Maw Sue warned me of this a long time ago. The gift, the curse—it was our secret. I had to be careful who I told, what I said, what I did. Not everyone understands.
“Willodean, your grandmother gets out of whack sometimes and has to go away to a place where she can get some rest and get back to herself again. Nothing more, nothing less.”
The Amodgians have her. I was positive. My mind was restless and pouring out thunderclouds of fearful matter.
“What she’s trying to say is that she’s bat-shit crazy.” Papa Hart spat. Salvia shot from underneath his tongue like a water gun. Dell gasped and glared at him. He responded with the old what—the—hell look. Her eyes burned him, then went slant and hard as two nickels. Her cheeks matched the shade of her lipstick. I knew exactly what this meant.
PTA is the nostril flaring, old testament, Moses with a stick, Jesus with a whip, southern hellfire and brimstone shit storm. It starts out as a normal discussion about something pointless, which suddenly turns sour. It ends up with people fighting over nothing, which ends in slamming doors, burnt cornbread, pissed off women reverting to silence and men drinking whiskey till the wee hours of the morning. PTA has stages of various degrees. Dell hit P (pissed) and T (ticked) simultaneously, which rarely happens, except in murders. P and T crashed into A (asskicking) which was the crème Della-crème of mother lodes. This causes a cosmic explosion.
“Well Mr. Doctor know it all.” Dell growled. “She’s sick. How dare you speak of my mother like that?
“She’s always sick.” Papa Hart yelled back. He crammed two fig cookies in his mouth as if that was a ploy for revenge or something.
“Why don’t you just scream it out loud?” Dell screamed about screaming. “Tell the whole damn neighborhood for God’s sakes. My Mother is Crazy.” PTA escalated into a full blown, kitchen sink, no wholes barred argument. They forgot I was there. Listening. To. Every. Terrible. Awful. Word.
“Well you said it. Not me.” Papa Hart blared. “And besides…” he grabbed another cookie and crammed the package into the pantry and slammed the door. “Hell that woman could be hit with lightening and it wouldn’t change a damn thing. Probably fuel her more. She needs to be somewhere she can’t tear the whole house apart or take a dozen goddamned pills mixed with poppy seeds and dancing around the neighborhood like some drunken Indian. People see her marching around her house like a lunatic. Shit. Got the whole town talking, you know. Your mother honestly thinks she saw Jesus playing a banjo on her rooftop. As far as I’m concerned they can hallucinate together and sing go tell it on the fruit filled mountain.”
Dell turned ten shades of red, blue, and purple. “Youuu—youu stop that right now.” Anxiety riddled her voice like bullet wounds. She zoomed past PTA and went into the kill zone. The kill zone was about fifty kilometers past the dead zone. I know these things. I live in them.
“You know I don’t like those places William Henry. How dare you say that. I don’t have a choice. She is out of control but what else am I supposed to do?” Dell looked as if she could fold up on the counter, helpless, defeated.
“I mean…I know what they do.” She sobbed. “They strap her down and give her electroshock therapy and God…who knows what else…I—I dddon’t’ want to know what else to do.”
What? What do you mean strap her down? Any breath I had left was now gone. Taken—snatched away by horrible words.
“She is my mother, William Henry!” Dell said with tight lips. “You know she has more good days than bad days. I—I try to see the good but, but…she’s getting worse. So YOU tell me. What am I supposed to do?” Dell was standing up and only inches from his face, ratcheting her fingers in the air. “That—that—Jesus day stuff—that was just a bad day.” She began to stutter and cry more. Her eyes sank inside her to a dark place, then suddenly sprang back up, unhinged and fighting mad. In the south, fighting mad is completely different than mad. Fighting mad is like declaring war. The shit gets real.
“Maybe she did see Jesus on the roof. How do you know?” She spat. Her lips curled under and her eyes locked onto his not letting go. She was a lot shorter than him, so she had to crane her neck upwards. I could see the blue veins sprouting in anger underneath her cool toned skin. Papa Hart unaffected by chaos, having survived WWII, simply leaned against the counter and ate a cookie.
“AAAAND it’s no different than you and your damned corn whiskey or your preacher father getting drunk and trying to pick up a mule. Now THAT was a fruit filled go tell it on the mountain kind of day, huh William Henry.”
