Farthest House

Copyright ©2014 by Margaret Lukas

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Published by WriteLife, LLC
2323 S. 171 St.
Suite 202
Omaha, NE 68130
www.writelife.com

Cover Photo: “
Textured Old Paper Background with White Datura Flower”
© Tamara Kulikova

ISBN 978-1-60808-093-9

First Edition

FARTHEST
HOUSE

Margaret Lukas

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Pat Craig, Jan Novack, and Gail Weiland for graciously reading the manuscript not once, but twice, and offering their sage wisdom. Thanks to David Martin, Stu Burns and Marcia Calhoun Forecki for their helpful critiques. Thanks also to Jeff Kurrus, whose unwavering belief in me has kept me writing, and to Sam Rutten for letting me peer into his world of bees. My teachers, Ann Pancake, Kent Myers, Jonis Agee, Anna Monardo and Richard Duggin, thank you for your instruction and friendship. A special thanks to Stan Rubin and Judith Kitchen for welcoming me into the Rainier Writers Workshop. Cindy Grady and Erin Reel at WriteLife, thank you for your support and acumen. I couldn’t have done it without you.

And to my family, my husband Jim, and my children: Jen, Emily, Julie, and Dan, thank you. You’ve been an infallible source of encouragement and inspiration.

1

Should I begin this recounting with my early childhood in the 1860s along the Rhine River in eastern France? Begin there with life in the villa across the water from Germany’s Black Forest and its wellspring of fantastic tales? There at the foothills of the Vosges Mountains and its rock cliffs—the perfect height for young women no longer able to bear the weight of their lives?

Let me begin many years later, after my arrival in America and finally Nebraska. Let me begin with Jeannie and Farthest House. On the 3rd of May, 1960, I stood unseen in the sad bedroom, watching the small group huddled around her: the doctor, her husband Julian, and his mother. As Jeannie struggled in childbirth, we all prayed the doctor could somehow stop the excessive flow of blood. Had I been alive, I might have been of use, for I’d been something of an herbalist, picking up my skirts as a girl and trampling through the French countryside. Later, as a grown woman, I walked through trees and along the banks of the Elkhorn River searching for the medicinal plants I needed. But I’d been dead nineteen years. What could I do?

Jeannie’s husband, Julian, knelt beside the bed, holding her hand, whispering encouragements and placing cool cloths on her forehead. Watching grief and fear harden the muscles in his jaw—a man who at thirty-eight had already seen so much—tore at me.

The middle-aged family physician, Dr. Mahoney, placed shiny metal forceps on a clean white cloth, but he kept his scalpel tucked deep in his aging leather bag. He would not use it. He thought Jeannie a bleeder.

Need I say a person’s thoughts are never a secret? The living pretend not to know another’s thinking, but this is partly a human attempt at propriety, and partly a means of self-defense. The truth is, all things are energy with shape and color. Seen from the spirit world, all thoughts are as bright as washed jewels.

And so, I knew Dr. Mahoney was considering how every year medicine made bounding strides and how in 1960 the advances were nothing short of miraculous. However, he knew no doctor or procedure that could stop this volume of blood, and he had no intention of cutting into a hemophiliac—she must be—to try and perform a C-section. He wouldn’t try that during a home-delivery, not without assistants ready with clamps and pints of blood. He saw no point either in waking a volunteer to crank up the village’s old ambulance. A driver would need a few minutes to pull on his pants, find his boots, get to the fire station, and bring the ambulance up the hill. There’d be the time it would take to load Jeannie onto a stretcher, the strain and jostling she’d suffer being hoisted down the stairs on a gurney, and the thirty-mile trip to a hospital in Omaha. She’d be dead before the ambulance lights swung into the emergency lot. The infant with her. For the infant’s sake, it was best to keep Jeannie as still as possible. If the newborn’s head miraculously descended within reach of the forceps, he’d harvest the child. Then, if the mother still had a pulse, he’d pack her and call for the ambulance.

