Cursed by Christ

by Matthew Warner

  Cursed by Christ

  Matthew Warner

  Cursed by Christ, this edition Copyright © 2018 by Matthew Warner. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover Copyright © 2018 by Deena Warner

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Matthew Warner

  Visit my website at MatthewWarner.com

  Related Copyright Registrations

  TXu000843260, TXu000955835, TXu001618207

  Also by

  Matthew Warner

  NOVELS

  Empire of the Goddess

  Plan 9: Official Movie Novelization

  The Seventh Equinox

  Blood Born

  Eyes Everywhere

  The Organ Donor

  NOVELLAS

  No Outlet

  Die Not In Vain

  COLLECTIONS

  Dominoes in Time

  Horror Isn’t a 4-Letter Word: Essays on Writing & Appreciating the Genre

  Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment & Revenge

  PLAYS

  Chess is Blind

  Pirate Appreciation Day

  How the Martians Stole Christmas

  FILMS

  Dr. Ella Mental’s Mad Lab Picture Show (with John Johnson)

  The Lovecraft Chronicles (with John Johnson)

  The Good Parts

  More information: MatthewWarner.com

  Chapter 1

  Lying in bed, Alice Wharton watched sunlight wash in through her open window and listened to the voices:

  “It’s because she’s a young woman, and ain’t picked a man.”

  The slaves worked below on the first floor, separated by thick floorboards, yet she heard them as clearly as if they stood in her bedroom. She pressed her pillow against her ears.

  “Lord telling her, ‘Get up and walk, Lazarus. Your life be waiting for you. Pick a husband, and get on.’”

  She saw them: two patches of light moving between the dining room and pantry, preparing the midday meal. Behind her closed eyelids, Alice saw Hannah, holding a bread basket, stand on tiptoes to whisper into the older woman’s ear. “Miz Alice need to be in bed, but not by herself.”

  Alice’s resentment lashed out. In her mind’s eye, she watched the basket fly from Hannah’s hands and into the wall.

  “What you doin’, girl?” the older woman said. “You want massa to whip you?”

  “It ain’t me—it Miz Alice!” Hannah’s eyes were wide as she backed into the wall. She raised her hands as if she were praying. “She doing it to everyone. When I’se on the slopjaw, she splashed me with my own—”

  “Enough of that, you vulgar girl. Now get on, ’fore I whip you myself.”

  With difficulty, she withdrew her perspective as Hannah fled into the rice fields. Guilt pressed her deeper into the bed. It wasn’t Hannah’s fault she was sick. I’ve lost my senses.

  Momma called adolescence the “the difficult time,” and Alice’s difficult time had started in 1852, eight years ago. Momma had been preoccupied with Alice’s journey into adulthood—frequently measuring her bust size and asking if she’d ever had the “woman’s sickness.” But Alice had ignored it as a mother’s doting. Only now did she realize Momma had been waiting for the real sickness to happen—the sickness of the head—which had begun this month.

  Delirium rose, twisting her insides. She wished she could just vomit and feel better. Images, colors, voices—they all crashed in.

  When the attack subsided, the sunlight angled over her bed at a flatter angle. A muffin, now cold—the midday meal saved for her—waited atop the bureau. She didn’t have strength to rise and eat it. Tears streamed onto her pillow. If only she could die, but the malady that gave each thought material substance before she could control it—such as with Hannah’s bread basket—wouldn’t go that far. She’d been in bed a week now, unable to concentrate on anything but the hurricane possessing her.

  She sensed Momma looking in. Behind her stood a torrent of fear and anger: Poppa. In her mind’s eye, Alice watched Poppa pull Momma’s elbow, taking her to the far end of the hallway and out of Alice’s hearing. But with her heightened senses, Alice still heard him clearly:

  “She can’t be acting like this with the reunion comin’ up. They’d think we’re raising a witch.”

  The words filled her with grief. He didn’t love her anymore.

  Momma covered her face and sobbed. “My fault.”

