Her hands released the linen. Her arms reached up higher.
One arm locked around his neck, the other grasped his hair, unthinkingly twined it in her fingers.
The tone changed again, becoming sorrowful. The luminous waifs stared with orphan eyes, the deer skipped away. The doves cooed mournfully, then scattered as an owl descended. The flakes swirled and stung in bitter wind.
Violet felt the gnawing hunger in her own gut, the muttering discontent of spiritless need. The gossamer that flowed gracefully from lithe bodies now hung ragged, lank and gray from racked limbs. Heaviness dragged each one toward what grave awaited them. The earth received them, assuaging all hunger, silencing all cries, erasing all need. Her bones seemed to rattle against Willis’s; the corrupt flesh that clothed them was only a cage for the soul. Her own body, and his, evoked loathing and weariness.
Overhead, the blasted branches rattled coldly against one another as if huddling vainly together for warmth that was not to be found. Cold and hunger howled and found answer in her hollow heart.
Her only desire was to cease striving. To escape endless, empty life and find an end to unanswerable need. She hung on Willis although she couldn’t think why, because to surrender and fall and be at craveless, lonesome peace seemed infinitely needful.
Violet rasped, “I told him I would never leave him.”
The music ceased.
Now there was a silence so cold and black, even the stones of the fireplace seemed to shrink from it. The river ceased to murmur and the branches no longer rattled. The silence seemed palpable, deafening, and obsidian with anger.
A groaning seemed to come from all around, a deep and unfathomed sound. From the trees came a tortured cracking and creaking as hundreds of years of growth were forced upon them in the space of minutes. Beeches’ silver-gray trunks were like walls, white pine stood monstrous with thrusting great limbs, maple and ironwood hove mightily through the canopy. Moosewood stood precarious, their spindly masts crossed in tangled thickets; the scant broad leaves waving like helpless hands. Poison ivy and wild grape strangled swelling boughs or themselves tore with a shriek.
When Violet was small she had had a fever, and when she closed her eyes she had a disturbing sensation of swelling and shrinking. The feeling she had now was similar, as if the trees were pressing in on her and Willis from every side. Their anger was imperative and palpable. She felt violated in every cell, even her mind was forced in upon.
But it was Willis they tore and pushed at, Willis they compelled, and if she only let go, the anger would recede and she would be free. Her arms shuddered with pain and her fingers seemed as if cold and asleep and the more she pressed her head against Willis’s chest the deeper the painful probing became.
A great, shuddering scream tore from the trees, mounting until she thought her bones would shatter, until just at the end of her strangled consciousness, a terrible, crashing wind blasted the preternatural trees. Shards of great beeches and maples fell about her and Willis, pine boughs crashed to the ground. The air was filled with powdered bark and raw slivers, and the redolence of black birch, balsam, and maple.
Sparks were flying from the embers of the pine branches that still smoldered in the fireplace. They settled on fluttering dry leaves and twigs and pine needles that blew among the shattered trees. The fierce wind fanned small fires among the awful tangle, and they burst into life among the slivered kindling.
Willis dragged Violet bodily behind the fireplace, where half of a split and leaning tree provided some shelter from the falling wood. If he spoke to her, his voice was lost in the screaming wind and the rattling boom of falling boughs.
While they huddled there, dashing the dust from their eyes, the crashing slowed and stopped. Only sporadic sounds of wood breaking, and tangles collapsing, could be heard.
After some time, Willis and Violet peered out of their makeshift shelter. The wind seemed to respond by driving into the shattered grove, blowing sparks and cinders around them. Smoke stung their eyes and sparks their faces.
Willis climbed out over broken trees. He threw away his bow and quiver, which caught on everything. He held Violet’s hand firmly, pulling her over the trunks and tangled branches; his other hand grasped his hunting knife to slash at small branches that caught their clothes and hair. Each yard of progress was laborious; fresh sap made the exposed wood slippery and treacherous with slivers. Fire was spreading into the surrounding woods faster than they could move through the ruin. Blazes began to leap tall; not far away a fallen balsam fir crackled and nearly exploded with flame. Violet heard deer fleeing and the beat of heavy wings in the dark just overhead—real creatures, not phantoms, fleeing the disaster.
