Nightcrawlers

23

They held off going back to the Ezren farmhouse as long as they could. Or maybe Godfrey did. It wasn’t that Kenney was starting to call the place home sweet home or anything, but he had a job to do. Godfrey, however, was in no damn hurry. In the sheriff’s cruiser, they drove past the Ezren place and through the high arched gates of Bayfield County Cemetery.

“There was something else,” Kenney said. “Something that Elena Blasden mentioned. Genevieve Crossen’s child. Something about Genevieve Crossen’s child.”

Godfrey nodded. “Yeah, that’s quite a tale. But I suppose, since I’ve already bared the county’s soul to you, you might as well hear about that one, too.”

Godfrey moved the cruiser down the winding dirt road, past newer sections of the cemetery with their russet- and emerald-colored headstones and brass flagholders, then over a low rise where the older areas were. And here, Kenney decided, was where the real cemetery began. It wound off over mounded hills set with oak and hemlock, a crowded city of leaning crosses and tombstones, broken slabs and ivy-covered vaults, a gray and white profusion of marble both water-stained and wreathed in creeping fungi. Family plots atop grassy bluffs were enclosed by rusting iron fences knotted with morning glory and English ivy. Ancient vaults were set into overgrown hillsides like black mouths. Monuments and shafts poked up from thick, congested stands of chokecherry and brambleberry, staghorn sumac and bracken.

“Somebody ought to clean this place out,” Kenney said. “It’s getting a little wild.”

Godfrey pulled the cruiser to a stop before the vaulted doors of a stone chapel with dark, hooded windows that were set with the gratings of bars. “Sure, somebody ought to. Got just the one caretaker here, county can’t afford no more than that. He has his hands full, it’s a big place.”

And it was.

Godfrey said they’d been burying people there since the beginning of the nineteenth century and longer, really, since just a few years back a group from one of the state historical societies located the old colonial graveyard of Trowden just beyond the back wall of the cemetery. They chopped it free from tangles of hawthorn, ash, and juneberry, exposing the crumbling flat stones to the light of day for the first time in well over a century.

Kenney sat there, staring at raindrops running like tears down lichen-encrusted markers. “Okay,” he said finally. “Let’s have it.”

Godfrey nodded. “If you want to know about Genevieve Crossen, then I suppose I’d have to tell you about a funeral and a murder. The funeral was that of Genevieve’s eleven-year-old daughter, Pearl. And the murder? Well, we’ll get to that soon enough.

“Now, we’re reaching back some here, back to 1956 in particular, the year I turned thirteen and the year little Pearl drowned out in Deep-Cut Quarry, an abandoned quarry that flooded over as quarries will do. The quarry’s still there, sure enough, though fenced off now and no one swims it anymore. Even back in my boyhood before the water turned green and filled with slime and swimmer’s itch, it was damn deep in spots and you had to know where you could dive and where you couldn’t. See, there’s pilings of limestone rising up and you weren’t careful, you could bash your brains out on them. But the quarry was full of other things, still is. People drove old cars into it, tossed bedsprings and appliances down there. You get your foot caught on some of those things and you’d never break surface again. At least… those were the stories.

“Nobody really knows the particulars of little Pearl’s death. She was fooling around out there, around the edge and must have fallen in, couldn’t climb back out. No matter. Later that day, Georgy Blasden and his brother, Franny—good kid, killed in Vietnam, April of ‘68—rode their bikes out to the quarry to catch some frogs and saw her floating out there. Georgy told me she looked like a fancy doll someone had thrown away bobbing out there… I suppose she did at that. See, Genevieve used to dress little Pearl up every day in fancy, frilly outfits, take the strap to her if she got dirty. Poor thing.

“Well, anyway, they fished Pearl out and laid her to rest here, just over aways from where we’re sitting right now. It was a very sad thing, very sad. After that, none of us kids were allowed to swim in the quarry… even though we did, secretly.” Godfrey paused there, the memory of it all filling him, making those lines on his face stand out like crevices in dry earth. “Well, as you can imagine it was all too much for Genevieve. See, that lady had suffered horribly. Her life was nothing but a tragedy from beginning to end. She’d had a son, too, Randy was his name. I barely remember him. He joined the marines and died over in Korea, October ’52. There was, as you can guess, quite an age difference between Genevieve’s children… but back in those days with no true birth control beyond keeping your legs closed and your johnson zipped up, shit just happened. You never knew when. Regardless, in the end, they both died awful, dirty deaths.

“Randy’s death had been tough on that family, so tough that Henry Crossen, Genevieve’s husband, started to drink like a fish, trying to wash the taste of his son’s death out of his mouth. But he never did. Two years after Randy came home in a flag-draped box, one December evening in ’54 Henry piled his ’48 Chevy truck into a tree out on Bellac and joined his son. He was hammered, as you can imagine, and after he hit that tree, the truck rolled over, slid down the hillside through the snow and right into Ten Mile Creek. Ten Mile wasn’t frozen over completely that year and the truck went through, coming to rest on its roof. With his injuries, which were pretty massive, I understand, Randy couldn’t get out. And that’s how he died… in a cab full of freezing water. When they found him there the next day, he was frozen solid and I heard they had to use saws and axes to cut him free.

“Too much, it was all too much, as you can well understand. Genevieve buried her son, then her husband, and finally her daughter and this within an ugly four-year stretch. She went soft in the head and who could blame her? Who could honesty blame her? People kept clear of her and her place, out on Wedeck Road, which is now just called County Road 707. She was just the crazy woman and you kept away like maybe what she had was catchy. Well, about three months or so after they buried Pearl, strange things began to happen. Stories began to circulate and they were damned unusual.”

