“Sometimes,” she said, “it’s not so bad. Though it tends to get colder here than it does nearer to the sea. Sometimes, we get mild winters.”
“Other times?”
She winked, and then blew a series of perfect concentric smoke rings before replying. “Well, I was born during the Blizzard of 1978. It snowed for thirty-three hours straight, drifts fifteen feet high some places. Hurricane-force winds all across Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, but the worst of it was right here in Providence County. It was a hell of a mess, and a lot of people died. My mother used to say, ‘You came in like a lion, Connie, riding on that wind.’ ” She laughed then, and I think I laughed, too. I know I was regretting not having accepted that second cigarette.
“People still call you Connie?” I asked, preferring not to contemplate all the many ways a person can die in a blizzard.
“Only once,” she said and winked again. “And now, if you will excuse me, I really shouldget off my ass and meet my garret. I assume we share the kitchen?”
“Looks that way,” I said, and then I offered to help with the stuff we’d left sitting at the foot of the attic stairs. She shook her head and told me it wasn’t anything she couldn’t handle on her own. She thanked me for the beer and promised to exchange the favor soon, then glanced down at the box containing Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.
“Before you unload that thing, could I maybe have a look at it?” she asked.
“Sure, though I’m planning on having it photocopied at the library, so it’s not like there’s a rush.”
She chewed at her lower lip a moment, then said, “Sarah, if you don’t mind, I’d sort of like to read the original. You know, the actual artifact. Reading a copy wouldn’t be the same, somehow.”
“Of course,” I replied, because, after all, I haven’t actually worked out when and where I’m supposed to meet the woman from URI to hand it over. “Truthfully, I’ve only read about half of it myself. But yeah, no problem. You can take it now, if you’d like.”
“Later will be fine,” she said, then thanked me again for the beer, and for helping her carry the stuff up from the car. After she left, I sat here, wondering how long it would take me to get used to the sound of footsteps overhead. And now it’s almost four o’clock in the morning, and the birds are yelling their heads off, and it just occurred to me that the clack from these noisy goddamn typewriter keys might be keeping her awake.
Not much to report, really. I thought of taking the car and driving somewhere there would be fireworks — Foster, or all the way down to Westerly or Watch Hill, maybe even Mystic — not so much because I give two hoots for Independence Day, but just to mark the passage of time, to stay oriented (or reorient myself) to some sort of calendar beyond my own reclusive rhythms and the inevitable progress of the summer towards autumn. I even went so far as to look online for potential destinations, places where fireworks displays were scheduled and so forth. But then Constance asked me to help her with the last few boxes from the rental car, and she started telling horror stories about traffic and drunken tourists and asshole college students, and I dropped the idea. Earlier, just after dark, I did hear some distant concussions, from the south, I think, so I’m afraid that’s it for my Fourth of July this year.
It’s really not so bad in the attic, aside from the heat, which was almost intolerable before we set up a little window-unit air conditioner that the Mexicans seem to have left behind. But it’s clean up there, and roomier than I remembered, and Constance seems happy enough with the space. I sat with her a while, and we talked and drank more Narragansett beer while the attic cooled down around us. I don’t think I could ever get used to that single, long V-shaped room, those steeply slanting walls meeting overhead like the hull of a capsized boat. Nothing very remarkable about the conversation, nothing worth putting down here, except that she claims she’s bi, that she’s had a couple of girlfriends, so maybe. well. I can’t be blamed for wishful thinking. Sure, I was already thirteen when she was born, but what the hell.
Later, she wanted to take a nap, and so I found myself downstairs again, looking over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript for the umpteenth time. Not so much reading it, as scanning what I’d read already. To be honest, the thing is a mess. There are chapters, but after the first, these divisions seem more or less arbitrary, and there’s almost no effort at presenting any sort of chronological history of the origin and traditions surrounding “the Red Tree” (it would be too kind to call this writing “non-linear”). Also, often, the author veers off into subjects that are, at best, tangential. The nearest thing I can compare it with are the writings of Charles Fort — which, I should note, are mentioned on that page I discovered in the typewriter’s carriage, and are also liberally cited in other portions of the manuscript. I haven’t read Fort since college, but I recall his rambling, unfocused style gave me fits. Anyway, here’s an example of what I mean — the tangents — from Chapter Two (ms. pg. 112). Right in the middle of a discussion of one of the better-documented episodes involving the tree, a series of murders dating from the 1920s, Harvey pauses to discuss an unrelated haunting:
Here I should like to mention the purported haunting at Portsmouth Abbey, which is said to have followed from the slaghter [sic] and mass burial of some thirty to sixty Hessian soldiers during the Revolutionary War. The largest land-based battle of the conflict occurred on August 29, 1778, at Portsmouth, Rhode Island, near a stream now known as Barker’s Bloody Brook (or the Bloody Run), a stream that flows through the Portsmouth Abbey grounds. Indeed, the very name of the brook is tied to this battle, as the waters were said to have run red for days afterwards, polluted by blood, so great was the loss of life. The precise location of the Hessian burial is uncertain, though most do agree it was beneath the boughs of a large willow tree, long ago cut down. The dead soldiers are said to rise from a great depression marking the grave site, often referred to as the “Hessian Hole” (again, reports vary on the location of this sunken area marking the grave). Spectral sightings are said to be especially likely on foggy nights. One wonders if director Tim Burton was aware of this tale when crafting his popular 1999 retelling of Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). It should be noted that there is no actual archaeological evidence that the mass grave is anything more than legend, and a recent survey of much of the battleground by Salve Regina University (Newport) failed to turn up any burial matching the description of the infamous “Hessian Hole.”
I will assume Harvey felt justified in making this digression from his discussion of the murders of 1922–1925 because the Hessian Hole story involves a tree and a bloody brook, vaguely echoing some elements of the “Red Tree of Barbs Hill Road.” Anyway, I realized that I wasn’t really sure how far back the legends surrounding the tree extend — because of Harvey’s haphazard attention to chronology — only that the oldest accounts predate the story of William Ames and his wife by more than a century. I sat down on the floor with the manuscript, and spread the pages out around me, trying not to think about Constance upstairs, napping beneath the air conditioner while I sweated below. Or the possibility that she might be napping in the nude. It would appear that the earliest account Harvey was able to locate regarding something amiss with a tree in the wilderness south of Moosup Valley dates to the years following the “West Quanaug purchase” of 1662 (and I confess that I am almost entirely ignorant of local history, so I’m taking Harvey’s word on this stuff). He writes (Chapter One, ms. pg. 29):