THE HOUSE INSIDE ME

by Camelia Wheatley

  Meg looked at hers a long time as if she was trying to figure out what to do with it. I think she expected it to change, or transform. She seemed disappointed and left as quickly as she had entered. But for me—it was life-changing. It wasn’t long after that the petal-faced flower people from Maw Sue’s jar crept inside my visions, days and nights, walking the rooms and the hallways of the house, and each held a Mason jar of their own, with flowers, everlastings of their own. I did not know my own private losses, combined with my broken knob of madness, would tangle up and escalate into something I feared, something terrible and terrifying. I lost control. I could no longer push it away. My tears and madness would sweep me to this room, without consent, without control. Over time, all was meshed together, the dreams of strangers, the whispers they spoke and the Petal People in the room, inside the house of seven, inside me. It seemed I could not bear it any longer. I simply forgot who the Petal People were, their representation. Instead of allies in this world, they became monsters to me. Frightening, awful things haunted me. Entering in and out as they pleased. It drove me mad to be inside the room, see them, hear them, and feel them. Their morbid expressions and the afflictions drawn in their petal-dried faces. They’d gravitate to me like moths to a light bulb.

  The tragedy of my childhood could only manifest itself inside the House of Seven, deeply buried inside me in a compound of rooms, a shelter for the little girl I used to be. I gave my gifts and curses a haven, a house of refuge. It was in this house of seven, behind the pine curtain of my heart, where Petal People wandered the hallways with Mason jars and one little lost girl cried out, in my dreams, “Make me seven. Make me seven.” She waited to fill the void. She needed to be whole, the all-encompassing oneness of spiritual connection with the almighty God. After all, it was the meaning and message of seven.

  PART II - 1970’S…

  CASSIDY THE CHILD

  Age considers; youth ventures.

  ~Rabindranath Tagore

  NEWS YOU CAN USE

  BY EDNA ROLLINS

  JUNE 11, 1971

  THE BEST NEWS THIS SIDE OF SALT FLATS RIVER

  The Moon Wanderers are traveling through town in the coming weeks and we need to be prepared. If you don’t know who they are, well, have a listen and I’ll tell you. The Moon Wanderers are a loose affiliation of individuals from all walks of life, some nomadic, homeless and the like, from all parts of the country who have joined up with a group, forming a larger group until it’s a massive cult with no leader, just a bunch of wandering souls gathering and camping from place to place, state to state. They call it Moon Gatherings which to me signifies gypsies of some sort, so I’d be cautious and lock up your belongings. They tend to barter mostly, none having real jobs. I’m told they walk around half-naked; they are prone to smoke strange substances and even have large tents set up for ceremonies with tonics that cause hallucinogenic visions. Sue Ellen Bonner says her cousin over in Whissett County spent some time with them, being a fugitive of the law and he said they were free-spirited, open-minded free thinkers, with no rules, no laws, and you can basically do anything you want as long as it is in harmony with nature. If that isn’t just a bunch of malarkey if I ever did hear such a thing. If anything, it should be a threat to our organized society. We need rules. We need laws. We need boundaries. We can’t have that free-thinking spirited hippy-go-lucky happy camper movement come in here like Woodstock and change our community and stir the pot. NO. What in the Lord’s tarnation would become of our fine town?

  Frank Bullard of the Forest Service says there isn’t a thing he can do about it. If people want to camp in the campgrounds, then it’s their right to do so. I disagree. And for that reason, we at the Eternal Order of the Sisters of Salvation feel it is our duty to stand up to this atrocity and demand action. We voted. We came to a decision. I will go and witness to these lost and damaged souls because it is the Christian thing to do. Understandably, if my late husband, Jimmy Don was here, he’d have a cat fit, me going off in the wild to witness God knows what, but I feel it is what needs to be done. The Lord commands us to go…and I shall. Don’t worry, community. I shall be of the uttermost safety when facing the heathens because I will have Mr. Billy Ray Thomas as an escort and we all know he visits Get Fit Gym on a regular basis, so I will be in good hands. I would advise that you do not camp the weekend of the gathering unless you plan to end up smack-dad in the middle of all the shenanigans. I ask for your prayers and guidance during this time. Until next time, I’m Edna Rollins and that’s news you can use.

