Copyright ©2014 by Margaret Lukas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from publisher.
Published by WriteLife, LLC
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Suite 202
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Cover Photo: “Textured Old Paper Background with White Datura Flower” © Tamara Kulikova
ISBN 978-1-60808-093-9
First Edition
FARTHEST
HOUSE
Margaret Lukas
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Pat Craig, Jan Novack, and Gail Weiland for graciously reading the manuscript not once, but twice, and offering their sage wisdom. Thanks to David Martin, Stu Burns and Marcia Calhoun Forecki for their helpful critiques. Thanks also to Jeff Kurrus, whose unwavering belief in me has kept me writing, and to Sam Rutten for letting me peer into his world of bees. My teachers, Ann Pancake, Kent Myers, Jonis Agee, Anna Monardo and Richard Duggin, thank you for your instruction and friendship. A special thanks to Stan Rubin and Judith Kitchen for welcoming me into the Rainier Writers Workshop. Cindy Grady and Erin Reel at WriteLife, thank you for your support and acumen. I couldn’t have done it without you.
And to my family, my husband Jim, and my children: Jen, Emily, Julie, and Dan, thank you. You’ve been an infallible source of encouragement and inspiration.
1
Should I begin this recounting with my early childhood in the 1860s along the Rhine River in eastern France? Begin there with life in the villa across the water from Germany’s Black Forest and its wellspring of fantastic tales? There at the foothills of the Vosges Mountains and its rock cliffs—the perfect height for young women no longer able to bear the weight of their lives?
Let me begin many years later, after my arrival in America and finally Nebraska. Let me begin with Jeannie and Farthest House. On the 3rd of May, 1960, I stood unseen in the sad bedroom, watching the small group huddled around her: the doctor, her husband Julian, and his mother. As Jeannie struggled in childbirth, we all prayed the doctor could somehow stop the excessive flow of blood. Had I been alive, I might have been of use, for I’d been something of an herbalist, picking up my skirts as a girl and trampling through the French countryside. Later, as a grown woman, I walked through trees and along the banks of the Elkhorn River searching for the medicinal plants I needed. But I’d been dead nineteen years. What could I do?
Jeannie’s husband, Julian, knelt beside the bed, holding her hand, whispering encouragements and placing cool cloths on her forehead. Watching grief and fear harden the muscles in his jaw—a man who at thirty-eight had already seen so much—tore at me.
The middle-aged family physician, Dr. Mahoney, placed shiny metal forceps on a clean white cloth, but he kept his scalpel tucked deep in his aging leather bag. He would not use it. He thought Jeannie a bleeder.
Need I say a person’s thoughts are never a secret? The living pretend not to know another’s thinking, but this is partly a human attempt at propriety, and partly a means of self-defense. The truth is, all things are energy with shape and color. Seen from the spirit world, all thoughts are as bright as washed jewels.
And so, I knew Dr. Mahoney was considering how every year medicine made bounding strides and how in 1960 the advances were nothing short of miraculous. However, he knew no doctor or procedure that could stop this volume of blood, and he had no intention of cutting into a hemophiliac—she must be—to try and perform a C-section. He wouldn’t try that during a home-delivery, not without assistants ready with clamps and pints of blood. He saw no point either in waking a volunteer to crank up the village’s old ambulance. A driver would need a few minutes to pull on his pants, find his boots, get to the fire station, and bring the ambulance up the hill. There’d be the time it would take to load Jeannie onto a stretcher, the strain and jostling she’d suffer being hoisted down the stairs on a gurney, and the thirty-mile trip to a hospital in Omaha. She’d be dead before the ambulance lights swung into the emergency lot. The infant with her. For the infant’s sake, it was best to keep Jeannie as still as possible. If the newborn’s head miraculously descended within reach of the forceps, he’d harvest the child. Then, if the mother still had a pulse, he’d pack her and call for the ambulance.
