I want to believe that pictures tell a story, a bigger story that we were a part of something, we were loved, and we belonged to someone. My heart oozed out smidgens of yearnings of my own, to be loved, to be special, to be wanted. They stir a thousand voices to cry out in the pictures, sifting voices, high and low, rugged and rough, harsh and urgent, alive and dead. I pick through a few sepia colored pictures and look at them. Papa Hart and Dell with ear to ear smiles and twenty something years old, stand in my hands like paper dolls. I wonder what they’re thinking…what they were doing? Another picture is dad, about sixteen years old, slicked back hair, white t-shirt rolled up at the shoulders, and standing in front of his first car, a 51 Chevy. Dell had a camera in her hands ninety nine percent of the time, so there are plenty of trails to follow. Mag and I are in a lot of pictures, as well. There are many pictures of folks I don't know, hoards of unfamiliar faces stare at me, people I haven’t the faintest clue who they are, ghosts from the grave, haunting me with their expressions, all telling me stories, their thoughts invading my mind, filtering through the rooms of the house, as if they belonged there, holding words to be shared, their lips crying out for a listening ear. Tell my story. Tell my story. This is when the gift is unbearable and I don’t know what it expects of me. What does it want? Why can’t it just leave me alone?
Right now, it’s voices, a plethora of them rising up from the pictures, clear as a bell chime, as if they sat before me, on the second generation rug sharing their deepest selves, their regrets, their wonderful joys and the world as they knew it, back when. I feel and hear them inside the house, inside me. They rush into the Mason room with the petal people are. I close my eyes and my fingers relax while the pictures drops.
I’m sensitive in spiritual life and death issues because inside me, this is where everything meets in the middle. That realm between—the gap, the void, the place I can barely speak of because of fear of entanglement. I’m upset, grieving in and out of myself, inside myself and I fear I’ll have a meltdown and end up inside the rooms, inside the house unable to pull myself out. Then I'll end up here again. Living with my parents. God. No way. The thought renders me to open my eyes. Mag is still sorting through pictures, holding back tears, one to another. I glance down the hallway. The doorway to my childhood bedroom creaks open as if a childhood monster lies in wait. A loud, torrential scream is heard only in my ears and the house inside me quakes.
It’s been well over a year since I excavated myself from the dark place that held me captive. That precious day I climbed out my window, plucked a leaf and claimed freedom as my own. Mag’s laughter creeps in and I can’t tell if it’s now—or then, a distant memory plucked from childhood. She's far away, unreachable, but then I realized I’m the one who’s drifted. When I snap back to the living room, Mag is a laughing hysterically, enough to bring Lena out of her kitchen lair.
“What are you girls laughing at?” She said curiously. “Whaaat, what is it? Is it Papa Hart?” She wrings her fingers on the dishrag and walks quickly towards Mag. I’m growing curious as well. What could be so funny?
“CRAWFISH.” Mag blurts out. She holds a picture up. “Checkerboard girl.” She heckled and fell over laughing even harder than before. Mom giggled too.
“You look like the girl from Who-vile.” Mag said. She tossed the picture to me and it landed between us like a brick. I look down and there she is. Big as Dallas. Big as damnation. The one I love, the one I hate. I had cotton white hair and a fair complexion with big blue eyes. On top of my perfect round head was one long curly piglet tied with a red bow. I was a year old when the picture was taken but only now do I see it for what it is.
Dell had sewn me a pretty red and white gingham dress. This was before the God awful patchwork phase took over. God help us all. The dress was sleeveless with an open neckline and full skirt. In the mid back area was a white button the size of a silver dollar and below it, a circle cut. Big buttons and holes were fashion statements in the sixties. Who knew? The picture was taken at Olan Mills Photography Studio. Lena hands them out to family and friends, and when Dell gets her 8x10 she immediately busted out in laughter. Hyena, beer spilling laughter.
“Why she’s as backwards—.” Dell said choking and giggling. “As a crawfish on a checker board.” Lena Hart looked at her as if she had drank way too many Miller Lights. Dell hurt herself to tears before finally explaining to Lena that my dress was backwards. PUT ON BACKWARDS. My first dress. See. Right there. Symbolic. Story of my life. And since then, I’ve been the butt of every checkerboard, backwoods crawfish joke in Pine Log.
