The Ghosts of Stone Hollow (3 page)

Amy slowed down to time her approach so she arrived at the garden just as Aunt Abigail reached the end of a row. Working side by side up the next two rows, they would be able to talk, and Amy had a particular subject in mind.

But Aunt Abigail had something to say first. “Is this the way you hurry home, Miss?” she said.

“I’m sorry, Aunt Abigail,” Amy said. “I
was
hurrying home ‘til a new boy who lives in the Bradley place asked me to help him find the nest of a baby bird he’d found.”

Amy knew the bird would be a good thing to mention. Aunt Abigail liked birds and had taught Amy a great deal about them.

“We found the nest,” Amy said, “but it was in a hard place to reach, and it took a while to get the bird back in.”

“Bradley place,” Aunt Abigail said, thoughtfully. She straightened up, pushing against her back with one hand as if to shove the bend out. “Hmmm,” she said. “Fitz-something or other. Doctor Fitz-something or other. Some kind of shirttail relatives of the Burtons. Heathens, according to your mother and the Reverend.”

“Heathens?” Amy asked. “Who?”

“That bunch in the Bradley place. Your mother heard all about them from the Reverend Dawson. He called to invite them to services, and this Doctor Fitz-whatever told the Reverend that his wife was a Buddhist and he was an agnostic, or some such nonsense. Man’s a writer, I hear.”

“What’s a Buddhist and an agnostic?” Amy asked.

“Heathens,” her aunt said, bending back to her hoeing. “What’s the child like?”

“The boy?” Amy stopped hoeing to think how to describe him. “He’s strange-looking. I thought he was ugly at first, but he’s not really. Just different-looking, with big eyes like an animal’s and a bony kind of face. Alice says he’s just plain crazy, and he does act awful strange in some ways. He’s in my class, but he seems a lot younger—but in other ways he seems older. I don’t know. He’s hard to tell about, I guess.”

Amy’s answer didn’t make much sense and she knew it, but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference since Aunt Abigail didn’t seem to be listening anyway. She’d gotten so far ahead while Amy puzzled over how to tell about Jason, that it took five minutes of furious hoeing to catch up. “How come they’re living in the Bradley place?” she asked when she got close enough to talk.

“Well, the way I hear it,” Aunt Abigail didn’t stop hoeing this time, so her words came out punctuated with ladylike grunts at each stroke of the hoe. “This Mister or Doctor Fitzmaurice—I think they said—is a relative of old Mr. Burton. That’s what the story is, at least, although I must say that I, for one, certainly didn’t see any family likeness.”

“You’ve seen them, then.”

“I saw the man last Thursday at the market. Tall man, sharp-featured, with a little billy-goat beard like some kind of Bolshevik. Story is, he’s working on some kind of history book and he wanted a quiet place to write and a chance to get the boy out into the country. He heard about the Bradley place through the Burtons. Must be pretty run down, standing empty for so long.”

The mention of run-down houses reminded Amy of what she had meant to ask. “About old houses,” she said, “I was wondering about the house in Stone Hollow. Tell me about it, Aunt Abigail. What happened there and why does everybody say it’s haunted?”

“Haunted,” Aunt Abigail snorted. “I’ve never met a haunt in my life, and I don’t expect to. And you know as much about the Hollow as I do.”

“Well, I know what the kids say, but they’ll say anything. Like that little Bobby Parks says a man-eating cow lives in the Hollow.”

“A man-eating what?”

Amy laughed. “A cow. He said he saw it. Coming up out of the Hollow with blood all over it where it had been eating people.”

Aunt Abigail made a snorting noise. “I’ve been hearing stories about the Hollow all my life, but that’s the wildest one I’ve heard yet,” she said.

“What are some of the other ones? The ones you’ve heard all your life.”

“Now, you know I don’t hold with that kind of nonsense, Amy Abigail,” Aunt Abigail said. “Just as you said, you can hear anything if you’ve a mind to listen. ‘specially in a backwoods place like Taylor Springs. But there’s not a thing that can’t be explained without having to bring any hocus-pocus into it. There are perfectly reasonable causes behind everything that ever happened there. Even what happened to that poor Italian family is just what might have been expected.”

“They were the ones that built the shack, weren’t they? Tell me about them, Aunt Abigail. What happened to the poor Italian family?”

