The Red Tree

CHAPTER THREE

Constance Hopkins was born not far to the south of here, born and raised in some little slip of a once-was town called Greene that I might well have driven through two or three times now, but I’ll be damned if I can recall the place. She says it was originally named Coffin Corner, until the paternal grandfather of H. P. Lovecraft, Whipple Phillips, bought pretty much the whole village back in the 1850s and renamed it after Nathaniel Greene, the Revolutionary War hero. In the Nineteenth Century, Greene was an important stopping point along the railroad, but then Henry Ford showed up and fixed that good and proper. Now I gather it’s hardly even a town at all. I didn’t ask her why the place had originally been named Coffin Corner, and she didn’t volunteer the information, so maybe she doesn’t know, either. Maybe it’s one of those things that nobody remembers. Maybe it’s a memory that’s been entrusted to a crumbling bit of paper in a library book somewhere.

She showed up around two, driving a rented PT Cruiser, and the car was almost the same color as the summer sky. Almost that exact same shade of blue. I walked down to meet her at the footbridge that fords the creek from Ramswool Pond, and, I’ll admit, at the time, I wasn’t thinking about much more than how maybe I should at least make an effort not to be a bitch. Fake it. Affect a neighborly attitude, because it wouldn’t kill me, and the last thing I need right now is Squire Blanchard deciding I’m more trouble than I’m worth. For all I know, this woman can actually pay her rent on time, and maybe she’ll up and decide she wants to lease the whole damn house out from under me. So, yeah, stuff a cork in it and play nice.

She had a bunch of cardboard boxes and some mismatched suitcases, along with an assortment of stuff you’d expect the artist who’s going to take up residence above your head to arrive with. Two huge wooden easels, for example. I introduced myself, and then helped her lug some of her things back to the house, things she didn’t want sitting out in the hot car — paints and art supplies, several rolled canvases, a plastic milk crate of old LPs. I quickly showed her around the first floor, including the bathroom we will now be sharing, and ended up at the steep, narrow flight of stairs leading to the attic.

“Bet it’s hot as fuck all up there,” she said, squinting into the gloom gathered at the top of the staircase, the gloom and the heat crouched so thickly you could almost see it, and I think I just nodded.

“I don’t suppose you’ve got beer?” she asked me. “A cold beer?”

“I think I probably can fix you up,” I said, and we left her things at the foot of the stairs and backtracked to the kitchen. I’m trying to develop a taste for Narragansett, and there was a whole six-pack in the icebox and two bottles left over from another. I opened one for her, and a second bottle for myself, and pointed at the table and chairs by the window.

“Try to excuse the mess. Try hard,” I said, and she laughed.

I don’t exactly recall now what it was I’d expected from this woman, whatever preconceptions and images I might have formed of her in my mind’s eye. But whatever it was, Constance Hopkins entirely defied and negated my expectations. I think I’d call her striking even if I weren’t a lesbian. And I think I’d call her beautiful, too. Not the sort of beauty you see these days, touted in magazines and on television. That calculated, cookie-cutter glamour of the dull that so many people seem, increasingly, to gravitate towards. Hers is not the sort of face that would ever get lost in a crowd, and sitting here now, I’m not at all confident I can explain what it is about her that leaves me with this impression. Her eyes have some odd, drowsy quality about them — unfocused, distant — but it’s nothing that suggests a lack of alertness. They’re a very particular shade of reddish brown. Maybe I’d call it cinnamon. Or rust. I don’t think I’ve ever seen eyes like hers before. That color, I mean. Her complexion is pale, but not at all pasty. Her hair is jet black and straight, and she was wearing it pulled back in a long ponytail. Sitting there, drinking beer with her, talking, I noticed there’s a very small chip out of one of her upper incisors. I wanted to ask her how that had happened, but I didn’t. Maybe later.

“You smoke?” she asked, and nodded at the ashtray on the table, near Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. It was half-full of butts and ash, because I hadn’t emptied it in a couple of days.

“Yeah, well. I was quit, you know, but now it seems like I’m not so quit anymore.”

“So you don’t mind if I smoke?”

“No, I don’t mind in the least,” I replied, and she fished a pack of Camels out of the bulging leather shoulder bag she carries for a purse. The Camels and a pink disposable Bic lighter, and she offered me one of the cigarettes, which I gladly accepted. She lit it for me, and then sat staring silently out the kitchen window for a minute or so. It was a silence that was beginning to grow uncomfortable, when she said, “I like your books. The novels. Your short stories are better written, though. But, I never would have guessed that you wrote any thing on something like that,” and, with her cigarette, she pointed at the antique typewriter. Suddenly, I was flustered, disarmed, whatever you want to call it, left feeling as though I ought be simultaneously thanking her for the compliment (as it happens, I like my short fiction better, too), apologizing for the old dreadnaught of a typewriter,and explaining that I normally work on a laptop. Instead, I just nodded and took another long drag on my own cigarette.

