Enter the Witches

The best way to think of it was as a race, I realized. Across the medieval battlefield, priests would hurry to offer the dying soldiers the last rites of the Church – knowing that witches would seek out those who had died without the benefit of extreme unction. Above the bloody fields, freshly soaked by war, the gleeful witches would swoop on their brooms to prey upon lost souls, who, seized by Satan’s henchwomen, would know no resting place. That was why the three witches in Shakespeare’s Scottish play (I certainly knew better than to name it, even in my thoughts) were so anxious to visit battlefields. They were harvesting wandering souls, lost for eternity between the worlds.

And then, still driving my Subaru north, I saw it. The witches would make their entrance above the audience’s heads – puppets on strings drawn across the ceiling toward the stage. Then, having rustled in the half-darkness, swarming like bats right above the playgoers’ hair, the witches would materialize in thunder and lightning on stage to begin the play. It would be the theatrical equivalent of that wonderful opening effect in the very first of the STAR WARS movies, where the gigantic enemy starship makes its entrance over our heads. It would be fun, but frightening, too. Should the witches be dripping blood on the audience, or would that be too much?

I had no actors yet, no costumes, no scenery or light equipment. All I had was the old barn on the derelict family farm in the Taconic Mountains of upstate New York, the farm which my sister and I had recently inherited. I knew the old barn well, from the endless family summers so long ago in the country. As a child, I had put on puppet shows there for quasi-involuntary gatherings of relatives and neighbors. I was well aware it was probably not as big, the old barn, as I remembered it. My puppets shows were over long before high school, before college, before I earned my graduate degree in theater. I had been a lot smaller then. But the barn would certainly be big enough to get a modest summer theater going.

I was on the edge of fulfilling my lifelong dream of having my own playhouse. The location was propitious, too – near the wonderful summer theaters in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and New Lebanon, New York. The area was obviously filled with summer people seeking good theater. The grounds of the farm would provide plenty of space for parking. The actors could room in the old farmhouse, once I put it into working order. All these years, I had been thrown out of job after job because I had insisted on my vision of what theater could be and must be. But all the years of burning my bridges were behind me now.

Of course, I needed a name. The farm was located in Berlin, New York. That invited some sort of reference to the legendary theater companies in the German capital city – or would that be too alienating?

It was eerie how little the town had changed, as I approached Berlin on Route 22. The only difference I could see offhand was that the local hotel and the local restaurant had both gone bankrupt. But that only proved how much Berlin needed something to attract tourism and motorists in search of a meal.

I threaded through the potholes on the roads through the cow pastures, and reached our family’s farm. There was the farmhouse. I had to admit the roof looked as if it were sagging with age. Had it always been like that? I couldn’t be sure.

But it wasn’t the farmhouse that mattered so much. We could always hire a mobile home or two. Actors are used to making the best of sub-optimal accommodations. What mattered was that wonderful old barn, by the ancient trees at the end of the cornfields. Soon it would be filled with cheering audiences, and then – once we’d established our reputation – we’d build a large modern flexible theater space, with a bar and comfortable dressing rooms. Berlin would become a theater Mecca.

I drove right past the farmhouse, and made my way down the dirt road between the corn fields. But, when I rounded the corner, and passed the trees, which were just as I remembered them, there was no barn there. The fallow, level cornfields stretched away on all sides.

Had I remembered everything perfectly except the location of the barn? I stopped the Subaru, and got out the map the lawyer had mailed me. The barn was right there on the map – exactly as it appeared in my memory, at exactly the spot in which my Subaru stood. Except it wasn’t there. Not a stick of it.

A little dazed, I drove the entire length and breadth of the property. There was no barn anywhere. I decided to drive into Massachusetts for lunch (there was a restaurant by Williams College I remembered fondly). As soon as I pulled into Williamstown, however, I parked and called my sister.

“I’m up at the farm,” I told her. “I don’t know what’s going on. As far as I can tell, the barn has disappeared.”

“Oh, the barn,” she answered. “Didn’t I tell you? I got a really good deal on the barn.”

“You sold the barn?”

“Yes. Don’t worry, you’ll get your half of the check in a few days.”

“Just explain this to me. How can you sell a barn, I mean, all by itself?”

“I know this furniture store in Hudson. It’s all the rage now. Very popular. They recycle old wood, the more battered the better, and make it into tables, chairs, cabinets. They paid me absolutely top dollar for every rotten timber in that eyesore of a barn.”

I was still in the Subaru, staring off at the imposing buildings, new and old, that made up Williams College, but not seeing them. I could feel the witches rustle above my hair, drooling with unholy desire for my lost and wandering soul.