The Hollow Tree at Dead Mule Swamp (2 page)

I repeated my plan on Thursday, but
this time, it worked. I watched the boy bike down the lane at four-thirty-nine-even
with a book to read this was boring enough that I was counting the
minutes.  As soon as he was out of sight, I stepped out on the dirt road
to wait for him. I managed to partially hide myself behind a tree. After a bit
he came pedaling back, struggling slowly over the uneven ground, and I stepped
out directly in front of him, and grabbed the crate fastened to the front of
the handlebars. I had to step back hard to stop the bike, but he had been
moving so slowly it wasn't really difficult.

"Hey, lady!" he yelled,
planting his feet on the ground. "What the f… heck do you think you're
doing?"

"I want to know who you
are." I said. "I just bought the house down the road."

"I know that. Everybody knows
that. Are you going to try to keep people out of the woods?" He put his
head down and worked the handlebars from side to side in an effort to shake off
my grip.

"No, I can't do that. This
isn't my property," I said. "I'll let you go, if you promise not to
ride away. I just want to talk to you."

"All right," he said, but
he didn't look happy. I released my grip, and he didn't ride off, but he did
continue to glare.

"What's your name?" I
began, but all I got in response was silence. "OK, how old are you?"

"Thirteen."

I lowered my eyebrows and pulled my
lips tight.

"Well, twelve," he said,
glancing sideways at something that might have been in the trees. But he did
not try to pedal away. He was very small for twelve.

"Won't you tell me your
name?" I continued more gently. "I'm Ana Raven. Not Anna, Ana, it
rhymes with Mama." A film of tears suddenly sparkled in the boy's eyes.
Something there had struck a nerve. "Do you have a mom?" I asked
gently.

The boy nodded in the affirmative.

"Please tell me who you are.
I'm not going to hurt you at all. If we are neighbors we should get acquainted.
I didn't mean to frighten you, but I thought you'd ride away if I only called
to you."

"I'm Jimmie Mosher," he
admitted, as if it were the name of a criminal.

"Jimmie Moser!" I
couldn't keep the surprise from my voice. That's the name of a boy who used to
live in my house. "

"That was my grandfather. I'm
named for him." For a moment a bit of pride shone in his eyes in
contradiction to the hangdog look of a moment ago, but then one of the tears
spilled out and ran down his cheek. Jimmie ducked his head again to hide the
supposed weakness from me and wiped his cheek against the shoulder of his
t-shirt.

"Where do you live?"

"Over on Alder."

I racked my brain to remember
houses on Alder. It was only a mile away, another dirt road, but I couldn't
picture any homes there at all. "Do you want to come to my place for some
milk and cookies?" I asked. I thought I had some cheap sandwich cookies in
the cupboard. My enthusiasm for shopping is low.

"Uh, no. I gotta go,"
Jimmie said.

"Jimmie, I have to tell you
something."

He looked at me warily and
fidgeted. "What?"

"I found your secret."

"Oh, hell! Now I gotta move
it. It's hard to find good trees."

"You're pretty young for that
kind of language," I said sternly. I was glad he ducked his head so he
didn't see me trying to hide a smile. "I won't bother it, but don't you
think it would be too easy for anyone to find? I'm sure there are hunters here
in the fall."

"Now too," Jimmie said.
"Turkeys. But no one found it before you."

"How did you get that much
money?"

"I didn't do nothin'
wrong!" His head came up and his dark eyes blazed in the pale face.

"I don't think you did. You
seem very resourceful to me." I glanced at the basket of cans, and saw
there were also chunks of other metal besides aluminum.

"I pick up metal and sell it
to the scrap yard," Jimmie admitted.

"That seems like a hard way to
earn very much money," I said.

He shrugged. "I'm too young to
get a real job."

"I have some things you could
do to help me. I even have some old metal trash behind my house that needs to
be hauled away. What if you did the hard work and we put the scrap in my Jeep
to carry it, but then you could keep the money?  I'll pay you something
for the time, too."

"You'd let me do that?"