  Poppa watched her cry for a while before entering the sitting room, where he pressed a toe on floorboards to listen for creaks. Sweat ran from under his straw hat. “Don’t care whose fault it is. She has a problem, and I want her to put a rein on it.” His eyes resembled gun muzzles. “You went through it when we first wed, but somehow you stopped it.”

  “I remember.”

  Softening, Poppa took a breath. “Know what I think it is? Remember the rock that fell from the sky when we were children?”

  She crossed her arms and looked away. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You and me, when we were eight. Walking that calf across Potter’s Field.”

  “We didn’t know each other then.”

  Stepping close, Poppa tenderly took her shoulders. “Course we did. Remember our song? ‘I’m the water in the kettle, I’m the seed on the corn …’”

  Momma finished: “‘I’m the color in the rainbow, thank the Lordy I was born.’” She looked up at him, wiping tears from her eyes.

  “We might’ve been singing it when the rock hit. Flipped me into the air.”

  “You’ve always been a showman.” Momma was smiling back, but something about this story disturbed her. She looked down, crossing her arms tighter.

  “And that calf—remember? Its young came out deformed after that. Legs missing, eyes missing.”

  “But Jeremiah, no rock can do that or cause what’s happened to me and Alice.”

  “No? What about Martha?”

  Martha was Alice’s older sister, who died as an infant. Tears flowing again, Momma turned her back.

  “Same thing, wasn’t it?” Poppa said. “Except the child had no mouth.”

  “You don’t have to tell me what was wrong with her! Didn’t I see ’er when she come out of me?”

  “Then why are you so blind about Alice? And why else you think you’ve been unable to have more children?”

  Momma sneered. “Maybe I’m fine, and you’re the one whose seed was poisoned by some rock.”

  Now Poppa crossed his arms. “I doubt it. Women always been weaker. Your hair fell out for three months after that rock came down, and I did fine.”

  Momma shuddered. He’d struck where she was vulnerable: the old pain of schoolyard taunts, the nights she’d sobbed in front of a mirror as her mother held her, stroking her bald head. Alice saw this in Momma’s mind. Anger snapping her in unseen places, Momma snatched Poppa’s hat off his head to reveal a large bald spot. “You did fine, did you?”

  Face darkening, Poppa swiped the hat from her hand. “You listen good: if Alice don’t get it together, her room’s gonna be vacant come the reunion. I won’t have her embarrassing me before my friends and family.”

  “She’s your daughter, Jeremiah. Don’t you have more heart than that?”

  Grunting, he brushed by her to the stairs. “I got heart, but
I won’t lose the whole plantation to make room for it.”

  Momma wiped her eyes for a long time after he left. Her blaze of emotions made her head resemble a candleflame, at least to Alice. The delirium was out of control—oh God, please take me. Was that Momma’s thoughts or her own?

  Alice blinked, and Momma was now sitting on the edge of her bed, caressing her cheek. “Have to come clean about what happened,” she was saying. “Your poppa doesn’t understand. It’s really all my fault.”

  Alice stopped hearing her voice. A reflecting pool opened in Momma’s forehead, and in the reflection, Alice watched her story instead of heard it.

  She saw Momma, as a child, one night rise from bed. This was shortly before the incident of the rock falling on Potter’s Field. The girl was fully clothed. She’d been playing possum, only acting asleep. Although she couldn’t hear anything from within the house, the girl felt energy gathering in the distance, like a thunderstorm on the horizon. She sneaked outside and walked through the darkness, her heart pounding with adventure.

  Near a slave settlement, she heard soft drumbeats and chanting. The girl crawled to the edge of a clearing filled with slaves. Like Indians, they danced around a bonfire, making designs with their hands and feet.

  “Yana bokinay,” they chanted. “Ey moh trana.”