“We don’t have to talk about it, Sarah, not if you would prefer not to,” she said.

“Well, then,” I replied. “In that case, I would prefer not to, thank you.”

“I know how it goes,” she told me, and sort of half smiled. “Or, how it doesn’t come,as the case may be.”

“So, you drove all the way from Los Angeles?” I asked, changing the subject, though I’d already asked her that same question outside, and she’d already answered it. And never mind that Blanchard had told me she was driving; it was something to say, words to fill in empty space, misdirection, and the only thing I could think of.

“I like to drive,” she said. “I hate planes. Even before 9/11 and all this security crap, I hated planes. When I go somewhere, I want to see where it is I’m going, all the places I pass through on the way there. You know what I mean?”

I told her that I did, even though I suspected I actually didn’t understand, at all. I’ve always despised long drives, ever since I was a kid and it was my father’s idea of Sunday afternoon recreation. Just driving. Driving nowhere at all. Back before the oil crisis in ’73, when gas was, what, thirty or forty cents a gallon. Constance Hopkins smoked her cigarette and watched the window, watched the bright, shimmering summer day outside the window, and I smoked mine and watched her, trying hard not to be too obvious about it. Trying not to stare. Trying hard. I asked her how it had gone, the drive from LA, and she shrugged and smoke leaked from her nostrils.

“Fine, except for the fucking breakdown in Gary.”

“Indiana?” I asked, immediately wishing that I’d said nothing at all, becoming all too acutely aware that my questions and replies were suffering from my unexpected fascination with this woman whom I’d expected would be nothing but an inconvenience.

“Yeah, Indiana. Only Gary I’ve ever had the misfortune to be stuck in. Car blew a head gasket or cracked a cylinder or something of the sort, and there was a mix-up getting a replacement. Added an extra day, waiting around while they sorted it out.”

“But otherwise?”

Constance looked away from the window, those drowsy red-brown eyes shifting towards me, and she nodded. “Fourteen states in less than a week. My second grand tour of Flyover Country. May I never, ever have to do it again.” She crossed herself, then smiled and took another sip of her beer, before setting the bottle down on the table. And, turning back to the window, as though the unexpected had become the order of the day, she said the very last thing I was prepared to hear.

“So, I suppose you know all about that old tree out there?” and she smiled again and jabbed an index finger towards the kitchen window. I laughed out loud, a nervous, somewhat unsettled laugh, I suppose, and realized that my bottle was empty, and my mouth had gone very dry.

“Not like it’s some sort of big secret,” she said, sounding amused. “Just part of that whole local legend scene, the crap you know by heart cause you grew up hearing it all the time. Well, if you grew up around here, I mean,” and she paused long enough to tap her cigarette against the edge of the ashtray. “Mercy Brown and the plague of consumptive vampires, all the phantoms, witches, ghost towns, shunned pastures, the haunted cemeteries, and whatnot. The usual New England spookfest. Hell, there’s even supposed to be some sort of swamp monster lurking about in a bog up around Gloucester or Chepachet.”

“Chepachet?” I asked, and she shrugged.

“Sure. Not all that far from here.”

“Well, okay, but the tree was news tome. Want another beer?” I asked her, and she glanced at her bottle, still almost a third full, but gone warm, and she nodded. I stood and walked across the room to the icebox.

“Old man Blanchard didn’t bother mentioning it, before you signed the lease?” she asked.

“No. Must have slipped his mind,” I said, opening the bottles and returning to my seat, handing one to her. “I had no idea I’d rented a house on a haunted farm. Or that the last tenant here was writing a book about the tree, then went and hung himself from it.

”“Ah, yeah.That would be Chuck Harvey,” Constance said. “Took a couple of classes from him, when I was an undergrad at URI. Again, not exactly a big fucking secret. I always did think the dude was, you know, sort of out to lunch.”

I let my eyes stray towards the window, towards the huge green canopy of that tree moving slowly in the afternoon breeze, recalling my walk the day before and how I’d found absolutely nothing the least bit out of the ordinary about the oak. How I’d almost dozed off on that big flat stone at its base.

“He was writing a book about it when he died,” I said again.

“Really? I never heard that part of it. I don’t think it made the news.”

“So this happened before you moved out to LA?”

