The Secret Sense of Wildflower (25 page)

“Louisa May?”

I don’t hear Mama come into the barn and suck in my breath with surprise. She stands in the doorway, her lantern shining a swatch of light right toward me. For a second, she reminds me of the gold Mary. Then a tingle begins in my chest and it’s as if the secret sense is announcing that something big is coming. Something, that as an old woman, I might think back on when I’m dying. I’m not sure if it's good or bad.

“Is Jo all right?” My voice sounds small again, like it does whenever I’ve had the wits scared out of me.

“She still has a few more hours,” she says. “But Sadie’s here.”

“Good,” I say. Everything seems more manageable whenever Sadie’s around.

“What are you doing out here?” Mama asks. She stands a foot away from the door, as if she can’t decide whether to come in or not.

I don’t feel like lying to her. The truth is, the only time I felt worse was when Johnny beat the living daylights out of me. Except maybe this is worse, because I am beating the living daylights out of myself.

“Louisa May, are you all right?”

“Not really,” I say.

She hesitates and then steps farther into the barn. I lower my head to shield my eyes from the light. She can see me all too clearly with the help of her lantern. It threatens to illuminate how scared I am.

I wipe snot on the underside of my dress, stretched taut by the fullness of my belly. No matter how hard I try, the tears won’t stop. I keep expecting her to say something about how worthless crying is, but she just stands there.

“Stop looking at me,” I say. I lean into my belly and start to rock back and forth, searching for even an ounce of comfort.

She lowers the flame of the lantern, as if to offer me privacy, and walks over to me. The light and shadows make us look like giants against the back of the barn. I hate crying in front of her. I don’t want to give her the pleasure of seeing me suffer.

Mama pulls an apple crate next to me and sits, and I have to resist pushing her away. I am tired of thinking of all the ways I’ve let her down. Not to mention all the ways she’s let me down, too.

“Mama, I never should have gone out that day. I should have stayed at home. But it was Daddy’s anniversary and I wanted to talk to him because I missed him so much.”

I bury my head in my hands. The tears flow. I want her to touch me, to comfort me, but she doesn’t. I try to convince myself that I don’t care and that I’m better off without her. She is so close I can feel her breath on me.

“Louisa May, I need you to listen to me like you never have,” she says. Her words are clear and strong. “Are you listening?”

“Yes, Mama, I’m listening,” I say, my words aren’t clear and strong at all, only soft.

Her voice softens to match mine. “Louisa May, I’m so sorry that it’s taken me so long to tell you this.”

She pauses and I wonder if she is about to disown me and throw me and my baby out of the only home I have ever known. She turns my head so that she can look into my eyes.

“Louisa May, you didn’t do anything wrong. Do you hear me? You didn’t do anything wrong. Johnny had meanness in him. You tried to tell me about him, after you heard something in the woods that night, but I didn’t listen . . . Honey, I should have listened.”

She starts crying, too. At first, it scares me. I thought she was too strong to cry, or too stubborn. I hug the baby as Mama’s crying feels almost unbearable. Like her pain is my pain and my pain is hers. We both miss Daddy. We both have regrets about how life has turned out.

After a while, Mama wipes her tears and takes in a long, deep breath.

“It wasn’t your fault that Johnny Monroe came after you,” Mama begins again. “None of this was your fault. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like it was. I just didn’t know what to do, honey. I’ve never wanted to kill anybody so much in my life as Johnny Monroe. I wanted to take Joseph’s shotgun and kill him myself. And as for Doc Lester, I admit I’ve done some stupid things in my life, but none quite as stupid as that. I guess it was my fear that drove me. I wanted to protect you from what everybody will say and what that precious little child will have to go through just by being born.”

In that instant, I understand forgiveness. The kind Preacher said Jesus had for the people that pounded nails into his hands and hung him on the cross. I push myself through the darkness toward Mama’s open arms. I fold into her, as if she is the golden Mary come to take me home. My head rests against her shoulder. I close my eyes, soaking in her love.

“We’re going to be all right,” Mama says. She kisses me on the cheek and rocks me in her arms. “We McAllisters are made of sturdy stock.”

We sit in that old barn for a long time. After a while Mama takes another long, deep breath, and releases it, as if she suddenly understands forgiveness, too, and all the breaks between us have mended.

In the moments that follow, I feel the secret sense come alive in me again, and I suddenly know that even though life will still be hard everything is also going to be just fine. I tell Mama that I am going to name the baby Lily because her mother’s name is Wildflower. Mama nods and tells me that Lily is a lovely name.

In my memory I hear Daddy playing his banjo in the living room singing an old country song that starts out sad but ends up all right. I can look on the best parts of life now, of having family with me and enough faith in myself that I can find my own way out of just about anything. Maybe someday, God and I will mend the breaks between us, too. Meanwhile, I will raise my daughter, Lily, the best way I know how.

SEQUEL!

I’m writing a sequel to
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
. It catches up with the McAllister family fourteen years later. I estimate publication to be in 2016. If you’d like to know when the sequel is published, please go to the link below and sign up to be notified.

https://www.susangabriel.com/wildflower-sequel/

YOUR REVIEW

Also, if you enjoyed
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
, I welcome your review of on your favorite book buying site, such as
Amazon
,
Nook
, iBooks,
Kobo
,
GoogleBooks
, etc.!

If you have feedback for me on the book for me, please email me at
[email protected]

Acknowledgments

There were many early readers of this manuscript before it became a tangible book. I want to thank in particular, Josephine Locklair, Jeanette Reid and Al Mankoff, who gave me invaluable feedback in the early drafts, as well as Tommy Hayes, who teaches fiction writing in the Great Smokies Writing Program. Also, my agents, Deborah Warren and Mary Grey James of East/West Literary Agency, and Lisa Bojany Buccieri were supportive for many years, as were Ann Bohan and Krista Lunsford. The last readers were Rich and Mary Schram who offered invaluable final thoughts and proofreading.

