*********
Janie felt that something was wrong in the house as soon as she stepped over the threshold. Something was missing. Something had been taken. She quieted her mind, as her mother had taught her. She sent out an energy of seeking. Like morning glory, her thoughts reached around the room and coiled around objects as she thought past them. They pulled her to the high shelf where her mother’s book rested. Finding it safely ensconced there, Janie knew where to look next. A small drawer where she often put her mother’s family ring. A drawer now empty when she opened it.
The ring was set with a stone as large as a robin’s egg, but it was not nearly as pretty as one. A dull white stone with a dark brown X of another crystal invading it, the ring was unwieldy. Rarely had her mother worn the ring upon her hand. When Mother Swavely did wear it, the ring was looped through a cord that was then fastened around her neck. Other times, Janie’s mother would place the stone over a page in her family’s book that she took down from the high shelf from time to time, and occasionally she had let the stone swing over a neighbor’s swelling belly like a pendulum. “A boy,” she would mutter solemnly if the ring swung side to side. If the ring should sway in circles, Mother Swavely would smile wide and say, “A girl.”
The ring was old, and in the same manner as the book that lived on the high shelf, had been handed down through Janie’s mother’s family for so many generations that the origins of the object could not be said to be entirely known. There was a belief that the stone had been found and then joined with the plain silver setting by an ancient healing woman of their lineage. That much Janie could believe. The rest of the story seemed like one of the fireside tales her Mother often told. She had always claimed that her clan was known to be tellers of tales, weavers of stories. How much faith could Janie put into such a fabrication of her mother’s? A woman who said she could hear the trees speaking. A woman who said she had captured Janie’s father simply by looking at him one sunny, summer day. Who said the stone in the ring let them talk to all manner of creatures in the forest. Who said the stone kept the woman who possessed it young.
Janie resigned herself that the original story was probably lost. Down through the years, it had simply grown more fantastical as one member of the Swavely clan tried to outdo the storyteller before her. When her own daughters were old enough, who was to say Janie herself would remember the story exactly as her mother had told it to her?
She had only mourned the loss of the heirloom for a few hours before Stranger walked in and returned it to her finger. Looking up into his face to show him her relieved smile, the look in his eyes was the only time she had ever seen him angry. She knew she would never entirely know what had occurred: not why the ring had been taken, not how Stranger had known, nor how he had reclaimed the object. What she did know was this: she would make certain that the ring would not be taken again, and that Stranger had seen to the punishment of the thief.
Even if Stranger had been able to speak, he may not have even wanted to tell her that a dear friend had broken her trust. That Genevieve Scovell had coveted the ring since the first day they had met.
********
The stone itself was likely common. The setting was simple - far from extravagant. Genevieve’s husband could have bought her several and not even cared. But she wanted Janie’s ring. There was something about it.
In the years that followed her betrayal and as she watched her perfect world start to crack around her, Genevieve would remember that if she had not wanted a baby so badly, she never would have been told to go see Janie Stranger who lived on the hill. She would never have made that first dreadful climb in the middle of the wretched month of August. Janie would never have held out her hand to offer Genevieve a cool cup of spring water, and she would have never seen the ring at all.
“There’s a cross in the stone,” Genevieve had exclaimed. “Where I’m from, the people believe these are stones that were created when Christ died.”
Janie’s brow had furrowed. “My mother would have told you they’re older than that.” Then she had moved the conversation onto the reason for Genevieve’s visit as she ushered her to a rocker on the porch.
Living up on that hill in a rustic, hand-hewn cabin, so far removed from any kind of society, the ring surely couldn’t have been worth much. Certainly not the shame of taking it. Certainly not what followed after.
She had tried to reason with herself in the beginning. Janie was most likely responsible for Genevieve being able to conceive her first two babies. She was a kind woman. She helped Genevieve tremendously those first few years after she had arrived in this region. Janie had taught her how to know the weather was changing by looking at the clouds. She taught her how the coats of the Woolly Bear Caterpillars can tell you what the winter will bring. Janie taught her how to survive this new land.
