To my mind this is a ghost story, although it doesn’t contain any actual spooks or spectres. What it does have is a family so bad, born bad, that though they’re long dead, or driven off, they continue to haunt and terrorise the people of Chopping County where the story takes place. An abandoned farm, once known as Stone City, a place where “the buildings were gone, collapsed into cellar holes of rotting beams” and “blackberry brambles boiled out of the crumbling foundations”, is their castle of Otranto. “There are some places that fill us with an immediate loathing and fear,” as Proulx puts it. And Stone City has “something evil tincturing the light”.
The farm was once home to the Stones, a family group led by Old Man Stone, the worst of the lot, “a dirty old tyrant” as one character has it, a man said to “have kids who were his grankids” and who “ought to have had nails pounded into his eyes and a blunt fence post hammered up his asshole.” Yep, he’s that bad. And even though he died a long time ago, his evil still permeates.
The story’s narrator is new to the area, and all this is related to him by Badger, a local man foolish enough to have gone hunting on the Stones’ property when he was a kid. “My dog,” he tells the narrator one day when they meet at Stone City “All I got in the world, ain’cha, Lady?”
Badger will come to wish he’d kept this thought to himself, at least while he was on this land, because somewhere in those cellar holes are the lingering spirits of the Stone family. And they are listening.
First published in Grey’s Sporting Journal, 1979, collected in Heart Songs and Other Stories, Scribner, 1988
A Personal Anthology 