(The semi-true legend of the Pine Barrens’ smallest ghost town)
Erasmus J. Ong crossed the Atlantic, Belfast to Philadelphia, in a heap of Estonian linen. The twenty-seven year old textile merchant stretched out on the large bolts of fabric he planned to sell in Pennsylvania for the construction of military uniforms, coats, and sails. The ship had a few sleeping compartments available, but they begged a steep price, so Ong opted to sleep atop his wares. His first night on the ship, he fell asleep petting Chinese silk and dreaming of the people, beasts, and fabrics he would find in his new home. By the third week, the Irish wool started to smell like wet dog, and Ong grew restless in the damp merchant ship. He produced a small sewing kit from his satchel and started poaching small strips of fabric from each bolt. He did not know what he was going to make when he started sewing the strips together, but after three days in a trance, Ong abandoned the confusing project and crawled up to the deck for some air.
Ong hadn’t eaten in four days. He crawled to the edge of the ship and hung his seasick head over the black ocean. He thought he was hallucinating the smell of food until he saw a man with a dark beard throwing cured meats off the side of the ship. Seagulls swarmed the deck, stealing bites of salami, while a zealous albatross stole an entire sausage link. The hirsute man cursed the birds as they flew away with his wares, distraught because all the cured meats he planned to sell in New York had gone bad. The butcher noticed Ong throwing up on the side of the boat and pulled him away from the ledge. He offered Ong a piece of bread rubbed with salted pork fat. Ong swallowed it whole and asked his new friend if he knew anyone with apples. The butcher reached into his pocket and dropped a handful of dried orange segments into Ong’s palm, saving him from the brink of scurvy.
Ong stayed up all night sewing a black butcher’s hat lined with orange silk to repay the stranger’s generosity. The next morning, when he went looking for the butcher, a sailor informed him that the man had jumped to his death. Ong tucked the hat under his arm, went back to his quarters, and resumed sewing. He attached his pile of scraps to the butcher’s hat and sneaked more fabric from every bolt he was responsible for, hoping the Philadelphians wouldn’t notice they were short.
Ong arrived at the port, sold the fabric, put his money into a new bank account, and realized there was no way he was getting back on a ship. His skin was green, his clothes hung off him like a schoolboy’s, and he reeked of mothballs. Curse that treated Irish wool, he thought. Although the pungent batik wax on the Indian cotton stunk pretty badly, too. Ong found a hotel in the city and washed himself until he was pink. He lamented his lack of clean clothes, but kept his head high and went out for the best dinner money could buy.
Ong entered the restaurant and noticed a chubby-cheeked Chinaman wrapped in bright red silks sitting at a long table with his entourage. The Chinese envoy was accompanied by his secretary, translators, assistant, and two inkblot artists. The artists were instructed to draw every food item on the table, and quickly!, before they cooled down. After they finished drawing, the envoy chose the better of the two and used the loser as a napkin. The squabbling between his three translators was unceasing. Everyone in the restaurant was horrified by the commotion— except Ong, who pulled up a chair.
“Erasmus Ong,” he introduced himself, “but the immigration office told me it would be easier if I went by Jacob. Maybe we can try Jacob.” He turned to the envoy, then his interpreters, who argued over their translations in frenzied Cantonese.
“Ong,” he reneged. “That’s it— Ong.”
“Yonghan,” the four responded in unison, bowing their heads towards the envoy. One translator added additional suffixes that denoted the envoy’s rank and chewed out the other two for excluding it. Yonghan shooed away two of his translators and kept one around to explain Ong’s jokes.
Yonghan finished his dinner, loosened his robe, pushed the table away from his bloated rotunda, and demanded a carriage return them to their hotel. The restaurant owners insisted it was too late to call one and refused to help. Yonghan’s translators went to a bar next door, where they found a willing driver: a local stagecoach driver who had just enjoyed a bottle of port wine with dinner.
An hour and a half passed before Ong realized they were lost in a pine forest and nowhere near the city. Ong poked his head out of the carriage and saw the driver bent over, snoring. He had fallen asleep somewhere over the Pennsylvania-New Jersey line. Ong guided the horse back to a road and walked alongside it until they reached a small cluster of houses with lights on. The translators argued over how to approach while Ong tied the horse and looked for signs of life.
