,” I said. “Truthfully, I’ve never much cared for the company of other writers. I usually just get into arguments I don’t want to get into. Why? Do you miss having other painters around?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Excuse me, Sarah. I really should get back,” and Constance pointed at the ceiling.
“Of course,” I replied. “I don’t mean to keep you,” and without another word, she turned and disappeared down the hall again. I sat there listening to her footfalls, to the opening and closing of the attic door. I sat staring at the name she’d scribbled on an index card, and the aquamarine smudges her hands had left on the paper. Suddenly, it seemed utterly absurd, that I’d lain awake all night, entertaining notions that Constance was sneaking about trying to freak me out by putting oak leaves on my bedroom floor. Or, for that matter, that she’d written “Pony.”
Later, sometime after a bland lunch of tuna fish and saltines and beer, I went back to Dr. Harvey’s typescript, skipping ahead, only half conscious of what I was looking for there until I’d found it. Beginning on page 262, Harvey documents a number of instances in which those who have had encounters with “the red tree” have been visited afterwards by the appearance of its leaves:Does the oak perhaps leave calling cards, meant to remind those who have visited it that they have been marked in some way? The pun was unintentional, but I shall let it stand. Does the oak leave calling cards. I have discovered a number of accounts that seem to indicate that at least some of those who’ve gone to the tree have later experienced the spontaneous manifestation of Quercus rubra leaves. The earliest such account goes all the way back to John Potter, fittingly, who in October 1710 wrote of the repeated appearance of “stupendous quantities” of such leaves, “gone red as blood and flame with autumn, and acorns, too,” appearing inside the house he’d built two years before. He recorded his wife’s alarm at the coming of the leaves, and also her consternation at having to repeatedly sweep them out of her home. Then, again, in the summer of 1712, Potter found his rooftop blanketed with “a heavy falling” of red oak leaves, though he claims he was unable to find even a single such leaf lying on the ground anywhere around the house. “The wind seemed unable to dislodge them, and they lay still.” I have even seen one of the leaves from the October ’10 manifestation preserved between the pages of his journal, where, I assume, he himself must have placed it. Potter also mentions an acquaintance from “Satuit” (Scituate) who, following a call on the Potters, found red oak leaves beneath both his bed and writing desk on several different occasions.
This is the earliest example of the leaves appearing a considerable distance from the tree, though it is hardly the last. I have so many newspaper accounts of such episodes that it would be tiresome for me to recount them all here (see Appendix B). Instead, I would call attention to two rather disturbing and exceptional cases.
Enter this under things I should have begun to wonder about long before now, but . . . here’s Harvey’s unfinished manuscript, yet there’s no sign anywhere of all these clippings and notes and such that he repeatedly mentions in the text. How is it, then, that the manuscript was saved, but the files on which the manuscript are based apparently were not? Did he destroy them before his suicide? Were they discarded or destroyed by someone else after his death, even though the manuscript itself was stashed away in the basement? Or are they still here in the house somewhere, so well hidden that I simply have not come across them? Admittedly, I have not searched for them, but I have, since coming here, had occasion to casually peer into almost every nook or cranny where they might have been sequestered. Then again, maybe I have been anything but thorough, and my bored rummaging has been too haphazard. Regardless, I’d love to see some of his sources, if only to confirm that they exist, and to discover to what degree Harvey might be selectively reporting these incidents, thereby distorting them, to suit his needs. But, as he was saying:The first concerns British Anglican occultist, poet, and novelist Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), who, I will note, was briefly a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (along with such Edwardian luminaries as William Butler Yeats, Florence Farr, and Maud Gonne). Shortly after the publication of her third, and final, novel The Column of Dust (Methuen; London, 1909) and while at work on Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (Methuen; London, 1911—possibly the most renowned work in a very prolific life), Underhill received a long letter from Margaret Cropper, a close acquaintance who was traveling in New England. Cropper had heard tales of “the fearsome blood oak somewhere south of Foster, in Rhode Island,” and had even visited the tree for herself. The letter in question, which has been printed in the Coll ected Papers of Evelyn Underhill (Longmans, Green and Co.; London, 1946, edited by Lucy Menzies), recounts a visit to the “old White [sic] farm,” and includes fairly accurate descriptions of the house, the tree, and the supposed altar stone. When the letter reached Underhill, the envelope also contained a single dried leaf, which she identified as having come from a red oak. However, only a few months later, Cropper returned to England, and Underhill notes that her friend had no memory of having sent one of the leaves to her friend. “Indeed, she found the strange tree most wholly repellent and wished to take nothing physical away from her encounter with it,” Underhill writes (ibid). The mystery was compounded when red oak leaves began to appear in Evelyn Underhill’s home with increasing regularity, and she writes of having found more than fifty of them, between the years 1909 (when the letter from Cropper arrived) and 1914, when the peculiar manifestations abruptly ceased. The leaves turned up throughout her home—beneath her bed, i
n a steamer trunk, in a box of correspondence that had gone unopened since June 1903, inside shoes and coat pockets, and, most bizarrely, once inside a can of plum pudding. Underhill describes the affair as “a botanical haunting, and a most unnerving, if ultimately harmless, affair.” The leaves were usually green and unwilted, though several of them “. . . wore the gaudy colours of autumn.” The case of Underhill’s “haunting” is also mentioned briefly in both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The History of Spiritualism (Vol. II, G. H. Doran; New York, 1926) and Slater Brown’s The Heyday of Spiritualism (Hawthorn Books; New York, 1970).
