Chapter 19
Chapter Nineteen
The three of us sat in the car park at the Misty Cliffs Church, TJ and me looking at the white-washed building with its pointed spire with a reserved awe.
Peabody was in the back seat rummaging through his bags and calibrating his equipment on the off chance that Ethel let him meter her. Or even let him into the churchyard.
“So, remind me again…” Tee said from the passenger seat, still staring at the church.
“She’s our grandmother. Viking Ormr was her grandson, and we are his direct descendants.”
“From the MacLaoch chick?”
“No, she was his one true love, but he was murdered before they could…you know.”
“Get it on.”
“Right.”
“So, who’s our mom in this scenario?”
“His sister-in-law.”
This made Tee look at me, one brow raised in disbelief. “He banged his sister-in-law?”
“More like: ‘My husband is chief and impotent, I need some sperm, you’re virile and leading a life that’ll get you killed sooner rather than later, so let’s do the humpity to save my position and title before my last chance is killed.’”
“Mind you,” came from the back seat, “all is assumed that Ormr’s brother requested this of him.”
“He was ordered to do the humpity with his sister-in-law? That’s next-level twisted.”
Peabody said, “You are applying values of the society you were raised in to a time when things could not have been more different. If she and her husband, a Viking chief, were to keep power, she needed an heir, and he needed to be viewed as virile. Your ancestor was doing her a service.”
“Also, Tee, Ormr had several lineages that died out, save for ours and Eli’s. He was, for all intents and purposes, happy to spread his…love. But, to the point I think you’re trying to make, when he came across Orabilia for the first time, I think his personal directive shifted.”
Tee turned in his seat to include Peabody. “How do we know all this?”
“Same way text messages will tell future humans of the world today. People wrote things down.” He twisted one last meter wand into place before declaring with an excited smile, “I’m all set here—shall we?”
“Maybe. Let’s take a moment. I’m not sure she’s going to like an audience.”
Tee squinted into the distance. “Is that her?”
Ethel, with long gray hair in a braid over her shoulder and garden gloves on, came around the front and through the gate to our car. I rolled down the window of Rowan’s off-road machine as if we’d just come to a drive-through.
She didn’t wait for hellos or introductions. It felt like she knew who everyone was already.
“Come on, then.” She walked away but stopped and came back and pointed at Peabody. I expected her to say that his equipment had to stay in the car, but instead she said, “Bring the big one. If Orabilia’s great-grandson,” she said of Rowan, “was too much for your equipment, I shall break it.”
When she was back at the gate, I looked back at Peabody, who was silent before his face broke out in intellectual excitement: “Excellent! This is perfectly thrilling.”
I looked at my brother. “Well?”
“Shall we?”
“Let’s.”
Peabody trailed behind us, measuring the boneyard with his equipment. Tee had insisted on hefting the equipment bag on his shoulder. I thought it was mostly because he could use it as a shield, just in case.
I nudged his shoulder with mine: “It’s perfectly safe. There’s no need to be on such high alert.”
“Yeah, but she’s a witch, right?”
“So?”
“So? Aren’t they mostly feminists who despise men? I’ve not dedicated my life to living in a gentlemanly manner.”
“Is that why you’ve got Peabody’s bag over your wiener?”
“Hell yes.”
We descended the path through the field of gravestones and into the church. We both paused, observing Peabody as he went through the damp grass, analyzing gravestone after gravestone. We shrugged. Peabody was deep into his work, and even our waves went unnoticed.
“He knows where to find us,” I said to Tee as we closed the church’s massive oak door behind us; the metal ring of the door knocker clanged as we did so. We headed to the apartment where I’d spent a lot of time, at the back of the echoing church.
In the cozy kitchen, Ethel looked up and gave us a rare smile.
“Tide and time wait for no man, but this woman is no tide. I’ve waited for your arrival with each sunup and sunset, wed and whet with the new life my grandson could never accomplish.
Leave it to the reincarnation of his female self to accomplish what generations before could not. ”
Tee gave me a knowing look. This was the kind of feminism that he was scared of in a witch.
“Thank you,” I said, taking her praise like a crown and proudly wearing it.
“And with you, your guests are thoroughly fascinating. This young chap,” she said of TJ, then, with a wave of her hand.
