The Red Tree Read online

  Set out about the circumference of those gnarled roots, I found many dozens of small glazed ceramic figurines, mostly of the exact sort one gets free inside boxes of Red Rose teabags.6 There were animals, circus performers, and characters from nursery rhymes, some balanced on the knotty wood, or tucked into crevices in the bark, others set out on the mossy ground surrounding the oak. It was an unexpected and startling sight, and I stood there for some time, studying the figurines. I did not take any of them away with me, or even touch them, thinking that, perhaps, they had been left here by the Blanchards’ grandchildren, who I understand frequently visit and have been known to wander as far as the Wight place. There was something reminiscent of a shrine or reliquary in the arrangement of the tiny ceramic animals, which are never mentioned in Sarah Crowe’s manuscript. I assume, therefore, that they were placed here following her death. I’d forgotten my camera that morning, so I am forced to rely on memory, but two of the figurines I recall quite clearly—a sepia-colored rabbit and a pinkish wild boar, both date back to the very first American series of animal figurines offered by Red Rose Tea (1983-1985). At any rate, dusk was coming on fast, and I still had to cross the rickety bridge and then navigate the rutted dirt path leading back to Barbs Hill Road and Moosup Valley. By the time I got to the Jeep, the air was filled with the eerie calls of owls and other night birds, and I was glad that I had not lingered longer at the red oak. I made it back to New York around ten-thirty that evening.

  And that was my pilgrimage, the dues I felt that I should pay before the privilege of writing this preface. And, now, having written it down, the day seems even more unremarkable and underwhelming than before. The mystery posed by the final months of Sarah’s life, the red oak, and the manuscript she left behind are to be found in the pages that follow, not this account of my “legend-trip” to the Wight Farm.

  I must also confess that I still do not fully understand the circumstances that led to that odd typescript landing on my desk, hardly a month after her funeral. It was wrapped in brown butcher’s paper and bore a Providence postmark, but no return address. In fact, it was accompanied by no cover letter, nor word of explanation whatsoever. Having served as her editor on two novels, and having considered Sarah—if not a close friend—at least a good acquaintance, part of me wished that the whole thing would quickly prove to be no more than an elaborate hoax.

  But as I read it, I recognized her there on every page. Even if, for whatever reason, some other author had perfectly aped her voice, most of the pages bear notes and proofreader’s marks in Sarah’s own unmistakable handwriting. Regardless, I requested that it be examined by a graphologist certified by the American Board of Forensic Document Examiners, Inc., who concluded, without any reasonable doubt, that Sarah Crowe did, in fact, produce at least the handwritten portion of the manuscript. I also discovered several pages bearing distinct fingerprints, presumably made when a ribbon in the old typewriter was being changed, and submitted those for fingerprint analysis by a private investigator (name withheld by request). Again, the results were positive. So, regardless of whether or not she actually conceived and composed The Red Tree, there can be very little doubt that she did, in fact, frequently handle the typescript and make notations to it. Ergo, if this is an elaborate forgery, it’s one she literally had a hand in.

  That last summer of her life, Sarah Crowe lived in a self-imposed seclusion, only infrequently reaching out to make contact with others. A few calls to her agent, a handful of emails to me, asking for more time on a long overdue and never completed novel. She had become, like the heroines of her novels, a haunted woman, drawing in upon herself, shutting away the world, wrapping herself ever more tightly in what I am forced to concede were shrouds of delusion and depression. A lifelong Southerner (who frequently claimed to loathe everything about the South), she abruptly fled to rural Rhode Island, seeking, perhaps, a new beginning. Perhaps peace. Perhaps some closure to what she saw as a chaotic and misspent life. There is never any definitive, conclusive statement in The Red Tree, only frustrating hints. We know that she had recently been diagnosed with a chronic neurological disorder that caused seizures and that may or may not have been a form of epilepsy. We know her tumultuous relationship with “Amanda Tyrell”7 had come to an ugly end, and that Sarah blamed herself for not having managed to somehow save her lover. We know that she was unable to write a contracted novel, and that she eventually found herself writing The Red Tree, in journal form, instead. Once a sociable, outgoing woman, at the end she’d become withdrawn and secretive. She was only rarely seen by either the Blanchards or the people of Moosup Valley. We know how she died, and that a coroner’s inquest ruled her death to be a suicide. We know that Sarah had always had a violent disdain for her own work, referring to it, for example, as “tiresome hackery”8 and “genre drivel.”9 And we know that the generally positive reviews and the praise of her peers did little to change this opinion, which seems to have been bolstered by the poor sales of her novels. In the end, this amounts to very little, this rough assortment of facts, and a poor way to sum up a life. But, then, I must remind myself this is not a eulogy I am writing, but a preface to a very odd book.