The hamlet had a few small houses with messy yards littered with scrap metal, stacked buckets, and clotheslines. He followed the sound of commotion and found a group of men playing cards on the front porch of Put’s Tavern. Ong guessed the men were travelers, like him, noticing their motley clothes and the way they seemed to communicate in grunts. The men who weren’t sitting at the card table hovered over the players, nitpicking the gameplay, arguing over rules, and cursing in their native tongues. Ong couldn’t wait to join them.
The bartender, a short mulatta with a forehead shaped like a pearl, had freckles across her flat nose and kinky blonde hair pulled back in a modest twist. She wore a burlap dress and rested her hands in a worn leather apron with divots pressed into the skin by the constant weight of the webbing of her thumbs. She introduced herself as Comfort Cooper.
“Where are you all from?” she asked, inspecting the tall, blond Dutchman and his crew of tired, confused, and hungry Chinese nobles.
“We got lost in Philadelphia,” he panted.
“That’s only thirty miles away. Where were you headed?”
“Our carriage driver had some strong drink and fell asleep.”
“Does he want to wake up and drink some more?”
“Is this a hotel?” Ong asked.
Noticing the silk lining of Ong’s coat and the gold rings on Chinese fingers, Comfort decided she would find a way to accommodate these travelers. She turned to a group of older children drying beer mugs and told them to clear their rooms. “Stay as long as you’d like.”
She pushed three tables together and covered them with a heavy linen tablecloth. A gaggle of children ran around the restaurant, pulling napkins off window frames to decorate the table. The little girls came in every color, hair texture, and size. The envoy yelled at his artists to start drawing them at once.
“The kids are so excited to meet a Chinese king,” Comfort blushed.
“He’s an envoy,” Ong corrected her.
“Some kind of prince?”
“Sure.”
“Our usual visitors are less exotic. Just a pile of drunks and Philadelphia lawyers, not to mention all the scum that washes up here on the way to that bawdy house in the woods. The would-be-johns who can’t afford it come here and cause trouble with the older girls. Sometimes the Quakers come here to adopt the stray children, but they only take the negro boys tall enough to work. My mother and I take in all the girls. We don’t have many men living around here.”
A frail old woman with a face like a baked apple came over to Ong’s table with a pungent jar of clear drink. She thudded the moonshine onto the table and limped back to her room. Ong and friends got blind drunk off the old woman’s famous moonshine, which the Dutchman tolerated better than his oriental buddies. High in spirit, he danced all night with Comfort and the children while an old man named Uriah drummed on buckets.
“What do you call this town, Comfort?” he asked.
“It’s not a town.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s where we live.”
The next morning, Ong was reluctant to leave the neighborhood. Yonghan, who was doubled over in a hangover and could barely open his eyes, reluctantly accompanied him on a morning walk around the neighborhood. Ong tucked his arm under Yonghan’s and guided him in a small lap around the houses. He talked while Yonghan dry heaved.
“Philadelphia is so dirty and expensive. I don’t want to go back.”
Yonghan threw up into a fern patch.
“What if I took my money out of that bank and used it to build a house out here? It’s close enough to the city that I can do business over there when I need to. Has anyone thought of that before?”
The translators, who hobbled behind them in equal stages of alcoholic mistreatment, waved their hands and didn’t bother to translate. “He thinks he invented the commute,” one of them grumbled. “Let’s get out of this dreary forest,” the other responded.
Ong returned to Comfort Hamlet, as he chose to call it, in a cart pulled by a mule named Cory. It took Cory from dawn to midnight, and Ong pulled his cargo for the last four hours. Bolts of fabric and his sewing table stuck out of his small cart. The Chinese had given him two gifts: a porcelain tea set and a portable bed made out of densely woven, hollow copper wires. He wore his eccentric hat the entire journey, admiring how it protected him from wind, sun, and strangers. The toque had grown into an odd shape with a wide brim and long tail. He looked like he was in the market for a cauldron.
Comfort offered to put him up in a storage room above the tavern. Ong remembered the card players, and patted his pocket to check that his money was still there.
“I’d prefer something more private.”
“You can stay in the doctor’s tent,” she offered. “It’s warmer than it looks and keeps the rain out.”