“It was still a good picture.” Lena said slapping me with the dishrag. Swat—hug—swat.
“Crawfish. Crawfish.” Mag heckled. I gave her a swift kick across the rug. Lena went back to the kitchen to deal with her own demons. Death stirs them up, for sure. We all deal with grief differently and she is no exception.
***
It happened yesterday. Mag and I were sitting at the table, simply trying to get through a conversation without breaking down. Papa Hart’s spirit hovered in our ears with stories and porch tales, the emptiness unbearable. Everything reminded us of him so it was hard not to think about anything else. Lena was doing what she always does, cook. The pear cobbler was cooling on the counter. The room simmered with left over spice, cinnamon and sugar. Dad came barreling in the kitchen, hot and sweaty. Across his face was the familiar, I—need—a—beer—look. He passed by the cobbler, eyed it devilishly and then plucked a corner piece of crust to his mouth. Lena having eyes in places no one else does, sprouts octopus arms and backhands him with a spatula, simultaneously while drying dishes.
“Gavin Clark. That’s your daddy’s cobbler.” The room went deadly quiet. Dad froze inside the refrigerator door. I couldn’t breathe. Mag gasped. Tension mounted and fell in the room. No one knew what to do. Idle bodies submerged into a zone of wrecked humanity. The refrigerator made that weird noise it always makes, at the same time everyone realized what Lena had one, including Lena. Dad rushed to her to comfort her. Mag and I crumpled in tears.
“I—I’ve baked him one every week—for years. I don’t know—how NOT to. I just….I just...” Her words were out of sorts and disjointed. Mag left the room in sobs. I sat there like a bump on a log traumatized by flat tears streaming down my face. Papa Hart would never eat that cobbler. So if Papa Hart couldn’t eat it—no one would. We loved Lena’s cooking, as much as the next person, but that cobbler wasn’t ours to eat. It was cooked with love by Lena and it shall remain, untouched, a stone marker, sacred and holy. I lost count how many breakdowns we had after that. One minute everyone would be talking and then tragically, without words, one by one, everyone disappeared to work out their grief. Lena cooked. Dad banged machinery in the tinker shop. I tree climbed the wondering tree. Mag flat out disappeared. No telling and I didn’t ask.
Today is a repeat of yesterday. When I arrived, dad met me at the door with that eerie face. All I had to do was look next to the cobbler. Lena was up at daybreak making fried pies and packing them just so, inside the Tupperware container with Papa Hart’s name on it, like she always did since the beginning of time, or so it seemed. Repeat meltdown. I stared at the monumental cobbler sitting next to the pillars of fried pies. Some people hug, some people drink, some are givers and some of us, like Lena, dish out love in desserts.
The kitchen is where I remember her the most, collaborating, concocting, cooking, canning and cleaning, all in the name of love. It is only now I am sorting through the memories and seeing my mother for the first time. An inkling of who she really is. As a child I didn’t know her, and still don’t in many ways but this I do know—if you got food in any form, at any time, you can bet a cast iron skillet, it was out of love from the heart of her kitchen.
She was hell bent that Mag and I inherit the kitchen gene as well and she started on us early. By six, I could cook hotdogs and thanks to Imperial Sugar, I had my very own cookbook. It was ironically titled, My Firs
t Cookbook. So much for creativity back then. But by age nine, I had mastered French toast and by ten, the highly prestigious, connoisseur of southern desserts, Pecan pralines or more properly pronounced, Pee-can pralines as Lena Hart reminded me, every damn day.
“Anyone who is anybody has to be able to make pee-can pralines.” As much as she said it I thought it was a prerequisite for marriage.
