WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1)

by Fowler Robertson

  Before I left, I leaned over and kissed his rough, unshaven cheek. I lingered long, my heart heavy and weighing me down. I squeezed his hand and tried to remember the way his calloused skin felt in my hands, the era of a great generation never to be again, not in my lifetime. An era of porch tales, houses constructed, fishing trips, blackberries and gardens grown. Tinker shop tales and motors built, and monsters spitting fire. War fought and won, buddies lost and buried. Children born and held, love given, accepted and shared. Hands that touched, that felt, that gripped. Scattered seeds and harvesting in groves. Life lived—life loved. I will not say goodbye.

  I painted a picture in my head with all the details, scents, sights and feelings of Papa Hart and our times. I built a room inside the house, inside me and called it snake runner, even though I had no idea what that was, it was going to inspire me to find out, but in the meantime, I would still have the memories inside our room to enjoy whenever I wanted.

  I let go of his hand. I let go of this man. I shall take the memories with me. I shall.

  Love looks. Love lets go.

  I felt the earth rumble or the building shake but it was more than that. I knew…

  My spirit eyes saw him first. Across the sky an Escort rode a white horse that trampled the clouds with his hoofs and dispersed them like dust. In that moment I remembered a peculiar story of battle he told me long ago. Papa Hart said he first saw Escorts in the war when he watched in horrible conditions, all of his comrade’s die. He explained their appearance and it is exactly as he said. In moments like this, I don’t feel cursed. It is the opposite. I am grateful for the gift. My gift. My eyes, my ears. For in them, I see hope.

  He wore a long grayish robe, translucent and tinted as if an ocean was wrapped around him in a cloak. On both sides it flowed outward like a hard rain falling sideways. His piercing eyes were the light of many fires flickering within two flames. One hour and six minutes later, Papa Hart left this life. He met the gaze of God, the eternal light. He looked for the last time. He looked at me and then he let go.

  It’s been three days since I saw him last and I’m a mess. I can’t seem to let go of anything. I relive it over and over again. I’m completely toast, mind, body and spirit and we haven’t even had the visitation, much less the funeral. The next few days will probably finish me off. Maybe they’ll dig two graves and throw me in one. Maw Sue’s words poke me like some haunt.

  “Willodean, don’t stare at the darkness too long. It will take you out of season.”

  “Okay, Maw Sue. Okay. I hear you. I hear you.” I say out loud.

  That night I fell asleep on the couch covered in old pictures, memories of my life as a child growing up next to my grandparents and great grandparents. In my dreams I didn’t want to take life for granted. I didn’t want to be crazy and all up in my head with worry, morbid thoughts and fears. I wanted to celebrate the small things; live life full, experience the love of family, laughter, friends, relationships, forgiveness, a sunset, a sunrise, the moon shining bright, fly like the birds of air, smell like lilies of the field, shine like stars of heaven, eyes to see, ears to hear, find my place, wear my centerpiece, go out knowing, dance with dirt dancers, revile in secret sister codes, tell porch tales, sink into storytelling and silence and consume a basket of crumbs of my life, simple be. Yes. Simply be. My dreams reminded me of what my heart desires. But getting there in real life is altogether a different ballgame. My mind doesn’t cooperate. The curse won’t let me.

  I woke up staring into the faces of snapshots all over the place, on my face, in my ears, under my arms, between my legs, tickling my feet, on top of covers, underneath, above, below and around, scattered everywhere. It's like the people in the pictures had a party while I slept. But that is not what amazed me. Scared me. Freaked me out.

  When I sat up—foggy and out of place, it took me a second to realize the picture were in biographical order as they happened. Year to year in order. A crumb sprang up on my tongue reminding me. I was not going to forsake its sweetness and spit it out. I swallowed it with gladness and right then and there, I decided to fulfill my childhood vow—the one I made on the porch when I was seven. When I was innocent about life, about love, before I let the curse run havoc on me, before I stole the necklace and regretted it, before it destroyed everything I loved, everything I cherished. I vowed to find the little girl with spirit eyes and spirit ears, the Willodean Hart I used to be, the little girl with the crackle shell and dreams. When I find her, I want to crawl inside her crackle shell and love her, and never let go. I fell off the bed and went straight to my knees. Pictures fell around me speaking voices of time and place. I recited the poem I knew by heart. I prayed to the Marie Antoinette God of my childhood.

  I want to simple be God. Birds of the air, lilies of the field and the stars of heaven. Take me God and make me seven. Send me crumbs that I may consume and make my life a beautiful bloom.