  As I’ve said, the same day I visited the Wight Farm and saw the red tree for myself, I stopped by the Tyler Free Library in Moosup Valley. The small white building is hardly a quarter mile northeast of the old farm, and I knew that Sarah had visited it several times in those final months. More than anything, I think I was curious to see if this modest country library had any of her books, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that they did have on their shelves a single copy of her second short-story collection, Silent Riots.10 I took it to a reading table and flipped through the pages, a little embarrassed that, though I was her present editor, I’d never read any of her short fiction. I made a mental note to get a copy of the book as soon as I got back to Manhattan, and was about to return it to the shelves when I noticed something scribbled (with blue ink) in Sarah’s hand on one of the otherwise-blank end pages. I sat there for maybe five or ten minutes, marveling at this scrap of graffiti, which read, simply, “Joke’s on you. But please do try not to take it too personally.—Signed, The Author (7/18/08).”

  That day, it just seemed sort of odd and funny, if you understood Sarah’s rough, usually self-deprecating sense of humor. And it seemed a little sad, also, that, only weeks before her suicide, she’d taken a moment to deface this library copy of a book of hers she’d publicly and privately claimed, time and again, to despise. Now I find myself wondering if, in that moment, in that act of vandalism, she didn’t give us an epigraph that might well serve both The Red Tree and her fiction-writing career as a whole. Maybe even her life as a whole, if one could only look back upon it from her own unique perspective.

  One final word: the typescript I received was not broken up into chapters, but consisted, rather, of a single continuous narrative. I have made the chapter divisions myself, somewhat arbitrarily, for the sake of convention. Also, I have added a postscript, an excerpt from Sarah’s novel A Long Way to Morning. It strikes me as apt commentary on what follows, and almost as foreshadowing.

  SHARON D. HALPERIN

  OCTOBER 4, 2009

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  CHAPTER ONE

  7 May 2008 (Wednesday, 9:38 a.m.)

  I’m almost awake now, starting in on my second cup of coffee, sitting here at the kitchen table, and writing this in the spiral-bound notebook I purchased down in Coventry, a little over a week ago. I only bought it as an afterthought, really, with some vague notion that I might begin keeping a diary, or maybe scribble down a list of the birds and wild animals and snakes I see around the house, something of the sort. Until this morning, I’d not even taken it out of the brown paper bag from the pharmacy. There were thunder-storms last night, and this morning there’s a heavy, lingering mist, but, even so, from this window I can see all the way north to the flooded gravel quarry the locals call Ramswool Pond. The pond is about a hundred yards
from the house, I’m guessing, past two of the ubiquitous dry-stack fieldstone walls. I’ve not yet bothered to walk down that way, because I haven’t noticed a trail, just a lot of poison ivy, wild grapes, and greenbriers. From here, the water is the color of slate, that same flat charcoal gray, framed in shades of green branches and yellow-brown grass and the leaden sky hanging overhead. The way it shimmers, I can tell that the wind is whipping up tiny wavelets on the surface. I was told, by the landlord—whose name is Sam Blanchard—that the pond used to be a granite quarry, dating from the twenties until sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. It was abandoned, then, and flooded as groundwater gradually seeped up and filled in the great, ugly wound scraped into the earth over all those decades by men and their digging machines. I have no idea how deep it might be, but I’m guessing pretty deep. I suppose that on hot summer days it might become a swimming hole, and maybe someone’s bothered to stock it with fish. Again, I’m just guessing. And this is not a hot summer day. This is a chilly, misty morning in early May. I imagine deer come down to the pond to drink, deer and raccoons and skunks; the woods around the old farm are full of deer, and I’ve heard there are even bobcats and black bears in these woods.

