The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Should we tell Blanchard?”

  “What for?” she asked. “So he can murder the poor thing.” That was the word she used—murder.

  And then we were talking about bears, specifically about the black bear that was spotted around South County in May. It had displayed a fondness for bird feeders. But I wasn’t thinking about bears or birdseed. I was thinking about Harvey’s manuscript and the account of Susan and William Ames. Back in 1840, not so long before the last wolves were exterminated from the forests of New England, didn’t the doomed Mr. Ames claim to have repeatedly seen his missing wife in the company of a very large wolf? That’s what I remember, though I haven’t looked back through the manuscript to see if my memory is mistaken.

  Time to end this meandering mess of an entry and go to bed. If I’m lucky, I won’t dream about wolves and the wayward wife of William Ames. If I’m really lucky, I won’t dream about Amanda, either, or Constance Hopkins, for that matter. Somehow, in only the space of half an hour, while we were sitting there in the hallway talking about wildlife, I went from furious to horny. I think I prefer furious; it’s quite a bit less distracting.

  July 19, 2008 (4:34 p.m.)

  So far, I’ve hardly seen Constance today. She came down for breakfast. And she walked with me to the mailbox. But that’s pretty much it. Whatever she’s doing in the attic, at least she’s returned to doing it more or less quietly. On the way back to the house, I brought up her “coyote” sightings again, though I didn’t tell her I’d had a nightmare because of them. Unlike yesterday, she seemed oddly reluctant to talk about the matter, almost as if, in the interim, she’d thought better of having mentioned it at all.

  “If there are coyotes around, doesn’t it seem odd that we never hear them?” I asked. “I’ve always gotten the impression they’re pretty noisy animals.”

  Constance shrugged and sorted through the day’s junk mail. “It might have only been a stray dog,” she said. “There must be lots of feral dogs about. Maybe a stray German shepherd or something like that.”

  “Maybe,” I said, and didn’t press the issue, as it does seem perfectly reasonable that someone could mistake a feral German shepherd for a coyote.

  As for the nightmare, I might just as well blame Harvey’s manuscript as Constance’s coyote. I didn’t go to bed last night when I was done at the typewriter. I sat in the living room a while, trying to concentrate on a DVD—Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons in Black Narcissus (1947). It’s one of my favorites, has been for ages, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Harvey’s manuscript in its cardboard box. So I ended up in the kitchen again, flipping through the pages in search of the account of William and Susan Ames (if only the thing had an index). Turns out, it was way back in the first chapter, right there in the first few pages. But Harvey returns to the subject later, and on page 173 proceeds from numerous retellings and embellishments of the Ames legend to the subject of ghostly dogs and purported cases of lycanthropy in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. His writing here is somewhat less focused than usual, and I’m assuming that, like most of the book, he must have meant this only as a rough first draft:Traditions of spectral canines of the sort best known from the British Isles are, as it happens, not alien to the States. Indeed, I have assembled numerous examples from various parts of New England. Though hardly as well known as the Barghest of Yorkshire or dreadful Black Shuck of East Anglia, there is, for instance, central Connecticut’s “Black Dog of West Peak.” Like many of its ilk, the appearance of this “black dog” is said to be an omen. Indeed, there is even a folk rhyme devoted to the animal’s seeming ability to bestow good luck or ill upon those who happen to catch of glimpse of it: “If a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die.”

  Though often sighted, the dog that haunts the steep volcanic Hanging Hills south of Meriden is said to leave no tracks and to utter a silent howl. The most oft-recounted tale associated with this apparition concerns the fate of one W. H. C. Pynchon, a geologist from Manhattan who frequently made excursions to the area to study its igneous rock formations. The April-June 1898 issue of The Connecticut Quarterly includes the definitive account of Pynchon’s three encounters with the beast, which, as the rhyme dictates, ends with his death (though, in actuality, the geologist did not perish in the Hanging Hills at the end of the Nineteenth Century, but died peacefully on Long Island in 1910).