  The Mason Jar

  I was eleven, mortified and stuck inside the morgue. It was the Mason room inside the house, where petal people live and surround me, whisper and tell me things. For years, I went there and stood in front of her casket where she slept and in horror repeating the mantra, “I’m sorry I took the necklace. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have done it. I’m so sorry. I will not say goodbye. I will not say goodbye.”

  Of course, as it happened inside the room, inside the house, inside me, it also acted itself out in my real life. One way or the other it bled out like the thick southern sap of my own making.

  At Maw Sue’s funeral, I refused to leave the casket. I just stood there like a statue. Maw Sue lay there stiff and lifeless and I saw myself laying with her, squished beside her and taken by the same shadows, the same afflictions and curse that neither of us was able to defend ourselves against. Did she miss the necklace even now? Does she know the truth now? She was dead because of me and I could not forgive myself. I thought by taking the necklace it would save us from the curse and make our lives better, but instead it took her from me. And I’m next. I just know it. I tried to take it back. But it was too late. I beat the dickens out of the mirror bin, even slammed it against the wondering tree and took it to the tinker shop and hit it with Papa Hart’s big hammer but it refused to open like some chamber door to heaven, only open to saints and Tessy Pearson. I just wanted to take everything back. I wanted to give her the stupid red stone so she could rub it all she wanted to and get back to her normal crazy self, but it was no use. Life just turned on a dime.

  Maw Sue had been in and out of the loony clinic, for weeks. Her tic-tac’s didn’t work like they used to, so she took more, overdosing, intensifying the madness within her. She went into the clinic, the awful place with no name to recover and mend, only to return more troubled than before. Jesus with a banjo on a rooftop crazy. Elvis has left the building crazy. The hardest part was that she acted like she didn’t know me anymore. It was like I didn’t exist. She walked the lonely road where only she could travel and it freaked me out. I wasn’t ready to let her go.

  “No.” I’d scream at her. “You stop it Maw Sue.” My lips trembled top to bottom. She’d stare at me with lost eyes as if she didn’t know me. “Love looks.” I’d say real close to her face.

  “Look at me. It’s Willodean. Look at me.” I’d scream over and over.

  “Where is Larken?” She said caught up somewhere else. “Will you go get Larken for me, hon. I need to talk to Larken.”

  Larken? Jesus Christ, where is she? Doesn’t she hear me? I had so much to learn about the gift and the curse and how to channel it all for good. I wasn’t doing a good job on anything for that matter. I mess things up left and right.

  “Let’s go over the channeling method, shall we?” I’d say. I move her legs, her arms in a storytelling mode to get her to remember. “Tell me again how to handle the shadows. Tell me of the gifts, the ancestors, and the curse. Tell me how the pugnators defended themselves. Tell me of the Cupitor’s. Tell me Maw Sue.”

&
nbsp; “What time do I need to go to work? Am I late? Oh, god, I can’t be late. I have to sew. They don’t like it when I’m late.” She’d say. Then she’d try to get up from her chair but before she could rise, she’d revert to the daze again, and sit back down.

  And Larken? Larken had long been dead. She was somewhere in her past and I could not reach her. I felt utterly alone. Alone with the gift and curse that I didn’t know how to use. I rambled through the house tearing closets up and looking underneath the beds, looking for the journals, the guide books, the old scrolls, anything that explained what I needed to know. I HAD TO FIND ANSWERS. I chastised myself the whole time.

  “It’s your own fault Willodean. You never do what you’re told. You never listen. Why didn’t you learn all this when you could. You messed the universe up when you stole the necklace and now the plan is screwed. Now it’s too late. TOO LATE! You’re doomed.” I exhausted myself looking for the journals. I could find no existence of scrolls, or diaries, or books of Cupitor magic, nothing that suggested anything that Maw Sue said was true. And then I wondered if it was all a bunch of lies. Is what everyone said true, is Maw Sue just mad?

  I remember the last anguished days before her death, the last time I saw her alive. She was disturbed, darkly disturbed and clinging to that damn Mason jar. In her cryptic, wrinkled hands it sat with the assortment of dried roses she kept inside it for as long as I can remember. Each one a representation of loved one passed, a single rose plucked from a funeral wreath or casket arrangement. She kept reaching for the necklace that wasn't there until she scratched long, bleeding marks down her neck and chest. I used to think the red stone dragon was the eye attached to her very bloodline, surging and pulsating under her skin, leaping and torturing me. When Maw Sue clawed for the stone, I'd feel regret and beat the mirror bin again, sledgehammering it to death, bricks, sticks and more, but it didn’t budge or splinter, as if it was forged in the fires of hell itself and I would be condemned to pay for my sins. I figured no one could open it except the devil. Once I got to hell, he’d open it and say, “Well done. Willodean. You stole something that wasn’t yours and plum killed your grandmother. Good job. Ready for some flames now? You like it torched or sizzling hot?” I would burn in eternal hell for what I had done. I felt sad, guilty and crushed for Maw Sue, her madness, our madness.

