To her father and sister, she had said nothing. Somehow, Hazel had known anyway. Salome had come home as Hazel was trying to halt her tears, and she told her elder sister where she had sent their father. Salome had bolted from the cabin and hoped she could catch him.
She knew their mother had wanted to do this on her own. Rebecca had wanted to go peacefully, without distress to anyone. This was how the passing had been done by her own mother. When the time came, Freddy simply went into the woods and never returned.
Looking back, this was the first occurrence where Hazel had known something important was happening. Until this day, she had known little things. Where to find some buttons that her mother had misplaced. Which part of the stream would be rife with fish. The days when Rebecca and Salome would be returning home after one of their excursions. But their mother’s leaving was something else, and after that day, Hazel knew when significant events were about to occur more and more often.
Turning from the porch, Salome went inside to join her family. Will was cleaning some fish the girls had brought with them. Jeanne was at the sweets, of course, while Constance was setting out some sewing. Like Hazel, her own girls had a touch of something. Jeanne seemed to see things that other people could not. Like today in the woods, Salome believed that the Girl and the deer and the woman were truly all there, just as Jeanne had said they were. It was only that Constance wasn’t able to see them while Jeanne could. Constance had other gifts. She could see at night as if it were daylight. She often came home with a trail of butterflies behind her in the summer and an escort of crows in the winter.
Salome looked at her girls now and remembered that day a few years ago in the forest with her father, the day she was too late to stop him from visiting the Ash where they had last seen her mother. She had been angry and disappointed. She had felt stuck here in this life, one that she had always thought would be temporary. She had been meant for great, magical occurrences, and on that day, she had resigned herself to an ordinary life. If she had followed in the manner of her mother, would she have truly been happier? Would her husband have doted on her as he had their whole life together or would her solitary journeys into the trees have turned him sullen and wary? Would one of her girls have loved her more because she was chosen? Would the one left behind learn to feel insignificant? Salome had her family, a family that she had never known growing up. If she had been like her own mother, she would have left her girls two years ago. She would never have seen Constance grow into her strange beauty. Her heart broke to think of leaving Jeanne at so young an age, and then it broke again when she realized that Rebecca had left when Hazel was not much older.
For years, Salome had measured the mundanity of her present life to the extraordinary childhood with her mother. Now, finally, she let go all of the sadness and anger and hurt that she had inflicted upon herself. The feeling that she had failed Rebecca in some way because her own children were not suited to the special gift of her ancestors. Salome looked at her children and thanked the good, green earth that she could stay here with them. She knew that if she had the choice to make today, the gift she had would have died with her regardless. The four Ash would have stood alone and waited for a Swavely who would not be coming.
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Chapter: Salome and Constance
In the final few years of Salome's life on this earth, she had begun to notice that some of the other children who visited with her daughters seemed to have a touch of the forest as well. Their Milton cousins had always shown an inkling of special gifts, but that had made sense to her since they were family. The others - the Boones, the Jamesons, the Gables, and the Mackeys - all seemed to produce children who seemed right at home with their frequent visits to Eversburg.
She once asked a young Beverlye Boone why she and her brother preferred the woods around her home to the school play yard she knew they had closer to their own. Bevie shrugged her shoulders and simply said, "It feels better here." Then she gave Salome a look as if she was confused, "You already know that, don't you?"
Salome wasn't sure. She had never been off the Hill. Of course she had been down to the stream, but her family always considered that the base of their land. She met Bev's eyes, "Describe it to me anyway, if you can."
Bevie scrunched up her face and looked out into the forest. "It's like...I've got candles inside of me. But when I'm in town, it’s hard for me to light them. And when I'm up here in Eversburg, they all light up at once." She faced Salome again, “I feel like I glow, like the fireflies in summertime, but all year round."
If Salome had any doubts that she had imagined the other children had special gifts, Bevie's explanation silenced them. She remembered the forest the day it glowed underneath her as she sat in the treetops. She remembered they way her mother glowed from time to time. Her own children and those of a few other families in the settlement below may not actually radiate visible light, but they all felt it inside of them.
She spent the last of her days trying to puzzle how it had happened. The whole town wasn't affected, only a few families. She confided in her eldest in hopes that she would be able to help her uncover this mystery, and Constance did her best.
Every trip into town for Constance became a visit for tea. She would ply their family friends for the histories of their journeys to this part of the world. From what she could gather, only one event seemed significant enough to link them all together, and in turn, linked them with her own ancestors, too.
The day that Constance discovered the truth that bound them all together, she had stopped at both the Mackeys as well as the Gables a second time. They had been able to answer a few final questions that had been lingering in the timeline she had been able to piece together. Now, there could be no doubt for her. She had her mother's answer.
