Tally Marks

Would you raise a family in a house haunted by your father? Since one man's legacy leave scars and shadows beneath an ancient oak tree. My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. The oak tree in front of the house had always been a witness to death. It stood there still on most days around the property, taking over everything inside of it, including me, especially on dark nights like the one who were about to have. I stood there watching it from the road during the day. As I heard the school bus approaching, James came running up to me from the school bus, just like he always did, a little project or a gift in his hands that he usually wanted to show his mom and talk about it before getting ready to have dinner with us. I waved to the bus driver and he sped off into the twisting hills to leave the other two kids, some that lived even farther out into the woods. Beatrice, my wife, didn't like us living so far, but it was a large plot of land, only taxes and bills to pay on it and nothing else. It was all my dad had left me. A successful business man who hated well, didn't like being around other people. He would often say to never trust anyone. James had a drawing in his hand, something he had exchanged with another kid from his class. Henry has a swing set in his house now, he said, stretching out his hand and giving me a piece of paper. He had a phone number on it, Henry's mother, asking about James going over to play at his house. Up until that point, I had been very careful with James, never letting him out of my sight, except for when he went to school and my wife caught on right away. Nothing's going to happen to him, she would say, it'd be fine. I walked behind James as he ran up to the house through the long pathway to the porch. I passed by the oak tree while they thinking about my son and how quickly he started going to kindergarten. So many things that happened in that property, and how I was that oak tree that had seen it all. Looks like James made a friend. I said. They want him to go play after school tomorrow, something about his swing set. That's great, Beatrice said. She was walking up to us, wiping her hands on her shirt as she grabbed the note from James and read it out loud. She looked at me right away, smiling, reassuring me that he would be fine. So she grabbed the phone and called the number on the piece of paper, and almost immediately. Maybe it's a mom thing, but she got along great with the woman on the other line. They agreed that we would go pick him up. She wrote down the address and everything was ready into the woods. Or is she from town? She's from town, not far, just down the hill over there by the Hudson Ranch, she said. Hudson Ranch was quite a distance away. I thought to myself, looking for excuse to change my mind about the whole thing. We had already talked about this among ourselves, that I had to start letting go. But I know that James had already talked about some of the things that I used to mention to my father when I was growing up. The strange figures out by the yard at night, visible from the room that James was now living in. They would crawl from that oak tree in the front, and sometimes they would scream, others they would cry. James had run into her room crying, saying that he had seen a man by his window, much older, a grandpa, he said. He said that the old man tapped on the window and walked out toward the tree. That night, I ran out there like a maniac, straight to the oak tree, the source of everything I experienced. Out there, I looked up at the branches, the markings of ropes from many years before, and I felt the chill of the shade of that tree, even at night, much colder than the other areas of that grassy field. I ran my fingers over the three tally marks carved on the trunk of it, the ones that haunted me almost every night when I thought of Dad. I stood out there for a while until Beatrice walked up and asked me to come back inside. It was nothing, she said, Maybe James was streaming. Yeah, I sighed as I faked the smile, and yet I knew that they weren't dreams. When do you pick up James, I asked Beatrice the next morning, once he had been picked up at the school bus out by the road at five, just in time for dinner, she said. I looked at my watch, seven forty seven am. This is gonna be fine, she said, and I knew that nothing was gonna happen to him. Everything would be the same. And I think part of Beatrice understood how the words of my dad had gotten to me over the years, not to trust those from town, to always lock your door, and to keep a loaded done right by the doorframe. The distrusting man, if that's even a word, paranoid even And I was about to say something about the address when Beatrice snapped and looked me right in my eyes, asking how long I was planning on doing this, What did I want out of my experiences around the house, And what was I gonna do about James being afraid to go outside at night? But he shouldn't go out at night, I yelled, that's the whole point. No, right, the shadows, the ghosts that roam around the house, isn't it. I didn't want to start a fight that early in the morning. But she was wrong. She thought they were bears or some other animals around the yard, because even she had seen them too, silhouettes of humans floating across our fields. It bothered me so much that I set out trail cameras out there with clear views of the dark fields the trees on the outside of the property, but