Blackbirch Woods

by Meredith Anne DeVoe

  Willis hesitated, clearly uncomfortable, even in the darkness. Then he said slowly, “We would have to be… ‘one flesh’.”

  “Consummated, in other words?”

  “Yes, sir, I suppose so.”

  Violet was suddenly glad for the cover of the dark, and was sure that Willis was too.

  Reverend Peterson cleared his throat. “Well, son, it’s like this. I doubt whether the curse is going to be fussy about paperwork. However…”

  “For Violet’s sake, I insist!” Willis interjected.

  “As do I, son. As do I.” He stood up. “Violet, you’ve shown me that you are as ready as you are ever going to be. I know the vows, my part of them, by heart. As far as I’m concerned, the town records don’t make you husband and wife, your vows before God do. Later on, Lord willing, we will officiate things, do the paperwork, make it legal.

  “But as far as I am concerned, if we do this, the two of you are bound before God, and there’s no going back. Do you understand me, young people?” The sternness returned, he seemed to loom a few inches taller.

  “Yes sir, absolutely.”

  “Yes, Reverend.”

  “Well, then. I pray your parents will forgive me.” He drew himself up taller. “I want to see your faces better. Let’s go down by the water where the moon is bright. I’ve done this enough times I’ve got my part memorized.”

  It took them a moment to realize that he meant to seal the transaction right there and then.

  In Blackbirch Woods, then, Reverend Peterson led Willis and Violet as they vowed to love, honor, cherish, and keep only to each other as long as they both shall live. He told Willis to kiss his bride. He pronounced them man and wife. He laid his hands on their two heads afterward, and prayed over them. Violet’s heart was leaping within her, but his prayer seemed to build a wall of strength and sureness around her and Willis… her husband.

  SONG OF SONGS

  Reverend Peterson left them, then.

  For all their brave words, suddenly they were both very afraid.

  Willis took her hands. “Violet, aside from the occasional sleeping fawn I’ve found, you are the only warm, welcoming, soft and living thing I’ve touched in so long. For some years now, I have wanted just to be able to touch you, to hold you close to me, to feel your life, to feel your breathing… to be with you. But I never thought it could really be. And now… thank God… I love you, Violet. And I ask myself, what in God’s name have I done.

  “But it’s too late for that. All we can do, is go forward.” As he spoke, his voice choked with emotion until it was only a whisper, and he moved closer to her until she felt his breath. She lifted their clasped hands.

  “Forward together, Will. We’re not alone anymore.”

  He leaned over as if to kiss her, but he stopped, and pressed his lips together. “Uh… Violet… I’ve never.”

  She smiled. “Me neither. Really? What they say about sailors and all?”

  “There were no girls on the whaling boat, you know. I got off that ship and all I wanted was to go back to the farm. Once there, I was always working. There were girls around, but no one I was serious about. So, um.”

  “I’m really glad, Will.”

  “Me too.”

  “So we’ll figure it out?”

  “Aye, that.”

  He ran his hands up her bare arms, drawing her close to him, touching her shoulders and her face.

  “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse,” Willis whispered in her ear. Violet gasped. “’Thou hast ravished my heart with one look of thine eyes.’”

  Candles flickered in the hearth.

  How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse!

  How much better is thy love than wine!

  Thy lips, O my spouse, drop as the honeycomb:

  Honey and milk are under thy tongue.

  NIGHT PEOPLE

  Much later, they lay tangled together. Neither wanted to move.

  But finally, Violet said, “It’s so quiet.”

  “Hmm,” Willis replied. “I believe that our good Reverend’s arrival may have put the night people off.”

  They lay quietly again.

  Willis sat up after a while. He frowned into the night, listening hard for a long moment. Then his body relaxed. “They are far, far away. I am sure they will be back. But we have some time until then.” He lowered himself next to her, but remained raised up on one elbow. He kissed her once, and regarded her.

