Black Cat

  Baby Celeste became drowsy, so Mama took her upstairs to put her to bed. I went outside and sat on the porch. I was still feeling nervous from all that had transpired. I wanted to be alone and relax. Now wearing a light jacket. I could enjoy the night air. The sky was cloudless. The wind I had heard earlier had carried the remnants of clouds away, sweeping the heavens clean so that the unblocked stars twinkled with a brilliance not often seen.

  On evenings like this, melancholy would unfold itself inside my heart like a newly hatched bird spreading its wings within the confines of a nest, bringing with it the realization that flight loomed in its near future. It was a promise surely to be realized, a promise so strong it filled the mind of the baby bird with images of itself gliding, turning, rising, and floating on the wind. These were memories it had inherited, memories that were part of who and what it was, memories that could not be denied or buried long in its dark unconscious.

  Likewise for me, the melancholy that unfolded brought with it memories, too, girlhood memories, an impressive nostalgia for things dainty and feminine. Fantasies came galloping back onto the field of my dreams. During a time in my life that was so long ago and now seemed to be truly someone else's life. I could imagine myself falling in love with a handsome and mysterious man. Once. I could see myself as a mother who could unashamedly love her child and did not need to hide her maternal emotions. Scents of perfume filled my nostrils. Dresses and shoes, scarves and ribbons, danced before my eyes.

  Noble used to imagine knights and dragons, monsters and heroes, coming out of the forest. He filled his days with stories and games he created in his active boyish imagination. Sometimes, Mama made me play alongside him so he would have

  companionship. I never once even thought to ask him to play with my teacup set or my dolls with me, not that he would want to do it My playtime was too calm for his bursts of energy. I used to think he would go shouting through the house all the time if Mama didn't stop him. Were all boys like him? I wondered, Were they all afraid of softness and the little silences that invaded our daily lives? Did all of his visions and dreams have to roar and crash against the walls of his imagination? Was reality such a threat?

  But I, too, had had fantasies, and just because I was older and life and the world were so different for me now. I didn't stop having them. Even now. tonight. I envisioned my own version of a handsome knight coming out of the forest that ringed our property, about to do battle with all the demons that chained me to this dark and dismal existence. I longed to be swept away, to be carried afar where I could let my hair grow again. where I could unstrap my bosom and permit my breasts to breathe. and I could once again experience and enjoy all the dainty and beautiful things in a woman's world.

  I would have clothes and dolls and perfumes. I would have jewels and my laughter would be untethered and melodic, instead of guarded and short. Somewhere and sometime. I would be able to flirt with my eyes, blush, and sigh, and I would be unafraid of the sound of my own name perched on the lips of a handsome young man.

  Do I dare wish for such things? I wondered. Will I be cursed for eternity? Will all our family spirits hate me and stop protecting me?

  Most important. would Mama hate me as she has never hated anyone or anything?

  I was so lost in these thoughts that I almost didn't hear the front door open slowly. Mama emerged carrying the small ebony wooden box cupped in her right hand like an offering she was going to make to some angry god. I didn't speak. I barely breathed, and incredibly, she didn't look at me or notice me sitting there. I could only watch her, amazed at how she moved. She stepped down the porch stairway like someone walking in her sleep. When she turned. I saw that in her other hand she carried a small garden spade.

  I started to stand, to call to her, but she walked faster and went directly toward the cemetery. Both intrigued and a little frightened. I followed far behind her, walking as softly as I could. She went into the cemetery. When I reached the enhance. I saw she was on her knees, digging in front of Infant Jordan's small tombstone. I stood there quietly, watching her dig. She became more and more determined about it, working faster and more intently.

  Finally, she concluded that the hole was deep enough and she placed the wooden box in it. She covered it quickly, smoothing the earth as best she could and replanting the clumps of grass.

