Chapter 8: Apple Butter

https://wvtourism.com/event/33rd-annual-salem-apple-butter-festival/

     "Well Mr. Hanken," begins a reporter for the Bound Brook Chronicle in the shade of a turning sycamore at the edge of the Longwood spring, "how is the 1918 apple harvest?"

"You see me stirring this here kettle," grunts the crusty farmer thrusting a long-handled paddle dripping with russet goo into a dented copper pot, "you know it's a bumper year."

"Any new fruits for next year?" queries the young writer, using his pencil hand to slide wire-rimmed glasses back onto his nose.

"You'll have to ask the big boss," squints the old man, realizing his opportunity as he levers the paddle to scrape the bottom, "if you can catch him from behind the bumper of that new Nash while he's running between land sales."

__________

     September of 1918 hadn't been such a bumper month for the Kaiser. Forced back to the Hindenberg line in the mountains of eastern France by a series of allied attacks, the Boche were on the defensive for the first time in the war. With a poor harvest and rumors of a possible armistice, resistance to the war was growing in many German cities.
    Meanwhile back in the states, increasing American casualties had accompanied what would become known as the Hundred Days Offensive that had driven Germany nearly back to it's own borders. Opposition to Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's new policy of world engagement was growing among the electorate and their representatives. George LaFollette, a stauch Wilson ally and family friend, was facing stiff opposition for the New Jersey Senate seat from Republican Walter Edge. The wiley ex-Virginian couldn't afford to break another cog in his financial wheel.

__________

    "Speaking of  Mr. LaFollette," continues the intrepid reporter sensing a story, "do you agree with his support of increased engagement in the European theater?"

"The only theater I support," the orchardman laughs, leaning on the paddle handle to rest from stirring, "is me keeping these orchards and Henry keeping his hand."

"Sorry about your son, Mr. Hanken. How is his finger?"

"Better for a few days, now oozing again," offers the farmer, jamming the paddle back into the thickening apple butter. "Seems bad bones are turning up everywhere."

"May he get the care he needs. And the fruit trees? Any reason why you might not keep them?"

"Like I said," Henry's father smiles with another hard scrape of the kettle bottom, "ask the big boss where else you might find bad bones."

Chapter 7: Council Oak

https://www.flickr.com/photos/therefore/5283467880

     "Hank!" hisses Molly from her perch up on a large branch of an old oak tree before breaking out laughing at his startled look.

"Geez Molly, if you were a snake you would have bit me," he smiles, reaching up to clench her trim hips as she slips down into his arms, his sudden hardness gliding up her belly as her feet reach for the ground. "I found more bones in that hillside we're digging into."

"It's not a Revolutionary War graveyard," she blurts, leaning into him and straining to rub her chest against the ridges of his abdomen. "The school librarian told me that the fighting happened by the Queen's Bridge. The thirty dead soldiers were buried at the main camp at Morristown."

"Who then?" he groans, lifting her to place the middle seam of her jodhpurs against him and hardly noticing his infected hand as she clasps her riding boots around his hips.

"She sent me to the Memorial Library," she exclaims, catching sight of the red leaves glinting in the sun as she leans back to push into him just right. "You won't believe what I found out about my old house."

___________

    Molly's family had a hand in opening both the town's libraries. The private high school where she went had been christened the Washington School at the urging of the primary benefactor and fellow Virginian to the father of the country, her own father George Preston LaFollette. The town's library was raised on land donated by the family, and both buildings, school and library, were built by renowned New York architect and LaFollette hiree Alexander Morecraft. A new donation accompanied each new development, and the largest land sale, the orchard where Henry's family lived and worked, was going to fund LaFollette's contentious senate race.

__________

     "Tell me!" Henry blurts as nuts crunch under his rocking boots, acorns from the very tree under which the land was purchased from a Lenape delegation in 1681.

"The old..." Molly gasps with each forward rock, "mansion...was built...on an...Indian...MOUND."

"Wow," he shouts, matching her final exclamation as her boots slide down to the ground. "That dig might end up being a real Indian giver."

"Don't be glib," she chides, pushing away as he tries to hold onto her hips. "The hill is a sacred site for those who came before us."

"Hallelujah to that," he concedes, right arm dropping to his side as he holds up the left to show her a drying stub. "And to your voodoo cure."

Chapter 6: Caught

 http://www.saoshyant.org/teachings_saoshyant_alexandra_hehpsehboah.htm

     "Get away from there!" commands a man catching Henry in his flashlight beam beside a cyan pool glowing in the full moon peeking over the still-leafed-out trees to the east. "This is Calco property now."

"Just saving this," Henry blurts, his two hands holding up a big flapping bird dripping bluish-green slime.

"You can walk along the river path," the guard relents, "but the next time you trespass by the dye pools I'll have you arrested."

