Later, the Girl will tell the others how he had struggled. He had seemed to want to pull away, but the strange metal would not let him. She would tell the People about the look in his wild eyes, how his skin had turned black and then sagged away from his face until it fell away completely. The skin fell away from his face and from his body and lastly from his hands. Only then did the Girl feel she could move her limbs to go to him. She had run across the field heedlessly. She had pulled the Boy back to the forest, back under the cover of their trees, and she thought that surely he would be healed now that she had done so. She stayed with him until she understood that his eyes would never open again, and then she had run for home.
The Girl cried out in her sleep, and her arm lashed at invisible terror. She dreamt of the Boy’s family and their grief. She saw their terrible faces as they asked the Elders for retribution. The Girl relived the moment she realized that the Boy’s relations did not mean to retaliate against the world of men. Instead, they said the Girl should be the one to suffer.
“The Girl was careless,” the matriarch had spat. “She has brought our family ruin. She will bring the People ruin.” She implored to the Elders, “What she has taken from us, so should she surrender.”
The Girl wakes from her nightmare. If she closes her eyes again, she knows she will still see the Boy’s family on the day they lashed out at her with their long nails. They had caught in the bracelet her mother had given her. The Girl could hear the fastener snap and the clink of the jewels as they fell to the stones underneath her feet. They had caught at her clothing. In her panic, she had spun away, and she could even now hear the sound as the cloth ripped apart. She could still see her People in the background. There were even those who could have intervened. Her own family could have asked for mercy.
“Why do they not? Why do they not?” she asked herself now just as she had thought to herself that day long ago. In that far away world that she had found the courage to run from. The People she had left when she realized she would have to be her own salvation.
She sees the edge of the land again. She hesitates not a moment but dives again for the waters. She shudders as she reacts to the shock of the cold.
The chipmunks fidget around her to reclaim the warmth. For their sake, she reclines and lets them huddle close again. They are a comfort to her as are the glow worms that share their cave with her. She closes her eyes, and the creatures glow brighter in hopes of easing her fitful sleep.
________
Chapter: Posie
She could hear her daughter talking softly to Zack as she stood at the top of the stairs. She had only meant to come down the hallway to turn out the light, but the sounds of the two of them quietly sharing the darkest part of night made her creep closer to the edge of the stairway. She stood there listening; it didn’t matter that she couldn’t hear their exact words. Their tone and swell of voices told her all she needed to know. Being aware of what other people were thinking and feeling without them saying a word had always been her gift. Applying her skills now, she could tell that Zack loved her daughter, and that her daughter was holding back even though she probably loved him, too. The specter of the deceased still clung to her eldest girl. Violette’s desire to put distance between her and the place of tragedy is what most likely had driven her back home from the other side of the country. Then Cora had passed not long after Violette returned, and it had only deepened her daughter’s sorrow.
“I’ll have to help that along,” Posie thought to herself. Images of hawthorn and scents of camphor popped into her head. She pushed them to the back of her mind until she could focus on a remedy tomorrow.
Only hours earlier, they had all passed a pleasant evening together. Her youngest daughter had arrived with her grandchildren, and then her own sister had arrived. Even Violette’s new beau had knocked on the door before her eldest was home. Posie had gone out to the shed to get this year’s log that she had brought down from the Hill, and when she returned, Violette had magically appeared.
“Isn’t that how it always is with her?” she had thought as she stamped the snow off of her boots. She spied her eldest hurrying over to her out of the corner of her eye.
“I can take it, Mom,” Violette offered.
“I have it,” her tone was more dismissive than she intended as she trudged past to lay the new Ash log at the front base of the already set woodpile in the rack.
Laurel, her youngest, moved a basket full of greenery, pine cones, a small pouch of flour, and two large bottles of cider from a corner of the room. Posie left briefly to hang up her coat and brought Zack and her granddaughter Maven back into the room when she returned. Maven insisted on putting all of the greenery on the Yule log herself and asked them to sing carols. Posie smiled because this had always been Laurel’s favorite part. Laurel sat close to the fireplace, and Maven had a brief heated argument with her mother when she caught Laurel rearranging a few of Maven’s placements.
“It started to fall! I just caught it and put it back,” Laurel fully lied to her daughter. Maven was lulled by her explanation and just as quickly resumed her happy mangling of “The Holly Bears a Berry.” The chorus she nails perfectly and yells, “Holly! Holly! Oh the first tree that’s in the greenwood, it was the holly!”
When it came time to dust the flour along the log, she backed away. As fussy as Laurel was at her age, Maven was worse. She didn’t want to mar her green velvet holiday dress. Posie’s sister Sophie removed the small pouch from the basket to open it while Violette splashed one of the ciders on top of Maven’s decor. When Violette stepped aside for Sophie to do her part, Posie watched her glance at Zack to gauge his comfortability. She had been relieved that he seemed curious but relaxed.
A spark of light drew her eyes back to the fireplace where Laurel knelt. The small piece of last year’s log had been nestled with ample tinder underneath the log rack. In this way, as Laurel lit the fire, we ignited the new with the old.