  “How I wish I could have married you in the old white church my family went to. It was plain, but somehow pure. There was no stained glass, just long clear windows with small panes—the old, greenish glass, with bull’s-eyes from the pouring. The sun streamed in like grace on my sister’s faces. How I miss their sweet smiles! I wish you could have known them, Violet. Maeve was the oldest of the girls, but I was eight years older. Deirdre next, and little Genevieve. She was no more than knee-high to me, a cherub. There was the baby, Ruthanne, but she died of the smallpox when I was seventeen. A little after that was when I went to Portland for more than a year and worked as a wood carver in a shipyard. I took one sea journey on a whaler, only nine months, as a ship’s-carpenter, but my heart wasn’t in it and I came home again.

  “Mum and Dad seemed to have aged so much in less than two years. I was sorry I had left them with all the work. My brothers were old enough but still… our house seemed sad and still, like the laughter had gone out of it, and I blamed myself.

  “Maybe that was why I was tempted into drinking that night. I had started going out of the house in the nights anyway, looking for light and music and friendship.

  “But when I think back, there was plenty of that in my own house. When I came back from the cow barn in the winters, and night had come early, I remember looking in the windows and seeing my sisters around the harmonium, singing hymns, and their candle-lit faces were like bright flowers in the night. And I remember them giggling quietly in church.”

  He chuckled suddenly. “I was holding the hymnal of a time, and a fly was plaguing us. One of us waved it away, then another. During the third verse of ‘Lily of the Valley’, that fly landed right on the hymnal page. Without even thinking, I snapped the book shut. My sisters saw it and it was all they could do not to explode with laughter, right there in church. Even my Mum’s shoulders were shaking and she was hiding her mouth behind her handkerchief.” Violet could see Willis’s teeth flashing in the night, smiling.

  “No, when I look back, it was me caught in the darkness and grief after the baby died.”

  It had been rare for Willis to speak so freely about his past and memories. Violet was moved.

  He shook his head. “All that to say, I wish you could have known my family. I know they would have loved you.”

  “I know mine will love you. They’ll be your family too.”

  He exhaled heavily. “If they can forgive me. But no regrets for tonight, beloved.” He laid back down next to her. “Because I’ve been too long waiting for you. It was worth all that time, and everything time took from me, to love you.” He pulled her against him again and held on tight.

  They waited.

  The night people did not come.

  They felt the night changing, and they drew on their clothes and sat up. Willis grew restless.

  “Dawn is coming.” Willis said, very quietly, uneasily. Then, after a while he said, “I should go away.”

  Violet looked at him uncomprehending, and then understood. “Willis, don’t go. What happens to you is my concern too, now. I should be with you.”

  Willis’s mouth worked, then he set his chin. He took her hand in his.

  It wasn’t long before a distant rooster crowed. A few birds peeped groggily. Willis squeezed Violet’s hand tightly.

  His hand grew cold in hers. Her own almost ached from the cold of it. She drew closer to him, but felt it as his spirit drained away. His skin changed—rather than fading, he seemed rather to come into focus, the same moistly sheened, gray-
gold as the quartzite boulders scattered along the riverbank. Whatever Violet had prepared herself for, whatever she had expected, it was nothing like this. One indrawn breath seemed to constrict upon him, and then his hand became as ash in hers. Her fingers closed in on themselves as the dry wisp that remained of him drained away.

  Violet felt herself drawn almost irresistibly with him. But there was a moment when she sensed that she had a choice, and she could not choose the darkness, much as her heart yearned toward it. No, she had to let him go. Between one breath and another, he was gone from her.

  She was shattered. Tears came unbidden and Violet knelt forward on the spot where he had just been sitting, but no warmth remained there. Her tears merged with the loam and moss and rootlet tangle.

  She was alone. More so than yesterday, because her body and her heart had merged with the life of another, and he was snatched away. She wept and moaned promises to the unspeaking ground. She remembered his touch and promised herself that he was coming back.

  She raged against the night people.