  Then she stood up slowly, stared at the tombstone a moment, stepped up to it. and placed her hands on the embossed baby hands. I remember how she used to tell Noble and me that she could feel those hands move. We tried, but felt nothing_ or at least Noble never did. I couldn't be sure.

  Mama stood with her hands on the tombstone so long, I wondered if she would ever leave. I heard her whimper. Crying was something I rarely heard Mama do, and it was surely something she wouldn't want me to hear. Now I was terrified of being discovered watching her. I had no idea how she would react, but the very fact that I hadn't made her aware I was doing so would surely anger her. She would accuse me of spying on her. Her rage could very well have something to do with why she had just buried the box and the fact that I had opened it.

  Slowly, as quietly as I could. I stepped back into the shadows. The more I did that, the more I did look sneaky, but it was too late to reverse my action. I had committed myself to not being seen. I continued to retreat, and then I froze in place when she turned from the tombstone and started out of the cemetery. Her eyes were down and she was walking quickly. She paused to flick errant tears from her cheeks, then she continued walking. I held my breath and watched her hurry back to the house.

  As soon as she entered. I walked into the cemetery and gazed down at the place where she had buried the black box. Why was she burying it here? Why did it have to be buried at all? What did all this mean? What deep, dark secret had Baby Celeste uncovered when she found the ebony wooden box? What had happened when we had opened it?

  In deep thought I walked back to the house and stood just outside the door listening. I didn't hear her moving about so I entered as quietly as I could, barely closing the door behind me. When I looked into the living room. I saw Mama sitting in Grandfather Jordan's rocker. She didn't look up at me even though I felt she knew I was standing there, which made me wander if she had realized I had been outside all this time and if she was now furious at me.

  "Mama?" I finally said. "Are you all right?"

  "Of course all right," she snapped. "Ill always be all right."

  "Are you angry at me?"

  "No, I'm angry at myself."

  "Why?"

  She rocked in the chair. I thought she wasn't going to answer.

  "I forgot about it" she finally said. "I should have remembered."

  "About what? The wooden box? The lock of baby's hair?"

  She spun around so fast that she almost cracked the arm of the rocking chair.

  "How do you know it was a lock of baby's hair? she demanded. Then she relaxed, nodded, and smiled, "He told you, didn't he? Your father whispered it into your ear. Yes, I'm sure."

  She threw her head back and rocked harder.

  "No, Mama."

  She brought her head down again and glared at me. "If you lie to me,Ill know. I'll always know when you tell lies. Noble."

  "I'm not lying, Mama. I haven't heard Daddy for quite a while now."

  "Um," she murmured. She rocked and thought. Then she let out a long, deep breath. "I should have known she would find it someday. I should have known." She stopped the rocking abruptly and spun her head around at me again. "Do you see how special she is?" she asked, flashing her eyes at me. "Do you?"

  "You mean Baby Celeste?"

  "Of course that's who I mean. Why do you stand there and pretend to be so stupid all the time?"

  "I'm not pretending to be stupid, Mama."

  "No, you're really stupid, is that it? Oh, the burden, the burden," she wailed, rocking on.

  "Sometimes, you have to help me understand things, Mama," I said as calmly as I could manage. "Why is that so terrible
?"

  She thought and rocked.

  "Was the lock of hair Infant Jordan's?" I asked. She smiled. "Yes, it was."

  "Why do you blame yourself then? Why was it wrong to keep a lock of her hair? You kept ours and pasted it in the family album."

  "This was different." "How?"

  "Questions, questions, since when are you so full of questions? Your sister was always full of questions, but not you, not you." she added with her voice drifting.

  "I just wondered how this was different."

  "It was different because she was never alive," Mama said in a tired voice.

  "Oh, I know that."

  "No, you don't know. She was never alive."

  I smiled at her. Now she was the one forgetting and sounding stupid. I thought. although I would never dare even suggest such a thing.

  "But you told me, Mama. You told both of us. You told us she was stillborn. Isn't that what stillborn means?"