Finally Willis helped Violet onto the trunk of a great, fallen poplar and they almost ran along its length. Violet hadn’t realized they were actually working their way toward the river until they reached the crown of the poplar which lay in the water. Her foot slipped and was soused in the cold, cold water. Willis pulled her up by the arm.
They clung to each other on their place on the fallen tree and watched the woods burn. Smoke and heat blew ferociously into their faces. Willis washed his hands in the cold creek water and scooped water in them for Violet to wet her scorched throat. Bitter smoke blanked out the stars and wrapped them in acrid darkness. Gradually, the fire died down.
Their legs were cramped from clinging long to their perch, their chests were sore from coughing. The heat from the dying fires blew away, and cold seeped into their limbs. They stepped off the tree trunk onto the narrow shingle of the river’s edge. A bed of fuming embers confronted them. Trees still stood a few hundred feet downriver, scorched but probably alive. They made their way to them, splashing in and out of the river’s edge and climbing over fallen branches and wrestling through stands of kinnickinnick.
It was there that they met the night-queen.
There was no wind or music, she simply emerged from the shadows as though an illusion of twisted bark and limbs. Gray was her raiment, adorned with feather and quill; hooded was her beautiful silver-gray face. Her presence was undeniable as a stone wall—all the illusory solidity of the ephemeral beings was concentrated in herself.
They stopped short, and Willis pressed Violet behind him instinctively.
Violet’s already trembling limbs were like water in the presence of so awesome a being. She was venerable and ancient, yet the dignity and beauty of her face made her winsome as a sweet child. Worship seemed the rightful response to this Presence. But Violet resisted, clinging to Willis’s hand.
She merely stood in silence before them for a long moment. The feral lips parted. Then Violet felt more than heard:
Like you, she is mine.
Her words resounded like mountains breaking. It was all Violet could do to keep her legs from folding under her.
“No. Violet is mine. It was to me that she freely gave herself. Not to you.”
She is yours. You are mine. What is yours is now mine.
“You have no claim on her. She is bound to me, and I to her, as a living man and woman. We are one flesh. You have no part in that.”
You gave yourself to me, and she is one with you. She is mine.
Violet spoke up, her voice a mere squeak. “‘The husband no longer has authority over his own body, but the wife does,’” she quoted.
The gray queen stood in silence for a long moment. She seemed to tower with sovereignty over them. Violet wanted to hide behind Willis. But she forced herself to stand and meet the radiant gaze over his shoulder.
The air seemed charged, ready to crack.
Violet cleared her smoke-racked throat.
“He was never his own to give. He already belonged to Someone.”
Willis turned to look at Violet.
That is none of my concern. He gave himself to me. No prior claim supersedes.
“He was no more his own to give than these mountains, or this water, or these trees. All of these, and Willis, belong to the
One who created them.”
A slight, slow smile spread over the silver one’s bloodless lips.
As, ultimately, do I, I acknowledge. But as you gave yourself to him, so he gave himself to me.
Violet hesitated. She bowed her head. Then raised it again, and came from behind Willis to stand beside him, still holding his hand. “A price was paid for both of us—a blood price. A life was given for ours, a life of infinite worth—the life of the Creator Himself. We, neither of us, are our own. We belong to Jesus Christ.”
At that name, the night-queen seemed to shiver and her head almost bowed as if involuntarily.
Violet continued. “It is in Christ’s name that I say to you, I am his and he is mine, and we are none of yours. Christ’s power binds, and none can snatch from his hand.”
A chill spread over the cold, graceful limbs. The hands looked as if they were ready to snatch, but the eyes acknowledged their impotence. They were sharp as new icicles, as distant stars. Violet physically felt their sting.