  13

  Seekers, Sages and Seers

  There is no exquisite beauty…without some strangeness in the proportion.

  ~Edgar Allan Poe

  I found it hard to be a kid. Not the outdoor-do-whatever-I-want-playing type of kid. I loved that part of being a kid; it was the adults around me that made me question life and what it’s all about until I was terrified to become one. From my parents, to Mama and Papa C, and even Maw Sue on some levels. She understood me the best, but there were parts of her I was disturbed by. She had rituals. Strange rituals. The kind you weren’t sure you wanted to tell anyone about.

  Our parents were out of town at a friend’s funeral and Meg and I were spending the night with Maw Sue. First of all, her house was all sorts of horrors by itself, so adding spooky rituals didn’t help. It was bedtime, so I tagged behind Maw Sue in my bare feet, clutching her skirt, while Meg clung to my T-shirt. Neither of us dared to go anywhere inside Maw Sue’s house alone. It was that sort of creepy. Turns out, all three of her husbands died in this house. Learning this horrific information made me especially anxious. I was sensitive to matters of the spirit world; unbeknownst to me how it worked, or what it was, I just knew I felt them, all around me. Meg loved to stay with Maw Sue during daylight hours, but the nighttime was another story. Meg rarely showed her weakness but I could see it in her eyes, and her bones seemed to tremble.

  I was all brave and courageous until I saw shadows on the wall and they weren’t mine, nor Meg’s or Maw Sue’s. Twenty or more surrounded the room, walls, ceilings, floors. My feet sped up, causing Meg to crash into me. My mind filled with dark thoughts. I latched on to the daisies on Maw Sue’s skirt and drew my eyes to squints. I hoped the fabric of flowers would be like the everlastings and take my fears like they took my grief, but evidently fabric flowers are not the Petal People flowers. It didn’t work like I wanted. She dragged us along into the dark of her bedroom. The door closed behind us on its own. I jumped so hard my feet came off the floor. Meg squealed and I felt her fingers dig into my back. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch. I expected a light to come on, but it didn’t. I felt her body turn, pulling me with it. A squeal and squeak made me freeze. Then I realized Maw Sue had sat down on the mattress. For God’s sake, where is the freaking light? Her boney hands grabbed me, and I knew it was her, but I still jumped, which in turn made Meg jump. We were like jumping beans in the dark. Both of us hugged so close to Maw Sue I could smell the crevasses of her wrinkles, a waft of old smoke and vintage bed linens. The room was so dark it made tunnels of blue in my eyes, those deeper than deep blues like the depths of the ocean. Lurking in the deep blue were creatures no man had ever seen nor would want to see. In my mind, I was convinced no one could enter the depths of deep blue black without turning dark themselves. It was nature’s way, the chameleon skin way, where light turns to light, and dark turns to dark.

  We sat and sat and sat. My eyes rolled around like marbles in a deep well. I could hear my heart thrashing in my ears and a slight whistle coming from my nose. Meg had scratched the daylights out of my back and my hands till I was sure I was bleeding. Suddenly, I heard chatter. Maw Sue was chanting or praying. I couldn’t make sense of it. My gut locked up. I inhaled deeply. A strange noise made my heart leap. Long scrapes like dreadful fingernails, as if something was trying to get inside the room. Maybe from inside the walls? I pressed deeper into Maw Sue’s skin. Meg had climbed around the bed and huddle
d her way in between us. More scrapes. Then more. Suddenly, an amber ball of light exploded in the room. Well, maybe not exploded, but it was so quick and unexpected it sure seemed like it. Maw Sue was holding a lighted candle on what looked like an old saucer. She reached over and sat the large box of matches on the nightstand. I sank back to my normal scaredy-cat self. The scratching was only the strike of the match. The after burn of Sulphur smelled like fear. The candle flame cast a crew of leaping shadows on the wall, or illuminated the ones already there. Maw Sue stared at the light like a flame god.

  After minutes of staring and silence she finally spoke. Meg breathed a sigh of relief as if she had held her breath the entire time. “Girls…are you afraid of the dark?” Lumps clogged my throat. I couldn’t speak. I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of this house, afraid of my mind, afraid of the thoughts that entered, afraid of what I saw and what I didn’t see.

  “Uh, yeah. Isn’t everyone?” I mumbled softly.

