The barrowfields, p.7
The Barrowfields, page 7
“Look, Henry—I’ve been meaning to ask you: Do y’all have any interest in selling some of that land? I’m not talking about the house. I don’t want that. I’m talkin’ about the bottom land down there where those horses are kept.”
“I don’t think so,” said Father. “Not anytime soon.”
“That house now—that’s something different,” said Rancy, with bulging eyes and a look of mystification. “That’s your problem. You’ll never sell it if you were to ever move.”
“It’s nice inside,” said Mother. “And we can see everything from up there.” The last of her words dissolved out of hearing as a tractor-trailer carrying crates of chickens in low cages rumbled by on the narrow road a few feet away, leaving dirty floating feathers and a putrid smell that soured everyone’s faces.
“Is it true that something awful happened to a whole family of people in that house?” Rancy stared up at Father, mouth agog, waiting for a response. I’m certain she already knew the answer but just wanted to hear it firsthand. It’d give her more credibility when she retold the story later on.
“That’s what we understand,” said Father. “But it was a long time ago and it never crosses our minds.”
“What happened exactly?”
“No one really knows,” said Father.
“But it was a murder, right?”
“It appears so.”
“Did you know about it when you bought the house? It’s a material fact, you know. It has to be disclosed. You could sue.”
“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Father.
“It is true,” said Rancy, still holding Father’s hand like a supplicant.
“Is it?” said Father.
“Well, you’re the lawyer,” said Rancy, finally releasing her grip.
“It doesn’t bother us,” said Father. “Everyone who’s had a house that’s more than fifty years old has lived in a house that someone’s died in. It’s not all that uncommon. In another twenty years, no one will even remember.”
“That’s right,” said Mother, ushering Threnody and me to the other side of the car. “It’s not out of the ordinary. And we try not to talk about it in front of the children.”
Before we left, Father, with his long black rider’s coat streaming out behind him like a pennant, moved with his customary long strides over to Maynard outside the church and said, “See you in a few weeks.” Maynard was unable to formulate a reply, but I know now that he vowed then, as he always did, to one day repay Father’s irreverence. And this he would do in time.
When we got into the car, I asked what had happened to the family who had lived in the house before us. Mother and Father looked at each other. “That’s a story for another time, young man,” said Father. “Don’t ask about it again.” And that was that.
A mile from home we drove by Violet Claybank’s house. She lived on the side of a hill just above the road in a white and blue singlewide trailer. The front yard featured a few scraggly trees and an old metal bedframe, inside of which Violet had planted rows of flowers.
Looking alarmed, Violet was out by the road in her pajamas and she flagged us down as we went by. The only thing I knew about Violet was that she did strange things to her cat, which was named Princess Mary Love. She had caught it somewhere, probably in a trap. Violet was never blessed with a husband or a child, but once she got ahold of this poor lost cat, she never let it out of her sight again. She would sometimes set it outside, but only if it was affixed in some manner to a large red brick. Violet would attach the cat to the brick (or vice versa) with a long piece of baling twine, and then she’d set the cat and the brick on her little front porch together, both of which were entirely out of place in the company of the other. At first, the cat would merely venture just far enough off the porch to use the bathroom. Later, the cat grew more daring. It would drag the brick off the porch and pull it with obvious strain all over the front of the hill. When you drove by, you’d sometimes see the cat sitting there looking out over the valley, but the brick was never far away. Occasionally you’d be lucky enough to see the poor thing climbing back up the grassy hill very slowly, one grueling step at a time like a rock climber, trying to make it back to the trailer with the brick in tow.
I heard someone ask Violet once, “Ain’t you afraid a dog or a mountain lion is gonna come along and get that cat? It can’t run when it’s tied up to that brick.”
“No, I watch her from the winda in yonder,” Violet had said. “I’d just like to see ’em try. I got a buckshot rifle I’ve been itchin’ to use.”
Out the window of the car, Mother called over, “Violet—is everything okay?”
“No,” cried Violet. “It’s not. It’s not okay at all.” She was white as biscuit flour.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” said Mother, getting out of the car.
“It’s Princess Mary Love.”
Mother and Violet huddled in the yard briefly and then Mother solemnly returned to the vehicle. She looked at me and said, “Violet needs your help for a little bit.”
“What’s she need help with?”
“Her cat.”
“The one she ties to a brick in the front yard?”
“Yes.”
“Well—”
“The cat’s no longer with us,” said Mother.
“I was afraid of that,” said Father.
“Did it run away?” I said. “Does she need help finding it?” This seemed like an interesting conquest to me.
“No—it died. She thought you could help her dig a small grave and bury it. I told her I would do it, but she said she didn’t think she’d need a very big hole and that you were more fit for the job.”
“Did it strangle on the rope?”
Mother disclosed that the beloved cat-child had come to the end of its days in the clutches of a hawk that came down out of the woods and killed it before Violet, ever vigilant, could get out the door to save it. The hawk tore the cat apart with Violet right there swatting at it maniacally with a broom. She had already put a homemade wreath on her front door.
