The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  So far as I can tell, none of Constance’s belongings had been removed. The leaves covered over everything—her bed, the floor, her portable stereo, the books, clothes that had been left lying on the floor, the few pieces of furniture that Blanchard had supplied, everything.

  Words fail. I’ve been sitting here staring at the typewriter, and at my reflection in the dressing table mirror, for the last fifteen minutes, trying to compose the next sentence in my head. Trying to find the words. Outside, birds are singing as though this were any other day. I can pick out the songs of catbirds, cardinals, jays, wrens, a crow or two farther away. And, of course, this is any other day.

  First, I saw the leaves.

  And then I saw the canvases. There were seven of them, arranged about the attic on seven wooden easels. They were not particularly large canvases, measuring maybe two feet by a foot and a half. All seven were blank, except for a single strip of paper that had been pinned near the center of each one with a thumbtack. The paper was newsprint, yellowed slightly with age. I began with the easel nearest to the door, reading the newsprint, then proceeded to the next.

  She took down a jar from one of the shelves as she passed; it was labeled “ORANGE MARMALADE,” but to her great disappointment it was empty: she did not like to drop the jar for fear of killing somebody, so managed to put it into one of the cupboards as she fell past it.

  The first strip of paper read simply, “By Evil, I mean that which makes us useful.”

  I admit that I stared very closely at that first canvas, unable to accept its blankness as genuine blankness. I could not stop thinking of Constance’s hands and arms and face and her black smocks, always smeared with paint. But no matter how carefully I inspected the canvas, it was completely empty, save the newspaper clipping. The coarse fabric had not even been given a primer coat that it might eventually receive and hold paint.

  The next canvas was the same, only the clipping read, “Places with white frogs in them.”

  And on the third easel, standing very close to Constance’s leaf-covered air mattress, was a blank canvas and a clipping that read, “Good in our experience is continuous with, or is only another aspect of evil.”

  I am not, by the way, recounting these lines from memory. I would never have remembered a third of them. There was (too conveniently, I thought) a stenographer’s pad lying open on one of the windowsills, and a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Both were partly hidden beneath the oak leaves, but when I happened to spot them—halfway through the canvases—I backtracked and copied the text into the notepad. It’s lying here on the dressing table beside the typewriter.

  The strip of paper affixed to the third canvas read, “Angels. Hordes upon hordes of them.”

  I lingered, reading that line aloud several times, not wanting to proceed to the fourth, and my mind drew connections that were or were not there to be drawn.

  There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.

  At the fourth easel, which was set up in front of the south-facing dormer, was a scrap of newsprint reading, “Or the loves of the worlds. The call they feel for one another. They try to move closer and howl when they get there.” The fifth canvas was placed so that it faced the wall, and I had to turn the easel about myself to read what had been tacked to it: “I have seen two of the carcasses, myself, and can say definitely that it is impossible for it to be the work of a dog. Dogs are not vampires, and do not suck the blood of a sheep, and leave the flesh almost untouched.” Among the bits of paper on the canvases, this one is conspicuous, not only for being the most wordy, but also because someone had bothered to note its source. Written in sepia-colored ink in a spidery hand, I read, “London Daily Mail, Nov. 1, 1905.”

  Five down.

  The birds are still singing, and I find their voices an odd comfort. But, right now, I’d give four fingers off my right hand for a cigarette and a cold beer. Sweat keeps running into my eyes. It must be at least eighty-five in this room. Eight-five or ninety, easy. I am waiting for a careless spark, and the oxygen in the air will instantly combust, and everything in the bedroom will mercifully be scorched to a cinder.

  The sixth easel was on the far side of the air mattress, near a tiny dresser holding most of Constance’s clothes. I checked the drawers; her T-shirts and underwear and sweaters and socks were all still there, though the drawers were also stuffed with oak leaves. The sixth strip of newsprint read, “I can draw no line between imposture and self-deception.”

  Which brings us to the end of this taut length of green fishing line, or to the point where Alice finally reached the bottom of her deep well. Seven. The final easel was standing a foot or two from the north dormer window. Before reading the piece of newspaper tacked to it, I glanced back towards the attic door, and was relieved to see that it had not swung shut. The seventh clipping read simply, “Out in open places there have been flows of a red liquid.” So, there.

  And if that were all—these seven canvases and their cryptic commentaries—I would suggest the following: Constance brought the leaves in herself, and placed them all about the room, to frame what she’d conceived of as some bizarre minimalist installation. I hadn’t noticed, but so the hell what. I also hadn’t noticed her leaving the farm, leaving me alone here, but, again, so what. I miss a lot, and the past few days, I expect I might have missed more than usual. If this is where it all ended, I could be satisfied with such an explanation, and I’d not bother with the handful of unanswered questions. But it didn’t end here. I’m not certain, now, that it will ever end.

