Lineage

by Juniper Black

  Who wouldn’t want a hilltop property full of strange and magical occurrences?

  If Robina’s children had shown any interest in the land, Cora would have coaxed Robina to leave it to them. She herself didn’t want to live up there, and the house that Rick had built for them was falling down a little bit more each day. Every time Cora came up, she swore the structure had shrunk another inch into the ground as if the forest floor was eating it. Rick should have made improvements to the original cabin, but he had insisted on building a more modern home. He had let the old cabin fall into ruin, and eventually they had to dismantle it for safety.

  Cora made her way up from the car to the house. This part of the trail was well-worn from centuries of travel. There used to be a trail that came up all the way from the stream, but rarely did anyone walk the whole length of it anymore. Not since the road went in about eighty years ago that let you drive most of the way up. Cora was sure the trail must have been beautiful, but she was equally sure she was glad she didn’t have to hike the whole thing.

  She knocked at the door, and when Robina didn’t answer she turned to the forest that surrounded her and called, “Robina!”

  A moment later, the reply came, “I’m here.” Robina emerged into the clearing from the trees on the west side. She looked tired, but there was another emotion in her features that Cora tried to place. As Robina walked closer, she knew what it was.

  “Resolve,” the word came to her. She put a smile on her face to try to coax one onto Robina’s own features.

  “Out for an afternoon stroll?” Cora asked cheerily. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  Robina met Cora in the middle of the clearing and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “Just trying to find something one last time,” she said as she looked pensively at the ground. She raised her eyes again to Cora. “Come inside. I’ll put the kettle on.”

  In another effort to brighten Robina’s mood, Cora tried to make her gossip upbeat. Her cousin smiled a wry smile a couple of times, but Cora could tell they were mostly for her benefit.

  When she ran out of tales, she inquired about Robina’s welfare. Her cousin gave a terse reply and then fell silent again. Cora wasn’t sure what to say next, and she couldn’t stop the quiet moment from stretching into awkwardness. She grasped in her mind for something to talk about and latched onto the first thing she could find.

  “What were you trying to find just now?” she asked. “Something you lost?”

  Robina’s gaze moved from her tea cup to regard Cora. She seemed to be trying to make up her mind about something. Finally, she said, “All those strange things that happen in your family - have you ever wanted to know why? I can tell you,” Robina paused and sat forward in her chair. “If you buy the Hill from me.”

  Cora held her breath. She thought for a moment on the offer. Robina might tell her a tale that was completely fabricated. Then again, too many odd things happened in the Swavely generations for them all to be coincidence. There might actually be a legitimate origin story. Robina might actually know what it was.

  “Where would you go?” she asked to buy more time. “This is your home.”

  Her cousin shifted in her chair and crossed a leg over the top of the other. “My father left me some property back in New York when he died. I never told Rick, and I let my father’s sister take care of it for me. She passed away earlier this year, so it’s empty now. I’m going back there,” she said. She looked hopeful for the first time today. “I thought there was something here for me, but I was wrong. I’ll cut my losses and go.”

  Cora nodded slowly. She had already looked at her savings after the first time Robina had broached the subject. She knew she had the money that Robina wanted for the land. “Alright, Robina,” she answered. “I agree. Tell me the story.”

  Robina shook her head, “Not yet. Not until the papers are signed. I’ll call you when they’re ready. I’ll tell you everything then.”

  ********

  Cora thought Robina would call her within the week. Instead, another month went by before her cousin finally said she was ready. Cora packed her tape recorder and her notebook to take with her. She drove the car in a light misty spring rain that disappeared completely once she was walking underneath the trees on the Hill.

  She thought she would take notes while Robina told her story, but instead the tape recorder caught everything while she could only sit spellbound. Robina clutched three books to her chest through the entire history she revealed. Cora signed her section of the transfer papers, and still Robina held them until the ink dried. Then she thrust the books into Cora’s hands as if she could not bear to touch them again.

  ________

  Chapter: Young Posie

  The Full Moon of March has other names. Out in the maple groves and north of them, they call her the Full Sap Moon. To the west and the south, she is known as the Worm Moon. In Eversburg, she is always called the Full Crow Moon. There is even a festival when she comes around each year.

  No one remembers the year the festival originated. We only know it begins at the statue in the exact middle of town. Since 1825, the monument of the War Memorial has stood tall in that space. Before that, the statue was something else. Something older. Something that someone wanted covered up at some point in the town’s history.

  Even when the Monument to the Civil War Soldiers was erected, there had only been the base of the original statue that remained. Whatever marker had stood atop it in the past had been moved or destroyed long before the first settlers came here. The mismatch of the older clay and the newer gray marble is obvious, no matter how hard the builders tried to hide it. There are marks along the base as well. Whoever put them there knew what they meant, but that knowledge has been lost. Also lost is the reason for the thick inlay of iron that runs the outer circumference.