It takes a village, as they say, and I remain grateful for all the support I’ve received over the years from family, friends and wise teachers. I am especially grateful to Anne Alexander, who has believed in me when others might have given up faith. Lastly, I thank Wildflower McAllister for trusting me with her story. I hope I have done it justice.

P.S.

Insights, Interview & Reading Group Guide

About the author

--- Meet Susan Gabriel

About the book

--- Interview with Susan Gabriel

--- Reading Group Guide

--- Other Books by Susan Gabriel

About the Author

Susan Gabriel is an acclaimed writer who lives in the mountains of North Carolina. Her novel,
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
, earned a starred review ("for books of remarkable merit") from Kirkus Reviews and was selected as one of their Best Books of 2012.

She is also the author of
Temple Secrets,
Grace, Grits and Ghosts: Southern Short Stories
and other novels. Discover more about Susan at
SusanGabriel.com.

Interview with Susan Gabriel

What inspired you to write
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
?

The Secret Sense of Wildflower
started with a voice, eleven years ago, at four in the morning, a voice that woke me up from a deep sleep. It was the voice of a girl who began to tell me her story: “There are two things I’m afraid of,” she said. “One is dying young. The other is Johnny Monroe.” A day or two before, I had visited the small cemetery located in the southern Appalachian Mountains where many of my family are buried. I spent an afternoon walking among the final resting places of my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, as well as ancestors I had never known. It felt like I had accidentally brought one of them home with me, who needed her story told.

For a fiction writer, to get the voice of a character so clearly is really good news. I, however, wanted to go back to sleep. Who wouldn’t, at 4 o’clock in the morning? For a time, I debated whether or not to get up. I ultimately decided that if I didn’t claim this moment, the voice might find someone else to write her story.

Needless to say, I turned on the light, picked up a pen and a pad of paper and began to write the story of Louisa May “Wildflower” McAllister. It took months of listening to her and seeing the scenes of her life play out in my imagination. Then it took years of revising and revisiting the story to polish it and get it ready.

Which character do you feel was the most enjoyable to write?

I loved Wildflower and even miss her now that she and I aren’t spending every day together. But I also loved writing about her sisters. All of them were named after the sisters in
Little Women
, which was her mother’s favorite book. Aunt Sadie was the old wise woman of the story and was great fun to write, too. Old wise women have begun to show up in several of my books. In my novel
Circle of the Ancestors
it is Sam’s wise grandmother who still practices the Cherokee ways. In
Temple Secrets
it is Old Sally, who has Gullah ancestors.

And then there’s Daniel. God, I loved Daniel. Still do. The story needed a positive male character to balance it out. And he feels like the brother I never had. My characters often become like family members to me.

Is there a particular message in your book that you want readers to grasp?

I realized just recently, after I listed all the books I’ve written, that almost all of them were stories of courage and transformation. Like
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
, these are all stories about people that persevere in spite of difficult things happening to them—people who end up learning something from the experience, usually about themselves, that will help them in the future.

I was a psychotherapist for many years and one of the things I learned from my clients is how incredibly resilient people are. They would come to me with these very difficult stories of things that had happened to them and yet they had the courage to tell me about it and then try to make changes to make their lives better. That’s heroic, in my view.

All my main characters (female and male) are on some kind of hero’s journey. They’re flawed, as we all are, but they’re seeking better lives. I also have a thing for secrets. Every novel I’ve written has some kind of secret in it that is revealed before the book is over. For Wildflower, it’s the “secret sense.” Do I have secrets I keep myself? You bet. I think all of us do.

Do you have a specific writing style?

I am what we call in the business an intuitive writer. I don’t use an outline, I just let the story take form in my imagination. With Wildflower, it was like watching a movie. I saw her walking through her life. I saw the story playing out like a film and simply wrote it down. I love it when stories come that way, and that’s part of why I often use present tense. Sometimes the story surprises me along the way. Sometimes the endings surprise me. I rarely know the ending as I’m writing it. The creative process for me is an act of discovery. Of course, I still have to edit and polish it after that initial draft, but most of the story is there.

It’s hard to pin me down in terms of genre. Mostly, I write literary fiction.
The Secret Sense of Wildflower
is considered southern gothic fiction.

What drew you to writing southern fiction?

I grew up in the South and except for a few years that I lived in Colorado, I’ve lived here all my life. For years, I swore that I would NEVER write southern fiction. I had enough crazy “characters” in my gene pool to not want to spend any time there. But as they say: NEVER SAY NEVER. It was only after living in Colorado for three years that I discovered what a Southerner I actually was.

To me, the thing that makes southern fiction “southern,” is not only that the characters are down to earth and sometimes bigger than life, but also that the land plays a big part in the stories. The landscape is often its own character and plays a central role.

Now I realize what a great honor it is to be considered a southern author. I am someone who is writing in the same genre as Harper Lee (who I’ve been compared to) and William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Reynolds Price, as well as Ron Rash (who lives just over the next mountain ridge from where I live in the mountains of North Carolina), and a slew of others that I admire.

I also write contemporary fiction (that isn’t southern), children’s books and poetry.

Are you currently working on any new projects?

I am currently working on a book called
Temple Secrets
. It’s a quirky southern gothic novel set in Savannah about the wealthy (white) Temple family and their black help. It is a comic novel, something I needed to write after I wrote Wildflower’s story. This project will be completed in early 2015.