Regional legend · 2 min read · Set in Wethersfield ·
Why the Wethersfield Gates Are Lifted
A village tale about a widow, a quarry and the white line that crosses the valley each autumn.
- status: folklore
This is how they tell it in Wethersfield, and they tell it the same way every September, to anyone who will stand still.
When the quarry closed there was a widow on Quarry Lane named Edith Marl. She had kept the gate to her yard shut for eleven years, because the yard held the stone her husband had cut and not yet sold, and she would not let a thing of his be taken. The village said it was grief. She said it was good sense.
One autumn night she heard something at the gate. It was not a knock. It was a sound like a very large number of very small feet, and under the sound there was a patience that frightened her more than any noise could. She did not open the gate. She sat up in the kitchen with the lamp lit, and the sound went on until dawn.
In the morning the gate was shut and the yard was bare. Every chip of her husband's stone was gone. Not stolen: there was no mark in the dust, no wheel, no boot. Outside the gate the grass lay flat in a line the width of a hand, running from her door down the lane, across the green and on to the river bend, and out of sight.
They say Edith followed it as far as she could. They say she found at the river a heap of white chips no bigger than a fingernail, and on top of it, one small pale animal, very still, with a chip on its back, waiting for her to take it. She did not. They say that was her mistake, or her mercy; the tellers disagree.
The next September the line came again, and the yard of every house in Wethersfield was open, because Edith had gone round at dusk and lifted every gate off its hinges herself. The line went through the village like a thread through cloth, and nothing was touched. It has done so every year since.
That is why the gates are lifted. Nobody remembers who first asked them to be. If you ask the old ones what the line is carrying, they look at you for a long time and say that it is not theirs to say.
This is a story. It was told to me by three people who disagreed about everything except the grass.