The Broken Leaf by Richard Simonds

The Broken Leaf by Richard Simonds

I

It wasn’t much of a road. It ran through short grass, with dirt tracks showing where the ruts of wagon wheels had carved their way, with an occasional hoofprint to the side, sometimes shallow, sometimes deep. It was a sunny late summer day, in the afternoon, but not too hot, and a decent wind blew. He went for walks like these frequently, as he had nothing better to do. They started with a sort of destination in mind, but when a choice in the direction to take came along, he just went where his legs told him to go. Usually a lake was a destination, where he would find a place to sit and look at the water. That day he was thinking he hadn’t seen Bear Lake in a while, but on the way, he decided that it was too close and a longer walk to Moose Lake was in order, even though it took him into parts of the surrounding area he rarely went to.

He was looking at the ground as he walked, when something caught his eye. Maybe if he’d been just an ordinary walker, and not particularly observant, something like this would not have seemed strange, but it stood out, and when he picked it up and examined it closely, he had never seen anything like it before. The best way to describe what he saw is quite simple: “a green leaf broken into two pieces.” Now broken leaves are very common, but they are always dry and brittle, as they are pieces of dead leaves that have fallen off the tree. However, this leaf was green, like it had been removed from or blown off the tree somehow. And it was clearly broken, not cut, snapped in half. It had been long and slender, and now the two pieces were even narrower than the original leaf. The leaf wasn’t dry; it was moist and pliable. He looked closely, it hadn’t been cut with a knife, the edges of the break were crooked. Plus, he didn’t recognize the leaf. He thought he knew all the trees and their leaves. Maybe that, also, was what had drawn his attention.

He took off his backpack and found the little metal box he kept inside. It called it his Box of Inexplicable Things. Its contents included a rusty thimble-like piece of metal, a piece of white quartz, a ring that was made of silver with a strange design, and a few other items. They were all things he had found during his walks. He thought that each of them must have a long story characterized by unlikely occurrences, miraculous even, about how they got to where he found them. He would dream up wild stories about them while he walked. He imagined the thimble belonged to one of the Fates spinning the wheel of time, and it had gotten lost, and someone might get to live forever. The quartz was the tip of a magic wand used by the king of the fairies to turn people into frogs. They were things he had never seen before or since during his walks and never expected to see again.

He looked around to try to find the tree that the leaf had come from. Off to the side of the road there was a sunken field. Beyond it there was an old stone house with a solitary square window, divided into four square windowpanes, facing him. Next to the house, in the direction he was traveling, were four large trees, about sixty feet high, set in a square, each with an oval canopy so perfect that it looked trimmed. He didn’t recognize the trees, but had a feeling that was where the mysterious leaf came from, so he decided to take a closer look.

It had rained recently, and the sunken field was bordered by embankments, so walking through it the ground was soggy, and then the mud got sticky. He was determined though to see the trees up close. Suddenly, the ground collapsed beneath him, like a sheet of thin ice breaking on a frozen lake, and he sank in the mud up to his shoulders. He was able to stretch his arms out to stop his fall, and he seemed to have landed on some kind of large, curved object, maybe a tree root. But he was completely stuck in the mud. If he tried to push himself out, his arms went into the muck, there was nothing to push against, although he felt the object below him was stable.

“Help!” he cried at the house that he was facing.

He looked around. The stone house seemed empty; there was no movement behind the window. As for the road, none of the hoof marks or wagon ruts he remembered had been fresh, and it could be days before someone traveled on it again. He looked at the trees, gently swaying in the breeze, the leaves rippling. The house stood there with its old, grey stone, and little tufts of moss that grew out of its walls and under the eaves. He couldn’t see through the window; it just reflected the sky and clouds behind him.

He decided every so often to let out a cry for help. He wondered about who might live in the house, and he yelled at the house again more loudly. But there was no response.

The hours passed, and his nervousness turned to fear. He reminisced, as he sat there, stuck, about his life, his childhood, his marriage, his children. He was an old man, lucky to have lived so long, to be able to walk along his paths through the countryside. He used to daydream about how his life might end, but being stuck in a field of mud he could never have imagined.

He thought of God, and the little church he attended, and what waited for him. He thought of the promises of salvation, but the thought of dying here in the mud alone, was unfair, and not what he thought God would have envisioned for him. He decided to pray anyway, the Lord’s Prayer, and then a prayer that he might be saved, but the words seemed empty and futile. If this was truly how it would all end, it seemed an unjust punishment for all of his faith, his tithing, his trips to church almost every Sunday.

