Faier Forest
by Heather Pagano
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
I still remember the dismay I read in Clyde’s face that first evening when he’d officially moved in. I told him I was going for my evening walk.
He slipped on his jacket to come with me.
I told him to stay home.
In my memory I still see Clyde standing in front of our empty hearth, his big hands hanging by his lean hips, his jacket still clutched in a white-knuckled fist. My going out for hours alone every evening was clearly not what he’d expected. I suppose he’d imagined us spending our evenings together.
I had other plans.
Clyde intends to pin you down. This was the murmuring of the voices in my head. By then I was used to their litany. I called them The Chorus. The Chorus needled me. He thinks he can tie you with that leather cord around your neck. You’re a dog on a leash. He won’t let you free. He’ll choke you to death first.
I was no dog on a leash. I turned my back on Clyde and walked out the door. As I crossed the threshold, every nerve on my body was on fire. I was defiant and guilty, a chemical reaction that produced heat and pain.
My evening walk took me, as it always did, to the edge of Faier Forest.
The Forest was a tangle of closed-spaced, tall, slender, trees that formed a thick canopy over the dirt and stones beneath them. Faier Forest was a wrong place. Everyone knew that a gathering of trees should be a community made of many different members, but Faier Forest was a strict monoculture. No other plant, no other life, not even bugs or squirrels inhabited it. An invisible barrier kept everyone and everything outside. We were told as children that there could be no life in Faier Forest other than the Faier tree. A sweet smell, like fruit preserves gone bad in the canning jar emanated from the trees. The stink attracted gnats that beat themselves against the invisible barrier that separated our world from the Forest.
I visited the Forest every evening because The Chorus told me that if I did, I would one day find Mama and Julia.
When I returned after dark on that first evening, Clyde was waiting for me, hunched over the banked hearth. Curls of poplar sweetened the air. He’d just carved a pretty little bullfinch, which he set on the mantle over the hearth.
For all he was a Poplar, I saw an expression flicker across Clyde’s eyes, as though he’d half-believed in the family curse, after all.
That lack of trust hurt me, and I couldn’t keep the edge from my voice. “Did you think I would disappear?”
“I believed you would come back,” he said, wiping his carving tools on their leather pouch, “and you did.”
Clyde took my hand and we went together to the bed that had once belonged to Mama and Papa. I hung the Faier leaf necklace on the bedpost. Clyde peeled the glove from my hand and touched the tender, red flesh of my Faier leaf brand. Then he kissed it. It burned just as it had when Mama kissed it.
I didn’t understand Clyde’s desire to kiss that brand any more than I did his gift of the Faier leaf necklace. Neither seemed like something a Poplar would do.
I buried my confusion. Clyde’s lips soon strayed to other places on my body that didn’t cause pain. For a stretch of minutes, maybe even for an hour, The Chorus went completely silent.
* * *
Spring came again, then summer, then fall. Then came Ada.
She was born on a winter night. Wind whined in the chimney and the whole house smelled of the seasoned pear logs that Clyde’s mother had brought for the fireplace. His mother was a Pear, and she believed burning pear wood eased childbirth. Neither her Poplar husband nor her Poplar son felt like arguing with her. My Aunt Hatia wasn’t there, too sick with the flu.
I was miserably hot, still my mother-in-law stoked the pear wood fire and the midwife wrapped me in blankets. Everything felt heavy on me, even the delicate Faier leaf necklace Clyde had carved for me. The fingerless glove that hid the Faier leaf brand was soaked with sweat. The birthing pain grew so strong that The Chorus wailed into a fevered keen whose words had no meaning.
Then, finally the midwife laid Ada on my chest. Ada had dark eyes and a wide nose and much more hair than I’d expected. I pinched her tiny hand in mine and squinted at the back of it. Her hand bore the miniature imprint of a pale pink Faier leaf brand.
The Chorus hissed: It’s a girl. She’s marked. She will bear the curse once you’re gone. You will disappear, then she will follow. She will never learn to truly love or to be loved, just as you never have.
