The Curse

The Curse

Iris Caldwell may have never come across it or even noticed its existence if not for her golden retriever, Ben. It wasn’t so much the chance discovery of the dwelling itself, but that of the little old woman sitting on an apple box beside her front door smoking a pipe. The dog made his way cautiously toward her, and Iris, upon finding where the animal had got to, saw the woman talking quietly to Ben as she scratched its ears. Relieved and intrigued, Iris found herself looking into a wizened face that resembled an emaciated prune with the eyes of a child staring out in the oddest look of innocence and wonder.

“I’m sorry if he bothered you. It’s not like Ben not to come when I call.”

The old woman nodded in a shy, withdrawn way.

“No bother at all, at all.”

She looked toward Iris with a smile that indicated her teeth were few and far between.

The building was well camouflaged against the forest, and far enough away from the walking trails. A secret place. Iris didn’t think it was anywhere one would live. It resembled a hovel no less, but as her eyes traversed the sagging moss-covered roof, she saw a pipe protruding, a chimney, where faint wisps of smoke curlicued into the branches of a large spruce that sprawled over to one side. A small window was directly behind where the old woman was seated, and the front door was faded, paint-flecked and green, weathered away by the elements.

How could anyone possibly live here?

Stepping forward, Iris put out her hand to shake.

“Iris, Iris Caldwell, and that's Ben.”

She greeted Iris with a gnarled monkey paw of a hand. It was like rubbing up against the roughest of sandpaper.

“Nuala Duffy.”

“Pleased to meet you, Nuala.”

She nodded gently as she sucked on her pipe, but her gaze avoided direct eye contact.

“Do you, do you live around here, Nuala?”

With an almost shameful movement of her right thumb, Nuala indicated directly behind her.

“My home.”

Iris looked at the ancient crone-like creature then back toward the shack, and the disbelief written all over her face must’ve tickled the old lady because she started to chuckle. Which made Iris blush, embarrassed by her lack of tact. Iris then wondered if she shouldn’t be getting in touch with Social Services, doing her civic duty. It was appalling that a senior citizen should be forced to live in such frightful conditions.

Nuala tapped out her pipe on a stump and rose. She was petite, no more than five feet tall, her back was crooked and she looked fragile, stooped as she was through age.

“Have, have you lived here long?”

She nodded gently as she turned toward the washed-out green door.

Iris took in her clothing, which was threadbare, shabby. She wore a heavy brown

pleated woolen skirt that went down to her calves, an old fisherman’s blue sweater far too big for her small frame, a black shawl, and on her head was a tuque that resembled a combination of a Scottish tam and a tea-cosy in colours so blended together with the grime of living that there was no telling of the wools original colour. On her feet were what looked like well worn army boots, sans laces. The dog followed Nuala to her door.

“Dogs like me,” she said as she opened her door and quietly shuffled over the threshold.

“Nuala, do you live all alone out here?”

She stood in the doorway, but did not turn around.

“Husband died more’an...more’an...Long time ago...Jest me here now.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that...No, no children?”

“None still livin’.

Nuala shook her head with such sadness, a terrible sense of longing, that Iris felt it pierce her heart.

“God bless you, Nuala Duffy.”

The old woman turned and grinned, then closed the door without another word.

Crows cawed to each other from the canopy as Iris and Ben followed familiar pathways. The dog halted at a stand of spruce trees, excitedly barking, waiting for his Mistress to catch up and follow him. Iris smirked as she felt for the backpack filled with supplies she thought Nuala might appreciate. The dog had moved on, sniffing the earth and following a scent into the forest, well off the trail and covering much the same ground as Iris had stumbled over chasing him the previous day.

“Nuala! It’s Iris...Iris Caldwell...We were just passing...Nuala, are you home?”

All was silence apart from the gentle whine of her dog, who pawed at the door in expectation. It was Ben’s fervent pawing on the old door that inadvertently pushed it open, whereupon it creaked back upon its hinges like some rusty dungeon grille. The interior was dark and the air was cloying. What light there was passed through the small window at the front giving life to dust particles floating like clouds of lint. It was quite warm within. The ancient woodstove, a relic from the last century, had visible embers glowing through its metal gate. Nuala couldn’t be too far away. Iris didn’t venture over the threshold, but as her eyes adjusted to the shadows she observed a small iron bed covered with a patched-up quilt and numerous blankets resting against a wall that appeared to be papered over with yellowing news print in a crude attempt at insulation. There was a curtained area toward the back where she supposed the old girl had her kitchen, pantry. A rust-stained chamber pot was beside the bed. It was then that Iris realized that there was no indoor washroom, nor was there a sink of any kind, and therefore no running water.

My god, she thought, this is all so primitive.

She heard a clanking sound coming from behind. Looking over her shoulder, there was Nuala, standing with a dented metal bucket half-full of water.

“Oh, Nuala, good morning! We were just passing and I thought, thought you might need a few supplies...I hope you don’t mind...”

