A Season of Whispers Read online

  “Yes, Tom,” said the other man. “I agree that would be best.”

  •••

  Just as one cannot hope to pen a menagerie of zebras and giraffes on the shoulder of a road without expectation of passers-by to halt and stare at them, so too did Bonaventure attract its share of gawkers and gogglers. More often than not Lyman, sequestered in the woods with his stone house, remained ignorant of them; but every so often when he was working some chore at the Consulate or helping in the fields, he would glance up to see a party of well-dressed excursionists, usually attended by Grosvenor, watching him as they would a monkey peeling a banana. Newspapers spilled a great deal of ink on transcendentalism, most of it unkind, and for Saltonstall readers, a colony of adherents in their midst was too much a distraction to resist. Bonaventure was a circus that stayed put. While charging sightseers a nickel for a walk around the farm wasn’t the most lucrative of side-businesses—nor was the penny for a cup of lemonade afterward—the overhead was small, so no one argued against the profit.

  Besides, as Grosvenor would often point out, such was Bonaventure’s mission.

  Yet there are only so many times one can scratch his buttock or armpit, then turn to find a half-dozen witnesses to the event, or look up with an apple halfway to one’s mouth to behold an audience leering outside the fence rail, before it agitates the nerves. Quicker than any magician’s student, Lyman soon learned to vanish from the scene upon the approach of outsiders.

  Not far from the Consulate lay a hillock shaded by clusters of white birches. From that vantage it was possible to observe the comings and goings of the strangers, and it was there that Lyman would escape to wait out any disturbance. He soon discovered he was by no means the first Columbus to plant his flag on that particular West Indies, for he was often joined by the young daughter of the Albys, who likewise shared his distaste at being subjected to voyeurism.

  “My name is Judith Alby,” she said upon their first encounter. “It’s pleasant to meet you. Are you the replacement for Mr. Bradway?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lyman as he took his seat. “Who is Mr. Bradway?”

  “He was an Englishman who stayed at the farm for a while but he left abruptly. A lot of people come and go here.”

  She sat cross-legged at the base of a birch. Lyman guessed her age to be around twelve years.

  “People arrive here with all kinds of ideas,” she continued, “though rarely do those ideas involve hard labor. The farm is like a canvas for them to paint upon but eventually when they don’t like the picture, they leave.”

  Lyman was somewhat taken aback by this sermon delivered by so small a prophet. “What then is your idea for this place, Judy?”

  “Judith. I have no ideas for it. Nothing grand, anyway. I came here because my parents did.”

  “So why did they come here?”

  The girl plucked a grass blade and placed it in her mouth before answering. “It was my father’s idea. My mother would join the Shakers if she could but my father is very much against it. You can imagine why. My mother’s sort of Shaker in spirit, which is why I’m an only child, or at least will be until the spring when I shall have a baby brother or sister. I suppose no woman is a fortress. It will be a sister, I hope. I would feel bad if it was a boy.”

  “Ah. You want a little playmate.”

  She looked at Lyman as if he was a dolt. “What good is it growing up a man here?” Her hand waved airily at the farm before them. “The only lesson taught at Bonaventure is how to sit around and dream. If a boy raised here ever left, he’d be in for a rude shock. He’d never be able to find work. He’d just wind up back here, or somewhere like here, or in some slum. This place is a land of lotus-eaters, at least for boys. My mother and the other women work as hard as they ever did on the outside.”

  Lyman took some offense at this slur against his sex. “Men just perform their work faster so they have greater leisure. It’s a proven fact that men have stronger constitutions than women.”

  “Tell that to Mr. Hollin.” When Lyman’s expression communicated ignorance, she asked, “They haven’t told you about Mr. Hollin?”

  “No,” said Lyman. “Was he another farm member who left abruptly?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said the girl. “He was a young fellow, very idealistic and enthusiastic, one of the originals to join. Our first February here a bout of influenza tore through the farm. Everyone had it at some point. I should emphasize that included the women and me. Of all of us, Mr. Hollin was the only one who failed to recover.”

  Lyman shrugged. “A boy dying of sickness doesn’t prove laziness on the part of the men.”