The last instance of leafy manifestations which I will here discuss is surely one of the most grisly episodes associated with the red tree. And yet it is also one of the most obscure episodes in this mystery, and my only records of it, beyond the memory of locals I have interviewed, is recorded in a pair of short articles in the always dubious pages of the Fortean magazine Fate (which has, over the decades, noted the odd goings-on associated with the tree in a number of articles)—“The Vampire Tree” (January 1982) and “Rhode Island’s Killer Oak!” (October 1983)—both penned by the same author, Patrick Baumgartner (about whom I can learn nothing, and he may have never been more than a pseudonym employed by the magazine’s editors and/or staff writers).
To summarize, according to these two articles, on January 17, 1981, a man from nearby Rice City (just south of here), a goat farmer and cheesemaker named in Fate as George Farrell, went to the Blanchard farm on business. He knew of the tree’s strange reputation, and at some point on that day, he visited it in the company of one of the landowner’s sons (the son is, by the way, the current owner of the property, though he professes no recollection of Farrell or the events described in Fate). Farrell was reportedly disappointed by what seemed a perfectly ordinary oak, and to show his contempt for the local tall tales, used a pocketknife to carve his initials into the bark, above the altar stone. Three weeks later, so both articles report, Farrell’s goats began to give extremely bitter milk. In the weeks to follow, three of the animals began to waste and finally died. Both pieces (which differ very little, and almost amount to reprints of the same article twenty-two months apart) state that the animals were summarily autop sied by a veterinarian from Coventry, who discovered that the they were each missing a “considerable quantity of blood” and that “their udders were distended, and, when opened, it was discovered that they were filled with a dark viscous material that stank of rotting vegetable matter, but, more remarkably, with the undigested acorns and leaves of a Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra).” The January ’82 article states, “The acorns of this species of oak are notoriously bitter and astringent, though they are still eaten by deer and other wildlife. The bitter flavor of the acorns is the result of high levels of the polyphenol tannin.” The veterinarian in question is never named (not even a gender is provided), and I have been unable to find anyone in the area who can tell me who he or she might have been.
The articles state that Farrell was so “angry and disturbed” by the unexplainable deaths of his goats, that he visited the Blanchards again, this time with a hatchet and three cans of gasoline, “. . . prepared to put an end to the demonic oak.” Fortunately, less hysterical heads prevailed, however, and he was discouraged from seeking his revenge upon the tree. However, Baumgartner’s articles state that, in his efforts to calm the man, Blanchard agreed to remove the section of bark that the goat farmer had carved his initials into, and it was reportedly then delivered to Farrell, who is said to have had it blessed (!) by a Catholic priest before he burned it to ash (in a twist reminiscent of the infamous Rhode Island vampire “epidemic”). The ashes he then buried in a sealed tin box in consecrated earth, possibly in the Greenwood Cemetery in nearby Coventry. The articles both claim that the lid of the tin box was engraved with a cross. In my interviews with locals, I have heard several variants of the story of the poisoned goats, however, in true urban-legend fashion, the details never match, and it is always attributed to the ubiquitous “friend of a friend.” Moreover, I can find no record of a goat farmer and cheesemaker named “George Farrell,” though it is possible that his name was changed by the editors of Fate (who, so far, have not replied to my inquiries for more details on the case, assuming, of course, that their files contain any additional information).