Within five years, Janie Swavely had become a close friend. And how did Genevieve repay the kindness? By lusting over that stupid plain stone. By plotting ways to make it her own.
The day she had gone up to Janie’s for the tea that had helped her conceive her other babes, she found the house completely empty. “A rare moment of quiet,” she giggled and sat on the porch to wait. She watched the sunlight move across the clearing in front of the house. She reminded herself that she was all alone. That no one had seen her come. That no one would know she had been there.
The ring was surprisingly easy to find. Genevieve simply stood in the middle of Janie’s bedroom and asked where she herself would place the ring. She found it on the third try. She slid the ring into a pocket and hurried back out to the porch. With still no one in sight, she stepped down into the grass with a pounding heart. She crossed the small clearing to the edge of the woods, then onto the trail that would take her back down to the stream and the road to home.
The moment she crossed the stand of Ash at the edge of the wildflower meadow, she knew she had done wrong. More than that, she knew she couldn’t take her actions back. A strange skittering sound seemed to follow her. As much as she tried to tell herself that it was just the wind blowing about in the treetops, she felt that there was something else. Halfway down the hill, she turned to look for the cause of the sound. Something dark slid along her peripheral vision, and she spun around away from it. Turning back to the path, she was faced with the tallest woman she had ever seen.
“Beautiful,” she thought before her eyes took in the bird skulls around her neck, the strange color of her eyes, and the beast at her side. “Deadly,” her mind flashed the amended thought back at her.
“The woman never spoke,” Genevieve would tell her daughter years later. “She held out her open palm to me, and I realized she knew what I had done. Somehow, she knew. I put my hand into my pocket. I clasped the ring and placed it into hers. I hoped that was the end of it, and I ran to home.”
********
Janie had realized part of the truth, of course, in the months that followed. Genevieve no longer came to visit. By summer, a third child had arrived stillborn. By the following spring, Janie heard that she had fallen ill. Year after year, a new affliction seemed to befall the family. Their crops failed in the field when everyone else’s flourished. For the next several seasons, they would find the fields half grown and rotted, as if the ground itself was sick. Genevieve’s husband had shrugged at the poor yields and declared he had never wanted a farm estate anyway. He commissioned an enormous house in town. He relocated his children and his ailing wife to what was becoming the town proper and opened an international trade office. The money kept sinking through his hands like the boats he kept losing in the oceans.
Janie turned her concerns away from the Scovells. She had her own family for whom to care. She had other people who made the climb seeking her help for common maladies and other needs. The visitors continued to come, but Janie never worried again about the ring nor her mother’s book.
She remembered the morning her mother had given them into Janie’s care. She had had Janie fet
ch the book. She had removed the ring from its cord and placed it onto Janie’s slender finger. With a gesture, she had beckoned Janie close to her so no one else could hear. She had whispered into Janie’s ear and followed her words with a kiss.
In memory of her mother, Janie woke before dawn the day after the ring had been returned. She had taken the ring and the book out into the forest with her. She traveled down to the wildflower meadow where the moon was still bright, and she made certain that none unworthy would ever be able to claim them again.
She would choose one of her children to pass on the secrets of her mother’s people. There was no question her choice was Freddy. Her little wood nymph; her quiet keeper of the forest secrets. When the book was needed, she would show her daughter where to find it. She would show her how to use the ring. When she thought the time was right, she would bend down to whisper in her ear the words her own mother had told her, and then she would seal them with a kiss.
________
Chapter: Janie
When her children were grown and had moved on to homes of their own, she and her brother would oftentimes sit by the fire at night. Every once in awhile, when he couldn't help himself, John would ask her, "Do you wonder where your Stranger went? Even after all these years?" As John was getting older, his mind wandered a bit. He never remembered he had asked her only a few months before.
Janie would smile. "I suppose he went where he thought was best."
