The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  A lot of other things were said, but that’s the upshot and the part I remember clearly. And later she told me that she was going out. I asked if she was meeting the owner of the sushi restaurant, and Amanda said who she might be meeting was her own business and none of mine. And that’s the last time I saw her alive. Most of this, I told the police. Most of it.

  I told them about the affair, and that we’d argued. I suppose I should be grateful that she killed herself in another woman’s apartment. At least it spared me the embarrassment and inconvenience of being suspected of foul play. At least, the sort of foul play you can be arrested and brought to trial for. And I didn’t have to worry about cleaning up the mess.

  If I wrote “Pony”—and I must surely have—the rest of my confession is there, in that story, however turned around backwards and veiled it might be, however fictionalized and prettied up with metaphor. What Amanda wanted, I couldn’t give.

  The bridle chafed, I suppose.

  That day, just before Amanda left, I told her I loved her, and she laughed and said, “Just because you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.”

  I’m finally running out of ribbon, I think, and I don’t have another to replace this one with. Maybe I should conserve whatever is left. Isn’t that a little like the miner trapped after a cave-in, waiting for rescue and trying to make his oxygen or flashlight batteries last as long as possible? Only, I know that no one is coming for me. No one is left who might bother.

  I’m going to wait a while longer for Constance. The car keys are here on the dressing table next to the typewriter. I’m only going to wait until morning.

  [Date and time of entry not noted.—Ed.]

  I will add this.

  Because this is true also. And because you go so far, and it hardly seems to matter whether or not you let yourself go just a little farther.

  I was falling-down drunk the night Amanda died (that is not meant as a caveat). I was drunk, and fell asleep on the sofa, because I could not stand to look at our bed, even though it had once been only my bed. Something woke me, very late, and I’d fallen asleep with the television on. Old black-and-white movies on TCM, and for a while I lay there, half awake at best, blinking and staring at the screen, bathed in that comforting silvery wash of light.

  On the TV, a young woman stared out a window. She was watching another woman who seemed about the same age as herself and who was sitting in a tire swing hung from a very large tree. It was almost exactly like the swing my grandfather put up for me and my sister when I was a kid. Just an old tire and a length of rope suspended from a low, sturdy branch. From the angle of the shot, it was clear that the window looking out on the tree was also looking down. I mean, that it must have been a second-story window. Or an attic window. The woman in the tire wasn’t swinging. She was just sitting there. There was no dialog, and no musical score, either. There was nothing but the sound of wind blowing. The woman watching from the window leaned forward, resting her forehead against the glass. With an index finger, she traced the shape of a heart on the windowpane. And then I realized that there was something approaching the tree. It came very slowly, and by turns I thought I was seeing a bear, a wolf, a dog, and a man crawling forward on his hands and knees. Whatever it was, the woman in the swing didn’t see it, but I had the distinct impression that the woman watching from the window did. After a bit, she turned away, stepping out of frame, so that there was only the window, the tree, the woman in the swing, and the whatever it might have been slowly coming up behind her.

  And I must have fallen back to sleep then, because that’s all I can recall of the film. My cell woke me sometime after dawn, and there was a Buster Keaton movie playing on the television. I answered my phone, and the call was from the hospital, from a mutual friend who’d gotten the news before me. Amanda had been dead about two hours.

  I have no idea what the film was, and possibly it was nothing but a dream. The night my grandfather died, my grandmother told us she was awakened by a very small bird, like a sparrow, beating its wings against the window. She’d been at the hospital for days, but she’d been convinced to go home and get some rest, because everyone thought my granddad was out of the woods. It was the dead of winter, and my grandmother knew the bird must be freezing, but she couldn’t remember how to open the window and let it in out of the cold. She swore she wasn’t dreaming, though my mother suspected that she was. A few hours later, the phone woke her with the news that Granddad had died in the night.

  Grandmamma said that the little bird was a psycho-pomp, and that she should have understood.

  I’ve been awake maybe an hour. I woke to find a very large dog standing at the foot of my bed, watching me. But when I sat up, startled, it was gone. I saw it very clearly. Its eyes were the same reddish brown as Constance’s eyes, and it had a mottled tongue, gray and pink. Its fur was dark, but not quite black. Not quite.

  It could have been the same dog that John Potter shot that summer day in 1724, shortly before both his daughters died. Charles Harvey described the dog very clearly, quoting from Potter’s journal. I don’t remember all of the story now, but it was broad daylight, and Potter had been sitting alone near a window, reading the Bible. He heard a noise and looked up to find this dog staring in the window at him. He said that it was standing on its hind legs, its forepaws propped against the sill. He called for his wife, and it ran. The dog ran. He said it had eyes the color of chestnuts. He said a lot of things, John Potter did, and I don’t know if any of the stuff that Harvey put in that manuscript is true.

  I never learned the name of the film, or the year that it was made, or who the actresses playing the woman at the window and the woman in the swing might have been. But then I never tried very hard. I’ve never mentioned it to anyone. My grandmother once told me she wished she’d never told anyone about seeing the sparrow.