  Closer to home, there is Rhode Island’s own “phantom dog of Fort Wetherill” in Jamestown. Less renowned, perhaps, than its cousin to the west, sightings of this dog are also reputed to portend doom. In Tiverton, there are reports of a “pitch-black dog” that has been seen to transform itself into the figure of a woman, who then proceeds to play a violin before vanishing. Similarly, though less musically inclined, is the shape-shifting black dog of Newport, which also transforms itself into a woman who is given to peering in through windows.

  That last detail is reminiscent of the famous Bête du Gévaudan, an unidentified wolflike animal that terrorized the peasantry of France’s Margeride Mountains from 1764 until at least 1767, slaughtering as many as one hundred and thirteen people. La bête was also alleged to have possessed shape-shifting abilities, and some of the reports indicate that, like the Newport lycanthrope, it was fond of gazing in through windows. Similarly, there are reports of a huge animal, suspected of being a werewolf, that is said to have wrecked a coach and laid waste to a farm east of Gresford in northern Wales in 1791, and to have stood up on its hind legs “like a human being” to gaze in through the windows of the farmhouse. The creature was said to have had blue eyes.

  Yeah, I know. Precisely the sort of shit I needed to be reading before bed. Anyway, Harvey eventually finds his way back to the red oak and the strange happenings here at the “old Wight place”:We see an element of the lycanthropic associated with the property, beginning with the death of Mr. and Mrs. Ames. The latter, you will recall, was said by her distraught husband to have been witnessed walking in the company of “a great wild beast,” though he also seems to have been of the opinion that it was nothing so mundane as either a wolf or panther. I will assume he also ruled out bears. A contemporary account of the affair, from the Providence Journal (“Horror from Moosup Valley,” October 2, 1840), even mentions that Ames had repeatedly looked up to find the face of Susan watching him from one of the windows, and that, on one occasion, William saw both the woman and her bestial attendant staring in at him.

  During my research, I have assembled more than a dozen additional tales from the Moosup Valley/Coventry region featuring wolflike creatures, and often werewolflike creatures. Many of these encounters are reputed to have taken place on the farm, usually within sight of the red oak, though a fair number come from what is now the George B. Parker Woodland Wildlife Refuge in Coventry. I will begin this catalog of lupine oddities with those sightings from the Parker Woodland.

  This 860-acre tract of land is located along the northern side of Maple Valley Road, about 250 yards east of the intersection of Route 102 (Victoria Highway), about ten miles from Providence. The tract has something of a reputation as a “ghost town,” as the woods are dotted with evidence of Colonial-era agriculture, including a multitude of fieldstone walls, foundations, wells, rock-wall pens that once held livestock, and the stone foundations of numerous buildings. In 1760, a dam was built on Turkey Meadow Creek, north of Maple Valley Road, and two abandoned stone quarries likely date from roughly the same period. Remains of a sawmill (ca 1760-1785) can be seen at the brook. The lion’s share of this land was part of the Shawomet Purchase (1642), and was then obtained by the Waterman family in 1672. After almost a century, the Watermans sold the land to Caleb Vaughn in 1760. Probably, the most celebrated structure here is the meager remnants of the Isaac Bowen House, a center chimney that was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Much has been made of the low stone cairns that are situated between Turkey Meadow Brook and Biscuit Hill R
oad (to the north), and the usual bevy of wild assertions have been made as to their possible origin, everything from Phoenician to Celtic settlers (and stranger things, as we’ll soon see). In truth, they are likely only the remains of furnaces used in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries to produce large quantities of charcoal, and rock piles made by Colonial settlers and the Narragansett Indians before them. One marvels at the constant invocation of Celts, Vikings, and other European races as an explanation for the creation of such cairns, as though Native Americans lacked the know-how to simply stack stones.

  However, the most colorful interpretation of the Parker Woodland cairns—and the most relevant here—is to be found in the writings of the Hungarian-born orientalist Arminius Vámbéry (who, by the way, was an acquaintance of Bram Stoker’s; Vámbéry makes a cameo appearance in Chapter 23 of Dracula, when Van Helsing refers to “my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University”). The “Coventry Center stones” are briefly mentioned in Vámbéry’s Werewolvery in Europe and Rituals of Corporeal Transformation (London, 1897), a digression from his study of supposed episodes of werewolvery in Ireland during the spring of 1874. In the book, the author tries to link a string of Gévaudan-like attacks in County Limerick to “a tradition among the people . . . of ‘raths’ or ‘hollow hills’ leading down into the chthonic realm of the Gælic Daoine Sidhe.

