“Do I have a dowager’s hump?”
“No. Yours is so special that it came with you. You didn’t need to earn it.”
They finished rounding the house. Three acres of manicured grounds, flowering trees in pink, white, and lavender, and a host of ground color, widened Willow’s eyes. “Our house has yellow dandy, um, lions,” she said.
The cat cane swung again, moving left to right in the air. “Magnolias, lilacs, tulips, jonquils, peonies, bleeding hearts.” The cane stopped. “That tree there is your tree.”
She led Willow to the far side of the yard, rather than into the garden. They looked down a long and steep hillside covered in clover, wild phlox, Dutchman’s breeches, and Bloodroot. Bees hummed over the acres. The plunge of wild and unfarmable land ended at a field with green shoots of corn just breaking ground. Beyond that ran the same band of trees I remembered so well. The shiny belt of the Elkhorn River running through them. Still farther was the squat settlement of Greenburr: one street of businesses, skirted by a compact grid of square blocks holding both small homes and one-hundred-year old stately mansions.
“It’s beggarly to never know land,” Luessy said. “I’ve lived on this hill all my life. I know its shape, sound, and what the trees want. I know the path the wind takes coming up here and how that changes with the seasons.” As if conjured, a sudden breeze blew over Luessy’s face, and she breathed deep. “A person must take root and commit to staying before the spirit of the land speaks to him.”
Willow listened less to Luessy’s actual words than to their tone and numbers. Mémé talked funny and constantly, not a match to Papa.
Turning from the slope, Luessy nodded in the direction of an old and crumbling foundation with plugs of thick-growing grass studding the cracks, the remains of Peu de Nid. The chiseled rocks, the size of kitchen kettles, were still stained black by the sweeps of flame that ravaged it so many years before. Though the home had been rugged and cold in the winter and Thomas dead many years, I still refused to leave it and move across the yard to live with Luessy. Until the fire.
“Do you remember that small house?” Luessy asked. When Willow shrugged, ‘no,’ Luessy continued, “My uncle built the place for my aunt, Amelie-Anais. He’d traveled to Europe and met her in France.” There was still no reaction from Willow. “She eventually learned English, but for a long time her speech was halting. When she went down the hill to shop, a few folks there—only second-generation immigrants themselves—snickered over her accent and sparse vocabulary. They liked to ask each time where she lived. She must have thought them fools for never remembering, but she was a lady. She’d point up here over and over and tell them again, ‘Farthest house.’ The town began referring to her place by that name. They called the road coming up here ‘Old Squaw Road’ because of the Indian women who came to Amelie for help.”
“Real Indians were here?”
“At times. Much of my uncle’s work was with the Omaha Tribe. They trusted him, and the women came to trust my aunt.”
Willow had no interest in the ruined foundation, but she stared at the waist-high stack of grave rocks where I unknowingly drifted. I hadn’t meant to settle on the gravestones, and I never expected I’d taken on such weight that she could see me. She pointed. “Who’s that?”
“Do you mean the crosses? My aunt and uncle are buried there.” It wasn’t what Willow had asked, but the child’s comment was unnerving. Luessy scolded herself. What was she doing? Trying to force Willow to remember things she shouldn’t be remembering? “It’s a good thing your father isn’t here,” she said. “He’d have plenty to say about my carrying on.” She took Willow’s hand again and steered her in the opposite direction. “See those white boxes? Jonah’s tending his bees. He’s anxious to meet you.”
Turning from the stones was hard for Willow, but Luessy insisted. “Don’t get too close to the hives, not until we’re sure the bees know you.” Her voice lifted, “Jonah! Willow is here.”
Seeing Jonah eased some of my pain, if not my guilt. He’d survived the years and still lived at Farthest House, though I knew living was not thriving.
He stepped from the shadows between the four columns of stacked white boxes: four hives, each three crates high. Willow saw a small man with skin the same black/brown of Friar’s eyes. He held a dented and rusty smoker and wore bib overalls with two faded shirts beneath. Old too, Willow thought, a match to Mémé. At his temples, gray wooly hair sprang from beneath a fraying straw hat, the hair sparkling in the sunlight. As they started for him, he set down the smoker and started for them. Willow marveled at the droop of his eyes; the outside corners had slid down, closing his eyes by half. The skin beneath his eyes, pads thick as thumbs, sagged. Her stomach danced as it did whenever she found new picture books in the library: flying carpets, Babar going to the circus, cows sneezing, and Jack climbing a bean stalk straight into a giant’s house. Mémé’s place, too, was full of magic.
