The Cadence of Gypsies

by Barbara Casey

  THE CADENCE OF GYPSIES

  by

  Barbara Casey

  Kud ce vjestica do u svoj rod?

  (Where should a gypsy go if not to her kin?)

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Prologue

  As their peculiar perfume is the chief association with spices, so sorcery is allied in every memory to gypsies. And as it has not escaped many poets that there is something more strangely sweet and mysterious in the scent of cloves than in that of flowers, so the attribute of inherited magic power adds to the romance of these picturesque wanderers. Both the spices and the gypsies come from the Far East—the fatherland of divination and enchantment. The latter have been traced with tolerable accuracy. If we admit their affinity with the Indian Dom and Domar, back to the threshold of history, or well-nigh into prehistoric times, and in all ages, they, or their women, have been engaged, as if by elvish instinct, in selling enchanting merits, peddling prophecies and palmistry, and dealing with the devil generally ill a small retail way. As it was of old so it is today—

  Ki shan I Romani—

  Adoi san’ I chov’hani.

  Wherever gypsies go,

  There the witches are, we know.

  Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling

  Charles Godfrey Leland, 1891

  Chapter 1

  The gypsy—not old, but beyond her birthing years—spent the early, pre-dawn hours digging roots, in the dark of the crescent moon, and every so often replanting a good piece of a root to grow next year. The day before she had picked herbs, during that time when the essential oils are at their strongest, before they could get evaporated by the midday sun. She had her favorite place where she searched, the place where the energies were strongest. Surprisingly, it was the old church graveyard built on a slight mound just outside of the rural Italian village. A creek ran nearby, and a tall, unkempt yew tree grew near the entrance to the graveyard, poisonous, but giving off positive energies. It was a place she knew well, having discovered it from a previous time the travelers came this way.

  Other gypsy women picked their herbs carelessly anywhere, or they would buy them dried from a shop, claiming good results. But the Kaulo Camio, a black gypsy who went by the name of Lyuba, knew better. She treated all plants kindly and with respect in order to capture their full spiritual healing essence. For she believed as good gypsies did that everything has a spirit, even the stones on the ground; and everything could bring good luck or bad.

  Once she had gathered what she needed, she returned to camp just beyond the village to prepare her potions. From the roots, bark and hard seeds she would make decoctions by soaking them overnight and boiling them the next day. Some of the decoctions she would add honey or sugar to; others she would thicken into syrup or add lard to make ointments and salves. She saved the freshest herbs for her oils.

  Soon her potions would be ready, and she would take them into the village to sell. Coughs or colds, rheumatism, cuts and bruises, burns—it didn’t matter. She knew what remedy was necessary to relieve pain, create lustrous hair, revive the impotent, whiten teeth, cure constipation, or simply heal the broken spirit. Unlike others who only pretended, she had the gift.

  But that would be tomorrow. Today, after her work was complete, she would teach the children. Lyuba was a choovihni—a wisewoman, an exalted and envied position among gypsy women. As her birthright, she and she alone had been given the responsibility to pass on the knowledge of the travelers to the ones who would follow. Today she would teach the older children about spells, making the duk rak and duk koor for protection, as well as the talisman. This particular group of children was bright and eager, but she was yet to find a child born with the natural gift. Those children were rare. In all her years as a choovihni, she had only known one—the beautiful one that was taken from her so long ago. And all of the magic she knew had not been able to heal her pain from that loss.

  Outside her hut, the shadow of the elm was short; the sun almost directly overhead. She needed to finish, for soon it would be time for the children. She carefully placed the last of the herbs in a bottle and covered them with olive oil. Sealing the bottle tightly with a cork, she put it with the others where it would be gently warmed by the sun.

  * * *

  Jimmy Bob Doake didn’t like change. Born and reared in that region of North Carolina known as the Piedmont, and the only sibling out of eleven who made it to the eighth grade, he never felt any desire to visit anywhere else, much less move to. He still lived in the house where he had been brought up, at least during the day, and now alone except for old Tick, his hound dog. And the Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women, his place of employment for the past thirty years, was only a couple of miles down the road, which is where he spent his nights. This night was no different.

  Jimmy Bob slowly made the rounds in his old beat-up truck, starting with the outer perimeter along the ivy-covered stone walls surrounding the campus, and then gradually circling his way toward the middle of the large, wooded property until finally reaching the center where the administration building was located. Without fail, the entire process took him two hours and forty-three minutes. However, on those nights when his favorite team was playing on television—it didn’t matter which sport—he would only patrol around the dormitory and the administration building, which would take fifteen minutes.

  Since there had never been any reason to change this routine, the time he would leave his office to go on patrol was always the same: 12 midnight. And because Jimmy Bob was a bit of a poet, often spending his solitary nocturnal hours transferring his inner-most thoughts onto paper while others slept, he visualized himself as heroic, charged with the weighty responsibility of keeping all safe during those hours he referred to in meter and rhyme as “witches’ moments”—the magical time that occurs between late darkness and early light.

