WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (29 page)

“You will make a great fiction writer one day Willodean, with all those stories in your head.” She
told me once. 
“Now unlike myself,
you
are the type to do something with it.”

“Fiction?” I replied. “There is nothing fiction about my stories. It’s real.”

How could she not know that? 
“It’s real as real can get.”
I said again. 
My voice dressed up in a black veil, black dress, black hose and black shoes. 

“Quote the raven,
Nevermore!” I said quoting Poe. I have no idea why.  My voice was serious. 
Monotone dread. 
In my vision, I saw a woman, a Barbie doll of vivid sorrow. A lady in dark clothing, like me dressed in black and surrounded by shadows swirling
while she walked to her own funeral. 

“You know what I mean
” Maw Sue said.  “
—good story is a good story no matter how it came about, fiction or non.”
She laughed then frowned almost in the same expression, if one could do such a thing.  It was a common bond.  A shared sight of things we knew. 
It scared her. It scared me.
 Together our visions saw the horrible. I was the black dress Barbie doll, a plastic heart, a plastic life,
a plastic everything. 
I was standing over the freshly dug grave,
dirt scattered everywhere, the ground hungry and waiting to swallow. 
My plastic black h
eels sank into the rich soil.  I
reached with my plastic arms and my molded hands till I reached my frazzled hair
on top of my frazzled skull.  In a knee jerk reaction, I
plucked off my plastic head 
and held it out to my side. 
Just like kids pluck off the heads of their dolls.
  A multitude of
Amodgian shadows swirled out from my neck hole. When I can stand no more of their fear, their dreadful blackness, I chunk my plastic head of frazzled curses
into the empty hole in the ground.  When the plastic head hits the body—gifts and curses spill out.  Unused, undone, unfulfilled.  My black dressed body leaned forward and fell—falling and falling and falling, slowly as if time had to catch up, while the darkness and held me, shadow after shadow, energy and lift, yearning for death, wanting death, and finally receiving my death.  The whole closed up, the dirt swallowed us all and then my eyes spun open to light.  Maw Sue and I were wide eyed at each other for what we had seen. 
“So Maw Sue…how is it fiction if I see it in my head?” I said
. 
Her eyes flickered with a wild that was not of this wo
rld. She didn’t have an answer so we simply stared into each other’s wildness, seeing the wild in each other, yet neither knew how to tame it.  And to be truthful, if we wanted to.  Maw Sue always said to tame something wild in nature is to kill it alive and only when it dies will it be free and wild again. 
Maw Sue struggled a wildness in her, as much as I did—the real and the unreal. Neither of us were able to tell the difference between the two. This was our curse. 

I decided I would write her a story. 
Lord knows, I’ve heard enough of them to write
fact or fiction to last a lifetime. 
I’ve heard fishing stories, epic war battles, dramatic narratives, biblical analogies, poems, fibs, death plots, love sagas, biographies, memoirs, cautionary tales, race car speed demons, outlaws gone bad, some hogwash and boatloads of cock and bull.

In Pine Log, stories traveled like wild fire, porch to tinker shop, through the rough thickets, across the oil tops, to the highway
s, pig trails and switch backs.  It hit the barber
shop, and dilly-dallied from house to house, neighbor to neighbor, and on more than one occasion, in a pulpit on Sundays, and lastly, if it reached Tessie Pearson’s house—it was pure legend. And when I say legend I mean, gossip. That woman made it her life’s work to know every bodies business but her own and she made sure others, knew others business as well. If Tessie didn’t know—the world was coming to an end, su
re as a bear shits in the woods.  That’s what Papa Hart said.  I think the only commonality Maw Sue and Papa Hart had, was their dislike of Tessy Pearson. 

