Chapter 20 Lost and Found
Lost and Found
Lydia Brown
“We’ll have to wait another day to see the witch’s books.”
“How come?” Gus wears her combat boots and is ready to go somewhere. Anywhere.
“A child is missing. It’s the girl I met in Birdie’s yard. Everybody’s looking for her.”
“That ghost girl you saw?”
“Yes.”
“That was a forewarning, Aunt Liddy. She knew what was coming.” I wondered the same thing.
“So, what do we do now?” Gus asks, clearly feeling stronger.
“We can still go on an adventure.”
“Doing what?”
“Finding a lost graveyard.”
“How did you lose a graveyard?”
“Truth was I forgot to look for it again.”
After Jack and I bought the property and discovered the graveyard on our first ramble, we spent every weekend working at the cottage and guesthouse and didn’t take time to explore.
When he died, I was set adrift and never thought about that ancient burial ground.
But it’s time to find the headstones and learn about the family that time has forgotten. My niece could do with a project.
I make peanut butter sandwiches and fill a thermos with hot tea and add them to my backpack with charcoal and a roll of parchment. Gus loops her camera around her neck.
“That first time your Uncle Jack and I came upon the graveyard was the day we bought the place. Memory says we walked southwest from the bluff. Here’s my compass. If you keep us walking southwest, logic says we’ll find it.”
But the white cat Uncle has different plans. He marches in the lead without need of the compass, as though on a mission; Gus blithely follows. We pass a boulder with a second white cat perched regal and serene. “Would you look at that?” I whisper, but the cat has scampered away.
“How long did y’all walk?”
“Twenty or thirty minutes maybe.”
“Did you pass any landmarks or odd-shaped boulders?”
“None that I can recall.”
“What does sylvan mean?”
“Sylvan? It means a wooded setting or an inhabitant of the woods. It’s a lovely old word from the sixteenth century. Why’d you ask?”
“Uncle Jack likes that word. He uses it in some of his poems. A sylvan chorus and another time he wrote about the sylvan-clad French Broad. I wondered. That’s all.”
“Were you reading his book of poems?”
“I’ve got it in my room. It makes me feel close to him.”
I follow Uncle and Gus walking in this sylvan setting and only mildly regret I’m not with Birdie’s books turning wondrous pages and finding answers.
But instead, the citizens of Baines Creek are on the hunt for their missing girl.
A girl Birdie was mentoring and worried about.
I’m lost in thoughts when my niece stops and I almost plow into her.
“I asked you three times if you like it.”
“Like what?”
“My name. Do you like Gus?”
“Sorry. Yes, I like your new name. It suits you.”
“I wish Mama did.”
“Give her time. She’s used to your old one.”
“I didn’t pick that terrible old-lady name. What were Mama and Daddy thinking?”
“Did you ask them?”
“Once. They said it was my triple-great-granny’s name like it was special, but it’s not. Nobody remembers her. Nobody talks about her. I think they went plumb crazy when I was born.”
“I don’t know, honey. Your mama didn’t tell me.”
She leads on and I add more conflict to the task of naming babies. “Did you know that some countries have strict rules for naming a child?”
“For real?”
“Yes. Germany, Sweden, Denmark—Iceland, too. They believe a baby requires a name that is distinctly a boy or a girl’s name. While it cannot cause offense, above all, the first name must be gender specific.”
“Who decides that?” Gus turns and wrinkles her nose in distaste.
“A Naming Committee,” I say to her back as she walks on.
“They create an approved list of male and female names. If you want a name not on the list, you pay a fee to have it considered. The committee accepts or rejects it, but if they reject it, the requested name can’t be entered on legal documents. ”
“That’s plain terrible specially for girls who want to sound strong, boys who want to sound sweet, or anybody who wants to sound different,” Gus argues. “Why is it anybody’s business? Do they get paid to do that job?”
“I don’t know.” I offer as a small kindness, “I do know your given name Augustina means ‘great and magnificent.’”
“I still hate it. You’ll never find anybody called that in the whole wide world. It’s child cruelty is what it is. And ‘Teeny’ for a teenager is torture.”
“When you’re eighteen you can change your name. That’s little more than four years from now. If you could pick a new name, what would it be?”
“Lydia.”
“For real?” I say and she turns around so I can hug her, and she hugs me back. The sentiment is precious.
Only minutes later she says, “Is that it?” and I look up to see the walled graveyard.
The cat was the perfect guide. It’s even more forsaken than I remember.
The porous surface of the stones is pitted.
The wall is beginning to tilt. We enter the square plot through an arched entryway, and I kneel in front of the tallest headstone, unroll parchment paper, and use masking tape to affix it while Gus takes photos of the wall and headstones from all sides.
Her 35mm Pentax camera is loaded with a twenty-four-print roll that she’ll shoot today and put in tomorrow to be developed.
We kneel beside the middle stone. “Press the paper flat,” I instruct, and I rub the charcoal block downward on the parchment beginning at the top, then across.
The obscured carvings begin to emerge. The family name is Morrigan, and the dying date is October 31, 1768. Gus glances at the other two markers.
“Aunt Liddy, they all died on the same day. It’d be like David, Minnie, and me dying together and leaving Mama alone.”
It’s the first time Gus has mentioned her family, and it’s poignant. “And on Halloween, too,” she adds.
“It is odd. Our Scottish forefathers originally called that night Samhain. They believed it was the one night in the year when the veil between the Otherworld and ours thinned so the dead could pass through. Do you know where the name Halloween came from?”
“Where?”
“It was the Scottish poet Robert Burns who used the word Halloween in a long poem that had over two hundred lines. He wrote it in the late 1700s, and though he used Halloween only once, it struck the public’s fancy. That was about the time these tombstones were carved.”
“What do you think happened to the Morrigans?”
“Could have been a feud or sickness.” I sit back on my heels. “Speaking of sickness, I don’t feel well.”
“Me either,” Gus says, and I look at her gray face with lips turning blue from a peculiar chill in the air. “But it feels different than the fever.”
“Let’s have some tea to warm our bones,” I suggest, and we step outside the square and are shocked to feel the balmy June warmth.
“What happened in there?” Gus looks through the arch. “Did we disturb the spirits?”
“I don’t know,” I say truthfully, for our bodies are proof that inside that wall we felt sick. “But let’s go home. I don’t want you to relapse. We have one rubbing. We’ll come back another day.”