kids. This map identified them as Burning Woods, and Ev had heard that name once or twice, too.
He closed the compass to a quarter of the radius he had needed to put a circle around all of Haven and drew a second circle. He saw that Bryant and Marie's house lay just inside that circle. To the west was the short length of Nista Road, which ran from Route 9 - Derry Road - to a gravel-pit dead-end on the edge of those same woods - call them Big Injun Woods or Burning Woods, it was the same thing, the same woods.
Nista Road ... Nista Road ... something about Nista Road, but what? Something that had happened before he himself was born but something that had still been worth talking of for years and years ...
Ev closed his eyes and looked as if he was asleep sitting up, a skinny old man, mostly bald, in a neat khaki shirt and neat khaki pants with creases up the legs.
In a moment it came, and when it did he wondered how it could have taken him so long to get it. The Clarendons. The Clarendons, of course. They had lived at the junction of Nista Road and the Old Derry Road. Paul and Faith Clarendon. Faith, who had been so taken with that sweety-sugar preacher, and who had birthed a child with black hair and sweety-sugar blue eyes about nine months after the preacher blew town. Paul Clarendon, who had studied the baby as it lay in its crib, and who had then gotten his straightrazor.
Some people had shaken their heads and blamed the preacher - Colson, his name was. He said it was, anyway.
Some people shook their heads and blamed Paul Clarendon; they said he'd always been crazy, and Faith should never have married him.
Some people had of course blamed Faith. Ev remembered some old man in the barbershop - this was years after, but towns like Haven have long memories -calling her 'nothing but a titty-bump hoor born to make trouble.'
And some people had - in low voices, to be sure - blamed the woods.
Ev's eyes flashed open.
Yes; yes, they had. His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. lt was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.
'Humpf!' Ev's mother had sniffed - Ev himself had then been nine or so, he recollected now.
'And I guess it's why your ma there tosses some salt over her shoulder when she spills the cellar,' Ev's dad said mildly to Ev.
'Humpf!' she said again, and went inside to leave her husband smoking on the porch and her son sitting beside him, listening intently as his father yarned. Ev had always been a good listener ... except for that one crucial moment when someone had so badly needed him to listen, that one unregainable moment when he had allowed Hilly's tears to drive him away in confusion.
Ev listened now. He listened to his memory ... the town's memory.
9
They had been called Big Injun Woods because it was there that Chief Atlantic had died. lt was the whites who called him Chief Atlantic - his proper Micmac name had been Wahwayvokah, which means 'by tall waters.' Chief Atlantic was a contemptuous translation of this. The tribe had originally covered- much of what was now Penobscot County, with large tribes centered in Oldtown, Skowhegan, and the Great Woods, which began in Ludlow - it was in Ludlow that they buried their dead when they were decimated by influenza in the 1880s and drifted south with WalIwayvokah, who had presided over their further decline. Waliwayvokah died in 1885, and on his deathbed he declared that the woods to which he had brought his dying people were cursed. That was known and reported by the two white men who had been present when he died - one an anthropologist from Boston College, the other from the Smithsonian Institute - who had come to the area in search of Indian artifacts from the tribes of the Northeast, which were degenerating rapidly and would soon be gone. What was less sure was whether Chief Atlantic was laying the curse himself or only making an observation of an existing condition.
Either way, his only monument was the name Big Injun Woods