They pierced and probed Violet until she could feel a burning-cold needle freezing her very heart. But Violet held the cold, cold gaze. “I am my beloved’s, and he is mine,” she mouthed, breathless. “Be gone from us, in the name of Jesus Christ.”
She saw the scream begin in the eyes, heard it rising like a whirlwind around her and Willis. Coals leapt to flames that raged, flames to roaring towers that sucked the oxygen out of the air around them. Violet had to close her eyes against the flying ash and dust and cover her face and ears with her hands to keep out the twigs and embers that pummeled her and Willis blind as they clung to each other. But it was as if the fire could not quite touch them. Then it was quiet.
The night-queen receded then, slow and majestic, but there was a taste of cowering in her measured dignity. Her face bowed, but not before Violet saw a change coming over it—as though centuries were laid on it, and ancient bitterness. She faded into the smoke, her beauty twisting into tortured shades before wisping away. She seemed to take all the air with her and left only smoldering, acrid fumes.
A few embers glowed in the devastation around them. “Let’s get out of the burned area, if we can,” rasped Willis, and led her along the river trail, around fallen trees and stands of shrub willows.
He paused and stood still, listening, on the edge of a stand of birches that had escaped the flames. “She’s gone. They’re gone.”
Violet looked questioningly at him. “I mean, there are no night people. The muttering is gone. The woods are at peace. They’re really, truly gone, Violet.”
Although she herself could not feel it, her soul rejoiced to hear the relief and joy in his voice. She squeezed his hand.
They walked slowly, tired and wheezing and spent in limb and mind. Violet paid little attention to where they were going until she realized they had plodded along for well over an hour. Still, she followed without question until the woods thinned. Huge old maples, thickly carpeted below with fallen leaves, let abundant starlight through. Up ahead she saw cornfields, and on a rise, Christ the King Church.
Violet realized that the night was changing. Dawn would soon come. She gripped Willis’s hand more tightly. Willis strode for the end of the woods and emerged into the open night.
He stopped and stood, breathing freely. “It was just about this moment, every morning, that I made that choice over and over, to go to ground and not to the One I really belonged to—how many thousands of times? And all along I had what I needed to become free, to see the morning. I chose to believe that I belonged to the night people, Violet. No more!” He dropped her hand and raised his arms to the fading stars. Then he picked her up and swung her around.
She laughed, and then started to ask why he had chosen to come here, but Willis said, “Please, my love. Just, shh.” He turned toward the east, holding her hand. She had an idea what the moment meant, and found herself murmuring, “‘More than watchmen wait for the dawn.’”
Light grew around them, mauve and salmon and buttermilk and blue, and Violet just watched Willis take it all in, his face full of wonder and tears. When the rose-gold sun peeked through the bare trees to kiss his face, he sighed, and bowed his head, and fell to his knees, and she beside him.
PART 3- LIGHT
I found the one I love.
I held him, and would not let him go…
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away,
turn, my beloved.
SUNRISE
The sun came up in a clear sky, gilding the heavy frost on the cut stalks of corn and lacing all the tattered wild plants along the river. Birds greeted the day cheerily and darted here and there. Canada geese honked overhead, heading south in a wide ‘V’. Willis greeted the long-sought sunrise with tears, while Violet waited in silence.
Finally he stood and lifted her to her feet. His face was soot-streaked and his hair scorched. A flying ember had burned his cheek. His clothes were torn and filthy. “That was…” he murmured. “This is…” he tried.
“Yes, it is,” Violet replied.
They gazed at each other, somewhat shyly, seeing each other anew in the rising pure light of morning.
After a moment, she squeezed his hand. “You don’t look very presentable,” Violet quipped with an adoring smile.
“Nor do you, wife,” he rejoined.
At the word, wife, her heart gave a little leap and she bit her lip.
“I love it when you do that,” he said. “Especially with sunlight on your face.” He tipped his head back slightly, his eyes traveling over her face. He wiped at a smudge on her cheek with his thumb. His lips worked momentarily, then pressed together tightly. Violet smiled gently back at him.