  Long before she got sick and I stole the necklace, ruining everyone’s life, Maw Sue had told me what the Mason jar and the roses were about. The red rose symbolized her first husband, Jefferson Starbuck Adams, the love of her life and none other, she said. He died of tuberculosis and left her alone with five children. According to other folks, Maw Sue was more stable with him than she’d ever been before. After he died, she went plum mad, off her rockers and never fully recovered. Dell mentioned finding a diary of his several years ago and it was quite remarkable the things she learned of the father she barely knew. The journal was a tanned leather binder with Starbuck in the center with a picture of a moon and one bright star in the top corner. The orange rose was her second husband, Sully, who she said died from just plain, meanness. Folks said she was so desperate for company after Jefferson died that she just grabbed onto the first blockhead that came her way. Sully was controlling and manipulating. Plus he drank like a fish. And turns out, that’s what killed him. His liver just quit.

  The white rose was her last husband, Morton, a gentle, quiet soul that kept to himself. He stayed with her the longest until he died in a car wreck. The other roses in the Mason jar are more tragic as if they are waiting on eternity to bloom again. Towering above the others is a single pink bloom, dried, aged and dusty but just as flamboyant as it was in its prime, fresh plucked from the vine. It was her mother, Joseemae Esse Ainsley. Pronounced Joe-See-May. No one talks about what happened to her. Whatever it was, it affected Maw Sue in the worst way. Then there's two peach identical yellow roses, Lorinda Lane and Lizzy Lynn, twin girls. They died of influenza at age three. Cradled next to them is two identical crème colored roses, holding each other, wilted arms intertwined with locks of curly blonde hair and blue ribbons. Twin boys born a year or so after the girls and appropriately named, Luke and Larken. All Maw Sue’s children were fathered by Jefferson Starbuck. None other. The boys drowned in the care of Maw Sue’s sister, Ida who was a drunk and passed out in the sun while the boys swam in the river unattended. Apparently, Maw Sue blamed herself for the longest time and convinced herself they were still alive because when they died she was still locked up in some crazy house dealing with her demons and when she got out, she was unable to accept the horrible awful because the reality would have sent her over the edge for good. Sometimes, the Dumas of Umbra, the houses inside us have a purpose in the rooms it builds. Maybe to keep the dead alive, so we can revisit our loved ones, in memory, whenever we want.

  I learned of this odd Mason jar ritual when Big Pops died. Since I had the gift, I was sensitive to spiritual matters, so the realm beyond me, those things I saw, felt, and experienced were over the top. It overwhelmed me with grief and other people’s sorrows and Maw Sue saw it in me and how it affected me.

  “Life doesn’t end in the grave” She said. She had me pluck a rose from the flower arrangement on top of the Big Pops casket and bring it to her house later that evening. When I got there, she took me in the back room. We went inside the cedar closet, the creepy hideaway that Mag and I swore was haunted with voices, knocks, and frightening sounds. A light bulb with a pull string hung from the ceiling with a spoil of crippling wires. It threw off shadows, exposing the dark things. I froze up while my skin pimpled and jerked, and the house inside me, stirred on its foundation. A thin white string ran from one side of the closet to the other. Old wool coats and polyester clothing hung behind it on wire hangers. Clothes pins hung limp from the string like meat hooks in a butcher shop. She took my rose, placed it upside down on the string and clipped it with a clothes pin. Then of course, she told me the story in the same fashion she always does when she’s storytelling, dramatic, detailed and mystic. In most cases, I loved every minute of Maw Sue’s tales but this one about did me in.

  The story goes, that the French used dried flowers to immortalize their dead and called it Immortelle, a symbol for longevity, resurrection, immortality. It meant everlasting. They used chrysanthemums, aranmathus, strawflowers, and asters, or any flower would do. Maw Sue happened to prefer roses.

