The Hawley Book of the Dead by Chrysler Szarlan Read Free Book Online

conversations with Carl Streeter; I drilled the girls that they must, too. I doubted that any of the locals were true magic fans. Even if they’d been to Las Vegas, even if they remembered the tragic death of a well-known magician, they probably wouldn’t guess who I was. They didn’t know why I’d moved to Hawley. And they wouldn’t know about my connection to the forest, to the Five Corners. None of them would remember me as a girl. I’d grown up in Williamstown, fifteen miles and a different world away. Only Jolon would remember, and he was long gone.
    I might have been the first Dyer woman in over two hundred years to use my husband’s name, but I’m also the last in a series of women with the name “Revelation” twining through a few hundred years of the Dyer family. I’d heard tales of them and their magic from the time I could understand speech.
    Thanksgiving was a harrowing time for my mother’s family, the time of year when the dark settled in and they contemplated the past, sowed it in the fertile ground of their children’s imaginations. Hearing the first murmured tales, my uncles and boy cousins would leave the table laughing at their witchy wives and mothers. But not me. I wanted to hear those stories. They were my birthright: I was a Revelation, after all.
    I was named, like the others, after the first Revelation in the New World. The great-granddaughter of Mary Dyer, who’d been hanged in Boston on the first day of June in 1660, for her Quaker proselytizing. Mary Dyer’s sons and daughters headed to Pennsylvania, where Quakers were better tolerated than in Puritan Massachusetts. That first Revelation’s grandparents were among them. But New England roots remained strong. Decades later, when Revelation herself was suspected in the Mount Holly,Pennsylvania, witch scare of 1740, she fled with her family to Massachusetts. To the place that became Hawley Five Corners.
    The first Revelation and her family were never seen again in Mount Holly. But Revelation’s sister Prophet received a letter the following year, in the spring of 1741. The letter said only, “Come to us. Travell the Massachusetts Western Highway and aske for the Hawley Five Corners as you go. You will finde us here, where we live in safety and peace.” Prophet never went, and died that year under mysterious circumstances. There were no other letters, but Revelation’s family almost certainly founded the town of Hawley Five Corners, “Hawley” an alternate spelling of their old Pennsylvania town. That is what we knew from the oral history of our family. Why the town had been abandoned didn’t figure in the family tales, only Revelation’s part in its founding, and the stories of her descendants.
    My Nan still owned the houses at Hawley Five Corners, yet had never gone to live in them. But I was bound to Hawley in another way. When I was a young girl, Hawley Five Corners was my own secret town, mine and Jolon’s. Jolon Adair was my best friend, then my first love. Every Saturday my parents would drive me to the Adairs’ house in East Hawley, and we’d ride their ponies. From the time we were big enough to saddle the ponies ourselves and ride into the forest, the abandoned village at the intersection of five roads had been our dream town. In those years we were growing up, vagueness was acceptable; parents had been lulled into the complacency of believing nothing lurked in wait for their children. We never told where we rode, that we’d eat our picnic lunches in that forsaken place. We grazed our horses among the abandoned houses while we ate our sandwiches, and hawks drifted in lazy circles overhead.
    When we were children we were quiet, almost reverent. Years later, we talked and laughed, smoked the cigarettes Jolon stole from his father’s pack of Chesterfields, and kissed among the lilies by the church, or on the steps of the white house with the tangled lilacs that would become
my
house. Then we’d ride to Pudding