Dreamthorp Read online

  Scarcely five hundred yards away from the Dreamthorp Playhouse, but many hundreds of years before, a group of men stopped beside a spring. One-Who-Runs-With-Deer fell onto the cushion of leaves that covered the floor of the forest and unwound the strips of leather from around the wound on his leg, while Many-Arrows brought him water in cupped hands. One-Who-Runs-With-Deer drank it and then examined the hatchet gash.

  "It is bad," Many-Arrows said. One-Who-Runs-With-Deer nodded. "But the one who struck the blow is dead."

  "You need rest. You cannot go on."

  "I know. I shall stay here. I shall fight them and give you time to run."

  "You are Chief of the Alligewi," Many-Arrows said. "We will not leave you."

  They had been running for many weeks, ever eastward, to escape the arrows and hatchets of the tribe they had allowed to cross their land. It had all begun so innocently. There had been a party of three families who had asked to establish homes in the lands of the Alligewi, tallest and strongest of people. One-Who-Runs-With-Deer refused, but gave them leave to pass their mighty river, the Namaesi Sipu, and the forests of the Alligewi beyond in order to seek a land farther east.

  Then more of these small men, who called themselves Lenape, came and requested permission for their tribe to pass the river, which One-Who-Runs-With-Deer granted. But when the Alligewi saw their many thousands as they crossed over the water, they grew alarmed, fearing that the Lenape had a force strong enough to attack the Alligewi. One-Who-Runs-With-Deer called his tribe to arms, and they attacked the unarmed Lenape who had crossed the river. Young and old, braves, women, and children were killed, and the Namaesi Sipu turned red with Lenape blood. Those on the western side were told that any Lenape who tried to cross the river or who came into the land of the Alligewi would meet the same fate.

  But the Lenape, as One-Who-Runs-With-Deer was quick to learn, were not children in the art of war. Made furious by the slaughter at the river, they enlisted the aid of the Mengwe, a tribe which had always coveted the rich forests of the Alligewi, and a great war came to the land, a war which lasted many years and killed many braves.

  Slowly the Alligewi were beaten back, reduced by the greater forces of their enemies, and the large, flat mounds that covered the Alligewi dead marched like giant footprints toward the east, where the tribe was constantly being pushed. At last the only recourse for the Alligewi lay in abandoning their lands completely and fleeing down the great river to the south to unknown lands. A party of one hundred of the fiercest Alligewi braves, led by One-Who-Runs-With-Deer, would lead the vengeful and pursuing enemy eastward, away from the handfuls of survivors who would move south. The plan was for the hundred, made swifter by the absence of the old and weak, to elude their pursuers and eventually join the others in the south.

  But the Alligewi had not reckoned on the speed and energy of the pursuing Lenape, who were determined to wipe from the earth all who belonged to the hated tribe of Alligewi. Skirmishes had diminished the band of a hundred to a mere twenty, the swiftest and strongest of the braves, many of whom were wounded but none so badly as One-Who-Runs-With-Deer.

  The chief drank again from Many-Arrow's hands, and knew that he could run no more. He would fight and die where he lay, in this stand of tall pines and oaks, near this quiet spring, with water that tasted cooler and sweeter than the precious water of the Namaesi Sipu. It seemed a fine place to die, and he hoped to take many Lenape with him, if they had the courage to close with him and not simply shoot him with arrows from afar.

  "We will not leave," Many-Arrows repeated, his mouth grim.

  "If you do not join the others in the south, who will plow the women and make new sons? Who will keep the Alligewi alive?" asked One-Who-Runs-With-Deer.

  "We will not leave our chief. We run no more. We fight."

  "They come!" shouted Eye-Black-As-Crow, who had clambered to the top of an oak, and now dropped to the carpet of dead leaves. "Many hundreds of them." Eye-Black-As-Crow was young, scarcely a man, but he had proven himself in as many battles as One-Who-Runs-With-Deer had fought when he was made chief. There was no fear in the young man's dark eyes, and One-Who-Runs-With-Deer felt pride as Eye-Black-As-Crow drew his hatchet from his belt. "I will kill many," the boy told the chief of the Alligewi.

