It wouldn’t be stretching things to say that he’d been with me since the beginning of time, our widowed fathers having rocked us in a single cradle bearing both our names. Unc was not my real uncle, of course, but if kicks in the rump and recounting acts of stupidity are family rites, our blood was surely mixed. My father, Dyfan, was a carver of little soldiers, toy carts, and dollhouse dolls, and it was he who carved our names on the bed, making a cross of Iago and Lilabet by linking us at the “a”. Unc loved to tell how we sucked on each other’s toes and confused our rompers, sometimes sharing one sleeve. Now Unc wanted to grow corn in a place named after savages on the other side of the world.
“Why can’t we go, too?” I begged.
The two men were the best of friends but my father didn’t hate the superstitious heritage and Welshmen’s majik Iago’s father called ballyhoo. On this point alone, they were ever at odds. If Father should think to drop a ball of yarn, or a key, or a knife into our bed as protection against the clutches of sorcery, Unc would take the whole lot down to Kenfig Pool and toss them to the bottom. Likewise, rosemary was ripped from doorposts and pins were not to be dropped in wells. As a baby, I was oft presented with my body linens turned wrong side out for luck. Iago’s were turned stubbornly right side. It was Unc’s fondest wish to raise his son to be a man “grounded in the grit of reality,” and America promised plenty of grit. No child of his would be sent out into the world with salt in his pockets.
Father, on the other hand, preferred to keep a twinkle in his eye and a faerie in his garden, so he said, “If it’s meant to be, Iago will make his fortune and send for you when the time is right. Until then, you must be patient.”
Patience is the mother of all wisdom, or so they say, but I was a motherless child in more ways than one. Already I was tapping my foot, itching to grow up. When Iago smiled brightly, as he always did, I smiled too, because neither of us knew what the years would bring. Under his coat was the full sum of our joint seashell collection, the sand from a hundred different tides spiraled away for safe keeping in the twists and turns of their dark crannies. They clattered when he hugged them against himself, and I didn’t know whether I wanted to laugh or cry because poor Iago looked ready to give birth to a porcupine. I settled for kissing him on his forehead, which was hot as the sun. With a final clack, he hopped in the wagon and off he rode with those bumpy shells and his salt-less pockets, certain we would meet again.
Sad to say, when next I saw my old friend, we would be different people, and that bright smile I once loved so well would be torn away forever like handkerchief-shaped flowers carried off by a strong wind.
That’s when I got the picture in my head, as I sometimes did. I can’t explain where these strange thoughts come from, popping into my brain like memories relived before they’ve been made, but for as long as I remember, I had always been cursed with such things. And those odd-like, out of place, preceding-memories usually did get made, eventually.
The day I waved goodbye to Iago, the picture in my head was of a trail of man-sized footprints winding a wooden floor. Heel to toe, the footprints went, forming a pattern shaped like a heart made of blood-red feet. I knew right then, this would be one of those memories that might one day come to pass.
2
The ride from Yellow Springs takes twelve hours, and that’s too much time to think. Already, I’d had four days in Philadelphia, six nauseating weeks aboard the topsy-turvy decks of the Morgane, and thirteen years of pacing the floors in my father’s house in Dolgelley. The last hours spent waiting to see him again were the worst.
I will wear toothwort on my lapel, Iago wrote from America in his little list of “instructions.” Kindly buy the tallest Flowerpot hat you can find when you get to Yorktown so I will be able to spot you at the depot. If possible, make it green . . .
My neck had a crick, and I could scarcely keep my head from drifting to one side or the other, but so far so good. Now if I could just get those footprints out of my head. I’d not remembered about them until Pittsburgh, yet somehow they felt like they were drawing closer.
Shame on you, Lilabet! I said to myself. I’d recently agreed to marry a man I’d not seen since I was in bloomers. Why not brood about that? The years we’d spent apart felt like worry stones, their strange shape ever-changing at the whim of my thumb.
