The Invited(44)

“Anything about our land, really. But mostly, what I’m hoping to find is anything about Hattie Breckenridge.”

“I don’t think there’s all that much, sadly. There are a couple of pictures. There might be an old land deed with her name on it. There could be more I haven’t seen yet—we can look together.”

“Do you know what happened to her?” Helen asked, turning away from the beams, looking at Riley. “I haven’t been able to get any real answers out of anyone in town.”

“I’m sure you haven’t,” Riley said. “It’s kind of a gruesome story and not one folks in Hartsboro are all that proud of.”

“Gruesome?” Olive said. “Awesome! Tell us!”

Olive had never heard the true story of what happened to Hattie. She’d asked her mom, but her mom had said no one knew for sure. Olive couldn’t believe she’d never thought to ask Riley. Of course Riley would know what really happened, and more important, she could trust Riley to tell her the uncensored, no-bullshit truth.

Riley leaned against a stack of wood, pushed her blue bangs out of her eyes, and began. “Well, people believed Hattie was a witch, right? That she had the power to see what was going to happen before it did. Her predictions often came true and it scared people. They believed that maybe she wasn’t just looking into the future but changing it somehow. That things happened because Hattie said they would.”

    Olive tried to imagine having this kind of power over people—the ability to make them believe you were capable of seeing into the future, shaping it even.

“One day, she warned everyone that the old schoolhouse would burn down. When it did, three children were killed. Hattie’s daughter was fine—she’d kept her out of school that day, which made Hattie look even more suspicious, right? So Hattie was blamed for the fire, as she’d been blamed for every bad event she’d predicted. See, people then, like now, I guess, are afraid of the things they don’t understand. They want something, someone, to blame.”

“Isn’t it interesting,” Helen said, “how little some things change?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Olive said impatiently. “So what happened to Hattie?”

“They hanged her.”

Helen made a little gasping sound. “Really?”

Riley nodded. “Half the town showed up after the fire at the schoolhouse. Kids had died and they were really pissed. They declared Hattie a witch and they hanged her from an old white pine that stood near the edge of the bog.”

“What year was this?” Helen asked.

“Nineteen twenty-four,” Riley said.

“Wow!” Helen said. “I’ve never heard of anyone being hanged for witchcraft that late. Most of the trials and executions were back in Puritan times.”

“I think it was pretty well covered up. People in Hartsboro weren’t exactly proud of what they’d done.”

“Where’s she buried?” Helen asked.

“No one knows for sure,” Riley said. “Though folks say she was dragged into the center of the bog and weighted down. That she lies there still and that’s what makes it a haunted place.”

“So, she’s in the bog?” Olive asked.

“Maybe,” Riley said.

“And the hanging tree? What happened to that?” Olive asked, trying to think of which tree it could be. There weren’t any big pines along the edge of the bog.

“They cut it down soon after,” Riley said. “Milled it into lumber. They actually used the beams to rebuild the schoolhouse.”

“The one they tore down last year?” Olive said.

“Yeah. Actually, I think I’ve still got a couple of the beams from it right here for sale.” She turned back toward the wood stacked on heavy steel racks.

    “No way!” Olive said. “Like, from the actual hanging tree?”

“That’s what people say,” Riley told them as she started looking at the tags stapled to the beams. “This one,” she said, pointing.

Helen came up, reached out to touch the beam, hesitated a second, then placed her hand on it, gave it a soft caress.

“This came from a tree from our land? From Hattie’s time?” she asked.

“I can’t prove it or give you a certificate of authenticity or anything, but I’m reasonably sure it did, yes. Then it helped frame the old one-room Hartsboro schoolhouse.”

The beam looked like all the others to Olive—old, a rich brown color, full of ax marks.

“It’s perfect,” Helen said. “It’s just what we need to be the header between the living room and kitchen.”

“No way!” Olive said. “You’re going to put the hanging tree beam in your house? What if it’s, like, haunted or something?”

Helen laughed. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she said. “But this beam…remember what I was telling you about, how they used to make lumber with just an ax? That’s what all these marks are from.” She ran her fingers over the face of the beam. “You can practically feel the history in it, can’t you?”

Olive put her hand on the beam, too, trying hard to imagine the tree it had once come from, standing at the edge of the bog; trying to imagine Hattie with a noose around her neck, how that tree was one of the last things she ever saw. And that tree had seen Hattie, too. Had held her weight, felt her last movements. Olive imagined there was some piece of Hattie in that tree, like a stain somewhere deep down inside it.