  He pauses in his examination of the “Black Beast of Limerick” to note that the “mysterious cairns in Rhode Island, while having no known link to fairy lore or even the mythology of the Red Indians, were, in the year 1843, the scene of an attack that appears to fit the pattern herein suggested.” Vámbéry proceeds to discuss the death of a mill worker, named as John Shattuck, who “. . . is said by newspaper accounts to have been slain by an enormous wolf. Some witnesses, however, dispute the identification of the killer, agreeing that it was a beast, but that the creature walked upright, yet was no bear . . .

  I can’t say that I’ve ever been much for stories of wolf-men (or man-wolves), but, reading this section of the ms., I was struck by the prevalence of such stories in legends, superstition, religion, and folktales. Cyno phobia on a cultural (or even species) level, something that almost seems hardwired into human consciousness. Wolves (along with jackals, foxes, wild dogs, etc.) are a sort of all-purpose boogeyman, from the Christian bible to the Qu’ran, from the Aesopica to the Brothers Grimm, the “Big Bad Wolf ” to Lon Chaney, Jr. Wolves, like snakes, have played the fall guys and villains in my thologies since almost forever.

  In fact, I can even cite an example from my own childhood. When I was a kid, my maternal grandparents lived out in the wooded mountains maybe five or six miles south of town. And ever since I was very small, they both regaled me and my sister with stories about something they called the “wolfeener” (I never saw the word written out, so that spelling is admittedly one of my own invention). They both claimed not only to have heard this creature’s peculiar, high-pitched howl, but, on one occasion, to have seen it with their own eyes. They insisted that, though wolflike, it was no wolf—that it was larger, fiercer, and, well, just different. My grandfather, who was a brick mason by trade, could reproduce what he said was the creature’s call, and that sound never failed to scare the bejesus out of us. Even my mother claimed to have repeatedly heard the animal. I recall my grandmother once coming across a photograph of a hyena in a book, and telling me that when she’d seen the wolfeener, it had looked a lot like that; she had been adamant on this point.

  I have often thought that this word they used—wolfeener—might have originated somehow from wolverine, though the wolverine has been extinct in the southern Appalachians since the end of the Pleistocene, some ten or eleven thousand years ago. For that matter, to my knowledge, red wolves (Canis rufus) were extirpated from Alabama by the early 1920s, when my grandparents were still small children. And coyotes (Canis latrans) didn’t reenter the state until after the 1960s, so neither red wolves nor coyotes seem likely suspects for the actual identity of the “wolfeener.” Of course, one wonders what stories their parents and grandparents told them, about a much wilder land. Okay, enough of this crap. Back to Harvey:“. . . Local folklore attributes the ancient stone mounds south of the mill where Shattuck was employed to Native devil worship, and also consider it a site frequenty chosen for the sabbats of witches. The mounds were, therefore, feared by locals and generally avoided. A witness to the attack upon Shattuck claimed that the beast emerged from one of the mounds and, afterwards, retreated back into the earth, by way of the same cairn from which it had arisen.”

  Vámbéry then proceeds to recount a second, earlier incident involving the George B. Parker Woodland cairns, this time dating from 1828 and involving a young woman named Sally Waite, said to have been the youngest daughter of a farmer “. . . who worked a plot of land not very far distant.” According to Vámbéry, the Waite girl suffered a series of “nightmares and waking visions” in which she witnessed elaborate “ceremonies conducted by demonic entities dwelling below the mounds, involving the blood sacrifice of both farm animals and human infants.” She “. . . repeatedly claimed that these beings were calling out to her, wishing for her to join them in their unholy fellowship and subterrestrial depredations.” She is reputed to have said, “The night has teeth. The night has claws, and I have found them. Walking through these woods, I have faced it.” After talking so openly of her dreams, Sally’s parents began to worry about both her sanity and her soul, and are said to have consulted a local Presbyterian minister. Then, on a snowy night in January, the girl slipped out of her family’s house (shades here of Susan Ames) and was found dead, two days later, her frozen and mutilated body spread out across one of the cairns. “Much of the corpse had been devoured, and tracks discovered in the mantle of new-fallen snow were queer, recalling no animal familiar to the people of the countryside. They seemed to vanish at the periphery of one of the mounds. Though there was much panic and talk of tearing open the stone heaps to find and destroy whatever lay inside, I can find no record that any such action was taken.”

