WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (70 page)

Long before she got sick and I stole the necklace, ruining everyone’s life, Maw Sue had told me what the Mason jar and the roses were about. 
The red rose symbolized her first husband, Jefferson Starbuck Adams, the love of her life and none other, she said. He died of tuberculosis and left her alone with five children. According to other folks, Maw Sue was more stable with him than she’d ever been before. After he died, she went plum mad, off her rockers and never fully recovered. Dell mentioned finding a diary of his several years ago and it was quite remarkable the things she learned of the father she barely knew. The journal was a tanned leather binder with 
Starbuck
 in the center with a picture of a moon and on
e bright star in the top corner. 
The orange rose was her second husband, Sully, who she said died from just plain, meanness. Folks said she was so desperate for company after Jefferson died that she just grabbed onto the first blockhead that came her way. Sully was controlling and manipulating. Plus he drank like a fish. And
turns out, that’s what killed him.  His l
iver just quit.

The white rose was her last husband, Morton, a gentle, quiet soul that kept to himself. He stayed with her the longest until he died in a car wreck. The other roses in the Mason jar are more tragic as if they are waiting on eternity to bloom again. Towering above the others is a single pink bloom, dried, aged and dusty but just as flamboyant as it was in its prime, fresh plucked from the vine. It was her mother, Joseemae Esse Ainsley. Pronounced 
Joe-See-May.
 No one talks about what happened to her. Whatever it was, it affected Maw Sue in the worst way. Then there's two peach identical yellow roses, Lorinda Lane and Lizzy Lynn, twin girls. They died of influenza at age three. Cradled next to them is two identical crème colored roses, holding each other, wilted arms intertwined with locks of curly blonde hair and blue ribbons. Twin boys born a year or so after the girls and appropriately named, Luke and Larken. All Maw Sue’s children were fathered by Jefferson Starbuck. 
None other.
 The boys drowned in the care of Maw Sue’s sister, Ida who was a drunk and passed out in the sun while the boys swam in the river unattended. Apparently, Maw Sue blamed herself for the longest time and convinced herself they were still alive because when they died she was still locked up in some crazy house dealing with her demons and when she got out, she was unable to accept the horrible awful because the reality would have sent her over the edge for good. Sometimes, the Dumas of Umbra, the houses inside us have a purpose in the rooms it builds. Maybe to keep the dead alive, so we can revisit our loved ones, in memory, whenever we want.

I learned of this odd Mason jar ritual when Big Pops died. Since I had the gift, I was sensitive to spiritual matters, so the realm beyond me, those things I saw, felt, and experienced were over the top. It overwhelmed me with grief and other people’s sorrows and Maw Sue saw
it in me and how it affected me. 

“Life doesn’t end in the grave”
She said. 
She had me pluck a rose from the flower arrangement on top of the Big Pops casket and bring it to her house later that evening. When I got there, she took me in the back room. We went inside the cedar closet, the creepy hideaway that Mag and I swore was haunted with voices, knocks, and frightening sounds. A light bulb with a pull string hung from the ceiling with a spoil of crippling wires. It threw off shadows, exposing the dark things. I froze up while my skin pimpled and jerked, and the house inside me, stirred on its foundation. A thin white string ran from one side of the closet to the other. Old wool coats and polyester clothing hung behind it on wire hangers. Clothes pins hung limp from the string like meat hooks in a butcher shop. She took my rose, placed it upside down on the string and clipped it with a clothes pin. Then of course, she told me the story in the same fashion she always does when she’s storytelling, dramatic, detailed and mystic. In most cases, I loved every minute of Maw Sue’s tales but this one about did me in.

The story goes, that the French used dried flowers to immortalize their dead and called it
Immortelle
, a symbol for longevity, resurrection, immortality. It meant 
everlasting
. They used chrysanthemums, aranmathus, strawflowers, and asters, or any flower would do. Maw Sue happened to prefer roses.

“Why are we putting it in the closet?” I
asked her.  I was utterly
afraid of the answer. My mind envisioned dead of the night fairies casting spells using flower petals. She bent down inside the closet, pushing, shoving and moving objects around I couldn’t see until she pulled out a dusty book, thick as an encyclopedia. She flipped through it quickly. She stopped and pulled out a piece of paper wrinkled, stained and folded in threes.