  The braves formed a circle facing outward, and One-Who-Runs-With-Deer harangued them, saying, "Fight bravely! Take their lives! Remember how they killed our women and children, our fathers and mothers! We are the last warriors of the Alligewi! Let our hate drag them into death with us!"

  One-Who-Runs-With-Deer kept shouting, and his cries grew more shrill with the agony of staying erect, as the wound in his leg opened anew, sending warm blood over his moccasined foot, turning the dead leaves black beneath him. He looked down, saw the dark blood pooled in cups of leaves, and heard the screams of the Lenape as they ran out of the brush. The last thing he yelled to his braves was "Darken the ground with their blood!"

  The battle lasted less than ten minutes. At the end of it all, twenty of the Alligewi lay dead. But their deaths did not stop the hundreds of Lenape from pursuing their vengeance. They hacked with their stone hatchets over and over at the unmoving Alligewi, hewing off arms, legs, and heads until not one Alligewi body lay whole, and their own brown limbs and faces were coated with blood.

  Then the Lenape danced and laughed and fell down on the ground, and finally tended to their own wounds. Miraculously, not a single Lenape had been killed that day, though some would later die of the wounds they had suffered.

  The Lenape chief asked the shaman what should be done with the bodies of the Alligewi, and the shaman, who had been called Old-With-Wisdom ever since his twentieth winter, told the chief that they should be buried in a large grave, but with no mound to mark the place.

  "Let them and their name be forgotten," said Old-With-Wisdom.

  In the middle of the stand of trees the Lenape dug a pit wide and deep enough to hold the twenty Alligewi, and dropped the pieces of the bodies into it, with no regard for the direction in which the heads faced. When the pit was filled in, the shaman took a piece of stone from a leather bag that hung from his belt. Its sharp edges had been smoothed, and the pointed end rounded and chipped until it roughly resembled a squat human figure. The old man held it aloft.

  "Here their bones will lie," intoned Old-With-Wisdom, "until the stars fall into the rivers. And their spirits will lie with them, torn and divided as their bones. One-Who-Makes-Spirits-Lie-Still will keep them in the earth."

  He knelt and set the piece of quartz in the center of the turned earth, and muttered several words none of the braves could hear. Then he rose, turned, and walked toward the west. The others followed, leaving only the grave behind in the stand of trees, the first human habitation in what would later come to be known as Dreamthorp.

  Soon the fresh earth was enriched by what lay buried below and as the days and months passed, seedlings grew from the blood-rich soil, and trees grew from the seedlings. Oaks and pines were the descendants of the Alligewi. The roots drank deeply of their flesh, and what had become of the strong muscles of the braves, the iron will of their chief, passed upward through the trunks, into the branches, the trees reproducing, growing more of their own kind.

  Through the centuries the trunks broadened, the branches reached the sky, the pines and oaks multiplied until the stand was now a mighty grove filled with life, life which the Alligewi and their frustrated hatred had sustained. And through those centuries One-Who-Makes-Spirits-Lie-Still remained faithfully over the grave, the rains and the soft earth eventually covering it, drawing it ever deeper into the ground, until at last it was submerged, buried above the braves whose vengeful spirits it was intended to subdue forever.

  And many years later the trees fell to the saws of white men. They were cut down, and the pine was planed into planks and made into cottages, the oak into chairs and beds and tables, and the people who lived in the little houses, who ate off the tables, sat on the chairs, and slept in
the beds never knew what had fed the wood, never knew what they harbored, or what they lived in.

  The resemblance to a human figure was, of course, remote, but the intention was evident.

  —Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp

  The trees had been cut from the grove in the first few years of the twentieth century, when most of the summer cottages were built. That was the time when the Eastern Pennsylvania Chautauqua, which had its home in Dreamthorp, was at its most influential, and new dwellings seemed to go up daily. The appetite for wood was enormous, and the grove was filled from dawn to sunset with men felling trees, lopping off limbs, and planing planks at the ramshackle sawmill that had been erected nearby. As a place of constant activity, it was an ideal location for Sam and Esther Hershey, over eighty years later, to canvas with their metal detectors.

