THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  NEWS YOU CAN USE

  BY EDNA ROLLINS

  August 26, 1988

  THE BEST NEWS THIS SIDE OF SALT FLATS RIVER

  When Texas heat rolls around, folks get a taste of what hell will be like. It is also when souls get restless and wander away from God’s law. As ladies of the church, we have our eyes and ears out into the community as to be overseers of his children, so we can guide those back to the place of the sacred. Lately, we have upsetting reports about a considerable amount of drinking at the Pulp Mill after shift changes. Husbands were not home after their evening shifts as they should be. Folks say they gathered on tailgates and drank till the wee hours of the morning, talking about the fish they caught, or the motor they overhauled or the upcoming hunting season. Second report is even more disturbing. Our teen populace has some wild habits they will need to overcome if they are ever to become graceful adults. On an average Friday night, teens can be found tracing all over theater row, and while some are inside the theater, they have been found to be not watching movies at all. Kissing and other scandalous behaviors have been noted. The ones that don’t make it inside, are seen leaving with older groups in cars or the backs of pick-up trucks and are usually found at Buttermilk Road in the pasture gathered round a bonfire, drinking and Lord knows what else. The most troubling behavior is teens discovered slipping off behind the theater where there are pockets in doorways and obscure hiding places. Let’s just say that if you have a redheaded daughter or your son drives a beat-up green Ford, you might want to talk to them about abstinence and the Lord’s view on sexual purity, and how babies are born, before you end up with an unwed mother and a wayward son.

  If the heat doesn’t kill us in Pine Log, alcohol will have a chance to take up the slack according to Lola Bess, owner of the Cut & Curl on Fourth Street downtown. If you mention this ad, you’ll get $5 off a haircut. According to Lola’s numerous clients, word is there is a petition floating around town and come to find out, Cletus Herrington started it. Cletus owns the River Shack Bar and Club across the Moss Belt river line, into Maple County which is just a crow’s fly from Pine Log community. Cletus wants to make Pine Log wet like Maple County and if he gets enough names, he’ll be able to put it on the ballot for folks to vote on come election time. And by wet, we’re not talking water, folks, we’re talking the devil’s juice. If this passes it would mean that every corner store and grocery would sell alcohol. We’d soon have beer joints and liquor stores on every side street. This is how the devil gets in, folks. There is no two ways around it. He starts with one finger and inches his way in, until he is there and then it’s too late. Everybody knows what goes on down at the River Shack Bar & Club at night, so let’s not pretend we don’t. This cannot happen to our fine town. We have started a petition of our own against this hedonistic idea and you can sign it at the Streams of Life Baptist Church, or just ask any member of the Eternal Order of Sisters in Salvation of which I am a proud, and long-standing member. We can stop this and we, in Jesus’s name, plan to.

  In addition, I cannot end this column without mentioning the reverberating effects of the strange fire that rocked Pine Log months ago, and continues to wreak havoc long after the flames were put out. Ms. Poland still has nightmares. The quilting club has started a prayer chain in hopes that she will reclaim her peaceful rest and return to normal. As for Mrs. Holsomback, she declares there is a hex over her entire street, because one week after the fire, her grass died, and her flowers wilted limp and fell over and she says her green thumb is now non-existent. She has been added to the prayer chain as well. Mr. Ferguson, who witnessed the entire event, says he has strange dreams of the woman at least once a week, still dancing on the lawn and occasionally hears loud taps at his window. He now keeps his shotgun near his bed and garlic hanging on the windows. Regardless, she still whispers to him in voices that entice and tempt him, but he says he rebukes her in Jesus’s name. I figure the only light we can see from this terrible event is that Mr. Bailey’s donation pot totaled a whopping one hundred and fifty dollars to replace his flowers. He loaded his truck at the Hilltop Farmers Market with quite a selection. He may win this year, so watch out.