“Come, put that bag down; I want nothing to do with your family jewels, despite you giving them to the MacLaoch agent so freely. I see now that is your power, so like your great-grandfather in that way. A lover of women, all women, until you find the one. And just like fitting a gear into place, another piece of this MacLaoch curse gets set to rest. She herself has fallen for a Minory, giving you and the entire lineage peace. Well-done.”
Tee was chuffed. “Thanks…er, Grandmama?”
She held out her hands to his, and he placed his palms on hers.
“What was that? Tell it again in your native tongue.”
Our South Carolina English could be hard to understand at first.
“Well, back where I’m, we’re, from, we use Mother and Daddy, Mama if we’re feeling real kind. You’re our elder, related to boot, so it’s only natural that I call you Miss Ethel, or what fits a mite better, Grandmama.”
Her regal chin tilted up, and she took in TJ. “You trust quicker than your sister.”
He gave her a happy grin. “I do; she’s got that stickler scientific gene Mother also has, which makes her ask why until the whole family goes screaming into the night. Me? Folks are just folks.”
“Grand-mama. I shall have it.” She looked to me then to TJ. “My grandchildren.”
Something settled down into the room. Cogs in a timeline wheel fit snugly into place.
At our grinning faces, she said, “Good, sit.” She gave Tee’s shoulder a pat, then put the kettle back on the stove to reheat the water in it.
As she spoke, she took down plates that had seen decades of use, all decorative small saucers edged with gold filigree and chipped in one place or another. Then she took down a wide round tin filled with cookies.
“Nicole Ransome Minory MacLaoch, you now embark on a very special personal education in this world after having lived as your grand-papa?” She looked to Tee to see if she got the terminology correct.
Tee had no reservations about the cookie tin and popped it open to reveal buttery gold cookies inside.
“Thank goodness it’s not buttons and thread,” he mumbled. One buttery rectangle cookie his mouth and another in his hand, he replied to Ethel, “Grandpappy or granddaddy.”
“Grand-daddy.”
It sounded regal out of her mouth, the grandest of daddies.
“Ormr is fine,” I mumbled, searching for the perfect cookie in the tin.
“Yes, he is your grandfather, but he is more than that for you, isn’t he? He is also…you.”
“He’s a real piece of work who’s left me nothing but trouble in his wake. I have a feeling he was like this in real life too.”
The kettle whistled at my sour retort, and Ethel picked it up.
In that thoughtful silence, she poured the water into a decorative pot that I was sure held the perfect Ethel blend: a powerful mix of black loose-leaf that could grow hair on one’s chest, a touch of finely zested citrus peel, and creamy-blue cornflower petals.
“He haunts you still.”
I looked down at my plate and pushed the crumbs around.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit that he had gotten my pig to run around manic-like.
And still had my pig on edge, even though he was gone.
But having your mind hijacked like that wasn’t something after which you just skipped off into the heather-laden hills with a song on your lips and love in your heart.
Tee answered for me. “He does. Keeps her up at night. She’s been walking the hills. Barely a stitch on, in this weather. He’s still messing with her head. Can we do an exorcism or something and get that fucker out of her?”
Ethel pulled her glasses out of the nest of hair on the top of her head and put them on.
“It is easy for children of your generation to want a quick fix. It is all this society feeds you: take a pill, read a book, eat a certain food. But this is not the way, is it…Cole.”
When she said my name, it blew across my skin and touched my nervous system, reigniting it like a forest fire. A forest fire for a second before being doused in water and going silent.
I dropped my cookie, and my hand shot out, and suddenly Tee’s hand was in mine. We looked at each other and then to Ethel. I was playing catch-up when Tee went on defense. He might have put on social airs at first, but he had never lowered his guard.
“I don’t know what you’re on about, miss, but we’re getting up out of here.”
Ethel was calm, digesting the fallout of what she’d done, looking carefully between Tee and me. “Your bond is quite interlinked.”
“No shit. She’s my sister, and you just—”
“Asked her if she was still high on the energies of battle. She is, so much so that she is swallowing connections and energies around her to sustain herself. She is on fire with it. You should have been unaffected.”
The cookie had been nice, but now it was too much. Too buttery, too sweet, too dry.
“I’m swallowing energies and connections?” I said and stopped, realizing something critical. “The field.” Nothing grew there save for the one night I’d gone and poured my heart out. “Am I sucking it dry? Am I keeping it from coming back to life?”
Ethel didn’t mince her words. “You are.”
“But I can also make it come alive.”
Ethel held a satisfied smile. “I see you’ve discovered that too.”