The French Acre

      Devaney took the phone call about the crows. It was Fourth of July weekend. My wife Carol and her mother were off at church and I was relaxing on my new redwood chaise lounge with a mug of French Roast and the Sunday funnies. My father-in-law Devaney, whom Carol and her mother called my partner-in-crime, came back from the living room with the portable phone in his hand. He set it on the end table between us and plopped heavily onto his patio chair.

      “I’ll leave it out here,” he said. “That way we won’t have to run in and get it every time it rings.”

      I tried to go back to reading Hagar the Horrible, but Devaney interrupted before I could start it.

      “Don’t you want to know who that was?” he said.

      I didn’t look up, but out of the corner of my eye I could see him scratching with his pen in his little notebook, playing cat-and-mouse with me. This was exactly why my mother-in-law appreciated me—I kept her retired-history-teacher husband out of her hair. But I had to admit, he wasn’t always annoying, and he was a pretty fair amateur shutterbug. He had shot some darned good photos to accompany the feature stories I wrote for the Valley News, the daily that serves the small Vermont and New Hampshire towns within a forty-mile radius of White River Junction.

      “Is there a story in it or not?” I said, trying not to look up. But I couldn’t keep my mind on Hagar. I looked up.

      Devaney smiled, a big cat-ate-the-canary smile. “Remember The Birds?” he said. “Hitchcock? Suzanne Pleshette? Rod Steiger? Peck, peck, peck?”

      I nodded. “It was Rod Taylor, not Rod Steiger. What about it?”

      “Not it!” he said. “Not it! They! The birds! They’re here!” He made his eyes go as wide as they could, then puckered his lips and began whistling the Twilight Zone theme song.

      Ever since we’d investigated Norwich’s humming church bell and the Witness Tree on the green, people had been phoning us--me and Devaney instead of the police--when something a little out-of-the-ordinary came up. A cow couldn’t just get lost; it disappeared, maybe got beamed up. So they phoned us. And a day or two after we met with the person calling it in, the cow would wander home or be found by a neighbor.

      Or the lights in a Florida snowbird’s house mysteriously came on and went off at odd hours, with no burglars to be seen anywhere near the place—so someone speculated that maybe ghosts were afoot in the haunted house. Devaney and I in turn called the snowbirds in Florida and learned that the lights were on automatic timers—but these were on a special irregular timer so burglars wouldn’t easily spot a nightly pattern.

      Sure, there were several other truly odd cases, but most of the calls were petty. Nevertheless people kept calling me and Devaney, as if we were the Upper Valley’s sleuths of the paranormal or psychic detectives or something.

      “Okay, which Looney Toon called this time?” I said.

      “Nelda Potter. In Norwich. Remember Zack Potter? Used to have that farm stand beyond the curves on the way up to Beaver Meadow--that place where we got the pumpkins ten, fifteen years ago?”

      “The dairy that became a Christmas tree farm?” I said, and Devaney nodded. “But Zack died.”

      “Of course he did,” Devaney said with a scowl. “I know that. But she didn’t. She’s the one who called. I was just dropping his name to help orient you.” Devaney rolled his eyes.

      “Fine,” I said, annoyed. “So Nelda Potter—Zack Potter’s widow—called. Is she holed up in her house with swarms of starlings pecking through her wooden storm doors and shuttered windows? Rather than call 911, she chose to call the Psychic Detectives Hotline, right?”

      “Closer to the truth than you think,” Devaney said. “But it’s not starlings. It’s crows—hundreds of them.”

      “And?” No story I could pick out so far.

      “And they’re not attacking her house. They’re roosting on that high wall around the French Acre.”

      Still no story that I could see. “You have a punch line to this?”

      “Yes, I do.” He paused for effect. “Nelda says there’s never been a crow on those walls before, not ever. Birds won’t go near it.”

      I looked at my father-in-law blankly.

      “She says the crows showed up when Charlie Rivers started clearing the French Acre two weeks ago.”

      The French Acre was a walled-in acre of land whose overgrown interior was reported to be an almost impregnable thicket of bushes and trees. Legend had it that before the Revolutionary War, the acre of pastureland had been bounded by a waist-high stonewall. But something happened and the Norwich townsfolk added rocks and mortar, raising the wall’s height to nine feet. Oddly, they left no gate and no door.

      “You mean clearing brush around the outside, right?” I said. “Outside the walls, like cleaning up after the accident?”

      Devaney and I had been at the French Acre two weeks earlier to cover the story at an accident scene. I’m a garden-variety reporter, a generalist, not an investigative reporter. Most of my stories are about high school graduations, charity cow-flop drops, 100th birthdays in nursing homes--local interest stuff, features, human interest pieces. But when the editors were shorthanded, my stories included the occasional accident.

      Four teenage boys in a pickup—all four packed in across the front with no seatbelts--had died when they slammed into the wall at the French Acre. The impact punched a small hole in it, and I remembered someone at the scene trying to shine a flashlight in. Holy mackerel, the guy had said. The brambles and trees are so thick in there you couldn’t swing a hatchet. 

      “No,” Devaney said, bringing me back. “Nelda said he wasn’t clearing brush outside; Charlie Rivers was clearing it inside, inside the French Acre.”

      I felt the short hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

      “What time’d you tell Nelda we’d be out?”

      “One o’clock.”

      “Call her back,” I said. “And get your camera. Tell her we’re on our way.”

      We passed Dan & Whit’s Country Store, turned left at the Norwich Inn, and headed out the back road toward Beaver Meadow. Nelda Potter’s farmhouse was only two or three minutes from the Inn, and the French Acre was along the way. I wanted to catch a glimpse of it in daylight. The last time I’d seen it, the night of the accident, its walls had been bathed in the light of emergency vehicles.

      “Holy crow!” Devaney said as the walls of the French Acre came into view. “Pun intended.”

      Nelda Potter had been right. The high wall around it was rimmed with crows, hundreds of them. I pulled the car onto the dirt shoulder and we sat watching and listening.

      “Notice anything?” I said after a minute or two.

      “Yeah,” Devaney said. “They’re quiet.”

      The lack of noise wasn’t what I’d been getting at. But he was right. The crows weren’t cawing. Not a single one of them. And they were all facing inward, looking down from their perches into the Acre, watching. Devaney pointed his camera and took a couple of shots of the birds.

      “No. Look. The hole in the wall is bigger now,” I said. “And there are brush piles along the outside, stuff that’s been cleared out.”

      Devaney snapped another shot or two, this time of an opening that looked like an arched doorway to a ruined Scottish castle.

      Just then a small blue pickup with a utility trailer pulled around us and stopped in front of the opening. A wiry older man got out, eyed us without waving, and began loading brush into the bed of the pickup and onto the utility trailer. His long gray hair was tied back in a ponytail. He didn’t bother to shoo the crows.

      “Charlie Rivers?” I said to Devaney.

      “Looks like him. Want to talk to him now?”

      “No, not yet. Nelda’s waiting,” I said, starting the car. “Besides, when we come back this way, Charlie should be loaded up and gone. If he is, we can take a look inside for ourselves.”

      “And I can shoot some pictures.”

      We gave Rivers a polite New England nod and a wave as we eased onto the road. The man in the blue jeans and chamois shirt nodded and went back to work.

      Nelda Potter’s white-clapboarded farmhouse sat on the opposite side of the road, less than a half mile beyond the French Acre. She waved from her porch rocker as we pulled into the driveway. Five minutes later we were in her parlor with teacups on our laps.

      “So, tell us about the crows, Mrs. Potter,” I said. “And what you know about the French Acre.”

      “Well,” she started. “There’s been a lot of deaths there.”

      “Four,” I said. “Teenage boys. A terrible waste. We covered the story for the Valley News.”