  As you can see, community, we have a lot to pray about. We are the gatekeepers, the overseers and the lights that beckons and guards this town lest the devil come in and take it. Go sign the petition against spirits and go see Lola for your haircut and five dollars off. Until next time, stay cool, drink sweet tea and when the powerful rays of the sun shine down on you and you feel the heat, just be reminded that it’s only a taste of what Hades is like and this town is heading on a fast track there, unless we turn it around. Until next time, tune into KTBR local radio news station 109.9. I’m Edna Rollins and that’s news you can use.

  10

  Room to Breathe

  In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it.

  ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  This generational mess I’m in, started long before I was even a thought. It started with the seven sisters. Sister number one was Raven. Number two was Sessa. Padillia was three, Minneola was four, Bagette was five and Cymbal was six. Wrapping it up as seven was Joseymae who was Maw Sue’s mother. And this is how the bloodline trails to me. As a kid I heard the strange, unbelievable, mysterious story a million times over. You see, Joseymae almost wasn’t. She actually died at birth, having lost her breath for seven minutes. Mourning with their tearful mother, the six sisters started praying over number seven as their mother did. Sessa, number two, grabbed a freshly cut rose stem out of the vase in the window and began reciting a poem out of her head as if the words just came to her. She held out the rose, now wilted and dried as if the eyes of God had scorched it in the otherworldliness of prayers and the unseen. She crumpled the death rose in her hand and let it fall upon the child like white ashes. Time passed as slow as a broken clock but in the seventh minute of time, as if by a miracle of sorts, number seven, Joseymae, returned to life and took breath. The sisters rejoiced that their baby sister had been spared. It was a divine sign and afterwards, the Ainsley’s celebrated life and death through ceremonial traditions each of them created, inspired by numbers. Because of Joseymae’s miraculous birth, death, and rebirth, seven became the number that represented life, and the lifeblood of the family, of wholeness and heavenly blessings. A supernatural, mystical meaning.

  They say Joseymae entered the void, the place where the lines between this world and the world beyond are thinly separated. Brue, the mother, began to call them the Seventh Tribe of Seven Sisters. Their father, Simon Ainsley, a carpenter by trade, built each daughter a box as a keepsake with the number of their birth carved into the wood on the inside. Attached on the outside was a beautiful mirror so they could each see the beauty of themselves, as he did for each of his daughters, equally. He called it their mirror bin. Brue continued to teach the girls that numbers were mystical. Each held messages, with meaning and purpose, and signified the spiritual perfection of each person. She taught the sisters to seek with all their hearts the mystical meanings of their lives, and their purpose by using the ways of old, which was part Gypsy, her heritage, and part of her own making, which she believed was divinely inspired. She kept journals and wrote down anything useful for her children to find their way in life. She believed Seekers were of the old ways, those who live in the middle, not completely of this world, and yet not of the otherworld. Always tangled up, broken by the topsy-turvy elements of life where they don’t feel they fit, yet all the while holding the realm of the untouchable unknown, a faith of the divine otherworld.

  They had gifts and talents passed on by blood but there were curses too. Brue warned each child they would face difficulty throughout their lives, because suffering always follows passion. What she did not know, was a bitter root sprung up among the seven sisters, one of jealousy and spite because Joseymae received excessive care, attention and doting from
her mother, more than any of the others. This bitter root would breed discontentment, tearing the family apart years later. Though they scattered, each sister going their own ways, they took their teachings with them and passed them down, each adding their own belief, ceremonies and traditions.

  Maw Sue continued the strange, eccentric tradition of stories, numbers and messages. As a child she warned me of powerful agents working against me, seeking my demise, a shadowy figure of my soul, a mind menace with an army of strange imps bent on oppressing me. I’m beginning to believe what she said is true. They are everything I’ve ever feared thrown together, both carnal and supernatural growing up with me, attached to me, a second skin I can’t shed. I understand why she called them interceptors. They intercept evil thoughts into my mind, which sends me fleeing to the house inside me. A house built by childlike hands filled with haunts and horrors. A dark harbinger of doorways enter into rooms housing my past, all marked with nameplates.