  “You haven’t heard the story’s end. Mr. Hollin was the first to die at the farm, so the question arose of where to bury him. Mr. Grosvenor chose a spot on the edge of the woods and made a service of it. A couple of days later Minerva went back to the gravesite to lay some flowers on it only to discover it had collapsed into the earth. A sinkhole—they had buried him atop a sinkhole. So Mr. Grosvenor organized the men, thinking to pull poor Mr. Hollin free to inter him somewhere more peaceful, only they couldn’t find the body. They dug and dug until finally they gave it up for lost.”

  “What does that prove besides bad luck?”

  Judith sagely regarded the farmstead. “It proves little, but it suggests intent. I think the men buried Mr. Hollin there because they knew the earth would fall in and they were too lazy to spade down the whole six feet. Mr. Grosvenor is quite fascinated with the geology of this place. He knew what he was doing.”

  Lyman’s ears burned with incredulity. He stood and brushed off his trousers. “I must say you’re a suspicious child, Judith. One wishes a little of Bonaventure’s idealism would wear off on you.”

  In reply Judith lay back on the grass to stare at the bits of sunlight filtering down through the leaves. “Perhaps it will in time. I suppose I’m committed until the end.”

  •••

  If you know nothing about the geography of Connecticut, just know this: the soil there is terrible. The entire state is nothing but a pile of rocks both large and small, which for the most part have been covered with a layer of earth just thick enough to permit the growth of green things. Every inch of tillable space in Connecticut only achieved its status because some farmer and his sons painstakingly removed each cobble and stone from beneath the blade of their plow, thereby creating a narrow island of fertile field adrift in a rolling sea of stone and root. This meant that very little of the two-hundred acres of Bonaventure was developed into either field or structure, leaving the abundance as wild as when the Natives first trod their moccasins upon it.

  Minerva, being her father’s daughter, knew a thing or two about the land. The early colonists, she informed Lyman, had established their farms in the intervales, which was their name for the spans of fertile soil between spines of trap rock—called such after the Swedish word trappa, which meant stairway. In their daily walks Lyman and Minerva rarely pursued the same route twice, resulting in the continual discovery of some new prospect. During a given jaunt their path might lead between red maples and eastern hemlocks, the slopes rising gently to shelves of stone wet with moss or hanging ferns or trickles of water; the next it could open into a broad flatland of grass and pokeweed, the sun shining upon a wall of talus in the distance; and then the track might darken and narrow, ascending to a ridge where they’d shimmy through a tight notch in the trap rock, their shoulders brushing the sides. They waited out rain showers beneath overhangs and tentatively peered over the edges of cliffs. Manmade walls, their gray stones splattered by pale green lichen, crisscrossed the woods, and sometimes they would encounter a mossy stump, cleanly sawed through and the trunk crusted with conks of bracket fungus lying beside it, and they wondered aloud who built the walls and who cut the trees. They picked their way through quaggy lowlands and hand-in-hand bridged streams along the backs of fallen timber.

  There was a parti
cular day, a cool and clear afternoon where the leaves seemed like bright flakes of paint falling from Heaven’s house, when the pair had just come around a bend in the path to catch sight of an odd woman standing on a gray humpback of rock not far inside the tree line. Though the weather was mild, the woman appeared to be wearing three overcoats with several layers of filthy shawl beneath, and the parts of her face that weren’t buried beneath coils of gray hair were nearly as dark as the stone. Because she had several sauce pots and pans lashed to a large pack on her shoulders, Lyman more properly heard her before he saw her. The woman clanged and banged with every twist as she danced upon the rock, scrutinizing the earth around her. When she finally glanced up to see them watching her, the woman said, “Watch’n your step—I ken there’s a turtle about.”

  Minerva’s face lit up like the dawn. “Bitty! Bitty Breadsticks!”

  “Aye,” said the woman, preoccupied with scanning the ground. She whirled in circles as if expecting an ambush from behind.

  The pair approached her, careful not to toe stray terrapins. None were apparent. “I’m afraid I don’t see any turtles,” said Lyman. “Even if I should, they’re never a terrible threat to people.”

  “Oh,” said Bitty Breadsticks, “the turtles ‘round here sure enough are. They’re snappers, these ones. Ferocious diggers.”