  “Cowards! Why didn’t you show yourselves! Thieves!! Willis is mine!” She remembered him touching her, owning her, and her owning him, in all the secret places of themselves. “I am my beloved’s and he is mine. Mine!” She whispered through clenched teeth, and met the sunrise with tears.

  The morning dragged.

  In a sense she felt grateful to have seen what happened to Willis. She was all the more determined. All the vague dreams she had imagined the night before had condensed into a hard knot of resolution.

  But what to do next? She didn’t have to be home until the following day. She couldn’t sleep.

  She tried to read her Bible but her mind was spinning. She tried to walk along the river trail but felt like she was abandoning Willis. She told herself that was silly. In the end she made herself walk a mile in one direction, then the other. She went swimming in the river. She ate some of the food she had brought.

  As the day wore away to afternoon she thought she would fall asleep on her feet. She looked at the time on her cell phone and decided that if she slept now, she would sleep till Willis returned. He would find her here, and wake her and tell her his name.

  She laid down on her pine-bough bed and dropped off to sleep.

  The sun slipped behind gray clouds an hour later. A fresh breeze turned the maple leaves up to show their silvery sides. Thunder woke Violet as the sky grew very dark and a few huge, hot drops of water began to spatter the maple leaves. Violet looked around, disoriented.

  PART 2- DARKNESS

  By night on my bed

  I sought him whom my soul loveth:

  I sought him, but I found him not.

  I will rise now, and go about.

  I will seek him whom my soul loveth:

  I sought him, but I found him not.

  ONLY A DREAM

  Fat raindrops stung her exposed cheek, waking her to a familiar feeling. Like there was something that she needed to remember; and she was slow to convince herself that it was only a dream.

  But the approaching storm wasn’t buying it.

  She opened her eyes to steely sky and wind hissing through the lush foliage of midsummer. A sudden, close thunderclap cut through her grogginess and she leapt up from the pine-bough bed, her heart pounding.

  The humidity and dropping atmospheric pressure seemed to concentrate the fragrance of the woods. Moss, pine needles, a hint of secretive mushrooms with salamanders curled around their stems and pale green ferns uncurling languidly. And the clean smell of Blackbirch River, the water low in high summer.

  It was real. A feeling under the white cotton of her old sundress confirmed it absolutely. Oh, God, it was true. And even stranger, part of her insisted that it was condign—that it was right. But how could it be? And…

  How had it happened?

  It couldn’t have happened, couldn’t. Violet shook her head realized she had to move, because she had no tent and was about to get drenched. She picked up her scattered personal items in confusion from the stone hearth where they lay beside the white, puddled wax from burned-out candles. She stuffed them inside her tote bag. It couldn’t be real… She took one last look at the river. It seemed to whisper, Yes, Violet—real. And right.

  Violet bowed her head and took a deep breath, wishing she could cry but feeling only an empty weight, a memory of covert pleasure at its center. “Lord, forgive me,” she whispered. Then she walked briskly up the path.

  Running up the cowpath from the impending rain, Violet felt the chafing of her lips and cheeks from whiskers and lips she could not even name. She observed with fitting irony that the frayed hem of her white dress was sullied with dirt.

  There had been wind. And someone else…? A long talk…then peace. Contentment. It was so vague.

  She had lit a few candles in the shelter of the fireplace. In the soft light, his face emerged from darkness, and took her breath away. She wished the face would emerge now from the darkness of her memory, but there was nothing there.

  After that she was unclear on precisely what happened. No, that wasn’t exactly true. She just wasn’t really sure how it could have happened—how she could have watched him spread her sleeping bag at the edge of the candle’s light, and take her in his arms—or how it could possibly have seemed so right, but it had. Katydids and tree frogs chanted endlessly, hypnotically from the forest. His eyelashes and irises caught the glow of candles, stars, and fireflies. Her heart was full of love. His kiss was intoxicating. The boundaries of her skin dissolved in joy…

  Violet’s brother once had a book of “Magic Eye” pictures, the kind in which one had to unfocus one’s eyes to see a hidden shape. But Violet could only see the shapes as voids, she couldn’t focus on them properly. That was how the night took shape now, as an empty place where clear memories should be.