Julian’s mother, Luessy, paced but never stepped more than a few feet away before turning back, often needing to touch her son’s shoulder, only to pace again. Her hands went in and out of her sweater pockets. Her long gray braid lay quiet over one shoulder, and she watched the laundry basket in the corner with its growing heap of bloody, rubber-backed pads. She was a mystery writer, and she knew the human body held as many as a dozen pints of blood. How much more could Jeannie lose before she bled out?
As that last dark hour wore on, Jeannie, who through the evening endured stages of pain and sobbing, now only moaned. Softly, semi-consciously. Dr. Mahoney had given her sedation, and she’d lost so much blood that she also lost her desire to try and speak. She used her waning strength to will her heart to keep pumping until her baby entered the world. She knew she’d not walk Luessy’s rose garden again or live to raise her infant, but she’d fight for breath until she saw her child alive. She’d know whether she’d given life to a boy or a girl. She’d look into the infant’s eyes so that she could recognize her child when they met again.
I imagined Death pacing at the foot of her bed, rubbing his arid hands together, grinning at the blood—rose after rose, a garden blooming from between the young and too pale legs.
Julian whispered what we all knew were lies. “You’re doing great. The baby is almost here. Everything is fine.” He kept hold—as well as he could—of any display of the panic and sorrow he felt, letting the ocean fill his body, flood the air from his lungs, and slosh deluge through his heart. He’d offer up his 6’ 2” frame, but he’d not add to Jeannie’s pain and fear by revealing his own.
Finally, when we’d all given up hope, the bloody infant was pulled free. At the sight of the baby girl, and realizing the life they’d not share, Jeannie’s slowing heart cried out with dark grief, and her mind formed a single word: Murder. Though her fading awareness couldn’t process an explanation, a deep ticking told her that her death was from more than childbirth. She tried to move her lips, to speak the word “murder,” but Julian was staring at his daughter held in the air by her tiny feet, deep red half-circles—bite marks from the forceps, ringing her temples. And my mark, the protrusion on her right shoulder blade like the bud of a wing.
“It’s over,” he said to Jeannie. He kissed her lips, her cheeks, her eyes—already appearing haunted—and he imagined she tried to tell him something. “It’s all right,” his voice more frantic as he prayed that the birth meant the bleeding would stop now. “Just rest.” Again, he dressed her face in kisses, desperate to keep her conscious. He wanted to say of the infant, “She’s beautiful,” but the shoulder, the still-blue silence, shouldn’t she be crying, and his fear for Jeannie kept the words locked in his mouth.
Despite a flurry of effort and commotion on the doctor’s part, Jeannie’s eyes stared.
Several minutes passed before Luessy could blow her nose, yet again, and put the infant she’d cleaned and swaddled into the arms of Mable, her housekeeper and friend. Afraid the baby would not live, she avoided Julian’s arms, the weeping arms of her son. She picked up the small, bloody scissors from the cold pan holding the afterbirth, cut through the thick rope of tissue, and tucked a small piece of the infant’s string into her sweater pocket. This she took out into the night, swaying and chanti
ng across the wide yard to where the bodies of my husband, Thomas, and I lay buried. Rocks as our headstones. Under the stars, she wept again for Jeannie, for her son, and for the motherless infant. She buried the string there, at the foot of our graves, praying the act would keep the child alive and bind her to the land. Land which Luessy no longer saw as her own.
I feared the act tethered the child to graves.
Since slipping out of my own old body, I’d been waiting to find peace. At first believing the casket lid shushing closed over my wrinkled and powdered corpse meant my indecent affairs were also being buried—the ragged ends of my stained life finally knotted and vanquished beneath the overhead thud, the skittish and crumbling roll of shoveled dank earth. Jeannie’s slow and painful dying, however, proved there would be no rest for me. The family’s saga that began when I was eight years old, and the Affliction that struck years later, still groped like one of my uncle’s ring-decked hands up my childhood skirts, reaching now to the fourth generation. What was I to do? Here was a child bearing my mark on her shoulder, her string was now attached to my grave, and I carried guilt for Jeannie’s death. I vowed to stay with the infant. To comfort and help her however I could, for as long as she needed me.
