The Ghost Feeler (23 page)

‘That's right,' Brand said, relapsing once more into his sunken attitude.

‘And after she came back did you meet her again?' the Deacon continued.

‘Alive?' Rutledge questioned.

A perceptible shudder ran through the room.

‘Well – of course,' said the Deacon nervously.

Rutledge seemed to consider. ‘Once I did – only once. There was a lot of other people round. At Cold Corners fair it was.'

‘Did you talk with her then?'

‘Only a minute.'

‘What did she say?'

His voice dropped. ‘She said she was sick and knew she was going to die, and when she was dead she'd come back to me.'

‘And what did you answer?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Did you think anything of it at the time?'

‘Well, no. Not till I heard she was dead I didn't. After that I thought of it – and I guess she drew me.' He moistened his lips.

‘Drew you down to that abandoned house by the pond?'

Rutledge made a faint motion of assent, and the Deacon added: ‘How did you know it was there she wanted you to come?'

‘She ... just drew me ...'

There was a long pause. Bosworth felt, on himself and the other two men, the oppressive weight of the next question to be asked. Mrs Rutledge opened and closed her narrow lips once or twice, like some beached shellfish gasping for the tide. Rutledge waited.

‘Well, now, Saul, won't you go on with what you was telling us?' the Deacon at length suggested.

‘That's all. There's nothing else.'

The Deacon lowered his voice. ‘She just draws you?'

‘Yes.'

‘Often?'

That's as it happens ...'

‘But if it's always there she draws you, man, haven't you the strength to keep away from the place?'

For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head towards his questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. ‘Ain't any use. She follers after me ...'

There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there? Mrs Rutledge's presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed hopelessly to revolve the matter. At length he spoke in a more authoritative tone. ‘These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul. Have you tried prayer?'

Rutledge shook his head.

‘Will you pray with us now?'

Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual adviser. ‘If you folks want to pray, I'm agreeable,' he said. But Mrs Rutledge intervened.

‘Prayer ain't any good. In this kind of thing it ain't no manner of use; you know it ain't. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you remember. Lefferts Nash – did praying help
him
?
I was a little girl then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That's what cured him.'

‘Oh –' Orrin Bosworth exclaimed.

Sylvester Brand raised his head. ‘You're speaking of that old story as if this was the same sort of thing?'

‘Ain't it? Ain't my husband pining away the same as Lefferts Nash did? The Deacon here knows –'

The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. ‘These are forbidden things,' he repeated. ‘Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we that the ... the dead woman ... is the spectre of that poor girl?'

‘Proof! don't he say so? Didn't she tell him? Ain't I seen 'em?' Mrs Rutledge almost screamed.

The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: ‘A stake through the breast! That's the old way; and it's the only way. The Deacon knows it!'

‘It's against our religion to disturb the dead.'

‘Ain't it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband is perishing?' She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took the family Bible from the what-not in a comer of the parlour. Putting the book on the table, and moistening a livid fingertip, she turned the pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand like a stony paperweight. ‘See here,' she said, and read out in her level chanting voice:

‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live
'

‘That's in Exodus, that's where it is,' she added, leaving the book open as if to confirm the statement.

Bosworth continued to glance anxiously from one to the other of the four people about the table. He was younger than any of them, and had had more contact with the modern world; down in Starkfield, in the bar of the Fielding House, he could hear himself laughing with the rest of the men at such old wives' tales. But it was not for nothing that he had been born under the icy shadow of Lonetop, and had shivered and hungered as a lad through the bitter Hemlock County winters. After his parents died, and he had taken hold of the farm himself, he had got more out of it by using improved methods, and by supplying the increasing throng of summer-boarders over Stotesbury way with milk and vegetables. He had been made a selectman of North Ashmore; for so young a man he had a standing in the county. But the roots of the old life were still in him. He could remember, as a little boy, going twice a year with his mother to that bleak hill-farm out beyond Sylvester Brand's, where Mrs Bosworth's aunt, Cressidora Cheney, had been shut up for years in a cold clean room with iron bars in the windows. When little Orrin first saw Aunt Cressidora she was a small white old woman, whom her sisters used to ‘make decent' for visitors the day that Orrin and his mother were expected. The child wondered why there were bars to the window. ‘Like a canary-bird,' he said to his mother. The phrase made Mrs Bosworth reflect. ‘I do believe they keep Aunt Cressidora too lonesome,' she said; and the next time she went up the mountain with the little boy he carried to his great-aunt a canary in a little wooden cage. It was a great excitement; he knew it would make her happy.

The old woman's motionless face lit up when she saw the bird, and her eyes began to glitter. ‘It belongs to me,' she said instantly, stretching her soft bony hand over the cage.

‘Of course it does, Aunt Cressy,' said Mrs Bosworth, her eyes filling.

But the bird, startled by the shadow of the old woman's hand, began to flutter and beat its wings distractedly. At the sight, Aunt Cressidora's calm face suddenly became a coil of twitching features. ‘You she-devil, you!' she cried in a high squealing voice; and thrusting her hand into the cage she dragged out the terrified bird and wrung its neck. She was plucking the hot body, and squealing ‘she-devil, she-devil!' as they drew little Orrin from the room. On the way down the mountain his mother wept a great deal, and said: ‘You must never tell anybody that poor Auntie's crazy, or the men would come and take her down to the asylum at Starkfield, and the shame of it would kill us all. Now promise.' The child promised.

