Lineage

by Juniper Black

  Running the last length of the path as best she could with the log clasped against her body, her car in sight, she let herself fully remember that last day with her Aunt. The flash of orange light, the sight of the leaves preternaturally falling to cover the path that she had spied between her splayed fingers protecting her face, the dark twisted shapes that looked nothing like crows. She could still hear them caw to one another. She remembered the small voice inside her had heard their sounds and had said to her, "Only the worthy. Only the worthy.”

  ________

  Chapter: Violette

  My mother had a vision of horses when she was pregnant with me, before she even knew that I was forming inside her. She told me, “I heard their drumming hooves on the hard ground. I saw a herd of them turn the corner to face me, and then I fainted dead away.”

  In the background, my Mom Mom - my grandmother - swayed back and forth quietly in the rocker. When my mother finished her story, Mom Mom gathered me up onto her full lap and hugged me tight. She told me of our cousin Tabitha, who had been born with the caul across her face. A thin sheen of placenta that covers the eyes, the veil tells the world that this babe will have the sight later in life.

  “And I told you before about my own great-grandmother. When I was a little girl your age, I used to watch people come to their house. People who were sick with all kinds of ailments. Pains in their chest, trouble with their joints. Once I saw a woman with a leg so swollen, she had to be carried up the street and inside the house. I watched her walk out on two good legs an hour later.

  “Remember these things, Violette,” she said to me with her forehead tilted close to mine. “Don’t forget.”

  Throughout my life, I’ve dreamed of horses. My earliest memories are both of dreams. In one of them my father was leading a white horse, which means I must have been no more than two. This dream is my first of the horse and the only hazy image I have of my father. Since that first night vision, I have had dreams with horses in them several times a year. They are sitting on the couch with a dog. They are roaming in a herd across the tall grass. I try to mount one and end up turning into a bird that flies over its sturdy frame.

  I always wonder what the horse means for me. Are they an omen that told my mother to expect something magical? Or are they only a remnant of the vision meant for her alone?

  ********

  I never intended to return here. Once I left, it was to travel the world over and over again. Why on earth would I return to a place where I had already spent so much time? Too much time?

  Once we grow up though, we realize we can’t control every aspect of our lives. Unexpected situations arise, and we find that we long for the familiarity of home. Even if it’s only for a little while. Cora was sick, and the doctors didn’t know what was wrong in her. There was a need for me to be here, and so I came. I sat beside her sickbed, and on good days she told me stories. Stories I had heard before mostly, but they were comforting to hear again. She told them on days when she felt strong, and so the stories were always a good sign. There were stories of when she was a young woman, stories about the day my father broke my mother’s heart for good, and stories about our ancestors and our cousins who had lived on the Hill.

  Memories of the Hill, where our relatives had lived for centuries, lingered throughout my life. They would fade away a little through the years but would always resurface. Without context and quite strongly, flashes of my time there came at the oddest moments.

  A walk with Aunt Robina through the path of small forest that separated her home from one of the cousin’s. The moon was new that night, and the woods were so dark. A story from her about another night when a skunk had been idling unseen by the wood pile. Aunt Robina was standing outside looking at the stars, and the skunk walked right up to her. "Be still - you have to stand so still if that happens to you, little one." He had sniffed her legs and walked on. I nodded my head, too little to understand that she couldn't see me do so in the darkness. Then she said, "Listen to the katydids. Can you hear what they're sayin'?"

  "What?" I asked. The bugs were talking? I listened harder.

  "They're sayin, 'Katy-did, Katy-did.' That's how they got their name."

  My Aunt Robina most likely had told me this story because she thought it was sweet. Or maybe to distract me from our dark walk home. But her accent, somehow different from ours in town, made the words come out, "Katy-died, Katy-died." In that moment, the dark - which I had not minded until then - became frightening. We were almost to her door, but I was little and the distance still seemed so far to me. I was aware that the night was full of insects, a lot of them, that chirped incessantly about a Katy who had died.

  Strange, these memories of the Hill. They always were. The relatives who chose to live there, stranger still. They didn't live like the rest of us down in town. By the time I was a teenager, I didn't visit as much. Robina eventually sold the land to my Mom Mom, and only then did the visits resume.

  The land had grown wild again, if it had ever been tamed at all. Something about the Hill unnerved my mother. She hated to come here alone.

  ********

  We started to make the first of several twisting, upward turns.

  My mother pulled the car onto a gravel road just inside a copse of trees and turned off the engine. "We'll walk from here."

  “Is it far to the top? I was pretty young the last time I came up here. I don’t remember.”

  “It’s fine. A short walk. Although be very glad that someone in the family decided at some point to put a road in at least this far. Otherwise, we’d be hiking in from the stream.”

  I turned my head and looked at an arc of trees that gently twined together from either side of a small road that led upwards through the natural arbor they created. Like something from a book, like a fairy-tale. Nothing could be seen more than three feet beyond the opening. Only shadows. You would have to go in to know what was beyond. Into the forest and up the rest of the Hill.