“Here’s Willow,” Luessy said.
Willow heard the pride riding the tops of her grandmother’s words, and she wanted to speak for herself. “My name comes from a tree.”
Jonah removed his hat and wiped his forehead with the cuff of his shirt. “My name is Bug, and that’s because of a bug.”
She stared. His face was geography.
“Wasn’t no bigger than you,” he said. “Oh, was it a hot day at my colored school.” He nodded slowly, as if the memory rolled toward him from a distance and needed waiting on. “A brown roach crawled outta my sleeve. It was a bad morning already, my clothes stinking something awful and nobody wanting near me. Seemed to me that I walked alone in the world. Then, here come that bug right smack out onto the plank table. The only thing willing to get close to me. I stared at them two little feelers on his head just a twitchin’, him trying to figure out where to hide. That bug had crawled up and down my arm without my even knowin’. I owed it something for not minding me and my black skin, and I hurt so bad with loneliness, I wanted him back in my clothes.”
Luessy listened quietly, giving Jonah’s story its time.
He leaned closer, and Willow closer to him. “I was considering on that,” he continued, “when a little girl about your size, sitting way down at the end, a pretty thing I’d set my eyes on, started crying and pointing at my bug. You’d a thought the feller a ten-foot rattler. Teacher locked me the whole afternoon in the outhouse. Said I smelled like I belonged there.” Jonah waited again on the story, glancing from Luessy back to Willow. “Once that door closed, ah, the stink and heat in there, I’d like to have fainted straight into the privy. Spiders and beetles black as me come out after a bit, covering the floor and wanting on my bare feet. Dancing was no good lest I wanted them under instead of over. I was too mean to scream. I had to get my mind around them bugs, tell myself they liked me, and there was no difference between us.” He nodded toward the hives, “I guess that’s stayed with me.”
He put his hat back on. “That was my last day of school. When teacher let me out, I ran all the way to the shack where I’d been holing up by myself. I never went back. Still, I’d gotten the name Bug, and it followed me to the streets. Caused me many a black eye and bloody nose before I figured if I was goin’ lose all the fights, I was too runty a fellow to mind name calling.”
When he finished, Willow told a story about herself. “Jeannie died.”
Luessy’s eyes widened, but Jonah’s continued to droop. “Yup. That’s a fact,” he said.
The two had said a lot to each other. They were friends now, Willow believed, even if she couldn’t say exactly how. “Do the bees sting you?”
“It’s me steals their honey, and a sting’s good medicine for what ails you.”
“If I was a bee,” she whispered, her eyes lowering to the neat patches on the knees of his pants, “I wouldn’t ever sting you.”
“Yup. I wouldn’t ever sting you either.”
Luessy and Jonah began talking roses, and Willow snuck a peek back to where I s
at. “A lady is there.”
The two adults glanced in the direction of her pointing. Seeing she indicated the graves, Jonah took a small, but quick step back. “Best be finishing my work.” The last thing he wanted, and with good reason, was a child able to see the buried dead.
Willow headed for me and Luessy followed. I looked at myself, surprised to see I wore the pale blue dress I’d been married in. Rows of beads decorated the waist and cuffs, caught light, and sparkled. To my further surprise, a drawing lay in my lap. The picture was of Sabine. My poor Sabine. She hadn’t been cursed with my back, and were it not for my shoulder and our age difference, we might have looked like twins. Perhaps I only wished it true, needing us to have that sisters’ bond. When I fled to America with Thomas, she’d still been full of a child’s playfulness, romping with the dogs and sheep, sticking her nose into everything from the baking in the kitchen to the milking and grape pressing, her hair always flying free of its ribbons and pins. Then, the letter came from France and Mme. Francoise, the ancient apothecary who lived on a stool in the corner of The Beast’s kitchen. The letter explained Sabine was a new mother with a daughter she named Luessy. The letter went on telling how Sabine cut her hair off and cleaved two fingers to the first knuckle.