  Stone apparitions—familiar and functional in daylight—now seemed unfamiliar and somewhat threatening in the soft illumination of the crescent moon high overhead; and everywhere dark, elongated shadows crisscrossed the lawn dampened by night-cooled air. The stillness was broken only by the rhythmic croaking of frogs from a nearby pond, an occasional splash, a mocking bird off in the distance, and the slight rustle of leaves.

  And even though the favored Durham Bulls had gone into extra innings against the Indianapolis Indians, the minor league baseball game was being televised by the local station in a delayed broadcast, therefore eliminating the need for Jimmy to cut his patrol short this evening. At exactly two hours and forty-three minutes after he started his rounds, he parked his truck and entered through the locked door of the administration building located on the east end. Within minutes he was comfortably reinstalled in his over-sized recliner positioned in front of the 12-inch television he kept in his small office. It was the top of the fifteenth inning; the Bulls 6, the Indians 5. The Indians were up to bat. Next to the recliner on a small table was a bag of cheese chips, a canned soft drink, and the pad of paper and pen he kept handy just in case he felt inspired to write something—a word, a phrase, a nice couplet.

  Al
l was as it should be.

  * * *

  “Ouch! You’re standing on my fingers!” This from the petite girl with a long, blond ponytail, wearing a nightgown, most of which was pulled up between her legs and tied into a knot at her waist to keep it from getting tangled on the limb where she was perched. Somewhere above her the sound of a saw and splintering wood filled the darkness followed by a stream of profanity repeated in several foreign languages for emphasis.

  “It doesn’t look right. It’s supposed to have a rim and a dent.” Clinging to a 12-foot ladder as she pointed the flashlight first this way and then that, the heavy-set girl wearing a nightshirt buttoned at the neck offered this with a slight lisp.

  The girl with the blond ponytail giggled.

  “What do you mean—dent?! Let me see that picture.” The tall black girl completely hidden aimed her flashlight toward the magazine that was being thrust upwards through the thick branches in her direction.

  “And the top is supposed to be rounded—like a button mushroom,” the girl in the nightshirt added, the word “mushroom” sounding more like “muthroom.”

  “That’s because it’s circumcised,” supplied the girl with the ponytail, from which she removed a small twig and a handful of leaves.

  “Shekoo, baboo!” More profanity. “Okay. I know what to do.” The tall black girl disappeared back into the upper-most branches of the tall plant that was more tree than bush. After several additional minutes, the sawing, crunching, and clipping sounds finally gave way to the more gentle sounds of tiny snips. And then, silence.

  “That’s it; everybody down.”

  The petite girl, with the magazine that had been overlooked in the last confiscation and now wedged firmly under her armpit, started the perilous descent first since she was nearest to the ground, followed by the tall girl. The girl in the nightshirt eased her way down the ladder juggling pruning shears, a hand saw, and scissors. Once on the ground, the three girls stood back to admire their work.

  “That is one honkin’ Peni erecti,” said the tall girl causing a fresh explosion of giggles. “Let’s get out of here.” After quickly rolling down the legs of her pajama bottoms, the tall girl grabbed one end of the ladder and, along with her two friends, lugged it and the other tools back to the shed that housed lawn maintenance equipment. Task accomplished, they returned to their rooms, and to their individual beds, careful not to disturb the other dorm residents, the floor monitors, their suitemates and, most importantly, their slumbering dorm mother, Ms. Larkins. Within minutes, they fell into a deep, peaceful sleep—the sleep of innocent angels.

  It would soon be light; and Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women would start another day.

  Chapter 2

  It was always the older ones who felt the need to challenge the ancient gypsy traditions. The children who weren’t yet adults, but who felt they were old enough to thwart authority and desire independence.

  “I want lots of gold,” said Milosh who had recently turned 17 years old—a man in his opinion. The oldest in the group, soon he would join the adults. “Teach me the spell to make me wealthy.”

  “You must be careful for what you wish, Milosh.” As always, the choovihni was patient with her young pupils. “But I shall teach you the spell for attracting material goods.” She sat in the shade of the tall elm with her full skirt spread out around her and waited until everyone was quiet and settled before continuing. “First, write down whatever it is you desire on a clean sheet of paper, then place the paper on a small square of green cloth. You must concentrate on it for a few minutes. That might be hard for you, Milosh,” she teased. The other students laughed. They liked for Milosh to be put in his place. Just because he was the son of the Bandoleer, it didn’t make him better than everyone else—even though he acted like it. And he played mean tricks on the younger ones who were too timid and afraid to say anything. “Try to visualize the object before you—the shape, texture, color. Feel pride in owning it, the pleasure you hope it will bring, what you will do with it.” She looked at each of her students, making sure they understood. “Then hold the paper to your forehead and say three times: ‘I have you, I hold you, I keep you.’