I learned
a lot of wisdom on front and back porches.  Stories have
messages, underlying
insight of sorts, enough to make a person think and change.  Stories packaged with w
isdom from age and experience, lessons from the past carried over to future generations—except the hogwash. And the cock and bull. That was the liquor talking. ‘Ole timers say cock and bull doesn’t make a lick of sense, stammers around, knocks things over, gets loudly obnoxious and falls down drunker than that fellow they call Cooter Brown.
I have yet to meet this Cooter fellow, but from the way everyone talks about him, he is mighty popular.  You
’d think as many times as he fell down, he’d learn to stay away from the liquor.
Growing up can’t be easy.  I’m beginning to think alcohol is a slow toxin to drink so they’ll forget they are adults. I can think of no other reason for their behavior.   

Maybe Maw Sue is right—maybe one day I’ll write stories and be an author of books and stuff.
I can think of nothing better if I could sit still long enough. 
Stori
es hold a magical power over me.  I feel
as though everything around me is connected, divine. The rain, clouds, sun, stars, trees, flowers, darkness and light.
Come to think of it, it it weren’t for storytelling—I might fall apart.  I ran off the porch but before I could hit the dirt, Dell yelled out the window. 
“And Willodean…” she said looking through the tiny mesh squares. “Don’t go in Maw Sue’s room.” 

“Okay.” I said not really caring. 
“I never go inside that room anyway.”

“Well good.” She said and then disappeared inside the kitchen. Little bells and whistles went off inside the house, inside me. Two of Maw Sue’s husbands died in her bedroom. 
Why on earth would I go in there?
 
I’ve been inside the room while she exorcised her demons through her candle ritual.  That was enough to keep me away forever and a day. 
I have enough dark rooms of my own.
 Dell sure was suspicious and a
damant? 
What are they hiding?
 My mind went to wondering and I wasn’t even sitting in the wondering tree.

Bones

Crumbs are falling
like rejected stars out of the night sky, tangling with the atmosphere, and arriving to earth with messages. 
Some are with light
and airy, snow melting on my tongue, energy and hope, and others are spiked to wound and cut.  Maw Sue said they come
in their own time, their own place, their own way.
She was right about that.  Indeed, m
y life is changing, crumb by crumb, memory by childhood memory, day by day. I am so different than the crazy divorcee
that lived with her parents only a year ago.  Time is slow and challenging now, allowing everything to come into focus, a choice to be made each time.  Before it was all or nothing, full throttle or sink in despair.  I’m a little balanced now and find it odd as if I’m waiting for the
preverbal chaos to descend, stir and destroy, t
ake me back to where I was. 

I have a cute little rent house on the outskirts of town. It has a small yard with a privacy fence and a lush evergreen garden
I can get lost in.  It’s small but tangled and when I venture down its path, it’s a maze of forest and trees that seem to multiply. 
I walk barefoot
because it makes me remember my childhood.  The
delicate blades of green grass
like tickles between my toes.  The smells are intoxicating.  S
weet succulent aroma of wildflowers, honeysuckle vines, tree bark, moon, stars, earth and sky. I 
have more good days now, than bad.  One morning I awoke to someone chopping onions in my kitchen.  It freaked me out, so I tip-toed through the living room, to the kitchen but no one was there.  I heard the chopping sound again and jumped.  It came from the window.  I got closer to inspect and it was a mockingbird just tapping over and over again, seeing its reflection. 

Spindly garden vines
attach their fingers to what they can reach, climbing upwards like leaf ladders.  Each morning
I sit in my pajamas on a bench
near the garden and close to the house.  I d
rink a cup of coffee and listen to the blue jays talk amongst themselves or watch the blue birds splashing in the concrete bath. Creatures creep and crawl, buzz and chirp, slipping up and down branches and rustling through leaves. At night, it’s another world as if the lesser light transformed
it at dusk by a cloak and veil. 
I stare with childlike eyes into the dark mesh of sky lit up with diamonds and the enormous moon which affectionately garnered my full, devoted attention as a child, 
and here lately, the same. 
The only th
ing missing is a wondering tree. 
I ask the man in the moon to help me find the little girl again, the one I left behind, sitting in the t
ree, or hidden inside the house, inside me.  Just imagining what I might face, the unknowns, sends me into a palpable
panic.
  Sometime last year, the therapist told me I was to deal with my feelings. 
Deal. Not react.
Emotions were wild and loose inside me, roaring waterfalls uncontainable, destructive. 

