WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (60 page)

As of three days ago, my life was moving in a steady forward motion, for the first time, unstuck, one tick-tock at a time, chugging along in grueling therapy sessions, room to room, horror to horror, confrontations, examinations, a host of wallpaper Branson’s to confront, magnifying contents, listening to recordings, journaling blood to ink, magi
c to mayhem, curses to blessing and more.  A
nd then it unraveled like an old sweater. Life came 
undone.
Papa Hart took his last breath—
and I lost mine. 
I still can’t breathe. I'm blue and colorless and stiff, not really here at all.
Not really anywhere. 
My heart continues to believe he’ll shuffle through that door any minute.
Here I go again, the hoping for hope Willodean.  

“Too bad, so sad.” The shadows mock, whisper and use my afflict
ion against me. I hear a noise outside.  I quickly g
lance up at the front door. 
He’s coming back. It's him.
This is all a bad dream. 
 He’ll walk through the door any minute now and plop down in dad’s ugly green recliner and say in his gruff voice, “Girls, did I tell you the story about…” and then the world would return to normal, 
our normal
.

Mag and I would be kids sitting at his feet, on the porch, for hours on end listening to his stories, traveling across time and
space, to colder, icy climates.  In t
he mountains of Italy,
while fighting a gruesome war, waiting out enemies in foxholes while ice forms in the tree limbs and when it turned pitch of dark, they’d snap off and sound like gunfire. 
He'd jump
up from half-sleep, not seeing, not knowing—just prayer for daylight and survival. 
“Survive another day” he’d say. Then we’d travel to the sandy beaches of the Redland riverbank with a cane pole
drowning some minnows and waiting on the fish to bite.  He’d show us how to perfect our casting skills and how to feel a fish on the other end and set the hook. 
By nightfall, we’d sit at a campfire and study the stars and the constellation of the black sky and learn how those three wise men found Jesus.
We were in awe of his stories. 
Then we’d go back to war and learn the proper skills of survival. The war did that to Papa Hart, make him think the world was one step away from annihilation. He said
the past often repeated itself and it worried him, but he hoped he was flat out wrong. 
He lingered long
and hard on the depression era when he was a kid being born in 1920.  His family always had food, little of it, but when others stood in soup lines they produced a garden and worked for their food, chickens, cows, pigs, and wild hunting. 
“Survive another day.” He’d say. Then he’d teach us garden
ing skills for this very reason.  He said
when the shit hit the fan, his grandkids, by God, would know how to survive, plant crops and avoid the soup lines and government handouts. But his favorite topic was the wherewithal and gumption to make a whiskey steel practically from nothing.
He prided himself on this. 
“You just never know when that snake of prohibition might rear its ugly head.”
He’s say right after he took a big ‘ole swig of the stuff.  I couldn’t help but think if it happened today, in the outskirts of Pine Log, they’d be a
rebellion, an uprising like none other.
People like their liquor, that’s for sure. 

He taught us the art of concealment, how to hide that sucker behind a corn patch, ‘cause the government was blood suckers and they'd try to take away a man's rights to drink or do whatever the hell he wanted. Fermentation was thereby a process of the Lord’s doing, grapes, barley, corn and various other products. It was good common sense for what ails a man, no matter the predicaments of life, come what may or something like that. He’d end his speech with, “Good things grow in the dark girls. Remember that. Survive another day.” Then he’d take a swig of his Holy juice and say, “Whoowee, this must have been in the dark a long time.” He’d laugh a hearty chuckle, light his tobacco pipe with a sweeter than sweet smell and pull out a box of malted milk balls for us to munch on.

“To bad, so sad. He’s gone.” The shadows say, drifting inside the living room and piercing my ears with their evil heckles.
A gut punch. 
The sounds, the memories, so sweet, so bitter—
I may never recover.
 I will never hear his voice again, no stories, no laughter, no sweet smell of his tobacco pipe, no more traveling, no more malt balls, 
no more
. How will I survive another day? The silence we shared—
gone
.
The thought renders me mad. 
No one shared what we had. 
It was ours.
 Our silence. It made me feel special. It was our thing. 
Was there something he forgot to tell me? Did he miss a story along the way? Will I survive if the awful, dreadful ever happens?
 I feel a big whol
e in my heart, replaced with panic and desperation. 
The air sifts through the empty spaces
inside me, wind through a crackle shell. 
Mag dumps the second box of ‘
their all dead and you’re next’
 4x6 paper blocks out on the rug.
People pieces
. Generations of folks that remind me of the grave, that life is short and what we leave behind, we need to get it done.
Right now, before it’s too late. 

I want to believe that pictures tell a story, a bigger story that we were a part of something, we were loved, and we belonged to someone. My heart oozed out smidgens of yearnings of my own, to be loved, to be special, to be wanted. They stir a thousand voices to cry out in the pictures, sifting voices, high and low, rugged and rough, harsh and urgent, alive and dead. I pick
through a few sepia colored pictures and look at them.  Papa Hart and Dell with ear to ear smiles and twenty something years old, stand in my hands like paper dolls.
I wonder what they’re thinking…what they were doing?
 
Another picture is dad, about sixteen years old, slicked back hair, white t-shirt rolled up at the shoulders, and standing in front of his first car, a 51 Chevy. Dell had a camera in her hands
ninety nine percent of the time, so there are plenty of trails to follow.  Mag and I are in a lot of pictures, as well. 
There are many pictures of folks I don't know, hoards of unfamiliar faces stare at me, people I haven’t the faintest clue who they are, ghosts from the grave, haunting me with their expressions, all telling me stories, their thoughts invading my mind, filtering through the rooms of the house, as if they belonged there, holding words to be shared, their lips crying out for a listening ear.
Tell my story. Tell my story.
 This
is when the gift is unbearable and I don’t know what it expects of me. 
What does it want?  Why can’t it just leave me alone? 