  I have written nothing, nothing at all, since leaving Atlanta and coming to Rhode Island, and the truth is I have not tried to write anything. And before that, I suppose I’d written nothing worth mentioning since finishing that last short story, which means it’s been a good seven months or so. More than half a year, come and gone. So much time, flowing up to fill in those empty, wasted days the way the slate-colored water has filled in an old quarry. I haven’t even unpacked my pens, so I’m using a yellow No. 2 pencil I found in one of the kitchen cupboards. I have always hated writing with pencils, ever since grammar school, and the heel of my hand is already smudged with graphite. What’s left of the pink eraser hardly even makes a decent stub, but lazy women take whatever they can find, I suppose.

  The coffee is bitter and good, but I wish I had a cigarette. Sitting here, looking out at the dense tangle of weeds and saplings behind the old farmhouse, looking away towards Ramswool Pond, the dream is already starting to disintegrate, breaking apart and fading, burning off the way this mist will do in only another hour or so. And I won’t lie. I’m glad for that. Hell, I would even be thankful, if there were anyone or anything I believed in enough to offer up my thanks. I rescued the notebook from the drugstore bag and found the pencil and sat down at the table to write out all I could recall of the dream, and now I am glad that all I can recall are fleeting glimpses and impressions. More how it made me feel, than whatever actually happened in the nightmare. Yes, of course, the dream was a nightmare. They are all nightmares now. It’s been a long, long time since I had any other sort of dream, even longer than it’s been since I’ve written anything worth reading.

  Sometimes, in the mornings and evenings, the deer come out of the trees to graze near the house, and I sit here and watch them. They amaze me, I think. I’ve lived most of my life in the cement sprawl and jumble of Southern cities, places where pigeons and squirrels and maybe the occasional opossum pass for wildlife. Watching them, the deer, I feel, constantly, that they are conscious of my scrutiny, of the attention of alien eyes. They are nervous, wary beasts, seeming always on the verge of bolting back into the cover of the oaks and pines and the tall straw-colored grass, back to those shaded, secret places where I cannot watch them. This morning, though, there are no deer, though I saw a fat groundhog earlier, before I started writing, trundling along near the barn. There are rabbits here, a veritable plague of rabbits, it seems, and I’ve seen hawks and bluebirds. I saw a rafter of turkeys a few days back. I had no idea that one refers to a flock of turkeys as anything but a flock of turkeys, that there was a collective noun for turkeys, until I looked it up online. A bouquet of pheasants, a murder of crows, a lamentation of swans, and a rafter of turkeys. Oh, unless the turkeys are immature, in which case they are a brood.

  Here I am, three pages into this notebook, the heel of my right hand smudged silvery gray, and I have hardly said a word about the nightmare. Am I stalling, or do I simply not care enough to trouble myself with it? Has it faded to the point where I couldn’t remember enough of it to put down, anyway? It was nothing remarkable, one of the regulars, some alternate version of the night that Amanda finally walked out on me. I think I have dreamt at least a thousand permutations of that night. Sometimes, she doesn’t leave. Sometimes, she doesn’t tell me where she’s going is none of my business. Sometimes, she doesn’t die. And yet, somehow, even those dreams are nightmares. Perhaps because, subconsciously, I know that they are lies. There is one truth to the matter, just one truth, and all the rest is only my silly fucking regret trying to make it play out some other way.