  The slaves not dancing—elderly and children—sat around the fire in a large circle. They raised their hands heavenward. The rags they wore had never looked so beautiful—like robes of gold. Hiding in the brush, the girl swayed, drunk on the sound. The rising sparks multiplied and swirled, taking shape. …

  Within the flames, a ladder rose to Heaven. Human forms descended to earth. The slaves shouted with excitement. When the girl sat up to see better, twigs snapped under her knees.

  An old woman turned and looked at her. “Oh Lordy, the massa’s child is here!”

  The girl never ran so fast in her life.

  When Alice focused on Momma’s lips, she heard her voice again: “Later, I found something in my pocket.”

  Momma held out her empty hand, miming the act of discovery, but when Alice looked, two green leaves appeared in her palm—images from her mother’s memory. Joined, they made a graceful “V”.

  “Angel’s wings,” Momma said. “Those were angels climbing down that ladder, and somehow I took one’s wings with me.”

  A childhood fantasy, Alice thought. They were only leaves from where she’d lain.

  The leaves evaporated from Momma’s palm. “Two months later, I had my first woman’s sickness. My nanny tried to force me to show her, so I hid in the chicken coop.”

  Alice saw the girl again—now rightly a young woman—pressing her body against the inside wall, peeking out through the door. She was mostly bald now, either from the effect of the stolen angel’s wings or the fallen rock. Face streaked with tears, her mouth moved with oaths. A terrific rage boiled within her, reddening her face down to her neckline. She doubled over with a sudden menstrual cramp. The chickens fluttered in their nests, throwing feathers into the air.

  Then silence. In amazement, the young woman looked at the rows of shelves. Now dead, the birds lay sideways in their nests, exposing their eggs. Broken ribs punctured their feathered underbellies, as if they had been crushed.

  “The angel’s wings,” Momma said. “Don’t you see? I misappropriated the powers of Heaven.”

  This sounded foolish. Alice could more readily believe Poppa’s explanation about the rock that fell from the sky. … But then she wondered: what if the rock had fallen from Heaven? Either way, Momma still could have donned the mantle of heavenly powers—the ability to crush roosting chickens, among other things.

  “That wasn’t the last time,” Momma said. “Pets, plants, once Uncle John’s entire cotton crop. I even may have—” She blinked back tears. “Even may have caused the deaths in ’42.”

  Alice saw Momma’s memory flash through pictures of children vomiting in the streets, their parents holding them in horror.

  “Every time I’m at Reverend Forney’s church, you know what I hear in my prayers?” She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief. “Jesus was embarrassed by the theft. He could retrieve the powers at any time but saves face in Heaven by making the wings a curse upon my life.”

  Alice lay there a long time, considering these words. Finally, she said, “Then what about me?”

  “Bible says God punishes sin down to the fourth generation.”

  It couldn’t be. Alice had always attended Reverend Forney’s services. She’d even been baptized. Jesus was a lifelong companion. She would stroll through Poppa’s rice fields, having imaginary conversations with Him, as she listened to the religious songs John O’erseer made the slaves sing so he could keep track of their whereabouts. Speechless, Alice searched her mother’s face for some indication the story was untrue, but found none. How could Jesus Christ be so petty and cruel?

  Alice teetered between belief in Momma’s version of events and Poppa’s, feeling as if she were on a seesaw’s fulcrum. Poppa, with his implication that a mere rock somehow changed Momma so she exhibited strange powers with her first woman’s sickness, then passed down the abilities to Alice; and Momma, who believed she’d unintentionally stolen the powers of an angel while spying on a secret ritual, and then passed them down.

  Looking into her mother’s face, Alice weighed her trust for her parents, comparing Momma’s unconditional love and Poppa’s selfish worry about his plantation. She asked herself whose explanation was more logical.

  And the seesaw tipped forever in favor of Momma.

  “We’re being punished by Christ?” Alice said. “I can’t bear it.”

  Momma stroked Alice’s cheek as if these troubles were only bed wrinkles to be smoothed away. “You won’t have to suffer much longer. I’ve struck a bargain with Jesus. Paying penance.”