Having transcribed all that, one thing that sort of leaps out at me is the surname of the possibly pseudonymous Fate “journalist”—Baumgartner. Anyone with even a smattering of German will see what I mean, that Baumgartner translates to “tree gardener.” Odd that Harvey missed that; it certainly would have bolstered his assertion that the name was merely a nom de plume. Or, I don’t know, maybe he did catch it, but appreciated the wordplay too much to spoil it for those among his readers who’d get it on their own. Also, I wonder if I ask Blanchard about this George Farrell fellow, if he’d be any more forthcoming with me than he was with Dr. Harvey. That is, assuming that there’s something here to be forthcoming about. It all smacks of “witch trial” histrionics to me, and if not for mine and Constance’s lost picnic, that damning firsthand experience with the tree, I wouldn’t be disposed to believe a word of this, giving the tales in the typescript no more credence than I’ve given the stock-in-trade of supermarket tabloids—Elvis sightings, Nostradamus, Bible prophecies, women who claim to have been impregnated by Bigfoot, UFOs communicating via crop circles, astrology, the Bermuda Triangle, and so forth.
Oh, there’s quite a bit more here about all the attempts over the years to burn and cut down the tree, I just don’t feel like copying it. But there have been many unsuccessful and aborted attacks upon the oak, it would seem. It strikes me as just shy of miraculous that the thing is still standing more than three centuries after the first word of it reached the ears of white men. You’d have thought, if nothing else, some bunch of teenagers would have cut it down and or something as a prank. Maybe I should not be so awed at the tree’s apparent wickedness as by its resilience. Then again, maybe they’re one and the same.
Bedtime, old lady. Put the spooks to rest.
July 18, 2008 (2:16 a.m.)
Have I mentioned the heat? I don’t generally whine about weather. I’ve never much seen the point, but Jesus fuck. I’m about a hairbreadth from breaking down and getting a little window unit AC of my own, stick it on the damn credit cards, and worry about it later, after I haven’t died of heat prostration. The meteorologists say there are cooler days ahead, and I do hope they’re not just fucking with us.
Constance came down from the icy sanctum sanctorum of her garret this afternoon, as paint-stained as ever, but somewhat more talkative. I must admit, it was something of a relief, at least at first. My own company wears so goddamn thin. Even that of a flaky, temperamental artist is preferable, at this point. However, one of the first things she did was comment on the heat downstairs, and I briefly contemplated murdering her and hiding the body in the basement. Or taking it to the red oak, in hopes that Hobbamock the Narragansett demon might be pleased, take pity upon me, and grant a boon of cooler weather.
“You should come upstairs,” she said, and “You should ask me,” I replied.
Constance laughed, but did not proceed to invite me back to the attic. We sat on the living room floor for a while, talking and sweating, before moving to the kitchen table, which was even more cluttered than usual. She looked over a few pages of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript, offering no comment. We drank cold beer and nibbled at Spanish olives, whole-wheat crackers, and slices of Swiss cheese, because, lunchtime or no, we were both too hot for an actual meal.
“You know what it makes me think of?” she asked, and nodded at the window, nodding towards the tree. This was fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d returned the pages to the manuscript box, and it took me a moment to realize what she meant.
“No,” I replied and took another sip of my beer.
“It’s like something from Violet Venable’s awful garden in New Orleans. You know, in Suddenly, Las
t Summer.”
I forced myself to stare out the window, north towards the tree and the steely shimmer of Ramswool Pond, for a moment before answering her. “I think, technically, it was Sebastian’s garden. Mrs. Venable had merely become its caretaker after her son’s death.”
“Is that what you think?” and now, suddenly, there was a trace of derisiveness in her voice, something verging on contempt. I looked at the tree again, at the high blue sky suspended above it, not a cloud in sight. The sun seemed to have robbed the entire world beyond the window of shadows, or even the potential for shadow. Given the topic at hand, it was impossible for me not to be reminded of Catherine Holly’s fevered description of the sun on the day of her cousin’s murder—a gigantic white bone that had caught fire in the Mediterranean sky.
“Is it?” Constance prodded.
“It’s too hot to argue with you about Tennessee Williams,” I told her.
“I didn’t know we were arguing, Sarah. I only thought we were having a conversation. I thought you might be getting lonely, down here all alone. I thought maybe you would appreciate someone to talk with.”
“Sebastian planted the garden,” I said. “It was Sebastian’s garden,” and she laughed and lit a cigarette.
The Red Tree Page 19