  The Hersheys were retired—Sam from a welding line, Esther from a life of housewifery and child rearing—and they had taken up metal detecting as a hobby, never expecting it to become the focus of their lives. But it did. In good weather and bad, year round, they were out with their matched set of Coin-Finder IIIs and their bags full of digging implements. Each had several jars full of coins and trays full of tokens and memorabilia to prove their expertise. They had milked dry the obvious sites around Dreamthorp—the old park now gone back to brush, the place where the railroad station used to be, the sparsely wooded area where the annual Dreamthorp Art Show was held every June—and they were in desperate need of some undiscovered burial ground of old coins and buttons.

  Charlie Lewis, on whom the Dreamthorp Playhouse would fall the day after Sam and Esther mined the grove, had told the Hersheys about the former lumbering site, which, not having been used as a source of lumber for fifty years, was now overgrown and forgotten. Forgotten, that is, by everyone except Charlie Lewis, who prided himself on his encyclopedic knowledge of Dreamthorp.

  Whenever Charlie wasn't listening to his collection of jazz, he was tracking down some bit of information that would add to his overall trove of facts about the community. All his life he had lived twenty miles away in Harrisburg, the closest major city to Dreamthorp. Although he always liked the tiny community, and attended a number of concerts and shows there every year, he had not become truly infatuated with it until his wife died the year before he was due to retire.

  Following the first concert he went to after her death—the Blackbird Jazz Band in the playhouse—he had walked up and down the narrow streets in the darkness, the candles and Japanese lanterns from the cottages giving him enough light to guide his steps. He had felt more at peace with himself than he had at any time in the weeks before, answering the greetings of the people who sat on their porches and said hello to the aging stranger walking their streets, not at all suspicious, but warm, welcoming even, and he decided that Dreamthorp would be the place to which he'd retire.

  As he took on the role of resident, he also took on that of historian as well, going through county records, newspaper morgues, and more obscure private sources to recreate the reality of what Dreamthorp had been. His sincerity and zeal earned him a reputation even among those who had lived in the town their whole lives, and he became one of them, totally accepted into the fabric of the village.

  He also became the logical one for Sam and Esther Hershey to see when they wanted to find a new digging spot. They had met Charlie Lewis when they were hunting coins on the beach of the lake, had chatted briefly, and Charlie had offered to tell them about some possible places to hunt. Now the three of them sat on Charlie's porch at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning, cool there among the trees, and he told the Hersheys how to find the lumber site.

  "Go down Emerson to Pine Road," he told them, "Turn to your left, and between Thoreau and Whittier there's a footpath. Follow it for three or four hundred yards, and you'll find a dried up spring and a lot of fairly young white oak mixed in with some white pine. North of the spring is where most of the felling took place. There's a large spot that's still pretty bare where they had the sawmill equipment."

  "Anybody ever hunt there before?" asked Sam Hershey suspiciously.

  "I assume not since Daniel Boone. A year or two ago I personally went down there and found pieces of machinery lying on the ground, so I knew that was where the sawmill was. But I don't think anyone ever did any digging for bottles or anything. Hell, hardly anyone knows about it. And you are sworn to secrecy, of course," Charlie finished dryly.

  Esther Hershey giggled.

  "I do not jest, my dear woman. And it goes without saying that a third of all gold bars you find will be donated to the Charles Lewis Dreamthorp Preservation Foundation and Chowder Society. But I think it more likely that you'll turn up a lot of nails and gears."

  "Oh, we'll probably find coins, if that many people worked there," said Esther.

  "For many summers," Charlie said, "that grove echoed to the sounds of numerous workmen. None of whom had any money to speak of."

  Esther giggled again. "I'd be happy with a few Indian heads."

  Charlie shook his head. "I know of no definite Indian intrusion into the area, and even if there was, their heads would long since be decayed."

  "Well, we'll see what we can find anyway," Sam said, chuckling. "And if we find any buried treasure, we'll cut you in, Charlie."