“This is a poem by a poet named, Laura G. Collins.” She said pausing suddenly lost for words, a catch in her throat, a poetic trance. “It’s called 
Immortelles and Asphodels
 or in our language
…everlastings.”
 Hearing the word
everlastings
 spoken out loud made me weak. She began to read.

THESE, our Earth’s perennial flowers—

 The fadeless blooms by Poets sung,

 Songs, that from Homer’s Age till ours,

 Down the aisles of Time have rung—

 In many an emblem do we weave

 For passionate Remembrance’ sake;

 And howe’er we joy, howe’er we grieve,

 Sacred pilgrimages make;

 For Loss and Grief, the Asphodels

 On our graves we mourning lay;

 For Memory, the Immortelles—

 Our loved ones live for us always.

 Death in Life, Life in Death—how we

 This, Love’s Faith, keep reverently.

As she read, her hands shook. 
The sounds of time broke like glass. Old grief leaked from her eyes and formed streams of water that flowed into the dry riverbeds of her wrinkled face. I was spell bound by the words, the meaning of the poem, the mystery, all held up in a dark place. A room built itself inside the house, inside me. Petal people rose up, alive and talking.
Her petal people and my petal people. 
I was about to freak out when Maw Sue starting telling me how it worked and then it made sense. The 
immortelles
 carry the grief in their petals so that we don’t have to. The rose absorbs our wicked suffering and our
burdened cries inside its stem and the moist petals. 
For the first time, I understood Maw Sue’s weird obsession with the Mason Jar. The curse of death took her loved ones, over and over, without understanding, without explanation, without answers. Overwrought with grief, Maw Sue clung to the petal people in the jar, the
everlastings,
 immortal symbols that carry our grief for us. They remind us—life doesn’t end in the grave.

When she finished the story, I wanted to find a flower of my own, for myself, right now, not wait till I die, but carry it in my pocket, bearing my grief, my curses, my gifts, my burdens, my regrets. The house inside me could not hold the despair, it needed help.

And help came. A few weeks later, Maw Sue presented me with my first everlastings, inside my own Mason Jar along with a copy of the poem. It was Big Pop,
but it was a start, nonetheless.  I felt relieved.  Th
e immortelles was as beautiful as the day I plucked it from the casket. Dried, fragile and burdened with my grief. I looked at the flower petals and saw Big Pops face and smiled.

Inside the room, inside me, the one I used to think was so utterly dark and meaningless, now made more sense. The petal faced flower people crept inside my visions, days and nights, walking the rooms,
and the hallways all carrying their own mason jars full of immortelles, their own grief.  It’s no wonder I felt so much grief, and sorrows from the grave.  
Over the years in my moments of overbearing loss, my tears would sweep me to this room, without consent, without control. It frightened me to be there, seeing and hearing the petal people, their morbid expressions, and the afflictions drawn in their petal dried faces. They’d gravitate to me like moths to a light bulb. Only now, do I recognize most of them as family, from old photographs and stories I've heard. Both sets of twins, girls and boys, the husbands, cousins, uncles, and others. I recognize Papa Hart’s mom and his uncle, nicknamed Chick Hart. He died in a saw mill accident, cut clean in two by a blade. They say it traumatized the Negro man working with him, he took off running—and they reckon he’s still running. Then there’s Papa Hart’s grandmother, who they called Big Mama. She’s the fattest petal pink chiffon rose you ever did see, and you can’t miss her. Story told is she crossed the Mississippi in a covered wagon and gave birth out on the wicked prairie. She lost the child in infancy and couldn’t let go. She held onto her wasted bones until the stench of flesh about drove everyone away. They convinced her to bury Charlotte Louise underneath the shade of a huge petrified rock. Inside Big Mama’s Mason jar is a tiny white rose, and chunks of red dirt at the bottom of the jar. It was simply a bud that never bloomed. It made me sad to see it. Each person inside the Mason room carries a terrible awful burden. Most, if not all, haunt me with their eyes. Uncle Chick is the worst. Rumor is he shot a man, and was in a lot of scuffles with the law and bootlegging as a trade. His face is stoic, his eyes like a long dead sunset fading to dark. He hovers beside me, around me, behind me, in front of me. He never lets me be. He has 2 roses in his jar. One pink and one white. I swear he is trying to tell me something, but what, I haven’t a clue.

