Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

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.

She suggested we follow the west bank a little farther, as there was considerably less in the way of briars and underbrush on that side of the creek. And since we could still plainly see the upper boughs of the red tree from the broad gully the stream had carved, it made sense to me. The ground was a little muddy, and maybe the gnats and mosquitoes were worse, but the air was cooler down there in the leafy shadows of that hollow. We could always cross back over, scale the steep bank, and then the stone wall, when we were even with the tree. And now, typing this, another (rather obvious) literary parallel occurs to me, “Little Red Riding Hood” and the mother’s instructions that her daughter not dare stray from the path leading safely to her grandmother’s house. The Brothers Grimm, and Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge,” and also, of course, Angela Carter’s retellings in The Bloody Chamber . Constance and I had strayed from the path, like mannish Miss McCraw and the four doomed students who followed her up Hanging Rock, or. digression, digression, fucking digression. Tell the story, Sarah, or don’t tell the story, but stop this infernal beating around the bush (and no, I shall not here initiate yet another digression regarding that unfortunate choice of words).

I think we’d walked for about ten minutes, when Constance noted how odd it was that the tree did not seem to be getting any closer. Or rather, that we didn’t appear to be getting any nearer to it. I laughed it off, said something about optical illusions or mirages, and we kept going, slogging more or less northwards towards the tree, which was still clearly visible. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, there was no longer any denying the fact that, somehow, the red tree had become a fixed point, there to the northeast of us, and that we should have already long since passed it and reached the edge of the pond. By then, it should have become necessary to turn 180° and look south to see the tree, but it remained more or less precisely where it had been, relative to our position, when we’d climbed down from the path to the nameless little stream.

“This is sort of fucked-up,” Constance said, not exactly whispering, but speaking very softly, as though she might be afraid someone would overhear.

“No,” I replied. “This is bullshit,” and I turned right, sloshing back across the tannin-stained water, getting wet to my knees and hardly caring. I scrambled up the bank, and over the fieldstone wall, and there was the path, and there was the far side of the deadfall, standing between me and the house, even though the pile of branches is, at most, only ten feet wide, and we would have passed it immediately, as soon as we began following the stream towards the tree. I stood there, out of breath, a stitch in my side, tasting my own sweat, and I shouted for Constance to get her ass up there.

After she’d seen it for herself, she shook her head and said, “It’s a different one, that’s all.” But the uncertainty in her eyes didn’t even begin to match the intended conviction of her words.

“Constance, I was here less than a week ago. Trust me. There was only one deadfall.”

“Well, then this one’s new,” she said, her voice taking on a frustrated, insistent edge. “ These limbs fell later, after you came through here, okay?”

I took the bandanna from around my neck and watched her while I wiped at my face with it. The stream water had long since evaporated, and the only moisture on the yellow cotton was my own perspiration.