      “Besides those four, I mean. There’s been ten or a dozen over the years. I remember young Henry Corbett in the 1950s. The Tucker girl and her boyfriend in ’63. Mary Grady’s twin boys from up the road, around ’67, they crashed on Graduation night. Then others in the seventies, eighties, nineties. It’s a bad spot--and there’s not even a curve there; that’s what I don’t get. They just wind it up on the straightaway and hit that damned wall--pardon my French.”

      “And the birds?” Devaney said. “You said there have never been birds on the wall of the French Acre?”

      “Mr. Devaney, Mr. Hoag, I’m eighty years old. I’ve lived on this farm for sixty of those years, and my husband lived here all of his seventy-eight. His family went back seven generations here. Everybody on this road knows that no crows—no birds of any type, not a robin or a sparrow—go near that cursed acre. There’s been nothing live there except trees and brush that have grown up inside and died and rotted there, then grown up again. There’s something wrong with it.”

      “Any idea what?” I said.

      “Well, they call it the French Acre, supposedly—Mr. Devaney, as a former history teacher you may know this—because a contingent of Lafayette’s soldiers camped there just before or during the American Revolution, 1774 or 1776, sometime thereabouts. It was a pasture then, with a low stonewall around it. At least that’s the way I’ve always heard it—Lafayette’s soldiers.”

      “But something happened,” Devaney interrupted.

      “Yes,” she said. “They died. All of them. It’s the how that’s a mystery. But whatever happened, people felt the need to wall up the Acre.”

      The three of us sat quiet a minute.

      “I’d heard this before,” Devaney said. “There’s speculation it was disease. Or bad food or poison water.”

      “But why build a nine foot wall around it?” I said. “With no plaque or historical marker. Did they die overnight? Or was it over several weeks or months? Was it a quarantine situation? Is that why they built the wall? There’s got to be something written down somewhere. Town records. An old diary. Something other than word of mouth.”

      “And what’s it got to do with crows?” Devaney said.

      “I don’t know,” Nelda Potter said with a shrug. “What’s it got to do with Mr. Rivers?”

      Devaney and I looked at each other, then back at Nelda.

      “Who hired him?” I asked. “To clear out the brush.”

      “I have no idea,” she said. “Maybe the Town? As far as I know, there’s no Society or Association that looks over the site, not like a cemetery association or historical society. Nobody’s ever tended it.”

      “Maybe the families of the boys who were killed hired him,” Devaney said. “Or their insurance companies?” But that didn’t make sense.

      “So why is Charlie Rivers down there bush-hogging it out?” I said to Nelda. “He must have been hired because he’s a handyman, a yard cleanup guy, right?”

      “I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve talked with all my neighbors on the road and nobody seems to know who’d hire him for it, or why.”

      “And what do you know about Charlie Rivers?” I asked.

      “Well, he lives a few miles north of here, past the Beaver Meadow Chapel where the road goes from paved to dirt at the Norwich/Sharon line. He’s always been quiet. He’s in his seventies, eight or ten years younger than I am. He’s part Abenaki Indian—name’s actually Charlie Three Rivers. Worked a bunch of different jobs over the years, including helping me and my husband in haying season, but mostly he makes his living mowing cemeteries in Norwich and Sharon. If you need to know more, you could check with Dutch Roberts, the Norwich town constable, and Oscar Bell, the Town Manager up to Sharon.”

      After we said our goodbyes to Nelda Potter, we drove back to the French Acre and pulled off the road. No sign of Charlie Rivers or his truck. We got out and stood in front of the newly enlarged breach in the wall.

      “It’s dark in there,” Devaney said, snapping a picture. “Like a cave.”

      I stepped through the opening and almost fell forward. I caught my balance by putting a hand on the wall, and found myself standing ankle-deep in soil.

      “You okay, Hoag?” Devaney called from behind me. He shone his flashlight in.

      “I’m fine. But watch your step. It’s soft. I think it’s silt and loam from years and years of rotting vegetation.”

      “Geez,” Devaney said, stepping in behind me. “You can hardly see the sky in here. It’s really thick overhead. Charlie Rivers has barely made a dent in it.”

      He was right, Charlie Rivers hadn’t cleared a hundredth of it yet. But he’d begun. The word thicket came to mind. What was left was an impenetrable woven thicket. I doubted anyone could successfully crawl from one wall of the French Acre to its opposite wall.

      “So, what do we see?” Devaney said. He handed me his flashlight and I did a quick search.

      “Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said. “You see anything from back there?”

      “Nope. You’ve got my flashlight.”

      “Hear anything?”

      “Nope. Not even the crows.”

      “Smell or taste anything?” I asked.

      Devaney said nothing for a moment, and I thought maybe he hadn’t heard my question. Then he answered. “Death, I think.”

      “You mean like rotting leaves?” I said.

      I shut up and breathed it in through my nose. Yes, it was layer upon layer of rotting vegetation. But it was also something hard to pinpoint. Devaney was right. Whatever it was, the smell made the word death appear in one’s mind. And it gave me goosebumps.

      “It is death,” came a voice from behind, startling us. We turned toward the light of the doorway. A thin man’s shadowy profile leaned on the wall.

      “Charlie Rivers,” Devaney said. “Didn’t hear you sneak up.”

      “Didn’t sneak,” the man said. “I parked the truck by your car and walked over to look inside. Tried my best to not scare you.”

      “The Acre’s scary enough,” I said. “Especially the inside of it.”

      “Oh, it’s not so bad once you get used to it. Would you prefer to come outside in the light and talk? I figure you’ve got questions. And you can empty your shoes out, so you don’t track it all over your wife’s carpet.”

      We stepped out.

      “Devaney and Hoag,” I said, and the three of us shook hands.

      “Valley News,” Rivers said. “I’ve read your stuff. Especially liked that piece on the Norwich Witch a couple years back.”

      Rivers was friendlier and more outgoing than I’d expected. He dropped the tailboard of his utility trailer and extended an open hand. Devaney and I sat down. Rivers stood.

      “We got a call about the crows,” I said. “The caller said it’s the first time a bird or beast has come near the French Acre. Is that true?”

      “Could be,” Rivers said. “I don’t keep watch over every little thing along this road like some of the busybodies do. But still, there’s a ring of truth to it.”

      “So what’s your part in it?” Devaney asked. “Somebody hire you to clear it out?”

      “Nope,” Rivers said, looking down at the ground. “Nobody’s paying me. And nobody asked me to do it.”

      “Then why?” Devaney asked.

      “It couldn’t be put off any longer, not after those four boys. And that’s when it opened up.”

      “Opened up?” Devaney said.

      Rivers motioned toward the new entrance through the wall.

      “I’ve got to take care of it before someone else is killed here,” he said. “It’s just something I’ve got to do.”

      “If you’re intending to clear that entire Acre, it’ll take you a year,” I said. With only that one small opening you can’t get in with a bulldozer or a backhoe or anything very mechanical.”

      “It’s got to be done pretty much by hand, anyway,” Rivers said. “You can’t bulldoze.” He looked up at me and said, “And no, I don’t need help. It’s something I’ve got to do alone.”

      “And just what is it you’re attempting to do?” Devaney said. “Is it about the French soldiers, the ones who fell to the disease?”

      “Who said anything about disease?” Rivers said, jumping down off the trailer. He grabbed an ax and a shovel and walked toward the opening. “Devaney, Hoag, nice to meet you. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to it if I’m to finish in less than a year.”

      After the holiday weekend Devaney and I visited Dutch Roberts, Norwich’s town constable, at his office. We’d known each other awhile and he’d always been helpful when I needed information for a story.

      “Charlie Rivers has been the groundskeeper for three or four of our smaller Norwich cemeteries for about thirty years now,” Dutch said. “He mows and trims, fills in graves that have settled, resets the stones that tip or fall, that kind of thing. Does the same thing for Town of Sharon at two or three of theirs. Put it all together and he makes a basic living part of the year.”

      “What’s he do the rest of the year? Go to Florida?” Devaney asked, chuckling.

      “I think he hauls firewood and plows snow. One winter he went to work for Henry Mason over at the funeral home.”

