Lineage

by Juniper Black

  His questions were: who was the person who came to take care of him whenever he was sick? And how come no one else could see him?

  It’s not like it was hard to miss him. Simon was a large, black man. He was at least 6’3”, dark skinned, and heavily muscled. He was always dressed as a nurse and had begun caring for Ed after his first illness as a child. Even to this day, Ed remembered the exact moment he had opened his eyes to the white ceiling that looked like styrofoam. He was trying to figure out where he was when a large face appeared above him. Edward could only see the man’s head, and this made Simon appear as if he was floating.

  “Hiya, Midget. How we feelin’?”

  Ed had opened his mouth to answer but only a strangled croaking sound emerged.

  “Oh, here. Have some water.” The man had brought a cup with a straw near him, and Ed saw how large his arms were. “It’s too soon to talk. We’ll try again tomorrow.” The man eased him back onto the pillows and tucked the blankets around him. He smiled down at him and then walked to the door. A moment after he was gone, his mother came into the room, and Ed turned all his attention to her.

  Ed was in the hospital two weeks that first time. He was in and out of fevers and dreams, but he had overheard enough to understand that no one there knew what was wrong with him. When he was lucid, he heard the panic in his mother’s voice even though his father told her over and over again that Ed would be fine.

  He was barely fourteen, and he was scared. It seemed as if when he was most scared, the Strongman would show up to check in on him. He made Edward feel safe. He made it seem that there was no place for worry, that there was only room for getting better. Ed was cold a lot, but when the man was in his room, he felt warm.

  The day Ed woke out of his illness, he felt as if he had been asleep for a long time. The sunlight coming through the windows looked like regular, yellow rays; not the blinding whiteness that had hurt his eyes since he had been in the room. The Strongman was slipping out the doorway. Ed tried to call after him and found he could speak again. His parents were the ones who rushed into the room at his call, though.

  Later that day, he asked them to find the Strongman so he could thank him for taking such good care of him. When his mother went to the nurse’s station, they said the only colored nurse they had working at the hospital at the time was a woman who was short and not noticeably muscular. When his mother asked Ed if maybe it was her that he saw, Ed shook his head emphatically. The doctors interrupted the moment and told his parents that whatever illness he had temporarily succumbed to had vanished. Ed was home by lunch the next day.

  Ten years would pass before Ed would have the chance to see the Strongman again. An accident at the plant where he worked several towns over smashed his arm and knocked him unconscious. As he started to come out of the blackness, he heard the rustle of clothing. He felt large, thick arms turn him in the bed. There was a scent in the air that he remembered from his childhood. By the time his eyes were able to open, he knew that he would be in the hospital bed and that the Strongman would be there. Ed was ready this time. He meant to get an answer to the question he had held onto for a decade.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Well, hello, Midget!” the Strongman smiled down at him as large as ever. He put a hand to Ed’s arm. He felt warmth as well as a kind of numbness course from the large hand onto his flesh. “You can call me Simon.”

  Ed was still groggy from whatever painkiller the hospital had given him. He felt dizzy, and he closed his eyes to try to stop the room from spinning. When he opened them, the light in the room told him hours must have passed, and an entirely different nurse was in the room with him.

  Ed had a name to go with his description of the Strongman this time, but it didn’t do him any good. No one at this hospital had a record of him either. He would spend the next five years wondering what Simon was. Was it Simon who healed him when he was sick? Or did Ed make Simon appear somehow?

  After his first experience as a child, his father had tucked him in that first night back from the hospital and had told Ed about their family history as if it were a bedtime story. Ed became excitable.

  “Then you’ve seen him? The man who took care of me?”

  His father had shaken his head and answered, “It’s not the same experience for each of us. When I wake up from an illness, I see a tiny blue salamander creeping along the bedsheets. Your uncle Rob sees a yellow one. Your grandfather didn’t see anything, but he always heard a sound like rumbling thunder.”

  Ed was crestfallen, “Then I won’t ever know who he is?”

  “You might, son.” Ed’s father finished telling him the rest of their story. “You’ll only have a few moments with him, whatever he is, so make those moments count. He’ll always come when your illness is almost gone. He spoke to you, and that is an experience none of us have ever had. Maybe you can learn something about why this happens to us.”

  Every time Ed was able to see Simon, he gleaned a little bit more. He thought he was getting closer to finding an answer until he realized last year that Simon didn’t actually answer the questions he was asked. Simon did a kind of doublespeak or evasion when he talked to Ed. He had never even said his name was actually Simon, he had just said that Ed could call him that.

  When Ed realized this, he felt only frustration. This last illness had dragged on for years, but now that he was on the mend he kept his eyes open. Any week now, he’d spy Simon’s wide face smiling at him. He knew what question he’d ask him this time. He meant to cut through all the bullshit answers Simon had given him in the past.

