The Red Tree

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I have visited the old Wight Farm and its “red tree,” there where the house squats ancient and neglected below the bogs that lie at the southern edge of Ramswool Pond. So, I have been. I have seen it for myself, but just once. Having accepted the task of editing The Red Tree for posthumous publication, it seemed, somehow, like a necessary pilgrimage. A sort of duty, required of me if I were to gain any insight at all into Sarah Crowe’s state of mind in those last months of her life. So, I went, and I even went alone.

I made the drive up from Manhattan in the spring, many months after receiving the typescript. The day was bright and crisp, a cider day in late April, the sky laid out wide and blue, and the land just beginning to go green with the first signs of spring. There was nothing the least bit foreboding about that day, but already my expectations had been colored by the pages of a suicide’s long ordeal and confession, and by the “secret history” of the Wight place that Sarah had discovered in yet another manuscript, this one having purportedly been left behind by the farmhouse’s previous tenant, a man who, as it happens, had also died there, half a decade before her arrival. The day of my visit fell, almost precisely, one year subsequent to Sarah’s arrival at the farm in April of 2008.

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