Right now, it’s voices, a plethora of them rising up from the pictures, clear as a bell chime, as if they sat before me, on the second generation rug sharing their deepest selves, their regrets, their wonderful joys and the world as they knew it, back when.
I feel and hear them inside the house, inside me. 
They rush in
to the Mason room with the petal people are.  I close my eyes and my fingers relax while the pictures drops. 

I’m sensitive in spiritual life and death issues because i
nside me, this is where everything meets in the middle. 
That realm between—the gap, the void, the
place I can barely speak of because of fear of entanglement. 
I’m upset, grieving in and out of myself, inside myself and I fear I’ll have a meltdown and end up inside the rooms, inside the house unable to pull myself out. Then I'll end up here again. Living with my parents. 
God. No way
. The thought renders me to open my eyes. Mag is still sorting through pictures, holding back tears, one to another. I glance down the hallway. The doorway to my childhood bedroom creaks open as if
a childhood monster lies in wait. 
A loud, torrential scream is heard only in my ears and the house inside me quakes. 

It’s been well over a year since I excavated myself from the dark place that held me captive. That precious day I climbed out my window, plucked a leaf and claimed freedom as my own. Mag’s laughter creeps in and I can’t tell if it’s now—or then, a distant memory plucked from childhood. She's far away, unreachable,
but then I realized I’m the one who’s drifted. 
When I snap back to the living room, Mag is a laughing hysterically, enough to bring Lena out of her kitchen lair.

“What are you girls laughing at?” She said curiously. “Whaaat, what is it? Is it Papa Hart?” She wrings her fingers on the dishrag and walks quickly towards Mag.
I’m growing curious as well.  What could be so funny?

“CRAWFISH.” Mag blurts out. She
holds a picture up.  “
Checkerboard girl.” She heckled and fell over laughing
even harder than before.  Mom giggled too. 

“You look like th
e girl from Who-vile.” Mag said.  She tossed the picture to me and it landed between us like a brick.  I look
down and there she is. Big as Dallas. Big as damnation. The one I love, the one I hate. I had cotton white hair and a fair complexion with big blue eyes. On top of my perfect round head was one long curly piglet tied with a red bow. I was a year old when the picture was taken but only now do I see it for what it is.  

Dell had sewn me a pretty red and white gingham dress. This was before
the God awful patchwork phase took over.  God help us all. 
The dress was sleeveless with an open neckline and full skirt. In the mid back area was a white button the size of a silver dollar and below it, a circle cut. Big buttons and holes were fashion statements in the sixties. 
Who knew?
 The picture was taken at Olan Mills Photography Studio. Lena hands them out to family and friends, and when Dell gets her 8x10 she immediately busted out in laughter. 
Hyena, beer spilling laughter.

“Why she’s as backwards—.” Dell said choking and giggling. “As a crawfish on a checker board.” Lena Hart looked at her as if she had drank way too many Miller Lights. Dell hurt herself to tears before finally explaining to Lena that my dress was backwards. PUT ON BACKWARDS. My first dress. 
See. Right there. Symbolic. Story of my life.
 And since then, I’ve been the butt of every checkerboard, backwoods crawfish joke in Pine Log.

“It was still a good picture.” Lena said slapping me with the dishrag. 
Swat—hug—swat.

“Crawfish. Crawfish.” Mag heckled. I gave her a swift kick across the rug. Lena went back to the kitchen to deal with her own demons.
Death stirs them up, for sure. 
We all deal with grief differently and she is no exception.

***

It happened yesterday. Mag and I were sitting at the table, simply trying to get through a conversation without breaking down. Papa Hart’s spirit hovered in our ea
rs with stories and porch tales, the emptiness unbearable. 
Everything reminded us of him so it was hard not to think about anything else. Lena was doing what she always does, 
cook
. The pear cobbler was cooling on the counter. The room simmered with left over spice, cinnamon and sugar. Dad came barreling in the
kitchen, hot and sweaty. Across his face was the familiar, I—need—a—beer—look. 
He passed by the cobbler, eyed it devilishly and then plucked a corner piece of crust to his mouth. Lena having eyes in places no one else does, sprouts octopus arms and backhands him with a spatula, simultaneously while drying dishes.

“Gavin Clark. That’s your daddy’s cobbler.” The room went deadly quiet. Dad froze inside the refrigerator door. I couldn’t breathe. Mag gasped. Tension mounted and fell
in the room. No one knew what to do. 
Idle bodies submerged into a zone of wrecked humanity. The refrigerator made that weird noise it always makes, at the same time
everyone realized what Lena had one, including Lena.  Dad rushed to her to comfort her. 
Mag and I crumpled in tears.

“I—I’ve baked him one every week—for years. I don’t know—how NOT to. I just….I just...” Her words were out of sorts and disjointed. Mag left the room in sobs. I sat there like a bump on a log traumatized by flat tears streaming down my face. Papa Hart would never eat that cobbler. So if Papa Hart couldn’t eat it—
no one would
. We loved Lena’s cooking, as much as the next person, but that cobbler wasn’t ours to eat. It was cooked with love by Lena and it shall remain, untouched, a stone marker, sacred and holy. I lost count how many breakdowns we had after that. One minute everyone would be talking and then tragically, without words, one by one, everyone disappeared to work out their grief. Lena cooked. Dad banged machinery in the tinker shop. I tree climbed the wondering tree. Mag f
lat out disappeared. No telling and I didn’t ask.