In the drawing, a picture I painted long ago and lost when Little Nest burned, Sabine’s beautiful hair was short and ragged-edged. I’d imagined her cutting it in a wild frenzy of self-hatred, sorrow, and panic. I painted her hands twisting in her lap, two fingertips on the right hand severed. Bright red blood and thick darker clots ran from the wounds. Now, that blood was alive, rolling off the paper, bleeding onto and soiling my blue dress.
Willow reached me. Her stomach told her not to look in my lap, but she did. She let out a small cry, cringing and pulling Doll to her face, only peeking over the top of the toy’s bald head.
Luessy put a hand on her shoulder and wanted to say, “Nothing is there,” but she knew better. “Let’s go inside now. I have someone else I want you to meet.”
The dress, the picture, the blood? Seeing my Luessy so much older, Tory with the taste of ashes in her mouth, Jonah in his decrepitude, returning to Farthest House and Thomas’s grave, I’d been sucked back in. It wasn’t that I needed Willow to help me find Tory, Luessy, and Jonah, but because of her I could no longer escape doing so.
They left the yard, Willow reluctantly, while I remained mired, the slick ether of time sucking me back to my childhood. I felt myself back in my child’s body, struggling, fighting for life. I was wedged into the tightness of the long cave tunnel. My breathing was ragged with the effort of staying alive, my toes pushing, my fingertips blistered from clawing stone. I counted: “…twelve, thirteen, fourteen…” my age. The counting helped keep panic at bay and measured my progress. At the count of thirty, I’d find the cave and be able to fill my lungs with air. And for as long as I chose to remain—I’d be safe.
The numbers also distracted me, however briefly, from my self-loathing. I bore the weight of a hundred mortal sins when a single one meant eternal damnation.
Backing out of the tight passage was impossible. I had no choice but to keep struggling, keep inching ahead on my raw knees. Alone in the rock, my whimpering burbled out along the uneven walls, rolling out ahead of me into the pitch darkness and sounding like a trapped animal. I prayed no rock had dropped into the passage since the last time, since even something small would turn the shaft into my grave. I prayed, too, that I hadn’t gained an ounce of weight in the days since my last visit and the cave itself hadn’t imploded or filled with water in my absence. I prayed hardest that the spirits, who first called me, still haunted the stone.
Crawling, the body-tight rock scraping and bruising, the sharp juts of stone cutting my shoulders, I welcomed the yarn-thin rivulets of blood trailing down my arms and the tears dripping from my chin. Le Bête, The Beast, might have preached, “Washing you in the blood of the Lamb.” But I believed I could never be cleansed on either side of death.
Inside the stone, only my labored breathing accompanied me, not his voice booming down the ornate villa hallways, replete with religious paintings in gilded frames, my name spilling over his fat, wet lips. “Amelie-Anais!”
And my mother pushing, “Go. Go. Your bishop uncle has interest in your salvation.” Seeing what happened in the bishop’s wing, using the eyes of her heart, would have caused her untold grief and possibly that especially bitter sin against the church, doubt. He was the village priest, prệtre, though he called himself an Auxiliary Bishop, and told us all he’d soon be appointed Titular Bishop and then ordained a full bishop. It was far easier for my mother to stay blinded by the bright fury of her household duties, managing the melee of servants who saw to his meals and laundry, the totting of her accounts and meager allowance, and the tending to her religious duties: morning Mass, rosaries, visits to grottos, and her ornate book of prayers.
8
A year passed with Willow and I spending weekends at Farthest House. Julian came on Sunday evenings to get her for the week and gradually overcame his aversion to stepping inside. Often, he sat at the table over a plate of Mable’s cookies, conversing with his sister and mother. An outsider might have watched them and believed everything was good.
That spring, Willow stood on the school playground of Our Lady of Supplication, Sister Dominic Agnes at her side. She watched her classmates form a circle, one child skipping around the outside of the others, deciding at whose heels to drop a scarf. For the fourth day, the nun hadn’t let her join in, and for the fourth day, the nun was angry.
