He was accompanied, increasingly, by forms in the dark. He tried to blame the drink, but adrenaline had inured him to the alcohol. Anyway, the illusion was not unpleasant, in fact the forms were increasingly graceful and the whispering was sweet. Deer and birds, sweet faces, bright eyes. While he was looking at them he realized he had left the path and he stopped to take stock.
What were they? The more he looked, the more substantial they seemed. And they were fair. The faces that formed were full of delight and they laughed with joy. They liked him, they wanted him to come and dance the forest paths with them. The whispering became singing, melody, music.
Willis held back. What, or who, were these windborne creatures? Where would they lead him? Well, after all, they were hardly real. What harm could there be in satisfying his youthful curiosity? Willis laughed out loud. The wind was a furor in him, and he danced with the angelic faces.
He rushed along with the slender ones through the splendid aisles of the woods. They drew him up where boughs lashed and clawed at the stars and owls rode the current silently. It was terrifying and thrilling and he gasped with fear and exhilaration.
It seemed only minutes until the gale seemed to be running out of energy. Far in the east, the stars were beginning to fade. It was time for him to get home. He was stone-cold sober by now. He would be wanted in the milking parlor in a short while. Papa would be knocking on the door to his room, innocent of his son’s wild night. He was stumbling weakly on the ground. A hand that had been holding his much of the night was growing cold and he sought to free his grasp. But more hands came from the darkness; cold, slender hands and lovely, desiring faces with wild gossamer hair and garments floating around them. The hands clawed him and their laughter was chilling as they drew him down. He could no longer find the boundaries of his own flesh; the cold of humus and quartzite stone, the seep of water and the fiber of roots bound him, muscle and bone.
There was nothing with which to cry out. Breath did not exist here, nor blood to pound. The cold stillness silenced all thought. He was trapped between one heartbeat and another. Leaves fell soundlessly and even the footfalls of deer were only a muffled echo in the suffocating moist chill, the dark of breathless ground.
But when full darkness fell again, the ground exhaled him with the angelic shapes. He simply found himself standing in the forest near the river, gasping desperately. He started, looking about him. Time for him to get himself… where? He had someplace to go. He knew the dancing shapes were will-o-the-wisping somewhere else in the woods, but his awareness of them was not urgent. Unsure of which way he should go, he simply started down the path. The stars sang overhead through the bare trees, and a few last leaves drifted down.
1982
Willis fell silent.
“And you’ve been wandering since,” Reverend Peterson said slowly. For the boy’s demeanor was irrefutable. For the moment, the minister ignored the part of his mind that insisted that the story was madness, twenty-one years notwithstanding. The young man believed it, they could start there. Maybe it was a metaphor, an allegory—it didn’t matter. The boy was lost.
“How long, Willis?”
Willis looked at him and smiled sadly.
“The better part of two centuries, sir.”
THE WHITE DRESS
2010
Violet went camping alone for the first time. She was eighteen. Her parents had reluctantly agreed. They had called ahead to let the Cronins know, and they agreed to make sure she got there okay, even though she had a cell phone by then and knew the route to the place like the back of her hand. It had been a three-hour drive to Blackbirch Woods from her home. She knew where her Dad stopped for coffee, and where they got ice cream on the way home, and which fast-food restaurant along the way had the cleanest rest rooms, just in case. The Cronins had not been around when she arrived, so she had left a note for them in the frame of the screen door, and walked the path alone in afternoon.
The family campsite was the only place she had wanted to go on her first day off from her post-graduation summer job. None of the friends she wanted to invite could ask for a day off, so close to the start of the summer. Violet decided to go solo. She packed her former school bag with a sweatshirt, mosquito repellent, trail mix, a roast turkey sandwich, candles, an old camping knife, a large bottle of drinking water and her Bible. It was only one night, so she would grunge out and not pack a change of clothes. The weather was hot, so she wore her old white sundress. Once, it had sported yellow flowers, but a miscalculation with bleach had washed them out to white outlines. The edges were frayed but she couldn’t let the dress go; it had always fit and felt so right.
Her siblings were all gone to college and the armed services now, and Mom and Dad didn’t want to go as often as when they were all kids together. They were beginning to talk about selling the place, although the kids objected vehemently.
Violet usually brought a friend or two along, but no one could go, and she actually thought it would be fun to have the place to herself. She could sing, dance, sketch, read, listen to any song she felt like as many times as she wanted.
And there was something there she needed to sort out, only she wasn’t sure what it was.
Arriving at the camping spot, Violet realized she had forgotten to bring a ground pad. Even in summer, she knew, the damp and cool of the ground could leak through the sleeping bag and make her uncomfortable in the night. No worries, she would make a pine-bough bed.
By the river’s edge, as twilight dimmed, she took her knife and cut feathery boughs from the fir and balsam saplings where they reached out for light over the water. As dusk faded, unease grew on her. The night was cool and the katydids were lax tonight. The birds settled in to nest. A bullfrog called mournfully now and again from the creek margin. She hadn’t really realized how weird it was to be alone. What if someone came?