I could not get myself to put one near the oak tree in the front. If there was one thing I could prove to Beatrice that there were no bears out there and no creatures large enough to match what we had seen. I think she was mostly worried about how all of these would affect James with his experience of seeing quote a grandpa. Beatrice was getting worried that maybe all of my fear was somehow being passed down, even though I never even came close to talking about these experiences in front of him. I walked out toward the porch and stood there, procrastinating about taking out the scrap metal I was clearing out from the shed from where the truck was. It was four point thirty when I pulled up to the house. Beatrice was still in the garage when I honked for her to come out. I know she always took forever to come outside, but every minute had the wait of an hour that evening. James was going to be ready very soon, and we had to be there to get him. The drive was as you could imagine it, Beatrice trying to lecture me on things while being careful enough to not let me shut down completely. Although it could have gone much worse, we got there in one piece. James was excited when he got back in the car and told us all about what they did and played at the house. We got burgers, he said, you got bert, I started, James, your mom made dinner for us. Beatrice shot me a stare that I could feel as I looked at James in the rear mirror. He stated quiet. Beatrice asked him some more about the games that he played, and he came around again. When we got back, James jumped out of the car, singing something he had learned at a stranger's house. He walked inside and put his backpack down by the hallway. I stood by the doorway as Beatrice walked over to James. So many thoughts thrilling like smoke around me, stinking my eyes and making it hard to breathe. I walked back outside. The sun had started its golden routine. As I leaned against the truck, the light beginning to dip between the branches of the oak tree. He ate dinner at a stranger's house with people from town. I thought of Dad's warnings. Why you always ate the same things at home. Why the only person to ever come over was his business partner Lewis. Why their meetings were always out in the yard or in the car, and why Mom always stayed out of everything. So many memories turning into life lessons that I couldn't get rid of. As I looked out at the darkness of that oak tree, I made up my mind that I would slow down and let those memories catch up with me. Finally, Beatrice was right. I didn't want this for James. I looked at the dark silhouette of the oak tree as I leaned on my truck, the wind picking up just a little bit, bringing alive part of the thing that terrified my father. You see that thing out there, my dad asked early one evening, just like this one. I nodded. That tree has a few things, and one day that thing will end up taking me too. The thing the tree, when it was getting dark out, looked menacing from my room, like a monster that would release one of its own. Every night, I could swear that I saw those strange silhouettes crawling out of it, things floating underneath its branches. But Dad was the only other member of the household that would talk about them with me. Had I sat with him during the heated meetings with others. The way he spoke of the people from town with such hate in his voice. One morning, the sound of Dad's truck approached my side of the house and he rushed inside. He grabbed something from the safe and got to the room we were not allowed in, and he dialed the number. I remember only part of his words, but exactly his tone during the call. Thieves, don't change, he yelled in anger, Bring her here. All I remember from that night were the crowds of people that surrounded our fields, the way Dad told all of us in the house to stay inside, as we grabbed onto Mom's skirt and tried to distract ourselves. In the kitchen, she was going to bake a cake. Nobody got to eat it. Mom had forgotten an ingredient in all the commotion, but refused to step closer to the refrigerator by the window. She just continued with the recipe. There was a moment when everyone got louder outside, a group of well over thirty people. Mom looked over the field for just an instant and brought us closer to her, and after only a few minutes it was completely quiet outside. Mom ran to the window and I watched as the group left and Dad was left standing there by the tree, carving something into it with a knife, writing something on the trunk. Mom started waking up its screams in the middle of the night for some time, and my dreams turned into nightmares. Whenever the curtains in my room were open, I could see figures swinging on the branches like upside down ears of corn from the ropes. I could hear the creaks crying, as if at any moment there were thud against the ground and begin to crawl. But I used to tell Dad all about this, and he would smile as he listened to me, asking me details about what they looked like, asking if it was a man or a woman out there, how many and what they were wearing. A man showed up to the house once with a box truck and parked it by the porch. He stepped out, and Dad ran out there. I watched him drag the man all the way to the tree, and they yelled at each other. I couldn't do anything else but stare in disbelief. Thinking back on it, I should have gotten Mom or one of my brothers to help, but I just stared at a distance from the window