  The air was sweet the moment you stepped onto the path under those trees. The sounds of the town completely receded in a way that did not seem possible. The entire walk to the top was a dream. I couldn't believe it. All of those stories that Mom Mom had told. All of her searching through the years of where our family came from explained by this short walk.

  This land, this place we called the Hill, was magic. I can’t remember if I had been able to sense it as a child. If this is where we came from, then we were magic, too. Aunt Robina had sold my Mom Mom the entire top of the Hill several years ago. Desperate to get off the isolated property and with no hope of her own children taking over the responsibilities, she had gladly sold her legacy. I want to believe she only did so because the land was technically staying in the family. I can’t be sure of this sentiment. Aunt Robina had always seemed to want something more than what she had, and her life had never afforded her much opportunity beyond the Hill.

  I remembered more clearly the years that Aunt Robina had tried to keep chickens and rabbits. The years that Uncle Rick had tried to raise a garden. The animals would escape their cages to breed anywhere they liked. The crops would always be inundated by wild herbs, brambleberries, and ramps. Someone had said it was their ill luck. But if your eyes and your heart were open, you could see the truth.

  The Hill was wild and free. Nothing domesticated could stay here. The land would give you what you needed but fight you if you tried to bridle it. Untouched, it stretched on for acres. A huge swath of forest surrounded by people and houses and farms. Here there was nothing but trees and land and everything that lived off of them. I wondered at my mother’s aversion to this place.

  "It's like there's a circle around the land that keeps it pristine," I said out loud. Posie had already moved further up the path and didn't hear me. She was standing near a place where old stones rose up out of the ground. A faint pattern that resembled a square. "The old cabin was here," I thought when I moved closer. I turned a circle so I could see what they saw, the p
eople who had chosen this spot to view the world. Mountains to the west, a stream that glinted far below, and a perfect circle in the tree line above to view the heavens.

  ********

  After the Hill, I went straight into Mom Mom's house - my mother's house, now - and climbed the stairs to the loft. My grandmother had always done her research here at the small Victorian desk. It fit perfectly beneath the window alcove with a view to the outside. She spent enough time in dusty windowless libraries and courthouse offices and preferred an outside view when she was home.

  I opened the top drawer and found it empty. All the others were as well. "Mom," I called out, uncertain of where she was in the house.

  A muffled voice answered back, and I knew she was in the middle room downstairs. I moved through the back bedroom to the top of the stairs that looked down onto the first floor. "Where did you move all of Cora's paperwork that was in the little desk up here?"

  My mother's face appeared at the bottom of the stairwell. A lock of hair had escaped the bun fastened on the top of her head and fell across her eye. "I put them in a chest in the attic. Should be just inside the second room up there." She moved away back to her task, and I turned around.

  The door to the attic was open. Just a crack. Most likely, it hadn't been pulled shut firmly enough the last time someone came down. At the moment, just back from the Hill, it seemed like the attic was waiting for me. The ancient door, relocated from some ancestor's house a century ago, creaked on old, black iron hinges when I pulled it towards me. Puffs of dust rose on the plain, wooden stairs above a small landing. This place scared me as a child, but not in the way that dark, dank basements frighten. I never felt there were monsters in the attic. There was something else that lived up there. Something old and shapeless.

  Looking around now, walking easily through the first room where only a few months earlier I had had to shimmy past chest high stacks of magazines and piles of luggage that hadn't been used in decades, I thought I may have been mistaken. Nothing lurked here. The entire front room of the attic was simply a gigantic space surrounded by thick, old wood beams.

  I had almost convinced myself that I was being silly. I was holding onto the memories of a child, one who had made up scary monsters where there were none. Then I entered the second room, and the feeling returned. Months ago, I had been so preoccupied with clearing out the first attic room that when Posie said the interior room would stay as it was, I agreed thankfully. I hadn’t even gone inside it.

  Crossing underneath the wide, wood beams that made a sort of doorway, the air here was suddenly cooler, and the dust much less accumulated. This room was different. The objects set in this room were sparser, too. No clumps of mounded papers nor racks of old trophies had ever lived in here. In this room, four gigantic hooks on swivels hung on a wall next to a bellows taller and wider than me. I opened a chest thinking it was the one Posie had told me to find, but instead I found three leather bound books preserved inside the cedar.

  “These must be the books that Aunt Robina gave us when we bought the Hill,” I muttered to the empty room. Maybe to calm myself in the unnerving air. I pressed the chest tightly closed.

  Everything here was orderly. Everything here glowed with a faint yellow light. I turned in a slow circle where I stood and found the only other small chest in the room. I carried it down with me to the loft.

  Cora had been tracking our ancestors for as long as I could remember. Some of the earliest memories I have are centered around her stories of one person or another from the Swavely or Wytknect lines. Other lines, too, I'm sure. I just don't remember them all. The box didn't look to be much help when I pushed open the lid. Thirty years of paper looked back at me. All of it written in Cora's nearly illegible cursive. I took the first few stacks of binders out and hoped there would be some kind of order. If there was, it was one only known to her. I looked at the few pages in my hand and the thick folders that remained as deep as the chest. I puffed out my cheeks as I exhaled. There was no telling how many months would be eaten up by dissecting what they held.