  I’ve never been able to explain the horror of my mind to anyone, except Maw Sue. I told her about my mind, how the shadow voices hover beside the light and feed off my fear, my insecurities and my want of answers I never get. They study and observe me, my desires or lack of. My features, my tears, my brokenness, my weary cries of yearning and loss for something I can’t find nor describe. They hunger and pinch off my loathing and gain strength from my weakness. Where darkness is—they are there. Where light is—they are there. They are hedged in the lesser light, right on the edge of it, the place where daylight meets dusk, dawn meets the day, and the thin line separates the light from the lesser light. They are there. They sit on the brim and wait. It’s the moments of in-between I fear the most. The long, drawn-out lapses of silence, void of space, time and presence where nothing exists, nothing cares, and nothing matters. This is when my mind is afflicted in the worst way. It cannot still itself for fear of destruction. I fear silence. In the small gaps, something ethereal from a nether world slips in. I can’t see it, but I can feel it. It lies in wait, tangled in the seconds of time after I scream, after the eerie calm, after my voice grows mute, when the aftermath of silence is left to crawl on my skin. I’ve endured an apocalypse without memory, only the trauma. I am a survivor of sorts, a conqueror of something dark and eerie, saved from the horrible, the terrible, yet I can’t tell you what it is.

  Maw Sue used to tell me salvation meant much more than any of us realized. For those dwelling deep in the midst of the mystical God, always learning, always changing and growing, it held a power unlike anything of this world. An unyielding enchantment. In the ancient language of Seekers, prophets and kings, sages and seers, salvation meant room to breathe. A belief in something bigger than ourselves. We relinquish control because we realize we don’t have any. A higher power holds all control, all deity supreme. When we let go, we have room to breathe. I held a lot of darkness inside me as a kid, so those words struck me as mystical. Life-changing. The air was sucked from my drab bones and cast into the atmosphere of Heaven’s portal, and before I could faint, it was pushed into me, different, not of this earth, abundant, effervescent, fresh and redeeming, a gasp of new breath. I pause in awe and wonder as if standing at the precipice of my own soul. The pine curtain is pulled back. For a few glorious moments I’m allowed to peek inside my past and my present. The light mixes with the shadows of darkness and merges in oneness. A connection where I comprehend my pain in the otherworldly realm where all things collide and give understanding.

  * * *

  Maw Sue loved art, paintings, sculptures and strange artistic things. Though she could never afford the real thing, she did acquire a book of all the great artists of the world and their masterpieces. I was eight when Maw Sue showed me the book and her favorite picture of Michelangelo’s famous painting, The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. My eyes darted straight to the hands and fingers of God and Adam and the infinite void of time between their fingers. This divine touch was what brought life to Adam. Made from the dust and stirred to life with one touch. The small distance between the fingers of Adam and God is what Maw Sue’s ancestors found to be the mystical void, the space of time invisible, the gap between this world and the next, the place where all things connect and find substance and wholeness. Maw Sue’s mother and her sisters were taught God was wholeness, and wholeness was the infinite meaning of the number seven, which intimately connected to her mother, since she was born the seventh child. Her mother doted over her amongst all the rest of the siblings. Thus, seven became a goal to master, the innermost part of one’s soul, to find a purpose and a place, only by converging in spiritual places between the fingers of Adam and God. As soon as I saw the painting, the space between the fingers, I felt it also. I believed I belonged in that tiny gap, waiting to be connected to the Almighty, waiting to feel whole. To be seven. As a small child with big hopes and dreams, I thought when I got older, I’d travel to Rome and see the painting in person. I thought if I could only see it, just once, by then, surely to God, by then, the fingers of Adam and God would be touching. If so, then so would mine. And all would be right in the world. I would be whole. The world would be whole. Even Maw Sue’s mind would be whole. Even now, remembering it makes me weep. Pieces of me shift, dislodge and reconnect. When I can no longer take the pain, the little girl inside the House of Seven, inside me, closes my eyes and whispers my salvation. A whirlwind of colorful leaves spin in my warped vision. The little girl makes lovely my losses. She gives me the salvation of my childhood. Room to breathe.

