This road out of town many years ago was called the corpse road. It was nothing but a dirt trail and when some townsfolk brought out a kinsman to bury in the cemetery at the end of the valley their carriages tossed up clouds of dust so great you had to follow by sound, and the only way you knew you were getting close was the horses getting skittish and the sound of birds disappeared altogether.
The cemetery was probably emptied out by the flood of 498. Champignon said he saw three generations of his family float by in twenty minutes. Parts of the fence remained. A few headstones’ caps could still be seen poking out of the mud. But it was abandoned. Kids go out there to scare themselves even now but I’m not sure there’s a single body left out there. Graveyard for a graveyard.
The road is now paved and it goes all the way through the block of granite at the end of the valley to the next town. Just outside our limits, it passes by a willow that seems like it’s got no business standing there. Although clearly it’s been defying sense for hundreds and hundreds of years. The trunk is as far around as four men can reach. A hundred men or more could shelter under its canopy. Despite the dark and sorry nature of its bark, which seems always as poxy as our ancestors were, the tree is stiff and upright. Walking up to it you can feel the solidness of the roots underfoot, spreading dozens of yards in any direction. It’s as firmly rooted here as we are.
It’s this tree that scares me. Because’n it just stood there, lonely of other trees for at least a mile, and was right outside of town, this tree was used on every occasion we townsfolk needed a solid surface against which to kill a man.
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