September Again (September Stories)

by Jones, Hunter S.

  “Jack and I exchanged many letters. His friendship helped me to come to terms with the terrible things I did in my earlier life. I never told him about the train wreck and the deaths I caused because of my sinful ways. He just knew me as a guy in the woods - haunted by his past mistakes.

  “I sent your husband many of the poems I started writing when I was looking for salvation. About every third or fourth letter, he would send me a few lines, sometimes just two lines of his own verse.

  “Then, one day, he sent me some poems which he said he was writing for you because you were having trouble sleeping after some trouble in the village near to where you live in Cornwall, England. He said he intended them to be a meditation in the form of five sonnets, some seventy lines in all. They were to relax you, Elizabeth, to make life a little easier for you. God knows, you have had some troubles in your time, me being one of them – for which I am sorry.

  “Here are the poems. They were written for you exclusively. He did not intend to publish them. They are yours. As you will see, there are only four of them in his hand because he was having trouble finishing the fifth and final verse. The fifth verse is in my hand because I wrote it after he died. I don’t know why I wrote it. I just did. Maybe Jack knew that I would have to. I don’t know what.

  “I hope they will make you feel better at this time when you have been feeling troubled in your life. I hope God will look on you with pity and that you will find new strength to deal with your troubles.

  God bless,

  Pete Hendrix

  BE STILL

  There is a morning in your mind

  A time of peace-made otherness

  In primacies of gentleness

  You find yourself a mote of life

  Suspended in a wand of light

  You float in perfect harmony

  You are a living wealth of calm

  A lichen of relaxedness

  You slow oxbow you surgent flow

  Until you still yourself to know

  Love is a morning in your heart

  Be still that it may be in you

  That you may feel its beauty true

  In stilling Nature's loving art

  ~

  JOIN WITH ALL

  In meditative balance true

  We are at one with all who love

  To love is how we're born to be

  A part of all made right and free

  We feel the strength of all we are

  At one with all who are long gone

  Made one with all still yet to be

  No longer just a lonely me

  We are made one the truth to see

  Our Human Soul's great primacy

  Join soul to living soul alive

  In balanc'ed morality

  One human commonality

  We hold each other's hand to thrive

  ~

  FEEL NEW GOODNESS FLOW THROUGHOUT

  From me to you and back again

  In surgent spiral nourishment

  From first to last in life it gives

  And gives and gives a gain

  To give in life with every breath

  To live to love and love to live

  To give new goodness to the last

  To live in love brings happiness

  To give to others in our hearts

  A pulse of calmness new imparts

  I feel you in my arteries

  In every limb in every vein

  You give to me tranquility

  A son rise in my soul again

  ~

  GIVE ANEW

  Your life's a dream that somehow flew

  A miracle on wings aloft

  You live anew with every breath

  Your Poet Nature writes in you

  A shimmering of given life

  You live, o how you live this dream!

  A breathing stitch, a living seam

  A gift of givens made to give

  New joy to other gifts you bring

  Because to give anew's to live

  This joyful dream's your air borne lift

  To give and give and give anew

  Instinctively you know it's true:

  To give wins all the greatest gift

  ~

  BE TRUE

  To love is all we need to do

  To know the best of all it is to be

  Alive to this imperative

  We are reborn with every breath

  We are made universal in our birth

  We are, o how we are!

  Made mediums of joy!

  A beam of truth illuminates our core

  A seam of primal light

  A stream of life forgiving right

  Be true to love for love to you be true

  To love commit to be complete

  The universe makes love

  To know herself to be made true

  ~

  10.

