Return to Cedar Hill

by Jacie Middlemann

  "Great-Grandpa came from Prussia," Casey said, not questioning her cousin's intuition. She had the same feeling. "But I have no clue what anything from there would look like."

  Mary agreed readily. She hadn't been joking when she admitted she knew little about the actual history of antique furniture.

  "Well, once we get it downstairs we might be able to figure out where it came from if we can translate some of these little words over here on the side."

  "Where?" Mary scooted around to where Casey was kneeling on the other end of it.

  "Right here, it's engraved in the wood, but the letters are pretty clear. It starts almost at the front and goes all along the lower edge and around to the back lower edge." They both looked...fingered the individual characters. "Even if what it translates into isn't anything important, we might at least be able to figure out what language it is. From there it might tell us which side of the family it might come from."

  Mary got a grip on the underside ledge of the piece and gave it a good tug. "This isn't just really old, it's really heavy."

  "I'm going to go next door and see if Court is home."

  Before Mary could suggest anything else in the event he wasn't, Casey was already through the small doorway and her footsteps could be heard moving quickly down the attic stairway. It was when the front door slammed that Mary was able to place the location of almost exactly where she was. The area seemed to run over both bedrooms on the other side of the front door. She wondered if the wall that separated the bedrooms and bathroom from the hallway might be part of the same wall that separated this small area from the rest of the attic. She'd give quite a bit to know if this had been the building standard of the time or another of great-grandma's own personal standards.

  Heavy footsteps coming up the stairs alerted her to Casey's success. When she looked over Court filled the whole of the small doorway blocking any little bit of light that had filtered in from the other part of the attic as he came through, followed immediately by Casey. She watched his face as best as she could in the poorly lit room to gauge his reaction. When he shifted up on his knees and looked around he focused quickly on the carved piece they hoped to get down the stairs. Mary wasn't at all surprised at his expression of wonder. She was still feeling much the same.

  Court shook his head, "I hate to sound ten-years-old again, but Wow!"

  "Your house doesn't have something like this?" Mary asked casually, almost teasing but very intent on his response. She anticipated it, considering his response to where they were.

  Court looked around the walled-in room. He'd seen a lot but nothing like this. "No, not that I know of. But I can guarantee I'm going to go up and check around a bit closer than I have in the past after this." He moved over to where Mary was. "This is what you want to haul down?" He took a close look at it and was immediately impressed at the carvings.

  "If we can."

  "Okay, let's see if we can get it out of here first so we have more room to maneuver." He carefully moved over to the far side of the antique. Nestling his shoulder against that side he gave it a shove. "This is going to be fun," he said when it moved bare inches.

  Casey got a grip on it from her end to pull. "Mary, you get back there with Court and push while I pull."

  Between the three of them they got it through the short entrance leading into the room and to the top of the stairs. Court moved past both of them and took the end that would go down the steps first. "Okay, I'm going to keep it from sliding down, you need to hold on to that end the best you can and let's try to keep it to one step at a time." He took a deep breath, the thing was even heavier than it looked. He wouldn't mind getting a look in it himself. He had no doubt the actual piece weighed plenty but something inside was adding an awful lot of additional weight to it. "Okay, let's get this thing down."

  "Once down, keep going straight into the front room with it," Mary added as she bent down to get a death grip on the lower edge of the wood.

  

  The three of them studied the old chest that was now positioned in the middle of Mary's living room. Because it stood on short sturdy legs it was taller than the average steamer trunk and as they’d seen in the attic almost twice as long.

  Court bent down to study the ornate carving on the front panel, for the first time able to see it clearly in the light shining through the front and side windows of the living room. "This is definitely hand carved. It's unbelievably intricate so whoever did it was a real master artisan of their time." He studied the corners where the wood was joined. "I don't know nearly enough about the manufacturing of furniture to be able to date this, but I do know this wood is old. I'm not even certain what kind it is. I might be able to tell better once we get it open and can see if any of the wood on the inside is unfinished."

  "I don't see how it opens." Mary had been studying the front edge of the trunk. There was no obvious latch, no apparent means of opening it. But all of them had heard movement from inside it as they had battled to maneuver it down the stairs.

  "There must be a hidden mechanism of sorts somewhere." Court ran his open hand gently and slowly across the wood.

  Casey walked in with her laptop open and running. She bent over to where the words were carved into the wood. "I've got a translator on here that does everything in every language there ever was." And it had come in handy more than once on her overseas trips during her previous life, she thought grimly. She picked out one of the shorter words where she was most certain of the letters and let the machine do its magic. "Hungarian." She looked up in surprise at her cousin. "Hungarian?"

  Mary didn't know what to think. She had never heard anyone in the family speak of Hungarian roots. "Any luck, Court?"

  He just grunted as he continued to feel around for some type of mechanism but he was also thinking about what Casey had said about it possibly coming from Hungary. "I'm not certain what kind of wood it is. I've never seen anything like it but I'll tell you this, it's a hard wood. That could explain why in some places in the carving it looks like the knife got away from someone." Whoever had made it wasn't an occasional woodcarver. This had been made by someone with real talent. And strength. "I still haven't found the lock but I'm pretty certain the hinges were hand-forged."