While she was happy to help her mother, who had never been farther than the stream at the base of their land, she was equally glad the task was done. Constance herself never felt completely at ease in town. She would rather be up on the Hill, roaming in their woods or tucked into their snug cabin. The people in town always seemed to fuss over things that didn't matter. The girls worried over their dresses. The boys worried over who was new in town. Their parents preoccupied themselves with marrying off their children so the process could just go on and on and on.
She never saw much point in their concerns. Her days were occupied with studying the wildlife that surrounded her. If you knew the forest well, as she did, it could tell you if the winter that was to come would be harsh or mild. Her woods could show you whether it would be a good year for trapping crawdads in the summer or if the rains of the season would make the stream too full and swift.
She thought about these small details of their forest as she made her way back home. She had grown up with the steep climb and had never minded it. If anything, she felt that it was one more way in which the Hill protected them. Someone had to commit to their purpose for the ascension up such a dissuading incline. Coupled with the eerie stories those in town told about what happened in the forest around her home, she was amazed that anyone visited them at all. The families that had been friends of theirs for generations made the trek, of course, and their children had always run all over the hill with Constance and Jeanne.
Jeanne had become so very pretty the last couple years. Unlike Constance, she enjoyed trips away from the Hill. Not a child any longer, she had begun attracting a large posse of interested boys from town, and they joined the rotation of visitors to their home. Constance knew she should be grateful. Seven years her sister's senior, she could have been married by now. She never had the ability that her sister possessed. The butterflies might trail her in the summer as much as the crows liked to walk her home in the winter, but she never had a line of boys follow her up the Hill as Jeanne was able to accomplish. When a recent excursion to town yielded an escort of yet three new recruits, Constance couldn’t help but think of the story of the Pied Piper. She hoped her sister had better intentions than
to steal all the boys from town, just because she could.
Constance had not turned out as classically beautiful as her younger sister. Her face was broad, though her cheekbones angled sharply and kept the shape of it from being overly round. Her eyes were green like all the children born in her family, but the almond shape was unique to her. Jeanne’s hair was a long, fine sheet of blond where Constance had somehow inherited an ancestor’s mass of orange tangles. At least it hid her ears. She had always been self conscious of their slightly pointed tips. She would never have as many suitors as Jeanne, but she also didn’t mind. The boys that mooned over Jeanne were loud and crass. Farmhands with large muscles but small brains. Constance may only capture the attention of a fifth of her sister’s numbers, but at least the men had character. They emanated a quiet power where Jeanne’s boys brayed without thinking. Constance would feel the skin behind her ear tickle and know that one of her sister’s suitors had turned their attention to Constance instead. She sometimes felt as if she was getting Jeanne’s cast-offs before she reminded herself that at her age she should at least be relieved she had a few. The latest was a man newly arrived from Scotland. Her ancestor, the first Swavely girl, had journeyed from there, too, and had made this her home long ago.
She was lost in thoughts of her new suitor as she neared home. In the familiar territory of her woods, she had let herself daydream and never noticed that the forest seemed too quiet that day. The geese had been flying just above the treetops the last couple afternoons. Honking their way southwest against the greying skies, there should have been more of them today. If there had been, perhaps they would have broken her reverie. She would have stopped and smiled up at them. She loved how nature sang its song of changes. After they passed, she would have noticed that even the stream’s roar was quieter than it should have been this time of year. She would have sensed that the squirrels hid in their trees and the rabbits in their burrows. The crows that usually escorted her home were strangely absent; not even lingering in the trees. If she had been more mindful, she would have sensed that the forest was telling her something wasn’t right in their little world surrounded by stream and hill and wildflower meadow.
If she had not been thinking of Finn’s soft voice, his head of brown curls and his own green eyes that stared at her so hard she could feel them, she would have noticed Jeanne waiting for her on the porch. Their mother’s knitting was in her lap, and Jeanne was sitting motionless in Salome’s rocking chair. A place no one save their mother ever sat.
Constance was almost to the front steps before she saw Jeanne and smiled. She drew a breath to tell her sister to move before she got in trouble with their Mama. She stopped when she saw how still Jeanne was. She let her breath escape her without speaking when Jeanne turned her face up to her.
A few hours ago, Constance had thought of how her Mother’s mind would be at ease with the knowledge of what she had finally discovered in town. A simple, sweet answer that bound a few families together with their own. Salome had seemed nervous, almost distressed, about the mystery. How relieved she would have been, if her heart had not given out that morning, when Constance told her the story as they sat on the porch while the geese flew overhead.
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Chapter: Constance
She had never made the conscious decision not to tell her sister.
Their mother had died, and Constance had fallen into grief. A piece of her remembered that Finn had encircled her within his strong arms. She didn’t recall sending for him. He seemingly just appeared one day and picked her up from her crumpled position in her mother’s rocker. She and Jeanne took turns sitting there for hours at a time.