"Sure. You'd be helping me.
Seriously, there's a lot of junk back there."

"I know. I've explored all
around. I already took the small stuff. I've been inside, too. It was easy to
sneak in. I liked to sit upstairs and think about my grandfather. But now you
own it."

"School gets out on Friday,
right?"

"Last day. Tomorrow."

"Come over Saturday, and we'll
start. Unless you have another commitment," I added.

"I'm not busy at all," he
said with all the gravity of a businessman making a corporate deal. "I'll
come."

Jimmie didn't exactly smile at me,
but he was no longer glaring defiantly. I figured the deal was sealed with the
promise of more cash. He pedaled away to the west. Alder Road was a left turn a
mile away.

Drawing on all my new-found
resources in the Dead Mule Swamp area, the next decision was an easy one. I
needed to see Cora Baker, the local historian. Not only was she the person who
had told me Jimmie Mosher used to live in my house, but she had hinted that she
had dated him when they were young.

I called her that night and asked
if she could tell me more about the previous owner of my home. She suggested I
visit her the following day. We pooled our resources to come up with a lunch.

So, late Friday morning, I drove to
the southwest corner of Forest County, to a small house on the banks of the Pottawatomi River. In a cooler I had egg salad sandwiches on whole wheat bread and a jug
of lemonade. 

Alder Road was not out of the way
at all, although it certainly wasn't the fastest route to reach Cora's. I
turned south on the little-used road, and drove slowly, looking for dwellings
that might be set back within the trees. I really couldn't remember seeing any
houses along here. However, after crossing the defunct railroad tracks, and
going around a jog, in about two miles I saw a house. At least, it might
loosely be described as a house. An old semi-trailer had been parked in a small
clearing, and a rough set of steps led to a door cut in one side. On the back
was tacked a lean-to structure made of warped plywood, broken cupboard doors,
pallets, and other scraps. A blue tarp was draped over this shed. The yard was
filled with broken plastic chairs, old tires, buckets, damaged and rusting
vehicles, and punctured bags of small trash with fluttering contents spilling
through the holes.

"Oh, my Lord," I said out
loud. "Can this be where that boy lives?" Alder continued for another
mile before running into Fox Road, and that was the only possible dwelling
place I saw anywhere along the way.  "And he has a mother and
sisters. What can I do that won't injure his pride?" I wasn't in the habit
of praying, but this was the closest I'd come in a long time.

At Cora's I carried in the cooler,
and she brought out a jar of homemade pickles, and plates. She'd already placed
a container of brownies on the table. We sat at her kitchen table and ate lunch
immediately. I liked Cora's old-fashioned kitchen that hadn't been done over
since the 1950s. The one anomaly was a nearly new glass-top stove. Cora was
no-nonsense, and when an appliance died she replaced it with one of quality.
However, the most remarkable thing about Cora was that she had a genuine museum
in her large pole barn. I had learned she wanted it to be in town where people
could visit, but all I knew about the situation was that the topic was very
upsetting to her.

After lunch, we went out to the
museum. She'd been working there all morning, and the building lights were
already on. "I have some things to show you," she said.

I was learning that there was nothing
Cora liked better than answering questions about local history. When she could
back up her answers with evidence, she beamed like a little girl, instead of a
woman in her sixties. Cora was slight and usually wore overalls with a pastel
shirt beneath them. This day was no exception, and the shirt was a lime-green
gingham check. Her gray braids hung loose, although sometimes she pinned them
up.

"Look at these pictures,"
she instructed, leading me to a work table near the middle of the large room,
which was ringed with professional exhibits. "I rummaged around and found
some gems!"

On the table were several old
photographs with thick backing. I picked up the largest one.

"That's your house not long
after it was built," she said.

The sepia picture was definitely my
house, but the full-grown maples I loved near the end of the driveway were mere
sticks. A team of dark horses was hitched to a large wagon. On the wagon sat a
woman wearing a white blouse and heavy skirts, and a suited man with whiskers
and a bowler hat on his head. I turned the picture over and read the spidery
writing aloud, "Jedediah and Maybella Mosher, 1896." There were also
individual pictures of the same man and woman.