Before Iago went away, the church tower on Six Bells Hill teemed with the most wonderful outbreaks of bloodshed and monsters and demoniacal mayhem. The spot was our haven away from the stubborn debates of grown men, and we called this place of our childhood Vortigern's Grave. Upon the jutting finger of disintegrating mortar that was once the bell tower, we’d hung a scarlet tablecloth to attract dragons. Additionally, a much-feared cockatrice with eyes in the back of its head had been known to sniff around the surrounding rubble, sucking milk from cows and blood from children. This was just as well, we thought, as it served to keep the local riff-raff away.
At Vortigern’s Grave, our imaginations soared and it was not unusual to witness villains succumbing to the Rock of Leap. Griffins laid agate eggs in damp corners purely as a matter of routine, and snake-stones were hoarded in secret vaults. Anything was possible. We knotted the sleeves of my outgrown dresses around our necks, took up our toy swords, and felled all manner of fiend and foe, jumping from stone to stone, growling, slicing, and slaying. Amid it all, that tablecloth flew, year after year after year, a scarlet promise offering good things to come in a chipped and broken world.
And then Iago left.
Afterward, Vortigern’s Grave became just another pile of tumbled stones cankered in hair-cap moss. I learned of Unc Mael’s fate one day while sitting on the old Rock of Leap surrounded by mice and dead leaves.
Four months had passed without word from our friends since they’d left for America, but on this day there was a letter! I hugged the greasy, crumpled thing, adoring every timid word on the envelope, though I had to squint to read them. Only my name was dark and bold, engraved to the point of tearing little holes in the paper. Tapping my foot, I spread the thing flat on my knees and began to pick through the reversed b’s and slanty t’s that were the hallmark of Iago’s penmanship. Soon enough, I was lifted from that broken parapet and flung across the sea to be reunited with my old friend once again . . .
3 November 1887
Dear Lilabet,
I have sad news. Father did not live to see our house built in Ohio. You might think he caught a cold on the crossing like some of the others, but that wasn’t what happened. Father made it to Knockin, fit as a fiddle, only to suffer an accident with a peg tooth harrow shortly after we broke ground. By the time he breathed his last, our savings was used up on timber and nails, and sacks of corn seed, all of which I’ve been forced to sell to Mister Cleavens as he was the only one willing to give me anything for them, and not much at that. Between you and me, this isn’t how I dreamt it would be.
The good news is there’s lots of work to be done, even if I’m paid in apricot butter and brown eggs. In August, I cleared trees for a dirty German man living in a log-house by the swamp. I didn't understand one word he said, and he was just as ungodly as the devil would wish him to be, so I’m glad to report I’ve moved on. As of this morning, there are twenty parlour tables to be unloaded at Jones Furniture & Coffins, and another twenty next Monday besides. This should feed me for a spell. In addition to selling tables, Mr. Jones is also the undertaker. Suffice to say, I’m not going to tell you where I’ll be sleeping tonight because then you won’t want to come, and I want very much for you to come here. It’s all I think about.
I’m making it sound bad, aren’t I? But Knockin is a place of some promise. Many have come from North Wales because the land is rolling and there are beautiful pippin-green knolls as far as the eye can see. I try to take a look at the knolls at least once each day. The church in town is Methodist, you’ll be glad to hear, and all the services are in Cymraeg. I don’t know if Father would have liked this village as much a
s he thought, though. Just yesterday, I saw some children going from home to home singing and telling rhymes, their horses decorated like the old days. I can’t say I know anyone except that dirty German, but it seems to me it’s the same people doing the same things. They just took a boat-ride to do it.
I’m not sending an address because I don’t know where I’ll be settling, but I’ll write again as soon as I can. In the meantime, will you do me a favor? Kindly climb up on the roof of the peach house like we used to do and keep an eye out for a cloud that looks like Old Man Odwyn’s head? We have the same sky here in Knockin, you see, and I’m hoping Odwyn’s head will sail from here to there because I know it would really make you laugh. I miss your laugh more than anything.
