Once settled in at Grandmother’s house, I took
up my normal chores as the oppressive summer heat suffocated,
squeezed the air from my chest and sweat from my skin.
We sat for hours outside; Grandmother in her
rocker and me snapping beans. I remember how the brittle planking
of the porch floor creaked and groaned beneath the rockers of
Grandmother’s chair. She sat there, rocking, rocking while my
little fingers grew tired from ripping the stems off the long
green beans. I would look at my grandmother through sweat-blurred
eyes. Grandmother always seemed dazed. Her glazed eyes constantly
searched the tree line of the forest which sulked alongside
her property line. Her thin lips worked against the curses she
spewed beneath her breath.
“Ain’t goin’ back there…” she muttered.
“Go back where?”
The rocker stopped, the floorboards grew silent,
but the sweltering heat refused to release its grip; I wheezed
for air. Grandmother’s face was pallid, and a sweaty sheen made
her skin appear greasy when she turned her gray eyes upon me.
They were haunted, the grey-blue irises resembled tattered ghosts.
She hummed a moment, as if confused, before she answered. “The
house in them woods…”
“But why not? I like the woods… At least it’s
cooler beneath the trees.”
“Never mind the heat, girl. That place is worse
than cursed,” she croaked. “Don’t go in them woods past midnight…”
Even at nine years old, I thought my grandmother
must be crazy. Something about that forest attracted me, pulled
me toward it—I liked it, I wanted to go in there. That forest
had a voice, and it whispered to me. One time, that last year
I visited, my ball rolled uphill toward those trees as if pulled
on an invisible string. I chased after it and stopped beneath
a twisted oak.
“Leave that ball!” Grandmother shouted from the
porch. Each time she caught me lingering near the trees she
would shout until I scurried home.
That summer was the last I spent at Grandmother’s
house. My family moved states away when my father’s job transferred
his position. I should have been relieved to leave that crabby
old woman behind, but some part of me missed the creaking boards
and suffocating heat. Some part of me missed Grandmother and
her obsession with those woods.
And, as I grew older, that obsession and its
source became mine. By night, my dreams were filled with tree
lines and hidden houses. By day, I haunted the libraries, absorbing
every scrap of information I could find on the West Michigan
area, researching every urban legend and rumored haunted house.
Nothing satisfied me, and I knew nothing short
of returning would ever quell the compulsion within me.
WAILING WINDS
No amount of prayer could save John and Synthia’s children from
the illness which swept from bed to bed like a thief in the
night. The four eldest children, too sad to watch, too scared
to leave, stood in a loose ring around their mother’s rocking
chair as she held their baby sister. Jennie, aged only one year
and one day, was the first victim.
Their father John’s fist curled, his lip stiffened.
Synthia, however, broke into haunting wails that faded only
when she collapsed into sleep.
After her twin brothers Samuel and Isaac’s funeral,
Eliza’s father turned into a man as rigid and unforgiving as
the trees outside their home, but her mother melted in the heat
of the same fever that stole their children. Synthia lay in
the bedroom behind the brick chimney, curtains drawn over the
empty doorway to keep the heat in, and quiet the cough clattering
in her chest.
The horrid death rattle followed Eliza as she
set about her remaining brother Josiah’s chores, which had become
hers the night the fever took his life.
She walked past her father with her head bowed,
contrite in action but terrified. Death stalked her family,
and every time as she slipped her feet into her mother’s boots
and trudged out into the deepening shadows to gather twigs for
kindling, she walked among the shadowed roots, the haunted trees
with wailing voices.
Eliza flinched and cried at each crackle of twig,
certain the spirit haunting the woods wanted her for its own.
The branches pulled at her, the roots tricked her feet, and
the paths she followed led ever deeper, but never out of the
woods. Tear-streaked and pale she returned to the back door
of their home and then hurried to bed, where she pulled curtains
tight over the windows and against the ghostly images of impatient
trees.
Synthia succumbed to the long sleep of death
in early September, leaving John and Eliza. Ghosts sat on the
empty furniture, poltergeists knocked books off shelves and
apparitions hunkered on the beds in the children’s room. On
the nights when the wind screamed in the pines, Eliza even heard
her mother’s cough. But then, on All Hallow’s Eve, everything
changed.
The temperatures dropped and an icy bank of fog
rolled in. Eliza sat at the kitchen table, her insides turned
as cold and inert as the murkiness outside the glass. She cast
her father a hopeful glance. Maybe this night she could avoid
the woods, the clutching branches, their frightening whispers.
John stood, taking his bowl with him to the dry
sink. “Mind your manners and your chores, Eliza.”
“But, Papa...the woods scare me.” She shivered,
pulled her shawl tighter against the chill and silently prayed
she would not be sent out that night.
He stood, the hump of misery straightening from
his shoulders when he turned, eyes dark and finger pointing
toward the empty tinder bucket beside the fireplace. “Do not
test me, child.
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