Kenney looked at him, almost afraid to ask. “What sort of stories?”

Godfrey swallowed, then swallowed again. “Well, people were saying that they’d seen Pearl… seen her walking around out in the woods.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Yeah, bad stuff, it was. But you got to remember the way this county was and still is… cut off. Nothing but a lot of small towns and farms with a lot of dark woods and thickets inbetween. People liked to talk, people liked to make up crazy stories. A lot of adults in Haymarket had heard the tales, did what they could to keep it from us kids… but we found out. What we heard was that Pearl’s ghost was walking around out there, haunting the back roads. Close enough, I guess.

“Now, I should preface this by saying that my old man was on the county board and my uncle Tommy was a deputy sheriff—lived next door to us—so there wasn’t much that happened around here they didn’t know about. Well, one moonlit night, I was laying in my bed and it was warm so I had my window open. Just laying there, not sleeping, listening to my old man and my uncle Tommy drinking beers and laughing out at the picnic table in the backyard. It was after midnight, I remember that much, when this car comes swinging into our drive, horn blaring. Somebody climbs out, ranting and raving and it took both my old man and my uncle Tommy to settle him down.

“Who it was, was Alan Kresky and he was drunk. Drunk and rambling, just scared out of his wits. Through my bedroom window above, I heard it all. Alan said he’d been coming back from Luanne Shields’ place out on Cricker Road, over towards French Village. He said he saw something, something that scared him white. It took him some time to say exactly what. Well, Alan was an old barfly and had been since he got back from World War II and nobody had to ask what he’d been doing out on Cricker at that hour, because both my old man and my uncle knew—just as the whole damn town knew—he was out there putting it to Luanne and had been for some time. Everyone knew that. Even we kids knew that. Old Luanne played it free and easy and the only one who didn’t know that was her husband, Bobby, who was out on the ore boats eight months of the year. Shit, as boys, we would hike out to Luanne’s after dark and watch her doing it through the window… sometimes with some guy and sometimes by herself.

“Anyway, Alan was out in the backyard and he was just blind… hell, I could smell the rye on his breath from my second-story window. I knew that smell of booze just fine, thank you very much, because the summer before, me and my pal Johnny Proctor got into his dad’s homemade chokecherry wine and spent the night vomiting out in a pasture. So, Alan was pissed, but what he’d seen out on Cricker had scared him so bad that he’d drove drunk right to the deputy sheriff’s door.”

“What did he see?” Kenney asked.

Godfrey sighed, studying the battalions of tombstones around them. “Said he saw Pearl Crossen walking up the side of Cricker Road easy as you please. You would’ve thought that my uncle and old man would have laughed at him and tossed him in the drunk tank, but they didn’t. Maybe it was how he looked—I couldn’t see from my window, of course, but his voice was bad, like somebody had pulled out his soul, spit on it and shoved it back in—and maybe it was because they’d heard that story too many times by then and were starting to wonder themselves. And maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with Genevieve herself. How she was crazy and haunted, made people real uneasy by then… like the ghosts of her family were slinking around her like hungry cats. She’d come into Haymarket now and again, just out of her head. See people on the streets, ask them if they’d seen Randy around or how she had to get to the tailor’s and get Pearl’s dress ready for her birthday party, but she had to run on account Henry was coming home and she had to get his supper on.

“At any rate, I heard my old man and uncle telling Alan he was drunk and was probably seeing things. But Alan said he wasn’t, he’d seen Pearl, she’d come back just like folks were saying. So Uncle Tommy said, all right, all right, maybe you saw some girl walking out there, but it wasn’t Pearl. But Alan said it was her, all right. And how did he know? Simple… the dress. It was the dress, he said, that fancy silk and lace dress, bright blue. Well, that carried some weight because little Pearl, as I said, was always prettied up by Genevieve like a china doll. Shit, when they pulled her from the quarry, it looked like she was ready for Easter dinner or her first confirmation.

“Alan insisted it was Pearl. She had been walking funny, kind of limping or something, and she was carrying some animal by the tail… a dead cat. You can just imagine what it was like for him out there on that moonlit road at the witching hour, seeing a dead girl shambling about with a roadkilled cat. Jesus. Now, I don’t honestly believe that my old man or uncle really believed that Pearl Crossen had kicked her way out of her casket, but something weird was going on and it had gotten to the point that they couldn’t ignore it anymore.

“See, lots of people were telling that same story and lots of people were getting scared. Too many nasty tales were circulating about Pearl Crossen. People had seen her walking the back roads at night same as Alan Kresky, funny look about her, hunched over and kind of hopping rather than walking. They’d seen her outside the gates of this very cemetery, crouching in drainage ditches, you name it. Mort Strombly said… I’ll never forget this… that he’d come upon her out on Cricker at three in the morning. That she’d been chewing on a dead dog at the side of the road when he saw her and he’d almost put his truck in the ditch. That when his headlights hit her, she looked up at him, her face all smeared with something black and filthy, and her eyes had been yellow. Shining yellow. And her face… well, Mort said it was all wrong, sort of crooked, jutting forth like the skull beneath was trying to chew its way out. Barney Hoke, this older kid we knew, said he’d been out parking with Leslie Strong and Pearl had come right up to the car. Said she looked like something out of a horror movie… like a living skull with greasy hair tangled full of sticks and burrs and dirt spattered over her face and lots of mangled-up teeth. Barney said that both he and Leslie started screaming, couldn’t help themselves. Pearl put her hands against the window—it was raining, so the windows were up, thank God—and Barney said those hands were swollen, white and sticky, looked like toadstools. He said they couldn’t see her clearly through the raindrops on the window, but whatever that thing was, it wasn’t Pearl.”