Mr. Blanchard had mailed me the keys to the house, and I went inside and walked through all the rooms of the house, one by one. It was still furnished with an assortment of antiques and junk, just as it had been when Sarah took up residence there. I saw the manual typewriter shed produced her manuscript on, the same typewriter that had supposedly been used to type out the older manuscript shed eventually found. I went up to the small attic, which, according to Sarah, was used that summer as a studio by the painter Constance Hopkins, before Hopkins returned to Los Angeles .The house was cold and dank and smelled musty, but no more or less so than any very old house built on such boggy land would after standing uninhabited for so many months.
I did not enter the enormous basement, as Id forgotten to bring a flashlight, and Blanchard had not gone to the trouble and expense of having the power turned on just for the sake of my brief visit. However, I will say that I very much wanted to go down those flimsy stairs and see how much truth there was (or wasnt) to what Sarah had written about the space below the house. It seems, to me, to lie very much at the heart of the matter. I stood at the basement door, and I even opened it, gazing down into that solid, formidable darkness, smelling the fetid air wafting up from below. But I am not the least bit ashamed to admit you couldnt have paid me enough to make that descent alone. The basement is a mystery I will leave for someone else to answer, some more intrepid soul, a would-be Lara Croft or Indiana Jones.
After the house, I peeked into the sagging, dilapidated barn, and a couple of the other outbuildings, before following one of the fieldstone walls seventy-five yards or so to that enormous red oak that had formed so much of Sarah Crowes fatal obsession. Along the way, I noted that a break in the wall, mentioned repeatedly by Sarah, had recently been repaired. Far more than the house and the surrounding landscape, the tree, and what I found near it, made an impression on me. To whatever degree she might have hallucinated, imagined or exaggerated her experiences at the Wight Farm, I can say with certainty that she did not overstate the imposing presence of this one tree. It stands at least a hundred and thirty feet tall, and at the base its trunk is easily six feet in diameter ,dwarfing all other trees in the vicinity. I will not here waste time describing the tree itself, as Sarahs manuscript does a far better job of that than I ever could. The branches seemed very stark that day, very grimly drawn against that April sky, despite a cheery spray of new leaves coming in. But, again, Id cite my expectations, more than any objective attribute of the tree itself, as the source of this impression. Here and there, names and dates had been carved into the bark. The oldest that I spotted was from 1888 (which Sarah also mentions), but there may well have been much older graffiti that I missed.
Set out about the circumference of those gnarled roots, I found many dozens of small glazed ceramic figurines, mostly of the exact sort one gets free inside boxes of Red Rose teabags .There were animals, circus performers, and characters from nursery rhymes,
some balanced on the knotty wood, or tucked into crevices in the bark, others set out on the mossy ground surrounding the oak. It was an unexpected and startling sight, and I stood there for some time, studying the figurines. I did not take any of them away with me, or even touch them, thinking that, perhaps, they had been left here by the Blanchards grandchildren, who I understand frequently visit and have been known to wander as far as the Wight place. There was something reminiscent of a shrine or reliquary in the arrangement of the tiny ceramic animals, which are never mentioned in Sarah Crowes manuscript. I assume, therefore, that they were placed here following her death. Id forgotten my camera that morning, so I am forced to rely on memory, but two of the figurines I recall quite clearly a sepia-colored rabbit and a pinkish wild boar, both date back to the very first American series of animal figurines offered by Red Rose Tea (19831985). At any rate, dusk was coming on fast, and I still had to cross the rickety bridge and then navigate the rutted dirt path leading back to Barbs Hill Road and Moosup Valley. By the time I got to the Jeep, the air was filled with the eerie calls of owls and other night birds, and I was glad that I had not lingered longer at the red oak. I made it back to New York around ten-thirty that evening.