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, son, you do.”
I got out of the car and watched with despondency as it moved slowly up the road and away from me behind faint nebulas of trailing dust. Reluctantly, I was set into the involuntary servitude of the crazy cat lady. She took me around to her backyard, where a box made out of discarded fence board sat on the ground under a dogwood tree. I gathered that this was the coffin that she or someone had made for the cat. The box was easily large enough to accommodate a child.
“Where would you like me to dig the hole?”
“Right ch’here, under the shade of the tree.” Violet’s pendulous breasts swung loosely under the fabric of her nightshirt.
“Do you have a shovel?”
“Yes, I’ve got a shovel. I’ll go get it.”
I started digging vigorously and soon needed to take a break. Violet said, “Have you used a shovel before? You have? Well, look. You don’t have to go at this like you’re killin’ snakes. That hole’s not goin’ anywhere.”
It took me a solid hour of hard shoveling to produce a hole of sufficient size to fit the box and I wound up with a large, painful blister on my right hand. I could hear Father telling me that I should have asked for a pair of gloves.
Finally the time came to lower the box into the hole, which required more effort than I expected. Violet then disappeared into the house and came back out in a black dress suitable for a funeral with a Bible and some flowers that I surmised had come from the flower bed in the front yard.
“I want to see her one more time before I bury her,” she said, crying all the while. She knelt down beside the cat grave, muddying her knees, and removed the lid of the coffin, which had not been affixed with nails as I had assumed. I edged closer to the grave and peered into the freshly dug hole, morbidly curious to see the dead cat and the damage done to it by the hawk. To my horror, I saw that the cat had been dressed like a doll, in a doll’s dress and white lace hat, like a dead child. It lay there on its side, its calico legs sticking straight out, its tongue protruding oddly from the side of its mouth. The dress had been cut down the front to allow for the legs to escape and then refastened under the cat’s chin. It appeared to be missing an eye.
I remembered myself and looked over at Violet, who was silently weeping as one hand stroked the stiff deceased animal. After what seemed to me an interminable period of time, she closed the coffin, placed the flowers she had picked on top, and stood to commence the eulogy.
Putting the dirt back in the hole did not prove nearly as hard as getting it out, and by the end of another hour I had produced a nice, smooth mound of dirt under the tree.
“Now we’ll need some rock,” she said. “You’ll find plenty out there in the field.”
I walked home after sitting with Violet in her kitchen for a suitable time to drink a glass of milk and reflect on what had transpired. She gave me a hug and said she’d drive me home, but I said I preferred to walk.
I hiked up and over the side of the hill through the tall grass to the near side of the woods, and then followed the line of woods around to where the hill came back down to meet the gravel road. Through a clearing off to the west I could see the black face of Ben Hennom and our house planted on the weathered rock like a tree without soil, and I thought about the people who had lived there before and wondered what had happened to them and if I was sleeping in one of the rooms where someone had died.
I looked for Father when I got home to relay my adventures with the dead cat, and was not surprised to find him in his office writing. Hoping to gain entry on the basis of the permission I’d received the previous evening, I grabbed Flatland out of my room and quietly resumed my place on the floor next to his desk. Finally taking notice of me, he looked up a bit dazed as if he might have just awakened. He laid down his pen and pulled me into his arms.
“How was it?”
“Worst experience of my life,” I said, plucking absently at the whorling cowlick on the top of his head.
“Really? That bad?”
“Pretty bad.”
“Did you get the cat buried?”
“We sure did. It was wearing a dress.”
“The cat was?”
“Yep.” Father showed genuine astonishment, and I was glad to have impressed him with that bit of grotesquerie. He picked up a pen and wrote dead cat / cerement: child’s dress in one of his notebooks.
“If she gets another one,” I said, “I’m not helping her bury it. I don’t care if she files adoption papers for it at the courthouse.” Father said he thought that was reasonable.
I asked him if he would take me on an adventure into the woods behind the house, which ran up the mountain for hundreds of acres over boulder and crag and had never been sufficiently explored by anyone, so far as I knew. Father called the woods the Gnarled Forest, and the name was apt. I had made several timid forays along the edge, but I’d never had the courage to go far enough to get lost. He said, “I really need to work, son. Let’s do it some other time.” I pleaded with him and did a little dance and he reluctantly buckled. Closing his notebook, he brightened considerably.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll go if your mother will pack us something to eat. We obviously don’t want to die out there.” And then brighter still: “Have you heard of Magellan? Ponce de León? Cavendish? Alexander Gordon Laing? George Drouillard?” These he compiled into a space of about five seconds and my head spun around.
“I’ve heard of Magellan,” I said. “What do you smell like?”
“God knows.”
“Are you trying not to breathe?”
“No—of course not.” He was, though.
“It smells like licorice.”
“It’s not, I can assure you.”