Doubts plagued my decision, weeds in my mind, but if I could unwittingly slay from thousands of miles and across an ocean, couldn’t I companion from just beyond the veil of death?
2
Three days after Jeannie’s death, with her body put to rest only that morning in the village cemetery, the whole of Farthest House lay under a pall. By evening, Julian’s sister, my dear Tory, already middle aged but still living there, had poured herself a glass of sherry to still her nerves and gone up to her room for the night. In the kitchen, Mable stood at the sink in a navy caftan and washed the last of the day’s dishes. She turned to glance with concern at the black gardener sitting at the table. She’d made him fresh coffee and set out a plate of homemade cookies, but he stared straight ahead, ignoring both. His name was Jonah, and the outside corners of his eyes, which fell when he was still a young man, now gave him the appearance of a small and forlorn basset hound. The radio was on low, and a commentator talked about the signing that day of the Civil Rights Act and how Negroes celebrated in the streets. At sixty-one, with all he’d seen in his life, Jonah scarcely cared whether or not a new law had been signed. Earlier laws hadn’t helped, and he couldn’t rid his mind of thinking about the number of lynchings there’d been in just his lifetime. Lynchings. Human beings at their most inhuman and the sight of busted up black bodies swinging. On top of that, not three days since there’d been another death in the house. Some homes went a hundred years and crumbled in on themselves and never felt death.
I couldn’t watch his misery. Sorrow and guilt sent me from the room and into the library where Julian stood at a window holding his daughter, her body snug against his. After the mortician came and removed Jeannie’s body, Julian reached for the infant and took her to his room—as though only the two of them could understand what they’d lost. Since then, he’d not let the housekeeper, his sister, or even his mother tend to the infant. He gave the newborn each feeding, watching the clock regimentally for two-hour intervals, and changing each diaper, though he asked constantly, “Like this?” and “This way?” but not giving her over to other hands. Even during the funeral and at the graveside, he hung on to the infant.
Luessy stepped through the library door, her reading spectacles in one hand. Her wide skirt reached to mid-calf, and her shoes were “sensible.” She came quietly down the short aisle, scarcely glancing at the rows of books on either side. Avoiding the wide desk where she liked to spend her evenings reading, she studied her tall son. His time in France during the Second World War and his training at the Police Academy were years behind him, but he’d remained lean and strong. Until now. Now he looked fragile. She approached him slowly, “Your baby needs a name.”
Out the window, a young willow tree blew in an approaching spring storm, branches swaying back and forth in the evening light and fronds floating in the air. Julian’s gaze lifted from the young trembling tree and settled on his daughter. “Willow.”
“Willow,” Luessy repeated, pleased with the sound.
He turned back to the window and the first drops of rain. “I shouldn’t have brought Jeannie here,” he said. “I should have made sure she was in a hospital. That quack of a doctor should be thrown in jail.”
“Nonsense. Jeannie wanted to be here. Dr. Mahoney has delivered hundreds of babies. Nearly all of them in their homes. How could any of us have known?”
The skin along Julian’s clenched jaw blanched. “She trusted him. I shouldn’t have let her talk me into it.”
“You were born in this house. So was your sister. We just didn’t know.”
“Doctors are paid to know.”
Luessy saw the eyes of a hurt boy. “They aren’t gods.”
Willow stirred in his arms but didn’t wake. He’d not argue with his mother. It wouldn’t change anything. Dr. Mahoney failed Jeannie, but so had he. In that, he also failed Willow. His mind tripped over the name, Willow. His daughter. He would not fail her again. “You think I’ve got it?” he asked. “You think I understand what she needs? How to do it all?”
