A velvet hand brushed against my face.
Accept the gift I have been to you.
I did not understand what the Spirit meant. I thought of the silver comb dropping into my hands on my birthday, but I knew it was something more than that.
I came here to protect and guide you, Betsy Bell, though it may be difficult for you to understand my ways and means.
I thought of Father in the fields explaining why Little Bright must eat the worms, had he not said it may be difficult for you to understand?
When I said I once was happy, but I had been disturbed, did you not know I spoke to you?
I had known, and it was true, once I had been happy, but I had been disturbed. Abruptly I felt I was lying in my bed with Father. He grunted “darling daughter” in my ear just like he used to and I could smell the sour whiskey on his breath. My stomach rose thickly and I feared I would for certain hail vomit onto the parlor carpet.
All that is over now.
How ever did you protect me? I did not speak the words aloud, I was incapable, the world was frozen silent, but the Spirit answered my thoughts.
I took possession of your nights, then I did poison him! There was much you suffered I could not affect. I did what fate allowed. You should be grateful, instead you throw away my gifts, like your comb into the river. You do not listen.
Only God can protect me, if He exists.
I did not want to accept the Spirit’s claim, for it seemed to say the murder of my father was a benefit to me. Repulsive as it was, I felt this could be true and part of an infinite plan my mind was too small to comprehend. I did not want to think on it.
God inhabits all things, you and me for certain. You are a special girl, willful as you are. The wisdom of the ages is available to you. Look in your heart, Betsy, for God is there, as real as I am.
Very far away, buried in the breathless silence, I heard the wailing of the hog outdoors and I understood how it was they knew when they were marked and it was time to call their angels down. There was much unspoken knowledge but it was possible to hear it. The hogs knew of their future as God spoke it to their hearts and they did listen. This was the Being’s gift to me, this knowledge of all things, spoken and not, unending time and silence, the life of all that lives. I understood it for a moment, but only for a moment.
Betsy Bell, do not have Josh Gardner.
I felt as though the Spirit removed me from my body and threw me out across a great stretch of rolling green fields of time, hurtling me toward a log cabin in a clearing. I felt as I had when I rode up the hill and saw the vision of Father’s skeleton. I knew there was something mean and ugly behind the door, and frightened it was my future self, I did not want to look. The Being laughed and the door swung open and I did see myself, older and holding a broom, sweeping the floor, crying. A huge sadness unlike any I had ever known before made my sweeping heavy-handed and the dust off the bare planks itched my nose. I did not know what was wrong, but I seemed frightfully alone in the woods. The Spirit was not present, yet somehow I knew that was part of my sorrow. The future me wished to talk with the Being and could not. A huge regret ached inside me. Abruptly I felt I was falling backward through a night sky, spinning, with only the light of the stars. I grew very cold and it seemed far too long since I had taken a breath.
This is why you must heed my counsel. Do you wish to lose your love?
What you have shown me is harsh and cruel in my future and my past.
I felt as though any moment I must relinquish consciousness and cease to be. I did not want the future the Spirit had shown me, and yet I struggled to remain living.
This is the last time we will speak, Betsy Bell. Do not have Josh Gardner, for with him you will learn the meaning of despair.
Why should I believe you? You have tormented me most grievously. You said you came to bring me buried treasure. You said you were of Kate Batts’s making. I know you to be most like the witch rabbit on our sleigh ride, evil, and capable of regeneration and mischief for all of eternity.
All that is true, but so is what I tell you now.
Your protection was a curse to me.
Why do you persist in your wrong thinking? I am your most dear friend, yet I have a mind to smash you like the bed frame, Betsy Bell, for you are an ungracious participant in your own education.
I thought of Mother pulling tight my braid, insisting I keep my faith in God contained within my head. How was it possible? I was distracted by the many events of my suffering. Yet, how foolish and wasted were my days, abused and fearful. If only I could have the chance to claim the love I knew was meant for me. Only the image of Josh’s full lips made it possible for me to hold out against the Spirit’s crushing grip on my breath.