  "She was never alive. Even on the other side she was a dead thing. We live first there. I've explained it to you many times. haven't I? We are born and we die many different ways and eventually return to what we were, return to where we were created in the first place."

  "I know."

  "She was a dark dead thing. She was born of evil, and opening the box was like opening Pandora's box. That's why I had to do what I did tonight. The evilness was set loose in our house. It had been sleeping up there all this time, just waiting for an opportunity."

  "Is that why you put out all the family pictures and lit the candles?"

  "Yes. I had to bring them all here, have them all help us, and they did.

  "But its all my fault," she added. rocking. "I shouldn't have taken a lock of her hair in the first place. I did it when no one could see. I had to have it. I just had to have it. I should have known. You see, I wasn't as powerful as Baby Celeste is. If anything proves it, that does."

  What did she say? She had to have it? That made absolutely no sense. "You did it? You took the lock of hair from her head?"

  Now I was really confused. She remained silent, rocking, staring at the wall, her lips tight with rage.

  "But how... you weren't even born yet. Mama."

  She turned to look at me, and in her expression I could see that she had said more than she had wanted. She actually looked frightened for a moment and turned away.

  "Mama?"

  She shook her head. "I don't want to talk about it anymore and I don't want you to talk about it. Ever."

  "But how could you be there to do it?" The question wouldn't swallow back. It was a bubble that wouldn't be denied no matter how I tried to keep it from reaching the surface. How could she be there to cut the lock of hair from a stillborn baby born to her great-grand-parents?

  The answer was in the heavy silence that fell between us. It wasn't a stillborn baby born to her great-grandparents. Was it her mother's baby? Why wouldn't she ever have told us? Why would she say it was her great-grandparent's child? My heartbeat quickened and a feather made of ice brushed over the back of my neck.

  "Was it your mother's baby?"

  She turned back to me ever so slowly, and when she did. her eyes seemed to have sunk deeper into her skull. Her lips became tight and thin.

  "No."

  "No? Then I don't understand."

  "She came out of me," she said in a deathly whisper. "You?"

  "I wasn't much older than you are. I hid it from my mother until I could hide it no longer and she drew it out of me so it would be stillborn. It was wrinkled and ugly. Only its hair was pretty, only its hair. Its hair was like spun gold. I couldn't resist."

  "Your baby? How did your mother know it was evil?"

  She looked away and rocked. "Every family has a dark spirit in it, a blemish. He was my father's younger brother. He wasn't here often or long, but it was enough. I was seduced, and afterward he was punished."

  "What happened to him?"

  She smiled. "Yes, something happened to him. My mother put a curse on him and he died a horrible death, his insides rotted out with cancer. But he was a handsome man, a charming man. Evil always is, you know, The devil hash a pleasing face,' she quoted.

  She looked at me. "That's why it's so important to be careful, to be guarded, to be

  good. That's why you must listen to everything I tell you and do what I tell you. Noble."

  She turned away again and rocked. "If she had lived, if she had been alive, she would have been the first Celeste. She knew that and she worked and worked at returning until she entered my Celeste, and that is why I had to bury her forever and ever. Now all the evil is underground and we're safe. We're safe," Mama chanted.

  She had entered the first Celeste? Had Mama always thought me evil? Was that why she so readily believed Noble's death was my fault?

  "We're safe," she chanted. "She's dead and gone. Buried and gone."

  She looked at me again. "And she'll never be resurrected." Her words fell like small explosions on my ears and echoed.

  And echoed,

  "Never be resurrected... never be resurrected... never..." I turned and ran out and up the stairway.

  5

  I'm Beautiful

  .

  All my life I had grown up believing that our

  house was truly sacrosanct, that we really lived within a castle protected by our family's spiritual wall as Mama had described, that we were safe and that the only evil that could come into our lives had to come from without, and only if we ourselves weakened and permitted it to happen. All of our family spirits were good. They hadn't had perfect lives. Some weren't productive and had caused their own problems, but their hearts were pure. That was what had made us special, what gave us the power to cross over, to see them and hear them. We had been given the gift because we had this pureness in our blood.