  Savage Dwarf and Other Slights

  Liz picks up the loose papers one more time as she sits on the side of the bed in her parents’ home. The little house had originally been a log cabin two hundred years ago. It had evolved into the little white clapboard house in which Liz and her father had grown up. Her father’s family had owned this property since her grandfather’s great-grandfather had moved into the Tennessee Valley when it was the Cherokee Nation. And, there they had stayed. Her feet are on the polished hardwood floor. Her mind roams to think of Jack as a lone tear tumbles feather-like down her right cheek. She brushes away the tear with the back of her hand before it can damage Jack’s writing on the pages. Too late. It hits the page and blurs Jack’s writing. Even his poetry is weeping now.

  Oh, Jack! You left verses for me. Seventy lines of you at your finest, written just for me, for us. The world knew he left thousands of lines for Indie. Numberless verses were spread across the globe, celebrating her. But, his most perfect, most exclusive words had been secreted away and written in honor of their life together.

  Jack’s love made me, an ordinary girl from North Georgia, into someone extraordinary. In return, my love for Jack made him normal, which was no small feat for wild Jack O. Savage. But now this. Just like it was after Jack's death. The insane media focus. And all because a hospital nurse wanted to earn a few dollars and leaked the story to the press. Now Jack's lines are out in the world. And the internet has its usual feeding frenzy. The media has picked up on the documents and the news has spread rapidly via the internet. Liz’s Love Letters. Poet’s Posthumous Promises. Dead Letter Office Comes Alive.

  Damn the internet trolls. The most hurtful was the British press. They attacked Zelda, calling her the Savage Dwarf. Savage Dwarf Loves Indie (but her dad loved her mum). Oh the hurt of it! Zelda is just a child - an eighteen-year-old little girl whose father died when she was very young. There is no reason to hurt a child. Especially when that child is my baby girl.

  Liz remembers the moment. Marlowe visiting her in Erlanger Hospital with a very sheepish Zelda, stony-faced Marlowe. She'd stayed in the hospital for three WEEKS due to “exhaustion.” Marlowe brought the papers to Liz while she was there. Once checked in, when it was only Liz, Dr. Marlowe Henry, and Zelda, Marlowe said, "Liz, Zelda has something to tell you. We've been holding it back till you were well enough. You are now well enough. This won't be easy for either of you, but it has to be done. Zelda, talk to your mom."

  Zelda looked concerned and scared. “Come over here, baby. Tell me what’s wrong,” Liz said. Zelda shuffled over to the side of the bed, finally sitting beside her mother. Zelda stared intently at her own hands, apparently not knowing where to begin the conversation.

  “Zelda, tell her. It’s part of our agreement,” Marlowe said.

  “Are you all right, Zelda? Please tell me, honey. Whatever it is, we will work it out.”

  Marlowe and Zelda looked at each other. Zelda turned toward her mother. “Mum, I’ve done a very bad thing. Very bad. I could go to jail.”

  Liz’s face froze in shock. “Oh
, Zelda, please tell me what’s happened. Did you get a DUI? Too many speeding tickets? We can pay the fines and you will be okay. We can find an attorney if you received a reckless driving ticket. Please don’t worry, baby.” Liz touched the back of Zelda’s hair and stroked it softly.

  “Mummy, I switched your meds with mine. That’s why you’ve been so very strange acting the last few months. I wanted you to know what it feels like to be me. So I switched meds. I tossed yours down the toilet. Nothing more. I didn’t think for one minute it would change you so much and make you want to hurt yourself. It was only meant to make you feel badly for a while.” *Sobs* “I’m so very sorry, Mummy. Please forgive me. Don’t let them put me in jail.”

  Liz scooped her daughter into her arms and kissed her as she did when Zelda was a small child. As Zelda cried, Liz assured her that everything was all right. They would work through this. Zelda eventually cried herself to sleep and Liz continued to hold her daughter to her, rocking her ever so gently.

  Liz winces as the memories roll through her.

  “What do we do now, Marlowe?” Liz asked.

  “Liz, it’s been reported to the hospital admin. Zelda has committed a crime, a serious crime. I only found out the afternoon we found you on the bridge, or I would have stopped it immediately. The one thing in our favor is that Zelda is very young, and she had no intent to commit serious harm. We will talk to the attorneys to see if she can do public service.”

