A Widow's Curse (24 page)

“You can't be serious.” He headed for the bench where I'd set the cross. “Everybody in Blue Mountain knows about that. That kind of gossip? Travels faster than the speed of light in our little town. Damn. I have to sit down. You really gave me a start.”

I followed along behind him. “But how did you know where the cross was supposed to—”

“Once again I say,” he told me, sitting down on the bench that faced the graveyard, “you have to be kidding me. First, lots of people, especially the Cherokee that still live in these parts, know about the curse. And most of us know about your great-grandfather's buying the cross. It's common knowledge.”

“Not common to me.” I joined him on the bench.

“Well, you've heard the thing about how you can't tell the forest for the trees? It's even harder if you're one of the trees.”

“You mean other people can see my family history better than I can.”

“Something like that.” He coughed for a moment. “Damn it. I need to exercise more. One little chase through the woods and I'm hacking up a lung.”

I commiserated, panting. “I know.”

“You don't know,” he countered. “You're not sixty-seven years old.”

“Neither are you,” I insisted.

“June ninth.” He sighed. “I'm a Gemini.”

“You are
not
sixty-seven.”

“You want to argue about my age?”

“No,” I said, getting my wind back. “I want to know what you're doing here.”

“Same as you.” He was just on the edge of being irritated. “Only I came to make sure you put this thing back the way it belongs, the Cherokee way.”

He tapped the cross.

“Yes,” I shot back, “exactly
why
do we have to do that? I've just figured out that all the Barnsleys who were cursed by this thing have been dead for over fifty years. The curse has done its work—it killed them all.”

I indicated the nearby graveyard as proof positive.

“Typical.” Dan patted his thighs with his palms. “Absolutely typical.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The curse, ignoramus, is on the water, not on any person in particular.”

“It wasn't intended to kill the Barnsleys?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged.

“And by the way, why was that, exactly?”

I may have asked him that just so I could catch my breath.

“You want to do folk research
now
? Let's take the thing down to the well house and I'll tell you the whole rigmarole while we do the ceremony. I think I got my breath back now.”

He grabbed up the cross and stood.

“Ceremony?”

“I got to take the curse off the water now, and we need the cross to do that. I have to explain everything? Like you said, the curse did its work, so let's get it off the water and go back to my place for a nightcap. What do you say?”

“I'd say I'm speechless, but the fact that I'm talking—”

“Are you coming with me or not?”

“I don't know. My first thought was that you were a security guard. I've seen other employees around here. I'm not sure I want to get arrested for trespassing and vandalism at my age. Especially not with a sixty-seven-year-old man.”

“Shut up and bite me,” he explained calmly. “And by the way, there aren't any employees around at this time of night; there's only the kid in the business office, and he's asleep in the back room there.”

“No,” I told him, “I saw a woman dressed in—”

“Shh!” he commanded with superhuman force.

He'd also stopped dead in his tracks. I thought he saw someone in the woods, and I strained my eyes to see if I could discover where the person was.

“Don't talk about that,” he whispered.

“Don't talk about what?” I glared at him, confused.

“Don't talk about the thing you saw. I saw her, too, but you can't pay her any attention.
None.
I'm serious. She wants attention; that's her food. The more you give it to her, the more she bothers you.”

“I—” There were no words that could express my bafflement.

“It must be a Barnsley.” He said it staring at the graveyard, and so softly that I almost didn't hear him.

“
What's
a Barnsley? That woman?”

“The thing you saw! Damn, you surely can be slow for a bright boy. It wasn't a woman; it was a spirit. And it wants attention, and that's just what we're doing by talking about her, so shut up, come down to the well with me, and have this thing over with so we can get the hell out of here before one of us gets dead.”

Without another syllable, he set off down the path, through the moonlit wood, toward the cursed black water.

I didn't quite know how, but the well house seemed even darker than before. By the time I got down the slope and into the cold stone room, Dan was already out the other side and sitting on the dock walkway.

I approached him as quietly as I could. He was obviously concentrating—or praying again.

“Look at this water.” He stared across the surface of it.

“Yeah.” I sat beside him.

“No, I mean, look and see can you tell where it's bubbling up. I'll be damned if I can.”

“What, you mean the ground source of the spring comes up right
here
?”

“Right. And that's where we have to—Wait a second.” He leaned forward.

“You see it?” I tried to look where I thought he was looking.

“Over on the bank. Should have thought of it myself. Does that group of stones look familiar?”

“Group of stones?”

I scanned the bank, but I couldn't find any stones, let alone tell if they seemed familiar in any way.

“There.” He pointed impatiently. “Right next to that horsetail reed.”

I could barely make out, just above the black water, five or six small rocks. They were only a jumble in the mud to me.

“You have to kind of squint,” he whispered, “and cock your head, but don't that look a little like a syllable from the Talking Leaves?”

I would never have thought of it myself, but when he said it, so hushed, it seemed obvious.

“It does.” I didn't even try to cover my astonishment. “Can you make out what it is?”

He straightened up, turned his face my way, grinning.

“Hard to explain.” He was beaming. “But it's a little like the old ‘
X
marks the spot.' My tribe—they surely could be arrogant in those days, huh?”