Seeing a therapist was a last ditch effort of my parents, in an attempt
to straighten me out as if therapists hold magic wands, that instantly transform and cure people.  Of course, it was a top secret mission in my family. 
Lena Hart couldn’t stand the notion of anyone in town finding
out.  I overheard Lena tell dad, “It won’t last.  She’ll be out the door in no time.  There is nothing wrong with her.  Just divorce trauma. She’ll get over it.”  It backfired.  Lena about had a stroke. 
Instead of bolting as Lena suspected I would, I found therapy illuminating, plus finding out it rubbed her the wrong way, gave me a smug satisfaction, I hadn’t had since roller derby.

“What’d ya’ll talk about in there?” Lena would ask
on the drive home. 
This was long before I
climbed the wondering tree, rescued the crackle or bought Annie.  It was during my lost days.  Ups and downs, extremes, pain wild and numbing, dreams and heartache, pain and more pain, everything ran together, black and white, grays.  I barely remember now—just smudges in my memory all ran together, chaos, mind churning, black and dark, out of control. 

“Mm—I dunno. Stuff. Me, childhood…”

“What kind of stuff?” 
Lena said as her voice changed.  Her eyes went slant and she’d stare at me a lot while she probed for answers. 
“Some things are not anyone’s business Willodean. You talk about yourself—Branson, marriage, your problems, all that crap but the rest of the family, like me and your daddy got nothing to do with it, you hear?”

You have everything to do with this
.
My heart flinched and I didn’t know why, just a tiny flutter and then back to beating.  For the short time I was in therapy, I did learn things about myself, things I hadn’t before, or maybe I did, but I put them away. 
Come to find out, 
all those television sets in my head, those radios talking, and other voices need an outlet. 
I have such an influx of information in my head, it has nowhere to go.
Nowhere to land. No place to park itself and form.
 It has no creative outlet upon which to manufacture itself. 
Go figure.

And since it has nowhere to go—it spins in chaos.
Inside the house inside me. 
Me. I am the chaos.
 The first time the therapist mentioned it, I thought of Maw Sue, her warnings about channeling the gift,
controlling the mind thoughts.  How to do that is lost to me, buried in a room somewhere inside the house. 

I called the therapist Doc, although her real name was Patricia Beaker. 
After several sessions, 
Doc told me I should release the material in my head by journaling, and it would also help to form the memories I have lost.  It was better than taking a pill. 
The letters that formed words that formed thoughts in my mind to spin chaos, now find rest on the blue line of my spiral notebook, a bench marker, a landmark in order to help me find my way back. 
And then, out of the blue sky, Lena jerked me out of a session, paid the bill and that was the end of it.  Therapy was over. 
On the way home, she told me I should be cured by now.

Lena-ology 101. Uh...alrighty.

I’ve been out of my parent’s house just long enough to remember what being alone feels like. 
Alone.
 I hate that word. It’s
even scarier now that I’m on my own.  No man to save me, rescue me, verbally abuse me. 
I am forced to come to terms with me. Myself. And I.
This alone is enough to send me packing and running. 
Doc says I can’t run anymore. I’m in a place of confrontation. 
She said I can run, of course, it’s a choice, but I’ll circle the same mountain over and over until I take a different path and confront whatever is making me run. 
I’ve never been here, this place, me, myself, all alone, without a man, without a relationship, without someone waiting in the wings, to save me, rescue me, love
me, and hate me, anything but alone.  The stillness is akin to dying, or feels like it.  It is
hard to move forward.
To know what to do next. 
It’s as if I’m waiting on some clearance method to engage and give me permission. I’m stuck it seems. 
Stuck.
 With no tree, no web, no crackle—just me and the house inside me. Just me and my man pillow. 
Alone
. I hate that word.