  First, I saw the oak leaves. And then I inspected the seven canvases, each one bearing a single snippet taken from an old book or newspaper. Otherwise, the canvases were naked. And then they weren’t anymore.

  Glancing towards the attic door again, and preparing to leave and go back downstairs, I saw that the change had occurred. I didn’t see it happen. That is, I did not catch the canvases in the act of metamorphosing, assuming that’s what they did. I’m trying, hard, to make no assumptions about process, or cause and effect, as I write this out. But assumptions are inevitable. And again, the shock to my senses that I would have expected to accompany such an event failed to take hold of me. I wasn’t horrified. I was not appalled. I didn’t become perceptibly more frightened than I had been before the seven paintings “appeared.”

  I’m not even going to try describe all seven of the paintings. I saw them, and, for the most part, that’s sufficient. They were garish, grotesque things. I remember telling Constance that I know very little about paintings and painters, and that’s true. But these brought to mind the works of Francis Bacon, with whom I am familiar because Amanda was somewhat obsessed with him. But I’m certainly not knowledgeable enough to attempt to describe the style. I did look at the Wikipedia article on Bacon before I began writing this (I also checked my email, but there was nothing new there), and the images it included served to confirm my initial impression that the paintings in the attic are reminiscent of his style, especially Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), Head (1948), and Study After Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)—more notes from the steno pad, by the way. I cannot say that I committed those titles to memory. The Wikipedia article states that Bacon’s “. . . artwork is known for its bold, austere, and often grotesque or nightmarish imagery.”

  I examined only one of the seven paintings from the attic closely. The last one that I’d come to (though it was blank when I reached it), the one propped on the easel near the north dormer window. The one that had, only moments before, held a strip of paper printed with a single sentence: “Out in open places there have been flows of a red liquid.”

  The first thing I looked for was the artist’s signature, expecting to find Constance’s. Instead, in minute white brushstrokes I read “B. Hirsch ’19.” I think that
I said her name aloud, then—Bettina Hirsch—the painter that Joseph Olney had fallen in love with during his time in Los Angeles, but who’d hung herself on Christmas Day 1920. The woman that had formed the focus of his mania regarding the red tree. The woman he’d done murder for, an unknown number of times, because he believed that she was being held captive by demons who lived beneath the tree.

  As for the subject of the painting, near as I could tell it depicted the mutilated body of a woman, and at the time I thought she was meant to have been attacked and mauled by some sort of animal. I don’t know if that was the intention of the artist. The figure was rendered in shades of yellow, orange, and deep red, and she had been placed against a background that was primarily a dark brownish shade of purple. Eggplant, I suppose, or aubergine. Both the woman’s legs and both her arms were missing, and there were only what I took to be bloody stumps. Her jaw was hanging open, as though frozen in the act of screaming. The paint had been applied very thickly to the canvas, almost caked on in places. In fact, I had the impression that there might have been another, older painting hidden beneath the one I was seeing.

  And still, I didn’t feel the chill up my spine or the possum across my grave or death breathing down my neck or whatever it is we are taught people are meant to experience under such conditions. I didn’t scream at the sight of a murdered rabbit. Perhaps, by this time, I was in shock, and maybe I still am. However, I did feel a distinct sense of revulsion. There was no fear to it, no dread. One does not feel afraid looking at crime-scene photos, or roadkill, or something left too long at the back of the refrigerator. Seeing it, I felt the need to wash my hands (though I didn’t touch the painting), more than I felt anything.

  . . . suddenly, thump! thump! down she came upon a heap of sticks and dry leaves, and the fall was over.

  On my way out of the attic, I paused long enough to inspect another of the canvases, the one nearest to the door. It bore the same signature, but was dated 1917. I cannot say for sure what the artist had in mind, but I was reminded of an immense tree, crowned in crimson leaves, and watched over by a moon (or sun) the color of oatmeal. Bettina Hirsch might have placed a series of dancing figures about the base of the tree, or I might have only been seeing a few errant brushstrokes, or something intended as understory, bushes, weeds. But I didn’t look at any of the others. I left the attic and pulled the door shut behind me. I wanted to lock it, but I don’t have the key. I quickly descended the stairs, and for an hour or so I sat on the front porch, half expecting to see Constance emerge from the woods, or come walking across the little bridge over the stream that runs out of Ramswool Pond. I watched for her on the dirt road leading out to Barbs Hill Road.

  And now, I think maybe I’ve had a change of heart. I think I do mean to leave this house. I can go to Providence, and it may be that, from a distance, I can begin to sort this out. Or forget it, if that’s possible. Either way, I don’t want to be here anymore.