Well, she could always pack up and go, but that seemed silly, and after all the assurances she gave her Mom and Dad that she would be fine, and the arrangements her parents had made. She cut a pine bough bed and piled the boughs near the fireplace. She prayed, and after a while she realized that her fears were just the unfamiliarity. Help was just a cell phone call away, and no one ever came out here anyway.
Did they?
She listened to a few of her favorite songs and ate a sandwich for supper. She set candles on the hearth. Then she decided to go out and see what the river was like this time of night.
She found a rock near the edge and let her feet drift in the cool water flowing by. She scoured her dirty feet in the sand. The Milky Way was a silver river in the sky, the Big Dipper poised to claim a drink from it. A few shooting stars streaked overhead. The moon was getting ready to come up and the stars in the east were paling in its light. She watched the gibbous, yellowish ball emerge through the trees over Signal Hill to the east until it cleared the hill and became pure silver white. Violet realized she felt happy to have her own thoughts and impressions, uninterrupted.
The wind stirred the trees. The sound of the thousands of maple, elm, birch and oak leaves moving seemed like singing. Violet decided it was one of her favorite sounds.
She became aware of another sound. It could be a deer, walking along their trail by the river. Violet sat up higher and watched the bank.
The few streaks of white moonlight through the waving trees hinted at a white shirt, glinted on tawny hair. It was a man coming. And the wind was getting stronger.
Violet was not afraid. She slipped behind the boulder she was sitting on. She could easily hide or even swim away. But beyond that, the form seemed somehow familiar to her, like an old friend, if she could only remember—
“Violet—it’s Willis,” she heard him call.
A shock of memories flooded her. She stood up, gasping with joy. He saw her and came quickly to where she was. She knew him, knew him well, but when dawn came he would be erased from her waking memory and only dreams would remain, slipping away to nothing but a restles
s unease.
She had last seen him the previous fall. Her family had come up for one last Indian summer campout.
That last time, they had had words.
Because he had tried to say goodbye.
GOODBYE
He had said goodbye. But here he was.
2009
“Violet, Violet, it’s me, Willis.”
In her sleeping bag in the tent, she heard his voice calling softly, and her heart leapt.
She slipped out of the tent and took his hand, as so many times before. But it was not like all the other times.
As his warm, strong, carpenter’s hand curled around hers, it curled irrevocably around her very heart.
She heard her own breath catch, and her legs felt weak.
They walked a few minutes, some distance away from the tent. He stopped and turned toward her, still holding her hand. “Violet,” he said quietly, as though trying to begin, but not sure how.
“Willis, I’m so glad to see you! It’s been such a long time.” In fact, she realized, she had not seen him since the beginning of summer; although her family had camped a half-dozen times, he had not come. She had gone home every time with an inexplicable feeling of disappointment. But she had written it off as her affection for the place and to not wishing to go back to her job, which had been tedious that summer, helping clean out the accumulated hundred years’ worth of junk from a wealthy neighbor’s old carriage house, sorting dusty antiques from moldering trash.
She loosed her hold on his hand and fixed her eyes on his feet. There was no way for her to tell him how she felt inside. Dad and Mom had always taught her that it was not for her to give her heart to a man who had not made his commitment clear and proven. But the doubt she felt about his feeling for her made her realize how attached she was to him, and how much it hurt that he didn’t care to see her.
“I saw Reverend Peterson again this summer,” Willis began. “We had a long talk, Violet.” He spoke haltingly, with long pauses. “And I realized that I had to make a decision about you.” His voice caught at the end.
Violet looked up at him. What she saw in his face made her realize that she had been mistaken—it was not at all that he didn’t care to see her: just the opposite. Tears started in his eyes, and his mouth was hard with grief. “You and I cannot be, Violet. Could never be. You know that very well, and so do I. So I came to tell you that, and to say that I am very sorry if that hurts, but it must be so. I cannot see you anymore… For your own sake, I am saying farewell.”
While he spoke, he had clasped both hands around hers, but she could no longer feel it. Then she realized something. She felt surprise, and then a flash of anger.
“It was you! Wasn’t it, Will.” It was an assertion, not a question. “We carved our names in the bark of that beech tree, and you sang me to sleep and then you came back later, and carved the names off. And—and you tore pages from my journal all last summer after I was asleep, so I couldn’t remember your name. And before that, I used to write your name with charcoal on the hearth, or in the sand by the river, or whatever and you went along with it, but after I fell asleep you erased it, didn’t you?”
Willis dropped her hand and stood silent.
“How could you?”
“Yes. I did all of that, and more. Because I was afraid of what would happen if you loved me. I am afraid of what would happen.”
“It’s—” Violet stopped herself. It’s too late, she was going to say. I already do. But Willis was going on.