The tent was a twenty square foot wooden structure covered in three layers of canvas that had turned green. “Dr. Still built this with two fieldhands. They cut people open in here. Deliver babies, too, when it’s too hot inside the house.” Comfort told him about the doctor while they each grabbed two corners of a blanket to shake out the dust. Ong accepted the tent, but was less than satisfied with the sick bed, which was dense with moisture. He was saved by a generous parting gift from Yonghan: a portable cot made out of copper wires which bent to his body and cradled him more comfortably than the lumpy feather mattress. He didn’t want to sleep in dried afterbirth and hoped he would never have to lay on that bed involuntarily.
Ong had such strange dreams in the tent that he woke up and chopped down thirty trees to build a shack. How hard could it be? he wondered. He was accustomed to precise measuring and cutting, but he discovered his sewing skills only partially translated to the art of carpentry. He asked Uriah for some advice, but the old man shook his head and started singing.
“He’s never built anything in his life,” Comfort said. “Even if he had, Uriah is so old he doesn’t remember anything but songs and bible verses. We let him name most of the children because he knows so many names. He’s named everyone in this room but me and you.”
In another corner of the Pine Barrens, a man no one had ever bothered to name was bleeding out on the pine needles. The man had absconded from his post at Charles Lindbergh’s Mansion up in the Sourland Mountains. Not a post as in an occupation or role, but the part of the fence he had been chained to since he grew hair under his arms. No one was permitted to speak to him, look at him, or address him by any name other than Devil. During a previous escape attempt, he dislocated his jaw to free himself from his iron collar, but other slaves caught him, pierced holes in the skin around his shoulder blades, and stuck metal rings through his hide. Then they welded the rings shut and attached them to a three-foot chain.
During the winter, when the master was too lazy to walk down the hill and take his frustration out on Devil, he took to beating his wife and dog. The dog, a black Doberman named Narcissus, was so scared of his master that he took to wetting the floor the minute he entered a room. Charles demanded the dog be tied to a pole along the same fence as Devil.
Devil and the dog developed a new language. They were ten feet apart, each on three foot chains. Every day, the dog encouraged him to come closer, closer, no matter how much it hurt. The iron rings tore Devil’s skin a little more each day until he was close enough to take his collar off. The dog nudged Devil with his nose and signaled for him to crouch down. He chewed off the skin that connected the man to his chains and freed him. Devil and Narcissus travelled through the woods looking for food. Narcissus, from his time spent inside a human home, knew that when people were bleeding the way Devil was, a man was supposed to come and rub something on the wound, something that smelled bad to eat. He sensed that smell everywhere in the woods. The smell came from every plant, but in a smaller concentration. He killed a rabbit for Devil, who was too weak to eat.
Narcissus ran through the woods, barking to alert a human, but it was night, and the houses he found were closed shut against beasts of the dark. A little girl peered through the window at him before being snatched away by an older woman. He kept barking and running until he found a house without a door. He put his nose under the canvas drapes and sniffed the tent before jumping in.
Ong was alarmed, but when he saw the breed of dog, he chose to trust him. He was familiar with Dobermans, a smart breed that doesn’t cause trouble for no reason. He followed the dog into the woods to the buttress of a tree, where a naked young negro was bleeding from his back. The injured man was muscular, but small in stature. Ong asked him to straighten his body, if he could, and tried to carry him like a large bolt of army wool. The man had lost all control of his limbs and whimpered like a child. Ong carried him to the doctor’s tent, yelling out Comfort’s name.
Two of the older girls took a lantern to look for the doctor’s house. James Still, known in the area as the slave doctor of the Pines, wore round glasses and a neat black suit. When he first attended to the patient, he thought the man had been whipped. Dr. Still washed his back, clotted the blood, and puzzled over the strange triangular wings of stretched skin jutting out of his shoulders.
“I can’t cut them off,” the doctor told Ong. “It’ll expose too much flesh.”
Devil had no idea what the doctor was saying. The worst of his pain was subsiding, and he relished the comfort of his first bed. The hamlet was abuzz with curiosity and compassion for their new friend. Comfort gave him a neat haircut and trimmed his beard until the only features that set him apart from other men were his wings. Ong sewed him a silk cape with a hood large enough to hide the growths. Ong guided Devil in front of a wardrobe mirror to admire his new clothes, but at his first-ever glimpse of himself, Devil ripped the door off the hinges and threw it so hard he nearly broke a window. Later that day, Comfort took Devil to a creek, where he looked down at his reflection in the water and saw a man.
“What will we name him, Uriah?” Comfort asked
“The only name he’s given anyone is Devil,” Uriah answered. “I can’t mess with that.”