He remembered the scene now, with its deep fringe of mystery, secrecy and rumour. It seemed related to a great many other things below the surface of his thoughts, things which stole up anew, making him feel that all the old people he had known, and who ‘believed in these things', might after all be right. Hadn't a witch been burned at North Ashmore? Didn't the summer folk still drive over in jolly buckboard loads to see the meeting-house where the trial had been held, the pond where they had ducked her and she had floated? ... Deacon Hibben believed; Bosworth was sure of it. If he didn't, why did people from all over the place come to him when their animals had queer sicknesses, or when there was a child in the family that had to be kept shut up because it fell down flat and foamed? Yes, in spite of his religion, Deacon Hibben
knew ...

And Brand? Well, it came to Bosworth in a flash: that North Ashmore woman who was burned had the name of Brand. The same stock, no doubt; there had been Brands in Hemlock County ever since the white men had come there. And Orrin, when he was a child, remembered hearing his parents say that Sylvester Brand hadn't ever oughter married his own cousin, because of the blood. Yet the couple had had two healthy girls, and when Mrs Brand pined away and died nobody suggested that anything had been wrong with her mind. And Vanessa and Ora were the handsomest girls anywhere round. Brand knew it, and scrimped and saved all he could do to send Ora, the eldest, down to Starkfield to learn bookkeeping. ‘When she's married I'll send you,' he used to say to little Venny, who was his favourite. But Ora never married. She was away three years, during which Venny ran wild on the slopes of Lonetop; and when Ora came back she sickened and died – poor girl! Since then Brand had grown more savage and morose. He was a hard-working farmer, but there wasn't much to be got out of those barren Bearcliff acres. He was said to have taken to drink since his wife's death; now and then men ran across him in the ‘dives' of Stotesbury. But not often. And between times he laboured hard on his stony acres and did his best for his daughters. In the neglected graveyard of Cold Corners there was a slanting headstone marked with his wife's name; near it, a year since, he had laid his eldest daughter. And sometimes, at dusk, in the autumn, the village people saw him walk slowly by, turn in between the graves, and stand looking down on the two stones. But he never brought a flower there, or planted a bush; nor Venny either. She was too wild and ignorant ...

Mrs Rutledge repeated: ‘That's in Exodus.'

The three visitors remained silent, turning about their hats in reluctant hands. Rutledge faced them, still with that empty pellucid gaze which frightened Bosworth. What was he seeing?

‘Ain't any of you folks got the grit –?' his wife burst out again, half hysterically.

Deacon Hibben held up his hand. ‘That's no way, Mrs Rutledge. This ain't a question of having grit. What we want first of all is ... proof ...'

‘That's so,' said Bosworth, with an explosion of relief, as if the words had lifted something black and crouching from his breast. Involuntarily the eyes of both men had turned to Brand. He stood there smiling grimly, but did not speak.

‘Ain't it so, Brand?' the Deacon prompted him.

‘Proof that spooks walk?' the other sneered.

‘Well – I presume you want this business settled too?'

The old farmer squared his shoulders. ‘Yes – I do. But I ain't a sperritualist. How the hell are you going to settle it?'

Deacon Hibben hesitated; then he said, in a low incisive tone: ‘I don't see but one way – Mrs Rutledge's.'

There was a silence.

‘What?' Brand sneered again. ‘Spying?'

The Deacon's voice sank lower. ‘If the poor girl
does
walk ... her that's your child ... wouldn't you be the first to want her laid quiet? We all know there've been such cases ... mysterious visitations ... Can any one of us here deny it?'

‘I seen ‘em,' Mrs Rutledge interjected.

There was another heavy pause. Suddenly Brand fixed his gaze on Rutledge. ‘See here, Saul Rutledge, you've got to clear up this damned calumny, or I'll know why. You say my dead girl comes to you.' He laboured with his breath, and then jerked out: ‘When? You tell me that, and I'll be there.'

Rutledge's head drooped a little, and his eyes wandered to the window. ‘Round about sunset, mostly.'

‘You know beforehand?'

Rutledge made a sign of assent.

‘Well, then – tomorrow, will it be?'

Rutledge made the same sign.

Brand turned to the door. ‘I'll be there.' That was all he said. He strode out between them without another glance or word. Deacon Hibben looked at Mrs Rutledge. ‘We'll be there too,' he said as if she had asked him; but she had not spoken, and Bosworth saw that her thin body was trembling all over. He was glad when he and Hibben were out again in the snow.

III

They thought that Brand wanted to be left to himself, and to give him time to unhitch his horse they made a pretence of hanging about in the doorway while Bosworth searched his pockets for a pipe he had no mind to light.

But Brand turned back to them as they lingered. ‘You'll meet me down by Lamer's pond tomorrow?' he suggested. ‘I want witnesses. Round about sunset.'

They nodded their acquiescence, and he got into his sleigh, gave the horse a cut across the flanks, and drove off under the snow-smothered hemlocks. The other two men went to the shed.

‘What do you make of this business, Deacon?' Bosworth asked, to break the silence.

The Deacon shook his head. ‘The man's a sick man – that's sure. Something's sucking the life clean out of him.'

But already, in the biting outer air, Bosworth was getting himself under better control. ‘Looks to me like a bad case of the ague, as you said.'

‘Well – ague of the mind, then. It's his brain that's sick.'

Bosworth shrugged. ‘He ain't the first in Hemlock County.'