Faier Forest
by Heather Pagano
|
Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
My last memory of Mama was of her kissing the backs of my hands; first my right hand, then her warm lips brushed the Faier leaf brand on the back of my left hand. That final kiss had hurt like a dozen bees stinging. When I’d cried out, Mama made shushing sounds and held me tight to her chest. The sharp point of her collarbone dug into the bridge my nose. Damp fell onto my forehead from her tears.
“Be a good girl for Papa, Celia,” she’d said.
Mama might have tucked me in with a blanket then, though there my memory is fuzzy. I was only four. My sister, Julia, was seven years old when Mama disappeared, and she remembered events better than I did.
Julia had been at school the day our mother left us. She’d been practicing spelling, writing the same word over and over, when pain struck the Faier leaf brand on the back of her left hand. Within an hour the brand changed from the pale pink outline of a Faier leaf to an irritated, red patch of inflamed skin. It had to have been then that the Chorus began speaking to Julia, but I didn’t find that out until much later.
The school nurse bandaged Julia’s hand and sent her back to class. When Mama didn’t come to pick Julia up from school, Principal Lenna walked Julia to the mill and asked at the office for Papa. Everyone knew about the curse on the women in our family, so I suppose Principal Lenna already had an inkling that Mama was gone.
Papa took charge of Julia, apologized to Principal Lenna and to his supervisor. Papa was an Elm, always very proper and polite, though Julia remembered he did seem worried. He clocked out early from the mill, and he and Julia and began the long walk home.
Our home is far from the lumber mill and from town. It took my father and sister almost an hour to return. When they arrived, they found me home alone. I was curled in bed asleep, a four-year old girl who still sucked her thumb.
Julia told me that Papa carefully examined the back of my left hand to see if my brand had grown red and painful like hers had, but there was no change to my Faier leaf brand. It was still the same pale pink as ever, the stinging from when Mama had kissed it long passed.
The three of us sat on my bed for a few moments, Papa in the middle, with an arm around each of us. He was an Elm, and said little about feelings: happy, sad, or in-between.
Eventually we made a tour of our house. No Mama. Nothing remained of her and yet everything remained. She’d left all her clothes behind. Also the clippings of our baby curls and Julia’s first lost tooth and the hand print leaf picture I’d made for her birthday. The lunch dishes were only half done. Laundry hung drying on the rack by the hearth.
She had vanished, and just like that, Papa, Julia, and I were a family of three.
Mama never came back.
Twenty years later, Papa passed away. Then we were two. Just Julia and me.
* * *
We were holding Papa’s funeral according to custom, on the first Friday following his death. Papa had belonged to Elm Lodge, so we held the viewing in the long, timber-lined Elm Hall. Lodge members brewed the tea, which filled the hall with the sharp fragrance of spruce needles. I felt numb to everything: cold, hunger, thirst, exhaustion, the murmur of mourners. Only glimpses of my fiancé and of my sister stirred any feeling.
It was like all the people in Elm Hall were waves that cancelled each other out, and Clyde and Julia were the only real people in attendance. I peered around the crowd of visitors for them. My Poplar fiancé, Clyde, had glued himself to Uncle Bern, who needed supervision. Julia was even shorter than me, and for the moment had vanished in the crowd.
It was late March, the world still cold and heavy with melting snow, and every time a visitor entered or left the hall, a blast of cold air chilled us. My Aunt Hatia, a Lilac, dribbled hot honey water into my cooling mug of spruce tea, which had long since grown bitter and cold in my gloved hand. “What do you remember about your mother?” Aunt Hatia asked. Nosy, but sweet. Typical Lilac.
I lied. “I don’t remember much. I was too young when she left.”
Aunt Hatia nodded, then cast an anxious glance at my Uncle Bern.
Uncle Bern was an Alder, kindly, but also impulsive. As brother of the deceased, he greeted everyone who came to Elm Lodge to pay their respects. That evening he smelled of cannabis cigar. The cannabis wasn’t helping him cope with his grief as well as he imagined.
I was a Birch, quiet, involved in the private world inside my own head. My grief was a hollow stone inside me, a lump that should have been heavy, but instead felt oddly light. Julia was also a Birch, and would understand how I was feeling if I could only find her.
As I searched the hall for my sister, a light, fluttery hand landed on my shoulder. I flinched and spilled lukewarm spruce tea into my lap.
It had been the funeral director’s hand that grazed my shoulder. We both pretended he hadn’t startled me. He did a poor job of not staring at the fingerless glove on my left hand, which I wore to hide the Faier leaf brand.
The director handed me a spool of strong, white cotton twine. “It’s time,” he said. “You and your sister should tie the knots now. This is yours, I have just given your sister her spool.”
During a traditional funeral, the children of the departed tie their parent’s corpse to the felled trunk of cedar tree, which is then carried across town to the kiln. Papa’s smoke would blend with the cedar’s and billow out the chimney to disperse in the wind, which was said to carry the dead’s lingering essence to the very edge of Faier Forest.
I stood, ignored my wet skirt, and went to look for my sister. Despite the fact that the funeral director claimed to have given Julia her spool of twine only minutes before, I still didn’t see her anywhere.
I searched the bathroom for Julia. Aunt Hatia checked the kitchen. Uncle Bern checked out back.
No luck.
Clyde, my broad-shouldered Poplar, searched Elm Hall grounds for her.
None of us could find Julia.
Without Papa’s eldest daughter to tie the knots that would bind his corpse to the cedar trunk, the funeral came to a stop. Friends who had gathered for the viewing offered to help find Julia. Clyde led a party of lantern-bearers on an exhaustive hunt through Elm Lodge grounds.
By midnight, still no Julia.
Around that time, the brand on the back of my left hand began to burn.