  “I won’t press charges against her,” Liz said.

  “Understood, but it’s a state matter, so we will work with the system to do the best possible thing for our girl. She’s a good, good kid. She just harbors a lot of rage, which most children do when they lose a parent at such a young age.”

  “She is not going to jail, or prison, or anywhere except back to school. If we have to get an attorney from Atlanta up here, I will do it. My baby is going back to Vandy for the next session. That’s all I have to say about that,” Liz said.

  Lowering her voice, Liz asked Marlowe, “Did she bring anything to stay tonight?”

  ”Yes, it’s in her backpack.”

  “Perfect. Zelda is staying with me tonight. We need each other. We can fit easily into this hospital bed. She needs me.”

  The next morning, Marlowe called Liz. “The DA's office decided to take action,” was all Liz heard her say. Spurred on by saving Zelda from any harm, Liz was out of the hospital within days. Determined to keep her daughter from the headlines and out of any brushes with law enforcement, she worked with both sides to reach an agreement. Zelda would spend one month in Chattanooga’s Moccasin Bend for psychiatric care. Following that, she will do community service, reading poetry and teaching writing to the underprivileged children of drug-addicted parents for the duration of her probationary period. She will see a psychiatrist twice a week for one year, overseen by the courts. After that, she will be on probation for one year. Once the two years of oversight and treatment were achieved, the court records would be sealed. The public would never know.

  Liz vows never to take another pill, not even a vitamin. She began running again on her family farm and helping her father with chores. She has a morning mantra. Daily, she will arise, look in the mirror, and say while smiling, “My life is anew. I manifest my heart’s desire through love.” She says it twenty-one times every morning until she begins to believe it. She dances the Rattlesnake Dance of the Cherokees as she says it so that the ancestors will know she honors them as well as the cycles of her own life, no matter how unbalanced they may be.

  Liz and Marlowe visit Zelda at school in Nashville. Oftentimes, they take Liz’s dad – Grand Guy, as Zelda calls him because she couldn’t say “Granddad” when she was a toddler. Since Grand Guy hates being in a city, to pacify him, they will often rent Moonshine Hill in Leiper’s Fork. Zelda drives down after her last class on Friday and brings a few friends. All weekend long, they grill out, build a fire beside the pavilion on the hill, and watch the stars.

  Jazz and Skyler often visit Zelda in Nashville. Likewise, she spends most of her school breaks with them in Florida, Bermuda, or even back in the UK. When the girls visit, Liz and Marlowe frequently take weekend trips with them and Zelda to New York, Mexico, the Caribbean, New Orleans. Liz knows that Zelda has started dating someone. But she waits for Zelda to tell her about the relationship. Liz’s life is all she had ever dreamt of, except she doesn’t have Jack.

  But, she has Zelda again and she is determined to be the best mother to her child that she can possibly be. Seeing Zelda happy is an achievement she will attain, no matter what the price. Even if it means sacrificing her own personal happiness. She has Zelda in her life again. That is the only thing that matters.

  Zelda feels the same and often drops her mum little emails or texts to say hello and tell her that she loves her. Knowing how close she came to losing her only parent shocked and scared Zelda. She doesn’t want to go there again. The gift of Jack’s pics and poetry of Indie, along with her mother’s tenacity when saving her from jail time and possible lifelong shame in the press, made Zelda grow up and grow up quickly. She says her mother is the bravest woman she has ever known, just as Marlowe had predicted.

  ~

  The phone call from Marlowe that Liz dreaded finally comes. “He keeps calling me, asking about you. You really should call him back.”

  “No. End of story. That’s the end of that.”

  “Liz girl, he saved your life. He just wants to say hello and see how you are doing.”

  “Marlowe, it was just some freaky coincidence. That’s all. End. Of. Story.”