Maw Sue tried to teach me what she knew, about the curse, about the gift and the importance of channeling when she could, when she wasn’t overdosed on ti
c-tacs or locked up in a clinic. 
I don’t think she realized how much I already knew of the dangers
that the curse would do to me
. 
I lived it out.
 She took a pill. I couldn't run or take a pill, I couldn't erase it, hide from it, none of that. The tragedy of me and all I was or wasn't, could not manifest itself as it should, so it simply hoarded up inside the Dumas of Umbra, established a foundation, a harbinger of rooms, a shelter inside me. I gave my gifts and curses a haven, a house of refuge. The Amodgian shadows took up residence as they willed and took their place. I wasn’t strong enough to fight them, I wasn’t a pugnator like Ms. Blanche said I was. 
She was mistaken.
 She was very, very mistaken. I thought Maw Sue was locked up in a clinic again, being poked and jabbed and shocked with therapy.
That night I had a horrible dream.  The house inside me laughed with shadow laughs,
the petal people marched and chanted another language while they held their Mason Jars expec
tant and waiting and only now do I realize what it meant. 

When they told me she was dead, I was in the living room sitting on the couch in front of my centerpiece. I was just about to unwrap a peppermint. The room went quieter than quiet, deadly still. The bedroom scene in my head
turned violent in remembrance.  It spilled into our living room
as if Michelangelo was painting the Sistine chapel but not with paint, with blood, and not the Sistine chapel, but Maw Sue’s house and not Michelangelo, but my great grandmother who had finally taken her own life and succeeded. 
They said she didn’t take her own life and wondered where I got such information, but I knew.  I knew what she did. 

She was gone. The house inside me, inside the Mason room, rumbled and welcomed her. 
Everyone tried to tell me Maw Sue simply passed away in her sleep, but they
don’t know what the curse can do.  T
hey didn't realize they were tricked. They didn't know what I
did. 
It was my fault. I took the necklace. I was the reason she's dead.

In those horrific moments after learning of her death, I expounded myself inside the pe
tal room, the immortelles room, the Mason room. 
The petal people flocked around me like they usually do. Sometimes I wonder if they see a reflection of horror or sadness in my eyes for things unspeakable, untold secrets. Regret. Shame. I was lost in the darkness of these petal apparitions when behind a few of them, she appeared. Maw Sue's wrinkled petal face showed relief as if she was glad to be
there, a battle over, finally.  She would not have to fight or struggle anymore. 

I was sick with whirring fan sounds and tick tocks. I felt stuck in memory, inside the bedroom, isolated in the walls of a family abattoir. I look into her petal face and fall deep into her God gazed eyes. I remember my childhood as if I’m plucking each petal off her face and throwing it to the wind. I remember the stories, the tall tales, the imaginations wild, the superstitions, the fun, the love and light, craziness and confusion, darkness and scorn. Maw Sue’s eyes afflict me and shove me away, pressing me out of the room with force. I find myself in our living room amongst the busted stars, moons and peppermint bombs, slivers of glass, my shattered centerpiece, my stability gone, crushed. 
No more.
 Mag is on the floor surrounded by glass splinters, and eating a peppermint. Lena is horrified and standing with a dishrag in the corner. Dad is weeping in his green recliner. It was hard to remember what happened after that. The hours and weeping ran together, the visitation, my mind a mess, the shadows calling me, wanting me. I do remember screaming at dad to stop the car before he pulled out of the cemetery, me blindly opening the door and jumping out before he could put on the brakes. I made a mad dash across the grass, darting towards Maw Sue’s casket. I had forgotten t
he most important ritual she taught me.  I had to have a flower to carry my grief. 
I scanned the area trying to determine an appropriate flower to symbolize her. I looked and looked but nothing spoke to me. The flowers on the casket were butt ugly. I have no idea whose decision
it was to put white carnations up there but it was the wrong one. 
I went into a panic, nerves frazzled and eyes flitting. My eyes widened when I saw it about fifty foot away
.  It was on the other side of the old fence row. 
I heard dad’s voice hollering in the background. I
paid no mind and took off running.  I reached under the fence and
plucked the most beautiful white Lily, a lush pure flower which doesn't worry with the cares of the world, for its creator takes care of it, come what may. Maw Sue’s desire was to be like the lilies of the field, the wildflowers tended by God, nurtured by the rain, the warmth of the sun and the glow of the moon. And now .
..she was.
 Maw Sue was finally free and wild like she was born to be, as nature intended, free from the confines of this crazy brutal world. Free of mind madness. Free of cares and worries. 
Free.