  I have to leave this place today. I can’t stay any longer. She’s not coming back.

  [Date and time of entry not noted.—Ed.]

  “Oh, I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers that you have just been reading about; and when she had finished, her sister kissed her, and said, “It was a curious dream, dear, certainly: but now run in to your tea; it’s getting late.” So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

  [Date and time of entry not noted.—Ed.]

  I went up to the attic again, to get the paintings, Bettina Hirsch’s paintings, and to bring them down. I meant to burn them all, because I could not bear the thought of them, of leaving them there to be discovered by someone else. So, I went up the stairs, and the door was still unlocked.

  There are no oak leaves carpeting the floor, and there are not seven paintings arranged on seven easels. Everything that Constance brought here with her is gone.

  No. Just this once, stop lying. It’s worse than that.

  The attic is the same as it was the first time I set eyes on it, that day I went looking for a yardstick. There are boxes and a few pieces of furniture, and everything is covered with a thick coating of cobwebs and dust. My hand-prints are still clearly visible on the lid of the old steamer trunk in which I found the yardstick. Otherwise, there’s no sign whatsoever that the dust has been disturbed for a very long time. No one’s been in the attic since I was up there in June. I stood there for almost half an hour, waiting to see through the illusion, desperate to find that it was an illusion. Like the blank canvases had been, before they became paintings. But no matter how hard I stared, or how many times I looked away, or shut my eyes, nothing changed. If I were to call Blanchard and ask him about his attic lodger, I think I know what he’d tell me.

  I’m very tired, Amanda, and I need to rest.

  I shouldn’t be this tired when I try to find my way back to the tree. I’ll rest for a while, and I’ll drift back down to the orchard, and the stone wall. I’ll lie
in my bed and wait. Someone has turned the ponies out again.

  EDITOR’S POSTSCRIPT

  Excerpt from A Long Way To Morning (Sarah Crowe; HarperCollins, 1994):

  Andrea lay very still, staring up at the ceiling, what she could see of it by the flickering candlelight. She lay staring at the high ceiling of the whore’s bedroom, warmed by the afterglow of sex, and by the woman’s naked body, so near to Andrea’s own. It occurred to her that Michelle’s sheets smelled like apple cider, which made her think of autumn. And it also occurred to her that it had been a long time since she’d felt this content.

  “You promised you’d tell me the story,” Michelle whispered. “After we fucked.”

  “You won’t like it,” Andrea replied, wishing silently that she could go back to the quiet, undemanding moment before.

  “Isn’t that for me to decide?” the whore asked.

  “It’ll only leave you with more questions than answers,” Andrea said. “And just when you think it’s one thing, this story, it’ll go and become something else entirely. It’s fickle. It’s a fickle story.”

  “The whole wide world is fickle, and you promised,” Michelle insisted.

  “It’s not even a real story,” Andrea continued. “And it’s populated with fairly reprehensible people.”

  “So is life,” replied the whore.

  “It really doesn’t make a great deal of sense, this story. It’s filled with loose ends, and has no shortage of contradictions. It shows no regard whatsoever for anyone’s need of resolution.”

  “Just like life,” the whore added, and she laughed softly and nipped lightly at Andrea’s left earlobe.

  “I doubt I’ll be able to finish the whole thing before sunrise,” Andrea said. “In fact, I’m almost certain I won’t be able to.”

  “Fine,” said Michelle. “Then I will have to call you Scheherazade, and you will have to think of me as the king. I will be forced to grant you a stay of execution until you’re able to tell me all of it.”

  Andrea didn’t respond immediately. She kept her eyes on the ceiling, and tried not to think about the antique straight razor in the pocket of her coat, draped over the back of a chair on the far side of the bedroom.

  “How the hell did I wind up with such a literate whore?” she asked, and Michelle laughed again. “Anyway,” Andrea continued, “you’d make a better Dinazade.”

  “That’s dirty,” the whore snickered, then added, “Vice is nice, but incest is best.”

  “Sure. Besides, the king has lots of other concubines to keep him occupied.”

  “Odalisque,” Michelle said. “It’s a prettier word.”

  “Fine, then. Odalisque. Regardless, you’ve been warned. This story, it has a lot going for it, as long as you can live with the questions it raises and never answers, and with a certain lingering inexplicability.”

  “I pays my money, and I takes my chances,” said the whore, whom Andrea was unable to think of as either a concubine or an odalisque. Michelle was just a whore, and Andrea was just a trick, and the razor was just a razor.

  “You don’t get to whine about it afterwards, or ask for your dollar back.”

  “I never would,” Michelle assured her.

  “Very well,” Andrea sighed, closing her eyes. “But only because Scheherazade always did carry a torch for her sister. Whenever she was getting banged by that fat old bastard Shahryar, she would shut her eyes tightly and think of Dinazade, instead.”

  “Well, there you go,” said the whore.