  While I’ve been sitting here, writing all my nothings in-particular, the mist has thinned a bit, but it has also drifted out across the nearer end of Ramswool Pond. I can no longer clearly make out the wavelets rippling across the surface of the flooded quarry. But, I see the wind rustling the leaves and the weeds, so know that they’re still there, those small waves. And now, I think, I know what I am going to write here, instead of the bad dream. I’ll write the bad dream after its next inevitable permutation, possibly. It can wait. The pond has reminded me of something I don’t think I’ve thought about in a very long time, and that’s what I’m going to write. After I get my third cup of coffee.

  I suffered through the better part of my childhood and my teenage years in a stunted little town about fifteen miles east of Birmingham, Alabama. Back in the seventies, that place was still clinging rather resolutely to the forties and fifties, I suspect. Hanging on for dear fucking life as the world rushed forward without it. I’ve given interviews where I made jokes about The Andy Griffith Show and such, calling my “hometown” things like Hooterville or Dog-patch or Mayberry on crack. Not so very far off the mark, no matter how snarky it might sound. I’m told that the town’s public library removed my books from its shelves after I said something to that effect in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Whatever. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke . . . or face the truth. But, I digress. Always, I digress. It’s my superpower. Some asshole at the New York Times Book Review once said that my novels would benefit tremendously from “an editor willing to rein in my unfortunate propensity for digression.” Or something along those lines. I suppose I shouldn’t use quotation marks when paraphrasing from an unreliable memory.

  Anyway, a couple of miles from my house, there was an old chert pit, long since abandoned and flooded, just like Ramswool Pond out there. I used to go to that old pit—which had no name that I was ever aware of. Most often, I went alone, sometimes to hunt the trilobite and crinoid fossils you could find there, sometimes to chuck rocks into the water or sneak cigarettes or shoot BB guns, sometimes just to get the hell away from my mother and father and my kid sister for a while. There were all sorts of local stories and folktales about the place. Supposedly, bootleggers had run a still out there during Prohibition, and it had ended badly with a shoot-out between the moonshiners and Revenue men. Careless swimmers were said to have drowned in the greenish, murky waters. Some claimed that the pit was connected to an underground river, and that giant, man-eating salamanders and bullhead catfish and fuck knows what else were swimming around down there. Car thieves were reputed to dump the carcasses of the automobiles they stripped into the pit, and I tended to believe that part, because here and there you could spot the rusted hood of a pickup truck or the roof of a car just below the water. I don’t recollect all of the stories. There were so many, but this is, I think, the first time that I have ever told my own.

  It was the end of the summer of 1977, and in a couple weeks more I’d be starting high school. Wait. I have to find a knife and sharpen this damn pencil again. Okay, pencil sharpened. So, summer of ’77, and the radio was awash with the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and the Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Blinded by the Light” by
Man-fred Mann’s Earth Band . . . all that crap, though mostly I was listening to Pink Floyd and David Bowie back then. Carter was president. The Bionic Woman and The Rockford Files were my favorite TV shows. I knew I was going to hell, because I had a bitch of a crush on Lindsay Wagner.

  And here I go, digressing again. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that on the August day in question, I was out looking for trilobites, because I’d sent some of mine off to the state geological survey in Tuscaloosa, and I’d gotten back a letter asking if I could please send more. Which meant I had to find more. Years later, a paleontologist in Birmingham described my trilobites as a new species, and I hope I spell this right—Griffithides croweii, naming them after me. That was my first brush with fame, I suppose, though I doubt anyone at “home” even knew. By then, I’d left Mayberry and was living with a girlfriend up in Nashville, but the paleontologist tracked me down, and she sent me a copy of the scientific paper. Her name was Matthews, Esther Matthews, I think. I still have it somewhere, that paper. I still have one of the trilobites, too. It’s about as big as my thumbnail, a shiny copper-tinted bug stretched out on a bit of brownish-orange chert. As I have admitted, in two or three interviews now, I’d have gone into geology or paleontology, instead of becoming an author, if only I’d been any good with math. If I ever had a “calling,” that was it. I took a few courses in college, and, to this day, a sizable portion of the nonfiction I read is books on paleontology and earth history. I often dream of fossil hunting, which, I suppose, is my subconscious mind working through regret. But, hey, at least I have the trilobite.