by Suzan Saxman
I lost myself in books. I walked down to the river. I found an old cemetery on the edge of the woods and visited it every day. But I wasn’t in my body. Everything was gone. My life in New Jersey. My mother. Jack. The new life I had tried to make for myself. Everything.
One night David and I were watching a horror movie when a strange thought struck me. The main character was about to walk into some room she clearly wasn’t supposed to go into. I knew she wasn’t supposed to go into it, everyone watching the movie knew she wasn’t supposed to, but still, there she was, opening the door and stepping inside. She had no business going in there. She should have known better. How could she be so stupid?
That’s when it hit me. Was this the mistake I was making?
In doing my psychic readings, was I walking down the wrong hallways, jimmying the locked doors, wandering into the forbidden forests? Might I not be opening myself to some onslaught of darkness and plain old creepiness because of what I do? Was the fire a message for me to stop?
Bob certainly thought that was the case. He’d been reading The Secret, and he was sure that through “the laws of attraction” I’d brought the fire on myself. Bob thought the house had burned because I watched too many horror movies. He didn’t really think it was my psychic powers, though. He still liked those. He was always calling me up to help him find misplaced checks. He still couldn’t get that I could never see that kind of thing.
Friends in New Jersey were sure I was going to move back. “You’re not going to stay up there after that, are you? You can’t possibly be supposed to stay. Isn’t the fire a sign? Shouldn’t you come back?”
I thought about it a lot, those months by the river. I wasn’t scared, but I was curious. Something had tried to burn me out of town. Some old force didn’t want me in Woodstock, but it wasn’t of Woodstock, that force. No. It was angry that I was there—that somehow, despite everything, I had made it to my home. I could sense that. I knew it. Lifetime after lifetime I have been silenced. I have been dismissed, ignored, and burned. Again and again I have been burned. Wasn’t I always being burned by Popes and Puritans? Weren’t they always threatened by what I might see?
What was it they didn’t want me to see, didn’t want me to say, age after age?
“You’re not going to stay in Woodstock, are you?” phoned another New Jersey friend.
“Yeah, I am,” I decided. “This is my home. I’m not going anywhere.”
I invited some of the Tibetan monks I ran into on the village green to come on over to the building and say some blessings over it. They circled the property in their red and orange robes, cheerfully chanting. First clockwise, then counterclockwise. It felt good.
David had made friends with a man who was Native American. He sculpted us two white gryphon statues to serve as guardians. He also brought over some of his friends to remove whatever curses might be lurking on the property. They lit sage and smudge sticks and waved feathers and chanted at each of the four corners of the building.
Driving back and forth from the store to our cottage, I often stopped at a little grocery store that specialized in English teas and cookies. The owner of the store was a tall man with long gray hair. He felt like he was caught somewhere in between being a man and a woman, like the old Greek seer Tiresias, though I didn’t mention this to him. One day, however, when I was paying for a package of chocolate biscuits, he asked me completely out of the blue, like he was suggesting I try a new marmalade, what I knew about the Black Madonna.
“The Black Madonna?”
“Everyone always thinks about the White Madonna, which is really just the version of Mary the Church wants us to accept. You know, the Pure Blessed Virgin in her white robes. But there is another Madonna and she is dark—like the earth. There are statues of her all over Europe and always have been. Her face and skin are usually black. The Church is always claiming they were blackened in fires, but they weren’t. They are all at ancient sites, places where the Goddess has always been worshiped. Those statues started out black, like the statues of Isis. A lot of those statues were just statues to Isis that were taken over by the Church. The Mary everyone knows? She’s just a whitewashed version of the Goddess.”
“Really?” This was all news to me. It was one of those very strange moments I sometimes have in my life. Here I am, buying English tea cookies, and suddenly I get the feeling that I’m about to experience some major revelation in my life. The little hairs on my arms were all electrified.
“She is Isis, actually. And Aphrodite. And Mother Earth.”
“Yeah?”
“That’s why she’s black, like rich soil along the river deltas. She’s the fertile earth beneath our feet.”
“Isis, Astarte, Demeter, Hecate, Kali, Lianna,” I said, remembering the chant of my Wiccan friends and trying to make some sense of what the man was telling me.
“That’s right.” The man was beaming at me expectantly.
“Is there anything else I should know?”
“We don’t take credit cards, I’m afraid.”
I handed him a five-dollar bill, left the shop in a stunned state, and got back in the car with David.
On the ride home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my whole life there had been something that enraged me about the Blessed Virgin. Mary had always seemed prissy to me, and something about her celebrated purity, all of that immaculate virginity and everything, had never felt right. She’d always felt like my blond-haired mother, pretending that she was perfectly proper and denying that she had a body with needs and desires. Ha! I thought. Underneath the pastel blue veils was really a Black Madonna, earthy and alive. I saw Isis with her wings outstretched to hold the world and a bare-breasted Kali, skulls hanging around her neck, sticking out her tongue. A Black Madonna wouldn’t behave like some long-suffering martyr to her life. She’d say what she really thought. She’d do what she really wanted.
Ever since I was a little girl I had sensed there was another Mary, hadn’t I?
A familiar onslaught of fury grabbed hold of me. I wanted to shake those poor pathetic nuns from my childhood and tell them that they had been wrong. It didn’t matter how long our skirts were or if we were good girls or sluts. I’d known it all along. They were wrong. Their Mary was wrong. I wanted to take that old statue of my mother’s and hurl it onto the ground and break it forever. I wanted to scream at the pastel-wearing psychics who tried to pretend there was no darkness in the spiritual world, who thought everyone was just bathed in white light and there was no evil as long as you pretended that there wasn’t. Most of all I wanted to yell at my mother, “Stop worrying about what the neighbors think!” All that fear about fitting in and behaving properly had made my life with her such a misery.
I’d always felt that prissy Mary looking down at me, smug, blond, perfect, and untouched. She didn’t want to look at dead people; she didn’t wear lipstick that was too red; she didn’t think about the things that happened down there.
“Don’t touch me down there!” I heard my mother screaming at the doctor in the nursing home.
I felt a cold chill deep inside of me. I got out of the car, and instead of going inside to the cottage, I walked through the woods to the old cemetery.
No one had been buried there in a long time. Many of the gravestones were crumbling and the names were hard to read. Still, I could feel the dead all around me. Women who had died in childbirth, children taken by disease, grandmothers, grandfathers, the lonely, the blessed, the suffering, the forgotten. My people.
I could see everything about them, even now, but I had missed the one true thing about the person closest to me. My whole life I had avoided seeing it, until this moment with the Black Madonna at my back.
How had I never seen it before? It had always been there right in front of me, in plain sight, and yet somehow I had never before let myself witness the one thing my mother had most feared that I would know about her. Her whole life she must have been frightened that I knew.
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sp; I sat down by a gravestone trying to take in what I had just seen.
She was a little girl in a red dress, and she was hiding in a closet beneath the stairs of her house. Her heart was racing; she was trembling. She was terribly frightened her brother might find her. Again. A wave of revulsion swept over me, and I knew. Her brother had been so much older than her, hadn’t he? And my mother never spoke of him, at all, and she wouldn’t let my sister and me even talk to him at family reunions. I remembered my aunt Mary refusing to see him and hissing that she wished that he would die.
It was as if my whole life I had deliberately chosen not to see what I knew must be true. I couldn’t see it until my mother was dead because if I had, it would have killed her. My mother had been molested as a little girl by her older brother. I knew it. I didn’t have any proof other than what I’d seen, but I knew it.
I also knew that there was no one I could talk to about this. My mother and Aunt Mary were dead. My own sister was committed to maintaining my mother’s idea of herself. There was no reason to seek out my cousins and talk about it with them. This wasn’t information that mattered to anyone else. It was between my mother and me, between us and the Madonna whose name I had not known until this day.
A wave of pity flowed through me, not just for my mother but for all of the abused women told that if they weren’t virgins they were whores. My poor mother. Poor veiled, submissive Mary. If only they’d had a Black Madonna to fight for them, to tell them that it hadn’t been their fault, that their bodies were not shameful no matter what had been done to them. I wanted a goddess who would tell that little abused girl that she was still perfect, still beautiful, and still powerful, and I wanted her to lift up her foot and squash the man who had hurt her like a bug. Instead, my mother had Mary telling her to be quiet, settle down, and keep herself covered up, for goodness’ sake, or everyone will think you’re asking for it. Mary was the wrapped-up goddess men had given to women to keep them in their place. No wonder she had always made me so angry.
My mother’s hell had been so much deeper than I had realized.
Her relationship with my father made sense for the first time, too. She was so uncomfortable with her sexuality that she gave herself to a sexless marriage. But she couldn’t get rid of her natural passions. Still, they had to be a secret, let in undercover. I knew I’d always embarrassed her, but I had no idea until this moment just how much. I was a symbol to her of everything that was dark and wrong and bad. I was even dark and brown eyed instead of comfortingly blond.
I was not Mary’s daughter; I was the handmaiden of the Black Madonna. I was defiant; I asked questions; I saw things I wasn’t supposed to. I wouldn’t be tamed.
Knowing all of this didn’t excuse my mother for who she’d been, however. Let me be clear about that. Just because I understood her in a new way didn’t mean she still didn’t owe me an apology.
Everybody has terrible things happen to them, if not in this life, then in past lifetimes, but suffering doesn’t let us off the hook. We’ve got to decide what to do with it. My mother could have chosen to accept having a psychic daughter as a gift. Maybe it would have helped her to contact the other side, to explore her own past lives, to discover other kinds of spirituality that might have healed her. She could at least have gotten into therapy.
I was also given a lot of suffering in my childhood, but I’ve been determined not to let it hold me back, because I know that life doesn’t ever stop. Every day is a chance to start over. We are given new days and new births and new lives at every moment. There’s no death and there are no dead ends, and when we can truly realize that we are always standing at the crossroads, life becomes a lot more interesting and enjoyable.
I felt a renewed defiance from what I had seen. The most important thing I could do was not leave Woodstock. I wasn’t going to let myself be burned out of town. My mother had given in, she was always a victim, but I wasn’t going to be. I was going to fight back, keep asking questions, and keep speaking up for the darkness and the dead.