“Yay!” Maven threw her hands up over her head and moved from one leg to the other as the fire caught. Her little brother, completely unaware of what was happening, mimicked his sister. While the two of them cheered and danced around the room, she placed the screen in front of the fire. Aunt Sophie opened the second bottle of hard cider to pour for each of them, and Laurel went to get the apple juice from the refrigerator so her kids would be included. She nestled them near the warmth of the fire with their juice and coloring books. The rest of them waited for her on the sofa and armchairs. She chose a seat next to Violette on the couch and linked their arms. Posie knew she was excited to have her sister home after living far away for so many years. They spent an hour in front of the warmth sipping their cider as they talked about whatever came to mind. Laurel kept a close eye on the Yule log which would need to burn through the night and smoulder through the next twelve. She had first watch to ensure that it would last until dawn and still have a small piece to save to light next year’s fire. When Maven’s and Connor’s eyes began to droop, she packed up all their belongings. She blew a kiss goodnight as she trundled them into the car.
“More cider for us!” Aunt Sophie declared after Laurel had left. She refilled their glasses and took over the firewatch. After a half an hour, Posie had said goodnight and took her glass with her to bed.
“My mother’s a very early riser as she gets older,” she heard Violette explain to Zack as she mounted the stairs. “She’ll be up by 3 a.m. and will take over the watch from me.”
She had crawled into bed with her book but must have fallen asleep halfway through a chapter. The hallway light was still shining under her bedroom door, and she had risen slightly annoyed that no one had turned it off from downstairs. She pulled herself out of bed and walked the length of the corridor. Sophie would have left for home by now, and the only voices she heard were Zack’s and Violette’s.
She heard her daughter begin to sing a familiar carol and turned down the hallway. Back in bed, she pulled her covers up around her
neck and closed her eyes again. It was the dream that woke her earlier. She tried to capture the details of it now, but they slipped away like pea tendrils harvested from the garden. With the dream gone, her mind went back to earlier in the week when she had gone up to the Hill.
She only ever went up there once a year, and always it was for the Yule log. Her husband used to go with her. She was always thankful that he was there to protect her. She could never understand how he could only talk about how beautiful the land was. He even pressed her to let him build a house up there. Standing right beside him, she could only look around and think, “Doesn’t he feel it?” There was a pulse of energy that ran along the ground and thumped against her feet, trying to get inside her. “Can’t he see it?” she wondered another time as the dark shadows edged around them in the forest canopy. “He must think they’re just crows,” she decided on yet another occasion.
She had shuddered when he had said he wanted to build a home there. “I will never live on this hill,” she vehemently told him. He had taken one more look around, then shrugged, and never brought the topic up again the rest of their marriage.
This year had been the first she had gone there alone in her life. She had always accompanied her mother until Cora became too frail, or she made Carl come with her. She knew she should have started training her own children long ago, but Violette was six until Posie felt stable enough to have her back. Then her youngest was born, and all her focus went into Laurel. Before she knew it, her eldest was out of high school and running as far away as she could get. Posie had tried to take Laurel once. She had refused to get out of the car. She didn’t like bugs, and the trees, she had said, “looked scratchy.”
Posie sighed and turned onto her side. Neither of her girls seemed to have much magic to them. She thought perhaps it was her fault. They were both pretty and accomplished in their own ways, but neither had more than a hint of glimmer to them that she could discern. Cora had sometimes had a glowing around her in the right amount of shade and light. Posie knew that she herself had some extra spark inside her, not that it had helped her in life in any way that she could see. If her daughters had anything, it had only accentuated the extremes of their personalities. Her eldest: headstrong and dramatic. Although Violette did seem to have a capability to find objects when they were lost. Her youngest: overly emotional always and shrill at times. Laurel seemed to know when circumstances were about to take a turn for the worse, a gift that only added to her high-strung nature. She knew something still lingered in their bloodline. Her granddaughter Maven seemed to have an extra sense, but time would tell if her gift stayed with her as she aged. Posie thought back on all the stories Cora had told her about their ancestors, and then her thoughts turned back to her latest visit to the Hill.
The ground had pulsed against her as it always did. She wished she could just harvest the Yule log from the base of the land as she did with the holly and pine boughs, but the Ash only grew along the wildflower meadow. The black shadows flitted around her as she made her way along the trail. She knew if she turned to study them, they would resemble the crows that used to follow her great-great-great-great Aunt Constance when she walked in the woods. But they didn’t feel like crows. When she looked at them with just her peripheral vision, they seemed larger than the common black birds, and they shambled along the tree limbs instead of flying.
The log presented itself to her. At least, that’s what it felt like. Setting there, equidistant between two Ash and exactly perpendicular. “It should have a bow around it,” she thought and eyed it suspiciously. Exactly the correct size: large enough to last through the night but small enough for her to carry back down the Hill. It was always this way when her family came to claim the log for the coming year. Posie should be used to it by now, but every year she felt uneasy about the find.
“Be thankful that the forest provides. Always,” her mother had told her when she was a younger girl, and as a girl she had done so. Her brief years of love for the Hill had long past. For a long time now, the trek up the Hill was only a duty to add to her others.