      “He’s not trained or certified as a mortician’s assistant, is he?” I said. “That’d take some basic education and licensing.”

      “Well, no,” Dutch said. “Not quite at that level. Not assisting with embalming or anything. Charlie was more of a fill-in to help wheel in the bodies and open doors at wakes and help with funeral parking.”

      “Does he still do it?” I asked.

      “Nah. That was six or eight years ago. Henry let him go after a month. Charlie told him he was getting vibes from the stiffs.”

      A half hour later we were in Sharon, chatting across the desk with Oscar Bell, the Town Manager.

      “A reliable worker, Charlie is. Been taking care of four of our cemeteries for years. He even found one up in Beaver Meadow, a cemetery we didn’t even know about. It was terribly overgrown, neglected for a hundred years. No idea how he located it. It wasn’t until he’d cleared it all out that we even found it on one of the old maps.”

      “You know anything about his history--like his family, education, jobs?” Devaney asked.

      Devaney knew we shouldn’t be asking the question, and I knew it, too. What’s more, Oscar Bell knew it. But he wasn’t a stiff bureaucrat, he was also a friend. He went to a file cabinet, slid open a drawer, and fanned his way through a sheaf of papers in a manila file.

      “Pardon me while I think out loud,” he said. “High school grad. Odd jobs. Never married. Supported his mother, one of the last of the Abenaki medicine women, who lived with him until she died about five years ago. That’s about it.” Oscar turned back to face us.

      “Sounds like Charlie Rivers you’re talking about,” said a voice from the doorway. Devaney and I turned in our chairs and saw a bent-over old man leaning on a cane.

      “Well, I’ll be damned. Alton Brock,” Devaney said, rising to greet the man with a handshake and a slap on the shoulder. “Come in, come in, my old friend. Hoag, you remember Alton Brock, don’t you, the unofficial mayor of Sharon, the man who single-handedly raised the money for the new school?”

      I nodded, shook hands, and Devaney motioned Alton Brock toward a chair.

      “Oh, I can’t stay, Devaney,” Brock said. “I’ve got a meeting down the hall. But I couldn’t help overhearing you three when I was walking by.”

      “You know Charlie Rivers?” I asked. “From some cemetery association meeting, right?”

      “Oh, I know him,” Brock said. “But not from that. Many of the old-timers here in Sharon know him--if they’re drinking water. When he was young—I doubt he’s done it in forty years or more--Charlie Rivers was the best apple-branch dowser around. If you needed a well, you called Charlie. He could locate water with a divining rod in places you’d never believe you’d find it. And he was always right. Never saw him fail. Charlie Rivers had The Sense.”

      “The Sense?” I said.

      “Well, sure,” Brock continued. “You know, the sensitivity. Not everybody can do it. It’s a combination of the apple-branch and The Sense. My mother—God rest her soul—told me it was like mind-reading the earth. That’s what Charlie Rivers could do.”

      I had a restful evening at home that night, because there was no story to write. It just wasn’t there. Instead I made notes about what I knew so far. And I asked Devaney to do a little research on the French Acre, Lafayette’s troops, and what else was going on around Norwich around the time of the Revolution. Then I called Nelda Potter back to get the names of the accident victims she’d spieled off. It wouldn’t be difficult to check the Norwich Town cops and the State Police for accident reports connected to the French Acre over the last forty years.

      Two days later Devaney called to say he’d hit a dead end. In fact, he found no evidence of French soldiers being in the area before or during the Revolution.

      “I checked Dartmouth’s library with a fine-toothed comb,” he said. “Despite the spot being called the French Acre, there’s nothing to support the idea that French soldiers came anywhere near Norwich. Several British contingents passed through and likely camped here, but no French.”

      It took me two weeks to find and go through all the Town and State accidents reports. Eleven people had been killed at the French Acre since 1935. They had all been coming from the same direction at a high rate of speed and, based on the sketches and photos in the files, the vehicles had all impacted the wall in practically the same spot.

      When I told Devaney what I’d found in the reports, he looked pensive.

      “Were there also accidents without fatalities?” he said. “I mean that’s a lot of deaths. Didn’t anybody ever walk away from one?”

      “Nope.”

      He was right. Not a fender-bender in the bunch. No one with a broken arm or leg, no one ever hospitalized.

      “All fatalities,” I said. “What are the odds?”

      “The wall’s like a death magnet.”

      I had enough background material to do a first story on the French Acre, a curiosity story. But because of the recent accident resulting in the four boys’ deaths, I decided against it. A curiosity piece could wait. No matter when it saw print, it would reopen old wounds, but right now the wounds were too fresh. I let it rest awhile.

      The leaves were starting to turn—golds and early reds--when we drove to the French Acre to see Charlie Rivers again. Hills of dead and dying brush had begun to pile up outside the wall. Charlie’s truck and trailer were nowhere in sight. Hundreds of crows perched on the wall.

      “Looks like he’s given up hauling it to the landfill,” I said.

      “Maybe he wants to spend all his time and energy clearing,” Devaney said.

      We stepped through the opening in the wall.

      “Hey, Charlie, you in there?” I called, not expecting to find him. We were amazed to see the progress Rivers had made.

      “Wow,” Devaney said. “He’s really gaining ground.”

      “Literally and figuratively,” I said. In the five weeks since the crash he’d cleared a quarter acre.

      “What’s that?” Devaney said, pointing.

      “A chainsaw,” I said.

      “No, not that. That.Those.”

      Before I could answer, Devaney had his camera in front of his broad face and was snapping pictures. In front of us were reflectors, red ones on aluminum rods, the sort you’d see marking the edge of a driveway. There were seven.

      “What do you think they’re there for?” I said.

      “No idea,” Devaney said. “A couple are close together, but then there’s one way over there, another out that way. And nothing connecting them, like string or crime scene tape. I don’t know, Hoag. Bodies, you think?”

      “Maybe. If there really are bodies here. If there are, how would he know where they are?”

      “He has The Sense,” Devaney said. “And didn’t Oscar tell us the man’s a dowser?”

      “A dowser, yes. But a dowser of the dead?”

      We heard the crunch of gravel along the road, then the sputtering sound of an engine that didn’t want to shut off. We stepped back out into the full daylight.

      “Hello, Hoag, Devaney,” Charlie Rivers said.

      “Hi, Charlie,” I said. “You’re making great progress, I see. That’s damned backbreaking work. You’re twice the man I am. I don’t have the stamina for it at my age.”

      “And I sure don’t,” Devaney said with a laugh.

      Charlie reached into the back of his pickup and pulled out a handful of the red reflectors on aluminum rods.

      “Those things help you keep your bearings in there?” Devaney said.

      “Gotta use ‘em,” Charlie Rivers said. “Nobody else knows where they are.”

      “The bodies?” I said. “Of the French soldiers?”

      Charlie moved toward the opening. “After all these years I wouldn’t say bodies.”

      “Bones, then,” Devaney said. “Bones of the French soldiers?”

      Charlie paused at the opening, smiled quizzically and said, “Who said they were French?” He ducked his head inside and stepped through. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I’ve got to get back to work now. Deadlines, you know, something newspapermen should understand.” And he disappeared inside.

      Devaney called, “Are you saying they weren’t French?”

      “Do your own homework.”

      It was Monday of Columbus Day weekend and the foliage was at its peak when Devaney called me.

      “You on a car phone?” I said. “You sound funny.”

      “One of those new cellular phones,” he said. “It’s my cousin Bernie’s.”

      “Bernie’s? You’re in Connecticut? Or is Bernie at your place?”

      “We’re in Connecticut. We came down for the long weekend.”

      “You didn’t mention it to me. Carol and I didn’t even know you were gone.”

      “Spur of the moment, I suppose. You know how I sometimes get inspiration. Well, yesterday the thought just jumped into my head—call Bernie, call Bernie. It wouldn’t go away. So I called Bernie.”