  It was shocking to hear otherwise, to learn that someone so close to us had been dark, depraved, and unholy and that his seed had entered our world like something infectious, a disease of evil that could contaminate us. Was Mama then right about me? Was the wickedness my grandmother aborted able to resurface within my heart, in the first Celestes heart?

  Mama's revelations resurrected my memories of that fateful day Noble died, a day not only Mama denied. but I did. too. Despite my reluctance to remember, my attempts to dam them up and keep them away, the images came flooding back over me. It was like someone pinning my eyelids back and forcing me to see, to look upon the ugliest and most frightening things. I wished I could shake the pictures out of my head, drink one of Mama's wondrous elixirs and forget forever, but that could not be.

  Instead. I recalled Noble standing on the biz rock in the creek. I had come to get him to go home. Mama was upset he was out there alone. He was stubborn so I grabbed his fishing pole, and then he and I had a tug-of-war with it. Once again I saw him losing his balance, only now I saw myself deliberately shoving that pole into him, driving him off the rock. Anger and jealousy had taken control of my arms. The dark thing had truly come to life within me. He fell off and hit his head on smaller rocks. I had to admit it. It was my fault, my fault. Mama was right to bury me and I had to stop fighting it. I vowed to put away my childhood fantasies.

  I would dream no more of handsome young men, of being a beautiful young woman, and having children of my own. I had to pay for my sin and remain forever incarcerated in my brother's identity. This was my prison. This was my fate. I would not cry and moan about it either. All that was feminine, gentle, and tender within me would be pushed aside and forgotten. I didn't deserve it. Anything that tried to revive it in me was surely evil, the evil Mama battled daily.

  I pledged to myself that I would join her struggle and fight beside her. I would put away the memory of that small black wooden box. I would forget that strange night and I would think no more about the golden curls, the pink ribbon. and Mama's sobs in the cemetery that hid so many of our family secrets. All graveyards, it occurred to me, were like gardens. They contained beauti
ful souls, flowers of the purest spirits, but they also contained the remains of the most sinister hearts, weeds that could choke the flowers.

  The effort it had taken Mama to drive the malevolent spirit from our home seemed to reinforce her determination to follow the new plan she had been given, a plan I did not yet fully understand and was now more afraid of questioning. Was she right? Did my questions rise out of a pool of inky evil still within my troubled soul?

  Mama continued to go out on dates with Dave Fletcher, and each time she did, she came home late and slept late. I was still afraid of what this could lead to. but I made no comments and I put on no disapproving faces. For one thing, she did seem to be happy. She was looking younger and younger and her revival along with the way the house was being revived brought new sunshine into our lives.

  It encouraged and inspired me to look past the dark and the gray. Like Mama, I wanted to put a new shine on the surface of our world. I whitewashed our fences, repainted shutters and doorjambs, cleared the weeds away from the sides of our driveway, pruned and trimmed our bushes and trees. The worn, tired, and droll look our house and property had was dramatically changed. Mama decided that even the shed had to be repainted and a new roof put on it as well. The only disadvantage to all this that she saw was that it would attract more gawking eyes. Cars passing by did slow down and some even stopped so the curious could get a longer, better look. Baby Celeste had to be kept even more secluded. Twilight was now too early for any sort of outing.

  The work I did was hard, especially in the hot summer sun. but I didn't complain. My hands developed calluses on their calluses. Many nights my muscles ached and I was so exhausted, I couldn't wait to finish dinner and get to bed, sometimes as early as Baby Celeste went to bed. However, I was up early and on to my chores often before Mama was up and at her own, especially after one of her dates with Mr. Fletcher.

  And then one afternoon she told me she was going on a special date with him that very evening and she needed me to take complete charge of things for nearly twenty-four hours. I didn't understand what that meant until she added, "I won't be home tonight."