__________

     Henry had set out from Longwood at dusk like he usually did for night fishing at the point. Crossing westward over the Middlebrook bridge at Talmadge Avenue, he started hearing a cacophany of caws from the sycamores lining the Raritan. When he finally remembered that crows were usually tucked into First Watchung roosts by that time of the night, the hairs had risen into piloerection at the back of his neck. The calls led him to a little rise of newly banked earth just beyond the high water line. Moonbeams broke the tree line as he peered over the hummock, illuminating a downed bird flopping around in a colorful pool.

    Since Henry's fateful previous fishing trip to the point, the Cott-A-Lap Company had started nighttime shunting of waste from their contested Somerville plant to this new site on the uninhabited outskirts of the floodplain. They were hoping that reopening five miles downstream with a portmanteau name would be enough to quell protests at the former location. They were right, and the Calco Chemical Company was digging drainage pools and raising buildings at breakneck pace with hardly a peep from the nearby neighborhoods of the west end of Bound Brook.

__________

     "Here you go, beautiful," Henry whispers, gently holding both sides of the colored bird and dipping it into the deep pool of the river as it's compadres silently alight onto the overhanging sycamore. "This ought to clean those flight feathers."

With each dip, the bird flaps it's wings and more of the dye drips down over Henry's hands. After a half dozen dunkings, a big black bird emerges from the slime and leaps into flight as he raises his arms into the glorious harvest moon.

"Free at last," he calls into the orange night, citing a song he'd previously heard wafting across this wide hole from a Negro camp on a moonless night.

He's starting toward town along the fishermen's path when the chorus strikes up behind him.

"Oh yeah, Molly's magic," he recalls, striding back to the point and placing the bone, feather, and crystal on the hump of a stone at the edge of the lapping water as the murder alights from the tree, flies across the face of the full moon, and disappears into the eastern darkness.

Chapter 5: Hoodoo

https://www.mindat.org/locentries.php?p=3366&m=210

     "Psst, Henry," hisses Molly, her luminous face glowing from out of the darkness up above the building site as he's finishing up the day's excavating.

"Be right up," he whispers back, loading tools into a barrow and wheeling it over to the batch mixer before heading down the street. "Night boss," he waves back, tossing his hair out of his eyes as he turns the corner toward the back of the Evergreens.

     "I've only got a minute," she gushes, emerging from a carriage bay carrying a derby jacket and riding gloves. "We're driving to Trenton in Dad's new Nash."

"Fancy meeting you here," he smiles, his face lighting up in the growing glow of the harvest moon. "What's cracking?"

"You have to take these to the point tonight," she gushes, handing him a small wing bone, shiny black feather, and smooth white stone. "My old nanny says your finger will heal if you leave them for the snapper under a full moon."

__________

     Molly was passing on the objects given to her by an aging African-American housekeeper who had stayed with the family after the fall of the south. She'd explained that the chicken bone represented Henry's hand, the hen feather it's cleansing, and the gemstone an alter to call on his ancestors. This particular stone was an analcine crystal from nearby First Watchung Mountain.
     The Watchungs are an upstart volcanic triumvirate extending from the more staid Appalachians in northwest New Jersey.  The southernmost ridge, First Watchung, cuts across the waist of the state's figure-eight figure to the palisades of the Hudson River valley, demarcating the north's ridge and valley woodlands from the South Jersey pinelands. In 1918, quarrying of the Watchung's predominant stone for gravel was becoming the basis for the paving of the garden state, but periodic finds of rare minerals protruding from the basalt attracted rock hunters of all stripes, including the LaFollette's elderly ex-slave housekeeper.
     George junior was in the thick of an intense race for the New Jersey seat to the U.S. Senate. He'd been hand-picked for the Democratic nomination by a friend of his Virginia family, President Woodrow Wilson. At stake in the race was the senate majority, held by a slim margin by the President's progressive party favoring international engagement.

__________

     "Everybody and their mammy has got a bone to pick for the cure of my hand," Henry groans, slipping the three objects into the baggy back pocket of his dusty knickers. "I just want to know why there are bones under your old house."

"Maybe that's why this place always seemed haunted," Molly counters, stepping closer to lean into her friend. "My sister once woke in the night and thought she saw a soldier with a bloody sword down in the ballroom."

"What was here before this place?" he wonders, feeling her heat on his chest as he wraps his long arms around her narrow back, hands resisting settling on her newly bulging hips.

"I certainly don't know, but Daddy tells everyone who'll listen that there was a Revolutionary war battle in Bound Brook. I'll mention it to him on the long drive tonight."

"No, don't!" he blurts. "I'll go back to the Point if you won't tell anyone about the bones."

"If you'll leave those three things beside the hole, I promise I won't tell Daddy," she bargains, looking up into Henry's hazel eyes, "but I am going to ask the school librarian  about this hill."