  ********

  I had known from a young age that my family celebrated seasons differently from others, even if we outwardly gave the appearance of being like everyone else.

  Samhain was observed with a fresh fire in the hearth at sundown and trying to read our fortunes from the tea leaves left in the bottom of a cup. At midnight, apples and milk were set out on the back door stoop for the hungry ghosts. When I grew older, I learned that this offering wasn't exactly traditional. I think that Cora used them because she knew the raccoons would take the apples, and the alley cats would lap the milk. In the morning, my face would look so relieved that it would all be gone and no harmful spirits had entered our home. They had roamed the night when the veil between our world and theirs was thinnest, but we had slept soundly and undisturbed.

  Winter Solstice brought the lighting of the new Yule log decorated with greenery, pine cones, a small pouch of flour, and a dose of cider. We would sing carols, and with a spark of light, the small piece of last year’s log that had been nestled with ample tinder underneath the log rack joined the flames.

  Yellow flowers and white candles and spiced milk for Imbolc.

  There were other celebrations throughout the year that I kept from my friends for fear that they would look at me strangely. Just as I would never bring up what they should do if they were to see a ghost; or that sometimes the women in my family would see a vision when a loved one died miles and miles away.

  ********

  If my Mom Mom was still alive, I would have asked her who Thomas Stranger was and what he had to do with us. Of all the histories she had told over the years, there were several of Janie Swavely Milton, but I could not recall one that carried his name. I remember stories about the path that led from Scotland and how the family had then migrated from Greensboro to the open land that was here before Eversburg. Those were the times when people just said they were from Crow's Gather or Hungry Mother Mountain or Double Fork Creek. I know there was a tale in there about how our town found its name, but I couldn't remember it clearly. There is a plaque mounted at the town park that gives a brief origin explanation, but Mom Mom always clucked her tongue when we passed by.

  "Men wrote that sign. Like usual, they don't know what they're talking about."

  With Thomas Stranger, there was a void in her histories. If she were here, I would have asked if that was because she did not know or because she did not want others to know. With all the other extraordinary tales she had imparted to me growing up, it seemed curious that she had never mentioned Thomas Stranger. He was, after all, one of the first names in our family tree. This could have been because she simply hadn’t been able to find any information on him and had moved on in her research. My grandmother had spent the last three decades of her life tracing the genealogy of our family. Once she ferreted out a line of succession, she did her best to travel and collect personal stories. Stories from inhabitants who knew our kin, if they were alive. She would travel to the cities where they were born, and if she could find residents still living who had known them, she would knock on their doors and ask for tales of them. If she could find nothing else, she would record details of the conditions of the area when our ancestors had lived in a place. All of this required much of her time, but she wanted more than statistical listings on paper. A gifted teller of tales herself, she wanted the stories. She wanted to be amazed.

  Oftentimes, details or even whole lives were lost in the early days when our part of North America saw an influx of new inhabitants from the old country. People reinvented themselves. They made up their pasts. Some became ghosts in history, and Thomas Stranger appeared to be one of them. No past family to whom he could be connected. An uncertain guess at the time of his demise.

  I wanted to believe the logic of this theory. I didn’t want to entertain the other thought scratching at my brain. The thought that said, “Maybe she hid him. Maybe she knew his story all
along and hid him anyway. Or maybe his story wasn’t the important one. Maybe Jaana Swavely who was the one who mattered, and so that was the line she followed.”

  In the last few weeks, I had managed to ferret out the parchments of family tree that flowed from the union of Jaana Swavely Milton and one Thomas Stranger. Sitting on the soft carpeted floor of the loft, I studied the five enormous sheets of paper that linked together through the seasons. My legs were bent and out to the side while I leaned on one hand.

  In the beginning generations of this line, starting with Thomas himself, one child had a question mark where their date of death should be. I traced down the trees lightly with the finger of my other hand. "Thomas...Winifred...Rebecca...". I murmured their names. After Rebecca, all the ancestors had end dates next to their names. No more question marks. Something had changed after her, and I puzzled over it until the arm I was leaning on went numb.

  I shuffled papers so they were lined up vertically down the loft. Then piled them side by side so the question marks almost overlapped. Next I spread them wider so the sheets lay side by side and sat up off my heels to get a different vantage point.

  Right then, I went back to when I was little, and Cora had told me about her great-grandmother. The one who cured people. "Faith Healer," she had called her. She had never been allowed to watch her when she did the sessions, but she had watched person after person arrive at various stages of illness and leave cured hours later. She had wanted so much to be like her when she grew up. She wanted to heal people.

  "But I couldn't," I recalled her saying. We had been in her kitchen. I had been eating a bowl of chocolate ice cream at the tall counter, still so young.