  * * *

  Doc says I will not begin to heal until I forgive the silence. The skeletons of unspoken words have snacked on my soul since I was a little. Nibbling on the word bones till I couldn’t remember anything but bits and pieces of fragments. I don’t know how to begin. Where to start. What to do. Doc tells me even if I don’t want to, or feel like I can’t, I MUST try. It begins with words because words had power when I was a child and this is the key to my release, my healing. So, I trust Doc and do it anyway. I wake up and forgive the silence. I make peace with the skeletons even when they rattle and clatter. I say the words. I pray the prayers. I journal the words as if writing them on skeletal bones myself. I do it even if I feel nothing. Month’s pass. No change. No forgiveness. Just the silence of haunts. And then…one day, it just happened. It was like God’s and Adam’s fingers touched merely for a split second, then parted, but the gift was left simmering in my soul. It rose to the surface where I could see it for what it was. The suffering did not present the wound until I was able to acknowledge there was one…in the girl with no voice, living inside the house of seven, inside me. I denied her for so long she was woven into the core of my inner self, the internal makeup of my madness.

  According to Maw Sue I was born with it. An innocence untouched by the raw brutality of the world, the spirit of childlike faith unaffected by the world’s enmity, a serenity she had long ago forgotten. When she held me in her arms as a newborn her heart stirred. For a moment she felt whole, forgiven, unified for a common cause and loved purely from the heavens. A warmth of transcendence shined from the sacred places where a proud Seventh Tribe, a majestic generation smiled upon her. Her mother’s and father’s faces appeared with glimpses of childhood, rare moments of contentment when the past and the present merged and formed crossroads of future journeys, where aged hands possessed new flesh and crumbs of life were sought by Seekers true to their calling. But then, as quickly as the symphony of love and light enveloped her with its enigma, she heard the black laughter. It crept in to spoil the new fruit and taint the seed of a new generation. Maw Sue tensed but refused to retreat. In the past she’d fled turmoil, a life broken and ruined, but my birth changed everything. A familiar knife hedged her back and the oppressive spirits hovered inside the hospital room.

  Later in years, when I was able to understand the story more clearly, I grew as tense as she did. Her rocking chair screamed out eerie squeals and the old house came alive with creeps and jitters. I lived wi
th the Seeker gift, so I knew the darkness long before it knew me. I wore it. Drank it. It was bile, putrid and dank, rising in my throat and fermenting in my stomach. I shared a cell of familiarity with Maw Sue without definition or meaning, just a knowing. Sometimes, she’d stop dead silent and get lost in the walls of the room, falling without falling, remembering some dark, dreadful unspeakable she couldn’t bear. There were times she was so frenetic her sudden movements would scare the crap out of me. She’d bolt to the medicine cabinet and take an assortment of blue, green and white pills. She’d return calm and distracted, as if a curtain had been pulled over her eyes.

  I see the world in which I was born through vivid eyes of imagination and magical interpretations because of Maw Sue and other storytellers in my family. It was so real to me, I used to think I wasn’t born at all. I simply fell out of the back cover of a whimsical, weird fairy tale. Maw Sue made me feel as if I had to fulfill some prophecy, some grandiose event foretold ages ago. According to the old ways, the seven sisters, the Seventh Tribe, a mystical power guided all things, all tribes and nations, and little ole me was part of it. She believed in me. Even though I was little, and didn’t understand it all, her belief in it was so powerful, it made me want to believe in me, too. The Seeker part of me, the blood of my ancestors, the mystical, the mad. Being Seven meant wholeness, a connection to the divine, and I wanted it more than anything.