Black Cat Weekly #8

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5The House On Graveyard Head

WHEN Linda slid into the back seat of the station wagon with Steve, she still thought her ears had been playing her tricks.

“Your mother didn’t really say Graveyard Head, did she?”

“Sure she said Graveyard Head. That’s the name of the headland where the Farr house is.” Steve chuckled at Linda’s incredulous face. “Cheerful sort of address, isn’t it?”

“But why?” Linda demanded. “For goodness’ sake, why?”

“Because the Farrs put their graveyard along the shore at the top of the ledges,” Steve explained. “You couldn’t miss it from the water. It’s all tangled up in vines and bayberry bushes so you can hardly find it now, but Grandfather said ships beating up Merriconeag Sound in the old days used to steer their course by the Farr headstones.”

“I still don’t get it,” Linda said in bewilderment. “Why didn’t they use a cemetery like other people?”

“But there wasn’t any regular burying ground when the Farrs settled here,” Steve told her. “All the early settlers had family graveyards, and a lot of them kept on using them even after they built a Meetinghouse in 1758. You would have, too, if you’d had to lug a heavy coffin five miles over rough trails to the church ground in Center Harpswell.”

Linda laughed. “Maybe I would, though I’d never have guessed it if you hadn’t told me. I can’t seem to picture families living in the same house in the same place hundreds of years. Down home in New York hardly anybody we know was even born in the city. Anyway, if I’d been a Farr, I’d have got rid of that graveyard name in a hurry.”

Steve grinned at her. “You’d have had a swell job on your hands. Fifty years from now Grandfather’s house will still be the ‘Lorenzo Purchas place’ even if Dad suddenly sells it to you tomorrow. Besides, the name fits. Wait till you get a look at that house on the Head.”

By that time, the station wagon was turning out of Juniper Point and starting along the main road on Harpswell Neck. Dr. Cobb barely crawled. Half his carload was giving him directions while they hunted for the break in a tangle of bushes that marked the old entrance to Dr. Sutton’s property.

“There it is, about ten feet in front of you.” Captain Pel pointed to the right of the road. “Better park where you are, Dr. Cobb. There’s no earthly use trying to turn in on the Head. Dr. Sutton’ll need a bulldozer before a car’ll navigate that road again. There’s a footpath, though; duck hunters and berrypickers have kept it open after a fashion.”

Following his lead, they plunged through the bushes, strung out in single file. Steve and Linda brought up the rear. Bayberry thickets and scrub growth hemmed them in on both sides, and overhead, wind-twisted birches nearly locked branches. Linda hardly took a step without turning an ankle or getting tangled up in blackberry creepers.

“Those Farrs certainly had sense,” she admitted. “I’d have made two graveyards right under my front porch before I’d carry anything bigger than a pillbox over a trail like this. You don’t suppose Waity would like to lend me that nice stiff horse collar he’s got on his ankle, do you? His foot’s the only one that’s safe.”

But the narrow rutted path finally opened into a pine woods where the traces of the old road were easier to follow.

“Going’ll be better in a minute,” Captain Pel promised. “The Head’s so rocky it won’t support much except juniper and berry bushes. That’s what made it so good for a garrison in the old days—not much grass to set afire and no cover for the French and Indians.”

But Linda was in no state of mind to brood over the past. She could start thinking about history if she reached Dr. Sutton’s house without a broken ankle, and she continued to pick her way gingerly until she emerged intact from the woods. Then she stopped to stare across the headland at the T-shaped old Farr house, its crossbar facing south down the Bay to the open sea and its tail of barn and additions stretching northward.

“See what I meant?” Steve asked, and she nodded slowly. If there was ever a headquarters for a ghost convention, it was that gaunt, weather-beaten old place with its doors and windows boarded tight and the sea gulls roosting on its chimneys.

“Bright and cheery all right!” Steve said as they started after the others down the field. “When I was in fifth grade, a gang of us used to come over here just before dark and scare ourselves half to death. Jim Moody had nightmares all night because we dared him to stay alone on the back porch fifteen minutes.”