of my bedroom as a rope went up on one of the branches. I shut my eyes and heard the squeak the same cries from the rope as it stretched and then swinged from side to side until it came to a near complete stock, woken up only by the soft wind that came through the property in the early evenings. It was almost dark out when he came back to the house. He went straight into this room with the telephone, and within five minutes two cars had arrived and taken the ropes off the tree and drove away. Back then, I had no idea what was happening, But as I grew older and things became more apparent, I learned of things hidden deep in my memories that showed that Dad was not a good person. The night Mom was found was the beginning of the end. The police was unwilling to help us at first, and we were invisible to those town for weeks. We would go out at night as I sat in the car, riding by dried up rivers and dirt roads with flashlights with my aunts and uncles, people I would only see on my mom's birthday for Dad. It ended with my dad calling over his friend and business partner, Lewis, to the house, only to carry him by himself away from the tree sometime in the middle of the night. For me, it hasn't ended yet. Dad would speak of the shapes at night, the ones that would whisper his name through the darkness of the fields. He would look tover the tree and let a manic laughter out, suddenly stopping what he was doing and sitting on the ground to look toward it. He would tell my brothers and I the stories of that tree. The woman who stole, the man who lied, and the one who killed. Everyone must pay was his lesson. But Dad was too far gone by this point. His sentences stopped making sense. Sometime around when my brothers went off to college and I was just getting into high school. I had learned to take care of myself by that point, and I didn't need him anymore. And he knew that the things that would come from the trees would remain outside most days and wouldn't bother me, though I wish I could have said the same for Dad. I heard the door open one night, and I walked over to it, only to see Dad walking out to the tree. It didn't surprise me anymore. He would often talk about wanting to confront everything himself and rush out there, sometimes spending hours under the branches of the oak tree. He was a haunted one. His conscience, as I now understand, was too much to bear. That night was his last. I walked out there before the sun came out to see the familiar shape of a large ear of corn like a sack, hanging from the tree. The police actually showed up that time and took care of the rest. From that point forward, things were silent for a while. I would be on my own from that point forward. All of this I remembered as I stood there, leaning on the truck in front of the dark oak tree, as the sun faded into the horizon behind the house, the darkness that was that tree now swallowing up the property. I thought of James and the real fear that I felt about losing him for one of my choices, or losing him to one of the many things he said he would see roaming around that house. And end to all of this was what we needed. Beatrice was right. She always mentioned how our lives would be better outside of that property, that memories become real far too often, that I was beginning to turn into someone else, and so I brushed toward the tree that night, now in complete darkness, as I felt the shape swoshed by my sides, the cries and the wailing of the ropes as they feared getting snapped into the deep growl, slowly turning into the final gasps of air the lives he had taken them. I felt the roots of that monster in front of me when I got close, nearly tumbling to the ground before I felt the rough side of the trunk against my hand. It twisted and turned hungry for what it thought I was about to offer. I searched with the tips of my fingers for the markings on that tree, high up there where Dadd used to carve them. One, two, three tally marks on the tree. I took the knife out of my pocket, unfolded it, and right next to the fingers of my left hand, I started carving the last of them. I could feel the wind against the oak tree and circling every part of my being as it prepared for my climb. But it was not for me. The fourth mark, long forgotten and missing, was for my father. Four tally marks, four lives the tree would ever feel against its surface. It was as though every scratch of that knife against the wood meant so much more than his very name on his headstone, A proper goodbye. I finally pulled away from the oak tree and ran back to the house. I stood still on that porch, the light buzzing with mosquitoes by the doorframe, when I heard it squeak open, Dad, Can we get a swing set, James asked, startling me. Thought of someone swinging from a set of ropes, and it chilled on my spine for the last time. We'll get one for the new house, I said, just as Beatrice stepped out toward the doorway. We stood there for a bit and I looked at her in the eyes before her smile faded. The wind picked up and we all heard a deep hum coming from the direction of the oak tree. We ran inside as quickly as we could shut the door behind us. Scary Story Podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kowar Robes. You can find me on social media and on my website Scary Story podcast dot com. Links to everything, including how to join Scary Plus, are in the description of this episode. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon.