My heart raced and I snapped like a green pea in my mother’s pea-shelling hands. My arms went stiff. The blood in my face ran hot and turned my skin red.
“Can we just get on with the party now?” I closed the lid of the freaking hope chest and stomped outside. My friends followed. “I’m sorry about…whatever that was,” I said leaning against the porch rail hoping I’d just disappear. My friends looked on while I went off the rails. “I’m not even out of school and she’s trying to marry me off. God. What’s the big deal anyway? What if I don’t want to get married? What if I want to tour the world? How am I going to lug a monstrous box up a mountain in Scotland, huh? What good is a kitchen blender on an iceberg in Alaska? That’s her life. It’s not mine.” My friends rallied around me and tried to cheer me up, but it was useless. My mother had embarrassed the crap out of me. I’d never live this down at school.
Even now that I’m grown, the wooden hope chest is a kitchen curse I can’t outrun. It sits against the wall like an unfulfilled prophecy, a cross to bear. I drag it wherever I go. Make it work, Cass. Use the kitchen gift. Be the housewife. Do what you should do! Who gives a shit about your plans, they don’t count. Be the good Southern girl. Sometimes I open the lid and scream, “HOPE! What hope? Where the hell is hope? Huh? Who gave you your namesake anyway? Stupid, stupid hope chest.” I’d slam the lid down and swear and be damned if I ever heard the word ‘hope’ again, I’d burn the sucker to the ground. But I never did. The hope chest and I endured. We had been back and forth more times than I could count. Do-overs and repeats, try and try again. Hoping Sam would love me. Hoping he’d stop cheating. Hoping my mother would understand me. Hoping I’d understand her. Hope and more hope. Me looking for hope—desperate for hope. I’d sit on the floor and lean against the hope chest, wounded and broken. Searching, wanting, and needing. Hope deferred.
I have learned that writing on the blue line brings other memories out, as if one prods the other and gives its approval to emerge. Today is no different. Another disheartening memory arrives like a wave that takes me under.
I was twelve. Big Pops was Papa C’s father who lived next door. He was old and brittle and useless with words but he was the only one I could sit with and remain comfortable with silence. We’d porch sit or piddle in the gardens for hours on end. We had this connection without words like I’ve never had with anyone. I never expected him to die. No one had ever died in my family before. I was unprepared. So much pain and sorrow. I felt my heart being ripped out. A fear rose up in me I’d never had before. A fear of death. I feared it as much as I feared the monster. My only coping mechanism was to climb the wondering tree outside my bedroom window to the highest limb. I slipped into a place inside me, the inner realm of mystery, of old ways, of seven, the one I was born tangled up in, the gap between this world and the next, where I lay meshed within the secrets and lies and madness. Between the living and the dead. Between the seven sisters and Maw Sue. Between the blood and the roots. Between the common man’s savior and the cross. In the space of the unknowns, I whispered a prayer, a long benediction of words pleading the blood of Jesus. I envisioned a long list of prophets and sages speaking the exact prayer in perilous times, two thousand years ago when lions stared them down and stones were cast, bodies burned and hung on crosses, all pleading the blood, petitioning the heavens to come down. But the blood didn’t save them. They died. When I questioned Maw Sue about this dire situation of compelling evidence, she of course, had an answer, as she always did.
“Some things weren’t meant for our knowing, Cassidy” Maw Sue said, “Having faith doesn’t mean we’ll always get what we want or keep those we love in this life. Death comes to all. The petal people will always come. We know not the time or place. But our loved ones are always near us.”
It was the strangest saying. And who the hell were the petal people? It gave me chills just thinking about it but something happened, I don’t remember what, but I didn’t get to ask, plus my mind was full of haunts already and I wasn’t going to add to it. But life interjected and did it for me.
Months later, Big Pops passed from kidney failure. Maw Sue had just gotten out of the asylum after having one of her spells, as they called it. When I heard she was home, I ran to see her. The atmosphere of her house had changed. It was a warning to me. I wanted to ask her what happened in that place. Castle Pines set fear in me, even thinking of it. Maw Sue was stoic. Pale and sad. In her rocking chair she swayed, darkly disturbed, back and forth with placid eyes staring into the nothing of the room. It was like she was here—but not here, somewhere else far, far away.