On the wall in front of his desk was a framed photograph of Thomas Wolfe, standing desolate in a greatcoat and vest in the corner of a room with his shadow cast in triplicate upon the closed door next to him. To the right of the desk was a ghoulish daguerreotype of Poe in a black leather frame with a copper inlay of asterisks (* * * *) that ran around it. A simple painting-lamp illuminated it from the top, day and night. On one of the arms of the lamp Father had positioned a shiny black facsimile of a bird that contributed to the absurdity. From any distance, to see the man hunched over his desk with the bird above him on the wall made you think of madness. In the day, the scene was a caricature. At night, it was ghastly and haunted my dreams.
“What kind of bird is that?”
“I don’t know exactly,” said Father, examining it from below. “It might be a blackbird. Or a crow, possibly. Maybe a grackle. It’s supposed to be a raven, but it’s not. You can tell from the beak.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I found it.”
“Impossible.”
“No, I did.”
“Where?”
“You’re going to find this hard to believe, my beamish boy, but I swear to you this is the truth: I found it in a cornfield.”
“This bird.”
“Yes, this very one.”
“What was it doing in a cornfield?”
“I have no idea.”
Mother packed us ham sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper with tape. With a roll of her eyes, she crossed herself as we were heading out of the driveway into the woods. Father and I set out up the hill like desert cartographers. He told me that at the top of the mountain the woods ended and there was a clearing from which we could see the whole county and probably Tennessee and Virginia. He said he’d never been up there, but that he could see the bald of the mountain from town.
Walking into the woods was like entering a cave. The trees were obsidian, timeless, and immense. Rotted limbs lay on the ground amidst blankets of decaying leaves, and heavy, writhing vines hung down to the ground in places, but these unfortunately were not vines that one could swing on, as I discovered time and again. Laurel bushes and rhododendron fought for an existence under the forest ceiling and often appeared frail and in need of sunlight. Gargantuan rock slabs jutted sharply out of the earth at angles, making broad shelters and hollows.
Some of the going was very steep, requiring both of us to grab hold of vines and trees to propel us up the hill. For the second time that day, I regretted not having gloves. The roughness of the locust trunks was wearing my hands raw and tearing at the weeping blister.
“Did you bring any gloves?” I asked Father as he pulled himself up on a rock ledge just ahead of me.
“Yes.” He had them in his back pocket. “Did you bring yours?”
“No,” I said sullenly.
Father sat down on the mossy platform onto which he had just ascended and waited for me to catch up. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got four hands, but only two gloves. Any ideas?”
“No,” I said. “You could give me yours.”
I joined him on the ledge and we took turns drinking water from the thermos Mother had sent with us. His glasses fogged and he cleaned them with his shirt, only to have them fog up again. He took off one shoe and shook a rock out of it.
“Son, who is tougher? You or me?”
Not thinking this through, I said, “I am.”
“I expect you’re right. By that measure, then, I need the gloves worse than you do.”
Having delivered some enigmatic lesson, he tossed me the gloves and we resumed our trek up the mountain. Our trip recalled to his voracious mind every forest and tree poem he had ever read. This began with our encounter with a birch tree. He broke off a twig and gave it to me to chew on, and then came the Robert Frost. “Birches”—he knew one or two complete stanzas from that one, and then there were others. He taught me “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and made me recite it over and over again until I had committed it to memory. We climbed on. The beauty of wild growth prompted a few lines of Coleridge’s poem about a lime-tree bower. “ ‘Well, they are gone, and here I must remain…/ On springy heath, along the hill-top edge, / Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance, / To that still roaring dell, of which I told…’ ” As the forest grew deep and dark in our ascent, he resorted to Poe, which seemed more apt then: “ ‘Dim vales—and shadowy floods—/ And cloudy-looking woods, / Whose forms we can’t discover / For the tears that drip all over.’ ”
“The cloudy-looking woods,” I sang. “The cloudy-looking woods!”
It took us two good hours of diligent and steady climbing to reach the top of the mountain. Nearing the peak, the trees and undergrowth became sparser, and short clumps of fragrant heather grew in peculiar patterns. As we continued to climb, a few bedraggled trees remained but the vegetation thinned, for underneath our feet was not soil but white, ageless stone with nothing around it but the blue summer sky. Remnants of fallen trees lay about in places, turned bone-white like skeletons of ancestral forgotten beasts by the unrelenting eye of the sun. At the top of the mountain, on this broad stone face, we stood and looked out over an immeasurable swath of green hills, forests, and pastures, all rolling imperturbably into the Blue Ridge Mountains lying to the west and north. The effect was dizzying.
Just below the top of the hill looking south was a magnificent tree. It stood absolutely alone at the edge of the mountain—there were no other trees around it—and below it the elevation fell sharply away five hundred feet. At first I thought it was dead; most of its limbs were bare and it had been stripped of its bark. But then I noticed a single green and yellow leaf waving in the sun at the utmost top. And then I noticed more; one here, and another there.
“What on earth happened to it?” I asked.
“It looks like it’s been struck by lightning a few times. Yes—see how the trunk is black here all the way up? It looks like it’s been burned, maybe on more than one occasion. I guess that’s not surprising. The poor tree is out here all by itself.” Father put his hands on the trunk as if he were saying goodbye to a dear friend.