Iris took off her backpack and grasped at a couple of packets of crackers to show the old woman - who smiled, but otherwise remained silent. As way of an apology, Iris blamed Ben for opening the door.

She picked up the bucket and trudged toward her home. Before venturing inside, she turned to Iris.

“Would yous like a cuppa tea?”

“Yes, that would be lovely. Thank you.”

Nuala poured water into a blackened kettle; next she went to the curtained area and came back with a small Brown Betty teapot and a scratched up tin.

“We didn’t mean to bother you...I hope you don’t mind us coming around.”

“Don’t mind company...Gets lonely out here sometimes.”

“Well, Ben and I will visit whenever we can, now that we know that you’re here. If you don’t mind, that is.”

Nuala nodded then, after a pause, almost trance-like, said the following:

“Best yous watch the hawthorn tree. Go ‘round it. Don’t upset them.”

Iris looked at Nuala, somewhat incredulously, remembering having seen a red hawthorn tree on the way in. Waiting for the old woman to elaborate as she put two teaspoons of tea into the pot, then poured the boiling water in.

“Soon be ready. Needs to draw. Like my tea strong.”

Moving to the door, Nuala took a fold-up wooden chair from behind it, placing it beside the woodstove, indicating that this was where Iris should sit. The tea was black and strong. Iris thought it might be Orange Pekoe. They drank their tea quietly. Then she wondered if Nuala was perhaps too used to the quiet and lack of human interaction. Too many years in this wilderness she thought.

“Nuala, why did you say what you said about the hawthorn tree? What did you mean?”

“Wee folk live there. Their home. Best not to disturb, don’t take kindly to it. They be wicked sometimes.”

Iris stared at her, not exactly sure what she was talking about. Nuala looked at her with a faint glimmer of alarm.

“The wee folk. Their home there. Best leave ‘em be. She don’t like trespassers. Not the auld one in black. Not her. No, not her. Sly as the devil that one is. Evil.”

Then she clammed up and said nothing more, her gaze lost in the past.

Iris wasn’t sure if the old lady was waiting for her to finish her tea and leave. Was the visit now over?

“Thank yous,” she said, indicating the supplies.

“My pleasure, Nuala. Anytime you need anything, just ask.”

Nuala looked at Iris, then she reached under the pillow on her bed, taking out a creased photograph. With great care, she passed it over to Iris.

“My husband. Arthur.”

Iris was a little surprised to see a black and white picture, sepia in tone, of a good looking young man in military uniform. He possessed a stoic face without emotion, his dark eyes giving nothing away. The uniform he wore was from World War 1.

“Handsome man,” Iris said.

“Gone now...The war.”

Her words rang dry as she turned away.

Iris looked at the photograph more closely. There was a date on the back. 1916.

“Was, was your husband killed in the war?”

Nuala nodded, then put out her withered hand beckoning for the picture to be returned, which Iris dutifully did, watching as the old woman replaced it beneath her pillow with such tenderness, it was as if she were cradling not only his image but also a loving memory.

“Married six months. Got the telegram. Monday mornin’ it was, it was.”

Iris had to stifle a tear as the old woman’s palpable sadness got to her. Reaching over, she squeezed her hand.

“God bless you, Nuala Duffy.”

A faint smile spread across her roadmap of a face.

“Gotta rest now,” she said.

And with that Nuala, without standing on ceremony, curled up on her bed and turned to the wall. Iris placed a blanket over the old lady’s frail body. The sadness was almost overwhelming, but she kept thinking about the date, 1916, and why it just wasn’t adding up. Because by her reckoning, the woman lying on the bed ought to be one hundred and twenty, or thereabouts.

On the walk back she stopped beside the red hawthorn tree and lingered, remembering that odd warning the old woman had given her. As she walked around the tree she started to feel slightly uneasy, as if she were being observed. Ben began to growl, and the crows in the spruce trees were noisily spooking Iris with their cacophonous descants. Out of nowhere the wind picked up and the trees creaked in aching cries, stretching malevolent faces within the bark, adding discordant rhythms of uncertainty and anguish as the branches reached forward like spidery clawing fingers, scratching and moving with a flaying swiftness or a heaving bludgeoning threat. Underneath all of this was the sound of whispering, faraway voices caught in the wind, whipping up the fallen leaves in a dance that could quite easily be summoning up the dead. Unnerved, Iris didn’t hang around, she moved quickly, eager to get home.

It rained for two full days. October’s saturation taking out what was left of the autumn colours, leaving the bare bones of wintery nakedness in its sodden wake.

The photograph of that young soldier from The Great War came back again, but Iris couldn’t reconcile the date 1916, with his death and Nuala’s age. There were a lot of things that didn’t add up when thinking about her. It was almost as if she had walked out of a fairytale and wasn’t quite real. Then she thought about the witch in Hansel and Gretel and felt guilty for doing so. It began to dawn on her that lonely old women living in huts in the forest were easy scapegoats for superstitious irrational fear that centuries of Christians had tarred them with, and burned them for, too. They were not exactly helped by the Brothers Grimm’s fairy stories either.