Sister Dominic Agnes’s immaculate white habit hissed, and the beads of her long rosary, hanging from her waist to nearly the ground, trembled, “Because I said, ‘No.’”
Willow’s good hand clenched a fistful of her blue-plaid skirt; her right hand hid in her sweater sleeve, invisible, but trembling.
When a boy dropped the scarf at the heels of Mary Wolfe, both he and Mary started running, but it was only Mary that Willow watched. Mary had the holiest girl’s name you could have and skin as pink as the painted statues in church. She had blue eyes, too, also like the statues and long hair as yellow as an angel’s. Every day, her hair was brushed back into a smooth and shiny ponytail and tied with a freshly ironed ribbon. Mary had a mother.
Willow blinked back tears. Through kindergarten and most of first grade, Mary had been her best friend. They skipped together at recess and sat side by side at lunch—Willow’s left ankle wrapped around Mary’s right, their legs swinging as though between them they had only three.
Then in early December, Sister Dominic Agnes rustled and puffed into the classroom to announce that Mary had been badly hurt. In order for Mary to live, they needed to pray hard. If they said enough rosaries, and if they were good rosaries, if the children prayed sincerely, no one’s mind wandering off the Sorrowful Mysteries, and no eyes getting sleepy, the Blessed Mother would count up all the numbers and tell Jesus, who would think about it, and maybe He’d trade the prayers and let Mary Wolfe get well.
With that burden on their shoulders, Willow’s class lifted the tops of their desks and pulled out strings of beads and offered up “Hail Marys” like dropping pennies in a jar for Jesus. Three rosaries every school day: the first thing in the morning, after they’d eaten their peanut butter sandwiches at lunch, and before leaving in the afternoon—struggling to pay off whatever ransom Jesus wanted. Each time they said a rosary, Sister Dominic Agnes cut and pasted another link to her black construction paper chain. Jesus needed to know they were very sad. Willow imagined Jesus visiting the dark and empty classroom with his mother at night (because He let only very special people see Him), walking in His sandals alongside the chain, counting the links, three new black circles each night. The number was always three, always matching.
Now, five months later, Mary had returned. On Monday of that week, with the chain draping across the top of the blackboard and down the sides and up to snake over the tops of all the c
lassroom windows, Mary walked into the room.
Jesus had let her get well. All that day, the other grades, K through twelve, filed into the first-grade room with their nuns or lay teachers and admired the funereal rope, their heads swinging back and forth as they looked from one end to the other and then at the beaming Sister Dominic Agnes and then at Mary sitting shyly in a chair placed at the front of the room. Even Father Steinhouse, the parish priest, came into the classroom and nodded approvingly at Sister Dominic Agnes and laid a hand on Mary’s head. Tuesday, a few parishioners visited. Wednesday and Thursday, no one came. No footsteps in the hallway resulted in believers entering, though each time someone passed the door, Sister Dominic Agnes stopped her instructions and waited. Now, on Friday, she’d hung a sign beneath the chain: Sister Dominic Agnes’s Miracle.
All of which Willow knew, meant Mary was a saint. Jesus let her get really hurt, and then the rosaries changed His mind, and He fixed her. Something He’d not done for Willow.
On the playground, Sister Dominic Agnes’s habit rustled again, and she buried her right hand into her left sleeve and her left hand into her right sleeve. “I’ve looked through my book of Catholic Saints,” she said. “There’s no saint named Willow. I think I must remove you from the May procession.”
Willow’s breath caught. She and her class had been practicing and planning for the procession, and she told both Mémé and Papa how the girls would march up the center aisle of the church in two lines, and then “fold open like wings,” and one line would go down each of the side aisles and into their pews. She’d practiced walking back and forth in front of Papa, taking slow, careful steps while keeping her eyes straight ahead. The procession was also special because Mary’s parents bought each girl a small, white basket to be filled with flower petals.
“I’ve taught school at Our Lady of Supplication for thirty-seven years,” Sister Dominic Agnes said. “The children have always had at least one Catholic name to put on their scapulars.” She looked down her nose at Willow. “Missionaries got around these problems by assigning Christian names, but our problem is more serious.”
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