In her cryptic wrinkled hands, a horror story and a saving grace—I just didn’t know it yet. They clung tightly to a pint-sized Mason jar full of dried roses she called the Petal People. This is where my belief in what I could see and what I could not see had to suspend itself into another realm of being—where the natural and the supernatural collide. I had to go where the seven sisters went, to the gap, the void, the space of time where this life meets the otherworldly. I was scared. The roses were dark and brooding, almost lifelike, their petals took on faces and their stems and leaves seemed to want to sprout legs and arms and leap out of the jar and start walking. The energy inside the house was insufferable. My knees were weak and ready to collapse on me. I felt consumed with the unknown. For Maw Sue, each rosebud in the jar was a representation of a loved one passed into the eternal light. A single rose plucked from a funeral wreath, casket arrangement or flower bed. At first, I was morbidly horrified to hear the story. It gave me the heebie-jeebies. She talked of the Petal People as if they were alive. The more I looked, the more they seemed alive, which freaked me out more.
I was young and didn’t understand death when I heard the story of the Mason jar and the Petal People. I was terrified, fascinated and petrified. I had hope and yet felt fear. My nightmares became my own versions of Petal People. Sights, sounds, shadows, whispers, stories, and voices. I still have these dreams, even as an adult, but I’ve learned to control them better now, because I know who they are. She told me they are my loved ones speaking from beyond the grave. It didn’t make sense to me at first, but Maw Sue said it would as I got older and grew into my gift and the old ways. The Petal People could talk to me and tell me their stories through my dreams. Unfortunately, even though I was a Seeker, I didn’t know what to do with all the words, stories and influx of information. I had too much in my own mind; I didn’t need no more voices eating my soul. I wanted the gift—but I was haunted by it.
The Petal People inside Maw Sue’s Mason jar were special to her. A single red rose symbolized her first husband, Jefferson Starbuck Adams, the love of her life and no other, she’d say with a smile as big as Texas. He died of pneumonia seven years after they married and left her with five children. She went plum mad afterwards and never fully recovered. Her oldest daughter, May Dell, who we call Mama C, found a diary of her father’s stuffed away for years and years, one she never knew existed. The journal was a tanned leather binder with Starbuck in the center with a picture of a moon and one bright star in the top corner. She loved reading about the father she barely got to know. Sometimes in my dreams, he told me stories too. I wanted to tell Mama C about them, to comfort her, but Maw Sue cautioned me against it. It was between me, Meg and Maw Sue. Our secret. Besides, no one else understood the gift like we did.
Standing next to the red rose was an orange rose, for her second husband, Sully who had died from just plain meanness. She was so desperate for companionship after Starbuck died, she just grabbed the first blockhead who came her way. Sully was controlling and manipulative. Plus, he drank like a fish. Turns out, whiskey killed him. His liver just quit.
The white rose was her last husband, Morton, a gentle, quiet soul who kept to himself. He stayed with her the longest and died of a heart attack. The other roses in the Mason jar were hard for Maw Sue to talk about but she managed to get through it. Once I heard, I understood. I never looked at those dried
-up flowers the same again. With each sight it was as if they were waiting on eternity to bloom for the first time, because they never got the chance to bloom on earth. One tall and bouffant pink rose towered above them all. It was her mother, Joseymae. No one talked about what happened to her. Whatever it was, it affected Maw Sue in the worst way, enough to never want to talk about it. Not even to me, and she told me mostly everything. I reckoned whatever happened, it was bad. The other two peach roses, identical, were Lorinda Lane and Lizzy Lynn, twin girls. They died of influenza at age three. And I swear to God, the roses were identical, twins of the same which gave me the goose bumps. Cradled next to them were two identical crème-colored roses holding each other with wilted arms intertwined with locks of curly blond hair and blue ribbons, twin boys born a year or so after the girls. They were named Luke and Larkin. I got the shivers just thinking about it.