That answer never satisfied John, but he closed his mouth tight to stop any other words from spilling out.
Janie had not known many things about her husband, but she was never one to question where treasures came from. To hold them for a little while and marvel at their beauty had always satisfied her. What she did know of him was enough. That he was always moving, like the stream where she had found him. That he knew all the birds' songs, even better than Ever had. That he liked to lie by the hearth and watch Janie in the firelight. That he never said a word out loud the entire time she knew him, but always made her know that she was cherished. She was loved. She was his treasure as much as he was hers.
Their conversations had been a mix of whistles and gestures. They turned subtle movements of eyebrows and lips into a new vocabulary just for them. When the time came, she knew he would need to meet her family. John was bound to stumble on them someday soon. He always came to Ever's burg as he chose.
"What shall we call you? What is your proper name?" Janie asked him on a night she was curious.
He had tipped his head back and whistled the song the Yellow Warbler makes at dawn.
He smiled when she laughed. "We can't call you that." She giggled again, then cocked her head. "You don't know this, but I've called you 'my Stranger' for weeks. What if I said you were called Thomas Stranger? Would that be alright?" Since he leaned over and kissed her, she supposed it was.
Good enough for her was not quite good enough for her brother John nor her father. Janie had always been stubborn, though. If it was Thomas Stranger whom she wanted, it was Thomas Stranger she meant to have. And of course, Mother Swavely was the one who would have the final say, and she did not object. No one could say, as the years went on, that Stranger had not been a good husband to Janie, a good father to their children, a good provider for his family. Janie had a strong son, pretty daughters, and always enough to keep them fed and in comfort.
"They grew up so fast," Janie said to her husband on the night they saw their youngest off to an apprenticeship in town. All of her children were close by, but they had chosen to live outside Ever’s burg. All of them wanted a little more of society around them save for Freddy. She had only agreed to the offer in town so long as she was promised she could return and make her own settlement through the stretch of woods to the East of her parents’ home. When the time came, Freddy would be the one to inherit Ever’s cabin.
Stranger had reached out and tugged Janie’s hair. He took her in his arms, and they rocked from side to side on the porch. The raccoons were waking up in the large cedar by the cabin. They watched the creatures ease themselves out onto the wide branches until it was too dark to see.
When Janie awoke the next morning, Stranger was already up. His hunting pack was on the table, and he had it stocked with supplies that would last him weeks.
"Bear?" Janie asked with eyebrows raised.
He nodded once and belted a Kingfisher tune.
She laughed as she always did when he spoke in birdsong. Her amazing man, her Stranger from the woods. She was going to tell him to be careful. Or maybe she had wanted to say, "Stay warm." She could never remember what she had meant to say to him that morning. The memory was all erased by what he did before he left.
A kiss for her lips, two for her eyelids. He put one in each of her palms and then he turned her hands to her heart.
Years later, she still tried to remember that she had watched him walk into the woods. She couldn't be sure. When she tried very hard, it seemed to her that he had melted into the trees at the edge of the cabin. Not disappeared, really. That wasn't the right word. More like the trees had absorbed him. She could almost see the image in her mind. Then her head would pound horribly, and she would lose the picture.
For men not to come home from a hunt was rare but not uncommon. It happened sometimes. A step mistaken on uneven ground. A prey's tenacity to hold onto its own life misjudged. Or Mother Nature’s decision that it was time for a man to rest. There was also another reason usually offered in hushed tones, never said directly to the grieving one left behind.
"A person sometimes wanted to move on," the men nodded to one another.
"A woman sometimes has trouble holding onto a man," the women clucked. Vicious things.
Janie never harbored any ill will. If her husband had passed, she wished him rest. If he had left her for other adventures, she would hold the memory of him close to her heart and was thankful of the time she could have him.
Some days, when the wind came down off the Appalachians like a swift deer and swayed the treetops, and the birds would get so quiet, she would stand on the porch and look out to the woods for him. Leaning against the strong post of her home, she'd remember the quietness that lived in him and the light that shone from inside his bright green eyes. She wondered if when she was old and fading, she would talk in her sleep as Ever had done towards the end. She wondered if one of her children would attend her and happen to hear Janie whisper what she never told a soul.