“Haaa…look at this.” Mag said pulling me out of my domesticated nightmares. It was a picture of us and our first cousin, Cotton. Lord bless our souls. What a sight we were. We were outsiders, dirt ramblers, always in the woods, always barefoot and looking for anything to get into. It startles me to see my own face, as if the picture sees right through me. Who are you? Where did you go? What are you all about? What happened? When I’m done screaming silently in my head, I throw the image onto the pile. That’s when it got weird. Or in my world, weirder. The world shifted, or maybe the room shifted, or maybe I shifted. Hell, who knows, it was hard to tell. Everything slowed down as if I was meant to capture every single detail, molecule and particle of air. Dream state, hovering over the abyss, suspended. The little girl levitates in air, floating, spiraling out of control. From the square picture, she attempts to press a memory out of me. I refuse to cooperate. The room returns to normal, the floating picture drops to the rug, and ruptured my heart undone. The walls of the house inside me shook, splintered into pieces until a doorway was opened—a door I never knew existed. My two visions taunt me, the one inside my own mind, inside the house, and the one I’m in now, inside my parent’s house. I glanced down the hallway and see my bedroom door open. Fear shot through me like invisible missiles. Every fiber of me stimulated, overwhelmed by something unseen, unknown. When the transition occurred in me, or around me or both, an unknown realm of something made its presence known. It came out. My heart hurt and I buckled under the pain, taking my body with it. Everything was eerie as if something slipped out, through the brokenness of my soul, something disturbing. A mixture of raw emotions trickled hot in me, not finding place, relief then pain, sorrow then joy, then pain again. A white heat began to rise in me. I could feel it simmering and making its way upward—and when I heard her voice—it was like hearing it for the first time with new ears, as if all the other little girl sightings were just delusional mind wanderings of a crazy woman.
“I’m here.” She said. The voice was crisp and so visceral my skin went into sensory overload. At first, I had nowhere to look but at Mag.
“What is it?” She said. My palpable stare concerned her. “Are you okay Willodean?” I was wobbly and out of focus. I tried to comprehend what just happened. Or if it happened. Could it be my mind lapsing again, playing those awful, terrible troubling Shadow house mind tricks?
“Why are you whispering?”
“I’m not whispering.” Mag said loud and obvious, her eyes twisted around me.
“You’re not?—I uh—uhhh.” I stuttered. I was unsteady, chest rising and falling. I closed my eyes, blinked a few times, and then opened. I felt myself drift towards two pin light eyes gleaming up from the 4x6 crawfish checkerboard picture of a little girl. Everything else was tunnel vision. Her stare penetrates me like hot flicks of blue fire igniting something dangerous in me. Is it her? Is this happening? Is she speaking to me? No. Stop it Willodean. You are going off the deep end again. That’s outright ridiculous. Snap out of it. Really? After all you’ve experienced in the last year and now you think this is ridiculous? The more I tried to reason with myself the more I heard her voice. She engaged me at every doubt, every hesitation, and every move. Against me, for me, with me. Her little arm rose up on the picture. Her forefinger curled back like a hook, catching me and taking me places I never wanted to go. It was eerie and vulnerable. Thoughts filled my head like a collection of broken toy parts being reassembled and put back together, the noise, the clink-clink, clanging, tinkering—sent me there. I heard the swishing softness of a leaf floating in the air, the quibble of legs dangling from a tree limb, the outcry of a paddle talk, the yelling banter of two girls, road trip rebels, shotgun salutes, Faith and 500, find your centerpiece, rise up like a queen and take your place. Speak. Voice it loudly. Let the world hear. Go out knowing, new heart, new heart.
I was startled, captivated and caught up in this bizarre engagement of little girls and adults, a mantra of haunting voices. Mag sat on the vintage rug completely unaware of the madness of which she was part. Unknown portals leaped out at me rapidly. Images flashed before my face, reliving time in snapshots, some blanks of darkness not showing their faces, ashamed, covered up and the rest was my life. It took all of five minutes to come back to myself. I had to come back or they’d have me committed. Bedazzled by the events, I pick up the crawfish picture and stare into the doomed prophecy, the backwards beginnings, sideways moves, crawfish on a checkerboard, wrong man, doomed relationships, depression, anxiety, house of shadows, screwed up little lost Who-girl. Who? Who? Who?