  “Why are we putting it in the closet?” I asked her. I was utterly afraid of the answer. My mind envisioned dead of the night fairies casting spells using flower petals. She bent down inside the closet, pushing, shoving and moving objects around I couldn’t see until she pulled out a dusty book, thick as an encyclopedia. She flipped through it quickly. She stopped and pulled out a piece of paper wrinkled, stained and folded in threes.

  “This is a poem by a poet named, Laura G. Collins.” She said pausing suddenly lost for words, a catch in her throat, a poetic trance. “It’s called Immortelles and Asphodels or in our language…everlastings.” Hearing the word everlastings spoken out loud made me weak. She began to read.

  THESE, our Earth’s perennial flowers—

  The fadeless blooms by Poets sung,

  Songs, that from Homer’s Age till ours,

  Down the aisles of Time have rung—

  In many an emblem do we weave

  For passionate Remembrance’ sake;

  And howe’er we joy, howe’er we grieve,

  Sacred pilgrimages make;

  For Loss and Grief, the Asphodels

  On our graves we mourning lay;

  For Memory, the Immortelles—

  Our loved ones live for us always.

  Death in Life, Life in Death—how we

  This, Love’s Faith, keep reverently.

  As she read, her hands shook. The sounds of time broke like glass. Old grief leaked from her eyes and formed streams of water that flowed into the dry riverbeds of her wrinkled face. I was spell bound by the words, the meaning of the poem, the mystery,
all held up in a dark place. A room built itself inside the house, inside me. Petal people rose up, alive and talking. Her petal people and my petal people. I was about to freak out when Maw Sue starting telling me how it worked and then it made sense. The immortelles carry the grief in their petals so that we don’t have to. The rose absorbs our wicked suffering and our burdened cries inside its stem and the moist petals. For the first time, I understood Maw Sue’s weird obsession with the Mason Jar. The curse of death took her loved ones, over and over, without understanding, without explanation, without answers. Overwrought with grief, Maw Sue clung to the petal people in the jar, the everlastings, immortal symbols that carry our grief for us. They remind us—life doesn’t end in the grave.

  When she finished the story, I wanted to find a flower of my own, for myself, right now, not wait till I die, but carry it in my pocket, bearing my grief, my curses, my gifts, my burdens, my regrets. The house inside me could not hold the despair, it needed help.

  And help came. A few weeks later, Maw Sue presented me with my first everlastings, inside my own Mason Jar along with a copy of the poem. It was Big Pop, but it was a start, nonetheless. I felt relieved. The immortelles was as beautiful as the day I plucked it from the casket. Dried, fragile and burdened with my grief. I looked at the flower petals and saw Big Pops face and smiled.

  Inside the room, inside me, the one I used to think was so utterly dark and meaningless, now made more sense. The petal faced flower people crept inside my visions, days and nights, walking the rooms, and the hallways all carrying their own mason jars full of immortelles, their own grief. It’s no wonder I felt so much grief, and sorrows from the grave. Over the years in my moments of overbearing loss, my tears would sweep me to this room, without consent, without control. It frightened me to be there, seeing and hearing the petal people, their morbid expressions, and the afflictions drawn in their petal dried faces. They’d gravitate to me like moths to a light bulb. Only now, do I recognize most of them as family, from old photographs and stories I've heard. Both sets of twins, girls and boys, the husbands, cousins, uncles, and others. I recognize Papa Hart’s mom and his uncle, nicknamed Chick Hart. He died in a saw mill accident, cut clean in two by a blade. They say it traumatized the Negro man working with him, he took off running—and they reckon he’s still running. Then there’s Papa Hart’s grandmother, who they called Big Mama. She’s the fattest petal pink chiffon rose you ever did see, and you can’t miss her. Story told is she crossed the Mississippi in a covered wagon and gave birth out on the wicked prairie. She lost the child in infancy and couldn’t let go. She held onto her wasted bones until the stench of flesh about drove everyone away. They convinced her to bury Charlotte Louise underneath the shade of a huge petrified rock. Inside Big Mama’s Mason jar is a tiny white rose, and chunks of red dirt at the bottom of the jar. It was simply a bud that never bloomed. It made me sad to see it. Each person inside the Mason room carries a terrible awful burden. Most, if not all, haunt me with their eyes. Uncle Chick is the worst. Rumor is he shot a man, and was in a lot of scuffles with the law and bootlegging as a trade. His face is stoic, his eyes like a long dead sunset fading to dark. He hovers beside me, around me, behind me, in front of me. He never lets me be. He has 2 roses in his jar. One pink and one white. I swear he is trying to tell me something, but what, I haven’t a clue.