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Melungeon—although
Two days later, the coroner told Dan that, in all likelihood, his wife and children had been killed in the impact, and most likely hadn’t suffered much if at all.
Too late for the Dreschers, it became their memorial.
who likes to talk fishing more than he does fish fishing.
They say that, for most people, the second year after you lose someone is harder than the first. During that first year, the theory goes, you’re still in shock. You don’t really believe what’s happened to you has happened; you can’t. During that second year, it starts to sink in that the person—or, in Dan’s case, people—you’ve been pretending are away on a visit aren’t coming back. This wasn’t what happened to me, but I guess that was because I’d been losing Marie for a long
“Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”
“He’s a fisherman, too.” Her words were slurred, from the hook piercing her lip. Again, I nodded, unsure whom she was referring to. Dan? “Some streams run deep,” Marie said. My lips trembling, I mumbled, “M-M-Marie?” “Deep and dark,” she said. “Honey?” I said. “He waits,” she went on. “Who?” I asked. “What do you mean?”
“The who?” I said, still trying to piece together those syllables. “What’s lost is lost,” Marie said. “What’s lost is lost.”
With the benefit of hindsight, I find it difficult not to see that dream as an omen.
To this day, I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but his grief, kept at bay so long, found a way to tunnel under Dan’s defenses, and, while he was otherwise distracted, seized the moment and fell on him, burying its dirty teeth deep in his gut and refusing to let go. Dan wore the same suit and tie for days at a time. A scraggly beard surged and ebbed across his face.
Before long, his job was in serious jeopardy. He’d been team leader on a pair of important projects, one of which demoted him, while the other dropped him outright.
His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.
“Hello, Dan,” I said. “What can I do for you?” “How long is it till trout season starts?” “Thirteen days,” I said. “If you give me a minute, I can tell you how many hours and minutes on top of that.”
“Dutchman’s Creek,” he said. If this had been a movie, I guess this would have been the moment ominous music boomed on the soundtrack.
That night, I sought out Dutchman’s Creek in my Ulster County Atlas,
Ashokan Reservoir,
The diner’s inside had been done up in early fisherman. There were rods and nets hung on the walls among what must have been thousands of snapshots of guys with fish.
was a large oil painting that hung above and to the left of the order window as you sat at the counter. This painting was so old, so begrimed with the smoke of a thousand omelets and hamburgers, that only by diligent and careful study could you begin to develop an idea of its subject.
“Dutchman’s Creek,” I answered. On impulse, I added, “Ever hear of it?” Probably, I could count on one hand the number of times something I’ve said has caused a person to turn pale.
“Alf Evers’s book on the Catskills.”
“What about the fellows who died there. Does he mention them?” Dan’s head jerked up. “No.”
“Strange, for a Saturday. Even with the rain, there’s usually some folks come in for breakfast.” He shrugged. “Almost like I’m supposed to tell it to you fellows, isn’t it?”
What Howard told us next took the better part of an hour, during which the diner was as still as a church, sealed off from the world beyond by the wall of water pouring from the sky.
Only once his voice had stopped was I convinced I’d just been buried under the greatest load of horseshit anyone ever had shoveled.
paper. For the next four days, I wrote. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, and I understood that the story had passed to me, that somehow, Howard had tucked it inside me.
was raised Catholic.
“He’s a fisherman,”
It’ll take Rainer two days to learn the identity of the man in the big house. As it so happens, it’s actually Clara who figures it out. Late on the second afternoon after Helen’s return from the grave, Clara hears a trio of women at the bakery discussing the Dort estate and the queer character who inhabits it.
About noon of that first day, Helen—or what was Helen—decides she wants those children back.
Whatever her words, they stopped his dad in his tracks. “What?” he says and Regina answers, “You heard me.” “Impossible,”
“This woman, your neighbor—the one who has left her grave—something must be done about her.” “What do you mean?” Rainer asks. “We have to kill her,” Italo says, “we have to put her back where she belongs.”
Although Rainer’s favorite quotation is that Shakespeare one, you know, about there being more things in heaven and earth, he is, as a rule, the family’s resident skeptic, champion of what he refers to as “clear thinking.”
Helen’s husband, George, keeps more or less quiet all that first day. Folks hear him moaning from time to time, but that’s about it. At dawn the morning after Italo’s visit, George starts screaming and yelling to beat the band. Once
The man shuddering in front of him is speaking a hodgepodge of languages: English, and what Rainer is pretty sure is Hungarian, and German, French, Italian, and Spanish, as well as a few more that Rainer isn’t too sure of but
to ask George what he was saying, because, about five minutes after Rainer’s arrival, in the middle of his stream of languages, George’s back arches, quivering, and he vomits a torrent of brackish water, a geyser that goes on and on and on, fountaining over his face, his clothes, the floor, the men standing closest to him, who leap back, cursing. More water pours from that man than you would think one body could hold, and Rainer’s sure he sees it running out George’s nose, ear, even from the corners of his eyes.
By the time they got hold of themselves and stopped, panting, and thought to look to George, he was dead.
“We know bad things are happening. What do you know about them? Who is the man in the big house?” “I don’t know,” Rainer says, “I don’t know who he is.”
Schwarzkunstler.”
“black artist” and means something like “black magician” or “sorcerer.”
“You’re what’s at hand,” Clara says. “Besides, you’ve done well enough in the past.” “I don’t think Wilhelm would agree with you,”
She isn’t sure about guardian angels or personal demons. That may be veering too much towards popery;
a young fellow by the name of Miller Jeffries, who’s sent by his boss to collect George’s body, upon his return to Woodstock shotguns his boss, then drives back to the camp to shoot his sweetheart and himself.
Jeffries only looked at him with dull eyes, said, “She told me everything,” and turned the shotgun on himself.
Pete Seeger used to sing it once in a while. I think he recorded it,
Well, he thought there was, at least. What the song misses is the source of Jeffries’s information. From his final words, the songwriter, following the newspapers, assumes
By the time Regina pauses her assault long enough for Helen to draw her arm out, it isn’t so much an arm anymore as more of a flipper.
Rainer’s daughter Gretchen is waiting for him. Italo hears her say something to her father about Lottie, and then Rainer is off, running flat-out for home. Italo catches Gretchen’s arm before she can follow him. “What is it?” he asks. “I don’t know,” she says. “Something happened to my sister. My mother says she met the dead woman. Now she’s asleep and she won’t wake up.”
Indeed, Lottie had encountered Helen.
Outside her sister’s radius, Clara is relaxed, forgiving, and even funny. To Lottie’s surprise and embarrassment, she’s learned that her mother has a great talent and memory for dirty jokes, which she never fails to indulge while they’re making long breads and pastries. It’s won her popularity with most of her fellow workers, male and female, with whom Lottie has been shocked to see her mother enjoying the occasional cigarette. “You don’t tell your father,” Clara said to her when she first spied her puffing away. The thought hadn’t even crossed Lottie’s mind, since she was sure Rainer would
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Even so, she’s gone from being one of the favorite employees to someone whose job is increasingly uncertain. Clara has watched this happen, and I’m pretty sure she knows its cause. She knows that Lottie has gone from thinking the world is flat to learning it’s round, so to speak, and pretty much all at once. For the last few days, her mother has done what she can to keep Lottie out of sight, sending her on as many errands as she reasonably can.