“Preachers can drink. What’s the harm in that?” He said popping his fingers. Dell’s eye went wild and big again.
“Well, I‘d rather see Jesus on a roof top than a jackass trying to pick up a jackass.”
Ewww…Burn. I wish I knew what the hell they were talking about. I’m not sure whose winning. Not knowing the whole story has me in the middle. I was lost in a sludge of a grown up conversation. Dell walked furiously back to the bar and angrily lit a cigarette, her hands trembling. She sucked it viciously. The swirls of smoke flee the wrath of the room. And I fled with them. I went to that place all children go when the adults in their life break and the world spins out of control, leaving the innocent amongst the rubble, in a cosmic upheaval of screaming, shouting and bickering. My mind traveled backwards in previous conversations. I was lost somewhere between shock therapy, Jesus on a rooftop and a drunken Jackass. I was sorting things out in my head when a rapture of bizarre laughter befell my gifted ears.
What? What could this be? Did I miss something? I returned to find them both falling over in great racking laughs. Had there been a joke? But how? They were arguing. How did it become funny? Papa Hart laughed his way to the record player. He turned the knob and dropped the needle on the record. The speakers blasted a country song. Papa Hart moseyed across the room, one hand in the air, the other on his hip, one foot out in front and one foot behind, as if this was a dance hall floor. He made his way to the kitchen drawer and pulled out a wooden spoon. Dell giggled like a school girl watching him. She reached for her bic lighter and held it like a microphone. What in Sam Hill is going on here? I felt weird and out of place. Do they even know I’m here? Maybe I don’t exist after all.
“We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.” They sang together. “We've been talkin' 'bout Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”
I watched the bizarre engagement act itself out. It was like fighting, except in a lyrically duke it out way.
“I'm goin' to Jackson, I'm gonna mess around, Yeah, I'm goin' to Jackson, Look out Jackson town.” Papa Hart sang. His tone was matter of fact. Dell reacted to him and his words by getting in his face, on her tippy toes and her lighter to her mouth.
“Well, go on down to Jackson;” she sang. “Go ahead and wreck your health. Go play your hand you big-talkin' man, make a big fool of yourself, you're goin' to Jackson; go comb your hair!” She bar stepped some dance moves across the floor and then Papa Hart’s big voice met hers, “Honey, I'm gonna snowball Jackson.”
“See if I care.” Dell’s voice rang out loudly.
“When I breeze into that city, people gonna stoop and bow. (Hah!) Papa Hart sang and stomped his feet. All them women gonna make me, teach 'em what they don't know howwww, I'm goin' to Jackson, you turn-a loose-a my coat. 'Cos I'm goin' to Jackson.”
"Goodbye," Sang Dell. She cocked her head to the side and flicked her hand in the air as if she gave two shits an iota. I was leaning against the wall that separates the kitchen from the den. I didn’t know what to think about all this. I was used to silence and slamming doors. I wondered how I was still standing. I hadn’t taken a breath since the conversation, turned shit storm, turned song fest, started. I mean, heck…five minutes ago, I could have bawled like a baby but now I want to sing and I don’t even know why exactly. I guess it just seems like the thing to do. I never understood adults no how. And I did like Johnny Cash. So I joined in, tapping my hand on my knee and
singing what words I knew, which wasn’t many. After a few minutes, the only thing I could hear was my own ridiculous knee slapping hillbilly laugh and a butchered version of Johnny Cash’s song. That’s because everyone else had stopped singing. Suddenly, they realized I had been there the whole time and I heard every single word spoken. Words before the song fest ensued. And when they realized it—I suddenly realized it myself and what it meant. Maw Sue was in all sorts of trouble. Information filtered and found place. Words went full throttle. Images flashed inside the house, inside me, pictures of horrible awful rooms where doctors strap you down, poke and prod and electrocute with therapy. My heart pounded in my ears.