      “And?”

      “Bernie invites us to spend the long weekend. It’s only a three-hour drive, so we pack a bag and head out the door. You know, I never do these last-minute things. But this just felt like the thing to do. To make a long story short, we arrived late last night and didn’t have much time to chitchat before we turned in. But this morning Bernie and I are having breakfast and I mention what you and I are working on—you know, the French Acre—and Bernie says, ‘Reminds me of the French soldiers buried in the Revolutionary War cemetery over at Norwich.’ Norwich, Hoag. Norwich, Connecticut, he means. He tells me it’s only a twenty minute drive, so here we are.”

      “Here we are? Where?”

      “Norwich. Connecticut. The cemetery, Hoag. Aren’t you listening, son? Bernie and I are standing in the cemetery in Norwich, Connecticut. I’m looking at a stone, a memorial to twenty of Lafayette’s French soldiers who died in camp here in 1778. It’s Norwich, Connecticut, not Norwich, Vermont. Someplace along the way, I think, this story got mixed in with ours.”

      “Get a picture of the stone, Devaney,” I said. “I’ll see you when you get back.” I hung up and drove straight for the French Acre.

      From a half mile away I could see Charlie Rivers’ truck. I eased over onto the shoulder a distance away, then walked the last hundred yards. When I poked my head in the hole in the wall, Charlie was standing near the most recently cleared section, facing away from me. He held a small split branch in his hands. I stood perfectly still and watched.

      “No sense gawking, whoever you are,” he called, not turning around. “Come in, if you like.”

      “It’s Hoag,” I said, stepping in on the silty floor of what had become a third-of-an-acre room without a ceiling.

      “No Devaney? He sick?”

      “Guess you’re not clairvoyant after all,” I said. “He’s away for the long weekend.” I labored through the soft soil toward Rivers.

      “Okay, Devaney’s away. What brings you out?” Rivers said, turning. “It’s a lovely day, a long weekend, you should be enjoying yourself, Hoag, maybe doing a little leaf-peeping.”

      “What brings me out is the soldiers. Devaney did his homework. You were right. They’re not French soldiers. That story comes from a different Norwich, the one in Connecticut. Somehow the story of Lafayette’s soldiers dying of disease while encamped at a place called Norwich got mixed in, or borrowed, or co-opted, whatever, with something similar here. Right? What we call the French Acre isn’t French at all, is it?”

      “Nope. It’s British.”

      “British? How do you know that? This whole walled-in crypt may be just another Cardiff Giant, a colossal hoax. We’ve found nothing written down anywhere that would suggest anything actually happened to a detachment of French, American, British, German, or other soldiers here--or to anyone, for that matter. Maybe it was just a cow pasture. If something happened, don’t you think someone would have recorded it?”

      “I’m pretty sure I’ve located thirteen so far,” Rivers said, motioning toward the reflectors.

      A little leap in the pit of my stomach told me he was right.

      “There was a reason no one ever wrote it down,” he said.

      He was forcing my brain to work hard now.

      “Shame?” I said. “Something they didn’t want future generations to know about?”

      Charlie nodded.

      “Like maybe the soldiers were sick and quarantined,” I said. “But the Colonists abandoned them—and walled them in?”

      Charlie Rivers said nothing, and I stood mulling it over in my reporter’s mind.

      “Then if none of this is written down,” I said, “how did you know?”

      “Oral history. Indian. My mother was an Abenaki medicine woman. She passed the story on to me. She said the whites wouldn’t tell it, wanted to forget it.” Rivers sat on a stump and motioned for me to sit on a log.

      “They did not die of disease, my mother said. Shortly after the American Revolution began, twenty of the King’s soldiers camped here in the pasture. The men of Norwich who were able-bodied enough to fight had already left to join the armies of the Colonies, so the few males who were left were either young or old or infirm. It was largely a community of women.”

      “Are you saying the soldiers went into town and raped them?” I said, thinking I could see where he was going.

      “No, they didn’t,” Rivers said. “In fact, if they had, what followed might have seemed somehow justified. But the soldiers were gentlemen. They hired six women to cook for them here at the pasture campsite. But the women feared their militiamen husbands might meet these same British soldiers on the battlefield. So they obtained a sleeping potion and mixed it with the soldiers’ evening meal. While the twenty soldiers slept soundly, the women slit their throats, all twenty of them. They hastily buried the dead where they had bled out.”

      “But why the wall?” I said. “To hide the shame?”

      “Maybe,” Rivers said.

      “What’re you thinking?” I said. “That the wall was to keep the spirits in?”

      Rivers shrugged. “I don’t know. They’re here, though.”

      “And you think that’s what’s caused the crashes, the deaths?” I said. “Every one a fatality, never a survivor. You think the spirits inside—on the desecrated ground—drew the vehicles and passengers to the wall?”

      Rivers shrugged again, and I glanced at the reflectors.

      “So what’s your part in all this? What drew you in?”

      “The last accident with the four boys. That one finally opened a hole in the wall. For years I sensed something here, but I couldn’t tell exactly what. The morning after this accident, when I stood by the break in the wall, I knew what I had to do.”

      “Mark the graves?” I said.

      Rivers didn’t answer at first, looked away from me. Then he said, “Yeah, mark the graves.”

      “You believe that’ll make the difference?” I said. “You think it’ll stop the accidents? I mean, wouldn’t it be easier to just press the Town to tear down the wall?”

      “Crazy as it sounds, it’s a historic site,” Rivers said. “The parents of the last two kids killed here tried to have it demolished and failed. Anyway, it’s a part of people’s mental landscape. Too much public sentiment in favor of keeping it.”

      “But back to my question,” I said. “Do you somehow believe dowsing the dead and putting up grave markers will put an end to it?”

      Rivers mistook my impatience, my reporter-style interrogation, for hostility.

      “Excuse me,” he said, rising to his feet. “I’ve got at least a half acre left to clear and time’s running out.”

      He picked up the chainsaw and fired it up, but even at the eruption of the saw the necklace of crows on the wall never flinched.

      When Devaney got back from Connecticut, I filled him in on my visit with Charlie Rivers.

      “What do you suppose he means, time’s running out?” Devaney said.

      “I assume he means time’s running out to get the brush cleared and the spots marked.”

      “But what’s this time limit he’s up against?” Devaney said. “Does he have to finish before the snow flies? Before the year is out? Before Halloween and the witching hour?”

      “Maybe before the wall claims any more victims,” I said.

      “Oh, come on, Hoag, we aren’t buying into that yet, are we? As far as I can see, what we’ve got is a string of unrelated automobile accidents over a period of decades, an old dowser clearing brush, and thirteen driveway reflectors that might—might—be marking some Revolutionary War graves. Heck, you haven’t even got enough to pull together a story on it yet, have you?”

      Something Devaney said struck me—a string of unrelated automobile accidents.

      “”They’re not unrelated automobile accidents,” I said. “They’re all related to the French Acre. And they all resulted in fatalities, no survivors. There’s something here, Devaney. I know there’s something here, and it’s got to do with Charlie Rivers’ story.”

      “Don’t forget the crows,” Devaney. “I don’t suppose you asked Rivers about the crows.”

      I hadn’t. I’d completely forgotten.

      “Tell you what, Devaney,” I said. “This week you do a little genealogical research.”

      “On who? Or is it whom?” he said, rolling his eyes.

      “On the car crash victims.”

      “The four boys?”

      “No. On all of them. See if they trace back to Colonial families who lived in Norwich.”

      “What? What are you thinking, Hoag—that it’s a revenge thing, the march of the dead soldiers?”

      “I don’t know what it is. But if there are ties here—if they’re all descendants of the women who massacred those British soldiers—there’s enough for a story.”

      “And what’re you gonna do?”

      “I’m going out to help Charlie Rivers.”

      “Help him do what?”

      “Clear brush,” I said. “And dowse the dead.”