“Yep,” she nodded. “I only went out there late last summer, near the end of August. No idea what I was thinking, really. I knew someone from college who wanted to split the cost of an apartment in Silver Lake, and there really wasn’t anything here tying me down. But Jesus, Joseph, and Mary, I swear to fuck, Los Angeles is the worst. It’s like someone decided to build a concentration camp for ass-holes or something, hoping the earthquakes and wildfires would clean up the gene pool.”

I told her I’d never been very fond of the place myself, and she started in explaining to me about the friend from college, another painter, and how this girl had gotten mixed up with a heroin dealer, how it turned out the roommate was a junkie herself. After all manner of drug-related Sturm und Drang,Constance had decided it was time to get out, and so here she was, drinking Narragansett Beer with me at the kitchen table. “I think they’re all probably in jail by now,” she told me. “In jail or dead. I’m just glad to be away from there, clear and free of that bunch of jerk-offs and needle freaks. Maybe now I can get back to work.”

And here she stopped and squinted at me through a gray veil of cigarette smoke. “So, he was writing a book, yeah? About the red tree? I wouldn’t have guessed there was enough material there for a whole damn book.”

I shrugged and pointed to the manuscript box. “Well, he seemed to think so. I found it in the basement. Rather, I found what there is of it. He died without finishing it.”

She took a last puff from her Camel, then crushed the butt out in the ashtray. “No shit? I thought that was maybe something you were writing. It just got left here, after he died?”

“That would seem to be the case, though I’ve talked with someone at the university who’s taking it off my hands next week. Someone who used to work with him, I think. He has a daughter, but she doesn’t seem to want anything to do with him.”

“Didn’t know that, either,” Constance said. “In school, we always assumed he was gay.”

“Maybe he was. He was certainly divorced.”

“Weird shit,” she sighed, and sipped at her beer. “So, Sarah Crowe, tell me. Are you the sort who believes in ghosts and cursed trees and the like?” she asked. “Does it make you nervous, all these skeletons in the closet?”

“No, I do not believe in ghosts,” I replied. “Or Rhode Island vampires,or swamp monsters. I’d be lying, though, if I said learning about Harvey’s suicide didn’t. ” and I trailed off, searching for words that wouldn’t be taken the wrong way, because suddenly I found myself caring about this stranger’s opinion of me. “It was unsettling,” I said. “And then, finding that manuscript, hidden away down in the basement. ”

“You think Blanchard intentionally hid the manuscript?”

“Sorry, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Just a figure of speech,” and see there what I mean about being careful of the words I choose, because I hadn’t meant that at all.

“Don’t you wonder, though, why he didn’t just toss it out, burn it or something?” Constance Hopkins asked, and now there was a faintly mischievous glint in her lazy eyes. “I mean, why save it? Why go to the trouble to stash it away in the basement?”

“You got me,” I said. “I don’t write mystery novels.”

“No, that’s right. You don’t, do you?” And as quickly as it had appeared, the glint faded from her rusty eyes. She lit another cigarette, and offered another to me, but I declined.

“How about you?” I asked, and, with hindsight, I see that the question was not merely an act of reciprocal curiousity, but a response to what had felt like a challenge or taunt from a woman almost fifteen years my junior.

“What about me what?”

“Are you,Constance Hopkins, the sort who believes in ghosts. or cursed trees, for that matter? Are you the sort who goes in for all this Fortean nonsense?”

She peered back at me through a thick cloud of smoke, looking confused. “Fortean? You just lost me.”

“You mean to say, you’ve never read Charles Fort, king of the cranks, archenemy of all that is rational, self-professed defender of so-called damned phenomena excluded by orthodox science? Rains of blood, fish and frogs falling from the sky, unexplained disappearances, mystery animals, and what have you?”

“Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “Not ringing any bells.”

“No problem,” I replied. “It’s probably for the best. Anyway, you haven’t answered my question.”

“Do I believe in ghosts?” she smiled.

“Yes. That’s the one.”

She continued to smile, and I did my best not to stare at that chipped tooth while she seemed to gaze through me, at least through the surface of me. Finally she nodded, very slightly, her smile widening just a bit, and shrugged.

“It’s complicated. Maybe we should come back to that question another time,” she said. “I expect I ought to wander upstairs and see just what I’ve gotten myself into,” and she looked at the ceiling.

“Sure,” I replied. “No hurry,” but there was an odd and unmistakable pang of disappointment, that she hadn’t answered the question. For a moment, I thought she was going to leave the table, but then she started talking again, and the conversation turned to more mundane affairs — just how much she dreaded going up those stairs to the attic, because she knew what a dump it would be. How there was a sleeping bag and an air mattress out in the car that would have to do, as far as bedding was concerned. How she hoped we didn’t both freeze to death when winter came around.

