Caitlin R KiernanThe Red Three
EDITORS PREFACE
The Red TreeI made the drive up from Manhattan in the spring, many months after receiving the typescript. The day was bright and crisp, a cider day in late April, the sky laid out wide and blue, and the land just beginning to go green with the first signs of spring. There was nothing the least bit foreboding about that day, but already my expectations had been colored by the pages of a suicides long ordeal and confession, and by the secret history of the Wight place that Sarah had discovered in yet another manuscript, this one having purportedly been left behind by the farmhouses previous tenant, a man who, as it happens, had also died there, half a decade before her arrival. The day of my visit fell, almost precisely, one year subsequent to Sarahs arrival at the farm in April of 2008.
I will endeavor to keep this brief, as it is not my story being told here. I am, at most, that storys reluctant caretaker.
After an early lunch in Providence with a college acquaintance Id not seen in some time, I took Route 6 west out of the city, past North Scituate, then, at the intersection with State 102, I turned south, through Chopmist and Rockland, crossing the Ponaganset River where it spills into the great gullet of the Scituate Reservoir, then drove on to Clayville and the Plainfield Pike. At the Providence- Kent county line, I turned northwest onto Moosup Valley Road. I was unfamiliar with this part of the state I largely still am and allowed myself to spend an hour or so looking about a couple of cemeteries in Moosup and the old church (ca 18641865) now claimed by a congregation of the United Church of Christ. I also had a look about the Grange Hall and the Tyler Free Library (the latter, ca 18961900), before continuing on to the intersection with Barbs Hill Road, just west of town.
The road is kept up moderately well, as there are many homes and farms spread out along its length, but it does change over from asphalt to tar-and-chip almost immediately. The turnoff to the Wight Farm is located just past a small pond, no more than a sixth of a mile from the north end of Barbs Hill Road. Surprisingly, unlike many of the assorted side roads, driveways, and footpaths, it isnt gated. Id rented a Jeep Cherokee for the trip; otherwise, Id never have made it much farther than the Blanchard place. The Blanchard family has owned the Wight Farm since 1979, and Id cleared my visit with them the week before, explaining that I was editing Sarah Crowes final book and needed to see the house where shed lived while writing it, which also happened to be the house where shed died. Mr. Samson Blanchard, her former landlord, was neither as curious nor as suspicious as Id expected from my scant, secondhand knowledge of the Yankees of western Rhode Island. I gave him my publishers contact information, but, later, Id discover that he never even made the call. I credit this, in part, to the fact that the Blanchards suffered virtually no media attention following Sarahs death. And, oddly (or so it seems to me), there is little evidence that local teens and other curiosity seekers have targeted the Wight Farm for nightly visitations, vandalism, or, to employ the vernacular of folklorists, legend-tripping. Indeed, given local traditions of ghosts, witches, and even vampires ,I find the general absence of urban myth surrounding the farm nothing short of remarkable.
The afternoon was growing late as I bumped and bounced my way along the narrow, winding path leading south and east through the woods to the Wight place. I couldnt drive the whole way, as the road dead-ends and theres
a turnaround less than two hundred feet from the house itself. I parked there, then crossed an alarmingly rickety wooden bridge on foot. It fords the unnamed creek that flows out of Ramswool Pond, joining other streams off towards Vaughns Hollow, before finally emptying into Briggs Pond after half a mile or so. Most of the trees here are oak, of one sort or another, interspersed with white pine, hickory, and red maple, and they threw long shadows across the clear, slow-moving water. The weedy banks were thick with reeking growths of skunk cabbage, the fleshy, purplish flowers open to attract bees and stoneflies. I noted the fading daylight, the late hour, and so walked quickly on to the house itself.
I wish I could say that during the two hours I spent poking about the place I felt some disquieting supernatural presence, a demonic or preternatural threat, or that I witnessed anything at all I am now unable to explain. Im sure, if I had, this would make a far more interesting and satisfying preface to what follows. But the truth is, I didnt. Beyond a general air of loneliness and the dim melancholy that such locales have always elicited from me, I didnt feel much at all. I had honestly expected to find the visit unnerving, and had even considered delaying it a week until my husband could accompany me.