Maw Sue blamed herself for their deaths. It wasn’t her fault, but you couldn’t convince her. The boys drowned in the care of sitters while Maw Sue was locked up in one of her mind episodes dealing with her demons. When she got out, she was unable to accept they were dead and gone. This, from what she remembered of Aunt Raven and her mother dying, was where the Petal People rose ritual came in. The tradition, however strange it may have been to some, was comforting for her. For Maw Sue, it was the only way to keep them alive in her memory.
When the passing of Big Pops occurred, Maw Sue took this as opportunity to pass on the rose ritual to me and Meg. We’d learn the story of the Petal People for the first time. Meg listened but she was her normal distant self, not like me, attentive to the realities of the otherworld. All she cared about was the here and the now. But me? I was extremely sensitive to life and death matters, those of the spiritual nature, those gaps of time and place, between this world and the next. Places where I seemed to be stuck, all tangled up, where I took other people’s grief and sorrows to myself and clutched them to my chest like a plunging sharp knife, unable to stop, even though it pained me terribly. It was a Seeker gift and a Seeker curse. Maw Sue seemed to understand both of us, even Meg’s distance. She took us aside at the cemetery. My mother looked on curiously, almost suspicious, as if she wondered what kind of baloney we were being dished.
“Cass, Meg…life doesn’t end in the grave,” Maw Sue said, holding our hands and squeezing. “Go on now. Pick a flower that reminds you of Big Pops.” My eyes glazed over the wide assortment of flowers surrounding Big Pops’ casket. Meg ran straight to the basket of marigolds and returned with not one, but two. I wasn’t even sure she understood the concept of Maw Sue’s words, but it didn’t seem to matter. Maw Sue smiled. Later in the evening we trotted over to her house, me carrying my peach rose and Meg with her marigold. She took us straight to the back room and inside the cedar closet, the creepy hideaway Meg and I swore was haunted with voices, knocks, and frightening sounds. We looked at each other as if we weren’t too sure what was fixing to go down. A light bulb with a pull string hung from the ceiling with a spool of crippling wires. Maw Sue pulled it and shadows seemed to run, dispersing themselves into the thick row of wool coats and clothing on wire hangers. My mind jerked. Trembled like a motor trying to start up. My skin pimpled and the house inside me stirred with spirits and whispers from the mouths of people I didn’t know. A thin white string ran from one side of the closet to the other. Clothespins hung limp from the old string like meat hooks in a butcher shop. Maw Sue took our flowers and placed them upside down, clipping them to the string with the clothespin. At this point in the private ceremony, it was story time. Maw Sue was always dramatic, detailed and mystic, as if she was caught up somewhere else altogether. In most cases, I loved Maw Sue’s tales, but this one about did me in. It was personal.
She told us the French used dried flowers to immortalize their dead and called it Immortelle, a symbol for longevity, resurrection, and immortality, which meant everlasting.
They used chrysanthemums, Amaranthus, strawflowers, and asters, or just about any flower, but Maw Sue preferred roses.
“Do you believe in magic, girls? The mystery of the unknown, the unseen?”
“Yes. Of course, I do,” I blurted out. In my vision, the room was engulfed with spirits of the dead. I could feel them around me though I didn’t know if I could say it out loud.
Meg shrugged her shoulders and looked at me as if she was completely distracted. Bored, even.
“Well, it’s okay to believe and it’s okay to have doubts. Life will let you know eventually what it’s trying to tell you, whether you want it or not.” She looked more so at Meg than she did me. Meg wasn’t the least bit concerned. “Just believe even when you don’t want to. Life will be utterly cruel, but you turn and laugh. Use the gifts, keep the magic going even when it gets the darkest. I see the gift in both of you. Of hope and everlastings. I do.”
Hope and everlastings. I simmered inside myself. Meg couldn’t care less. She had already plucked a coat off its hanger and was deep diving into the pockets to find treasures like we usually did when we played dress-up.