“Oh…no, no Willodean, it’s not what you think.” Dell said. She cupped her hands to her face until her words muffled. “It’s not what you think.” She reached for her puffing sticks pack and nervously lit one. She got up and made her way around the bar. The pitter patter of her tiny feet was a mouse scurrying through a maze looking for a way out. I felt her hands on my shoulders and could smell the earthy scent of tobacco burning. She squat down on my level and went through a spill of crap common to adults who are trying to crawfish. Lie. Make up stuff. Lie again.
“Honey. It’s okay. Maw Sue is gonna be just fine. When people get old they do things they wouldn’t normally do. Your grandmother, well, she takes way too many pills. She gets disoriented and then she gets angry and doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t mean to be that way. That’s why she had to go away for a while so she can get better and come back, better than ever.” Her voice turned chirpy as if she had just read me the ending of a Hans Christian Anderson fable. “And all is well in the kingdom.” Pffftttt! Fear spackled through me and caused the shadows to appear. Remind me of the truth, the curse, what I knew to be true all along.
“She’s not coming back.” The breathless shadow says. He appears to life from the swirling smoke of the puffing stick. The shadows know me, all of me, every fiber that wove me together since birth. He taunts me with interceptions, mingling into my mind, pictures of Maw Sue’s body strapped to a table in a cold room. More shadows arrive, one after another, from cigarette smoke tendrils, all stirring up memories, haunting darkness, screams and dreams, fears and tragedy. Dell talks and sucks on her puffing stick, unaware. The shadows toy with me like a wounded animal in a trap. I am nothing but a captive in their sporting arena of play, to experiment their weapons, to perfect their strategies, to engage me and ultimately destroy me. The Amodgian shadows are disembodied spirits of everything I fear coming to life. They want me to join them forever. They even invite me politely.
“Now that Maw Sue is gone..you can stay with us.” The shadow heckles in warning. He disappears only to reappear in another part of the room. “You’ll be alone. All alone with us.” He says guttural. A few other shadows enter in for fun.
“Electrified—sizzling—snap, snap!” They say in unison. “Shocked with therapy—not dead yet—but soon.” Grimacing laughs bellowed. It felt like the ground shaking. “And your next—ahhhaaaaa.”
They creep and crawl creating living, breathing nightmares. My mind wanders without the wondering tree, seeking places to hide, avoid, deny. I could see Dell’s mouth moving in intervals of speech, but hearing nothing, while she sucked on the puffing stuff, and made motions with her hands. Occasionally, she’d give Papa Hart the evil eye and then look back at me with a reassuring smile. She doesn’t know I’m stuck inside the Dumas of Umbra watching the shadows hover, bob and weave. All afflicting me with fear, worries, doubts and my deepest, darkest secrets. I try to keep it together. If Papa Hart and Dell see the crazy in me, like they see in Maw Sue, I’d be carted out the door next, just like the shadows said. The shadows mock and feed off my weakness, my thoughts. Maw Sue can’t die. She can’t. No. I need her. I need to know more of the gift, how to control it, what to do. How to fight. I can’t survive without her. No one knows or understands but Maw Sue. She can’t die.
The shadows pull and suck life from me. I wander to dark places inside the house, corridors of many souls, hallways of hell. I can’t keep myself from going there. It draws me and keeps me. Maw Sue told me at an early age that it was my responsibility to put those thoughts in a place where they could be controlled. If left to wander unchecked, the shadows could destroy a person in no time flat and merely by their own mind and thought process.
“Control your mind, Willodean.” She’d say. “That’s the key.”
And no time like the present. I went to the room I created a few weeks ago. It happened one night when I went on overload. Tiny hands held the hammer and built it board by board, nail by nail, and wall to wall until the room was complete. The outside door was as bright as the sun, so bright the only doorknob to handle the brightness was a star. The gold nameplate said SEVEN. And underneath it said, NO SHADOWS ALLOWED. I simply built a room where they did not exist. On the inside walls was inscriptions of the poem, Seven, and other quotes and words I loved. Even a painting of the Michelangelo art work, Adams fingers and God’s fingers. I could sit in this room forever. The rest of the room was similar to those glass globes that shake and snow falls, but in my glass globe Seven room, it was a forest of wondering trees and leaves falling in every seasonal color. There was a pine thicket with taller than tall pine trees, and thick carpet grass, a large open field with nothing but lilies and at night it was a cascade of moons and stars. There were crackles enjoying their life as a child bug, sucking root and digging tunnels and never having to grow up, molt or have dreadful sex. It was perfect in every realm.