"Those are the grandparents of
Jimmie Mosher."

I almost did a double take, but
then I remembered I hadn't yet told Cora about the young Jimmie, and she was
referring to his grandfather. Cora rarely left her house. Local history was
very real to her, but I wasn't sure she knew much about the current generation.

Next she led me to the corner of
the museum with the replica of Judge Reuben Pierce Oldfield's bedroom.
"See the fancy lights?"

"Of course." The curved,
gilt brackets beside the bed ended in beautiful, etched glass bell globes.

"Those actually came from the
Mosher house. When the place was re-wired I got Jimmie's parents to give these
old fixtures to me. Most houses had pretty much the same kind, so they fit here
perfectly."

"Do they still work?"

"No, just decorative."
She sighed. "I don't have a good picture of the house when Jimmie lived
there, but these are from my personal photos." She handed me a small album
bound with leather, into which she'd placed a bookmark.

I turned to the marked page. These
snapshots were of a type I recognized from my own parents' albums. I didn't
think of Cora as old enough to be my mother, but she was. And there, in a
number of black and white photos, she and a thin young man with dark hair were
smiling at the camera. He looked very much like the boy I had met the day
before. As I turned the pages, I saw them playing croquet, picnicking on a
beach, and paddling a canoe. The last page contained posed pictures from a high
school graduation. Everyone had taken turns standing with each group of people
until there were pictures of almost every possible grouping. In the background
was a red brick building. I recognized it as the now-empty, former Cherry Hill School. I pointed at the adults in the pictures. "Who are these
people?"

"Those are my parents, and
here are Jimmie's. Their names were Jedediah, Jr (everyone called him Jed), and
Hazel. The Moshers, that is."

It was difficult to find an
appropriate way to ask the questions that filled my mind.

"You want to know what
happened. Why I married John Baker, and not Jimmie Mosher, right?"

"It crossed my mind." I
grinned sheepishly.

"I was a stubborn little fool.
Remember I told you how I'd been collecting historical things since I was a
child?"

I remembered. Just a few weeks ago,
Cora had shared with me her lifelong love for history which had resulted in
this private museum.

"Jimmie wanted me to give it
all up. He was a lot of fun, but he thought my collections were silly."

"You couldn't work out a
compromise?"

"One day he wanted to teach me
a lesson about what was important. He took a pile of my papers outside and set
fire to them."

"Oh, no!"

"It turned out they were
nothing important. He'd staged the trick with my mother's help. But instead of
learning anything, I sent him packing. That was the end of our
relationship."

"What became of him?" My
interest was now intense, because a son of this Jimmie would be the father of
mine.

"He went downstate and met a
girl who went to the same college. Her name was…" Cora wrinkled her nose
and pursed her lips "…Sandra Sue. Much more modern than someone named Cora
with dust on her nose. Anyway, he got a degree in business and moved back here
with Sandra Sue. They opened a restaurant. It's the empty building just west of
town on the highway."

"Where are they now? Did they
move away?"

"Both dead. Killed in a car
wreck." She sighed heavily.

"Did they have any
children?" Of course I knew they must have had a boy.

"One son, Lee, who also had a
son, I believe."

"Don't they live around here?
Why didn't he keep the family homestead?"

"It's one of those local tragedies.
The son and grandson were in the car too. Only the baby survived. His mother
moved away. I don't know what happened to the baby after that."

We had opened a couple of folding
chairs while we were talking, and now we sat there in silence for a few minutes
while I thought over what I should do. Cora must have realized I had something
on my mind because she waited patiently. "Are we through with these?"
she finally asked.

"For now," I said.

Cora bustled around putting the
photos back into cases stacked along the long wall near the newspaper archive.

When she was finished she came back
and sat down again.

"I have something to tell
you," I began.

"I thought perhaps you
had," she said, rubbing a small hand over her lips to hide a smile.
"Did you find another great secret in your house?"