  “You shouldn’t be. You want to know why?”

  No. No. Not at all. I didn’t want to know the answer.

  “In the scriptures, Genesis 1:16, God says he made two great lights--the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. And guess what? He made you. Both of you hold all the light that he created, so you don’t have to be afraid of darkness. As Seekers, we need sight, so light and dark are just realms of life, places where we adjust our vision and enter faith, just complete trust in a power greater than ourselves. With all that going for us, there is nothing to fear.” She glanced sideways at me. Her eyes were a gray mist, shrouded in mystery. I can think of plenty of things to be afraid of. One is my mind. It’s a house all to itself sometimes—a horrible abattoir of dark things.

  “I used to fear many things, my thoughts, the dark, what people thought and other things.” Maw Sue’s eyes changed dimensions, passing into another realm, of moons and stars, a world outside my lens I could only view through her eyes, a universe to themselves with her words coming to life. “You both know my mother was a Seeker. She got it from her mother, and so forth. All the sisters had their own gifts, curses, fears, troubles and their darkness. It’s why I face it every night before I go to bed—for Seekers, the darkness is a tangled place where enemies lie in wait to confuse us, taunt us, keep us from our true selves. Sometimes, our worst enemy is within us. We must be careful. I face the darkness because it gives me peace and sweet sleep.” Her tone was serious, flat-lined and peculiar. “I face it eye-to-eye, me to it, dark-to-dark. No matter what my mind or the enemy tries to make me think, I convince myself of what I know to be true. You must have a firm sense of self to do this. It’s important not to lose yourself on your journey. Don’t be afraid of the path. The dark and light are created for purpose. Whichever one you fall into—use it. Make sense, girls?”

  Meg was half asleep on Maw Sue’s shoulders and mumbled something indiscernible. I nodded over and over again. I was straight-up terrified. If truth be told my bones were wrecked. This enemy she spoke of seemed latched to my spine, bending me like some puppet at a play. If I was gifted, I had no idea how to properly use the gift. I messed everything up all the time. All I knew was fear.

  “Us gifted Seekers have to stick together. Pass on what we know. Help each other out. It makes us less alone in the world. We have a lot to learn in the years to come, girls.” She winked and sat the candle on the table. “Now let’s get you two in bed. It seems one of us is already past that.” She winked at me while she helped Meg into her cot and tucked her in underneath the thick, heavy quilts.

  I crawled into my cot and pulled the covers up, all the way to my nose. Maw Sue blew out the candle and I went into a state of fear, barely sleeping a wink. Just like every night, my mind was full of the terrible awful. I wasn’t like Maw Sue. I could not face the darkness. How could I? The darkness was living inside me, bedded up in my bones, and I couldn’t shake it if I wanted to. Every day I fought against turning as black on the outside as I felt on the inside. The only refuge I had was storytelling. Maw Sue was strange, a little eccentric, but man, oh, man could she tell a story.

  Many a day she’d be in her rocking chair and we’d be at her feet listening. “Now Cass, Meg,” she’d say. “It’s very important to live out of your gift, use it for good, be fully who you were created to be.” Her voice was sweet and her breath smelled like the juice from pomegranates. But it could change in an instant. “Girls, I never wanted to feel all this energy.” She was talking about the gift and how the vibes overtook her, not only the energy of herself, but the energy of other people. “The times I had the most problems were when the energy was not mine, it was theirs. Others, people’s junk I took upon myself, until I learned how to channel the negative to its rightful place. It was a long time coming and it shall be the same for you.” Meg and I looked at each other, half scared out of our wits and half entertained.

  If she wasn’t gift telling, she was spilling out spooky stories about phantoms and ghostly figures. She’d get dramatic, tell us they sought to steal our namesakes, our right to live free and sacred. I knew them well. I felt the stench of their breath against my skin most my life.

  Meg took an entirely different approach to the stories. “Pure poppycock!” she’d say. I’d be all locked up in fear and she’d just laugh and laugh. The older she got, the meaner she got. And the less she cared about stories, rituals or things I liked. Maw Sue and I were on a different wavelength than Meg. You had to believe in the stories to allow them access to your world, which Meg wouldn’t allow. Of course, I didn’t want to see the phantoms she spoke of—but I couldn’t help but see them. I knew they were there before she told me they were. Unnamed. Prickles of hair spiked on my neck, my arms. Something inside always knew they were there. In my altered sense of vision, they disguised themselves to fool me, subtle glints out of the corners of my eyes, a streak of shadows here and there, and then gone. Tricks of the mind. Their presence was like the boogeyman of my nightmares lingering into my days, seconds and minutes.