While I’m in the Seven room, I can still see the other realm of this world, where Dell is still talking, smoking and cutting eye glances at Papa Hart whose is back to eating cookies and staring at both of us as if we fell off the crazy train. There is no fear inside the dimension of the Seven room. No shadows, no scary images, no fear. I can’t stay here forever, it’s only a temporary gather—my—wits place. I talk to God while I sit in the branches of the wondering tree. He answers me with breath and spirit inside my heart. He tells me that he is not the creator of fear, only love, power and a sound mind, which I really, really need. And then I remember what Maw Sue always said. “If everything else fails—just plead the blood. Speak the saviors name and poof, life changes. Nothing can withstand the blood.”
I’ve yet to see how this works, exactly, I mean, look at where it got her. Maybe she’s as crazy as everyone says, and maybe I am too.
Dell is down to her last drag of smoke and I know my time is short. I have to go back sometime. So I climb down out of the wondering tree. I take a deep breath. I have to go back to the realm of reality that is filled with fears, shadows and other creepy things. Dell’s lips move in silence, jabbering between puffs and the shadow glints are still there—waiting on me. I step out of the seven room but before I am completely out, I take a moment inside the inner realm of mystery, the one I was born into, between this world and the next, the tangled part that is me, secrets and threes of mystery and unspoken things. I whisper a prayer, a long benediction of words pleading the blood, Jesus on a roof top, kind of prayer. I envision a long lists of prophets and sages speaking the exact prayer in perilous times, two thousand years ago when lions stared them down and stones were cast, bodies burned and hung on crosses, all pleading the blood, all petitioning the heavens, bleeding hearts and bitter souls. I remember their tragic endings. The blood didn’t save them. From what I’ve read in stories, it didn’t end well at all. They all died. Death in deplorable conditions, their suffering unfathomable. Fear trickles on my skin thinking of it. A stirring spirit rattles me undone. Maw Sue said that some things weren’t for our knowing and having faith didn’t mean we always got what we wanted. And sometimes life didn’t turn out like we planned. It is God’s call in the end. Being human, we are conditioned to carnal things—we can’t see the end picture like God does. All I begged for is a little head’s up, that’s all. Just a hint, a peep to warn me. It would have helped me a whole, whole
lot because inside my head, I lived out my life in warp speed, growing up accelerated, from child to adult in five seconds, age ten to fifty and the whole time, I created my death over and over again in various ways, trying to determine which one I liked the best. It was my way of giving God the okay or uh-huh or no freaking way. I was obsessed with death. How did God plan for me to die? Was I going to fall off a cliff, a car wreck, drowning? A snake bite or a plane crash? Eaten by a shark or worse than worse—shock therapy like Maw Sue. I was a bundle of fear, on top of fear, acting out fear and living in a house of fear. I was a big ‘ole walking lump of fear.
I came straight out of the Seven room and stepped into reality but I wasn’t going to go out without a fight. I had to try it, stoning or not.
“I plead the blood of Jesus.” My lips whispered. The cry so faint it barely made life from the syllables. The second the words touched air, the shadows dismantled—stung by fire or singed by the blood. Impressive.
“What hon? Did you say something?” Dell said.
“Nothing.” I said. “Not a thing.” But it was a thing. A big thing.
“I thought you said…” Dell paused as if she was trying to figure out what she thought she heard me say. “Well I hope you understand our talk.” She stood up. I felt a hot jab on my leg. I looked down to see a hot trail of ash from her cigarette on my thigh. “Oww.” I said brushing it off. It narrowly missed my shorts. Rats. Why couldn’t it have burnt these ridiculous shorts to dust? This was the ugliest pair to date. The brunt of the shorts are white and have eight distinctly placed red, white and blue squares in the front and for some ungodly reason, there is one lone black patch on my right butt cheek. It was supposed to be a pocket but she ran out of material. I think she ran out of brains. Mag made it worse by drawing an eyeball in black permanent market on the opposite butt cheek. Now my ass looks like a drunken pirate when I walk. Hi-hoe Matey!
WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) Page 18