  Words from Scripture echoed in her mind.

  I sleep, but my heart is awake; it is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, "Open for me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one; for my head is covered with dew, my locks with the drops of the night.”

  Who was the one for whom she had opened the door of her soul in the night?

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered; part prayer, part dismay. She stopped along the trail.

  It wasn’t God’s fault, she knew, but how could she have done that—with—with…

  Now, the tears came.

  Violet did not know his name. She had known his eyes, his hands, his skin: but she could not remember his name. She had let him “know” her, and he remained a stranger. A beautiful face that came out of the dark and took her hand. Eyes that reflected moonshine and candlelight, but showed no one to her. She had given to him what she had treasured up for years, to be offered to one who had earned the trust and right to her inmost self… Her sense of loss was unfathomable.

  Thunder shattered her thoughts, seemed to crack the very boulders along the path. Violet ran up the path toward the car.

  THE CRONINS

  Violet saw the white farmhouse at the head of the cowpath, where it passed the spot where the wreck of the old dairy barn had been—the Cronins had removed the last of the sad hulk years before, and only the stone foundation remained—and became a paved driveway. The car was there, dwarfed by the Cronin’s SUV.

  She ran under the roof of the back door just as the rain came in earnest. She dropped her tote on the stoop and ran her fingers through her hair. Then she knocked on the screen door.

  “Hello, Violet, come on in, so good to see you, you’ve gotten so tall and pretty, I can’t believe you’re going to college this Fall, aren’t you? Did you have a nice campout? Too bad about the rain, good thing you got out of the worst of it. I suppose it’s too wet for camping, unless you’re a duck…” Mrs. Cronin chattered on, wiping the counter and every conceivable surface as she spoke before wringing the dishcloth and hanging it to dry. Then she stood with one hand on the edge of the old-fashioned porcelain sink, and the other
cocked on her hip, facing Violet squarely.

  “Did you eat anything? You probably need some dinner.”

  Violet smiled. “No thanks, I’m fine, Mrs. Cronin. I just wanted to say hi and see how you’re doing. You weren’t around when I got here yesterday afternoon.”

  “We went to the hardware store, and Frank is out there in the workshop now doing God knows what, you know how men love to just putter around. Did you have a good night? I hope you were wearing bug repellent, geez but the mosquitoes about carry you away this time of year.”

  “Oh, yeah, I’m all slathered up.” Violet hesitated, but before Mrs. Cronin could start chattering again, she asked, “I did see a guy, uh... Do you know him? Tall? Probably a little older than me?”

  “No one should be back there, it’s posted. Still, those trappers think they own everything. Did he have a gun, was he hunting?”

  Violet thought for a moment and vaguely recalled. “I think he had a bow and arrows.”

  “Darn trespassers. Like they own the place. He didn’t bother you, did he?”

  Violet shrugged. “He was just passing through.” If her manner was forced, Mrs. Cronin didn’t notice; she was fuming about poachers and trespassers and maybe she should go down and have a chat with the game warden again, maybe he could get off his duff and do something…

  Mr. Cronin came banging in the back door, wiping his hands on a shop towel. Violet stood back while Mrs. Cronin filled him in. Then he looked at her and said, “Well, hello little lady. What did the fellow look like? Did he bother you?”

  Violet fumbled to describe him, but Mr. Cronin shook his head. “No such animal living close by here. Maybe it was the Wentham Ghost,” he said with a comic scary face.

  “Oh, criminey, Frank, you trying to scare the girl?”

  Violet kept a mild face. It had been no ghost her arms had been around, no ghost who had kissed her. She was glad Mrs. Cronin had misinterpreted her blush. “What is he talking about?”