As the red hawthorn tree came into view, Iris put the lead on Ben and skirted its perimeter, trying hard not to dwell in its shadow too long. Self-doubt mingled with fear is an unusual combination once it infects the blood stream, and her pacing quickened as she made her way to Nuala’s.

Iris arrived to see the old lady engaged in using a hatchet to cut up kindling; her frail spindle-like arms not much stronger than a stick of kindling themselves, going about a task that required a modicum of strength. Alarmed at her actions, fearing for Nuala’s safety, Iris took over the task as if it was nothing out of the ordinary, leaving the old girl to rest up on her apple box near the door, whereupon she took out her pipe and filled it with tobacco from a small pouch retrieved from somewhere on her person.

When Nuala suggested “Tea?” Iris was more than relieved, feeling the perspiration between her breasts moving down her torso after half-an-hour of vigorously chopping up kindling with a hatchet that could’ve done with a bit of sharpening.

“God bless you, Nuala! That would be grand and just what the doctor ordered.”

The old lady stopped still, frozen mid-step.

Ben got up and growled, his eyes darting toward the forest.

When Nuala turned to face Iris, she appeared changed, and Iris noted that her face was younger, as if the lines of age had leapt off her brow revealing something quite extraordinary. She stood before her in a growing breeze that blew the dank leaves willy-nilly in a minor tumult of the strangest of upheavals. It was as if the earth itself was shaking, shifting itself awake. Nuala was smiling at Iris, and it was then that Iris saw her beautiful white teeth that had never been there before now.

“You blessed me three times, Iris...I am freed from the fairy’s curse!”

Iris, stared in disbelief, frightened by the remarkable change occurring before her eyes, watching what was once an old crone disappearing into a kind of phantasmagoric kaleidoscope, whirling through the ages that tore through the decades as if they had never existed at all. Nuala’s clothing had all but disappeared in an incandescent mirage of lace and gossamer, and now she stood before Iris in a silk white dress, it could have been her wedding dress, a luminous beautiful young woman, her eyes shining again with youth and vitality, pouring out love beyond the comprehension of Iris, who was still holding on to a blunt hatchet and wondering what in God’s name was going on.

“Don’t you see? You broke the fairy queen’s spell, Iris! A stranger had to bless me three times, that was the key into the lock, an impossible task I’d always believed. She had condemned me to live at eternity’s gate, lost in time, without pity or salvation, to grow older and older season after season, but never to rest, never to depart this plain, cursed and forgotten...”

“...But, but I don't understand what’s going on, Nuala?”

The young woman laughed joyously.

“Thanks to you, your kindness, I’m free! Don’t you see that? Thank you, Iris! Thank you!”

She then indicated toward her hovel, and where once it had stood was now no more. Iris almost keeled over. There was nothing left but brambles and alders, no sign of anything man-made. Nature had reclaimed the world as its own again. As the leaves flew all around them in a flurry of fire-like colours, Iris started to feel quite dizzy, as if she were about to fall over. None of what was happening made any sense. The last thing she remembered was looking up at the young woman, opalescent in her white dress, disappearing further and further away, as if she were moving down a tunnel filled with the luminosity of unbridled happiness. Then there was darkness.

When Iris awoke, she opened her eyes to see the lolling snout of her golden retriever standing over her. Sitting up, she got her bearings again, realizing she was exactly where she remembered she’d got to, but strangely without certain visible landmarks that ought to be around here. She didn’t question having passed out, her blood pressure could get low, and it wasn’t that uncommon, especially if she’d been overdoing it, and Ben had certainly given her quite a chase. Standing a little shakily, she was certain this was the place where she’d happened upon that flattened wreck of a shed. As she moved around the brambles and alders something metallic caught her eye within the ground. Slowly pulling away at the earth and leaves, she found a battered old tin. The lid was still attached but rusted shut. She shook it gently and heard something moving within, possibly tea, and it made her smile with fondness, as if she were remembering something, some memory, she couldn’t quite grasp. An odd feeling of familiarity.

Passing the red hawthorn tree, Iris became aware of being watched. Glancing upward she saw a raven perched mid-way, its sharp black eyes trained on her. Ravens and crows were not unusual sightings on her walks with Ben, the coastal trail was full of them most days, but there was something about this raven that sent a shiver down her spine. Keeping a tab on her dog, who was snuffling a few yards ahead of her, Iris heard a strange cackling sound coming from behind her. Turning back to the hawthorn, instead of the raven perched up there, she saw a little old woman dressed in black with an anemic face and a smile like a demon. That cackle became a shrieking laugh, and the creature transformed itself back into the raven, cawing as if there would be no tomorrow.