“Nobody knows exactly. Except they had a little girl die of the lockjaw and not long afterward the father died, too, in an accident. They say someone from the town went up and found the man dead, just outside the barn, and the woman was missing. They found her later wandering in the Hills, and sent her away to an asylum. They say she was as mad as a March Hare. Those that found her spread all sorts of wild tales about the things she said, but sensible people didn’t pay any attention. Downright sinful to frighten people with the ravings of a madwoman.”

“But why did she go mad, Aunt Abigail?”

“Who knows why a person goes mad. Not that it was to be wondered at, losing her husband and little girl so close together that way. With all that grief to bear, and being Italian to begin with, it would have been almost more of a wonder if she hadn’t gone crazy.” Aunt Abigail stopped again to straighten her back.

“Do Italians go crazy easier than other people?” Amy asked.

“Well, I don’t know about that, but they are a flighty bunch. Apt to fly off the handle about most anything. Catholics, you know. The whole bunch of them.”

Amy had heard Aunt Abigail so many times on the subject of the Catholics that she was sure she already knew all the interesting facts by heart, so she tried to steer the conversation back to Stone Hollow.

“But some other people died up in the Hills, too, didn’t they, Aunt Abigail?”

Aunt Abigail shrugged. “Just a couple of bootleggers. They’d built a still up there to make whiskey.”

“But what did they die of?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Probably killed each other. Got drunk on some of their own whiskey and got into a fight about something. Nothing very mysterious about that.”

Then, before Amy could try again for new information on Stone Hollow, Aunt Abigail switched the conversation back to the Catholics and refused to change. Amy wasn’t very interested, since she had heard it all so many times before, but at least this time her father wasn’t around to hear it. Daniel Polonski had been born a Catholic, and although he said he wasn’t much of anything anymore, he didn’t like to hear the things that Aunt Abigail always said about them. When her aunt and her father started discussing the Catholics, Amy usually tried to be someplace else.

Aunt Abigail had gotten sidetracked off the Catholics and had started in on the Unitarians—who according to her were just as bad, only different—when the approach of Old Ike provided an interruption. Amy had noticed him coming across the farmyard for a long time before he arrived. He walked slowly, dragging his stiff left leg, and frowning more and more fiercely the closer he came, until his thick gray eyebrows seemed to meet over his hooked beak of a nose. Following, as he always did, several yards behind, came Ike’s old gray dog, Caesar.

“Miz Abigail,” Old Ike began, “think I better take the Jersey over to Rayburns’ today or tomorrow—” before Aunt Abigail interrupted him.

“Amy Abigail,” she said, “run along for a minute. Run along and—” She glanced around looking for something to tell Amy to do. “—and cheer up that poor old dog. He looks about as happy as a cat in a mud puddle.”

Amy was glad for a chance to play with old Caesar instead of hoeing tomatoes, although she would have liked to stay and listen. Not so much to hear about taking the Jersey cow to see Mr. Rayburn’s bull— she’d already found out all about that from Betsey Rayburn—but just because Old Ike himself was one of the things she needed to find out more about. There was something strange and mysterious about so many years of scowling silence, and Amy had something inside that made her have to find out about anything that seemed the least bit secret. For as long as she could remember, there had always been things that she just had to know about, and Old Ike was one of those things.

She left, slowly looking back over her shoulder, until it became obvious that neither Old Ike nor Aunt Abigail was going to say anything until she was completely out of earshot.

“Caesar,” Amy said plaintively, as she approached the old dog, “aren’t you even a little bit glad to see me?” As usual, he was pretending he wasn’t. His head was turned away, and he was trying to pretend that he was very interested in watching an old brown hen that was scratching in the dust near the woodshed. But he was really watching Amy out of the corner of his eye.

Amy squatted down right in front of him and made her voice sad and trembly. “Don’t you like me just a tiny little bit?”

He broke down then, as he always did, and pressed against her, licking her face with his warm wet tongue, and wagging his thin tail. She put her arms around him and hugged, and he stood very still with his eyes almost closed and made a croony noise deep in his throat. Once, when Amy’s mother had heard him do that, she had jerked Amy away from him in fright, not understanding that that growl had nothing to do with biting. But Amy understood. It was easy to see why a dog who’d belonged to Old Ike for years and years would understand growling better than anything else. And poor old Caesar
was
Ike’s dog, at least as much as he belonged to anybody.