  “Be aware, Meg and Cass.” Maw Sue’s eyes turned dark and dreadful. “Fight for your life. Your identity. Your namesake. It is your ancestral birthright as a Seeker to fulfill your destiny.” Meg cut her eyes at me, suspicious. She was capable of thinking what everyone else in the family thought about Maw Sue from the get-go.

  “Psshhhh…y’all are cuckoo. Ain’t no such thang,” Meg said, rolling her eyes. She thought Maw Sue’s stories were hallucinations due to drinking her herbal concoctions, mixing them with her pills. Meg didn’t care one iota about birthrights. She just hoped her destiny contained designer shoes, handbags and a plane ticket out of this town, and she’d be happy as a lark dipped in gold.

  “You both come from the blood of Seekers with beautiful, wonderful gifts. You must use them, or they will become your curse. And most of all, darlings—” She’d pause, stop her rocker and bend down. Her voice would turn to a crippling whisper. “Always, always—make lovely your losses.”

  And there it was. The weight of four words on my shoulders like giants with smelly feet. Four words broke my ever-loving Southern sap heart. I grew heavy with unknown burdens. Anytime I asked her what it meant, she’d tell me life would let me know, soon enough. Those four words were like sticky old wallpaper glued on my heart, and every time I heard them being spoken, an unknown force snatched a top corner of the paper and yanked it down, exposing my vulnerability. No matter how much got peeled off, it left a gruesome layer of pain behind. Make lovely your losses. Make lovely your losses. I feared a great weeping loss was always at my back. I lived on the verge of anxiousness, waiting to lose something—but what?

  “Can’t they just steal our hillbilly britches instead?” Meg blurted out, interrupting my thought process. She was prancing across the floor like a Sears and Roebuck catalog model.

  “Now you know Mama C made those shorts for you out of love.” Maw Sue giggled.

  “Well, it may have been love
but it certainly wasn’t for the fashion.” Meg said, popping her hip out. If truth be told, we’d have liked to set fire to these atrocious handmade patchwork pedal pushers a long time ago. Meg and I both cringed when we heard the old sewing machine threading down a drumbeat of warning, thump, thump, thump on some poor unsuspecting fabric we’d be wearing in a few hours. I tried to persuade Mama C to more charitable works, like the five kids down the street, river trash, starving and half naked. She ignored my poverty facts and kept on sewing despair. The ones I was wearing now looked like hand-me-downs from James Brown’s closet. One side was half black and white polka dots, the other half was purple with dizzy, yellow swirls, and a plumage of pink flowers sprouted from my crotch. My backside was worse. Wide black stripes interlaced with slim yellow lines. Speed Racer could race right up my butt crack. It was a bona fide racetrack. Meg’s shorts were another sight altogether. It was the Fourth of July meets Woodstock and they had a baby. Stars, stripes and tie-dyed heaven. The only things missing were reefer and Bob Marley.

  My favorite clothing Mama C made me was my Moon Wanderer attire that irked the crap out of my mother when I wore it. I literally had to hide it to keep her from burning it. It started when the hippie gathering turned up in Pine Log at the campgrounds, but first they came through town in big painted-up buses, and vans, and women with flowing dresses, and flowers in their hair, and barefoot, playing and singing music and carrying on about stopping the war. We happened to be downtown at the JC Penney store sidewalk sale when they paraded by. Meg and I ran beside them, while my mother’s eyes turned the size of paper plates and she yelled at us to come back, but we kept going. Hanging out the windows of the cars were free-spirited girls with skimpy shirts and painted faces, holding signs saying, Peace and Love, Stop the War. Others danced in the back of pickup trucks, and some girls had no shirts on at all, which made the local men stop and gawk. The boys were loosely dressed with hip huggers, long hair and some had beards. Something about the Moon Wanderers lit a fire in my belly and ever since, I mimicked the hippie movement, in dress, hairstyle, and temperament, which absolutely freaked my mother out.