  What is remembered is the route of the procession, that the girls aged ten through twelve wear long, black feathers in their hair, and that the rest of the townspeople will be led by the oldest person fit enough to lead them.

  In the past, this was a task handed over to the Miltons, whose men all lived long, sturdy lives before they slipped away peacefully in their night slumber of advanced age. They will lead the townspeople north to the first hill. They will turn right to follow what was once a switchback and now is a paved road. It will wind them around the base until a second road intersects to pull them upwards to the next hill, the next loop, and the next. They’ll finally find the old dirt lane that narrows into the forest. They’ll walk among the trees and all the buds and early leaves of spring. The air will be fresh and clear, and depending on the year, there may still be lingering snow along the ground.

  When they reach the yawning mouth of one of the old caves, the girls will remove the crow feathers, and the mothers will come forward to place them at the foot of the entrance. Their husbands and their brothers make an arc behind the rest of them. From the outside, this most likely looked protective. As someone standing on the inside, it felt like we were being offered.

  Their ancestors were taught this by the Native people who once lived here. This was the way they had learned most things in this new place. When they had been lost in the middle of these woods and surrounded by nothing but trees and hills.

  Some of the newer arrivals to town will go along their first year. Desperate to build new friendships in a town that considers you a stranger for your first decade, they will try to ingratiate themselves with their new neighbors. They’ll march alongside the others and attempt to hide their puzzled faces. They’ll wonder why everyone is so deadly silent. They’ll shake their heads at the bizarre semi-circular laying of bird feathers in front of a dark, gaping hole in the ground. They’ll walk home again and think maybe the procession is an homage to miners. Or perhaps it’s something to do with the syrup harvest, even though there are no sugar maples in those woods. Only the older residents would remember what the true purpose of the ritual was, and only if their family kept the story
alive. At any rate, nothing that would be shared with a newcomer.

  Not all of the families will go, of course. There have always been those who scoffed at any traditions the Natives may have had. Those too pious to believe there was any value in something not born from scripture. Others would have been too frail to make the journey or too busy taking care of their ever growing families. My own family never went. When I was old enough to ask my Mother why we didn’t, she told me, “We’ve already paid our debt,” and shut her lips tight so I would know she would say no more on the matter.

  I stole away one year and walked with a friend’s family. I thought we were headed to our own relatives’ Hill until the procession hooked away from it sharply to the left. Even still, when we arrived at the cave, I knew we couldn’t be that far away. Maybe just the next hill over and down closer to the stream.

  I watched the others pay their homage, even though it didn’t seem like they knew that’s what they were doing. I wondered why they let their little children get so close to that dark mouth. I wanted to ask my friend why the men stood far back. I would have if everyone hadn’t been so quiet. Later that night, tucked into bed with my friend on a sleepover, I tried to ask her what the dark, bird-like creatures were that watched us from the trees. She said I was lying. She said I was trying to tell her a scary story. “They’re just crows, silly,” she had said almost angrily. Not wanting to upset her, I made myself giggle. We talked about boys, and after a while, I pretended to go to sleep.

  ________

  Chapter: The Girl

  The car came up the road and parked at the top of the turn off. Not the long, dark car that usually came, but a smaller car that was the color of poisonous berries or the blood of an animal after it was killed.

  “Red,” the Girl remembered. This color is called red.

  Something was happening with her mind. She was forgetting things she should know and remembering things that should have been long forgotten. Like the name of this color, “Red,” she said to herself again. She knew what the color was, of course, but in her mind, the word came to her in the old language. The language she had spoken as a child.

  “Back in the old country,” she remembered vividly. “Before I was cast out.” She shuddered at the memory of that day. It was so clear that she searched her mind again to make sure it had actually happened long ago and not yesterday.

  She knew what was happening to her, although she couldn’t believe so much time had passed already. Her mind was making itself new again.

  When one of her people lived more centuries than their memory could retain, the mind began to erase insignificant details. This was necessary, or the Girl would go mad. The most important details and the events she held dearest would linger the longest. If she was lucky, she would be able to retain them even after her mind reset.

  Sitting in the tree limbs, she felt anguish over the realization that she might forget Janie and the children. She sat completely still for a moment. “Would that not be a gift?” some part of her thought. “I wouldn’t remember the heartbreak of losing them. I would forget my shame of the pain I caused them. I could just be me again.” The Girl twirled lichen around her fingers while she considered this outcome.

  The sound of women talking broke through her pensiveness, and she peered down through the wide green maple leaves. She remembered these women. They were some of hers, and she smiled. “That’s Cora...and that one is Posie,” she thought with assurance. Cora came to visit Robina and every winter to ask the Ash for the Yule log.

  ‘Why on earth did you buy it?” Posie asked her mother.

  “Well, she meant to sell it, and I didn’t want it to go to some stranger,” Cora answered as she made her way into the clearing. She turned a slow circle as she assessed the view. “What if they came in and cleared all the trees? Built an apartment complex? This land has been in the family for centuries. The Milton descendents kept the farm, and Janie Swavely’s descendents got the Hill.” She turned to Posie, “It’s our heritage. It’ll be your heritage.”