Her husband had been the Girl. Her husband had been the Woman. Janie had known it from their eyes as much as the stillness that came with each of them. She had known and had not cared how it had come to be. Her husband had been a gift from the forest. From him, she had four strong children to go forward in this world. James, named after Ever, with hands that healed. Cora, whose eyes could see for miles, even in the darkness of the night woods. Lise, whose presence soothed or brightened a room as she pleased. Winifred, who knew the forest's secrets and kept them safe guarded.
Standing on the porch until the fireflies came, she saw the long lives of her children appear before her and the generations after them that were to come.
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Chapter: John Milton
He had never embraced Thomas Stranger. After his sister’s husband had vanished, John soured on him completely.
In Janie's presence, he was consoling as the months passed and no sign of Tom was found. There had been faint tracks near the edge of the cabin's surrounding woods, but nothing he could find past the tree line. John trekked up the hill to see his sister every day instead of once a week. More and more often, he would stomp down the hill to his farm. Of all the reasons for a man not to come home from the hunt, John was inclined to believe the worst one. Sometimes a man just left everything behind. In Stranger’s case, this excuse may be true but not for the reasons that others whispered behind Janie's back.
His sister's husband had always seemed eerie to him. He almost laughed when Janie had introduced him. "Stran
ger?" he had thought. "He's stranger, alright," and had watched the new beau from the corner of the room that whole first night.
He could not deny that Tom was able-bodied, though, nor that he helped Janie tremendously. The guilt of an older brother subsided a bit now that there was another man around. The trek up the hill was a duty for him, and he already had work enough from sunup to sundown. He hated to admit it, but the thought of one less task on his mind was perhaps the reason he let Tom into their lives without much of a fight. A man none of them knew, with no voice of his own, and no real way to find out his history. John thought later that he should have protested in a stronger voice.
John did spend a few weeks asking people around the area if they knew of Tom or maybe of the family from whence he came. No one ever knew. Of course, he had asked Tom himself where his family was, but interpreting bird calls and cricket sounds was never a skill of his. Janie seemed happy, and Tom was good to her from what John could see. With duties of his own, he turned back fully to his farm.
Janie had her first two little ones, their parents passed on soon after, and his farm had turned profitable enough to hire a manager for the day to day. John found himself with time on his hands, a luxury he had never been fortunate enough to possess. He sat up at night and thought of what to do with his new-found time. He could have joined the men's club in the next town over; or packed his horse and trekked south along the Appalachians; or pursued the fine, young daughter of Blacksmith. Sitting by the fire at the end of day, his final thoughts were always on the mystery that was closer to home.
Thomas Stranger never left the hill. Not once had he been in John's home. Janie came down every once in awhile to visit friends or for a special occasion, but Stranger was never with her. "He's hunting," she would always say. It was an easy excuse to believe. John had never questioned it until now.
He began to visit Ever’s burg more often, always unannounced. If he could catch Stranger unawares, he might reveal something about himself. Always, Stranger seemed to be waiting for him. He met John on the trail halfway up the hill, facing downwards in the middle of the path so that John would see him plainly. A small smirk drawing up his mouth and his green eyes sparkling. Another time, John had almost been to the cabin when somewhere in his mind it registered that the same Alder Flycatcher song had followed him as he climbed. When he turned around, Tom stood ten feet behind him. Only one time had he succeeded in surprising Stranger as he stood at the edge of the woods by the cabin. After that moment, he promised himself not to try again. He never told his sister that he had once seen her forest-husband glowing like the fireflies that surrounded them in summer. Even then, he couldn't be sure that Stranger had not meant for John to see him all along. John decided that some mysteries were best left alone. He had turned and walked back down the hill to home, and the next day he had gone to court Jehan Blacksmith.
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