Chapter 16 Double News
Double News
Lydia Brown
My telephone rings twice on Saturday, and the calls change everything.
The first is from Kate Shaw with tragic news, and I slide to the floor holding the receiver. “Dead?”
“It happened a week back.”
“Oh.” After my awkward introduction. After she banished me.
After I was busy doing things that didn’t include Birdie.
I missed my chance to know her, and I am heartsick.
Death waits for no one, but the sad truth is that Birdie died and I had no warning, no whiff of her pipe tobacco, no portal opening to announce the news.
Baines Creek lost its healer, and I lost my link to answers.
There is bittersweet news. Kate inherited Birdie’s stacks of books, and she has spent the past week wandering through the pages lost. She needs help. Tuesday we’ll meet at the schoolhouse.
Later that same day the phone rings again.
It’s my sister Lucy calling about her thirteen-year-old daughter, who is wreaking hell on the family’s ordered life.
Miss Augustina Rose Flannery, Lucy’s youngest child—named after her triple-great-grandmother and with the little-girl nickname Teeny—now wants to be called Gus.
That insistence has stretched Lucy’s patience in unbecoming ways.
Lucy wants to send Gus here for the summer, and I say yes.
We’ll meet at Little Switzerland Inn two miles from my place but thirty miles from Lucy’s home on the other side of Burnsville.
Lucy teaches at Mountain Heritage High School, and her youngest will start there in the fall.
I haven’t seen them since Christmas. We’re busy is the excuse to stay apart, but our ties to each other have grown thin.
And there was Jack’s death two years back. Only now grief is releasing me.
I wait at a table on the flagstone patio, face the Catawba River valley and sip a glass of chilled chardonnay.
Little Switzerland was the vision of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Heriot Clarkson.
The original inn built in 1910 was demolished in 1961 and rebuilt as a seventy-room chalet.
It was my task to review historic records for this place, and they now reside in Special Collections at Ramsey in Asheville.
This summer day, gentlemen play horseshoes and teenagers play badminton. In the heated swimming pool, children wear water wings while mamas sip spiked lemonade, and I glance over to see a frazzled Lucy cross the terrace.
She turned fifty last January and looks matronly and pinch-mouthed.
My sister with a penchant for ten-dollar words and Nancy Drew mysteries is gone.
The girl with a dream to write the Great American Novel is gone too.
Or is lost. That unfinished manuscript gathers dust on a closet shelf.
She teaches English at the local high school, but I imagine the stimulation is limited.
My sister weaves around tables ahead of her daughter who lugs a duffel bag large enough to hold a body.
At least I think that’s Gus. The change is shocking.
Fair hair has been replaced by purple tips spiked with gel.
Metal piercings pinch her ears, eyebrows, and lips.
A black tank top sits atop budding breasts.
Cargo pants hang low, and heavy combat boots carry my niece forward.
“Hello, Lucy,” I say and rise to give her a hug. “Can you stay for a visit?”
“No thank you. I’ve got to get back.”
“Date night with Ryan?”
“Really, Lydia? No. A business dinner I’ll endure for Ryan’s sake.” She adds, “Teeny isn’t feeling well,” and my niece rolls her eyes. “She has an upset stomach but wanted to come anyway. Sorry to dump a sick child on you…”
I look at my niece and her pale face and wonder if it’s partially the makeup. “We’ll take it easy the next few days,” I say. “It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, so that’s a reason to relax. Gus can stay as long as she’d like.”
Lucy smirks at her daughter’s preferred nickname, then delivers a weak kiss on her forehead and slips away trailing disapproval. I turn back to this tiny Gothic stranger. “I’m sorry you’re not well, Gus, but I’m glad you’re here.”
She cuts dark-rimmed eyes at me. “For real? You haven’t asked me to come since Uncle Jack died.”
“And that’s too long. I’ve missed you, and when you’re better, I could use your help.”
“For real? Doing what?”
“Two things: to find a lost graveyard and go see the secrets left by a witch who died.”
“For real?” Gus scoots up straighter.
“Let me feed you first, and then I’ll tell you what I know.”
We order fries and burgers from my favorite waitress, Sandy. When she asks my niece how many piercings she has, Gus recognizes a kindred soul. “Eight,” is the prideful answer.
Sandy points to the eyebrow hoop. “I bet that one hurt.”
“Not really.”
“I been thinking bout getting a second hole right here,” the woman says, pointing next to a simple gold hoop.