When the old man limped past Amy on his way to the barn, Caesar pulled away and followed him. But he stopped twice to look back at Amy and flap his skinny tail.

T
HAT EVENING AMY WAS
still thinking about Stone Hollow. Although she had long ago questioned everyone who might know anything about it, she was suddenly tormented with an inescapable itch to find out more, to see if anybody had any scrap of information that she might somehow have missed about the mysterious hidden valley.

The next person she had a chance to question was her father, during their regular before-dinner game of checkers. With her aunt and mother busy in the kitchen, she had a perfect opportunity, so she took it, even though her father was not a very good prospect, being almost a stranger to Taylor Springs.

A stranger, Amy thought, looking at her father’s dark, sharp-edged face, shadowed now as he bent over the checkerboard. A stranger to Taylor Springs. It was odd, but that was what he seemed, even though he had lived there as long—a little longer, really—than Amy had herself. Yet Amy had always thought of herself as a Taylor Springs person. Even before she had ever been there, she had thought of herself as somehow belonging to Taylor Springs.

“How much longer have you lived in Taylor Springs than I have, Daddy?” she asked.

“Longer?” her father said. “Oh, you mean when I came here in ‘25 to work on the bridge and met your mother?”

Amy nodded.

“Well, let’s see. I started work around the first of April, but I stayed in Lambertville the first week or two and drove up every day, until I found a room in Taylor Springs. And your mother and I left town on the twenty-eighth of September. We were married in Reno that evening, and the next day we hit out for San Francisco. And that was the last I saw of the great little town of Taylor Springs ‘til we came back to live with your Aunt Abigail two years ago last May.”

“Why did you and Mama go to Reno to get married?” Amy asked. “Why didn’t you get married right here in our own church?”

“Well now, Amy Abigail,” her father said, “I think you know the answer to that question.”

Even without the twisted grin and the tilted eyebrow, Amy would have known her father was being sarcastic. He never called her Amy Abigail except when he meant it to be sarcastic.

“And if you don’t, you’d best ask your mother about it, or your Aunt Abigail. Your Aunt Abigail would be a good one to ask about that.”

Of course Amy had already asked and, just as her father said, she did know the reason, more or less. She knew that her mother had been living on the Hunter farm with Aunt Abigail when she met and married Daniel Polonski, and that Aunt Abigail had not approved of the marriage. What Amy didn’t really know was why. Once at school, Shirley Anderson had told Amy that her mother said Helen Fairchild had run away to get married because her sister and her fiancé had had an awful fight. Amy had asked about that, too.

“Fight?” Aunt Abigail had answered. “That Mary Anderson was born gossiping, and her daughter’s just like her. That’s the trouble with a place like Taylor Springs—nothing better to do with your time. When you hear malicious stories like that, you have to consider the source, Amy Abigail. Consider the source.”

“Fight? Your auntie and me?” Amy’s father had laughed. “Why, in those days, Baby, I weighed in at two hundred pounds and could have licked my weight in wildcats. Wouldn’t have been a very fair match, would it, for me to fight with a lady? Not even your Aunt Abigail.”

When Amy saw that he wasn’t going to be serious, she had tried her mother. What she asked her mother was, “Did Aunt Abigail and Daddy have an awful fight about you and him getting married, Mama? Is that why you went away to get married and never came back until Daddy broke his back and couldn’t work anymore so you had to come back and live with Aunt Abigail or else go on relief? That’s what Shirley Anderson says that her mother says.”

Amy’s mother’s answer had been, “What, dear? Who said that? Why, I can’t imagine where she heard a thing like that. Your father and I went away because he had a job waiting for him in San Francisco, and we never came back until after he was hurt because he was so busy and working so hard. Your father always had to work so hard. He did such hard dangerous work. I was always so worried about him. Bridges are such dangerous things. Why even the little bridge to Lambertville where he was working when we first met—”

“When we first met,” her mother said, and the answer about whether there had been a fight turned into a story that Amy had heard many times before. A story about the tall handsome young man who came to Taylor Springs, and how all the girls had admired him, but how he had only paid attention to Helen Fairchild, who was still blond and beautiful then, even though she was already a little older than most girls are when they marry, and who some of the younger girls already thought of as an old maid. And exactly what the handsome young man was doing when they first met, and what they said to each other, and what they said the next time they met, and on and on and on. Amy had always liked the story, but it didn’t really answer the question.