Chapter 3 Wounded #2
I stand and reach in my pocket for my penlight, but it’s not there.
In my anxiety over the meeting, I left it in the cabin or at school.
When I step away from the dying fire, my heart flutters with familiar fear.
It’s more immediate than the worry Birdie declared tonight.
I’ve never grown used to the dark in this untamed place.
A whispering, growling place, and me without my torch.
My pride prevents me from knocking on Birdie’s door and asking for help.
It would be one more barb she’d fling at me.
I stubbornly move through the black as quickly as I dare, my heart racing, my breath quickening, my ears on alert.
I move with my arms outstretched like a blind man groping through the dark.
I keep the creek on my left and work to calm my ragged breathing.
The cacophony of tree frogs and cicadas and katydids is mind-numbing.
That’s when I see them. Lights on the ridge, moving out of rhythm. They’re not lanterns and the orbs are too large for insects, too small for humans. They move independently until they sense me watching them. Then they come together in a line and watch me.
I run. I run through the dark with brambles and low branches clawing at my arms and face.
I stumble over roots like a drunkard, fall to my knees and struggle to my feet.
I gasp for mercy while racing away from the alien lights.
I’m overly frightened like a silly child with my heart thudding thick.
I break into my clearing and Rachel steps out of the shadows, my comfort on four legs.
I’m relieved and crying and calmed all at once when my dog nuzzles me and licks my wounds.
This tender mongrel dog I named Rachel is a boy dog, not a girl dog.
He’s named for my love, Rachel. It was that Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue,” that gave me courage.
I heard it playing on Sadie Blue’s transistor radio, a clever song about acceptance and gender struggles.
My boy dog doesn’t mind a girl’s name, and I gain relief when I say Rachel out loud and confide my struggles to his attentive ear.
My breathing slows, and Rachel and I enter the cabin.
I light the lantern to see the damage done by my dash through the woods.
Blood runs down my arms, but they’re only surface cuts.
I wash the scratches with a clean cloth and add a layer of witch-hazel ointment Birdie gave me.
My trousers are muddy, and blood has seeped through at the knees.
My headache has ratcheted into a blinding pain. It’s a dismal end to a dismal day.
I now stand in a plain place that looks the same as it did a decade ago: a saggy sofa the color of mold, a bowed table, a thin mattress in a sleeping loft.
The roof still leaks when it rains. There are no frills except the line of Creekrise newsletters tacked to the wall like celebration flags.
The arsonist who set fire to the teacher’s cottage beside the school was never apprehended and it was never rebuilt.
This empty cabin was to be temporary, but it became permanent when I didn’t complain.
The message upon my arrival in 1970 was clear: Teachers aren’t welcome up here.
Yet I came and stayed because I had nowhere else to go.
I feed Rachel from the bag of dog food that I haul up the trail every month.
I’m criticized for letting him stay inside at night and in harsh weather.
I don’t require he hunt or guard to earn his keep.
Practical mountain neighbors say I spoil him too much to make him any good, but Rachel serves a mighty purpose.
He is my sounding board. My confidant. My comfort.
I stoke the fire in the woodstove to boil water for Birdie’s tea.
I’m ignorant about what medicine from the forest will provide tonight’s relief, only grateful.
Where she learned all she knows is a mystery I don’t question.
Was there a granny healer who taught her?
Or her mother long gone? She told me once about an old Cherokee who had gone to the woods to die but delayed his leaving to pass his wisdom on to her.
He gave her the truths of the forest and Birdie became a revered medicine woman.
She was called a Skinwalker by the Natives.
Everyone in these parts has heard of Birdie Rocas.
She is a puzzle that I can’t solve, so I don’t try.
Tonight, after a demanding day that became tolerable only when I reached the safety of home, I eat day-old corn bread with my hip propped against the butcher block and sip hot, bitter tea.
For the moment I ignore the disappointing church meeting and think about those peculiar lights I’ve never seen before.
If I’d had my flashlight, I would have been watching my boots and missed them altogether, so maybe they aren’t new. Only new to me.
Now that I’m safe within my cabin, they seem benign compared to the callous strangers who delivered hard news to people I admire.
Was Birdie suggesting we fight the system?
Or is she hoping we can hold on to the old ways and not have deep roots ripped from sacred ground?
Whatever happens, the good and the bad, come two weeks from now my time here will be over.
Exhausted, I climb to the loft and step out of my trousers.
Both knees are bruised and bloodied, and there is a ragged hole in my favorite pants.
I punch my flat pillow before I lay my weary head.
I’m angry at worries that followed families home tonight.
Some older children will play hide-and-seek with truant officers until they turn eighteen.
Some families will retreat deeper into the hollers and cross the Tennessee border.
Others will be carefully taught to fear change.
And those who flourish might become outcasts for thinking differently.
Birdie’s tea begins to work. Tense muscles let loose. Throbbing wounds are dulled. I am pulled under into a dreamless void. My last thoughts are this: None of it is as simple as dropping gravel on a steep road and building a bridge over a creek to bind disparate people.
Misters Clooney and Jessup stirred up a hornet’s nest.