When the shapes that looked like crows moved closer, she had picked up the log and hurriedly started back to the car. The trek down should have been faster, but for some reason it never was. The forest floor was dark this time of year with only grey skies to light the tree canopy and no snow yet to brighten the forest floor. Posie could hear the crows skittering down the treeline, and she willed herself to think of times when she saw beautiful things here.
The years when her father would bring her to see her Aunt Robina. If her father was there to perform a maintenance task, her cousin whom they all called Aunt would pack a thermos of hot tea for them and take her on an adventure hike. The first time Robina had ever taken Posie, she had told her that they were looking for a secret cave that glowed orange. When Posie had asked her why, her Aunt had told her, “Because our family lost something there, a long time ago, and I’d like to get it back.”
“What was it? The thing that got lost?” Posie had asked.
Her Aunt Robina had told her what she wanted to hear. She realized that when she was a few years older. Robina had said the cave held a special book full of magic and a treasure map. They were exactly the objects that a ten year old girl would search for willingly.
Posie felt she had traveled over every inch of that hillside. She had searched every thicket of brush. They followed deer trails and searched the wildflower meadow. They peeked inside the crevices formed by giant rock piles. Once, Posie had climbed a tree to try to get a better vantage point, but all she found were rolling hills beyond their own.
She wasn’t certain if her father knew that her Aunt Robina was searching for something. Robina always just waved at him and said, “We’re going on an adventure. Be back in a bit.” Her father was a quiet man. He never asked her what she did on their hikes. They would ride home in pleasant silence and the soothing calmness that always emanated from him.
Aunt Robina had been a beauty when Posie was a young girl. Little by little, over the years as they searched the hillside for her imagined treasure and never found a speck of it, the beauty of her Aunt eroded. As an adult, Posie should be able to look on the fading beauty as something that happens to us all. She could rationalize that all she had seen was her Aunt Robina getting older, but something inside Posie whispered that it was the disillusionment of not finding the special cave that made her Aunt’s lip begin to curl derisively. Silky black curls turned to brittle gray locks that hung drably around her face when they weren’t pulled back into a bun. Her Aunt had clenched her fists too many times in frustration that now they simply held the form and hung like half curled hooks when they rested by her sides.
When her eldest had been young, and Cora had been unable to watch her for a day, Posie knew that Violette would visit with Aunt Robina as well. This didn’t occur often, but there was enough frequency to make her fret slightly about what her own daughter would experience up there. She would always ask her afterwards, “What did you and Aunt Robina do today?”
She would hold her breath and wait for the answer, but all her daughter ever said was, “We played Yahtzee. And I helped get the eggs from the chickens. And I got to hold one of the bunnies.”
Posie would sigh her breath out with quiet relief. “Nothing to worry about,” the voice inside her whispered. “Aunt Robina gave up that search long ago.”
She had been there, the day her Aunt had given up. They had found a faint trail that neither of them remembered being down before. A strong gust of wind had stirred the autumn colored leaves away from the forest floor in a swirl of color, and the winding downward path had emerged. They had followed it past a stand of four Ash, and just a little farther on, Posie had seen a flash of orange light.
“Did you see it?” her Aunt had turned to her sharply. She had put her clawed hand on Posie’s thin arm. “Did you see the glow, too?”
“Ye-yes,” she had stammered. She had been frightened by her Aun
t’s countenance and the elevated tone of her voice.
“Come on,” her Aunt had pulled her along. They had walked a few feet more before a wind gust whipped the evergreen tree boughs around them. The trees slashed at their faces, and they both threw their arms up to protect their eyes. When the wind stopped, and their hands were lowered, the path they had been following was hidden underneath a thick coat of newly dropped leaves. Posie blinked her eyes in confusion. Every direction looked the same, although Posie knew that couldn’t be right. The stand of four Ash should have been behind them, but as she rotated where she stood, trying to get her bearings, several groupings of four Ash seemed to be on all sides of them.
“No!” she heard her Aunt say and turned to face her. By the look on her face, she expected her Aunt to start yelling. Robina had even opened and closed her mouth several times, but no words escaped her. Instead of harsh words, her Aunt simply closed her mouth and went silent. Her face went slack and dull as Posie watched all the rage disappear somewhere back inside of her.
“This way,” her Aunt had gently taken her hand and led her along a new trail that had appeared. They soon found themselves back at the wildflower meadow, and from there it was just a short walk away to her little house.
Posie stopped visiting after that day. She made excuses to her father when he invited her to go up to the Hill with him. She didn’t want to turn into what her Aunt had become: bitter, dejected, hopeless. Posie could tell herself that this is what happened to many women whether or not they believed they lived on a Hill that held magical secret places close to its own heart. Posie could tell herself that the wind had merely tricked them a little that day long ago. That they had simply gone down a trail they had actually been down before but hadn’t recognized it. That there had been no flash of orange glow or perhaps that the sun had glinted off of something and created the momentary splash of light. That as they had turned to head home, she had only seen black birds emerge from out of the dark tree canopy. Only some crows that followed along behind them to make certain they didn’t turn back.
Lineage Page 14