Iago
I read his words no less than twenty times, then curled up and wept my heart out on that rock where once I bravely took on white dragons with nothing more than a bedgown cape, a wooden dagger, and my good friend by my side. When I’d cried myself out, I looked up and made the sad discovery that the dove trees had shed every last one of their handkerchiefs. They’d long since blown off with the thorny circlets and the stern, practical voice of Unc Mael, like so many faded ghosts.
Unlike my mum who died before I kicked free of the womb, Iago’s had lived long enough to hold him, and name him, and kiss his little baby fingers. Instead of fetching the midwife when she started to bleed, Unc let a local charmer dip his finger in her blood and make the sign of the cross on her forehead while reading from Ezekiel. He was a man of great faith back then, but when the words of Ezekiel failed to revive her, Unc Mael gave up being Welsh and started saving his shillings so he could emigrate in body as well as soul. Before succeeding in his escape, he made two attempts to leave, but his ulcers always acted up the minute he got packed.
Father said it was hard for a man to leave behind something familiar, even after he’d decided things were no good for him anymore. The day Unc actually left us, Father admitted, “When a man’s stomach starts to bleed, it’s time for him to go.”
In the end, this proved little consolation. After I told Father about Unc’s death, his eyes never twinkled half so merrily again. Rather than scorn the romantic traditions of our past, my father began to despise the romance-less world that had claimed his oldest friend. By the end of his years, he would be the most superstitious man to ever live, dragging me twice to the Wishing-Steps in Chester and making me run from top to bottom fast as I could while holding my breath. Father took up a relentless belief in cautions and folktales. Every time we took the coach-road past the Dusty Forge Inn, I had to close my eyes. Every time we crossed The Tumble-down-Dick, he bid me to keep my head low. We tied ribbons on the tails of our cows and refrained from making butter on Mondays and Saturdays. Every year, we put ground ivy in our hats on the Nos Calan gauaf in order to see who the witches and wizards were. Alas, dear Father wearied me.
Life is always ironical, my father used to say. Like giving up the wife you love to get the child you love. Or wishing on every star to keep your daughter close and then driving her away with all your wishing.
One big irony.
My life became about observing dead customs and waiting for word from Iago. Harder than the waiting was being unable to write in return because Iago never stayed in one place long enough. He was ten and then eleven and then twelve, his life a steady stream of sleeping in ditches, oiling saddles, and using a bull plow. He wrote faithfully but spoke mostly of the past. I knew little of his present circumstances.
“Three more stops,” the woman beside me explained twice in English before noting my confusion and switching to Cymreag. Finally, I understood: After thirteen years of sewing his letters into a lumpy satin pillow that I took to bed every night, Iago Godwyn was three short stops away.
By this point, so much time had passed, he’d become little more than scrawled words on dirty paper and a lot of wishful thinking tucked into a frayed pillow case. I knew he was dark like me, for we’d often been mistaken for brother and sister, but I could scarce recall the look of him. In Dolgelley, I’d sometimes tip my face over Blackfork Creek and pretend my eyes were his. He would look at me then, and I would look back at him and, even though there might be one sun behind his head and another behind mine, it would almost feel real. Then a minnow would swim through or the tail of my blue hair ribbon would cut across his pretend eyes, and it would all be spoiled. I spent hours on my back on the hot slate roof of the peach house, trying to convince myself that his clouds were the same as mine.
Perhaps I was getting cold feet. I’d watched the whole way, staring endlessly out the train window, and the clouds seemed somehow wrong. I got the distinct impression they weren’t real, but rather something painted on the glass to trick me. If I were to scratch them with my nail, I wondered, would they flake away to reveal a world where everything was the opposite? A land with blue clouds and white sky. A land of bloodied hearts.
“Don’t worry,” the woman next to me said, as if people in this strange new land knew how to read minds as easily as train schedules. “I’m two years off the boat from Bryn Du, and it’s not so different here.”
I didn’t believe her though. There wasn’t a proper set of stone steps to wish on anywhere in this new place.
Let me just say this: before the turnips, I was a lot less leery.
In the days when superstition guided my every move, I didn’t let a shooting star or a birthday candle pass without wishing my youth away. Time being what it is, one morning I found it forever vanished. I even remember the moment it happened. Iago’s latest letter was shivering in my hand, and I had just read the words out loud to my old border collie, Aballoch. Aballoch, I should note, seemed troubled by Iago’s words, too.