  4 August 2008 [Time of entry not noted.—Ed.]

  I’ve just read back over my account of the dream of Amanda and Constance, Monday morning’s dream. And I see that Sarah is up to her old tricks again. Which is to say, I can’t begin to fathom why I bothered to add so much embellishment to what little I could truly remember. Half of it—at least half—is simply made up. I understand why I once fabricated dreams for an insistent therapist, but why bother here? I can’t even say that I was lying to myself. I knew full well what I was doing when I did it. My best excuse would be to claim that it was some sort of defense mechanism kicking in, that I was falling back on the old habit of storytelling as a means of keeping myself calm or giving voice to fear, something of the sort. And having lied, it doesn’t mean that I was necessarily dishonest, any more than “Pony” is dishonest. I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That’s the paradox of me. Regardless, seeing it now, all the parts of the dream I didn’t genuinely dream, I find it annoying. Hell, I find this entry complaining about it annoying.

  It’s very quiet outside. A skunk passed by the window a little earlier. I didn’t see it, of course, but smelled it. And there was some sort of owl hooting out there for a bit, but, otherwise, the house and the woods around it are quiet and still. I might almost believe that I have been taken away from the world and placed somewhere else. I’ve left all the lights downstairs burning, and the porch lights are on, too, so here I am, a little puddle of brilliance in the inky void. I brought my laptop into the bedroom a while ago, and tried playing a couple of CDs to dilute the silence—Bob Dylan’s Street Legal, and then Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M. But the music only seemed to make me more jumpy. It masks the noiselessness of the night, but in so doing, it also masks the noises that I cannot stop listening for. I found myself straining to hear through the music, even if I can’t say what I was listening for. Constance’s coyotes, maybe. Or Constance herself. Or maybe the red tree, after it pulls itself free of the ground and begins an ent-like march towards the house. So, I turned the music off halfway through “Maps and Legends,” and now the stillness is broken only by the clack-clack-clack of the typewriter’s keys, the clack of the keys striking the paper.

  This doesn’t seem like the time for confession. Sitting here, swaddled in the dark, and the silence pressing in on my bright electric bubble. Though, on the other hand, the tree and this house don’t seem shy about revealing their atrocities by the stark light of midday, so why should I balk at divulging my confidences by night?

  When I discovered Amanda was fucking the owner of the Buckhead sushi restaurant, I confronted her. It was a very cold day, and it was raining, on and off. A misty, ugly sort of rain for a misty, ugly sort of day. It was late afternoon, and there was fog over everything, heavy fog like you don’t often see in Atlanta. She was sitting on the chaise, reading, and I’d been pretending to edit something, the page proofs for a short story. There were pages in my lap and on the coffee table, marked in red. STET written in the margins again and again and again, which is usually the way I react to the ministrations of copy editors, whether they happen to be right or wrong. I write STET, and, half the time, I know I’m just being an asshole, but I do it anyway. They are my mistakes. Let me make them.

  I can’t remember what Amanda was reading. A novel. She’d taken the day off. And I said that I knew what she’d done. She laid down her book and stared at it for a time, and then she stared at me.

  “So,” she said, finally, “what happens now?”

  “I don’t know what happens now,” I replied, and my voice seemed flat, betraying almost nothing of the rage that had been seething inside me for days.

  “Who told you?” she asked.

  “What difference does it make, who told me?”

  She sighed and glanced out the windows at the fog.

  “It’s true?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s true. But you know it’s true, without asking. You always know what’s true, don’t you, Sarah?”

  She was baiting me, like I needed provocation, and I let the jab go. Or I tried to let it go. Every word that passed between us eliminated the possibility and served to set the future in stone.

  At some point, she asked if I wanted her to leave, and I told her no. But I knew that what she was really asking for was permission to leave, that it’s what she wanted, and I had no intention of making it easy. If she wanted to move in with the purveyor of eel and tuna, she could damn well screw up her nerve and do it on her own, without my complicity. And that’s when she got angry, when I withheld a simple release from her predicament. She said things I have tried hard to forget, threw accusations the way some women might have thrown dishes or knickknacks or stones. And, mostly, I sat there with my pages and my red pen, listening, wishing I knew some magical incantation that might yet undo the whole mess. Wishing impossible, silly things, the way a child wishes, the way people pray to their gods. That I could have been the woman that Amanda needed, assuming that such a woman was ever born. That there were still words t
o set things right, words to facilitate salvage, and that I could find them. That she would just stop, and tell me she was sorry, and that it was over. That it wouldn’t happen again. And that, hearing this, I would believe it, and go back to my copyediting, and she would go back to reading her book.

  “Most of the time,” she said (and I remember this; I will always remember this part), “I do not even know who you are, Sarah. You write, but you hate writing. And then you blame everything and everyone around you because writing is all you have. And now, these seizures of yours. How much more am I supposed to be able to deal with?”

  “You’re sitting there telling me that you fucked this woman because I hate writing, and because I’m having seizures?” I asked. For a second, I think I might have been more flabbergasted than angry.

  “Yes,” she shot back, suddenly standing up and letting the book fall to the floor at her feet. “Yes, Sarah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Because, goddamn it, you never let a day go by that you don’t remind me and the whole damn world how utterly miserable you are, and how you expect us all to be miserable right along with you.”