Luessy’s eyes dampened, and she looked to the small, sleeping face and the tuft of dark hair on the crown of her head. Julian, with his determined purpose and strong hands, had swaddled the infant so tight in her yellow receiving blanket it was a wonder she could breathe. And the way Julian held her, not rocking or cooing, but tight and tucked, he might have been holding a football. Luessy hesitated. She wanted to say, Heavens no, you’re not thinking of returning to Omaha so soon. Instead, she heard herself say, “Willow will teach you what she needs.”
“I can’t come back here.”
Swinging her hands behind her back was Luessy’s only way of keeping herself from grabbing her granddaughter. She thought of insisting that he leave the child there to be raised by the household of females, but this was Julian’s child, and he needed the infant. “I know how much you loved Jeannie, but someday this house will be Willow’s. I want this to be a second home for her while she’s growing up.”
Julian shifted his weight, ready to leave, but he stopped when Luessy dropped a hand on his forearm. “Take some time,” she said. And then, to keep him close a minute longer, “I know death can take years to heal. When you’re ready, bring Willow back here. I’ll be waiting.”
He lifted the baby to his shoulder, touching her soft cheek with his rougher one. He couldn’t explain his wanting to cut all ties to the house and everyone who lived there, but he did. “I need space. Don’t call, don’t hound me.”
“Hound you?” Luessy needed to sit, but she didn’t want to leave his side for a chair.
His brows pinched, apology grabbed his face. “I just mean you can’t fix this. You can’t mother me through and make it all right.” She looked tired—the last three days had aged her, too. She’d also lost Jeannie, and death had entered her house. “I know it sounds cold,” he said, “but let us go.”
He left her standing there. He couldn’t explain what he couldn’t understand. Loss for certain, shock, maybe even pity for himself and Willow, but that wasn’t all. Jeannie had needed him to understand something, to give her dying moment some assurance. He’d failed to understand, failed to give her what she needed. Now Willow needed away from where everything went bad, and she needed kept away until the world righted itself. If ever the world would be right again.
3
When they left, no one imagined six years would pass so quickly. Willow lived in Omaha with hardly any knowledge of family outside of Papa. And me, Amelie-Anais, the ghost of her great aunt. I was the one Papa called imaginary each time she spoke of me, until at last, she quit mentioning me, though she often sensed me standing over her bed at night, soothing away tummy aches and restlessness. She moved me into ever lower regions of consciousness, but I never l
eft her.
On a May morning in 1966, she woke from a night of especially vivid dreams. Her right shoulder blade felt bruised from having spent another night on the hardwood floor, but she lay watching the sunlight stream in through her bedroom windows. Tiny dots of red, blue, green, yellow. Already she had an acute sense of color.
A faint sound grew and overtook her fascination with the bright motes. With a start, she realized the vibrations rivering through the floorboards came from boot heels striking the polished wood in the short hallway. Papa. She scrambled to her feet, and using both arms—even the weaker one she didn’t like—she grabbed up her blanket, pillow, and last of all Doll, shoveling them onto her bed. Falling onto the heap, she shut her eyes as tightly as she could and fought to keep them closed. Papa frowned when he caught her sleeping on the floor, and his frowns went into her mouth and down to her stomach and stayed there a long time.
When the sound said he’d entered the room, she peeked with one eye to be sure he saw her in bed. Now she could be awake, and she yawned and stretched and smiled at him. Her smile faded when he gave her only a distracted glance, only half his attention. He went instead to the wicker basket holding her clothes, moving the easy way she wanted to move, but not coming to her bed to ask her about bed bugs or to lean over and kiss her cheek with his whiskery face, maybe even to swing her into the air. He dropped a knee to the floor before the basket and began picking through her clothing. Watching him, Willow remembered what she’d seen the evening before, and her stomach began feeling saggy and heavy. Was he still so sad? She scooted off the heap of her blanket, kissed Doll, and hurried to stand beside him, aching to have him tell her everything was all right. “The bedbugs didn’t bite me.”
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