“Let’s call him JD for now. Jersey Devil. Maybe he’ll read some scripture and choose something for himself.”
Ong tried teaching JD and the children how to read, but their lessons didn’t go so well. He started to wonder if the people of the Pines were built for songs that disappeared into the mist. Maybe some things aren’t meant to be written down. Nevertheless, Ong persevered until JD eventually began to speak full sentences. Months later, J.D. used a word Ong had never taught him: lawyer.
“Where did you hear that word?” Ong asked.
“These men at Put’s say they send people to jail.”
“Are you thinking of going into the law profession, JD?”
“I want master in jail.”
“It’s not illegal to whip slaves. I wish it was, but it’s not.”
JD thought for a moment. “What about wife?”
“Depends.”
“Master hits wife like dog. Miss Audrey gonna die.”
“Leave it alone,” Comfort called out from her wash basin right outside the schoolhouse. “There’s nothing you can do for her.”
Sylvia was eavesdropping too. She was beginning to lose control in her hands and legs and could barely push herself to her side when her back got sore, but she recognized the rancor in JD’s voice and knew it had to go somewhere. She mustered a weak bellow and summoned Ong to her bed.
The next morning, Comfort watched Ong and JD struggle over a carpentry project next to the doctor’s tent and wondered what they were building. Her mother seemed unusually cheerful.
“They’re making me a wheelchair,” Sylvia beamed. “As soon as they finish, they’ll take me on a nice walk around the woods.” Sylvia’s eyes looked unfocused and childlike. Her voice was becoming more girlish, too. Her mother was growing simple the way people do when they know they’re going to die soon.
Ong and JD assembled the wheelchair in six days. They took the batting out of the doctor’s bed and made Sylvia’s chair as soft as they could with the materials they had foraged around the hamlet. They placed her in her new chair, and as soon as they were out of Comfort’s earshot, Sylvia produced a crudely drawn map and demanded they take her to the brothel in the woods. Her last wish was to burn it down herself.
She had worked there for two months before she fell pregnant from a visiting Dutchman who was blonde and blue eyed like Ong. She built a rudimentary shack in the woods and traded moonshine for food and blankets. The week before Comfort was born, she walked two hours to find the slave doctor of the Pines. He gave her the idea to open a tavern. He could operate in secret under the cover of her restaurant. It was quietly known amongst the working girls that the children they conceived were better off gone— especially the girls. Some of them gave up their babies with a light hand and spotless memory. Sylvia envied their callousness.
Ong, JD, Narcissus, Sylvia, and Cory walked miles through the woods until they reached a light pink shack. Ong rapped on the front door until Sylvia told him to kick it open. She ordered the girls out of their rooms and told them to pack a bag and grab their children. The girls were toothless and haggard in threadbare clothing, barely sentient after the previous night’s debauchery. The only way the whores and johns could maintain their unholy union was with a terrifying amount of alcohol. They ignored Sylvia and rolled over in bed.
JD and Narcissus were more effective. The girls shot up, rolled their blankets into Cory’s cart, and stood around waiting for their next instructions. JD, Cory, and the dog started walking them away from the pink house while Ong filled it with pine needles and dry brush. Sylvia’s fingers could barely light a flame, but she insisted the building had to be destroyed by her hands. She told him to cover his face while she swallowed big gulps of smoke to overwhelm her feeble lungs. Sylvia died halfway through the journey home.
The tenuous order of Comfort Hamlet crumbled in Sylvia’s absence. The brothel fire introduced a dozen refugees to the community, and the girls struggled to adjust to their new routine. On their way to burn down the brothel, Sylvia made Ong promise to teach the newly unemployed girls how to sew. In return, she taught him how to brew redeye. Not even Comfort knew her secret recipe. Ong struggled to keep his promise and eventually gave up on the lessons. The sight of the girls entertaining guests while their children made mud pies in the dirt road filled Ong with so much guilt that he started brewing a stronger hooch than Sylvia ever tasted. He fermented rye, corn, and moss inside a bladder hidden inside the cone of his famous hat and stumbled around in a state of perpetual intoxication.
After months of numbing their consciences with white lightning, Ong and J.D. became con men. They’d get the johns blind drunk, undress them, and hide their clothes. In the morning, the men woke up drunk, disoriented, and naked. Ong and J.D. would offer them an expensive selection of imported getups from Europe and China. The men, eager to sheath their giblets and head home, eagerly paid out the nose for expensive ruffled getups from Ong’s stash.