These days I sometimes wear a cross and sometimes an Egyptian ankh around my neck. I don’t think the Black Madonna cares which one I have on.
Eventually, we moved back to the White Gryphon, and because Bob and David’s renovation had been so successful, Bob decided to buy another house up the street and fix it up with David.
It was late one night, and I was about to shut off the television when David announced that he was going to do some work on the house.
“Now?”
“Yes,” he answered. In retrospect, he wasn’t behaving like himself. He was almost robotic, possessed. But I was tired and I went back to bed with my book. What I didn’t realize, since it was only just past midnight, was that it was now officially Friday the 13th.
I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard a neighbor pounding on the front door of the shop and screaming, “Come quick! Fiona! Fiona! Come quick! There’s been a terrible accident.”
I flew down the stairs and out the door. There were police cars and ambulances racing up the road. Lights were flashing. People were screaming. I ran up the street to the house where David had been working.
“Don’t go in the garage!” someone screamed as I approached.
“Stay back! Don’t go in there!” pleaded a policeman, grabbing my arm.
It felt like the fire all over again.
Policemen with flashlights were searching the ground in front of the house. Blood was splattered everywhere.
“What happened? What happened?” I yelled.
“Don’t let her in here! Don’t let her see me!” David was screaming as the EMTs brought him out on a stretcher.
David had cut off all the fingers of his left hand with the table saw.
A neighbor drove Gavin and me to the hospital behind the ambulance, but by the time we got there they had already decided to airlift David to New York City. The neighbor brought Gavin and me back home, and the moment we walked in the phone rang from the hospital. They needed to see if we could find the one finger the police hadn’t been able to locate. We found it, we put it on ice, we got it to the hospital in the city, but ultimately it didn’t make any difference.
After seven operations, one of them more than twenty-four hours long, David still wasn’t able to keep any of his lost fingers.
When the hospital called to tell me that it wasn’t going to work, I let out a primal scream from the deepest place of my being. I think I could have handled it better if it had happened to me than to sweet, gentle David. After all, I don’t need my fingers to do readings. But David used his hands all the time. He made things. That’s who he is. Whether he’s crafting an elfin sword or a beautiful piece of crystal jewelry, he’s a craftsman. A left-handed craftsman. His fingers were always busy. He fixed things. But it was even deeper than that.
David had always been my rock. No matter what happened, he was there and steady, the one making everything safe and comfortable in his own odd, eccentric way. I live in the ether, but David is practical. He does the driving and the cooking. I realized in that moment that David had always been my protector. No matter where I had roamed, he had been there for me. What did it mean that he had been attacked? Was it because of me and what I did?
David was in terrible pain, both physically and emotionally.
He looked like a Civil War soldier in the hospital, covered in bloody bandages. They were even using leeches at one point to try to get the blood flowing between his reattached fingers and his hand. I kept thinking it was like something that had happened to one of King Arthur’s knights. It was a mythic wound to take away David’s hand.
Were we supposed to leave Woodstock? I had to ask that question again. I asked the spirits, Jack, my father, the universe, the ground beneath my feet, and I listened hard and the answer I got was always the same.
No. You belong in Woodstock.
Whatever was trying to get me to leave town should have known that I can be pretty obstinate about doing t
hings my way. I was staying put, and I knew that if I did, some new kind of destiny was going to open up for me.
A tall, bearded priest from a tiny ramshackle chapel up near the top of the mountain stopped by the store one day. I think he was Russian Orthodox. He’d heard about David; he’d been there for the fire.
“There’s a war being fought here between good and evil,” he told me. “You should know that, but you should also know that you are good, so good, powerfully good. This is an old fight, the oldest fight of all, and you’re a part of it. I’m glad you’re here. We need you. Big changes are coming soon.”
I don’t know if he was talking about things we can see in the real world or the forces of angels and demons. Or maybe both.
I was so out of it, I couldn’t really take in what he was saying. Long ago the angel had told me I would be safe in the Catskills. What a joke! Could she have been kidding? Was she setting me up? How was I possibly safe in this town?
I had the monks come back, and also the Native Americans, and everyone did a lot more chanting. Another spiritual teacher in town told me that whenever the demons arise to attack, you know you are on the right path. I wish I had felt more reassured.
To fight back, I decided to get my back tattooed with my own protective demons. I had the tattoo artist create a wild-looking vampire woman with bared teeth—gorgeous but lethal. I wanted her to have my back. She’s one part Kali, one part Anne Rice, one part gargoyle. My rats, too, are part of the tattoo, curled together in the symbol of yin and yang, light and darkness. It’s an empowering tattoo; it makes me feel safer, tougher. I felt very open when I came to Woodstock, caught up in the lighthearted fairy magic of the place. But I’ve become much more armored since I’ve been here. Powerful forces are on the move.
Soon after all that, a beautiful, statuesque blonde wandered into the store. I noticed that she had Celtic knot work and seraphim angels tattooed on her arms. She made me feel like Gollum, what with my vampire lady and rodents crawling over my scrawny back.