“What do you mean?” I could find absolutely no reason for amusement.

“Well,” he groaned, getting to his feet, “think how many years those rocks stood there telling everyone who passed by them, Here it is, stupid. It's a double curse, really. If Barnsley or any of his brood had taken the trouble to learn the Cherokee language, they would have known this thing was a curse. They could have taken it out in a second. They probably just thought it was a nice Indian decoration. But it was like saying to them that their own ignorance was as much of a curse as anything we did to the water. That's a pretty good joke.”

A joke that, if you believed that sort of thing, had taken the lives of every Barnsley who had ever lived there. I didn't think it was quite right to mention that the Barnsleys would not have believed in a Cherokee curse and would never have been looking for it in their water.

“Let's get to it.”

He headed across the walkway and onto the far bank.

I got up, trying to understand what the Barnsleys had done that was so much worse than other families to provoke all the deadly curses they'd acquired.

“So,” I began, coming across the walkway, “I gather that the Cherokee at the time didn't like the Barnsleys' being here. But why was there so
much
ire?”

He stopped.

“Are you kidding me?” He turned. “Know much about the Trail Where They Cried?”

The way he said it made me shiver. Suddenly, every plant and every insect, all the night birds; even moonbeams seemed filled with a wailing silence, a welling of soundless tears.

“Treaty of New Echota,” he said with some difficulty. “One of the few documents the United States government signed with my tribe that they honored. It gave all our land to the whites, and it took us away.”

A sudden massive rain cloud took away all moonlight, everything went silent around us, and the gardens and the ruins weren't real. They were a stage set that had been hastily constructed long ago on a much more permanent, ancient, and ultimately more beautiful stage.

“In 1830, the Congress of the United States passed what they called the Indian Removal Act.” Dan's voice was filled with rocks and wind, lightning and roaring waterfalls. “Almost everyone in America—I mean whites, now—was against it, but President Jackson signed it anyway. We fought it. Took it the Supreme Court and tried to establish an independent Cherokee Nation. In 1832, the Court ruled in our favor. In our
favor.
Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign, and that made the Indian Removal Act illegal. They only way they could make it work then was if the Cherokee would
agree
to be removed, which, of course, we would never do. So we won.”

He stared out across the water, up the hill, to the ruins of the Barnsley mansion.

“So what happened?” I sounded like a small child.

“The Cherokee—I mean, like any other nation, we didn't all believe just one thing. We were a diverse bunch. Your people, your history is filled with disagreements. You have two basic sides, as far as I can see: the more conservative people and the more liberal people. We were divided, too. Most of us liked Chief John Ross. He fought the whites. A smaller group, fewer than five hundred out of maybe twenty thousand Cherokee in north Georgia, went with Major Ridge, who—for reasons of economic greed and demon possession—advocated the removal. He actually wanted his own people to be taken from this world and rubbed out. The Treaty of New Echota was signed by Ridge in 1835. It was completely illegal, but it gave Jackson the paper he needed to remove us.”

“Jackson just put it into law? On the basis of such a flimsy document? Without Congress?”

“No.” Dan's voice had grown soft, a volume without hope. “It had to be ratified. People spoke out against it.”

“Davy Crockett.” I remembered talking with Andrews about it, and I felt a sudden pang of guilt for leaving him behind at my house without an explanation of where I was going. Clearly, I wasn't in my right mind.

“And Daniel Webster.” Dan sighed. “But it passed anyway. It passed by a single vote.”

“What?”

“The irony there, of course,” Dan said, managing a wry smile, “is that if your friend Davy Crockett hadn't left Congress all mad and hurt before that, he could have cast the tying vote and Jackson might not have gotten his way. But he did. In 1838, the United States invaded my country and began to take us to Oklahoma. Without a thought for our houses or our things, we were supposed to leave the land we'd lived on since the beginning of time and walk from Georgia to Oklahoma. You're not in terrible shape—how do you think you'd fare if you had to walk that far?

“Not well.”

“Now imagine if you had Hek and June with you, trying to help them along.”

The very thought of June Cotage being forced to abandon her house, walk though the mountains, across the desert, and into Oklahoma—it churned my stomach.

“We weren't allowed to forage for food, so a lot of us starved on army half rations. Those of us that made it got to Oklahoma just in time for the killing winter of 1839—still the worst on record in that state. Over four thousand of us died on the way, and an unrecorded number died right when we got to Oklahoma. It's a tough mixture: winter and despair. It ensured the death of my country. Only a very few of us stayed put in Georgia, hiding out, blending in. Kind of like these rocks.”

He stared down at the Talking Leaves arrangement of stones near his feet.

“We went unnoticed for decades by the whites, who walked right by us,” he concluded. “And now I'm a tourist attraction. Just another way for whites to make money. But I can't look in these woods, or walk though them, without seeing a ghost by every tree, a spirit standing in this very water, silent—cold.”

I fought the urge to look into the water.

