WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (47 page)

Months later,
having no choice but to listen to the little girl inside the house, I began to change, slowly but little by little. 
She convinced me that I did not want to die and if I stayed in this marriage for much longer—that is exactly what would happen. 
She told me to trust my own gut instinct. 
I believed her.
 I hoarded up inside the house inside me, and talked with the little girl about what I should do. With a lot of work, a lot of self-discovery and a lot of supernatural power, the little girl gave me the courage to leave and take a step in the right direction, even with terrible fears. I had plenty of those. All I could see was a broken woman, a torn kite, blood and tears. No wind. But the little girl reminded me I was grit and courage. Stars and moons. Faith and hope. I wanted to believe her. I needed to believe her.

It took a while for me to really let it sink in. I’d take a few steps, then panic and retreat fearfully, not fully convinced at times. My insecurities would rise up. 
I can’t make it alone. I will die. I will crumble.
 
I need this man. I need this pain. I need this bed. I need this lie.
But each day, she reminded me…grit and courage. Stars and moons. Faith and hope.

Branson got wind of something different in me and he didn’t like it one bit. In order to put me back in 
his
 place, he’d immediately slay me with words or deliberate actions that would cause me to doubt. Only now, am I seeing this for what it truly was. My
bag of bones body had lived a lie for so long, denying the truth and my body erupted and started having fits. 
Uncontrollable, out of no-where, out of body experiences, panic attacks, fear of dying shit that literally took me, all of me. 
The truth collided with lies—earthquake. 
God just reached down from heaven and shook me like a rag doll.
That is the only way I can explain it because that is what it felt like. 
Branson
didn’t know what to do with a crazy, sick woman and having no compassion, he pawned me off on my parents. 

“Yeah, she’s lost it.” I heard him say when he slammed the door
of my parent’s house.  I’m positive he went straight to the bar. 
Bastard.
The next day my paranoid parents drove me to a clinic while I lay in the backseat thinking about Maw Sue, shock treatments, tic-tac’s
, and petal people. 
I could hear the voice of the president screaming “Forward!” But I just kept falling, deeper into the house, inside the rooms, below, beneath. 
Tick. Tock.
 

Lena Hart totally freaked out. Of course, 
she would.
 The curse doesn’t exist. 
Not my daughter, not my child.
 I don’t remember the trip or the conversations. Dad said it got real when I told Lena about the shadow people, the ones inside the house, inside me. I started clawing at my chest, scratching, prying at my skin till I bled, as if I was trying to get inside myself, unlock a door, force my way in, stop the pain, stop the madness. I told them about the little gi
rl that lived inside the house.  This
scared the black hair dye clean out of my mother’s head. And just as she feared, when doctors could find no logical medical conclusion to all my symptoms, they referred me to a psychiatrist.

“Are you sure there isn’t anything?” Lena said to the doctor, desperate.
Not my daughter.  Not my child.
“Maybe the stomach flu? Food poisoning? I mean, for God sakes there is no telling what she eats. I tried to teach her to cook but…” When Lena could not convince the doctor she knew more than him, she had no other choice but to adhere to the family curse though she denied it vehemently. 
Pink elephant.

Shit Happens

Hidden behind the chicken coop is Maw Sue's garden of indescribable sweet strawberries. When the berries ripened, Mag and I would find an open space like two birds hunkering down on a nest, shaking our tail feathers, strutting in circles, thrashing dirt and finally squatting in the perfect spot to pick and eat. On every side, as far as we could see was dazzling red jewels draped around leaf
y necks.  The edible gems were sweet and mouthwatering until we made ourselves sick. 
We ate and ate and ate. Mag fell over in the dirt with a half-eaten one in her hand, moaning. I was stuffed to the gill but couldn’t make myself stop. The infamous scre
en door slammed from the porch and the bell rang out a low chime. 
Maw Sue eyed us and then walked to the washing machine. 
It was time to snoop. 
It had been six weeks si
nce Maw Sue’s mental breakdown.  No o
ne
knew I went inside the bedroom and witnessed the terrible, awful. 
I hadn’t the guts to ask her what happened in there, although it pained me to think about it, what it meant and why. I’d catch myself staring at her from across the room, trying to form a clue of something I missed, anything that would explain her act
ions, her silence, and her secrets.  I thought of her life, the stories she told me, the tragedies she’d faced, all the deaths, and wondered if she’d just lost it—
again
, like when Aunt Raven died and she lost time and place, having no idea of what she did. 
I waited for a sign, a gifted-intuitive connection
between us, an eye glance or a signal to let me know.  I had noticed, s
ince she had returned home, she had not once, looked me in the eye. That was unlike Maw Sue.
She was always eye to eye telling stories.  I could always see the stories playing themselves out in her eye reflection, like watching a movie.   

“Hey Maw Sue.” I
said running across the yard and up on the porch.  My hand was full of berries I couldn’t seem to put down.  She turned and glanced above her horned rimmed glasses. 

“Whatcha doing?”

“Doing a bug.” She
said fiddling with the washer. 
“You wanna pull its tail?”
I hated hearing this ridiculous southern metaphor. 
It was basically a polite way of saying, 
mind your own damn business.
I just got straight to the point. 

“No bugs today. How do you grow your berries so big Maw Sue? What's the secret? You can tell me. I won’t tell Papa Hart. I promise.” She avoided eye contact and slung a powder blue pillow case across her shoulder. I hoped she would find it in her heart
to tell me all her secrets, not just the garden growing secrets.  B
ut I should have known better. Papa Hart and Maw Sue had been dueling it out for years in the secret mojo garden arena. Who could outdo who—the biggest vegetable, the plumpest cucumber, the biggest berry, the best tasting green bean. Maw Sue won hands down on the strawberries but Papa Hart tipped the cart with the biggest tomatoes. Their
rivalry intensified each year.  They
watched each other like hawks afraid one or the other would sabotage their crops. Sometimes, they’d eye each other across the pasture at the beginning of gardening season, their hand tillers drawing rifts in the dirt. It was like gardening at the okay corral.
Hoes and rakes drawn like pistols. 

