The Hire
By Paul Cameron Brown
"Corn's high this year," chirped the old woman, almost with a cackle. "All's the better for them to hide in," the old woman was continuing, her face a brazen mixture of distain and contempt.
"These come to the house, late model cars, too, and just wait. Lord if I knows what for," her voice trailing off, reedy, almost water besotted much as the likeness of an old boot, the colour of her wrinkled skin.
Old Meg was an authority of sorts in these parts. Seems she had had her share of the strange and eventful in her time.
At the age of sixteen she had married. I'm speaking now of early in this century, just as the car was making its appearance in this part of eastern Ontario. Right away her new husband and she had bought a farm some eight miles distance from Kincaid off Palace Road.
"Yeh, well we weren't in that house morn a week when the strangest things began happenin'." That was the extent of her explanation as to why she and her hubbies of a few months made the journey into town to stay at her in-laws not once but every night of their married life for over forty years.
Meg was a recalcitrant soul. Probably had she been born three centuries earlier folks would have said worse. Certainly she said little and allowed you to say scarce more. Why, even now she was staring at you, just like her custom offering only a pittance of facts as to why there occurred an exodus of cars to the lone side-road by the big weathered house. A cynic would have begged the hire of something illicit to summon numbers in that quantity. Old Meg let it be known it was something more profound than that. Her every manner convinced you comments as such were guilty of the grossest understatement.
Weird lights, barnyard animals could be seen in the house and a hulk of a rusted car in the debris of a lawn. She was a widow of 18 years with no one to call her home. To listen to the neighbours tell it, they were alarmed, best as they could recollect, when the old Ford lumbered toward town regular as ever each night at dusk.
"What ails those two," folk along the Palace would say. "You'd think new marrieds wouldn't care to be disturbed. Maybe Humboldt's right when he says there's some awful going's on there."
Rumors don't substantially change, I thought. Take, for instance, stories people tell of old Lake on the Mountain in these parts: the underground reservoir replete with ghostly lights, bottomless channels and of a lake not giving up its dead. It was alarming alright to sit across that expanse of water and see not a boat or hear a sound. Almost as eerie as standing here looking at Meg talk of Humboldt's forecasting eclipses back in '32. How he'd been right, dead right, each time with his divining rod.
Meg was still on the subject of Humboldt. Seems as for all his questions he had met a bitter end. To hear Meg tell it, one evening after the leaves were down - a cold evening at that - Humboldt, a recluse and bachelor recently separated from a sister with whom he had lived, was fetching wood. Being old and a careless housekeeper, the old man tripped and split his lantern. They found his charred remains near the door of the woodhouse next morning. Meg had seen the flames light the November sky. To hear her tell of it, that night had seen an uncommonly large number of cars on the back roads off the Palace. Meg was not drawing direct inferences, but I could see in the space between her eyes a sly connection.
She was silent on such things, drew the conversation back then forth to peculiarities surrounding the Ashley home. Meg was an Ashley. Since her husband's death, she had stayed in the family home not only days but those dreaded nights as well. I pressed for explanations.
"But if you wouldn't stay a night with Charlie when he was alive - the two of you - when you were married and had the companionship, why would you dare now? If you made the journey into town each night religiously for forty years only staying here during the daylight hours, how can you bring yourself to remain now?"
The question seemed logical enough, but seemed to irritate her. But was I trespassing too indelicately on the subject of the late model cars or probing into a veiled past too transparently?
"Yourn a relative of Conrad's," - Jean's I heard her say. To my surprise, I told her my aunt had often taken me by this house on the way to Kincaid. As a child, the house in its unkempt stage had made a lasting impression on me. Brooding, enormously lonesome, the derelict house slouched against a weathered fence in a loathsome fashion. Overcast skies or darkness gave it the appearance of containing as many goblins or trolls as fancy might see fit to inhabit, I thought of a magnificent set of ruins, something Hawthorne might have used for his Seven Gables or a nigh perfect setting for a decadent family in the throes of their own poverty - some chilling Gothic charmer!
What was more, the chief inhabitant of such a home seemed straight off the grill of the gingerbread lady or the hag who forced her fattening children to hold out fingers to see if they were plump enough for the oven. Sufficiently chilling for a precocious mind - the place guaranteed sleeplessness for nights on end. Visions of the old woman, cat in hand, standing on the deck of her flag ship-like house, ghastly in its gloom, rifled through my consciousness. The abundance of animals and the witchy control she exerted over them, simply reinforced the spell over an impressionable child. Every detail was complete, right down to that proverbial one decayed tooth dangling from the centre of her facial cavity. One could only expect her to jabber in cackles instead of sentences for her memory to be entrenched deeper in every aspect.
More startled now than taken back, I summoned my organizational abilities to make sense of what she had imparted to me.
"Jean ever tell you of Direxa?"
The name jolted me. I summoned forth the pieces in a haphazard way. An old woman who traveled miles from Hay Bay into town to sell her produce sped across my mind. Consistent to the end, she sauntered through drudgery and routine until they claimed her sanity.
"Must be the climate in these parts," I found myself saying drily in the back of my throat. Meg was staring at me. I made an attempt to put my eyes off her.
I nodded my agreement indicating I had heard the name.
"Yes, Direxa. Of good Puritan stock, I added."
She spoke no agreement this time and told me to consult her if I had questions.
"Direxa, she's long dead!"
"I know, she still talks to me," Meg whispered turning to walk away.
In a typical fashion, I thought of the lore concerning the supernatural adolescent reading had brought me - the Superstition mountains of Arizona, dream time and the Darling range in Australia's north, the Snowmen, the Wendigo tales of the Coast Salish Indians. These, it seemed, were not more exotic than the home spun tales of my province's eastern townships, Lennox and Addington. Those two ghostly minutemen drilling in the marshes of the Ontario Coomb, Canada's answer to the Fens district of East Anglica. Strange, much as my presence here volunteering information to a woman who freely talked in lurid details concerning poor Humboldt's death but not of cars that visited these roads at night, clairvoyance, poltergeists or spells that bound her to a second home.