  “You need to rethink this. If you’re going to teach Zelda how to forgive and forget, you need to show her. He’s been great about helping Zelda with research into the correspondence between him and Jack, too. End. Of. Story.”

  “Oh, Marlowe, I dunno. It...he…the entire episode simply opens so many old wounds. Oftentimes, the past is best left in the past.”

  “Oh, I understand that. No doubt. Only thing, and think about this, Liz, you have never really forgiven Pete. But, without the role he played in your life, whether you like it or not, you would never ever have visited London, never met Jack and you wouldn’t have our girl. In one sense, he gave you a life and now he has saved your life. Why don’t you let me give him your number? You don’t have to see him or anything. Just say hello. Thank him for being on that bridge and find out how he is doing.”

  “Ohhhh. Marlowe. Is he still a lawyer?”

  “No, from what he said, he lost his license to practice in Georgia and Tennessee after the accident. He really lost everything. He’s been living on Walden Ridge in that cabin. A mountain man, more or less. He said he started crafting Cherokee pottery after he found an old example of how to make it. He has an old kiln and turns pottery the way it was made hundreds of years ago. It’s really caught on with the tourists in the area. His work is even being sold at museums across the Southeast and in Oklahoma. He’s been given a second chance in life, so why don’t you give him a chance to at least say hello to you. It seems like the least you can do.”

  “Okay, okay. Next time he calls, give him my number. But, tell him it’s only so I can thank him for being on the bridge. Nothing else. Nothing. And, I probably won’t answer the first time he calls. Just so he’ll know.” Liz nervously twists the ring on her left hand.

  “That’s perfect, Liz. Once you’ve done that, everything will begin falling into place for you. I just know it. Forgiveness means so much.”

  Three weeks later, Liz looks at her phone, expecting it to be Marlowe, but the number has a 423 area code. She knew it would be him. She answers it anyway.

  11.

  Cherokee Forgiveness Trail

  She sits on the front porch, the lilacs’ fragrance mingling with the soft spring breeze. The iPhone rings in its silver case. Since Zelda’s return to her life, she surrounds herself with bright shiny things to reflect the sparkle returning to her life. The vase on the porch, full of
red and purple tulips mixed with yellow jonquils, reflects the bright afternoon sun. Even the pale blue cotton dress she wore has a silver belt and matching silver ballet flats. Liz is happy again. On the third ring, Liz answers the phone. I won’t run anymore. It’s time to face the truth.

  “So, you won’t even meet me for a cup of coffee?” he pleads through the phone.

  “It’s not a good idea. You know that. I…I just want to thank you for saving me from…from the bridge thing,” Liz replies.

  “I would’ve done it for anyone, Liz. Knowing it was you brings me even more hope for the future.” She can hear the angst in his soft drawl. His voice lowers to a whisper. “You know I’ve changed, Liz. I have really changed. Like everything about my life is different now.”

  “Marlowe told me about your changes, Pete. I’m very happy for you.” This is the man who led you to Jack, Mrs. Savage. Be kind. The little voice in her head reminded her of what she already knew. “I only wish the best for you and your loved ones.”

  “Liz, the only thing that never changed, is…well, I, uh, um…I never stopped loving you. I apologize for the pain and hurt I brought into your life.” She hears him breathing, sighing. “You have never left my thoughts. Never. If only I would’ve met you before I met Leanne and had a family, both our lives would’ve been so different. I promise you.”

  Butterflies fill her stomach. “Pete, please. You don’t need to say anything else.”

  “No, Liz. I need to tell you.” She hears him swallow. “Remember the lavender I planted for you? It’s still there, beside my cabin.”

  Liz’s heart sinks. She had placed Pete in a box. Just like she had placed the feelings for her brother, Charles, long ago and far away. Only the feelings for Pete have never seen the light of day and never been given wings. Those feelings are more like a raw wound. The loss of her mother washes over her as does the pain from Zelda’s rage toward her. The loss of Jack continues to haunt her.