  Only a month later, as he walked down the wide sterile hallway from his latest checkup, he saw the hulking figure of the Strongman turn a corner at the far end. Edward hadn’t noticed until now how empty and quiet the hallway was. Only he and Simon were here, gradually coming closer together. When Simon was near enough, Ed reached out for the Strongman’s arm. His hand barely covered half of the man’s biceps. His fingers tingled to numbness almost immediately but he held on anyway.

  “Why come to me in this form? Why not a salamander or the sound of thunder?” The numbness had crept up Ed’s forearm nearly to his elbow. He didn’t feel Simon pull away, but he was already passing beyond him.

  “You needed a protector.”

  “A protector from what?” Only two steps left until the adjoining hallway intersected. Simon would turn a corner and disappear again for heaven only knew how long.

  “Midget,” Simon still called him even though Ed was in his fifties. “Things are changing...and you have less time than you think.”

  ********

  The Heritage of the Boones as told by Mabel Boone’s Niece

  Everywhere in town, there is the constant sound of crickets and birdsong. The noise is so pervasive, your brain will tune it out completely and pretend it's the same as the hum of the power lines. Their song varies in thickness during the day and night, but it's always present. It insinuates into the house itself. It grows louder when experienced from the front porch swing or either of the upstairs or downstairs screened porches in the back of the house.

  A shaded front porch with an ample swing is the preferred method for seeking relief from the sticky heat that swarms through the long summer. Few houses have air conditioning. Even the ones that do use them rarely, caving only after days and days of a hot streak drive them to mechanical methods.

  An accompaniment of cold fruit is usually present while on the porch, and the selection changes over the weeks with what is in season. Strawberries give in to blueberries and are themselves replaced by the next ripe crop. Finally in July, the stone fruits peak, and you find every other porch lined with housewives and grandmothers, their lips stained red by the summer melancholy of the last of the cherries.

  Planted too close to the full moon or if they ripen when the orb’s circuit has slipped into Gemini, Libra or Aquarius, the fruit skews more tart than sweet and lingers with another flavor that never quite sol
idifies. These small fruits unknowingly bought at the Town Square market will add a soft, sad layer to the thoughts of their consumer.

  In decades long past, the Boone family who ran Willow Farm would have recognized these conditions. They would have held the fruit back for themselves. Mabel was the last matriarch of the Boones. With only her husband's sons to follow her, she often felt outnumbered by her household of men. The older she aged, the more brazenly her youngest son argued with her about the harvests. With a head for business and a determination to rise above his station, money was his biggest concern. Her simple explanations about why they kept the fruit from market at certain times did not assuage him.

  At some point in their family history, the women who came long before her may have had a more satisfying reason for guarding the cherries. Whatever they might have said had been diluted over the years. Mabel was left with the excuse she had heard her grandmother use and was only able to tell her own son, "Because we answer to the moon." She didn't understand the words herself. They might have been good enough when she was a child, but in the ears of her modern boy they had no weight.

  The first time he successfully set out the crates to go to market, she had been too old and feeble to stop him. She had sat in her rocker and watched the trucks kick up dust behind them as they headed down the farm's dirt road to the Old River Highway and the way to town.

  "That's the end of it, then," she thought. She couldn't even explain to herself what it was the end of and that somehow seemed worse. To realize that something was lost without even knowing what it was.

  Mabel never left the farm by then. Her legs that had once strode through the orchards and climbed the trees had become too frail to even allow her to stand for more than ten minutes at a time. A trip into town seemed an impossible task to her. She wouldn't get to see what their cherries did to the people who bought them.

  At market, women seemed to gravitate to the fruit almost exclusively. They asked for them by entire flats and cradled them back to their cars. Swaying on the front porch swing on a summer’s early eve when the humidity blessedly lifts a little, bite by bite turns the women shades of pensive. A mixture of relief and longing settles in, like the sensation of the evening breeze that is sure to come along in a little while.

  They sift through the memories of friends lost too young, the whole summer spent on an uncle’s horse farm, the dress that made them feel beautiful and the lover who told them that they were. Close-lipped smiles flutter off and on, and their gaze turns from the porch floor boards out to the large, ancient oaks past the white railing. The air finally cools, the sky turns its colors, and they find they are glad to be alive and here.

  ********

  The Heritage of the Angelos as told by my husband Zack Angelo

  Most of Uncle Leo’s dreams were of the future. As his body aged through the years and his eyesight dimmed and his muscles grew softer, he thought his dreams would fade, too, but they didn’t. They grew even clearer than when he was a young boy. Even so, he knew that his dreams were not as clear as his father’s had been. When Leo had asked his own son if he had special dreams, he had looked at Leo as if he were crazy. Leo realized his son had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Maybe he’s too young. The dreams might start later in him,” Leo told himself after the first failed attempt. He let it go and waited another year, then another, then five. His son’s dreams were like anyone else’s. Not about anything other than his own psyche.

  Leo’s father would have been relieved to know that their family’s affliction, as he had called it, seemed to be passing out of their bloodline. His father had been a working man. Rough but not unkind, he was always trying to make Leo stronger and more stoic. The dreams had made him uncomfortable. They took him out of the simple life he enjoyed and made him deal with the belief that there were other forces at work in the world. His father would have traded his gift gladly if it meant he could live as everyone else. He would have preferred to go to bed at night and wake up the next day blissfully unaware of what was coming up the road.