I crept into the Elm Hall bathroom and peeled off my fingerless glove to find that my pink Faier leaf birthmark had flushed deep red, just as Julia’s had the day my mother disappeared.
I knew what that red brand meant: yet another woman in our family had vanished.
Julia is gone. You will be next. That was the first thing The Chorus said to me.
I should have been startled by the voices in my head, but I wasn’t. The Chorus is much like the thoughts that rattle around everyone’s head all day long, the internal monolog that conjures us into being. The chatter of The Chorus had a subtly different quality than normal thought. It’s hard to explain.
Julia is gone; she is never coming back.
The time had come for me to tie my father’s funeral knots. Alone.
Both the funeral director and Aunt Hatia begged me to wait for Julia’s return to tie the knots, but I knew she wasn’t coming. Julia was gone, just like my mother, my aunt before her, my grandmother, and her mother before that.
Near one o’clock in the morning, the exhausted funeral director stopped fighting me and let me tie my father’s knots.
Alone, I wound the cotton twine to bind Papa’s body to his cedar log. The log and corpse were carried to the kiln by Uncle Bern and the funeral director and a few Elm Lodge members roused from bed. Clyde was not there, he was still out searching for Julia. Poplars don’t give up easily.
Alone, I sat in the muddy, wet weeds and watched Papa’s smoke rise from the kiln toward the moon. Sharp cedar incense and hot ash filled the air, making my eyes water. My throat seized up. I tried to conjure a sense of love for my father, but all I found was that hollow stone.
The Chorus took over my brain. I still took the voices in my head for nothing more than the tortured thoughts of a woman who had just lost both her father and sister. Alone, now, the voices said. The family of four was reduced to three. Then you were two. Now you are only one.
Around three in the morning, Aunt Hatia slip-slid down the mud-slick hill to where I held vigil. My thoughtful Lilac aunt draped a scratchy old blanket around my shoulders. Uncle Bern didn’t want her to stay out in the damp and cold, so he pulled her by the elbow back up the hill. I watched their lantern flicker as they struggled to climb to flat ground.
Around four in the morning, smoke stopped billowing from the kiln. I could still see the haze of it gathering at the border of the Faier Forest. Nothing entered Faier Forest, not a squirrel, not a gnat, not a seed, not a mote of dust, not a wisp of smoke.
I was watching the jagged edge of the Forest border, usually invisible, now defined by my father’s funeral smoke, when Clyde slid down that hill and crouched beside me. As always, the sugary smell of poplar shavings clung to him.
When he wrapped his arms around me, the heat of his body seeped through the blanket. “I couldn’t find her,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left you tonight. I’m sorry.”
“You came back,” I said. “That’s all that matters.” I leaned my head against his shoulder. I felt a little less alone and, for a time, the whispers in my head silenced.
* * *
The following spring, Clyde and I laced ribbons around my birch tree in my family grove. Even though Clyde knew all about the curse that had caused Julia and Mama and their predecessors to vanish, he gave curses no credence. Clyde was a Poplar: practical, steady, and sensible to the last.
For my ribbon-lacing day, I wore a dress blue like the sky, with matching ribbons on the hem and sleeves that fluttered in the breeze. I’d dyed a pair of lacework gloves blue to match the dress. The gloves were a more elegant alternative to the fingerless work-a-day glove I wore to hide the bright red Faier leaf brand on the back of my left hand.
Clyde and I held our ribbon lacing where my birch tree was planted. My family grove held many birches. Both my mother and sister had been birches. But there were also Juniper, Alder, and Cherry trees, heavy with pink or white blossoms. Unlike Faier Forest, which was a species monoculture of only Faier trees, the People’s groves were natural gatherings of many different trees and plants, where all were welcome.
My tree was a tall, white birch whose silvery-backed leaves rippled in the wind. More than fifty of our friends and family had crowded around it to attend our ribbon-lacing ceremony. My ribbon was blue, same as my dress. Clyde’s ribbon was gold. Both ribbons were anchored high up the birch trunk so Clyde and I could circle the tree in a pattern, braiding the ribbons so they twined snug around the trunk all the way to the ground.
At the end of the ceremony, Clyde’s mom and dad tied off and cut his gold ribbon. Aunt Hatia and Uncle Bern stood in for my absent parents when it came time to cut the blue.
I belonged to Clyde, and he belonged to me.
Guests spread picnic blankets beneath the shade of my family grove and opened hampers brimming with cheese, jarred preserves, maple candy, and fresh-baked bread. Neighbors, friends, and family — mostly Clyde’s family — watched the two of us kneel on our blanket and kiss.
Behind us, the tattered remains of the ribbons from my mother’s lacing day rattled in the breeze. Time had leached the ribbons to colorless scraps, but they still clung to her tree.
When we walked home from the ceremony, Clyde gave me a delicate little carving made from poplar wood. He’d strung the carving on a leather cord to make me a necklace. Clyde was an expert whittler, and this figure was especially delicate: a paper-thin, heart-shaped leaf veined with ridges that ended in tiny spikes around its perimeter. It was a Faier leaf, an exact replica of the brand on my left hand.
I stared at the gift. Why had Clyde chosen the Faier leaf, of all things, to make into a necklace and present to me on our ribbon-lacing day?
I bent my neck, indicating that I wanted his help putting the necklace on. I must have hesitated a beat too long to wear it, because I detected stiffness in his face.
A week later, Clyde brought his clothes to my house, along with his mill boots, his wood-carving knives, and the smell of freshly whittled poplar.
Clyde came from a big family. He had two older brothers and four younger sisters. My big house was empty except for the two of us. It must have seemed too quiet to him after all the happy chaos he’d grown up with.
Copyright © 2022 by Heather Pagano