  Minerva held in a laugh. “On my honor, Bitty, my friend Tom here has lived in the house nearby for several weeks now and he says he’s yet to see any animal beyond a few birds in the branches, let alone a turtle.”

  “It’s true,” said Lyman.

  Bitty looked at him sharply. “What house nearby? You mean the old Garrick house?”

  “If you mean the stone house, yes.”

  “You haven’t. The house’s ruined.”

  “I’ve been repairing it.”

  “You been livin’ there? Sleepin’ there?”

  “Yes.” And then an idea occurred to Lyman. “Would you like to come see? We could make you supper, if you wish.”

  Bitty stared at him a moment longer and then—gingerly, on tiptoe—stepped off the rock and crossed over toward Minerva. “Let’s haste away,” she said low into her ear. “I don’t like it when the turtles eavesdrop.”

  It had been Lyman’s experience, elbow to elbow with the sailorly crusts of the Manhattan wharves, that beneath the thick rinds of graybeards and old salts lay the soft fruit of gossip if only one had the patience to spit out the seeds of nonsense that inevitably riddled it. Bitty, for all her antipathy toward Lyman and the stone house, could muster no dissent when Minerva showed her the contents of a small basket she had packed for a tea picnic in the woods. After finding an agreeable spot that the old vagrant pronounced free of turtles, the trio were soon enjoying an apple each while rashers sizzled in a pan over a cheery fire. Lyman did not hesitate to also produce a small bottle of Newport rum for supplementing their hot tea, offering it at the earliest opportunity so that Bitty’s tongue wagged with the meal.

  It had the intended effect. Lyman was relieved to learn, for example, that Bitty had indeed been the figure on the road to lunge into the trees upon being viewed by Mrs. Grosvenor. “Your mum don’t like me much,” Bitty said to Minerva.

  “Yes, well,” said Minerva, “more properly she does not care for your habit of hanging around the kitchen door for days on end, begging cups of coffee and table scraps.” Then she added to Lyman, “Their last encounter ended with Bitty on the swat end of a broomstick.”

  Whatever Mrs. Grosvenor’s feelings toward the itinerant old woman, her daughter Minerva didn’t share them; in fact, Minerva possessed the foresight to appreciate Bitty for what she was—an eccentric in a world bursting its stitches with solicitors and bankers—rather than what she wasn’t. Bitty traveled a circuit among the towns and farms between Lyme and New London, panhandling and rummaging through garbage and junk heaps for trade-worthy bric-a-brac. For the past week she had, unknown to most of their community, been sponging off the charity of Mrs. Alby over by the cabins, but with her patience finally extinguished, Bitty had been forced to head toward the next destination on her tour. She did not intend to linger in the area—particularly this close to the stone house.

  “You needn’t be so afraid of it,” Lyman told her as they stared into the flames and digested. “I’ll admit when I first heard the violin music my blood ran a little chilly too. But I’ve come to discover it’s just a trick of acoustics.”

  “You rascal,” said Minerva with surprise, “so you have heard the music.”

  Bitty growled deep in her throat. “The fiddlin’ is Sed Garrick’s doing.”

  “Sed Garrick? Was he the Garrick who came from England?”

  “Aye. From Dunwich on the coast.”

  “The Garricks were the original settlers of the farm,” said Minerva.

  “I remember,” said Lyman to Minerva. “Your father mentioned it my first day here. Something about the Garrick family exiled from England and the town sliding into the ocean.” Then he said lightly to Bitty, “Does Sed Garrick still haunt the basement, playing his violin?”

  “Don’t mock me, young fella.” Bitty squinted at him. “The fiddlin’ isn’t fiddlin’ at all. It’s them, tryin’ to lure folks close.”

  The fire cracked and popped. The sun seemed to drop faster on the horizon. “And who might them be?”

  Bitty glanced over her shoulders, much as she had done when the couple first encountered her. Yet instead of answering Lyman’s question, she said, “It’s Sed Garrick who’s to blame. It’s he who taught them that trick. He played fiddle himself, see. Before’n him, they hunted as anything hunts, with strength and speed. As an animal hunts. But it was Garrick who lectured them in cunnin’.”

  “Whatever are we talking about?” Minerva asked.