After the last jar of Sylvia’s brew ran dry, the residents of Comfort Hamlet were forced to sober up. Travelers kept their wits, starving the thievery corporation. There was only one person who always seemed to have a buzz: Ong sashayed around town, his arm around a different woman every night. His lovers took turns biting on the tassel of his long silk hat, where he kept a secret bladder full of the old recipe.
“You’ve changed, Ong.” Comfort told him. “It’s that juice in your cap.”
“You drink it too.”
“You make it too strong.”
“You love how strong it is.”
“You’re trouble. You’re going to be the end of this town.”
“I am this town.”
A sincere prayer from a celibate soul will always come true. That’s why children often get their wishes— even though they’re usually wasted on snow days or mild illnesses to take them out of school. All of Ong’s women had men at home; men who had been hurting for quite some time. A visiting Polack said when Ong touched her, she started to see time itself dissolve. She described going blind, seeing nothing but a rotating white circle that grew bigger and bigger until it took over her entire mind's-eye. The feeling Ong gave her was so powerful she lost the ability to speak, move, or feel anything but that concentric white glow radiating from her lower back. She never touched her husband again.
The men of Comfort Hamlet prayed for Ong’s demise with such fervor that someone found a way to shove him through the fabric of time. Ong really did vanish for a while. He realized he’d overstayed his welcome and traveled the Pine Barrens, living out of a mule-cart. In leaner months, he pitied Cory and put the yoke on himself. The men never discussed their prayers or plans with one another, but all started to take long walks at night after his disappearance. They looked for his cart, hat, or string bean body, but they never found him.
One night, he came back, starving and collapsing onto Comfort’s bar with a haphazard excuse and urgent drink request. She reluctantly served him and told him to get scarce before his enemies got to him.
“What enemies?” Ong scoffed. “I’m beloved.”
The man at the end of the bar hadn’t taken his eye off Ong since he stumbled in. Ong had slept with Mark Grever’s wife, Daisy, a few months prior to his disappearance. The sight of Ong’s hat filled Mark with uncontrollable rage. Comfort kicked him out of the bar before he could pick a fight.
The next morning, Comfort woke up to the sound of Narcissus barking until he was hoarse. The dog found Daisy’s corpse in the woods. Her body was wrapped in shiny yellow fabric and suspicion immediately fell on Ong. He admitted to seeing Daisy the previous night, but denied killing her. He claimed she had come to him in the night, asking for shelter from her drunk, angry husband, and begged for something to wear. He claimed he had given her a long wool tartan cape to wear, but nobody was able to find it when they searched the nearby woods. He denied the yellow silk was his, and tried to think of ways to prove it.
“I’ve never seen fabric like this,” Ong protested. “It seems to be made of oil.”
When he lit a match and burned the corner of the fabric, the faux silk melted and smelled like rubber. The burnt hem bubbled, hardened, and turned black. Despite this demonstration, the police didn’t buy Ong’s petroleum-based alibi, and they took him to a Philadelphia prison for the murder. Right before they cuffed his hands behind his back, Ong threw his huge silk hat into the pines and watched it catch on a high branch. The bladder full of redeye fell onto the forest floor and was snatched up by J.D. the next morning. When Comfort showed him the box of Ong’s clothes and letter informing her of his hanging, J.D. mourned the loss of his first human friend by drinking the entire bag of hooch alone in the woods. He stumbled back to Put’s Tavern and overheard a rowdy group of local drunks, who were celebrating Ong’s death on the front porch. Upon seeing the men, J.D. erupted into a redeye rage and pulled a long, ragged knife out of his cape. Devil’s short stature and ropey strength allowed him to weave between the legs of the revelers. He stabbed them in the thighs, stomach, groin, and face. Grever ripped the silk cape off J.D.’s back, revealing his long, leathery wings, mottled with brown, white, and pink scar tissue. Narcissus and J.D. dragged the bodies of the twelve jealous men into the woods and watched them soak the forest floor with blood. He walked to the tree where his friend was arrested and carved ONG’S HAT into its bark. J.D. disappeared into the Pine Barrens and still haunts Southern New Jersey to this day.
-- Anna Krivolapova is the author of Incurable Graphomania (APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL PRESS) and a forthcoming novel via Farthest Heaven.
