Amanda and I used to joke that it was her superpower, finding four-leaf clovers. I’ve never been any good at it myself, but she could stand over any given patch of clover, and, within only a minute or two, without fucking fail, spot at least two or three. And here were five from some spring or summer afternoon that I could not recall, only that shehad found them for me. I picked the violet. I can’t even remember now what led to the preservation of these particularclovers. I mean, if I’d saved every four-leaf clover Amanda ever found and gave to me, I’d have hundreds of the things. I didn’t even put them in the book, so I can only assume that Amanda did. For some reason lost to me, or never known to me, thesewere special. Maybe if Amanda were still alive, she’d know why. I could have picked up the phone and called her, and she would have laughed and told me, would have described that morning or evening, the circumstances that made these matter so much more than all the others.
I’ve spent so much energy casting Amanda as the villain, even though I know perfectly well that’s bullshit. It’s easier to recall the constant bickering, the minute wounds we inflicted upon each other, her low blows and my cheap shots, and incidents like her taunting me outside the Morewell Tunnel, than to tell the truth. The truth is so much more inconveniently complicated. But here were these five clovers and the violet stashed inside this book I’ve cherished since I was a kid, undeniable evidence that it wasn’t all hurtful, no matter how “toxic” her therapist might have deemed our relationship. Here was proof that a moment had existed when she loved me enough to put these tokens of good luck, which came so easily to her, but always eluded me, where she knewI would always have them.
I sat on the living room floor, and held the wax paper, and cried until my sinuses ached and there was nothing in me left to cry. I was terrified that Constance would come downstairs, and I’d have to try to explain, but she didn’t. And then I put Amanda’s keepsake back between pages 184 and 185, closed the book, and returned it to the bottom of the cardboard box.
In Chapter Five of Harvey’s manuscript, he relates an apparently well-documented incident from 1957 that bears an unnerving similarity to what happened to Constance and me on Sunday afternoon. An unnerving similarity, or a remarkable similarity, or both. This is new territory for me, and so I’m not entirely certain what adjectives are most appropriate. In all honesty, I’d pretty much resolved to stop reading the manuscript. I’d decided, before Sunday, to let Constance read it and satisfy whatever morbid curiosity motivates her, then deliver it to the sociologist in Kingston. The thing has begun to make me nervous, and before Sunday, I would have said it makes me nervous in no way that I can lay my finger on. Now, I can lay my finger on page 242, and point to the precise source of my unease — or one of the sources, as I am beginning to see that it all fits together somehow, even if I cannot yet fully articulate the extent of the nature of this interconnectedness.
On page 242, Harvey writes:
The odd case of Olivia Burgess bears discussing in detail, in part because it was reported in numerous newspapers, not only in Rhode Island and New England, but all across the country. Here we do not have to rely upon the frail pages of antique diaries or local folklore or turn to urban legends where the only sources that can be cited are the inevitable FOAFs. In my files, I have forty-seven separate newspaper and magazine accounts of the Burgess incident, all of them printed between October 17, 1957, and May 2, 1974, including a number of interviews with Ms. Burgess. Though a few of the periodicals in question may rightfully be considered suspect (the December 1963 issue of Fate, for example, and a particularly sensationalized piece in the September ’71 issue of Argosy), most of the reporting is straightforward and often outwardly skeptical of Ms. Burgess’ claims (many of the later accounts appear as “seasonal” Halloween-related pieces, neither taking the story seriously nor bothering to get the facts straight).
On the morning of Thursday, October 10, Olivia Burgess, a widowed 45-year-old native of Hartford, Connecticut, was visiting the Wight Farm as part of research for a book on the history of agricultural practices in pre-Revolutionary War New England. Having been told that there were remains of an old cider press located within easy walking distance of the house, at the base of a large tree somewhere near Ramswool Pond, Ms. Burgess set out on foot, alone, to see if she could confirm or deny the report. By all accounts, in the fall of 1957, the land between the farmhouse and the flooded quarry was still being kept clear, and the walk would surely have seemed a simple enough detour. However, the story she would eventually tell a friend back in Hartford, who urged her to repeat it to a local reporter, was anything but simple.
According to Ms. Burgess, she found the large stone situated at the base of the old red oak, just as it had been described to her by the landowner’s wife. She reported photographing the stone from several angles using a Brownie Bull’s-Eye camera. It was only when she’d finished and had headed back towards the house that her visit to the Wight place took a macabre turn. Olivia Burgess claimed to have become immediately disoriented, though she was certain from the position of the sun and the fact that the tree was visible behind her, that she had to be heading in the right direction. Also, she noted, she soon lost sight of the farmhouse, though it should have lain directly ahead of her, to her south.
“The longer I walked, the farther away from me the house appeared to get. It literally grew smaller as I approached, as though I were experiencing an inversion of parallax or stereopsis. The effect was not only frightening, but I soon became nauseated, almost to the point of vomiting.” Finally, the house vanished from sight completely and Burgess grew “very afraid, because I could still see the tree quite well whenever I looked back towards the pond.” After almost half an hour of trying to reach the house, she retraced her steps to the tree and tried once again to reach the farmhouse, with identical results.
“It was getting late,” she told The Hartford Courant, “and twilight was coming on. I became terrified that I would be unable to get back to the house before nightfall, even though it lay less than a hundred yards away.”
After a third failed attempt to walk back to the house, Ms. Burgess had the presence of mind to try a different tack. Though it was growing dark, she crossed the stone wall west of the tree and walked in that direction until she managed to reach a farm on Barbs Hill Road. She then caught a ride into Moosup Valley, and did not return for her car until the next morning, and then only with the company of a male acquaintance from Foster, as well as an off-duty fireman, the landowner, and another local (unnamed) farmer. She is quoted in the original Hartford Courant article as having said, “I know perfectly well that all four of them thought I was certifiable, and I told them a lot less than I’m telling you. But I wouldn’t go back out to that tree for a million dollars.”
When the film in her Brownie was processed by a photo lab a few days later, all the prints were returned black, devoid of any image whatsoever, as though the film had never been exposed.
There’s quite a bit more of this. In fact, Harvey devotes the majority of Chapter Five to the episode, to various interviews with Olivia Burgess ( néeAdams) and to numerous secondhand sources. He claims (and it does appear, from his account) that Burgess stuck to her story, as first reported, until her death in 1987 at age seventy-five. Some of the later versions of the tale, notably those appearing in Fateand Argosymagazines, took considerable liberties and embellished the story, as though it weren’t bizarre enough to start with. The Argosyarticle states that Burgess found fresh bloodstains on the stone and around the base of the old oak, and the Fatearticle not only claims that she was pursued by a “large black wolflike animal” during her ordeal, but tries to link the episode to both UFO s andthe nuclear accident in Windscale, Cumbria, which happened to occur that same day (and was considered the world’s worst reactor mishap until Three Mile Island).