“I try not to think about the winter,” I said, truthfully. “I’ve never lived anywhere cold in my whole life.”

“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 should get 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:

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):

Yeah, okay, enough of this already. My eyes are giving out. Didn’t I say I wasn’t going to hand copy Harvey’s damn manuscript, that I was going to have it Xeroxed? And here I’ve just transcribed about four pages of the damned thing! But, that said, the upshot is that people have been afraid of this old tree (hidden now, out there in the dark beyond my kitchen window) for almost three hundred years. And the stone I lay down on, and where I almost dozed off below those branches, has (or had) a reputation as an altar used by Indians in human sacrifices. I have to admit, reading back over that part gave me just a bit of a shiver, even if I’m most emphatically not the sort of woman who believes in ghosts and Rhode Island vampires and bog monsters.

Oh, speaking of Constance, she came down about five this afternoon, looking refreshed from her nap, and offered to fix dinner for the both of us. I never turn down a home-cooked meal, so long as someone else is doing the cooking. She scrounged about in the kitchen and somehow came up with the ingredients for a couple of cheddar-cheese omelets, with French fries on the side (I had a pack of Ore-Ida frozen shoestrings). While we were eating, she asked about the manuscript pages scattered all over the floor, and I told her about the “altar” at the base of the tree. I said that I wanted to make a second trip out to the tree, as I didn’t recall seeing the groove and spout mentioned by Harvey, and she asked if I’d mind if she went along. Like I was going to say no, right? So, it’s a date. We’re planning to pack lunch and have a proper picnic on the stone, dubious past or no, bloodthirsty demons or what have you. Okay, so maybe it’snota date, strictly speaking, but at least it’s not me sitting here on my ass, smoking too much and drinking lousy beer, moping about the novel that I’m not getting written while I obsess over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.

The best-laid plans of mice and men and bored writers, as they say. Or as they ought to say. The heat was exceptional today, the sun like a searing hole punched into the sky leading straight up to Hell. By one this afternoon, the mercury had reached 93F, and Constance and I decided to put our plans for a picnic at the red tree off until another, cooler day. The meteorologists (whom I’ve noticed are even less reliable here than back in Atlanta) are promising cooler weather soon. I suppose the proximity to the sea complicates matters, adding a greater degree of uncertainty into that already dubious undertaking of predicting the future course of cold fronts, high- and low-pressure centers, the whims of the polar jet stream. But, the long and short of it, the day was dangerously hot, and, in lieu of our picnic, Constance invited me up into her garret to partake of the air-conditioning. The little window unit was hardly able to keep up, what with the hot air rising from below and the sun blasting down on the roof, but the attic was still a far sight better than being downstairs.

Earlier in the day, before the heat got so bad, I’d gone with her up to Foster, to return the rented PT Cruiser. On the way home, she talked, mostly, and mostly she talked about growing up around here. There were questions I’d wanted to ask, about her painting and California, and about what taking classes from Charles Harvey had been like, but I’d kept them to myself. Then, up in the attic, I saw that she hasn’t yet begun painting, which I suppose is hardly surprising. She has begun stretching two canvases (the stretcher bars were Brazilian white pine, she informed me), and the place already smells like oil paints and linseed oil and gesso. She sat on her air mattress, me in a metal folding chair, and we smoked and drank Narragansett and listened to the window unit chug and wheeze and try to keep up with the heat. She has a little portable stereo, and something by Lisa Gerrard was playing on repeat. I can’t now recall everything we talked about, and I won’t try. The stuff two people from different parts of the country talk about. The things two artists working in completely different media talk about. But, there was one thing I wanted to get down here, and as I prepare to do so, I realize that I have developed a certain relationship with this typewriter and the journal I’m using it to keep (instead of writing my novel) — it would appear that I have taken it into my confidence, and I’m going to have to stop leaving these pages lying about where Constance could easily come across them and be tempted to read things I would really rather she didn’t.

“You asked if I believed in ghosts,” she said, and I think maybe we’d been talking about Henry James, for whatever reason, and so it didn’t seem strange to me that she had returned to the unanswered question.

“And you said it was complicated,” I replied, and sipped at my beer.

“I wasn’t trying to be coy. It is complicated. The answer, I mean. But, if you’re still interested, I’ll try to explain.”

“I’m still interested,” I said, not adding that I strongly suspected she was being coy. “If you want to tell me, sure, I’m interested.”

“Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” she continued, wiping beads of condensation off her own bottle with a corner of the sheet. “At least, not in any traditional sense. I don’t believe in the soul, or that the mind is capable of surviving death, so a logical consequence is that I can hardly believe in restless spirits and the like. See what I’m saying?” and she scooted a few inches across the air mattress and a little closer to my chair.

“Sure,” I said. “It sounds like maybe it’s not so different from my own reasons. The physicalist approach to monism and the so-called mind-body problem. Thought is merely a function of the brain—”

“—no soul,” she said, cutting in, and I think that, in retrospect, I’m a little embarrassed at how I was trying to wow her with my knowledge of things that I really know very little about (I’m not much better with psychology than I am the weather). Constance tapped at her head with an index finger. “Just my brain, and my mind exists no more independently of my brain than my chewing exists independently of my teeth. Thought, mind, whatever. it’s just what the brain does. The dichotomy between that which we call mental, or spiritual, and those things we call physical, is merely an illusion. It’s all physical.”

“No arguments here,” I told her, hoping that the conversation was not about to step off into some hard-core philosophical waters much too deep for me to follow. I’d already pretty much used up my bag of jargon with physicalism, monism,and the mind-body problem.

“No soul,” she said. “No spirit, so no ghosts, right? The brain dies and rots, taking its functions, including mind, with it. So, no ghosts.”

“Bingo,” I said, and she laughed.

“Except—and I know how freaky this is going to sound, so bear with me — maybe there’s a sort of cosmic escape clause that allows for the existence of the set of phenomena that people tend to call ghosts and hauntings. And it’s not that ghosts don’t exist, it’s just that most people are mistaken about what they are, or aren’t.”

I think I blinked and let the metal folding chair rock back on two legs. “Okay, now you’ve lost me,” I admitted, and she laughed again.

“Oh, Sarah, you’re plenty smart enough to keep up,” she said. “Just give me a second. See, maybe it’s not about souls or spirits at all. Maybe it’s actually something that has a lot more to do with physics and how the universe operates. We know that matter distorts space and time, right? Well, what if there are other ways that space and time can be distorted by matter, perhaps not only by the gravity generated by an object’s mass, but by the behavior or experiences or. ” and here she paused, searching for some word.

“It’s an old idea,” I said, letting the chair bump back down to the attic floor. “Events so traumatic that they warp time and space and create what parapsychologists and other crackpots call residual hauntings, I believe. Nonconscious hauntings that work sort of like a loop of videotape.”

I realized that Constance had stopped smiling, and now she was just sitting there, staring at the walls.

“Crackpots,” she said, and took a drink of beer.

I sighed and fought the sudden urge to punch myself in the mouth. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, instead, but she just shrugged and leaned over the side of the air mattress, setting her bottle on the floor.

“You said that you were still interested, or I never would have started in on this. I know how it sounds.”

I apologized again and told her to please continue, to finish whatever it was she had been about to tell me. And then she said she blamed the heat, that if the day weren’t so hot, we’d have gone out to the tree as we’d planned, and this conversation would not have happened, and I wouldn’t think she was a crackpot.

“I never said I think you’re a crackpot,” I protested.

She stared at me a few moments, then shrugged and said, “It was fairly implicit, don’t you think?”

I closed my eyes tightly, seeing yellow-white afterimages of sunlight and restraining myself from blurting some smart-ass quip or another—“Do we have to have our first lovers’ spat before I get to fuck you?” Something equally self-destructive.

Instead, I told her, “I’m sorry, Constance. I honestly didn’t mean it that way. I think maybe I’m a little drunk,” and I probably was. I opened my eyes, and she was still staring at me. “No,really,” I said. “I was not calling you a crackpot. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that, okay?”

And she smiled at me and lay down on the air mattress, and I was glad for the smile, whatever it might mean, and glad that those cinnamon eyes were now trained on the sloping attic ceiling and not on me. “Do you want to hear it or not?” Constance asked.

“I do,” I replied, and she furrowed her brow, making what A. A. Milne might have called a thoughtful face. Only, it was obvious this was a sort of mock-thoughtful face, and I knew this expression was some part of my punishment for having implied she was a crackpot.

“You have to swear that you won’t just use it as an excuse to make fun of me again.”

“I wasn’t making fun of you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and pointed straight at me with her left index finger. “You have to fucking swear,Sarah Crowe. Otherwise, you’re never gonna hear it.”

“And that would ruin my day,” I muttered, and her brow grew more furrowed, the thoughtful face edging towards an impatient face.

“Fine. I fucking swear,” I said, before she could withdraw the stipulation and any chance I might have of hearing whatever it was she was trying to decide whether or not I should hear.

“Scout’s honor?”

