Crackpot Palace Read Online Free PDF Page A

among the trees.
    For our first Christmas in town, Lynn and I were invited to a party. The couple whose house it was at had a son in our older son’s class. I met a lot of people from town and beyond, and we drank and shot the breeze. When the living room got too crowded and hot, I stepped out into the backyard to have a cigarette. It was lightly snowing, but it wasn’t all that cold. I was only out there for a minute before the door opened and this older woman, a little heavyset but tall, with white hair, came out and lit up. I introduced myself, and she told me her name was Ginny Sanger.
    I talked to her for quite a while. Eventually she said she was an amateur historian. The origins of the area had always interested me, so I asked her when it had been settled.
    â€œWell, the first people were, of course, the Lenape, the grandfather tribe of all the Algonquin nation,” she said. “They go way back here. The first Europeans, you’re talking early 1600s, Swedish trappers. Stuyvesant came in 1655 and shooed the Swedes out. The English eventually kicked the Dutch out.”
    â€œWhat got you into the history?” I asked.
    â€œAfter my husband died ten years ago, I really had nothing to do. He left me with plenty of money, so I didn’t have to work. One summer day, about seven years ago, I went over to Atsion Lake for a swim. Do you know where I mean?” she asked, pointing east.
    I nodded.
    â€œI was out in the lake swimming around, and I stepped on something sharp. I knew I had to find whatever it was; there were a lot of kids in the water that day. I reached down to the bottom and felt this big piece of metal. Bringing it up, I saw it was a flat, rusted figure of an Indian in a big headdress, shooting a bow and arrow. He was attached at the feet to about a four-inch shaft. It was pretty corroded, but you could definitely make out the form.”
    â€œSo that got you started?’ I said.
    â€œNo, what got me started was my neighbor, who told me to take the thing over to Sherman, who lived just a little way up Atsion Road from us.”
    â€œSherman?” I said, and the name rang a bell but I didn’t place it.
    â€œYou’ve seen him. The old guy with the raincoat.”
    â€œYou know him?” I said.
    â€œEverybody up that way knows him. I took the Indian to him, and he told me that it was an ornament for a weather vane and had been forged in the iron works at Atsion Village, probably in the mid-1800s. He started telling me stories about the early settlers and the Lenape. We sat all afternoon on the screened back porch of that crazy house of his, sipping iced tea from blue tin cups, and he told me about a place called Hanover Furnace, a story from the time of the settlers that involved a description of how iron was made, an evil spirit of the woods, and the last Lenape sachem.”
    â€œFrom seeing him around town, I got the impression he’s kind of out of it.”
    â€œWell . . .” she said.
    Lynn came out looking for me then, ready to split. I introduced her to Ginny and we quickly said good-bye and left through the back gate. On our way home, in the snow, we walked around the lake and I told her what the old woman had said about Sherman Gretts.
    Months went by, and I was deep into writing a book, so I didn’t go out much. Crackpop was about the last thing on my mind until one Friday evening in February. Lynn came home and told me that in the morning on her way to work she saw the old man going into a house down by the end of Atsion Road. “I never noticed the place before,” she said. “And I can’t believe I didn’t because it’s bright yellow.”
    The thought of Crackpop in a yellow house made me smile.
    â€œYou’ve got to see it, though,” she said. “I always thought, when I passed, that there were trees, like tall dogwood, growing around it, but today, when I saw him and knew it was his place,