Chapter 23 Mystic
Mystic
Kate Shaw
Lydia is talking plain foolishness. Even when I squint my eyes, all I see are weeds and rocks. She sees something that belonged in Birdie’s world. How can we see differently what’s right in front of us?
But then I’m reminded of those nights in midsummer when the moon was full.
I’d hear drums pulsing through the woods.
That primal beating kept me awake, stirred my core, and pulled me to rise from my bed and gaze out the window.
Those nights there was a glow through the trees, and embers rose high in the sky from a giant bonfire, and I could hear faint yips of joy and chants.
But I never went to explore. The drums came only in the dark.
Once I asked Birdie if she heard the beating drums, and she ignored me.
Now I wonder if it was this very meadow that was alive with her rituals.
For all of Lydia’s enthusiasm and enlightenment, standing in the presence of Birdie’s grave I feel the crone’s disapproval.
It’s oily and clings to my skin and smells mildly rancid.
Is it because I brought Lydia here? Is it because we’ve decided to carry Birdie’s books off the mountain?
Did she really think that on my own I could unravel the purpose of her compulsive journals and understand a fancy chest that doesn’t belong?
And why did she give me the burden of protecting something so priceless and perplexing?
Why not give it to someone who belongs here?
Someone who cares. Birdie’s death alone would have taken me to my knees, but the all of this place is too much.
We head down the trail and Lydia reminds me to tell her the story of the miracle card and the killing snow.
I was hoping she’d forget. I say, “It feels trite talking about that ordeal, especially since Loretty isn’t home,” is how I begin the story from four months back when the woods became a frozen hell and I faced my demons.
“The Old Farmer’s Almanac had predicted ‘the snowstorm of the century’ was coming,” I start and feel my heartbeat quicken at the memory.
“Seasoned souls had been preparing and so had I. Chopping firewood became the daily task as walls of split wood got stacked in sitting rooms, on porches, and encircled houses like a wall of defense. My neighbor Jerome Biddle had cut enough seasoned wood to last me two winters. A line of five-gallon buckets were filled with spring water for cooking and drinking. At the Rusty Nickel, shelves of canning jars, candles, kerosene, batteries, and lamp oil were stripped the day they were stocked. Folks prepared for something big coming. Something that would be slow to leave.”
I pause and turn. “Where were you when it came?”
“At the Rare Book School in Charlottesville. The storm didn’t reach that far north, but it was all the news.”
“You’re lucky,” I say, and we walk on.
“When it started, Rachel and I went to the top of the ridge and watched the world turn into a pretty snow globe. On the second day, my wall of firewood was covered with ten inches of snow, so I brought the wood furthest away inside to dry. Rachel and I took another walk before we’d be snowbound, this time past Birdie’s empty trailer.
She asked me to join her in the mushroom cave.
Said temperatures would stay steady there, even if the snow piled high.
I declined her invitation. I felt claustrophobic in the cave.
To my way of thinking, I had enough food to feed an army, a fresh stack of books to read, and my dog for company. I thought I was prepared.
“On day three, snow reached twenty inches, so, again I used my broom to keep the top of the woodpile clear and brought in more logs to dry and thought I was staying ahead of the game. I read and listened to my transistor radio. I had extra batteries. But on day four, the wind howled and the snow came down as though it was only now becoming serious. That’s when I thought about that card you saw: EXPECT A MIRACLE.
“I got it at the October Festival at the elementary school in Burnsville when Eli and I took the children to wear paper masks and get free candy. We watched town people bob for apples, eat cotton candy, and carve pumpkins into scary faces. The bluegrass band played tunes and a man on stilts defied gravity, but it was the fortune teller’s tent that captivated Loretty and young Crystal Mayhew, who thought it would be fun to have my palm read. ”
I stop when I say Loretty’s name and turn again to face Lydia. “What if we don’t find her? How can we stop looking? Who would harm a girl born special?”
“Special how?”
I hesitate. Should I trust Lydia with the secret of Loretty? Do I dare say what is common knowledge up here? I decide to speak bluntly. “They call her a sin-eater.”
“I’ve heard of them,” she says without a whiff of disapproval. “But they’re usually older people who are willing to carry a burden. I’ve never heard of a child taking on that task.”
I turn away from her acceptance of such preposterous folklore.
I’d hoped she would challenge Loretty’s gift.
I’d hoped that Lydia’s beliefs were based in the logical world, but I stroke the miracle card in my pocket like a worry-stone.
That card has changed me, and my feet now straddle the divide between common sense and the mysterious.
I continue. “The girls were fascinated with the crystal ball in the middle of the gypsy’s round table, and she played her part to the hilt.
She spoke words about my fate line, my Girdle of Venus, and my love line intersecting my lifeline—not once but twice.
When I left she gave me the card EXPECT A MIRACLE.
And when my cabin sat under four feet of snow with drifts above the roof, I made a list of miracles I would appreciate.
At first I was cavalier about the exercise.
I did it to pass the time. It was a game.
Then something changed when I reached for the kettle to warm my tea and heard a terrifying sound.
Sleet. It clattered dangerously through the forest like spilled BBs.
“In an instant, I realized I wasn’t prepared for a felled tree crushing my roof or a branch crashing through a window. I had been careless. I’d seen abandoned cabins swallowed by kudzu like the one beside Birdie’s graveyard. They were somebody’s shelter until they didn’t shelter.”
I stop talking because the retelling is upsetting, and Lydia doesn’t pressure me.
I don’t say out loud the part where the door latch rattled and I could barely breathe, certain that something starving was on the other side.
I stared at that flimsy door and wondered what animal smelled me through the wood.
Then, on its own, the door opened a crack and ice chips swirled inside like bizarre confetti, and I nearly fainted.
I pried the door open on the alert for the swipe of a claw, the whiff of rancid breath, but all I saw was a wall of ice pressed against a latch that could no longer catch.
The eerie blue wall of ice filled the doorframe. I was in a frozen tomb.
I finish the story in a hurry, about Birdie sending two boys to rescue me. How they dug through the ice, broke a window to get inside and pulled Rachel and me out, us barely conscious. We huddled under Birdie’s bearskin on their sled, which took us to the Rusty Nickel.
I end by saying, “It was a miracle we survived.”
Lydia asks, “Did anybody die?”
“One man. Billy Barnhill. He froze to death under a stack of deer hides in his trailer. He’d become a recluse since killing his buddy in a hunting accident.
Billy was never the same after. He kept to himself, drunk and addlebrained.
Only one woman was faithful to the man everyone else forgot: Loretty’s mama, Sadie Blue.
She brought him food every week: a quart jar of stewed tomatoes or green beans or cabbage soup.
She would knock and leave the food outside his door.
Next time she came, the empty jar was waiting.
What she did was enough to sustain the hermit locked in a narrow hell of his own making. But the killing snow did him in.”