The days turned into weeks, and Constance was vaguely aware that Jeanne imposed less often on her time in the rocker. Fumbling through the days as if moving through thick fog, Constance cared for her father as best she could. In return, Finn took care of her. She was grateful to have him, especially on the day Jeanne declared she was leaving their Hill.
“I only stayed these last few years because of Mama,” she revealed defensively one day. As if she believed Constance and their father would try to stop her. As if she feared they would keep her with them against her will. Jeanne had accepted an offer of marriage. She had agreed because the suitor was wealthy and handsome, of course, but more so because the accordance meant she could leave the wild of the woods and live in town.
Until this day, Constance had never realized that Jeanne’s feelings for their home had never matched her own. She thought her sister had run to town so often simply because of her playful nature. Lulled by her own love of the Hill, she had never questioned if Jeanne had other reasons. She never considered that Jeanne was dreaming of escape.
The confusion Constance felt joined with her sadness. She was already carrying the loss of her mother. Now the loss of her sister was to be heaped upon her. The look in Jeanne’s eyes and the flush of her face made it plain that she meant to leave with no return in mind.
“I will never see her again,” the small voice inside Constance spoke to her. She knew it spoke true, as it always had before.
She spent the next week pushing aside her grief to assist her sister in her packing. The groom’s sturdy companions took the bulk of the belongings, although Constance carried down the wedding quilt her mother had made. She carried it as far as the edge of the stream and then found she couldn’t seem to take a step further. She realized she didn’t want to anyway and passed the richly embroidered fabric into her sister’s hands. Jeanne crooked one arm around Constance’s neck and brushed a feather kiss across her freckled cheek. She whispered in her ear, “Don’t let this Hill make you sick as it did our mother.”
Constance jerked away from her. Shocked at her sister’s words, she could not think of a response. She watched Jeanne back away, turn at the stream’s edge to cross, and disappear on the other side through the thick mat of trees and shrubs. It seemed as if the forest had swallowed her, although Constance knew that what lay beyond was simply the dusty road into town.
The walk back up to her home felt longer than usual to her. She was glad of the robins and their cheery tune. There were new blooms on the honeysuckle. The sunshine broke through the tree canopy in a way that made it appear as if the sun was a physical presence. Thick rays that you could see so clearly that they made you believe you could encircle them with your hand if only you dared reach out for them. Constance never tried, though. She wanted the illusion, and the glamour was enough for her.
The crows met her halfway up. They chased away the robin’s melody, but they replaced it with a dark, throaty song of their own as they followed in the trees behind her the rest of the way home. They cawed to one another, and at times they cawed down to her. The small voice inside her could almost understand what they said. “If only I could hear them clearer,” she thought as she gazed back at them. That she felt protected by them would have to be comfort enough.
They clustered together in the oak closest to the cabin, and she arrived at the top to find Finn on the porch. He was rocking in a chair, but it was not her mother’s. She realized he had carved another. Under the distraction of the day, he must have secretly arranged it on the porch from whatever hiding place he had stowed it. He had made it so they could sit side by side, and she smiled for the first time in months.
“Your father’s gone hunting,” Finn told her as she sat down next to him. She nodded without speaking. When he held his hand out to her, she stretched her arm over her rocker’s armrest and took it in her own. He talked to her plainly about the life he wanted to have with her up on the Hill. Away from the bustle of town, they talked about their future until the moon came up. The whip-poor-wills rustled from their dusky hideaways to chant their lament and gorge on the insects of the night.
Only as she and her betrothed turned inside did Constance realize she had never told Jeanne what she had learned in town. Her mother was gone. Her sister had abandoned her. Who else was there to tell? Not her fat
her, who had pretended he had never seen the glimmer that sometimes appeared around his wife. Not her new husband-to-be, stoic and practical and disinclined to fabrication. Even if there was someone, why on earth would they believe her?
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Chapter: The Girl
The Girl sang to the trees the song they liked best. It was one of the few things she remembered from her former homeland. Her own mother had taught her the words, and while she recalled the lyrics, the image of her mother was long forgotten.
She strived to please the Ash. They understood the Girl had done all she could to honor the pact they had made between them. More than anything on this earth, they knew that Nature likes a balance. Sometimes even the best made plans fall prey to Nature’s tricks.
At least Freddy and Rebecca had been able to join with them. The Girl could feel their energy all around her. They sighed with the wind in autumn and pulsed in the spring to help the plants grow. She knew some part of them waited for Salome, and the Girl fretted on how to console them when they realized far too much time had passed with no sign of their kin.
Salome knew all the rituals. She knew what was supposed to happen. All she had needed was one of her own daughters to inherit the seed from Stranger. Freddy and Rebecca had been born with it, but for a strange twist of fate, that same seed was absent in Salome’s girls.
This was when Nature discovered what the Girl had done. This was where Nature made sure to right the balance.
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