I’m admittedly at a loss how to write all this down — the events of the past twelve or thirteen hours — but I’m also determined that I will write it down. Some part of me is genuinely frightened, reluctant to put the experience into words, and, still, I find myself driven to compose some account of it. Are we back to writing as an act of exorcism? Wait, don’t answer that question. In fact, no more questions requiring answers, no more questions, just what I am left to believe occurred this afternoon when we tried to visit the tree. We talked about what happened over dinner, which Constance fixed because all I could do was sit here and smoke and stare out the kitchen window at twilight dimming the sky. We talked, but it was an indirect, guarded conversation punctuated with lengthy, uncomfortable silences. I asked her if she’d ever read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House,specifically the scene where Eleanor and Theodora get lost just outside the house and stumble upon a ghostly picnic. She hasn’t, and asked if I’ve read Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths.” I have. Of course, I have. We ended up talking about The Blair Witch Project, though that seemed to come uncomfortably near the bald facts of the matter, and so I brought up Joseph Payne Brennan’s short story “Cana van’s Back Yard,” precisely because I had a feeling Constance hadn’t read it. Inevitably, by fits and starts, we came to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock,both the novel and Peter Weir’s film, to Miss McCraw and Mrs. Appleyard and her charges, Irma, Miranda, Edith, and Marion.
Constance said, “The girl who wasn’t allowed to go on the picnic, because she hadn’t memorized the assigned poem. The one who had a crush on Miranda? Wasn’t her name Sara?”
I didn’t answer the question, and, thankfully, she didn’t ask it again.
Yes, I know it’s sort of twisted that we had to resort to fictional metaphors and parallels because we were both too goddamned scared to talk about the thing straight on. But I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do now, talk about the thing straight on. Just write it down. Make it only words. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but. I’m starting to think maybe our dear departed Dr. Harvey figured out that words can do more harm than we generally give them credit. You’re stalling,Sarah.
Yes, I am.
We didn’t get out of the house until almost noon, and I’m not writing all that. Neither of us had slept very much, and we kept finding little chores that needed doing, little distractions. Hindsight can create all manner of illusions, and here, hindsight might suggest some prescience. You know, the man who misses his flight because he needs new shoelaces or Starbucks takes too long with his frap puccino or what the hell ever, and then he finds out the plane crashed, so surely some extrasensory force or guardian spirit was at work? That sort of thing. But the truth is we were bleary and distracted by exhaustion, and neither of us was really up to it. She didn’t get much more sleep than I did.
And she was still worried about me, because of last night’s seizure, and that kept coming up, and whether I was actually well enough for the walk. But the day was much, much cooler than yesterday, and the humidity quite decent, and I assured her that I would be fine. She pointed out that I couldn’t possibly know that, and I reluctantly conceded and told her that I’d learned I couldn’t let this condition turn me into a shut-in. I have no means of predicting these episodes, but I have to live my life, regardless. What I didn’t say was, Constance, please mind your own goddamn business, although, by then, that’s what I was thinking. She’d asked me twice about my medication, had I taken it, should we carry it with us, what sort of side effects do I experience from it, do I tire easily, shit like that.
“We’re not even going a hundred yards from the back door,” I told her. Andthere’sthe single most damning fact of this thing, right there, the undeniable that I wish I could find some way to deny.We were not going even a hundred yards from the back door.
“Sarah, it’s just that I need to know what to do, if something happens,” she said, packing a canvas tote bag with bottled water and a couple of apples and the sandwiches she’d made. “And I don’t. I don’t know what’s myth, and what’s for real.”
“You saw what happened last night,” I replied. “What else is there you need to know?”
“Yeah, but that was only a little one, you said. Right? So what if there’s a really bad seizure? What then? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help you. I mean, should I take along a spoon or something, to keep you from swallowing your tongue?”
I laughed at her, which didn’t help the situation, and said, “Only if you want to watch me break the few good teeth I have left.”
“It’s not fucking funny,” she growled and stuffed a whole handful of granola bars into her bag, enough granola to keep a troop of Boy Scouts hale and hearty and regular for a couple of days.
“No,” I said. “It’s not funny at all, which is probably why I make jokes about it.”
“Well, it’s not funny, and the jokes won’t help, if something happens.”
And so I told her what she could do, which really isn’t very much — that she should try to make sure I don’t hit my head on anything hard or sharp, and that she should roll me over into the recovery position, if possible, so I don’t strangle on saliva or anything. It seemed to help, just telling her that stuff, and at least she didn’t cram any more granola bars into the bag. I guess I’d taken the edge off the sense of helplessness she was left feeling after last night.
“How would I know if it’s bad enough to call an ambulance?” she asked.
“Constance, do I look like I could afford whatever it would cost to get an ambulance and paramedics all the way out here?”
“Jesus,” she sighed. “I’d fucking pay for it, alright? I would pay for it before I’d let you lie there and die in the woods.”
I lit a cigarette and stared out the screen door towards that huge red oak, silhouetted against the cloudless northern sky. “If it ever lasts more than five minutes,” I said. “Now, are we going to do this, or stand here talking about my fits all day?”
“I’m ready when you are,” she replied. And that’s what was said before we left, as best I can now recall. There wasn’t much else said until fifteen or twenty minutes later, when we realized that we were lost. Or, rather, when we began to admit aloud to one another that we were lost. At first, I think it was more embarrassment than anything, embarrassment and confusion, and I’m sure we both thought that whatever had gone awry would right itself after only another minute or two. We’d simply gotten turned around somehow, that’s all. People don’t like to admit when they’re lost, not only from a fear of looking like a horse’s ass, but also because the admission entails an acceptance that one is in some degree of trouble. And, in this case, I spent half my childhood and teenage years in the woods back in Alabama and know well enough how to walk less than a hundred fucking straight yards from Point A to Point B, plus I’d already visited the tree once. Constance is a local and, despite her time misspent in Los Angeles, is also no stranger to walks in the woods. So, we were both fairly, and not unreasonably, reluctant to admit, even to ourselves, that something was wrong.
Near as I can tell, it started when we reached the break in the fieldstone wall and the deadfall of pine branches and had to leave the path to cross the stream running out of the pond in order to make our way around that impenetrable snarl of rotting wood, poison ivy, and greenbriers. We were both sweating by this time, and I paused at the stream to wet the bright yellow paisley bandanna I’d brought along before tying it once again about my throat. Constance crossed before me, and stood there staring in the direction of the red tree and Ramswool, talking about catching salamanders and turtles when she was a kid. I made some joke about tomboys, and then followed her across, noting how very dark the water was. I didn’t remember this from before — the somber, stained water — but it made sense, thinking about it. All that rotting vegetation surely produces a lot of tannin, which leaches directly into the stream. Where the water was moving, it was the translucent amber of weak tea, and where is wasn’t, here and there in deeper, stagnant pools, it was the rich, almost black brown of a strong cup of coffee. I associate this sort of “blackwater” with bayous and with the Southern coastal plain, and it seemed oddly out of place here on Squire Blanchard’s farm. Also, it brought to mind Dr. Harvey’s mention of the Bloody Run in Newport, that stream supposedly painted red with the blood of so many slain Hessian conscripts during the Revolutionary War.