“So here's the punch line to our story,” he said, rallying. “Julia Barnsley didn't like Savannah because it was too hot and there were too many bugs to suit her, so her husband, Godfrey, found this piece of land—high on a hill, cool even in summer, way above the gnat line—and he wanted it. The trouble was, it belonged to us, to the Cherokee. So Mr. Barnsley, a wealthy cotton magnate, and his father-in-law, a rich Savannah gentleman, went to Washington and had dinner with Andrew Jackson. They made a sizable contribution to his reelection campaign—which went into Jackson's private account, of course—and the next thing you know, we have the Indian Removal Act.”

“Godfrey Barnsley,” I began, dumbfounded, “was responsible for the Indian Removal Act?”

“The irony gets deeper. He wanted this particular plot of land because of this very spring. It was exactly what he needed to make his modern house with hot and cold running water and flush toilets. But this was a sacred spring, like a Cherokee church. What would you do if someone wanted to use your church for a bathroom?”

“I don't have a church,” I stammered, “but if I did—”

“So everyone told Godfrey not to build here, not to screw with this water. He didn't listen. So we put this in his water supply.”

Dan held up the cross.

“Hard to believe it's held up all these years,” I said, staring at it.

“Not really.” He looked at it as if it were made of jewels. “It's treated. We had a way of—it was kind of like creosote: sap and a tar-like gunk that you use to seal a thing like this. It'll most likely survive the nuclear holocaust. We knew it would outlast the Barnsleys. And it poisoned their water—every time they drank it, washed in it, cleaned their clothes and their dishes and their faces and hands, they were smearing the curse onto themselves. It got into their genes. It passed from generation to generation, and lived on in their blood even if they moved away from this land.”

“Jesus,” I whispered.

“I thought you didn't know what praying was.”

“That wasn't a prayer.”

He shrugged.

“Let's do this.”

Dan suddenly squatted on the bank and looked down at the stones.

“The—well, the trouble is,” I stammered, “that curse? It kind of got onto my family, too.”

Dan froze.

“What?” He didn't look up.

“My great-grandfather, Conner, I believe, had figured out that the Barnsleys and the Briarwoods—how should I say this?—cross-pollinated.”

“Briarwoods?”

“That's my real family name. Conner changed his last name when he came to America because he was wanted for murder in Ireland.”

“That story's
true
?” He finally looked up at me. “I been hearing that one since I was a kid. I thought it was just something the old man made up to keep people from messing with him. You know, get a reputation as a bad ass, but you don't actually have to
be
a bad ass.”

“It's true.”

“So how did your kin and the Barnsleys—”

“It's a long story,” I interrupted, “but the crux of it is that Godfrey's mother, in England, dallied with a servant named Briarwood—a gardener, actually—and produced Godfrey. And here's a bit of gothic coincidence:
she
put a curse on both families as she was dying in childbirth with Godfrey.”

Dan sat on the bank.

“Man.” He shook his head. “What the hell did the Barnsleys do to make God that mad at them?”

“I was just asking myself that same question.”

“Double curse.” He looked up. “Was the mother's husband alive or dead?”

“Alive.” I didn't know why he'd asked that.

“Well, at least it wasn't a widow's curse, then.”

I didn't bother to tell him my thoughts on that subject.

“So I believe Conner came here in 1942,” I said hesitantly, trying to get us back on some sort of track, “because he was trying—in his own weird and probably misguided way—to remove the curse from his family. I don't think he much cared about the Barnsleys one way or another.”

“How's that for the Web of Life?” He smiled.

“I've heard the term, of course, but I'm not exactly certain, in this context—”

“Look,” he told me impatiently, “I don't want to get all hoodoo on you, but the universe is like a spider's web, and at every junction there's a bright bead of water, and in every bead of water there's a life—yours, mine, everybody's. You can't touch one part of the web without making something happen in every one of those beads of water, because they're all connected by the web.”

“That doesn't sound—Is that Cherokee philosophy?”

“Well, I saw it on one of those Bill Moyers interviews with Joseph Campbell. You know Joseph Campbell.”

“He's my spiritual father, and a hell of a folklorist, but you can't—”

“God Almighty, Doctor,” he shot back, “could we
please
take the curse off this water so we can go back to my place for a nightcap? We can talk world philosophy all night if you want—but I'd very much like to get away from here. This place give me the willies.”

Again, I thought of Andrews.

“What do you want me to do?” I tried to sound a bit more contrite than I actually was.

“See, to take the curse off the water,” he began, his tone almost scholarly, “you have to remove this cross thing in the right way. You can't just pull it up out of the ground and sell it at an auction to raise money. The curse is still on the water that way.”

“So you figured out that Conner came here for the auction.”

“I'd heard stories about this water curse since I was a little boy.” Dan was distracted, staring down at the arrangement of rocks, looking for something. “Everybody knew that the sacred—Hey, look.”

He fit the cross down into the middle of the rocks, a hidden cavity, and it stayed perfectly upright, like Excalibur in the stone.

“Now what?” I whispered.

Dan took out a pocketknife, opened it, and held up the blade for me to see.

“Look at how the nexus of these two pieces of wood,” he said softly, “is kind of like that web thing I was just saying. The place where these two sticks cross is the place where the living thing is. If I take away the junction, the circuit is broken and the energy is dispelled—the magic is gone.”