“You should do it,” Gus says and grins for the first time and looks more like herself.
Sandy winks. “I’ll put your orders in lickety-split.”
Gus sits forward and puts her elbows on the table. “Tell me bout the witch first.”
“Her name was Birdie Rocas,” I begin and recount my traipse up the mountain to her trailer, her dresses that dragged the ground, her corncob pipe and how she shunned me as she sat beside a girl half Gus’s age being taught lessons by a master healer. I even confess my brazen behavior.
“She went inside and closed the door but you stayed? How come?”
“I hoped she’d take pity on me and talk.”
“But she ran you off instead.”
“But not before she came out to say that she could read my thoughts and that I couldn’t have her secrets yet.”
“What kinda secrets?”
“The good kind, I hope. I did see stacks of homemade books inside her trailer.”
“Books about what?”
“We’ll find out Tuesday, but I’d guess they’re like diaries where she wrote happenings.
Since she was a healer, there’s likely plant cures and living history about her part of the world.
Three years ago, I saw Birdie’s name on a piece of handmade paper covered with her words.
Someone had sent them to Uncle Jack’s department.
I’ve been looking for her ever since. At least I had that brief encounter before she died. ”
Our food arrives and Gus dips one fry in a puddle of ketchup. “What about the girl? Who’s gonna teach her now?”
“I don’t know. You want to hear a strange thing?”
She nods.
“When I was leaving that night, I thought I saw her in the clearing. My headlights flashed across a child, but when I got close, no one was there. My eyes were playing tricks on me.”
“Maybe it was her spirit but not her.”
“The two can separate when we’re alive?”
“Maybe,” she says and shrugs delicate shoulders.
I finish half my burger before I think to ask Gus, “Are you afraid of witches?”
“Not the good kind.”
“How can you tell the difference?”
My niece looks at me like I’m too old to be that dumb.
“Good witches celebrate the full moon. They protect Mother Nature and become healers and midwives. They’re part of the circle of life, Aunt Liddy. I thought you knew those things.”
I’m glad to see her sassy spirit surface. “Where’d you learn that?”
“Might’ve dreamed it.” Gus looks down at her fingernail and picks at the black chipped polish. She hesitates before her tone turns more furtive. “I tried talking to Mama bout my dreams back when I was little. She called me a foolish girl having foolish thoughts.”
My palm itches. Trula Freed told me I came from a line of psychics, but I never thought about the gift being current.
“Do you hear whispers in the night? Messages from the other side?”
My niece’s eyes widen.
I explain, “The first voice I heard from beyond was Oma. She had died months before and I was starting to forget her when here she came, whispering in my ear while I slept. I smelled her Dentyne chewing gum; that’s how I knew who it was. Lucy didn’t believe me.”
“What was her message?”
“To be on the lookout for Wade Sully, Aunt Helen’s first husband. He was already dead in the war, but we didn’t find out till later.”
“But Mama found out what you said was true, didn’t she?”
“She did, but she never acknowledged my dream about it.”
“She doesn’t believe me either.”
“But I do.” I squeeze Gus’s hand.
Of all my siblings, Lucy was the most critical of me when our parents were killed. She thought I had been trying to get attention all along. I’m not surprised Lucy doesn’t support Gus.
“You are not foolish, Gus Flannery. That you are not.”
Gus has barely touched her food so we have Sandy box it up for later. We leave the inn and drive to the cottage. On the way Gus says, “I haven’t seen it since it’s done.”
“The cottage? Well, shame on me. That’s about to change.” I don’t explain that I’ve been slow to heal and isolation in this place was a necessary part of the process. Only now can I share it with her.
Storm clouds thicken as I pull off Crabtree Road onto my dirt road that winds up the steep hill and stops at the tree line.
We follow the path through the forest that leads to the cottage on the cliff.
Gus struggles to carry her canvas satchel, so I grab one handle, and we cross a carpet of lush moss and braided roots and the suspension bridge.
We climb two steps to the porch then fat raindrops pummel the tin roof. I open the door—
“You have a cat,” she shouts above the downpour.
“No, I don’t.”
She points. “Then who’s that?”
A white feline sits on the swing cleaning its paws like it’s at home.
It vaguely looks like the apparitions I sometimes see at a distance.
It jumps down and rubs against Gus’s leg and the three of us enter the unlocked door.
I close it to muffle the rain while the cat jumps on the counter looking for food.
I find a can of tuna in the pantry. It’s a mannered creature but forthright.