  Momma didn’t elaborate, but Alice saw her cast aside thoughts of a man’s jawline.

  Her mother produced a rose from a skirt pocket, and straightened the petals. It was from her indoor rose garden, which she kept in trays by the drawing room window. Momma doted over those roses, which never numbered more than twelve, and it shocked Alice that she had uprooted one. Carefully watered soil still clung to its stalk.

  “The angel’s wings grow restless—get cooped-up in our heads. You must control them, or you’ll never leave this bed sane.” She held the flower in front of Alice’s eyes. “They need flight, and to do so without hurting you or others. Send them into the rose.”

  Alice looked deeply into the petals. She gasped as a wind filled her mind. It launched her into the flower.

  She flew into its smallest spaces. Strands of rope or hair, intricately braided—presumably by God—swirled past her. The rose was a house, filled with a million rooms and tubular hallways. She explored each of them faster than lightning skips between clouds. As her momentum dissipated, she glided on the angel’s wings back into her head.

  Then all was calm for the first time in weeks. Gratefully, she fell asleep.

  Chapter 2

  The clothes and corset squeezed Alice’s ribs. Too tight. Sunlight blinded her—she saw nothing but sky—and children were screaming. Dizzy, she fought to maintain control, and for the first time in weeks, the angel’s wings threatened to escape her head.

  Poppa would be so angry. Please, Jesus, not during our family reunion.

  As she swooned, strong hands caught her. The man smelled of sweat and pipe smoke. “Woah, careful madam,” he said, setting her on a chair. But she still couldn’t think with the sunlight and pressure, and the children’s screams. Why, oh why wouldn’t they stop?

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  The angel’s wings swooped through the man’s head and came back with a picture of herself through his eyes: dark braided hair, in her best dress that reflected the sunlight, sitting on a wooden chair, leaning forward and covering her face.

  The picture carried the man’s mind-voice: Don’t hav
e a pint of piss in ’er.

  “What?” Couldn’t think. Disoriented. Nauseous.

  “I said, are you all right?”

  “I’m …” She breathed deeply, keeping her eyes closed until the wings settled.

  Finally, her ribs stopped fighting her corset. The children’s voices returned to normal, now just three boys arguing at once:

  “The slaves is gonna have an uprising. My daddy said so.”

  “Your daddy don’t know nothin’. My daddy—”

  “My daddy read it in the paper. He seen ’em keep crockagators as pets, and …”

  She shut them out. Just boys—brattish nephews of cousins she hoped never to see again. Soon, someone’s momma would tell them to hush. Then once the adults were finished eating, it’d be the children’s turn, and their annoying mouths would be filled with Poppa’s poultry.

  Opening her eyes, she found herself facing the rear lawn. Almost a hundred of her father’s relatives and acquaintances picnicked on red-checkered blankets. The womenfolk wore their best summer dresses, and the military men wore uncomfortably hot uniforms. A gaggle of slaves served everyone drinks and food.

  The man’s hand stole through hers. “Shall I fetch you a brandy?”

  She withdrew from his touch. “No, thank you.” He might be a looker in that blue officer’s uniform, but this was presumptuous of him. “The sun is a trifle hot, however.”

  He helped her to her feet. Deftly, he wrapped he arm through his and led her to an orange tree’s shade. Except for his age—he looked to be forty—he resembled the two suitors who’d visited her that spring: hard, angular features that she liked. Constantly chaperoned, of course, she had enjoyed the suitors’ attentions and the wild daisies they had brought her from the fields. Poppa did nothing but complain about her spinsterism, and about how she never attended parties or dances, yet he’d had the gall to veto the suitors’ declarations of matrimonial intent, saying they were too poor. And ever since last month’s first sickness with the angel’s wings, there had been no social calls of any kind. Confidentially, Hannah the slave girl had told her that rumors were circulating that the massa’s daughter had a contagious form of the falling disease. At least the present dizzy spell had passed, and for that she was grateful—to what, she didn’t know. Not to Jesus.