Julian’s mother, Luessy, paced but never stepped more than a few feet away before turning back, often needing to touch her son’s shoulder, only to pace again. Her hands went in and out of her sweater pockets. Her long gray braid lay quiet over one shoulder, and she watched the laundry basket in the corner with its growing heap of bloody, rubber-backed pads. She was a mystery writer, and she knew the human body held as many as a dozen pints of blood. How much more could Jeannie lose before she bled out?

As that last dark hour wore on, Jeannie, who through the evening endured stages of pain and sobbing, now only moaned. Softly, semi-consciously. Dr. Mahoney had given her sedation, and she’d lost so much blood that she also lost her desire to try and speak. She used her waning strength to will her heart to keep pumping until her baby entered the world. She knew she’d not walk Luessy’s rose garden again or live to raise her infant, but she’d fight for breath until she saw her child alive. She’d know whether she’d given life to a boy or a girl. She’d look into the infant’s eyes so that she could recognize her child when they met again.

I imagined Death pacing at the foot of her bed, rubbing his arid hands together, grinning at the blood—rose after rose, a garden blooming from between the young and too pale legs.

Julian whispered what we all knew were lies. “You’re doing great. The baby is almost here. Everything is fine.” He kept hold—as well as he could—of any display of the panic and sorrow he felt, letting the ocean fill his body, flood the air from his lungs, and slosh deluge through his heart. He’d offer up his 6’ 2” frame, but he’d not add to Jeannie’s pain and fear by revealing his own.

Finally, when we’d all given up hope, the bloody infant was pulled free. At the sight of the baby girl, and realizing the life they’d not share, Jeannie’s slowing heart cried out with dark grief, and her mind formed a single word:
Murder.
Though her fading awareness couldn’t process an explanation, a deep ticking told her that her death was from more than childbirth. She tried to move her lips, to speak the word “murder,” but Julian was staring at his daughter held in the air by her tiny feet, deep red half-circles—bite marks from the forceps, ringing her temples. And my mark, the protrusion on her right shoulder blade like the bud of a wing.

“It’s over,” he said to Jeannie. He kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes—already appearing haunted—and he imagined she tried to tell him something. “It’s all right,” his voice more frantic as he prayed that the birth meant the bleeding would stop now. “Just rest.” Again, he dressed her face in kisses, desperate to keep her conscious. He wanted to say of the infant, “She’s beautiful,” but the shoulder, the still-blue silence,
shouldn’t she be crying
, and his fear for Jeannie kept the words locked in his mouth.

Despite a flurry of effort and commotion on the doctor’s part, Jeannie’s eyes stared.

Several minutes passed before Luessy could blow her nose, yet again, and put the infant she’d cleaned and swaddled into the arms of Mable, her housekeeper and friend. Afraid the baby would not live, she avoided Julian’s arms, the weeping arms of her son. She picked up the small, bloody scissors from the cold pan holding the afterbirth, cut through the thick rope of tissue, and tucked a small piece of the infant’s string into her sweater pocket. This she took out into the night, swaying and chanting across the wide yard to where the bodies of my husband, Thomas, and I lay buried. Rocks as our headstones. Under the stars, she wept again for Jeannie, for her son, and for the motherless infant. She buried the string there, at the foot of our graves, praying the act would keep the child alive and bind her to the land. Land which Luessy no longer saw as her own.

I feared the act tethered the child to graves.

Since slipping out of my own old body, I’d been waiting to find peace. At first believing the casket lid shushing closed over my wrinkled and powdered corpse meant my indecent affairs were also being buried—the ragged ends of my stained life finally knotted and vanquished beneath the overhead thud, the skittish and crumbling roll of shoveled dank earth. Jeannie’s slow and painful dying, however, proved there would be no rest for me. The family’s saga that began when I was eight years old, and the
Affliction
that struck years later, still groped like one of my uncle’s ring-decked hands up my childhood skirts, reaching now to the fourth generation. What was I to do? Here was a child bearing my mark on her shoulder, her string was now attached to my grave, and I carried guilt for Jeannie’s death. I vowed to stay with the infant. To comfort and help her however I could, for as long as she needed me.

Doubts plagued my decision, weeds in my mind, but if I could unwittingly slay from thousands of miles and across an ocean, couldn’t I companion from just beyond the veil of death?