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Welcome to The Scourge of Scarlet Fields: A New England Folktale. The year is 1683. The setting? Over yonder, under gathering clouds of grey, where lies Balinbrooke, a developing colony, deep within the heart of the Massachusetts Commonwealth.
To the South-East, small farmsteads dot the large pastures of grain stretching from the settlement’s log-walled borders, where callous-handed countrymen wipe the dirt and sweat from their brows after a hot afternoon of tilling the fields. Through the settlement’s gate, with its musket-bearing guards at watch from the wall’s wooden walkways and timber-topped towers, we come upon a bustling town—one alive with piety, hope, and rumor. Down the main street, white-bonneted women in black haul, upon their shoulders, large wicker baskets of damp garments from the creek. Coon-capped huntsmen, hung with fresh hides, haggle with herdsmen over milk and fleece. Beside a sparking anvil, a black-bearded smith, whose bald head flushes red with sweat, hammers iron shoes into the hooves of a chestnut foal. Leading into the settlement’s epicenter, marked by the old, stone-brick well, where it was said the colony had first been claimed, the muddied square flourishes with penitent churchgoers. Aloft in its whitewashed belfry, catching the bronze glow of the hanging sun in its glare, the chapel’s bell tolls overhead, heralding the sky’s sweeping dusk and the end of the day. At the bell’s moan, a torrent of children floods homeward from the schoolhouse, whose governess stares up at the mighty cross atop the chapel and closes the shutters on its overbearing visage. And, at last, to the west, over the wooden bridge and babbling brook, where colossal pines and dark spruce crowd the cabins of lumbermen and forest trappers, where the dirt road leads into the dark wood, where the path stretches and curves into gnarled knots, we find an apple orchard, where dwells at its center a mighty hanging tree, whose wicked fruit, on this particular evening, rot black like bile and fall from their stems. A dense wall of mist rolls in from around it as the tree begins to tremble and twist with the fog—a fog that’s thick, heavy, and cold to the touch. Slowly—ever slowly—the fog fingers its way through the trees. Driving in from the wood and surrounding Balinbrooke, the fog wall spreads and, soon thereafter, envelops the town.
It is here where this tale begins…