  “Fold the paper into the green cloth and tie it with a length of red wool. Tie seven knots into the wool and as you tie each knot, say, ‘You are mine, I own you.’ Put the green cloth with the paper in a small box, and each day, for seven days, hold the box to your forehead and say three times, ‘You are mine, I own you.’ After you have done this, put the box away in the back of a drawer.”

  “Will I have lots of gold if I do that?” Milosh asked.

  “It will bring success to those who are patient and deserving,” Lyuba answered.

  For the next several hours, Lyuba taught the children other spells: the spell using the power of trees, a ritual to cleanse the aura of their individual spaces, the spell for strength. When they got older, she would teach them the spells for attracting romance and for keeping a loyal lover. For now, however, she would teach only those things that were appropriate and what they could understand.

  When the day’s lessons were complete, and the elm’s shadow once again lengthened, the parents came for their children. Concerned, Lyuba watched Milosh return to his hut alone. His chakra, that point of light indicating the heart, was dark and brown rather than green as it should be. Much was expected of the only son of the Bandoleer. He held promise, but he had much to learn. Unlike his father, he was impatient and quick to judge others. His focus was on material things, and he ignored what was important. There was also a darkness in his spirit; something that could be dangerous if not corrected.

  He would go and prepare the paper, wrapped in green cloth and tied with a thread of red wool, and wish for much gold. He had not understood.

  * * *

  The slight voice tremor was all that was needed, but the deep, audible sigh confirmed what Carolina suspected: that she was in for another real ass-chewing. This would be the eighth time getting called into the headmaster’s office in the same number of months she had been teaching at Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women. Each time it had been because her girls had committed a serious infraction of rules or behaved in some inappropriate way that was unacceptable within the stone walls of Wood Rose.

  Her girls, the ones she had been given total responsibility for, called themselves Females of Intellectual Genius, or FIGs. Everyone else, however, called them strange. Never before in the history of Wood Rose had a student even come close to approaching genius status. Certainly not in the time that Dr. Harcourt had been headmaster. Then, within the short span of one week, two seven-year-old children—Dara Roux and Mackenzie Yarborough—were admitted, each from a different family, a different background, and a different part of the country, but each with an intelligence quotient well within the range of genius. Amazingly, several years later, a third student—Jennifer Torres—was enrolled, whose age and scores were comparable to those of the original FIGs. What Wood Rose could do for these gifted girls was now coming to a close, much to the relief of the administration, faculty, and staff alike. This would be their final year at Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women, for in June—less than six weeks away—they would graduate.

  Carolina was still in bed, deep in thought as she usually was whenever she had a quiet moment to herself, when the telephone rang. For several days she had been struggling with how best to approach the headmaster. Ever since being put in charge of the FIGs shortly after getting hired at Wood Rose, she had been trying to come up with innovative ways in which she could somehow excite her girls, challenge their intellect, and, most of all, keep them out of trouble. The inherent problems of being different extended beyond their prickly relationship with Wood Rose staff members. The multi-faceted difficulties in teaching the FIGs frequently left the faculty with feelings of inferiority and impotency at the very least. None of the other residents wanted to be around them either, with the exception of the youngest re
sidents who didn’t yet comprehend the difference between being brilliant and normal, which brought about additional struggles of an inner psychological nature. Carolina had tried a variety of things, but, obviously, what she had been doing wasn’t working. What had stimulated her when she was their age? What mysteries of the universe had intrigued her?

  Then she had remembered.

  She had just turned eighteen when she was accepted into the accelerated liberal arts program at the University of North Carolina located in Chapel Hill. That summer, in preparation for the fall term, Carolina had been assigned an extensive and comprehensive reading list. That was when she made the discovery, and from that day forward, her life and the way she thought of herself had been charted in a veil of mystery and immeasurable conjecture. What if…became her mantra. She felt as though she had been thrust into a parallel universe. Nothing had excited or concerned her more, before or since. It became her own secret research project, something she remained totally committed to even with her heavy class schedule that would guarantee an early graduation from the university. It was what motivated her to get up every morning and what kept her working late into the night. With each new bit of information, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant, she was pointed in a different direction, to another amazing discovery and thrilling revelation.

  The dedication to her search had not diminished in the years from when she first made her discovery. In her personal analysis of it, she didn’t know what she hoped to accomplish. She only knew that she was somehow connected to one of the greatest mysteries in the world by some strange twist of fate. She also knew that it was her responsibility to seek an outcome, for, in the end, it would define her very existence.

  Within three years of being accepted to the university, Carolina graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts; and then, because she didn’t know what else to do, she went on to get a master’s degree in foreign languages, and a doctorate in psychology. Through it all, the secret remained with her, her “special” project, like an invisible companion, as she chipped away at the truths hidden. By staying closely associated with the university, she had access to research materials that would otherwise be difficult or even impossible to obtain, especially when it involved materials in foreign countries. It was her obsession, consuming all of her spare time between classes, assignments, lab work, and whatever else was necessary to fulfill graduation requirements. It was her best friend.