  "Are you sure?" She didn't know much but Mary knew enough to know what hand-forged implied.

  "Certain enough to put some serious money down on it." He ran his hand over the top of the lid again with growing determination to figure out how to open it. "And not just hand-forged but hand-forged a long, long time ago." With that thought came another and Court shifted his search to the underside of the piece. Slowly, with painstaking attention to what and where his fingers ran over, he searched for anything that was out of the ordinary. Bingo, he thought as he felt a small indentation, shaped in a small circle and just barely big enough for a finger to rest in, or push, he thought even as he did exactly that. At the moment he did, without any warning, they all heard a soft "pop" as the lid of the trunk shifted up slightly and simply rested there in position.

  "Oh!" Mary quickly slid her fingers between the lid and the bottom edge of the chest fearing it would close on them again. She lifted the lid carefully, surprised despite their struggles in getting it down the stairs, of just how heavy it was.

  "Here, let me." Court took the lid from her and continued pushing it up and backwards when she would have stopped assuming it would stay on its own. He saw right away how the back edge of the lid slid along and into the upper edge of the bottom part of the piece as it lifted. When it was almost completely vertical the back edge of the lid slid down into the open rim cut into the back edge of the trunk where it fit perfectly.

  "Unbelievable workmanship," Court said more to himself than anyone else in the room as he bent over to admire the absolute intricate simplicity of it. As he did he was oblivious to the two women beside him who were rendered speechless as they took in the contents of the old trunk.

  "Mary," Casey whispered, "I think th
at might be a Bible."

  "A family Bible," Mary agreed softly as she reached in and carefully lifted the ornately decorated book from where it had been stored and saw only then what it hid. "Oh my. Casey." Her heart sped, beat like a drum as if she'd run a mile. And then another. "There's another one underneath it." She moved to the side so her cousin could carefully lift the second Bible out from where it had been carefully preserved.

  They carried both to the table in the dining room, setting them down gently before returning to see what else was to be found in the old chest.

  "Ladies." Court was running his fingers along the edge of one of the short sides of the lid that now sat upright in its current open position. "I think I have a date for you, at least a date when this may have been made." As they both moved to where he stood, he pointed to the numbers carved deep into the wood. "1592." He looked at them, shook his head at their expressions of awe and completely understood. He felt the same. "Old." He patted Mary who stood closest to him on the shoulder. "Really old." He thought about his own attic. Truthfully he'd never been up there other than to set out bait for the rodents which made their home away from home there. He thought too about his grandmother's attic. Both were worth checking out. There was obviously no knowing what folks put up in attics to get out of the way then totally forgot about.

  He looked at the two women beside him. Both were still silent as they came to grips with the enormity of what they'd found. He shook his head. "I'm going to leave you two to go through this. Call me if you need any other help." With that he silently let himself out the front door.

  Both women stood in front of the old wood chest looking down at all it held. There were other books, very old books that looked way too fragile to touch. And there was more... fine linens, old glassware, all of which someone had carefully packed into the chest long, long ago.

  Mary reached in and carefully drew out a thin piece of material, fragile with age, but still whole and intact. She gently laid it over her outstretched arm.

  "Oh, Mary." Casey drew in a breath. "It looks like a veil, maybe someone's wedding veil."

  "Maybe," her cousin agreed.

  "Do you think this was someone's, I don't know. Hope Chest?" Casey fingered the old material, still soft in places despite its age.

  "At some point, maybe." She looked at the care that had been taken to pack the contents up. Thought about what Court had said about the workmanship of the actual chest. "You could be right. Somewhere, sometime around 1590 something it could have been someone's Hope Chest, or whatever they called it then." She walked over and carefully laid the fabric on the table where nothing else would disturb it. "And I think it was passed down." She thought about her mother, her grandmother, and everything she had ever heard about her great-grandmother who had bravely come to America at seventeen. Brave and alone. "Maybe from daughter to daughter." She thought about it, marveled they were in possession of such a treasure. "I wonder if Great-Grandma brought it with her or if it was sent to her later." She shook her head, "It doesn't matter, it came to her and she obviously took very good care of it."

  "From Great-Grandma to Nanno." Casey looked up, chewed her lip, wondered about a history they didn't know, didn't have all the answers to. Didn't know there had been questions that needed answers. "What about our mother's generation? I never heard Mom talk about this." She reached down to run her palm gently over lace that shouldn't be in the good condition it was. "And I certainly never heard anything about Hungary."

  "Same here." Mary thought about it. "And this chest is something Mom would have talked about," she felt certain about that. "With her dying breath if that's what it came to."

  "Then they didn't know." Casey thought about it, spoke what they both wondered. "Could it be Nanno didn't know about it either?" She looked over at her cousin. "About this," she waved her hand over the legacy neither had known of. "Or whatever connection we have to a country nobody ever mentioned."