But Maw Sue ignored my pleas. She put the towel in the washer and dropped the lid. It made a loud twang that jolted me. In defeat, I stuffed a berry in my mouth while strawberry juice ran down my chin. At the same time, Maw Sue bent down, mischievous and at eye level and pointed at the coop.

“Chicken shit. That’s the secret.”
  

Tiny seeds ganged up in my throat cutting off air. 
I gagged a vile taste in my mouth. 
This is not how I imagined my death. From a strawberry. No. I can’t go out like this.
 
No.  Not a strawberry.
 
I gasped for breath while everything around me projected itself in slow vision. 
Chicken shit? Noooo, it can’t be.
 
While I’m choking I see Maw Sue reach inside her wrinkled mouth, stretching her bottom lip, a rubber band of skin while she adjusted a dip of snuff and then she spit off the porch. 
A bullfrog with hiccups crawled from my belly, to my throat and sat next to the seed lodged in the crawl space, somewhere between my tongue and vocal cords. 
It was an orchestra; a hiccup, a heave, a gawk and a gag.
 

In slow mode, I saw Maw Sue’s unnec
essary grin and her arm raised like a large tree branch swaying in the wind. 
The force of a slat hand pounded my upper back. It ejected the strawberry seeds and the bullfrog. The blob of gunk launched clear across the porch, a fighter pilot ejected from a plane, landing in a gross red yuck. Maw Sue chuckled and walked casually back into the ho
use. I ran to the refrigerator before I died. 
Finally, after a gulping two glasses of clear water, to clear my throat of any clogs, my skin return
ed to a ruddy pink. Since I almost died, I planned on finding out the truth. 
I addressed the pink elephant in the room.

“You’re pulling my leg, huh, Maw Sue?” I felt for sure she’d agree. “Chicken shit. Ahahaha.” I
fell into laughter.  It was a hilarious thought. 
Then I realized I said shit in front of my great grandmother. I expected a swat of white fire across my leg any second, but it never came. She just lit a cigarette and sat in her chair staring into the nothing of the room. She was different since
she’d returned from the clinic, that place of shock therapy and horrible terrible. 
I shuddered thinking about it but I didn't have
time to panic, I needed answers and if I could get her to talk gardening, maybe I can fin-niggle my way to the truth about the bedroom. 

“I know…I know.” I said nodding my head and trying to be chipper. “Papa Hart will never know your secret. I won’t tell him. I just want to kn
ow the truth, ya know, Maw Sue.” I eyed her real serious like.  I hoped she could read my eyes but she never looked at me.  “
Did you make an herbal growing potion? Well, it’s really good if you did.”
Garden secrets lead to real secrets. 

“They are sweet, aren’t they?” She
said finally acknowledging me.  Then she
r
ummaged through a stack of mail on the table. 
I churned with information trying to figure out what to say next. I wanted my Maw Sue back, the old Maw Sue, the one before the bedroom incident but I didn’t know how to get her, find her. I walked to the other side of the table to face her. Her wrinkled lips bobbed the cigarette up and down, putting out billows of smoke like a factory stack and forming quirly-q’s around her face like a white Texas perm. She tilted her eyes towards me and then quickly back to junk mail. If s
he knows me at all, she knows I’m not leaving. 

“Poop—shit.” She said blatantly slapping the mail ag
ainst the table irritated. 
I felt slightly assaulted and jumped back. “It’s the shit that makes ‘em that way. S-H-I-T.” A long stem of ash fell from her puffing stick and crashed into a gray heap on the table. The meshing, sifting sound filtered through my ears.

“Gardening is about growth Willodean. It’s the laws of nature. Plant a seed, take care of it, fertilize it, and it grows. Seed grows, birds eat seed, birds shit seeds, seed grows. Like that. Don’t they teach you this in school? Everything is connected back to dirt. Everything goes back to the dirt
.” She jumped up from her chair.  The screeching sound made me flinch. 
I’d never seen Maw Sue this way. She was always eager to tell stories, not like this. She pushed the chair under the table. It let out a shriek. She held onto the back cushion with both hands, gripping and scratching it with her nails. The sounds drove me to the bedroom again, images of the good book, the blood lines etched in scripture, the whir of the fan, the tick-tock, Maw Sue and Starbuck as pasty white faced Dresden’s, peppermint bombs, the screaming George. I closed my eyes to make the images go away. When I opened t
hem, Maw Sue’s gaze was distant but I stood firmly grounded, waiting. 

“And besides...,” she paused and
looked at me. 
My eyes met hers for the first time in weeks. I fell into the gray vacant spaces of their roundness—fell into that suspended place where she was held captive. It rattled me undone. The house rumbled inside me.

“Willodean. You’re too young to understand this but it’s the shitty things in life that make something better—
muuuch better
 than it ever could have been without it.
Or that’s what I have to tell myself. 
There are lots of things I can’t tell you …
won’t
 tell y
ou…” She paused and bit her lip.  Secrets held inside her, locked away. 
What?
Tell me. 
Why do adults hide things?

“It takes living.” She said sternly. “And if you live life long enough, you’ll get shit on, sure as I’m standing here. The thing is, if you get a pile—you best make something of it. Perspective Willodean. Just call it 
Shit perspective
.”