  Bitty’s voice sank lower. “You reckon, that’s what got him booted out a’ England to begin with. What happened to Dunwich, if’n you can imagine. Old Man Neptune took it for his own. And they over there, the townspeople and the elders, they understood what was causin’ the tides to come rushin’ in and the earth to dissolve under the soles a’ their shoes. Oh, they may a’ not known every bit, every chapter and verse—but they knew enough. The scratchin’ beyond their cellar walls and the rumblin’ under the streets and the holes openin’ up and swallowin’ stock and even folks themselves, if’n they was foolish enough to wander far at the wrong times of day and night. And they kenned old Garrick had learned to discourse with those under, and told them where to go and when to eat in return for what they could bring him out a’ the earth.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread,” said Minerva. “One moment we’re talking about violins in the basement, and the next we’re talking about someplace in England.”

  “Oh, aye,” said Bitty, whose weaving followed its own warp and weft. “Dunwich it was—called Dommock in the old Anglo-Saxon, the capital of East Anglia where the bishops once held council and the Knights Templar kept their dark sentinel. A city a’ churches, a’ priories and chapels, that one by one fell into the sea. You think it was an accident, young fella? Do you?”

  Lyman shrugged, his disregard for her shifting into embarrassment for himself.

  “Twas no coincidence that a place as holy and righteous as Dunwich eroded bit by bit into the sea,” said Bitty, tongue and tone both scolding. “Dwindlin’ and shrinkin’ until nobody was left but those few who kept indoors or walked straight lines between thresholds. No, they knew, the townspeople and the elders. They knew somethin’ lived among them. Beneath them. And they cottoned Garrick knew that fact better than any.”

  Minerva said, “I still don’t understand. What something?”

  Earlier Bitty and Lyman had passed the small rum bottle neighborly between them, with Minerva abstaining. Now Bitty held the empty bottle tightly in her grip, forgotten, and addressed Minerva in her roundabout way. “There’s some’n believe Sed Garrick brought them over when he came. But I can’
t see how he’d a’ managed that, and besides, the Indians had myths about them going way back. The Mohegan and the Pequot and the Narragansett, they may not’ve agreed on much but they agreed on the noises. Said it was a god, name a’ Hobomoko, down there shaking the world, and their soothsayers and wise men would interpret the rumbles like a Gypsy reading chicken bones. Matchitmoodus, they called this region—the Place a’ Bad Noises. The Puritans thought the Indians was Devil worshippers, though truth is, they was less about worshipping old Hobomoko and more about steering on his good side. And when they sat on his left hand, well, they gave Matchitmoodus wide berth.”

  The dusk closed around them like a fist. Lyman noticed how silent and still it was, as if the trees and rocks themselves leaned toward them, eager to hear the old woman talk.

  “I can imagine some a’ those stories reached Britain in letters and traveler’s yarns and Garrick kenned the substance a’ them. No, more’n like Garrick chose this place because they was already here, and if’n he could commune with them as was in England, he could commune with their American kin. He was already old when he came over, him and his family and his damned fiddle, and he lived longer still after settlin’ here. Some’n say he was upwards a hundred and fifty when they finally buried him in the family cemetery, somewhere ‘round, lost now. His age being a’ result of the exchange he had with them, see. Carbuncles, they said—like ulcers or pearls they would give him from deep underground, to extend his years. They—”

  At that instant, just as the crest of the sun’s orb dipped beneath the unseen western hills and night decanted like syrup across the trees, a thunderclap broke the stillness and resonated under their feet. The Moodus Noises. The effect on Bitty was like paper in fire. Her eyes widened, her jaw dropped, the bottle fell to the leaves. The air trembled a moment longer, and then like a jackrabbit she was up. She snatched her pack with one hand and the frying pan with the other. “If’n you run you can make the Whitney farm and the hayloft far off the ground,” she said aloud. Lyman sensed neither he nor Minerva was not the intended recipient of the words. To them Bitty said instead, “Get out a’ these woods and somewhere safe, youngin’s. The turtles is on the move.” Then she reached into her shawls, snapped something from around her neck, and pressed it into Minerva’s hands. “You was ever kind to me, missy. Keep it close.”