He thought more about what had led him to his predicament. The area he had wandered into was a mysterious area, full of strange settlers who spoke a different language and kept to themselves. Someone had told him once they were from the western islands off the coast of Ireland, and they didn’t speak English. He hadn’t seen a church here, just farms where they grew mostly potatoes, and kept sheep.

The wall of the embankment next to the house was low, and despite being stuck in the mud he could see over the ridge. And then he noticed, as he peered between the trunks of the mysterious trees, a strange sight right in the center of their square – an upright stone, carved in the shape of a cross with a circle through it. To him it was a Christian symbol, but it did not feel Christian, maybe because of the circle. It seemed like maybe some kind of tombstone. It gave him a chill. What an awful place to die, he thought.

The sun went down; it was a spectacular sight, full of yellow, pink and red. He’d never had that much time to watch the colors of the clouds change, and he intently stared at each one, as if he’d never seen a sunset before. And then it became darker and darker, and there was nothing but night sky.

His wife had died a year after the birth of their fourth child. The children were long gone to far-off places in the world, getting away from the bleakness and drudgery of that remote part of the world. They all said they would come get him if they ever found success in life and help him in his old age, but the letters he received were always full of worry and concern. Sometimes they would ask for money, and he would put some in an envelope and send it back, but it was never much. There was no one waiting for him back home, no one coming to look for him. No one knew where he was.

The darkness came on thick and black. The sliver of moon on the horizon gave a little light to the darkness and was not enough to cast a shadow. The occasional fly came by and flew in his face. He thought he would be unable to sleep.

The sliver of moon set, and it was pitch black.

Then he heard what sounded like the creak of a door.

For a moment he was filled with hope.
“Help! Help!” he cried.

He heard footsteps.

“An bhfuil duine éigin ann?” he heard, a male voice. He couldn’t make out the words.

“Help! Help! I’m stuck in the mud.”

He heard laughter. More laughter as the footsteps approached. It was a rich, deep laughter, and yet it had an undertone of malevolence.

The voice spoke again in the language he didn’t understand, but it seemed to be agreeing to help him.
“Thank you, thank you,” he replied, then he heard the footsteps going away.

He then saw a flickering light in the window. He then smelled something strange, a heavy, sweet scent, like nothing he’d ever smelled before. There were faint noises from the house. Then he saw the man, carrying a lantern, approaching the cross at the center of the trees, and something was put in front of it. And then the thing he was standing on moved, pulled away from him, and he was falling and falling, his head and arms slipping under the surface of the mud, and he was no more.

II

When they started building apartment buildings along Route 101 just south of Fredericton, they had to stop almost right away. In the past they’d simply ignored any bones they dug up, but there were inspectors now, and the fines substantial. Usually, it was just a random grave of some poor, forgotten soul. But here it was not only bones, but all kinds of things, which made the construction supervisor grimace. A call was made to the archaeology department at the University of New Brunswick.

Carol loved to receive these calls to relieve her otherwise monotonous day and the need for her to focus on her Ph.D dissertation on the pre-history of the Maritime Provinces, which was languishing. Usually, it was someone who thought they’d found some old pirate treasure, even though there was nothing of the sort ever found in that area; they never traveled that far north. She threw on her coat and headed out to the address. “Old bones and strange things discovered,” was the message she’d received. “Better than just old bones,” she thought.

Carol arrived and parked near the backhoe which had started the digging. There was something about the site which immediately caught her attention. The first thing she noticed was the presence of four very old trees nearby in a very exact square. Sometimes trees that old were protected from construction and sure enough they were behind a wire fence. She scanned a photo of the trees into Google images and pulled up they were yew trees. She’d never seen them in this area before. They were beautiful and the memory of them stuck in her head.

The backhoe had scooped up a skull, which was strange as usually other bones came with it, but looking down into the ground, the hole, which was only about two feet, the top of the spine showed, the body appeared to have been buried straight up. More interesting though was a bag of some sort that had been found next to the head. The bag had mostly disintegrated, but there was a metal box inside. The whole thing was old enough to be of interest; she roughly dated it 100-200 years ago.

Carol had some misgivings, as the size of the crew indicated that there may be some pushback to halting work on the site, but her internal archaeological alarm bells were going off, and so she put a stop to the construction, and promised it would just take a day to figure it out, and the workers seemed happy to go back early. Unfortunately for the construction company, the findings of the team sent out the next day clearly required them to set aside the area as one of archaeological interest. It wasn’t a normal 19^th century grave; it was something inexplicably strange. It wasn’t just one body, there were several, all buried feet down, head up, which made no sense to anyone. Plus, all kinds of silver and gold jewelry and other items were found, and most of the bodies held little stone Celtic crosses in their hands.