“Violet, it isn’t that I don’t want to see you. I wish to see you more than anything. More than sunrise, more than day. You are the only light in my life, if this is living. I love you, and because of that, I have to say goodbye. Because I’m with them now. I made a foolish choice a long time ago and I must live with the consequences.” He stood taller, it seemed, as he said so. His gaze was direct.
Her heart was still stuck on “I love you” but her mind was trying to find its way through the woods.
“What about—what about a—a bride? You told me a long time ago that you needed to find a bride. What was that about?”
Now Willis looked angry. He looked to the side, and swallowed. His lips moved abortively. Then he shook his head, and looked her in the eye.
“I told you a story because you were young. It was a fairy tale, a ghost story. You liked stories. Something to make you sleep easy. Nothing more.” Crickets chirped in the silence.
Violet crossed her arms. “Tell me.”
“There’s naught to tell.”
“Yes, there is.” She shook her head. Her voice dropped to a breaking whisper. “You’re a terrible liar. Don’t ever lie to me.”
His eyes dropped. “I’m sorry.”
After a moment, Violet reached for his hand and squeezed it.
An owl hooted not far away. In the past, they would have set off owl-spotting together. A few moments passed, and when he spoke his voice was soft, as though from a distance.
“You were a child when we first met, Violet. I never guessed that I would still be seeing you, years later, and you nearly grown now. When we met, I had lost all hope. If I told you things, it was because I wasn’t thinking that it would ever matter. I knew you would forget about me when you slept, and I thought that would be the long and short of it. End of story. Someday you would grow up, and get married, and stop coming here, and I would be here remembering you while you grew older and perhaps you would bring your children here and I would be just as always…” his voice broke off and he shuddered, then collected himself and went on.
“But it does matter, now. You matter more to me than anything. Even if I am but a shadow in these woods until Jesus comes, you have been the sun rising on my dark world, and you will shine in my heart always. But you matter to me more than freedom, more than having this curse lifted. There was about a minute when I think I dared to hope for that, Violet. When I hoped that you would love me in return, and be my bride and rescue me. But…”
Violet was biting her lip. “Will.” Taking a small step toward him, she took his other hand, and took a deep breath. “I do love you, Willis. I’m not a child anymore, and I love you.”
His eyes fixed on hers and his mouth pressed together, his eyes again becoming wet. “God help us,” he whispered, and drew her against him, hard. She returned his embrace, holding him hard also. He mumbled her name into her hair. The fine linen of his shirt smelled like ferns and moss and falling leaves. “God help me, I love you.” He squeezed his arms around her until it nearly squeezed the breath out of her, then seemed to realize he might be hurting her, and his embrace loosened. He spoke into her hair, and his whisper was fierce. “Listen to me, Violet, I will not have you becoming as I am. That would be a curse upon a curse to me. You are young and alive and have all the hope and freedom to dream and become what God intended you to be. I will not risk taking that hope and freedom away from you. No!” He stepped back suddenly, and started to turn away, as if he was going to run—
“Willis! Won’t you even give me a chance?”
“Have you not been listening?” He was shouting now. “You want me to give you a chance to become as I am?”
“A chance to set you free, a chance for you to live! A chance for us to be together!”
“A chance for you to be trapped, accursed forever!”
“Willis.” She stood up straight, and felt calm. “I am willing to take that chance for you.”
“But I am not. No, Violet, I’m not willing. I love you too much. I could never stand to see you as I am.”
She stepped toward him. “Will, at least tell me what is involved. At least let me know what it is you fear so much for me. Because if you won’t let me try, I need to know why not.”
His shoulders sagged. He told her to sit down.
He told her what he knew.
1817: THE NIGHT-QUEEN’S SONG
Come away with me, young man
Come away with me
Run among the sh
adows
Fly among the trees
Cold the water’s running
Silver are the stones
Black the night about you
Weary are the bones
Lay it down, the burden
Lay it down, take wing
Let the wind caress you
Let the voices sing
Listen to the night-song
Listen long and well
For we’ve things to reveal
We have tales to tell
Long, we have been dancing
Flying with the wind
Come away and join us
Come, and enter in
Now you are among us
Our friend, brother of night
Are you not free to fly now?
Are you not mystified?
We are lovely, we are silver
We are starlight, we are moon
We are wind and we are lightning
We profane and we consume
Now you are among us
And never will forsake
Now you are one of us
Make you no mistake
Captive mine forever
Creature now of night
Dawn will see you never
Forgotten by the light
Should you tire of darkness
Should you long for day
Abandon hope, and witness
What the night-queen has to say:
You are mine, unliving
Unmortal, unredeemed
Yea, for you were willing
And none can intervene
Save only that your flesh
Should join in holy vow
One flesh with one who loves you
Only she could save you now
Then she too will be mine
Her life bound to your death
Blackbirch Woods Page 6