“What did you expect him to have?” Linda demanded. “Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Addams probably dreamed that house up between them. Steve Purchas, if you get more than six inches away from me when we’re inside, I know I’ll drop dead and haunt you!”

But by the time the pair of them had caught up with the rest, the atmosphere around the Farr house had grown so practical that any self-respecting ghost would have taken flight, squalling, with the outraged sea gulls, from the roof. Four men were prowling from one side to another, tapping framework for the hollow tune of rotten wood, and on the front porch Mrs. Purchas was prodding and poking at the floor boards.

“They’ll still hold us over there by the door,” she announced. “You can get busy with that crowbar, Steve.”

The sound of ripping wood brought the men hurrying up the steps, ready to lend a hand, but Steve was not having much trouble. Rusty nails and screws simply broke off under pressure. It was the door itself that presented the real problem. In the end, they had to force it because the lock was so badly corroded. Then Dr. Sutton pushed it wide, and they crowded after him, peering eagerly over one another’s shoulders. Even with only the door open, light streamed ahead of them down the wide hall, and they could see how meticulously Patience Farr had prepared her home for safekeeping before she sailed on her last ill-fated voyage. Yellowed dust sheets covered settles and tables, and on the wall each picture wore a newspaper blanket.

“How Dr. Sutton’s grandmother must have loved her house to take care of it this way,” Linda exclaimed impulsively.

“Loved it and had to leave it again and again to sail with Jude,” Mrs. Purchas said, nodding. “Just as Jude’s mother before her had loved it and left it to sail the seven seas. Farrs were born at sea and died at sea, Linda, but the Head was always home.”

Naturally, upstairs was too dark to explore, but they looked as best they could through every room on the first floor, barking their shins on furniture and stirring up clouds of dust, before they wandered down the hall again to the front door. The shrouded pictures on the wall had roused Linda’s curiosity more than anything else.

“What do you suppose they are?” she asked Steve as the rest trooped out ahead of them.

“Family portraits and pictures of the Farr ships, I guess,” he said. “Most of the old houses around here are full of them.”

Sunlight was streaking across one picture right in front of them, and Linda reached up to tuck its wrapper more securely behind the frame. “Watch it,” Steve warned her, but the paper had already crumbled under her touch, and she looked at him in dismay.

“Never mind,” he said. “Go ahead and pull the rest off. We can wrap it up again. Waity’s got tonight’s paper stuck in his pocket. I’ll go swipe a piece of that.”

Left alone a minute, Linda removed the last dusty shreds and studied the picture in delight. It was a portrait of an oddly beautiful girl with a cluster of flaming red curls in the nape of her neck and strange greenish lights in her eyes. She’s only a little older than I am, Linda thought, but she’s not nearly as tame. Maybe she was born in a storm at sea. She leaned forward quickly to read the name “Loraney Farr” on a brass plate. Then she rewrapped the picture in the newspaper that Steve brought her and they strolled on outside.

“You’ll want electric lights and plumbing, I suppose,” Dr. Cobb was saying when they found the others. “What about water? Will you drill a well?”

“If I have to, of course,” Dr. Sutton said, “but there used to be a wonderful spring on the place according to my mother. Maybe one of the Purchases can tell us what’s happened to it.”

“You mean the Witch Spring, Dr. Sutton,” Steve told him. “It’s still the best spring anywhere around. I’ve been here berrying when it hadn’t rained all summer and half the wells were dry, but the Witch was flowing the same as ever. She’s over here.” He led the way toward a green thicket a dozen yards further. “The springhouse tumbled down years ago though. You’ll have to build that over again.”

Trailing along after them, Linda listened interestedly. What she wanted to have accounted for was that name. “Would somebody please stop just long enough to tell me why it’s called the ‘Witch Spring’?” she asked.