“Sure. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Yeah, that’s better,” she said, smiling again, and the creases wrinkling her forehead began to relax. But she didn’t open her eyes. In fact, she didn’t open her eyes again until she was almost finished telling me her ghost story, as though she needed to try and shut out the sunlight filling up the little attic in order to recall the events in question. I sat in my metal folding chair, smoking, and she lay there on her makeshift bed, while the window unit droned and gurgled wetly to itself. I’ll freely admit, I’ve never been a very good listener, and yet, there was something in the way she stacked the words. and I seemed to hang on every one, every syllable, every pregnant pause. Then again, maybe it was only lust and a peevish libido keeping me focused.

“Back when I was in high school, just after I got my license, I used to drive out to the Cliffwalk in Newport whenever I could. Usually, I went alone. In the summers, I’d try to find the days when the tourists weren’t so bad, but it’s Newport, and so that’s always a crapshoot.”

I exhaled smoke and cleared my throat. “Constance,” I said. “I know I’m interrupting you again, but. I’ve never been to Newport, and I have no idea what this Cliffwalk thing is. Keep in mind I’m just a dumb redneck from Georgia and this will go better.”

She sighed very loudly and shook her head in disgust or disbelief. “The Cliffwalk,” she said, speaking very slowly now, the way one might talk to a small child with attention issues, “is a trail leading along the cliffs, over on the east side of Newport Island, behind Salve Regina College and all those great fucking mansions that people like the Vanderbilts put up back in the 1890s. You have heard of the Gilded Age, right? The fallout of the Second Industrial Revolution? John D. Rockefeller, Silas Desvernine, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, all those guys?”

“I think maybe I heard of it once,” I said, not bothering to smile because her eyes were shut. I took another drag on my cigarette.

“So, behind the mansions,” she continued, “there’s a pathway. It was just a dirt trail back when, a long time ago, kept clear by the Indians and the colonials and then the Victorians and whatnot. It runs on for miles, and in some places the drop to the sea is seventy feet or more. But over the years, hurricanes took their toll on the path, and finally, I think, the Army Corps of Engineers came in sometime in the seventies and paved it and repaired all the storm damage, fixed the walk up all nice again. Better than new, I’m sure.”

“Our tax dollars at work,” I said.

“It’s nice,” Constance said. “Maybe I’ll take you sometime. Anyway, so I used to drive out there, back when I was sixteen, seventeen, hoping there wouldn’t be crowds of sightseers. And one day it was foggy and sort of cold for summer, so there was hardly anyone, and I pretty much had the place to myself. July 21, 1995, so that’s what. thirteen years ago?”

“Almost,” I told her, counting on my fingers. “Sixteen days from now, it’ll have been thirteen years.”

“Fine, so twelve years, eleven months, and spare change. And there I was, alone at the Forty Steps, down at the end of Narragansett Avenue—”

“What are the Forty Steps?” I asked, and she shook her head again, so I added, “A Georgia redneck, remember?”

Constance made an exasperated sound, and somehow managed to roll her eyes without opening them. “At the east end of Narragansett Avenue, on the Cliffwalk, there’s a granite staircase leading down to a sort of balcony above the sea. Used to be, the steps were wooden, and back in the Gilded Age, the Irish servants from the mansions would gather there for dances and socials and whatever the Irish immigrants called such things. There’s a Gaelic word for it. ”

“Céilí,”I volunteered, and she nodded.

“Ten points to the ignorant redneck dyke from Georgia,” she laughed. “Yeah. Well, so they had their parties at the Forty Steps, to blow off steam, back in the 1880s and 1890s and so on. Nowadays, though, the old wooden steps are gone, and there’s a sturdy red granite staircase enclosed by walls made from blocks of limestone and mortar, so it’s a lot safer. It was still new, in 1995. There’s a name engraved on each step, the name of the person who ponied up the dough to pay for that particular step. It cost something like three thousand dollars a step. And then, from the little balcony — which is probably two-thirds of the way down the cliff — it’s, I don’t know exactly, but I’d guess another twenty or thirty feet down to the rocks and the sea. Far enough you wouldn’t want to fall.”

“Or jump?” I asked. And Constance frowned, and I thought for a second she might even open her eyes.“

Or fucking jump,” she said. “Far enough that if you didn’t die outright, you’d be pretty busted up. I used to sit there on the limestone wall of the balcony, because it’s a good view, and there are lots of fossils in the limestone. That rock didn’t come from anywhere around here, but I don’t know where it did come from. Also, there’s a sea cave, below the south side of the balcony, and it’s great to just sit there and watch the water rushing in and out again. But that day in July 1995, I was just coming down the stairs, and I looked up, off towards Purgatory on the other side of the harbor, and for a second I didn’t see her, just the sea and the far shore—”

“Didn’t see who?” I asked.