  There was a long moment then when neither of them said anything; there was no sound but a few cars down on the street, and a police siren somewhere in the distance. Then Andrea opened her eyes, and she took a deep breath, breathing in the cider sheets. And then she began.

  “Not long ago, there was a very talented painter named Albert Perrault, but, before he could finish what would have been his greatest painting, he died in a motorcycle accident in Paris.”

  “Wasn’t he wearing a helmet?” the whore asked.

  “I have no idea,” Andrea replied, sounding slightly annoyed. “And do not interrupt me again, not if you want to hear this. As I was saying, this unfinished painting, it would have been his masterpiece. . . .”

  THE END

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In August of 2006, while walking in the woods near Exeter, Rhode Island, I happened upon an enormous oak tree. There were a number of peculiar objects set all about its base—dismembered doll parts, empty wine bottles, a copy of the New Testament missing its fake leather cover, faded plastic flowers, and other things I can’t now recall. For no reason I could put my finger on, I found the sight unnerving, and didn’t linger there. Perhaps it was only the tree’s relative proximity to the Exeter Grange Hall and Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. The state’s most famous “vampire,” Mercy Brown (1873-1892), is buried in the church’s cemetery. Or perhaps my disquiet arose from the simple, unsolvable mystery of those random objects scattered about the base of the tree. Regardless, like everything else that I see and hear, the oak tree was filed away as potential story fodder. And, two years later, from it grew the novel that became The Red Tree.

  There are a great number of other sources of inspiration that I feel I should acknowledge, some of which have been quoted and/or alluded to in the text of the novel. These include: Michael E. Bell’s Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001); Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941); various works by Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft; Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979); Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1890, 1894); Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) and Gore Vidal’s film adaptation of the play (1959); Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871); Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’ The Blair Witch Project (1999); the works of Carl G. Jung and Joseph Campbell; Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967); Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000); Joseph Payne Brennan’s “Canavan’s Back Yard” (1958); Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979); Karl Edward Wagner’s “Sticks” (1974); Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959); Henry David Thoreau’s The Maine Woods (1864) and Walden; or, A Life in the Woods (1854); Charles Hoy Fort’s The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), and Lo! (1931); Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899, 1902); Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907); and M. R. James’ “The Ash Tree” (1904). Also, the section of The Red Tree titled “Pony” originally appeared in Sirenia Digest #2 (January 2006).

  I would also like to thank my agent, Merrilee Heifetz of Writers House, and my editor, Anne Sowards, for their support of this book; Sonya Taaffe, for many helpful conversations, and for proofreading, translation, and invaluable feedback; Carol Hanson Pollnac, for her assistance with research, including that first trip to Moosup Valley; William K. Schafer, for all his continued support; Harlan Ellison, for the pep talks; Dr. Richard B. Pollnac (University of Rhode Island), for reading the first draft and offering comments and proofreading; Byron White, for more things than I can mention; and the staffs of the Peace Dale Public Library, Providence Athenaeum, Providence Public Library (Central Branch), the URI College of Continuing Education Library, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. And, most of all, my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, without whom I’d have stopped writing a long time ago.

  AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY

  Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of nine novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, and The Red Tree. Her award-winning short fiction has been collected in six volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder; To Charles Fort, With Love; Alabaster; and, most recently, A Is for Alien. She has also published two volumes of erotica, Frog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

  www.caitlinrkiernan.com

  greygirlbeast.livejournal.com
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  1 See the relevant entry, “legend trip,” in Jan Brun vand’s American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Vol. 1551), pp. 439-440.

  2 Michael E. Bell, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires (2001, Carroll & Graf Publishers).

  3 It should here be noted that while I have been suc cessful in acquiring the necessary releases allowing me to speak of Hopkins and her part in this strange affair, and to publish everything Sarah wrote about her, Ms. Hopkins has repeatedly refused my requests to be interviewed. The only published work concern ing Hopkins, aside from what follows and her website, was a brief profile and review in Culver City Artscape (September 2009) following her installation at a gal lery on La Cienega Boulevard last summer, a show which apparently included several of the canvases mentioned herein.

  4 Quercus rubra(=Q. borealis), known as the North ern Red Oak and Champion Oak; also see Donald Cultoss Peattie’s A Natural History of Trees of Eastern and Central North America (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950, with a 2nd ed. in 1966).

  5 These measurements were given me by Mr. Samson Blanchard, a few weeks after my visit.

  6 Manufactured by George Wade Pottery in Burslem, Staf fordshire, England, Red Rose Tea has included these “whimsies” since 1967, beginning as a short term pro motion in Quebec. The first American figures were offered in 1983. To quote the company’s website, “To date, it is estimated that more than 300 million Wade figurines have been given away in packages of tea in America.” See also The World of Wade by Ian Warner and Mike Pos gay (Schiffer Publishing, 2003).

  7 Sarah chose this pseudonym for her former lover, and I have chosen to respect her decision to do so by never using “Amanda’s” true name. However, it is not difficult to learn, if one is so disposed.