Chapter 4 Lost Gift
Lost Gift
Lydia Brown
I became the odd child at five when dead people came calling in the night.
I’d feel their breath in my ear. Smell their chewing gum or pipe tobacco or cooking spice.
Feel the heat of the triangle on my palm that pronounced me different from my siblings.
By the time I was seventeen, I was living comfortably with this dream gift that came when it was needed to find lost things, warn of danger, or advise folks in matters of the heart.
I got used to looks of worry or wonder on the faces of neighbors. Then I got careless.
I slept in that April Saturday because I was feeling poorly.
I didn’t work market like I was supposed to, and Daddy took my place.
Midmorning, Cora and I were making sugar water for our honeybees when a car pulled in the driveway.
Through the window we saw the sheriff get out and put on his official hat.
I went to the door and stepped back when I saw his face.
Trouble was here for sure, but whose? Was it Aunt Fanniebelle or Uncle Nigel?
Was it my sister Helen down the road? What brought him out this morning?
Cora came up behind me, and my brothers Everett and Grady made their way in from the field.
It was the four of us at home, too young for the news the sheriff came to deliver.
From a lifetime of practice he said, “Can we sit at the kitchen table?” and we shuffled from the parlor down the hall to the pine table with long benches on each side.
The same table that brought the Brown family together mornings and evenings with Mama at one end and Daddy at the other.
Today, the four of us lined up on one side and the sheriff sat on the other, his shoulders slumped.
Then he spoke words I wished he would take back.
“Your mama and daddy are gone.”
“Gone where?” Cora asked.
“It was a car accident. They were crossing the bridge. A stranger coming the other way had an episode. A heart attack, we think. His car swerved and ran your parents’ truck into the river.”
Cora looked at me and said, “But Mama and Daddy can swim, c’aint they?”
I looked at the sheriff. “Not if they got hurt.”
He nodded.
We sat there trying to process impossible thoughts, then I pleaded, “Are you sure?”
He played with the rim of his hat but finally met my eyes and nodded.
My first stupid thought was to find Mama and Daddy and tell them this god-awful tragedy.
They would know what to do, how to act, what comes next.
Seconds ticked by and I felt myself getting madder.
Felt anger curdle in my belly like spoiled milk.
I hadn’t dreamed a single damn warning about this abomination.
Didn’t feel Mama and Daddy leave this earth and pass over.
Wasn’t washed in the smell of Vicks that Daddy believed held healing powers.
Had no hint that death came and took our parents while I stirred stupid sugar water for the bees.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“The stranger?”
The sheriff took out his notebook he carried in his khaki shirt pocket. “Wilford Gentry from Tarboro way. Sells vacuum cleaners.”
I hissed, “I hope he’s burning in hell.”
We became untethered. Helen and her husband were summoned from down the road.
Lucy and her husband and son living north of Asheville came home.
Irene and Byron drove from Lynchburg across the state line.
Bert Tucker, now a secretary in Washington, DC, already married and divorced, came home alone.
All of them returned to the farm of our youth to mourn with Everett, Grady, Cora, and me.
And they cried till they were wrung out.
But not me. My eyes were dry from anger and guilt I couldn’t release.
My siblings knew the dead talked to me. They had witnessed my uninvited testimonies to friends and neighbors, but they had never spoken to me about it—not until our parents died.
My oldest sister Irene started first. “What have Mama and Daddy told you? Are they safe with Oma? Did they see Daddy’s people?
Tell me they don’t hurt.” I turned away as Irene ugly cried.
Lucy, pregnant with her second child, said, “If it’s a little girl I’m gonna call her Minnie. Would you tell Mama that? It would be a comfort to say Mama’s name out loud every day,” and she cried quiet tears. It was spooky how no sound came out.
I couldn’t eat at the kitchen table because of the crushing pressure to tell them what I could not.
Nobody yearned for answers more than me, but I had no comfort to offer.
Not at the wake. Not afterwards in the kitchen walled in by acres of covered dishes.
I stayed in my room and listened as hard as I could, though listening hard was not how the gift worked.
My failure grew more crippling the next year because no one shared my burden or eased my guilt.
Even Trula Freed, the clairvoyant who lived in the nearby cottage with the red door, looked at me with pity.
After graduation, I left Everett and Grady and Cora to tend bees and put in tobacco, and I never went back.
Home became Asheville-Buncombe Community College, the alma mater of Lucy and Bert.
And then came the magnetic mystery of Appalachia and my library work, and a man named Jack Reynolds who looked like my daddy.
Jack loved books and wrote poems and took soulful photographs of a land I already loved.
In 1963, I married him and kept my maiden name as women of the times were beginning to do.
To the man I married I confessed my failures and my quest for the spirit world, and Jack Reynolds loved me still.