They sounded perfectly innocent when read against a furry ear. After all, they were just three simple names tossed away in a sentence about finally finding a permanent place to stay:
Bethan. Meriel. Gwendraith.
Unc Mael would have been disappointed I let them bother me at all, yet a maggoty wiggle of dread began to take shape under my skin. I got a picture in my head, too, and it was a bad one, an ax blade tipped in blood.
Was it intuition? Jealousy? A germ passed to me on an envelope soiled with the suspicious grime of American grit? Iago had just turned eighteen. Bethan, Meriel, and Gwendraith Vevay were three red-haired sisters who hired me to harvest their turnips. I should have been deliriously happy. For the first time in seven years, I had an address where I could write to him. For all I knew, the red-haired sisters were wrinkled biddies in rocking chairs.
The maggots wiggled all the same.
By the time I finished reading his note, a single red hair had slipped from the envelope and wound itself three times around my finger, requiring a snip with mustache scissors to restore the flow of blood. An enflamed print of that troublesome hair crisscrossed my skin for days after, but I tried to put it out of my mind. Selecting purple ink to do it, I sat down to pen seven years’ worth of sentiments to Iago on the turnip farm.
In sorrowful, violet flourishes, I re-lived the day I learned of Unc Mael’s death, saying to him what I’d never been able to say before. I tearfully recalled the days when we had nothing more to worry about than rolling up our hems and wading into tide-pools. In laborious detail, I described for him the terrific sense of boredom and desolation that now reined at Vortigern’s Grave. Page after page poured out, erupting like a swallowed burp. When I was done, I looked up just in time to see Odwyn’s head at long last floating by.
For the next few years, I endured a series of grim replies, the likes of which contained conflicting declarations on paper stained by grassy fingerprints. Wait for me! one pleaded. Don’t wait for me! the next one ordered. Please say that you’re waiting for me or else I will die . . .
Once, a spiky flower fell from the folded paper. When I took it to Father, he held the prickly thing up to the light and shouted, “Sow thistle! Sow thistle!” and tore it from my grasp. “Doesn�
��t Iago know that if a man gives sow thistle to his wife, one or the other is sure to die?!” I was forced to hide all future letters from my father due to the month-long illness I contracted following the sow thistle.
Iago did not much like the Vevay sisters and yet, year after year, he continued to work for them. I have run across some bad people in my time but these ones are the very worst. Father would have hated them for sure. Well, too bad. He shouldn’t have made me leave Dolgelley.
What’s wrong with them? I wrote.
Please don’t make me tell you, he wrote.
And so it went, year after year. Sometimes, his letters opened smelling of sulfur. Sometimes they reeked of vinegar. Upon occasion, I would find a symbol or drawing on the corners of his envelopes, yet he was clueless whenever I asked about them. Time and again, he wrote: Just between you and me, this isn’t how I dreamt it would be.
The year we turned twenty-two, I didn’t hear from him for eleven long months. Then, out of the blue, a letter arrived:
12 March 1901
Lilabet,
I know I’ve not written in a long time now, but I’ve been very busy. There is money to be made in oil, I’ve discovered, and I’m happy to tell you that I’ve made a bit. I’ve built a good house outside of Knockin which I call Watersplash. It has a brook you can hear while lying in bed. I have several acres to call my own and two fine oil wells to boot. It’s taken a long time to be able to say this, but I’m finally able to send for you.
I realize we are not children anymore. I will not hold you to a promise we made when we were young. You mustn’t come because of anything to do with Father, either, nor would I like you to marry me out of pity. Maybe you already have a husband? I’ve thought about this a lot. Maybe your husband is reading this right now and laughing at me.
I hope you don’t have a husband.
I do well for myself, but you should know that I do not deserve you. I’ve done things I’m not proud of in order to get by. There have been women in my life. It’s crazy to ask you to travel half-way around the world for me when we have not seen each other in all these years.
PANDORA Page 330