Were you not certain in the knowledge I WOULD speak? My words appeared as possibilities in your heart before they were uttered in your ears.
There was the swoosh of a bird wing and I had the feeling I was waking from a dream. I was still the size of the room but I could breathe and I could see Mother’s lips moving in prayer at my feet, so time had resumed. My lungs filled easily without gasping.
“You cannot frighten me with a vision of future tears. I have already known the limits of despair and it is my resolve to find peace in sharing love.” My head was dizzy and my speech broke unevenly into the silence.
The dark is more vast than you know and it is within you.
“I know the darkness, I know it, for you have brought it to me with your rattling thistles and foul poison and bad memories.” It was difficult to choke the words out, but I was determined. “You say you are the life of all that lives but I am all that lives as much as you! I am more of it than you, for I have what you do not, which is a body and a single mind. Do what you like with the dead and the unborn and the thousands of souls having their say in the other worlds. Know everything you will, but understand you cannot know the pleasure of two lips pressed together or rays of sun against your cheek. I am alive and you are not!”
You are a beautiful girl. Be of it, but not it.
I thought the Spirit meant I must fulfill my potential and I hoped it would agree with me in how I should do it. I thought of Dean striking the witch dog down and Kate Batts filling with Spirit without encouragement from the congregation. I thought of Chloe mixing lye and ash to make a perfect soap and of Mother sorting the beans for seed and drying. I pictured Mother engaged in any simple task, sewing, or cutting the lavender blooms in the garden, or wrapping our scarves around our necks to protect us.
A sad sigh filled the room and I could feel as well as hear it. The black nausea within me began to dissipate as though the sigh opened the door in my breast and released it all. The cold darkness fled my body and I could see it as a cloud of black leaving the room. I watched it hover at the window, then thin itself and slip through a crack in the parlor sill. That it could all add up to just so much darkness in one soul. I was overjoyed to see it released and gone from me. Whoever placed it there, my father, God or the Being, it no longer mattered, for I would no longer be afraid. The depths of God would not be for me like the long drop from the cavern to the fishing hole. Instead they would be part of each moment lived. I planned to fill my soul with the lightness I had felt on my birthday. A lightness that smelled like lemons and let me know I was blessed by God.
You threw away my gifts, Betsy Bell. As the worms give richness to the soil, so evil and suffering give depth to the soul, for without them there is no good, no joy. It may seem heavy knowledge for you to hear, but it is your responsibility to use it wisely.
A sublime warmth overcame me and I thought of the days after John Jr. and I had met the Being in the cave. I recalled the hours of dusting and sewing when I had thought deeply about the intelligence of the intelligent and unending time and silence. I had understood more about it than I had realized. I could accept as truth what the Being said, and I recalled feeling its intention to protect me before it spoke for the first time. I had not understood it t
hen and I had abruptly forgotten I ever felt it. I understood it now.
“My past will be ever present and my history will inform my future actions,” I reassured the Spirit.
Nature will take its course with you, Betsy Bell.
It was difficult to comprehend, the knowledge of all things, but I had the feeling of it, like the velvet hand against my cheek and the sweet meat of the Spirit’s cherries in my mouth. I felt my limbs and head shrinking back to my regular size and my whole body tingled as if the Being had run pins and needles through my veins. I gave my forehead to the parlor carpet as earlier I had laid it on the purslane and violets and months previous I had laid it in the snow, crying after Father breathed his last, certain in the knowledge the day approached when my own heart would thump and heave no more. The snow, the flowers, the parlor carpet, the plank floor of my room, my forehead had laid against them all. I felt the light inside me spreading from my fingers to my toes, melting all the sadness I had suffered. The stone in my belly was gone and I knew it would not return. I thought back to when I was nine and felt the Spirit in the woods and wondered how God’s good earth could have such cold and frightening places and I understood for certain, God’s good earth contained it all.
All That Lives Page 41