  Leo had never felt that way. He enjoyed the rare nights that he was allowed glimpses of the future. He would wake the next morning with the strands of vision clinging to him like a spider’s web. He would spend the entire day trying to puzzle out what the images meant. He would pass others in the street week after week and wonder to whom his dream visions belonged. Sometimes a month or six would pass before he could finally know for certain.

  The night of our wedding, he had had too many bourbons. He had asked his son one more time if he had had any peculiar dreams.

  “No, Dad,” his son had smiled at him and shook his head in a way that made Leo feel as if he really was a crazy old man being placated. “Pop, I don’t think I ever dream at all. If I do, I never remember them.”

  His son’s answer made him so sad, he had gone out to the porch to hide how moist his eyes had become. When he saw Violette already there, he was relieved. It seemed like the universe had placed her there to remind him there were others like him yet in the world. A few families in town that had a little spark left inside them. He could tell the sparks were dimming as the generations passed. They were flitting out like candles that have run through their wax. There on the porch that night, he could linger a little longer with another like him. Even Violette’s glow was much fainter than her grandmother’s had been. He had to look so hard for it, he thought he might be imagining it was there around her. A trick of his old man’s eyes. Leo had met Violette’s young niece, though. The light was brighter in that one. It gave him hope that maybe a grandson of his could be born with their dreams. Maybe their gift was changing and would start to skip a generation. Their gift might surface every now and again like an ancestor’s distinctive nose or pale gray eyes.

  A lot of his friends from the other old families who kept their own secrets had passed on, and his own son would never understand what he kept trying to tell him. He thought of his father again and wished the gift had not made him feel so odd. Sharing some of his dreams with another who understood what he meant would have been nice.

  When he had danced and drank too much to be respectable, his son had gently maneuvered him past the others. Leo said his last goodbyes on the way out to the car. After making sure Leo was safe inside his home, his son had gone off to his own house. He had offered to walk Leo upstairs before he left, but Leo had shooed him off.

  “I’m not so old that I’ll fall down the stairs after a party,” Leo had told him. “Maybe I’ll have a nightcap before I head up to bed,” he had teased, knowing he had had more than enough.

  He did linger in the family room for a little while. He liked to look at the old family photos that stood in their frames along the mantle and across the piano. He liked to study the men and try to see if there was something special in their eyes. He tried to imagine if an outsider had ever been able to glean the nightly power that his ancestors had held. He himself had never thought they looked any different from anyone else in town. They certainly didn’t glow in the photos, even though there were stories that they had in real life in certain lighting.

  Leo climbed the stairs finally. The evening had been wonderful, but weddings always made him miss his Ava. Bittersweet was how he felt as he thought back on the reception. He wasn’t sad so much as lonesome. He had been thinking of how many years had passed since Ava was last here on earth when he fell into slumber.

  He thought he woke in the night. There had been a noise downstairs. He hadn’t heard it, but the house reverberated with an echo of some kind. Leo waited in the bed and only made himself get up when he realized he felt afraid. “Angelo men don’t accept fear,” his father had told him when he was a boy. “We face our fears.” Leo stepped into his slippers, pulled his baseball bat from behind the bedroom door and crept downstairs.

  There was a light on in the living room, even though he thought he had turned all the downstairs lamps off. He hesitated before he entered the room, and his fa
ther’s words echoing in his head made him press onward.

  Stepping across the threshold, he knew he was in a dream. His living room was a forest. It was daylight, and the woods around him should have been buzzing with noise. There were no crickets, although the air was warm. There was no birdsong, though the angle of the sun told him dusk was close. He turned a circle where he stood and realized that the sunlight itself was wrong. The beams of light were thicker somehow. He didn’t have a word in his vocabulary that he could use to describe it, but something in him knew this type of light was called by a certain name. The word was dangling in his brain, but he couldn’t reach it.

  He turned a circle again, and when he turned completely there was now a small group of people gathered. He was looking at their backs. He moved closer to them, and when he approached he realized he was smaller than the others. He held up his hands in front of him - a dreamworld trick his father had taught him - and saw that they were the hands of a child. He clenched them into fists and then opened them wide again. This he did three times. When he opened wide his palms for the last time, the feeling of the dream changed, and he knew he was in control of it.

  At least, he should have been. Something in the dream was fighting him. He could feel the edges darken as if only the end of the world lay beyond the ring of trees around the people he found himself among. Something even darker than the blackness moved along the tree line. He narrowed his eyes in an attempt to make out what the shapes were. He thought he could discern wings and wondered perhaps if they were birds. His dream body leaned forward to try to see more clearly when a wash of orange light lit the entire space. The creatures inside the darkness disappeared but so did the trees themselves. The light moved across the ground like a flash flood. It dipped under branches and poured itself over rocks. It insinuated itself around the group and drenched everyone around him in glowing embers.