      For the next three weeks I worked side-by-side with Charlie Rivers. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t pressure him. A nominal trust seemed to build between us—or maybe he was simply ignoring me. On my fifth day I noticed several new reflectors in the ground. He must have dowsed at night or before I arrived that morning. Another reflector appeared the tenth day, giving a total of seventeen. That’s what we had on Halloween morning, October 31. We also still had a quarter acre of brush to clear.

      “Hoag,” Charlie said that day as we sat eating lunch from paper bags. “I appreciate your help. I really do.”

      “Are you disappointed we won’t get it cleared by tonight?” I said, remembering Devaney’s comment about Halloween and the witching hour.

      “No. Why?” Rivers said, looking surprised.

      “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought, you know, Halloween, the crows, the deadline you mentioned.”

      “What about the crows?”

      “Well, you never mention them. There are hundreds of them. They’ve been here for almost four months now. They wouldn’t come near this place for decades, maybe longer. What do you make of them?”

      “Harbingers of death, I suppose. Don’t you think? I mean, most cultures see ravens and crows as symbols of death, right?”

      “But the four kids died months ago. These soldiers—if they are indeed under this soil—died hundreds of years ago. Why are the crows still here?”

      “You’re the reporter, Hoag,” Charlie Rivers said, and got to his feet. “I don’t explain this stuff. I just sense it.”

      That afternoon, after we cleared a small patch of brush, Rivers let me watch as he used a split apple branch to dowse it. I’d never seen anyone dowse for water before--certainly never for bodies—and I had a healthy skepticism based on the ouija board I’d tried using with my cousins when we were kids. But when Charlie stood over a certain spot, the stick did seem to quiver faintly in his rough hands. He had me mark the location with a reflector.

      I left early that afternoon to get home for trick-or-treaters. Charlie said he’d stay until dark.

      Devaney’s geneaology search didn’t produce the results I had hoped for. Not one victim had a connection to any colonial Norwich families.

      “But I did discover something else,” Devaney said. “It looks like every one of them had a trace of Abenaki Indian blood in their veins.”

      The next day was Saturday. Devaney and I drove to the French Acre right after breakfast, both dressed to clear brush. The crows were there, but Charlie Rivers hadn’t arrived. We poked our heads in, then stepped inside and nosed around.

      Eighteen markers. Maybe an eighth of an acre left to clear.

      “Guess All Saints Day isn’t his deadline,” I said. “That’s today.”

      We heard a vehicle crunch up on the gravel. A minute later Dutch Roberts stepped into the mostly cleared French Acre. He gave a whistle of surprise.

      “Morning, Hoag, Devaney,” he said. “What brings you two out on a Saturday? Looks like you’re dressed for gardening.”

      “We’re giving Charlie a hand today,” I said. “It’s a lot of work for one man alone. And what about you? What brings you out? Come to help?”

      “Hell, no,” Dutch laughed. “Did enough bush-hogging when I was younger. My back won’t stand it now. If I laid into it, I’d have to spend the afternoon on the heating pad.”

      I could see Dutch’s eyes sweeping the place, taking in the reflectors.

      “The graveyard’s grown,” he said.

      “What makes you think it’s a graveyard?” Devaney said.

      We hadn’t been in touch with Dutch since the week following the accident.

      “Oh, just a guess,” Dutch said. “Not very orderly rows, though. Maybe it’ll all make more sense when you put up the little flags.”

      “What flags?” I said. Dutch looked genuinely surprised that we didn’t know.

      “The ones Charlie Rivers ordered through Dan and Whit’s store. They’re the size you put on graves for the holidays.”

      “How’d you find out?” I said.

      “Oh, a bunch of us were shooting the breeze at Dan & Whit’s. Veteran’s Day came up, which is what—nine or ten days away? The store clerk mentions Charlie Rivers was in the other day and hit the roof because his two twelve-packs of flags hadn’t come in. Seems he’d ordered them around Labor Day—a special order—and the clerk had forgotten to call it in. So now Charlie’s sweating it. They told him they’d call around to flag stores and distributors.”

      “But what’s the big deal?” Devaney said. “Charlie can go down to the VFW or the American Legion and get them, no problem.”

      “No you can’t, Devaney,” Dutch said. “They’re foreign flags, not American flags. French, I’d guess. Makes sense, this being the French Acre. So I’m figuring the flags will take the place of the reflectors on Veteran’s Day. Maybe Charlie will have a little memorial service.”

      I could see Devaney was itching to say, “Or maybe two dozen British Union Jacks,” so I shot him a button-your-lip look. Although Rivers hadn’t said the story he shared with me was told in confidence, I presumed it was, so I’d said nothing to anyone except Devaney, who had followed suit. And we didn’t tell Dutch then.

      Charlie Rivers still hadn’t shown up by the time Dutch left, so Devaney and I worked for a couple of hours clearing brush, then drove to Dan and Whit’s for coffee and sandwiches.

      “We’re helping Charlie clear brush down at the French Acre,” I said. “I know he ordered some cemetery flags—French, maybe--and I wondered when they’re expected in.”

      “British, not French,” the clerk was quick to correct. “And they’ll be here in under two weeks.”

      “So not in time for Veteran’s Day next week?” Devaney said.

      “No. But I asked Mr. Rivers about that, too. He said he didn’t need them for Veteran’s Day. He’ll have them soon.”

      In the car Devaney said, “So if the deadline isn’t Veteran’s Day, when is it? And why?”

      “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m worried about Charlie. I’m going to call his house and see what’s up.”

      Rivers sounded puny when he answered the phone. He’d come down with the flu and was worried it would put him behind schedule. I said we’d drop by with some hot soup from Dan & Whit’s.

      Twenty minutes later we were in Charlie’s living room. He lay on his couch, wrapped in a blanket, shivering. On the coffee table sat a jar of yellow powder, a blue bottle, and a bowl containing a bright yellow paste.

      “Home remedies?” I said.

      “Abenaki potions,” he said. “For big aches and pains.” He wasn’t kidding. The man was sick. He looked terrible.

      “Try an old-fashioned remedy from our tribe,” Devaney said, holding out the container of chicken soup.

      Charlie smiled weakly and said thanks. After an awkward silence he admitted he was worried about the French Acre, so I volunteered to keep working at it while he was down with the flu. He was grateful.

      “Clear, but don’t dig up anything, Hoag,” he said. “Same as we’ve been doing it all along. Don’t disturb what’s under.”

      “Want us to try dowsing, too?” Devaney said. This was his first day working inside the French Acre.

      “You’re welcome to try,” Rivers said. “I doubt you’ll have much luck. If you haven’t sensed water, you probably won’t sense the dead. But who knows? It won’t hurt to try. Even if you don’t locate anyone, I’ll be back soon.”

      We stood at Rivers’ front door and I called back to him, “What’s the deadline?”

      “Umm, night of the twenty-fourth,” he said. “It’s got to be ready by then.”

      “Why the twenty-fourth?” Devaney said.

      “You’ll see,” Rivers called back, then whispered loudly, comically, “It’s a secret.”

      The next day was Sunday, so Devaney and I only put in half a day’s work, a three-hour morning. We cleared a twenty-by-ten piece of land that each of us tried unsuccessfully to dowse. Maybe there just wasn’t anybody down there. As we gathered our tools together to leave, the two of us stood in the center of what was essentially a huge, high-walled, private cemetery for a very few inhabitants.

      “Notice something different, Devaney?” I said.

      Devaney beamed proudly. “Yeah, it’s just a little bit bigger now, Hoag, thanks to our efforts.”

      “No,” I said. “Something else.” He looked up and his body slowly made the turn.

      “Damn,” he said. “No crows. Not a single, damned crow. Were they around when we got here this morning?”

      “Can’t recall,” I said.

      Neither could he.

      We worked the next week, half days only. It was all the manual labor our poor old bodies could take.

      Charlie Rivers gained enough strength to make a brief appearance on Friday. When he saw our progress, he split an apple branch and located number nineteen.