  "Oh, forget it. I wouldn't mind seeing what you turn up, but anyone could've located the site who had three hundred hours and a ton of elbow grease to spare. The nails are all yours. Now if you'll excuse me, Bix Beiderbecke awaits."

  The Hersheys were as excited as children as they made their way to the grove. They walked in shade, occasional sunlight coming through the roof of leaves to dapple the narrow street down which they scurried. But for all their excitement, Dreamthorp was somnolent in the June warmth. Saturday mornings in summer were a time of peace. People slept late, lolled in bed when they did awake, and lingered long over their breakfast coffee and magazines. A few people began to stir outside by eleven, and at noon activity began in earnest—painting latticework, repairing shingles, sweeping leaf dust from porches, trimming back limbs that encroached too closely upon the second-floor window screens—all the jobs that living in the uniquely sylvan community made necessary.

  But now, only a few people saw the Hersheys walking to the forest, and of those only Cyrus and Nancy Haldeman acknowledged them by waving to them from their porch swing where they were having coffee. The Hersheys waved back and grinned out of self-consciousness at not being residents of Dreamthorp, as though only certified cottage owners could have digging privileges in the woods.

  A few minutes after passing the Haldemans' place, Sam and Esther found the path that Charlie had told them about. It was narrow and overgrown in places, but neither had any trouble walking it. They came upon the clearing several hundred yards east.

  "Here's the spring," Sam told Esther, pointing to an arch of weathered stone that now covered only a patch of dried ground. "And all this new growth—this has got to be the place."

  They turned on their machines, awkward metal devices that looked like a broomstick with a pie plate at one end and a recipe box covered with switches and dials at the other. They put on their earphones and went to work, holding the machines like scythes, walking in closely articulated patterns, sweeping the ground before them as they went. Back and forth the white, round discs of the metal detectors moved, like spaceships cruising over strange terrain searching for lost crewmen.

  Now and then Sam or Esther would hear a rising beep in their earphones and stop, then move the disc in slower swathes until its center was directly over the place where the noise was loudest. The machine would be set aside, and a metal spike plunged into the ground and rotated. Then the digging began.

  They used small garden trowels which were able to remove a maximum of earth with a minimum of effort. Usually they were careful about taking up plugs of turf, putting the excavated earth on a small sheet of canvas, and then carefully replacing it again. But in this untenanted grove in the
middle of nowhere, they felt no need to be so fastidious and merely shoveled out the dirt and roughly dumped it back in again when each individual search was over.

  By one o'clock an ecstatic Esther had found fourteen coins. There were eight Indian head and three flying eagle pennies, an 1887 nickel, two 1900 dimes, and a 1901 quarter. Sam, on the other hand, had only turned up four Indian heads, a flying eagle and a vast assortment of nails, screws, and twisted bits of iron.

  "Why don't you turn on your discriminator?" Esther asked him. "It's no wonder you haven't found more coins, you spend so much time digging up all that junk."

  Sam's face soured at the rebuke. "Hey, a place like this, you've got no idea what you might turn up. Besides, at least the junk is from the period—there aren't any pull tabs or beer cans, are there? There might be some tools or who knows what else. You go for the coins, and I'll keep trying potluck. Speaking of which, are you hungry?"

  They ate some sandwiches then, and, after a trip into the bushes to relieve themselves of their morning coffee, continued to hunt.

  At three o'clock, after finding two more coins and a large assortment of mangled ironmongery, Sam received a very strong signal in his earphones. "Got a big one," he said to Esther.

  "What?" she asked, taking off her earphones.

  "I said I got a big one. There's something under here all right."

  "Probably a rusty steam engine," Esther said. Her rapidly filling coin bag jingled gaily as she replaced her earphones.

  Sam ignored her teasing, fell to his knees, and started to dig. Six inches down he struck, if not what Esther had predicted, than at least something that could have been part of a steam engine. It was iron, and rusty, and as he uncovered it he saw that it was a small piece of a wheel rim, the wooden wheel it had guarded having long since rotted away. He sighed, but figured that he would excavate it completely, just in case something might be beneath it and so that it would not fool him again.