“But why are we putting it in the dark closet?” I said, gawking. The string looked awkward and yet creepy as all get-out with the upside-down flowers hanging oddly out of sync. My mind envisioned dead-of-the-night fairies casting spells using flower petals to summon a thousand monsters from the black earth. Maw Sue bent down, rustled around against the back wall and came up with a dusty thick book as big as an encyclopedia. The outside was bound with leather and I thought I saw the name Sessa carved in it with an abundance of flowers and swirls below it, but I couldn’t be sure. Maw Sue opened the ancient-looking book. The dust appeared to make me dizzy. She flipped the pages open to a flattened rose, burgundy red like wine, wilted with time, crinkled and dried between the pages. She picked up the rose delicately and held it with tenderness. A loud sigh left her lips.
“This is a poem written by my Aunt Sessa, a Seventh Tribe member, one of the seven sisters, and her gift was words, poems and great wisdom. My mother told me this poem is what Sessa wrote when my mother Joseymae had lost her breath and died. Of course, we all know she was reborn in the seventh minute, but the words had already formed themselves as fate. The poem became part of the ceremonial tradition. Brue, my great-great-grandmother and the seven sisters all took part. It became an important part of the Seventh Tribe tradition.” Her words seemed mysterious and as magical as if she were some fairy godmother about to grant me a wish. Maw Sue began speaking. My bones trembled. My eyes leaked. My heart fluttered. Something happened I couldn’t explain.
Everlastings By Sessa Ainsley #2
Time goes quickly day to day
Petal after petal we pluck away.
Life is here—it comes and goes
As quickly as the flowers grow.
One day here—then gone the next,
Blooming and wilting—life perplex
We live life but death we fear,
It takes our loved ones, those so dear.
Pick a flower from the casket,
A wildflower for your basket.
Take the flower—dry it well.
Petals, petals, cast a spell.
Take our grief, our tears.
Absorb our unspoken fears.
From the grave, our loved ones speak,
Alive, alive voices we seek,
Shouts and whispers and shrieks.
The door of life, the door of death.
Petals, petals do tell;
Petals, petals cast a spell.
Take my grief forevermore;
Until I meet my loved
ones at the door.
The sounds of time broke like aged glass. My soul seemed to crack with it. I watched Maw Sue break as well. Old grief leaked from her eyes and formed streams flowing into the dry riverbeds of her wrinkled face. I was spellbound. The words, the meaning, the mystery all held up in the everlastings. In her, in me, in the Mason jar, in the Petal People, in the Seventh Tribe.
Right then and the
re, a room built itself inside the house of seven, inside me. The walls were made from the tall pine trees. The windows were the blue skies and the Petal People lived there, rose faces, stalk stem limbs, leafy arms and slim necks. They chatted as if they were still alive, having never left this earthly realm. They were immortal inside me, in the house of seven, they were the everlastings. The Immortelles, the Petal People carried the grief in their petals so we didn’t have to. The rose from Big Pops absorbed my wicked suffering and my burdened cries. It took to its stemmed chest the moisture of our tears.
Meg was unimpressed. Distant, distracted and still rummaging through the closet like some junk-seeking junkie. But I was thoroughly enchanted with the entire process. For the first time, I understood Maw Sue’s weird obsession with the Mason jar and the Petal People. The curse of death took her loved ones over and over, without understanding, without explanation, without answers. She was so overwrought with grief, all she could do was cling to the Petal People in the jar, the everlastings, and immortal symbols carrying our grief. They remind us that life doesn’t end in the grave.
A few weeks later, Maw Sue presented us with our first everlastings, along with a copy of the poem by Sessa. Sitting inside a simple Mason jar was my first Petal Person rose of immortality, Big Pops. Inside the plush soft rose petal, I could see his face, his form take shape. The stem formed his body, the leaflets his arms, his legs. He was my first protector of the Petal People realm. I felt an odd sense of relief, as if I didn’t have to endure life alone. The Immortelle was as beautiful as the day I plucked it from his casket. And Maw Sue was right. It did exactly what it was supposed to do. The dried, fragile rose took my grief.
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