      Devaney handed him a reflector to mark the spot. While he stood poking it into the soft soil the crows fluttered back in threes and fours.

      “Hoag, Devaney, you guys have been great,” Charlie Rivers said. “And I thank you with all my heart. But I know I can handle it from here on. That’s nineteen, so there’s one left—probably the sentry. My guess is I’ll find him in that last corner. I’ve got two and a half weeks. Weather permitting, I’ll make it just fine. I’ll get back to clearing brush tomorrow. Thanks again.”

      We were pretty tuckered out, so being dismissed didn’t feel so bad. We told him we did have stuff to do in our own lives, but we’d check in on him regularly, see if he needed anything. We shook hands, packed up our tools, and left.

      It rained ten of the next fourteen days. The whole Upper Valley was one gigantic puddle. The French Acre wasn’t immune. Several times when it was coming down hard, we drove by and saw Charlie Rivers sipping coffee in his pickup truck, parked in front of the nine-foot wall, waiting for the rain to slack off enough so he could wade in and fight to get a little chainsaw work done. He made little progress in the two-week stretch. Even if we had wanted to, there wasn’t a thing we could do to help.

      Monday and Tuesday, the seventeenth and eighteenth, I was tied up with a couple of writing assignments farther south in Springfield and Ascutney. But I didn’t need a photographer, so Devaney helped Charlie out for part of the day.

      “The guy’s killing himself,” Devaney told me on the phone the second night. “He’s there at dawn and works until dark. And I don’t believe he’s fully recovered from that flu yet.”

      I told Devaney I had to make another trip south Wednesday on the Springfield story, but I’d try to help out Thursday.

      “Have you found out why the deadline is the twenty-fourth?” I asked.

      “He’s pretty tight-lipped about it,” Devaney said. “Near as I can figure, it’s the day before the full moon, so maybe there’s a tie-in there.”

      Wednesday afternoon when I got home from Springfield I had a message from Nelda Potter on the answering machine.

      “He’s got the whole place lit up,” Nelda told me when I called her back. “He’s been working the last two nights there, running a generator and electric lanterns. I don’t drive at night, but my neighbors told me. They said it looks positively eerie, the light shining through the opening in the wall where the boys hit it, and lit up like a searchlight from inside, shining toward the heavens. The crows stay there at night now. I don’t think they did that before.”

      I phoned Devaney, who had just gotten back from helping Rivers at the French Acre.

      “I saw the generator and the lanterns, but I didn’t realize Charlie had been staying round the clock,” Devaney said. “I’m only on days. We’re making headway and, if you help out, the three of us should have it all cleared by this weekend--Monday at the latest, and that’s the twenty-fourth. Still, I’m betting we’ll get it done and he’ll locate the last grave by the weekend.”

      Thursday morning Devaney picked me up and we drove to the French Acre. Charlie’s pickup was parked in front, but when we stepped through the opening in the wall, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. The generator wasn’t running and there were no lanterns lit. The area of uncleared brush was down to about thirty-by-thirty. We stepped back out toward the road and looked in the pickup. Charlie was stretched across the bench seat, curled up under an Army blanket.

      “I hope he’s just asleep,” Devaney said, and prepared to rap on the window.

      “Don’t,” I said, grabbing his wrist. “The man’s exhausted. He needs the rest. You and I can get started without him.”

      We cleared brush as quietly as we could for two hours, not firing up the chainsaw. Finally Charlie Rivers appeared behind us.

      “Morning,” he said. “Thanks for letting me catch a few winks.”

      “No problem,” I said. “No sense killing yourself over a deadline. Besides, we’ll make it by Monday night, no sweat. The weather report for the four or five days is good—at least until the full moon.”

      Rivers smiled. He knew I was fishing.

      “More than a full moon,” he said, and turned to walk back out of the Acre. “If you two don’t mind, I’ve got to pick something up at Dan & Whit’s. Then I’ve got to hitch up my trailer and pick up a load. Back in a couple of hours.”

      Devaney and I worked until noon, then knocked off for the day as planned. Using two chainsaws we had made a commendable dent in what remained. Rivers still hadn’t returned by the time we packed up and left.

      Carol invited her mother and father over for dinner that night, and after we gave an update on the French Acre, my mother-in-law said, “Is this some kind of a special full moon?”

      “Good question, Mom,” Carol said. “You mean, like a harvest moon, a corn moon, a wolf moon—one of those superstition things? Wolves howling, asylums and emergency rooms filling up, people freaking out? I read somewhere that lunar and lunatic come from the same Latin word.”

      Before Devaney could roll his eyes, I said, “You know, could be you’re onto something. We like to check out all possibilities, don’t we, Devaney?”

      He rolled his eyes. “Well, it’s not a Blue Moon,” he said. “That’s when you get a second full moon in the same month—like first and twenty-ninth, second and thirtieth, third and thirty-first. I don’t know about the others.”

      While the three of them were having dessert, I went to my study and got on the Internet, planning to do a search for Full Moon. But Devaney’s comment about the Blue Moon had stuck in my mind. I typed Blue Moon in instead of Full Moon. A World Book encyclopedia article came up.

      The term blue moon was used as early as 1528 to represent an absurd belief. Later, people described uncommon events as occurring “once in a blue moon.” Blue moon also refers to rare types of full moons.

      Two types of full moons qualify. According to one definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month that has two full moons. According to an older definition, a blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. The older definition was developed using a calendar in which spring always begins on March 21.

      So a blue moon wasn’t simply the second full moon in the same month, as Devaney had said and as I had always thought. There was an older, different definition.

      I did a computer search for phases of the moon and came up with charts from the U.S. Naval Observatory. I found the one for the current year, 1996. In the autumn quarter the full moons fell on September 27, October 26, November 25, and December 24--four full moons in a quarter. And the third one—the blue moon--would be on Tuesday, November 25 at 4:10 a.m. It was the definition I hadn’t known about, the one that didn’t require two full moons in the same month. Charlie had said it was more than just a full moon.

      So that was why Charlie Rivers needed to be done by Monday night, the twenty-fourth. Although the date of the blue moon would be Tuesday, the twenty-fifth, because it was in the wee hours of the morning Tuesday, it would seem as if it were appearing late Monday night, after midnight.

      I printed out a copy of the article and the astronomical chart to show Devaney. Retired history teachers could be such know-it-alls, but they weren’t always right.

      “Maybe he figured there was going to be an even worse accident on the blue moon,” Devaney said. “So he wanted to clear and mark all the graves with the flags. You know, the honorable thing, thinking it’d set things right and save some lives.”

      “Sounds plausible,” I said. “But who can say? I sure don’t know what’s in that man’s mind. As he said, we’ll have to wait and see.”

      Friday morning we were met by more than a hundred bales of straw stacked at the opening in the wall. Charlie’s pickup and utility trailer weren’t around, but there was a note pinned on a bale of straw blocking the opening: Devaney and Hoag. Can you move the straw inside? Don’t break the bales apart, just space them evenly around the ground. Back soon. Thanks. C.T.R.

      “Looks like we’re going to seed it and cover it with straw for the winter,” Devaney said. “We’ll have grass in the spring. Old Charlie’s gonna give the town a park.”

      We had lugged the last bales inside and were resting on them when the pickup and trailer pulled up in front and Charlie beeped his horn. Devaney and I clambered out to see what he wanted.

      The truck and trailer were piled high with more bales. The three of us unloaded them and, under the watchful eyes of the crows, hauled them inside the compound.

      By Sunday noon we had all the brush and trees cut, cleared, and piled outside the walls. It took Charlie less than five minutes to locate the twentieth soldier’s resting place. I marked it with a reflector.

      “That’s all of them, right, Charlie?” Devaney said.

      “Twenty. That’s it. But just to be sure, I’ll make a final sweep of the place after lunch. That’ll be it, guys. Your work is done. I appreciate all the time and labor you’ve put in.”