Carol felt particularly drawn to the box and felt it was key to understanding the meaning of the strange graveyard. In it, she found what she suspected was a thimble, although it was badly damaged, and which made her think the box belonged to a tailor. She suspected the quartz stone, another odd thing to find, had some kind of religious significance. But the broken leaf was the most puzzling of all. It must have fallen off the yew tree, dried up, and been broken somehow, but why it would have been in the box was the most puzzling.

With the area sealed off, the archaeologists looked around, and new discoveries were made. A large, roughly hewn Celtic cross about the size of a tombstone but considerably thicker, was found broken and lying on its side in the ground in the center of the square of trees next to the burial site, very similar to certain crosses found in the British Isles, and matching the small crosses in the hands of most of the bodies.

The broken leaf puzzled Carol the most. While most archaeologists would have viewed it as unimportant, there was something strange about the leaf she couldn’t get out of her head. She sent it into the lab for advanced analysis. It was important to her for her theories about the person found with the leaf to find out everything about it.

The scientist in charge of the spectography called her on the phone one day and asked her to come in.

“Carol, I want to show you something very unusual.”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” He brought up on the computer screen a very detailed photograph. “Look at the edges there in the break of the leaf.” And then another photo came up. “Here’s a photo of the way a dry leaf normally breaks.” He went back to the first photo. “But here, look very closely, it’s not exactly a break but a ‘carving’ along the leaf, as if an incredibly fine knife had been used. But a knife, no matter how fine, would not give such a clean, perfect cut.”

In addition to the strange break, the carbon dating of the leaf also gave a spectacular result – the leaf was 2,000 years old. And with that and the findings of the Celtic crosses, Carol suddenly had a fabulous new dissertation topic. In “The Celtic Presence in New Brunswick” she would theorize that ancient druidic relics were brought over from Ireland in the 1800s along with the emigration from the potato famine. She presented her topic to her dissertation advisors, and they approved the change.

However, it was the very next day after her dissertation approval that she got the call that made her thesis irrelevant, and over the coming days as the television cameras came and she was interviewed repeatedly, she soon became the most talked-about person in Canada, and their discovery made headlines for weeks around the world. They had found the foundation of an old stone house near the yew trees, and, with their luck with dating the leaf had decided to carbon date a piece of wood that had been used in its construction. 2,000 years. The stonework was analyzed for wear. Also 2,000 years. It was that old. And then when the media descended there was the amateur arborist who said the enormous yew trees were also 2,000 years old. They were not indigenous. They had been planted in a square. A long time ago.

They had been there. A long time before anyone else.

And while the yew trees and cross made some kind of sense, as part of some ancient religious ritual, no theory could explain the leaf. Some said it was some kind of druid magic. They were so in tune with the trees they could cause the leaves to do that. Carol would stare at the leaf for hours, her head full of wild thoughts. She would dream of strange rituals under the yew trees where the druids would bend life to their will, tear things apart and put them together again. She read book after book on druids and druid magic until her head was filled, and she couldn’t think about anything else.

And then one night she heard the wind and rain and thought of the man who had died in the bog. “It must have been a night like tonight,” she thought. In a daze, she drove out to the site and parked her car. She had on a long raincoat, and a large umbrella, but the rain was still soaking her feet. She had a flashlight. She decided to walk over to the fallen cross. “The answer must be in the trees,” she thought. The ground was muddy, but she avoided the dig and walked on the ridges that surrounded it.

She sat on the fallen cross, on the white stone, while the wind blew through the trees. She sat there thinking and thinking, until the wind and rain started to die down.

The trees began to whisper to her. “Bígí linn sna hlúir” they said, but she couldn’t understand. She wasn’t imagining things. She knew they were speaking, some terrible spell, and suddenly felt a terrible urge to leave.

She ran towards the road where her car was parked, but she tripped and fell into the dig, and when she fell roots came up from the ground and wrapped themselves around her wrists and feet and pulled her down, down into the mud.

They never found her, but the next day, before people became seriously concerned, a pair of archaeologists at the dig suddenly noticed a broken leaf that looked exactly the same as the one their supervisor had been obsessed with. It was lying on a patch of mud in the dig, where if they had looked more closely, they would have noticed that the mud had recently been disturbed. The green leaf was striking against the black mud.

“Wow, look at this, it’s just like the leaf that’s driving them all crazy,” one of them said.

“It must be something about the trees,” said the other.

“I will just leave it for Carol, she will know what to do with it.”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Richard Simonds 2025

Image Source: MythologyArt from Pixabay