“I am absolutely sure that she wasn’t there when I first looked up,” Constance went on, ignoring my question. “And then she was. Like someone throwing a light switch, like a magic trick. She just. appeared.”

“Or you simply didn’t notice her for a second or two.”

“I’ve tried hard to believe that, over the years, Sarah, but it’s not the truth. The truth is, I looked down those granite steps at the balcony, and one second she wasn’t there, and then, the next, she was. That’s the truth, whether you believe me or not. That’s what I saw.”

“But. you know. whatever you saw is not necessarily what happened. Optical illusions—”

“I won’t finish this story if you’re not interested,” she said. “I mean, if you’d rather argue, we can do that.”

“I’m not trying to start an argument.”

“Then just shut up for a few minutes and listen. It wasn’t an optical illusion, or a mirage, or whatever. Yeah, there was some fog, but I know what I saw. She looked a little older than me, no more than twenty, say. She was wearing a dress and boots, and my first thought was this was one of those Society of Creative Anachronism types, or some sort of goth or something, because the clothes were tailored and the boots. It was like seeing a postcard or an old photograph from the Nineteenth Century. And she had this antique-looking pistol gripped in her right hand, and the barrel was set against her temple. She was looking out to sea, and so her back was turned to me.”

And at this point, I have to admit, Constance had my attention, and I just sat there listening, staring at the smoldering tip of my Camel.

“I stopped where I was, there on the steps, and for a minute or two, I just stood there, watching her. Her finger was on the trigger, and I could hear that she was crying. Well, sort of sobbing, softly. I almost couldn’t hear it over the breakers. And then I took another step or two towards her, though she hadn’t seemed to notice I was there, and I said, ‘The fall will probably kill you. The gun. I really don’t think it’s necessary.’ Something to that effect. And she turned around, turned and looked straight at me, and her face. ” Here Constance trailed off and was silent for a while.

Finally, I said, “You can tell me the rest some other time, if you’d rather.”

Her eyes still tightly closed, she shook her head and took a deep breath, as if summoning some necessary courage, as if filling her lungs with the requisite will to finish her story. She breathed out slowly, and, sitting there, I thought of Lamaze classes and childbirth and of taking a very deep breath before a dive into cold saltwater.

“I’m fine,” she said. “So, anyway, she turns and looks at me, this woman with her revolver and her dress that looks like she just stepped out of a Merchant-Ivory film. And the look on her face, Sarah, I knew, then and there, that expression was exactly what people mean when they say someone looks like she’s just seen a ghost. The woman lowered the revolver, letting her arm go limp at her side, and very slowly, very carefully, without ever saying a word, she climbed down off the wall onto the balcony. And vanished.”

“Vanished. ” I said, not meaning to sound skeptical, but sounding it anyway.

“Just gone, Sarah. The whole thing couldn’t have lasted more than a minute. Two minutes, at the most.”

“And there were no other witnesses?” I asked.

“No, no one. I walked over to the wall, and stood there a long time, staring down at the sea sloshing against the boulders. It’s all charcoal-colored shale there, and the sea foam looks so white against it, and the sea is so many shades of green and blue, and I remember seeing strands of kelp in the surf that day, down there below the Forty Steps. There was no one else, just me and a few cormorants and gulls.”

She paused again, but this time I didn’t say anything. Just sat listening to the wheezy AC and the birds outside the old house far from the sea, but maybe not far enough. When she started talking again, Constance opened her eyes, but she didn’t look at me. She lay there, very still, staring at the ceiling.

“A few days later, I went back to Newport, to the public library, and found this book there on local ghosts. I don’t remember the title. Oh, wait. yes, I do—The Hauntings of Newport—written by a history professor up at Harvard. Right near the end of the book, there was a story — not really a ghost story, not exactly — about a woman in 1901 who went down the Forty Steps to kill herself. She’d found out that her husband was sleeping around on her, getting it on with the maid or some such, and she’d brought his gun with her. She planned to shoot herself and fall over the edge, let the current carry her body away so that no one would ever know she was a suicide, and she’d never have to face the shame of her husband’s infidelity. Maybe people would just think she slipped on the steps and fell, whatever. But she didn’t shoot herself, Sarah, and she didn’t jump, either. Decades later, when she was an old woman, when her husband was dead, she told all this to a newspaper reporter. She said that she heard someone, right as she was about to pull the trigger, and turned to find this strangely dressed girl watching her, and the strangely dressed girl told her that the gun was unnecessary, that the fall alone would do the job. And then the girl just. wasn’t there anymore. That’s precisely how she described it. ‘Then the girl wasn’t there anymore.’ The woman’s name was Anna Turner.”

