III
The incident at the tannery — they did the work, by the way — marks a change in people’s attitudes toward the stranger. While there had been some folks suspicious of him from the moment he appeared on the turnpike, most have been more curious than anything. Now, that curiosity has been mixed together with unease. I wouldn’t go so far as to say folks are afraid of Cornelius’s Guest as that they’re ready to be, you know? Suddenly, everyone’s noticing the strange goings-on at the Dort house. There are a lot more storms than there used to be, or so the old-timers say, lots more thunderstorms, and don’t they linger over the Station? Haven’t the Dort house’s windows been seen shining with a weird, blue light late at night? Hasn’t one of the local children reported seeing something in the local spring, something she couldn’t stop crying long enough to identify? There are stories that Cornelius has been seen, during a fierce summer storm, the lightning falling almost as fast as the rain, walking through one of his orchards, accompanied by a figure in black — not his Guest, no, this figure is distinctly feminine, wearing a long dress and a long, black veil. No one can make out her features, but there’s something about the way she walks that seems off, as if she isn’t used to using her legs her way, or has forgotten how. Certainly, she’ll haunt the dreams of one man who witnesses her stroll with Cornelius, a minor painter named Otto Schalken, who’s up from Brooklyn visiting his brother Paul, the schoolmaster in West Hurley. Otto’s caught out in the storm when he ignores Paul’s warning to delay his daily constitutional. Needless to say, he finds the experience of being in the thick of a true Catskill thunderstorm a bit traumatic; though, when all is said and done, it’s not half so bad as the sight of Cornelius and the woman in black. Like I said, she walks through his dreams. Otto, whose previous claim to fame was illustrating an edition of Coleridge’s poems, achieves the only celebrity he’ll know for a half-dozen canvases rendering that woman in the long black veil. He doesn’t include Cornelius in the paintings, which show the woman wandering not in a Catskill apple orchard, but next to the sea. I’ve seen a couple of them in art books, and there’s something about the sea — it’s black and storming, and the way he painted the woman’s dress and veil, it’s like she’s wearing that angry sea. No one’s sure what Otto was up to — I mean, a few critics have taken educated guesses, but the man himself left no word aside from a packet of cryptic letters he wrote to his brother once he’d returned to his apartment in Brooklyn. He was pursued, Otto wrote, “by a very Geraldine, to whom my soul is no more than water to drink.” The brother sent a reply asking him what he meant, but he never received an answer. After completing the final canvas in the series, Otto sat down in the bedroom, took his straight razor in hand, and slit his throat from ear to ear.
Nothing like a bit of melodrama, huh? Otto Schalken’s story aside, if you look into most of the reports about Cornelius and his Guest, you find that they trace back to one person, who tends to have been less-than-reliable: a child, say, in trouble for staying out playing too late and blames his tardiness on what he saw over at the Dort house, which is passed on by his gullible parents. There are one or two things that a number of people agree on. During the summer of, I think it’s eighteen forty-nine, might be eighteen fifty, an especially bad storm blows in and hangs over the Esopus valley for the better part of a day and half. There’s rain, yes, but folks will remember this storm for its thunder and lightning. The thunder shakes houses like an earthquake — in fact, it’s blamed for cracking the rear wall of one of the houses in the Station. As for the lightning, there’s so much of it night practically turns into day. Several people living in or staying at the Station swear that the Dort house takes more than a dozen direct strikes. The house has a lightning rod, of course, and those who witness the lightning touching that rod say that it seems to hang in the air for an instant longer when it does, like a long, snarled thread being drawn from the sky. The other thing folks agree on is that, after the night of that storm, the Station’s spring tastes different. Most say the spring has become sulfury, but a few insist that isn’t it, that the water tastes burnt, somehow.
If things have been strange at the Dort house, they never become so strange that folks feel they have to do anything about them. After the night of that legendary storm, the Guest appears less and less, and he was never that visible in the first place. Other things occupy people’s attention. The tanneries start to close. By the time the Civil War breaks out, they’ll be a thing of the past. The whaling industry’s pretty much belly-up, too. I bet you didn’t know that the towns on the Hudson used to send out huge whaling fleets. What was it? At one point, Hudson — the town, I mean — had more ships than Manhattan. Big part of the local economy, then the bottom fell out of it. And in the background of all this were the debates about slavery and states’ rights that were laying tracks to the Battle of Bull Run. As time goes on, Cornelius Dort and his Guest become the kind of bogeymen you use to keep your children in line, and less anyone’s real concern.
Years pass — decades. The Guest rarely if ever shows his face, to the point that younger folks, the ones who had been the audience for those tales of the man in black, doubt his existence. There’s no doubting Cornelius, though. While the march of time stamps the red out of his hair and wears deep lines in his face, he remains as full of vim-and-vigor — not to mention vinegar — as ever. People say it’s because Death himself is afraid of the man. What’s that saying, you know, “Heaven doesn’t want me, and hell’s afraid I’ll take over.” That fits Cornelius to a T. Investing in munitions, he makes a ton of money off the Civil War, to the point he’s one of the richest men in the country. He never remarries — doesn’t keep company with anyone, really. When he reaches eighty, he suffers a stroke, which only slows him up for as long as it takes him to master using a cane. When he reaches the century mark, there are articles on him in the local papers, even a piece in the New York Times. The Times reporter rides all the way up from the City to try to interview Cornelius. For his trouble, he receives a jab in the gut from Cornelius’s cane and the front door slammed in his face. He still writes a decent story about the old man. Like everyone else, the Times has no desire to stir Cornelius to wrath. None of the local reporters attempts to approach Cornelius.
IV
Right around the time Cornelius starts counting his age in three digits is when plans are being drawn up for the Reservoir. New York City is living beyond its means, and someone has to make up the difference. Spoken like a true upstater, right? I assume you know the story. After some discussion, the powers-that-be in the City and State decide to dam the Esopus and turn the valley behind it into a lake. This doesn’t go down so well with the people whose houses, land, and businesses are going to be at the bottom of said lake, and they do what they can to fight the plan. Cornelius is at the forefront of that struggle, spending no small part of his fortune hiring lawyers and buying politicians in an effort to convince the City that the water from the Adirondacks would taste much better. Initially, there are a few, hopeful signs, but that soon changes. In the thirst of all those people, Cornelius has finally encountered a force he can’t overcome. The Reservoir is approved for the Esopus valley.