  "Possibly." She thought it out. "We're assuming it's from Great-Grandma's side of the family." She studied the contents of the chest as she spoke. "I tend to think it’s simply because it's hard to imagine all this being passed down to a son and not a daughter."

  "That's a bit sexist." Casey commented though she was in total agreement.

  "Maybe, but if you think about how far back this dates and the traditions of the time...who knows." She needed a cup of coffee even more than she needed a shower at that moment. She sensed more than heard Casey follow her into the kitchen. "And in all honesty who of us have ever researched the family genealogy beyond what we've been told. Just because they came here from Sweden and Prussia doesn't mean that's where their grandparents or great-grandparents were from."

  "True." Casey leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen as her thoughts wandered. "I can start some research on that front. Maybe join one of those online genealogy sites."

  "That sounds good. Start with Great-Grandma...I just have this strong feeling that's where all this," she waved her hand towards the front room, "probably comes from. It may sound sexist but wedding veils and family Bibles are more along the lines of what a mother passes down to her daughters if she has them." She sighed, knowing that no matter what they did on their own this was something they simply couldn't keep to themselves. "We need to talk with Aunt Charlie. Dance around it first, see if she has a clue."

  "Okay," Casey agreed. "And if she doesn't?"

  "We'll figure that out when the time comes." Mary knew from experience that not everything could be pre-planned to the nth degree.

  "Gees, Mary. Lord knows what else could be up there."

  Mary quietly agreed. Quietly wondered why it had been left there. And how it had managed to go untouched all this time. And if it had anything at all to do with the strong pull she’d had most her life to come back here...to this city...to this house.

  "And you didn't even want to bother going up there." Casey felt no small amount of satisfaction over her part in this. She punched her cousin lightly on the shoulder. "This is great," she said, smiling broadly, happier than she could remember being in a long time. "Life is good."

  

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mary parked her car in one of the small parking areas that could be found along the many winding gravel roads. Anyone considering parking right alongside the old cinder blocks lining the narrow roads would quickly find out the hazard of doing so. So narrow were these roads, if they could be referred to as such, that no one could get past the other unless you were walking. If two cars were to meet coming from opposite directions, one would have to back up until one of the pull-off areas designed specifically for parking were reached to allow the other to go by.

  Mary had often thought that it was quaint. As she'd gotten older, she realized with the knowledge of history an adult picked up along the way, contrary to the black and white world of a child that the roads had been designed and constructed in a time when a single horse or a horse drawn buggy were the only transportation of the day. Walking had probably been the intended traffic for what could have easily been considered pathways rather than the roads for automobile traffic they were now used for.

  Time hadn't stood still though. Not as it did for those here. Only visitors to this sacred ground found the means of getting around an inconvenience. And, Mary thought, they'd get over it soon enough. If you were here as she was, there were other more pressing thoughts to contend with.

  She had several intended destinations in mind as she got out of the car. But now here, amidst the quiet and surrounded by the massive towering trees that provided all the shelter anyone needed from the sun, she had only one. She carefully made her way along gravel and dirt pathways where they existed and even more carefully past aging stones where they didn't.

  The family owned several plots. But when the time had come only one came to mind, only one had been right. As she reached her destination she stood still for a moment and simply looked out at all that surrounded her. At the top of this s
mall hill so many of the oldest stones belonged to her, belonged to who she came from. She walked to the one she sought. Standing there, looking down, she could swear she felt the slightest touch. The wind…she let herself think...believe, and brushed her hair back with her fingers. It had to be the wind. But there was a place in her that knew better. That believed stronger.

  "I miss you Mama," she said softly, sighed on a breath that wobbled unashamedly. "I've tried to keep my word to you." She sat carefully just on the edge of the place where her mother rested. Ran her fingers along the marble that glinted in the rays of the sun that lightly filtered through the trees her mother had always loved so much and now surrounded her for all of time. "Beloved Daughter, Sister, Wife, Mother. Beloved For All Time." So much to so many. So many left behind. Some still floundering. Mary thought of her younger brother.

  "I'm still trying," she whispered. "You asked us...demanded," she thought of those last days, the long vigil, and the even longer nights spent in the hospital surrounded by its cold compassion and rigid rules. "That we go on, that we be our best. That we remember all you taught us. Be all that you were for us." She felt the tears well and let them. Grief for loved ones should never be denied by self or others. "And we've tried Mama...for you, for ourselves. But our worlds shifted when we lost you. Everything that once was...changed." She sighed heavily on the word that didn't even come close. "How could it be otherwise Mama?" She dashed away tears that fell unchecked. "How could the loss of someone so loved, so important to all we were, everything we knew, how could that not change us? Change our lives? Move our world?" She leaned against the stone, much as she would her mother had she been there. "But we're doing the best we can, the best I can, just as you asked." She felt the wind gently swirl around her. "Just as you demanded of us. You did so much for us, we couldn't do any less for you." She rose, raised her face to the wind, felt that soft whispering touch, held it close, embracing it. "I miss you Mama. Every single day...I miss you." As she rose, she heard the bells. Looking in their direction, seeing from where they rang, she knew it was not fate...but faith.