Oliver's Curse

By his own admission, Oliver was the "meanest sumbitch in the Valley" and in his final days, he did not go gently. There were, in fact, a good many in Grand Pre in the summer of '58 of who didn't think he'd gone at all.

Nothin' but superstition, a course, my grandmother assured us - the voices, the apparitions, the unexplained late night lights - superstition and rumor, hardly a genuine haunting. For the most part, it kept the realty company frustrated and the would be buyers at bay. The old gingerbread farmhouse where Oliver had lived alone for all his adult life fell into disrepair, then dilapidation, and finally ill repute. It wasn't long before it was put up for public auction and sold for taxes to the highest bidder.

Some disreputable land developer from the city, Nana said disapprovingly - More'n likely got it for pennies on the dollar and gon' clear the land and put up some fancy, damfool, newfangled shoppin' center  Somewhere between the tax sale and the groundbreaking though, peculiar things began to happen at the old farm. There were accidents with the heavy machinery, workers got lost and claimed to hear things in the woods, the weather seemed bound and determined to delay the process at every opportunity. Hard hats and lunch buckets went missing on a regular basis, paychecks inexplicably didn't clear, crews that had worked together for years suddenly couldn't get along and brawls broke out daily. Two construction foremen were fired for drinking on the job and one was caught setting fires. Grand Pre started thinking less in terms of a haunting and more in terms of a curse.

Ain't nothin' to sacrifice a virgin over, my grandmother remarked contemptuously, but might be time they's havin' some second thoughts 'bout that place.

Then in the spring of '61, a most unusual storm hit. On a clear late afternoon in Grand Pre, without the first drop of rain, lightning shot from the cloudless sky. According to the witnesses, the first couple of strikes sheared into the trees around the main house and split them clean in two. The third struck an earth mover and it exploded, sending bits of charred metal raining down like shrapnel. The fourth, fifth and sixth - every man there swore they struck simultaneously - set the woods on fire.

The fire burned for two days - the same amount of time as it had taken the developer to order all the crews out - the same amount of time it took for the Mounties to arrive. By then, the blaze had died out but the land was blackened with soot and ashes and the smell of smoke was still strong enough to make your eyes water. Around the woods that surrounded the farmhouse was an odd but quite precise circle of seared, scorched trees and burned up grasses that stretched well past the treeline but uniformly stopped a hundred or so yards from the rough wooden fence that encircled the house. The farmhouse itself was intact - eerily and impossibly so, the mounties realized quickly - it was undamaged, untouched, unassailed.

Naturally enough, no one believed a word of it

I declare, I ain't never heard such nonsense, my grandmother announced, as if anythin' could've survived that kind of fire less'n it was a Act of God!She couldn't dismiss the mainland paper quite so easily. They had pictures - black and white and grainy to be sure, but pictures all the same - as well as a sordid story on the house and its curse and even Oliver. Nana snatched it and angrily stuffed it into the old cast iron stove.

Damfool yellow journalism rag! she spat, Folks don't need no excuse to git stirred up! Not enough of 'em mind they's own business as it is! 

But Nana, I wanted to know, Why didn't it burn up?

How on God's green earth do I know, she snapped and gave me a mild swat on the backside, It ain't for me to know the likes of it! And not for you either!

Folks steered well clear of the place after that and when the hurricane came a few years later, the last beams gave way, the roof caved in, and the whole thing from fence to brick chimney was carried away in the wind. If there had been a curse, some folks said, it had done its work well.  Last I saw it, it was a barren place of broken trees and dead grass. Except for a faraway owl watching over it from a dead tree,and a few gulls overhead, there were no signs of life or regrowth, just bare, burned ground and a very faint, plaintive hint of smoke. I knew it was only my imagination - this was the real world, after all, and smoke simply does not linger after so many decades - but nevertheless I decided not to stay long.

 Even if they're not real, sometimes you have to respect the power of a curse.