“Because the Farrs were smart enough to have a witch in their family,” Mrs. Purchas said, smiling. “She tapped the ground one day and created it. At least, that’s the way the story goes. Before that, the Farrs had a dug well and it was always running dry like everybody else’s.”

They stood awhile watching the water flow steadily over the worn silvery stones, and Linda’s eyes grew dreamy. “Perhaps she’s still lurking around her spring, Dr. Sutton,” she said. “Maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll see her riding her broomstick across the face of the moon with her nose in a big shadowy hook and her white hair flying.”

“Then she won’t be our witch, and I’ll have to chase her for trespassing,” the doctor protested. “There was nothing toothless and scraggly about the Farr witch, I’ll have you know! Ours was nineteen and redheaded.”

“A disturbin’ woman,” Waity added promptly. “That’s what my great-great-grandfather called her in his diary. Loraney, her name was. She was living on Bailey Island yonder, time she married Shubael Farr.”

He pointed at the rocky shore across Merriconeag Sound, but Linda was paying no attention.

“Why, I’ve just seen her back there at the house,” she cried. “No wonder she didn’t look as tame as I do.”

At Dr. Sutton’s startled expression, Steve couldn’t keep his face straight, and Linda chuckled.

“Her picture’s hanging in the hall,” she explained. “She’s absolutely gorgeous. I can understand Shubael all right, but what made a witch decide to capture him, Dr. Sutton? Was he supposed to be fabulous?”

“Girl in every port, according to the family stories,” the doctor assured her, “but frankly I suspect Shubael was a man of business. I have his old account books, and for a whole year he’d entered regular payments to Loraney opposite the notation ‘spells for favorable winds.’ Perhaps he decided it would be more economical to marry his witch. Then fixing up fair winds for his voyages would fall under the head of ‘wifely duties.’”

But Linda refused to listen. “I don’t believe it,” she announced indignantly. “Loraney bewitched Shubael for some good reason of her own. She brewed brews and mixed potions.”

“Strawberry hair likely was enough brew,” Waity said drily. “It beats all how unsettled most men can get when a redheaded woman crosses their bow.”

Dr. Sutton laughed. “As long as she fixed up this spring for me, I don’t mind how unsettled Shubael managed to get. Anyhow, poor Loraney’s spells must have failed her. The first voyage she and Shubael sailed together, neither they nor their ship came back.”

The general conversation turned to practical details of piping water into the Farr house, and Steve pulled Linda aside. “Loraney’s headstone’s down near the shore with the others,” he said, and she fell hastily into step at his side.

“What’s her headstone doing there, though, if she was lost at sea?” she demanded.

“Families put them up anyway,” Steve explained. “After a ship was so long overdue they had to give up hope, they ordered a headstone with ‘Lost at Sea’ on it. There are plenty of that kind with nobody under them on Graveyard Head. The Farrs were all sailors—fishermen and whalers and clipper-ship men.”

He pushed tangle after tangle of myrtle and wild grape aside, hunting until he found the stone that he wanted. “Here it is,” he said, LORANEY. WIFE OF SHUBAEL FARR. LOST AT SEA 1798. AGED 19. The minister’s supposed to have come galloping right down here to order the witch’s stone pulled out, but it didn’t get him anywhere. The Farrs just said they put headstones up for Farrs regardless, and that was that—except they didn’t go to Meeting for quite a spell!”

Linda looked around her. At her feet slept generations of seafaring men and women. Behind her, the lilacs they had planted guarded the old wall, built stone upon stone from their rocky acres. Before her, the Bay they loved slapped little waves against ledges they had climbed.

She turned eagerly to Steve. “I hope Dr. Sutton clears away the weeds and tangles. I want the stones to be visible again so sailors on the Sound nowadays can know how much the Farrs loved the sea.”

Steve looked down at her in surprise. He had not expected her to understand why the Farrs lay sleeping as close to the Bay as they could get. “We’ll work on Dr. Sutton,” he said. “Just lilacs and flowers aren’t enough for seafaring people like them.”