~*~
After Colonel Devlin left, I stood over the uniform for a long time, feeling the cloth with my fingertips, and wondered what my sister would say of it. Was it pure wool, Hannah? Or a wool blend?
Feeling particularly cold in the center of my body, I carried it up to my bedchamber—the chamber that Hannah smiled in, dreamed in, and figuratively died in. The house creaked and moaned as I never had heard before. Did it miss my sister too? My mother? Even my father?
It was black outside, and while I undressed, I saw my reflection in the glass of the window that over looked the fields and the copse that I knew intimately. The other window pointed in the direction of the Joneses’ house, the barn, and the river that slashed across the forest. That same river was swollen and flooded with melted snow and recent spring showers. The river gushed and gurgled its sacred, old-as-time language to me. Was it whispering how it took my sister’s life? How it helped ease my sister’s pain until there was no sadness, malaise, or despondency. With murky brown frigid water, the river swam by and comforted my sister, as Hannah had asked it to.
My eyes adjusted from viewing the woods to myself in the glass. This morning, I had tied the laces at the back of my waist myself. I had forced the strings too tight and looked at the angry red criss-crossed lines on my back by contorting my head at the window. Unfastening the pins in my hair, I stood bare before the woman in the glass.
My hair waved down to my hips, and as such I didn’t see my breasts, but a glance of shoulders there, a bellybutton here. My skin glowed white, my eyes were a vibrant green. I looked so alive. Why didn’t I just die? This pain that made my bones so brittle wasn’t killing me. Why not?
While walking naked in my chamber, I found a scrap of the lavender foamy fabric that was Hannah’s funeral dress and tied it around my arm. Lying down on her side of the bed, I looked up at the dark ceiling.
Tomorrow was to be a day of grieving for me, the next was my wedding. Soon, I would no longer be a virgin and have no one to talk to about the intimacies of corporally knowing my husband.
This was the thought that tipped my decision.
I had looked forward to the day when I could giggle with my sister about my lover husband. I would whisper to her some vague innuendo of what making love was like, but now I couldn’t do any of that. I had slept alone, for the first time ever, last night. Although, it wasn’t really sleep. Anytime I would fall into a doze, I’d wake and search for my sister. Then the muscles in my body twisted, sinew snapped, my bones would crush all over again with the pain that she was no longer alive.
Yes, that decided it.
Tomorrow, I was going to become a murderer.
I dressed in the uniform. It was a bit roomy, but not by much. It was a uniform for a boy, probably for a drummer.
Tying my hair back with a black ribbon at the nape of my neck, like the men do, I then tucked the rest of my tresses into the jacket. I didn’t have to search far to find my sgian dubh, the small, sharp dagger. Sliding my feet into my riding boots, the knife hooked inside and rubbed against my calf. I tried to see if the tomahawk would fit in the other boot’s sleeve, but it was too thick at its apex. Sliding the ax up my arm’s sleeve, I found a perfect fit, which concealed it flawlessly. I had to hold my hand a certain way, but with a flick of my wrist, the tomahawk sprung from my sleeve, where I caught it by the handle.
After calculating the distance of the walk, and all other endeavors pertaining to murder, I took the uniform off, laid it on the floor, then laid my knife and ax at the foot of my bed. With only the wisp of light purple cloth on my arm and a long thin silver chain that held an acorn-sized blue diamond over my heart, I walked back to my father and mother’s chamber. My father kept a claymore sword as a keepsake of his heritage. I hefted it out of its leather sheathing. I would have liked to tear Kimball’s arms off with the weight of the weapon, but it would have been too heavy to carry through the woods. It would be conspicuous too. I wanted something swift, fast. The tomahawk.
Carrying the claymore with me to my chamber, the utterly alone chamber, I laid down with the sword. There was something comforting about the long rapier. Or perhaps I was completely mad by that time with my grief. At first I rested with it beside me, staring at the metal, the craftsmanship of the twisted knots of the Scot Celts. Then, thinking of warriors from past times, of kings who fought with their troops, I pulled it on top of me, like the tombs of the great knights, placing the cold weapon to run down the length of my body.
This long sword had been handed down by generations of Scot men. The claymore had known battle, and I found it to be my only friend in the dark of that night.
I observed the black hours progress slowly. My father’s pocket watch kept time for me, while I held it in my palm. The hands moved at a bitterly slow pace through the long night. The moon, that white half globe, tried to glimmer through my windows, but my evil demise wouldn’t allow any illumination to shine in. The greasy, gritty water of my heart consumed all the light.
I wondered where Jacque was. Oh, Descartes, how I understand at long last your prophetic philosophy: What is real? What is a dream? This cannot be my life. I didn’t deserve my entire family to die. I know, I know, no one does, but . . . but perhaps, left over in my blood from my mother’s line of Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts as the very first settlers, I somehow had believed that if I just tried hard, labored long enough, good things would always happen to me. I had had sufficient misfortune with my father’s untimely death, but I had survived and made it so that my family endured. (Dare I mention that we flourished with our love and laughter?)
Now this? None of my family members were alive. I was an orphan in this world. Certainly, I had Mathew, and I loved him, and promised myself I would do better by him, but I had never envisioned a life without my family, my sister. What was I to work for now? What could I fight for? Why was I still alive when all I was living for was gone? This house, this farm was my only reminder of a life once lived.
I let my eyes drift closed, but they jerked open only a minute later.
Then it was time.
Chapter Fifteen: Lunacy, or Not