“Who are you?” My mind screams silently. I think of the song by the rock band, The Who. How perfect it fit me, my situation. The last time I crashed and burned in an apocalyptic meltdown, was after the divorce. I said all sorts of things in front of family that left them bewildered, confused, frightened. I don’t remember what was said, but whatever it was, it was enough to make Lena Hart freak smooth out. Their faces are immortalized in my memory—the way they looked at me—with hopelessness and how they looked at each other. I know what that look means. I have always known. It means Jesus with a banjo on a rooftop. That’s what they think it means. More or less. For me, it’s the curse rearing its ugly head, trying to take me out, like it did Maw Sue.
The first month I moved in with the parents, I suffering delusional madness of divorce, of Branson, broken love, broken hearts, wanting death, wanting to end the endless surge of pain that hunted me. They poked pills down my throat and took me to all kinds of doctors, psychiatrists. It was only when I landed in Doc’s office did I find any solid ground to stand on. She gave a voice to my demons without judgment. She provided an understanding ear for my pain, allowing me to uncover buried pieces of myself, underneath all the layers of darkness and chaos. But now, I fear it has returned…
“You’re looking in the wrong place. I’m here.” The voice said. It came from the little girl in the picture. I will not look. It isn’t real.
“What is wrong with you?” I heard Mag say. There was a lapse of time and space between what she said and what I heard.
“I miss him.” I blurted out. “I miss her.” It was the only thing I could think to say, missing Papa Hart, missing the little girl, who I used to be, me and her. Mag looked at me hard like a stone rock for a solid thirty seconds. It’s the truth. I miss Papa Hart and her. Or Me. The little girl. The person I was when I was around him. That girl. Around Maw Sue too. That girl. That girl is the only one that seems real to me. My adult self seems fake as fake can get. My God. I miss me.
“Yeah, I miss him too.” Mag said tearing up. She didn’t catch the part about me and if she did, she didn’t say anything. Mag tossed the brag book into the pile of people pieces, sighed loudly, and put her hands behind her head, and looked up at the ceiling. Suddenly, I was ravaged by voices, but it wasn’t Mag, or the little girl. It was the others. The people I didn’t recognize. They were rustling around on the picture blocks, coming to life, all looking at me, telling me things, stories and words, all running together. I thought for sure they’d walk off the Kodak paper and set down in front of me, light a pipe to smoke, drink a beer, or perform some rite of passage to pass on to my kin. They’d tell me joyful tales, horrible and awful tragedies.
Welcome. Step into the life of Willodean’s brain. This is it. People, characters, voices in my head all the time, driving me mad. I’m gifted and cursed. People enter my head all the time, tell me things. I don’t know how to rid myself of them, so I simply stuff them inside the house, inside me. I built them a room to live and breathe and come and go. It’s like a hotel
in my head.
“You can’t run from your gifts honey.” Maw Sue's voice blended with the wind and rushed through the screen door stirring up my heart. I felt ten years old again, frightened of namesakes and gifts and curses. I know, I know, I say to her, to myself. In silence. Her words are stuck in my head reminding me. “Channel it in right direction. Make lovely your losses…blah, blah.”
I argue. “Well, I don’t know how to do that yet, do I? Dearly departed, deader than dead but alive, great grandmother. Ahhhhhhh...”
“The journey of time will instruct you.”
Get out of my mind. Don’t I have any privacy in my own head? I want to scream. Shout. Jump up and down. Then I realize that Mag is staring at me like a bug in a jar. My peculiar behavior has her full attention. Uh-oh, put on that mask Willodean or she’ll get suspicious and rat you out to Lena Hart and you’ll be back in clinical trials and taking pharmaceuticals till your normal. I don’t want to put on an act anymore. I want to rip off the mask I wear, the one I’ve dawned since who knows when, the pretend Willodean, don’t be yourself Willodean. I want to let my crazy out in the open and not give a shit. I want to be Annie and roar like a shotgun blast. I want people ducking for cover, at least a little scared. I am dangerous. I am wild. I am grit and courage. Stars and moons. Faith and hope. It is part of me. It is what it is. It runs through me. I can no more rid myself of it than I can my own arm or legs. I need it all, the sane and the insane. I just need to figure out how to channel it in the right direction. Sometimes I think Doc is the only one who understands me. I wonder if she makes house calls?
WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) Page 40