  Unfortunately, Vámbéry fails to cite his sources, and I have personally been unable to find any newspaper or periodical account of either incident, nor have any of the locals I’ve interviewed known of them. However, I have succeeded in uncovering an intriguing pair of sightings dating from the mid-1950s, recounted in an article in Argosy (April, 1962) by Don Valigursky, “A New England Wolfman?” In this short and somewhat lurid article, two sightings of a “hairy beast that walked upright” were made along Maple Valley Road. One might, at first, relegate these to Bigfoot lore (not unknown to the state), except that the witnesses both emphasized that the “loping monsters” they saw exit the woods and cross the road in front of their car’s headlights (both sightings were at night) had long, dog- or wolflike muzzles. In one of the two sightings, the driver—named as Mrs. Joann Laycock of Foster—reported that “I hit the brakes when I saw it come out of the trees, because at first I thought it was a deer. I’m used to seeing deer on the road at night, and you don’t want to hit one. But I soon saw it wasn’t a deer, and it rose up on its hind legs and stared directly at me, looking through the windshield. Its eyes were red in the headlights, and I’d swear before a court of law that the thing smiled at me before crossing the road and vanishing into the forest again. I saw its teeth, and they looked like a dog’s teeth.” Again, local newspapers do not back up these stories, nor have I found any evidence that the two witnesses named in the article ever lived in the area, or even existed (though both names may certainly have been changed for publication). Don Valigursky, I will note, also wrote a number of articles in the 1970s on the “pigman” of Northfield, Vermont, and one on Sasquatch sightings in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

  But now, let us return to a number of similar occurrences here at the Wight Farm, some of which are clearly linked to the “red tree.”

  Jesus, it’s got to be some kind of neurotic me sitting here transcribing this outlandish manuscript, a
suicide’s obsession. Has it become my own obsession? In touching and reading these pages, in my trip to the tree and my exploration of the vast basement below the house, have I become infected by this same idée fixe? Has Constance’s “coyote” only exacerbated it? Did Harvey see coyotes of his own? I wonder. I need to stop and cook dinner, for myself, and for Constance, if she will come downstairs long enough to eat. But first, my dream from last night.

  It’s nothing much, and anyone can see that it was plainly inspired by what Constance said, and what I later read in Harvey’s typescript.

  I was outside, out back behind the house, not far from the steps. There was an amazing moon in the sky, the sort I always think of as a harvest moon—low and huge and a luminescent yellow orange, rising over Ramswool Pond and the red oak and everything else. I smelled smoke, and wondered if there was a forest fire, and I remember hearing a raucous chorus of birds—catbirds, robins, mockingbirds, jays—and thinking it was strange to hear so many song-birds at night. The air was cold, and my breath fogged. I turned to go back inside, and that’s when I spotted the pale figure of a woman crouched in the weeds at the edge of the yard. There was a very large dog with her. I won’t call it a coyote or a wolf. It just struck me as a very large dog. It licked her face, and, in return, she licked at its muzzle, and I realized then that the two of them—this woman and the dog—were lovers, and I felt suddenly ashamed, as though I’d been caught spying on some especially private moment.

  The woman stood up, and though I think she’d been clothed when I first saw her, she was now entirely naked. The dog sniffed at the space between her thighs, and she stroked the top of its shaggy head. I started to say something, but then I saw the way her eyes shone red in the night. She was watching me now, and I realized that she looked a great deal like Amanda, but also a lot like Constance. Her face was the perfect amalgamation of their two faces.