      “But what about the straw?” I said.

      “Yeah. Where’s the grass seed?” Devaney added. “Don’t you want us to help you seed it?”

      Charlie stared at us. “Oh, the seed? Umm, I haven’t picked it up yet. I’ll get it tomorrow—and I’ll rent a spreader—it’ll be light work. I can handle it myself. Can’t spread the straw until the seed’s laid down, but the straw will be light work, too. You two have done more than enough. Thanks.”

      “But I thought you had a deadline of tomorrow?” Devaney said.

      “And what about the flags?” I said.

      Charlie Rivers looked sheepish.

      “Charlie, you didn’t bust your hump to clear this place out by tomorrow just to create a town park. It’s about them,” I said, motioning around us at the reflectors, “the soldiers.”

      “Yeah, Charlie,” Devaney said. “Why don’t you spill it?”

      Rivers looked uncertain for a moment, measuring us. Then he said, “Tomorrow night. Come after midnight, right around three-thirty in the morning. Nobody else. Just you two. I’ll take care of everything between now and then. Don’t come beyond the opening in the wall, though. Stay outside.”

      “Okay,” I said. “Three-thirty, not before. Just the two of us. Can you tell us what you’re going to do?”

      “No, I can’t,” Rivers said. “And Hoag, Devaney, promise me—no cameras. Promise. No cameras.”

      “Promise,” I said, Devaney standing dumbly beside me.

      The rest of that day and all of Monday we honored Charlie’s request and left him alone. Twice on Monday we drove by and saw his vehicle there. On our first pass we noticed he’d picked up another load of straw, which he carried in without help. On the second pass we saw him carrying ropes and two-by-fours. But we didn’t stop.

      Devaney came by after supper and we half-watched a couple of TV shows. Our minds weren’t on TV, they were on Charlie Rivers and the French Acre. We rehashed all the information we’d collected, went over everything we’d seen and done. But, except for the idea of a memorial service, we had no idea.

      “He said no cameras,” Devaney said. “But he didn’t say no tape recorders.”

      “I’ve got two in my coat,” I said. “One in each pocket.” We each had heavy winter coats, scarves, gloves, and hats. It was going to be a very cold, frosty night, the forecast said, but no wind chill.

      We watched the ten o’clock news on one channel, the eleven o’clock news on another, and a late-night talk show. When we couldn’t stand it any longer, we went out to an all-night truck stop for bacon and eggs. At 2 a.m. we paid the bill, walked out into the parking lot under what seemed to be a full moon and slowly made our way toward the French Acre.

      We rounded the last curve onto the straightaway and could see it. With the light of a full moon above and lantern light inside, it looked eerie, like a huge crown that was glowing on top. It wasn’t yet 2:30, so we pulled off the road two hundred yards before it. Devaney pulled out the thermos he’d filled at the truck stop and we drank a couple more cups of coffee. We saw Charlie make a couple of trips to the truck, the last one for a ladder.

      I heard Devaney’s door open.

      “Just got to step out and pee,” he said. “Get rid of some of this diner coffee.”

      When I looked out his window a minute later, I saw a camera in front of his nose. I pressed the button and lowered his window.

      “What are you doing?” I said. “I thought you were peeing. We promised Charlie no cameras.”

      Devaney clicked off a shot, turned his head toward the open window, and whispered loudly, “I am peeing. A good photographer has to be able to do two things at once. And I heard Charlie to say he wanted no cameras inside. And, regarding no cameras, I believe he said after three-thirty.”

      Sometimes Devaney could split hairs and mince words better than the teenagers he’d taught. This wasn’t the time to argue with him.

      “Hurry up,” I said. “The cold air’s pouring in.”

      He climbed back in and closed the door as quietly as he could. I hoped Charlie hadn’t heard the noise or caught a glimpse of our dome light while the door was open.

      “So what’ve you got besides the camera?” I said. “Video surveillance equipment?”

      “As a matter of fact, I’ve got the mini-video cam in the bag behind me, and a collapsible tripod. I know we can’t take it inside, but I figured we could set it up just before 3:30 outside the hole in the wall. It’s the only way I’ll get any shots to compare with the others I took.” Devaney had shot dozens of rolls of film the past several months, both inside and outside the French Acre. The walls of his study bore witness to the gradual success of Charlie’s brush-clearing efforts.

      At a quarter-past-three I started the engine and we eased behind Charlie’s utility trailer. The light shining in the French Acre silhouetted the hundreds--maybe thousands--of crows on the wall. We could see the moonlight shining off the feathers of the ones closest to us. They seemed to glow an iridescent blue-black, as if they had auras.

      Devaney opened his door and started to climb out.

      “Hey, what are you doing?” I said, putting a hand on his arm. “It’s early.”

      “Relax,” Devaney said. “I’m simply going to see if everything’s okay with Charlie. Maybe he needs a little last-minute help.” Then he added, “Besides, I figured I’d get set up.” He reached for the mini-cam on the back seat.

      “Just wait,” I said. “Give him until twenty-five after, anyway.”

      Devaney gave me a pouty look and reluctantly slid back into the car. I pulled out my two miniature tape recorders and tried them. Both worked fine.

      “A little nervous?” Devaney said. “Eager to get down to brass tacks?”

      Before I could answer, a truck pulled up behind us. I sighted along my outside mirror and saw a large figure in heavy clothing get out. He walked straight toward my driver’s-side window. He approached like a cop on a traffic stop.

      “Hoag? Devaney?” a deep voice said as I lowered my window. I tried to look up at the man, but he shone a flashlight right in my eyes. “You’re both under arrest,” he said, then started to giggle, “for idiocy!”

      “Dutch? Dutch Roberts?” I sputtered. Well, what the--?”

      Both Dutch and Devaney were laughing now.

      “Devaney,” I said. “Did you tell him we’d be here tonight?”

      “Yes, he did,” Dutch said. “He called me during The Tonight Show.”

      “Hoag, I know nothing’s going to happen,” Devaney said. “But we could be walking into an ambush, and nobody else knows we’re here.”

      “Ambush? You think Charlie’s taken almost three months to set us up for an ambush? What’s he going to do—scare us to death?”

      The two of them kept chuckling.

      “All right, Dutch, get in the back seat, damn it. But first,” I said, catching a glimpse of the holster on his hip, something he almost never wore, “please put that pistol in your glove compartment. There’s nobody here but me, Devaney, a sick old Indian dowser, and a boatload crows.”

      Dutch obliged.

      When it was time, we all got out and approached the wall.

      “Look at that,” Devaney said. “He must have seeded it all by himself.”

      Dozens of kerosene lanterns hung from spikes pounded into the inside walls. Every inch of ground had been covered with loose straw. But the layer of straw was far too thick to be protecting newly sown grass seed. The straw looked to be more than a foot deep. The driveway reflectors were gone. In their places were small British flags taped to the ends of long, straight branches.

      “What in the hell is that?” Dutch said, pointing toward the center of the French Acre.

      Something like a tree fort, a cross between a duck blind and a giant rattan barstool, stood eight feet above the ground on poles. The wooden ladder we’d seen earlier was leaned up against it.

      Charlie Rivers sat cross-legged in its center, head down, forearms on knees, palms upturned.

      “What’s he doing?” Devaney whispered. “Yoga?”

      “Some kind of meditation,” Dutch said.

      Devaney set up his tripod and mounted the mini-cam on it. He panned across the Acre a couple of times, wanting to capture the bluish-gold color of the straw, which looked like an ocean. He zoomed in on Charlie in the tower, then panned around at the faces of the crows, every one facing the tower.

      “Has he got his eyes closed?” Dutch said.

      “Of course he does,” Devaney said. “He’s meditating.”

      A moment later Charlie Rivers began removing his clothing.

      “It’s ten minutes before four o’clock,” I said into the tape recorder. “After a period of what appears to have been meditation, the man we’re watching has started taking off his protective clothing. Hat, coat, boots, shirt.”