There was another silence here, and I stubbed out the butt of my cigarette and set my empty beer bottle on the floor, waiting, because I wasn’t sure if she was finished, and, really, what do you say to something like this? She rolled over on her side, towards me, and the air mattress complained with a rubbery, scrunching noise.

“I promise, I’m not making any of this up,” she said, and I either nodded or shrugged, I can’t remember which. Constance furrowed her eyebrows again, like someone trying to solve a trigonometry problem, and licked nervously at her lips. “I imagine the book’s still in the Newport library, if you ever wanted to look it up yourself.”

“Did I say I don’t believe you? I don’t think I did.”

“No, you didn’t,” and she sat up, reaching for her unfinished beer. She took a swallow, then returned the bottle to the wet ring of condensation it had left on the unfinished hardwood. “What Ireallythink, Sarah,” and here she lowered her voice as if someone might overhear. “About ghosts, I mean — is that there are weak spots in the universe, or thin places in time. In the fabric of time or the quantum foam, whatever physicists are calling it these days. And where these weak spots exist, they essentially act as windows, connecting two moments that otherwise would be separated by months or years or even by centuries. Maybe they only last for an instant or two, maybe a few minutes, then wink out of existence. Maybe, sometimes, they recur at the same place and time repeatedly. It explains what I saw that day, and what I found in the book later on. It explains what Anna Turner saw, and why she didn’t kill herself. You stop and think about it, well, it explains a lot of things that people call ghosts.”

“It does,” I agreed, lighting another Camel and blowing smoke towards the ceiling.

“But you don’t buy it?”

“Well, come on. You have to admit, it does seem rather too convenient, or fortuitous, whatever, that a randomly occurring flaw in spacetime would just happen to manifest at a point that would have allowed you to save this woman’s life that day, the two of you ninety-four years apart.” I took another puff, exhaled, and squinted at her through the smoke.

“I never said I believe that it’s necessarily a random event. Maybe, somehow, human consciousness plays a role in the process. Perhaps, Sarah, consciousness, like mass, can distort space and time. So, traumatic emotions can act as a catalyst, if certain conditions are just exactly right. Or, maybe, there’s some greater mind — maybe Jung’s collective unconscious, let’s say — that determines when and where these thin spots appear.”

“Or God, maybe? A beneficent, intervening cosmic intelligence…”

“I thought you said you’re an atheist,” she said, scowling slightly.

“Oh, I am. Through and through. But I also don’t believe in the collective unconscious, so, for me, if you’re looking for potential causal agents for this hypothesis of yours, one’s just as good as the other. Anyway, it would make for a pretty fickle fucking god, don’t you think, since your thin spots seem picky about who they show up to save? Well, unless that’s the random part.”

Constance laughed then, and that was good, just knowing that my skepticism hadn’t pissed her off. She lay down again, and the talk moved on to other things. Nothing else was said about ghosts or Jung or holes in time, and that was good, too. Because, sooner or later, I might have done something stupid like tell her I do think it’s a crackpot idea. Or, I might have pointed out that her having discovered the account of this Anna Turner woman in a library book only works as evidence in favor of her proposal if I accept that she’s not lying about having found it after the supposed ghostly sighting, instead of having come across it first and then fabricated the story of that day at the Forty Steps to match what she’d read. If I had to bet green folding money, well, I fear that’s where I’d place my wager.

But, I will admit, hearing her “ghost story,” I couldn’t help but be reminded of what I thought I saw in a chert quarry in the sweltering summer of 1977.

Sitting here now, pecking at the typewriter of the late Dr. Charles Harvey and watching the clock hung above the kitchen sink, I’ve just remembered something Isak Dinesen wrote. Well, I’m sure I’m not recalling it exactly, so this is a paraphrase—God made the world round, so we wouldn’t ever be able to look too far ahead.Something like that. And I’m thinking, maybe it isn’t nearly round enough, and what would be the point of limiting how far ahead we can see, when we can see so far back the way we’ve come? It’s too late at night for thoughts like these, and the pads of my fingers are feeling tender. Sometimes, these days, that’s the only way I know that it’s time to give up and go to bed, when my fingertips get sore from slamming at these keys. Anyway, Constance and I have rescheduled our picnic at the “Red Tree” for tomorrow, assuming the weathermen are right and the day’s really going to be cooler, like they’re predicting. I hope so. I need to get out of this house for a few hours.