The shape of nothingness inside her, she realized, was filled now with air and light. It no longer weighted, but lifted her up.
The cornfield stretched up a long slope to Blackbirch River Road. One or two cars passed occasionally, some of them still with headlights on. Violet saw a fire truck pass by, going away. She realized what had happened could not have passed unnoticed by the outside world. “We should go see Reverend Peterson,” she said. He nodded, kissed her briefly and put his arm around her shoulder.
They walked the short distance to the church and knocked on the parsonage kitchen door. After a time, the minister came to the door, still in his bathrobe and pajamas. He peered out the door glass and quickly unlocked the door. “My word, did you kids come out of that forest fire? Violet, they’re looking for you, your parents are probably frantic. Come on in, come in. Let me look at you, are you okay?” He looked at Willis. “And you…”
“Your servant, sir, Willis Wood.”
Then the old minister gasped with surprise and joy. “Praise the Lord! I was up half the night praying, Violet, but I fell asleep on my knees, and next thing there’re sirens and whatnot, and the phone started ringing… well, Hallelujah! Willis, I can hardly believe my eyes!” The old minister fussed for a few more moments, then batted at his forehead and turned to Violet.
“Frank Cronin called in the forest fire last night, and reported that your car was parked at his place, so he assumed the worst, and he called your folks. They should be there by now, at the Cronin’s.”
“Can we call Cronins and let them know we’re—I mean, let them know I’m all right?”
“I’m already dialing,” he said, lifting the handset. Willis gazed in bewilderment at the telephone, the purring refrigerator, the formica-topped dinette. He could see no woodstove or fireplace, but the room was somehow overly warm, after the crisp morning outside. A lot had changed since 1817.
After a minute Peterson put Violet on the phone. “Hey Dad. Yes, I am completely okay, just really dirty and tired and I think I have about a pound of smoke in my lungs… of course I didn’t pick up my phone, I left it in the woods and it’s probably toast. Dad, just come, all right? There’s someone here I want you to meet. Yes, I’m fine, thank God. Okay. Love you, Dad… okay, put Mom on.” She had almost the same conversatio
n with her mother. Finally, she hung up the phone and smiled. “Reverend, could I use your bathroom and explain to Willis how to use the shower? And I don’t suppose he could borrow some clothes?”
Todd and Jessica Aubrey arrived at the parsonage a short time later. Violet came running out and in spite of her soot-smeared, smoke-reeking clothes and hair, her parents embraced her firmly. “We were afraid of the worst, of course,” her Mom said without preamble. “Thank God you’re okay.”
Reverend Peterson emerged from the parsonage, unshaven but dressed. He shook hands with Todd and Jessica and welcomed them inside for coffee.
As they sat down at the kitchen table with mugs in hand, Willis emerged into the kitchen, smelling of soap. Violet jumped back up. He wore old clothes of the minister’s, a belted pair of Levi’s that probably had fit the Reverend thirty years ago, and were several inches too long; a t-shirt and sweater, probably the same vintage. His hair was combed and wet and his feet bare. Violet grinned helplessly toward him.
I can’t believe he’s my husband. She walked over to him and took his hand.
Reverend Peterson was introducing him. At his name, her father dropped his coffee mug.
Violet looked from Willis’s face and was bemused to see recognition on her mother’s and father’s faces.
“Mr. And Mrs. Aubrey,” Willis said with a bow, “There are some stories we need to tell each other.”
THREEFOLD CORD
Violet showered and changed into some clothes that had belonged to the late Mrs. Peterson. They hung on her spare frame but were warm and comfortable. Jessica helped Reverend Peterson make breakfast while they waited for her. Todd Aubrey busied himself reporting back to the Cronins, reassuring them of Violet’s safety, and politely asking about the property damage to their land. Willis stepped outside for a moment, barefoot on the driveway gravel, to look again at the crisp, fresh morning.
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