      “Damn, he’s got to be freezing,” Dutch said. “Is this a man in his right mind?”

      Charlie’s striptease went on for ten minutes as if it were a ritual thing until he had nothing left but his long underwear and tee shirt. At four o’clock I reported into my tape recorder that he was sitting buck-naked on the platform.

      “Oh-ah-wa-hay-ye-ah,” Charlie chanted. The tape player was too far away to pick it up, but I repeated into it what I thought I heard Charlie saying. He sang it like a mantra, kept repeating it the way I’d heard Native American rain dancers do it in Arizona.

      A cloud passed across the moon and I felt a chill run down my spine. It was 4:05 when I mentioned the cloud and my chill on the tape.

      “It’s some kind of purification ceremony, ain’t it?” Dutch said.

      Neither Devaney nor I answered.

      Rivers had lit six lanterns and arranged them on the platform around him. He prepared what looked like a smudge pot on his lap and began streaking his face. At first I thought of war paint. Then I thought of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and my mind conjured up a memory of my wife Carol returning from the worship service at church with a smudge of ash on her forehead, a sign of repentance.

      “What time is it, Dutch?” Devaney said.

      “Four-oh-nine,” Dutch said, and before he could say more the crows moved—just slightly, ever so slightly--all of them. We heard their feathers rustle, all of their feathers together.

      “Jeezus,” Devaney said, and we all shivered. “What was that about?”

      “Four-oh-nine, as I said,” Dutch answered. “Four-oh-nine and going on the witching hour.”

      Charlie stood up on the platform with his arms raised, with what appeared to be leather thongs around his biceps. He continued chanting to the skies, maybe to the gods. Or was it to the moon? To the blue moon?

      We saw the crows move again, heard the sea of feathers rustle.

      “What happens now?” Dutch said.

      “I don’t know,” I said. “Four-ten. Full moon. Wait and see.”

      Charlie stopped chanting. He turned around in a circle once, twice, three times, and reached for the lanterns. He swung in a softball pitcher’s windup and flung them toward the corners of the compound. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. The lanterns landed, some without breaking, others with the sound of shattering glass chimneys. The loose straw quickly caught fire around each lantern.

      “Rivers!” Dutch yelled. “What in hell are you doing? You goddamned fool, get out of there.” He sprang through the opening but immediately floundered in the loose straw and fell over.

      “Dutch, get back here,” Devaney screamed. “You can’t get to him now.”

      The two of us grabbed the constable and dragged him back to the opening.

      Charlie stood chanting wildly. In no time the entire surface of the compound was engulfed in flames. The crows stood their ground, moving their wings in wider sweeps now--fanning the flames--bringing in oxygen from outside the wall. They cawed, a cacophony that mixed with but didn’t drown out Charlie Rivers’ insane chanting. The six separate fires from the lanterns connected and moved toward the center, bound for Charlie’s tower. We saw the twenty British flags disappear in the hungry flames.

      “Oh my God, oh my God,” we would later hear Devaney say on tape.

      A moment later the heat was so intense we had to back away from the opening. Even above the snapping and popping, though, we heard the tower come crashing to the ground, and Charlie’s screams.

      The crows lifted off en masse then as Devaney and I stood transfixed, watching stupidly as they flew across the moon and out over the deep dark woods.

      Dutch ran to his truck to call the Fire and Police Departments. By the time they arrived the French Acre was nothing but a smoking black smudge. The only flames they could douse came from the support poles of Charlie’s tower.

      Devaney and I sat weeping while the Town and State Police asked us questions.

      It was days before we could bear to check the audiotapes and mini-cam footage. We were pretty sure we knew everything we had said on the audiotape. But right after we pulled Dutch up from his fall into the soft straw, as Devaney was saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” we could hear Dutch say, “See them? Soldiers. Blue smoke soldiers.” With the intensity of the moment, and with Devaney saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” neither of us recalled Dutch uttering that. And upon questioning, Dutch said he couldn’t remember saying it, either. Nor did he remember seeing it. Even when we played the tape, he swore it made no sense to him. Nothing, no blue smoke soldiers—nothing at all--showed up on the videotape to corroborate it.

      “So what do you think it was all about?” Devaney said as we tried to piece it all together in my study. “What’ll you put in the story?”

      Another Valley News staffer had already written up the basic fire story—I was too caught up in it--but there was space reserved in the weekend supplement for the special report I’d be delivering.

      “Well, we can tell Charlie’s side of it,” I said. “We can clear up the misconception that it’s Lafeyette’s French soldiers, explain about Norwich, Connecticut. It’ll be interesting to bring in Charlie’s background—Abenaki, cemetery groundskeeper, funeral parlor assistant, dowser. We’ve got the part about the British flags bought at Dan & Whit’s, the decades of automobile fatalities, your time and my time working with Charlie. What we saw the night of the blue moon. The crows. Everybody on the road had been talking about the crows. There’s plenty here for a story.”

      “I know that, Hoag. I know there’s plenty. But what was it all about? Was it a purification ceremony? Give the soldiers a funeral with honor?”

      “Well, sure, obviously it had to be some of that,” I said. “But--”

      “But what?”

      “My guess is, Charlie Rivers didn’t tell it all to me, because if he did, he’d have tipped me off that he was going to die in the process, and he knew I’d try to stop him. You see, he told me those Colonial women obtained a sleeping potion they mixed in with the food they fed the soldiers. Charlie didn’t say a drug, he said a potion. Remember how he used the same word—potion—when we took the chicken soup to him? The word potion suggests to me it’s a pass-down story, handed from generation to generation of Abenaki medicine men and medicine women. That’s how his mother got it. He said she was a medicine woman. A potion is something you get from an herbalist, a naturopathic specialist who knows natural cures and remedies--a medicine woman.”

      “You mean a long-lost, distant relative of Charlie Rivers?” Devaney said.

      “Maybe. But it probably doesn’t matter if it was a blood relative or not. It’s an issue of honor for the entire tribe.”

      “Is that what the accidents were about?” Devaney said.  “Remember how the victims all had Abenaki roots? Was the French Acre calling for Abenaki blood?”

      “Charlie may have recognized that all along. But it wasn’t until the wall opened up after the last accident that he sensed it in his unique way, when he went past the scene the morning after.”

      “You think Charlie felt it was his duty to do penance, to atone for his tribe’s sin?”

      “Sin’s more a Judaeo-Christian word,” I said. “I think Charlie’s people would say dishonor.”

      “But it was the colonial women who slit the throats of those soldiers,” Devaney said.

      “True,” I said. “But it was Charlie’s Abenaki ancestor, the medicine woman, who supplied the potion. So, whether she knew how the sleeping potion would be used or not, she had a hand in the murder of twenty men.”

      “But why did the act of atonement—this making right—have to coincide with the blue moon?” Devaney said.

      “I’m not sure,” I said. “Maybe if we ask an Abenaki medicine person, we’ll learn the answer to that. Or maybe it was just something Charlie sensed—you know, with that sixth sense he had. Maybe he just knew that’s when it would work.”

      “What do you mean—work?” Devaney said.

      “Apparently the ceremony, Charlie’s sacrifice, worked. I think that’s what Dutch--or somebody, maybe Charlie through Dutch--was telling us on the tape. Blue smoke soldiers?Blue smoke, blue moon? Think it’s a stretch?”

      “I don’t know, Hoag” Devaney said, shaking his head. “Maybe. It’s a theory. Good thing is, the mystery’s solved.”

      The following spring a team of forensic anthropologists unearthed the remains of twenty men. Buttons and other evidence indicated they had been British soldiers who died during the Revolution. Attempts to determine causes of death were inconclusive. The remains were returned to England.

      Two years later the Town dismantled the wall and built a Little League field on the French Acre. Now, for the first time in two hundred years, the French Acre teems with life. The park has been aptly named Soldiers Field.