  Posie wrapped her arms around each other and shivered as if she were cold though the air was temperate. The Girl hadn’t seen her in many years, and she could tell Posie didn’t like this place. She searched her failing memory for a reason why, and finally located an image of Posie as a young girl in the forest with Robina. “My little friends scared her,” she recalled, and she regretted that any of her kin wouldn’t feel at home here. Looking back on that day, though, the threat had been how close Robina had come to finding Janie’s book. The crows had only been cawing to Robina, but of course Posie was at her side. “She couldn’t have known, couldn’t have known,” the Girl murmured.

  Posie looked upwards sharply as if she had heard something. A blue jay darted down from the trees and seemed to appease Posie that the bird was all she heard. She turned back to her mother. “What will you do with it? None of us are going to live up here.”

  Cora tilted her head from side to side. “We’ll see,” she said as if she knew a secret. She gestured towards one of the paths on the other side of the clearing. “Let’s have a stroll since we’re here. This path will take us down and around back to the car. A little longer route than the one we just climbed, but not as steep.”

  The Girl watched Cora take her daughter’s arm so they walked side by side. They disappeared into the trees, but the Girl stayed where she was. She looked around her and spied a bird. Speckled breast. Long beak. Black and red hat. This was called a special name; she almost had it. Something...something....

  “Sapsucker,” she remembered.

  ********

  The Girl turned in her sleep and whimpered on this night as she had the last several. She would wake in the morning with the unease of her dreams clinging to her and know that she hadn’t slept well. Tomorrow would be no different.

  She turned again, and the chipmunks that had crept in after dusk had to huddle closer for her warmth. For a few moments, they watched her brow furrow and her hands clench. They were helpless to alter the course of the Girl’s dreams, though, and soon curled themselves into tight, furry balls of slumber around her.

  In her bed, the Girl twitched now and again. In her mind, she was chasing after a Boy who was more swift than she. She laughed and yelled for him to “Wait!” His own laughter drifted back to her on the wind as she watched him run even faster. The red hair down to his shoulders flew behind him, and the heels of his feet flashed at her as she tried to catch him.

  Some lucid part of her twitched again in her bed and thought, “I know him.” Her dream-self didn’t have to struggle with remembering. This was her friend she was chasing. This was Dovny. They had been together almost since birth. She was his betrothed, and he was her protector.

  He slowed now and let her catch up to him. She pulled alongside of him and watched him pretend he was winded. He smiled at her with a grin that matched her own, and they loped side by side until they neared the edge of the forest.

  In unison, they slowed to a walk and then crouched low to creep closer to the edge. The veil became thin here, and they would need to step carefully to ensure no one on the other side of the barrier would see them.

  Often they came here to peer at the men who worked the fields. They liked to watch how the men’s muscles swayed and flexed. They enjoyed listening to the men’s voices as they sang. The men’s bodies were so much longer than their own and their voices so much lower in vibration.

  The Girl and the Boy were used to spying on the men as they worked far across the field, but today they were surprised to find them much closer to the edge of the woods. The men usually toiled with their ploughing and struggled against the land. What they did in this late morning light was different. Something shimmered in their hands and then was put down in the sheared crop to glint in the sun.

  “What is it?” the Girl whispered. The Boy shook his head in reply. He didn’t know what it was any more than she, but he could feel a power to it. A slight humming that travel
ed along the ground as the men set it down.

  Later, she would wish she had never asked. She would wish she had known to tell him, “Stop. Stay here with me.” Instead, she simply watched when he had ventured to the very edge of their barrier. She held her breath when he boldly stepped beyond it.

  The men had paused in their work and left the fields, so the Boy thought there was little risk. Certainly, many of his kind had ventured into the land of men, and he himself had done so more than once before. He knew the Girl had not. She was satisfied with their home and the rules of their People. What need had she for the world of men?

  The Boy was curious, though. He liked to steal away. Today was no different in that regard. How could he foresee what the cost would be when there had been no harm done to him in the past?

  He stepped beyond the treeline into the clearing and heard the Girl hiss at him in objection. The outlying crops had not yet been cut, and the Boy had plenty of cover to creep closer. Seed heads swayed above him in the breeze. Now and then, a gust of wind parted them enough for him to see the glimmer ahead.

  “What is it?” he asked himself and peered cautiously to be sure that no one in the field remained to observe him.

  The men had laid the long objects in the shape of a square, and the Boy could see now that it was a type of metal. Not a metal of the earth - not like his People had ever seen. There was a vibration to it that was clearly unnatural, and yet the Boy wanted to reach for it. He put out his hand, and he heard the Girl yell to him, “Come back!” He couldn’t stop himself. His hand grasped the metal and grew cold from the touch. When the cold reached his shoulder and began to creep across his chest, the Boy tried to let go.