I turned my head. I refused to look at my newborn daughter. “Take her,” I told the midwife. “I don’t want her.”
The midwife made no move to help me.
“I said get rid of her!”
The midwife took Ada from my arms and carried her downstairs to Clyde.
Baby Ada wasn’t happy in her father’s arms. Even all the way downstairs, her shrieks rang in my ears. The sound twisted with shrill warnings of The Chorus. Their nonstop chatter made me dread the child I’d just given birth to. I’d brought her into a life where there could be no real love. Even if she laced ribbons with a Poplar, like Clyde, who prided himself in not fearing our family’s curse, she couldn’t truly give her heart to anyone not knowing that at any moment she might vanish.
No matter the curse and The Chorus, in time I fell in love with my tiny Ada. She grew, becoming less tiny and more ferocious with every passing day.
Clyde wouldn’t let me cover the Faier leaf brand on her hand. I half expected him to whittle a minuscule Faier leaf necklace for her.
He did not.
For Ada’s six-month birthday Clyde planted a sapling in my family grove: a birch, like mine, that would grow into a tree where Ada might one day lace her wedding ribbons. Beneath its branches, Ada’s four aunts transplanted a sod of bluebells from the meadow at Clyde’s old home. Ada and I went to water the sod every evening just before sundown, and we would watch the delicate, drooping fronds of the bluebells perk up after their drink.
It was around that time, when Ada was six or seven months old, that I resumed my walks to the edge of Faier Forest.
I’d recently returned to work, part-time cleaning at Poplar Hall, the lodge where Clyde and his father belonged. While I cleaned, I left Ada to doze in the care of Aunt Hatia and Uncle Bern, or at Clyde’s family home with his mother and the young aunts.
I learned I could clean Poplar Hall fast and gain an hour, sometimes more, to wander the edges of the Faier Forest. My feet would sink into the the cushiony ground of decaying leaves and pine needles that had blown to the border of the Forest. The rank fruit smell of the Forest no longer bothered me. Whenever I neared the Faier trees, The Chorus would quiet some, as though finally satisfied.
The walks became the center of my days. I left work ever earlier, arrived later and later to pick up Ada. Clyde’s home was so chaotic, no one seemed to notice my absence. If I was late to my aunt and uncle’s, I’d bound through the door at dinnertime, breathless, with apologetic offerings of fresh mint or pockets full of berries.
For Ada, I’d have an apology gift, too: a large leaf, a rock, a strip of bark, a dead butterfly. Anything she could hold in her curious hands, bright eyes taking in the treasure before she stuffed it whole into her mouth. While I pulled wet bits of debris from her gums, The Chorus bemoaned what a miserable failure I was as a mother.
One warm September evening, when I’d strayed along the edge of Faier Forest as long as I dared, a hand closed on my shoulder.
I bit my tongue so hard that blood ran between my teeth. I smelled the sugary scent of poplar.
The hand pulled me back from the edge of the Forest, and I turned to see Clyde, his face in shadow, unreadable. He gave me his handkerchief to clean the blood from my chin.
“Your mother and sister are not in Faier Forest,” he told me.
My throat ached like I was trying to swallow an apple whole. I had never told Clyde why I came to the edge of the Forest, or even that I went there at all. I wondered how many times he had followed me on my walks.
“You think the mark of the Faier leaf means your missing mother and sister are in the Forest, but it does not.”
I swallowed.
He knows nothing, The Chorus said. You will find your mother and sister among the Faier trees.
“I know for a fact that your mother never entered Faier Forest. Your mother was seen, about two years after she left you, down South in cotton-growing country.”
Lies, The Chorus raged.
Clyde held both my shoulders and squeezed. “Listen to me, Celia. You remember my Aunt June? Eighteen years ago she travelled South to go back and visit her people. When she passed through Elicott, she saw a dozen or so cotton mill workers outside, eating their lunches. Your mother was among them. Her lunch was tomato pie. Aunt June walked right up to your mother to confront her. Your mother saw her coming, dropped the napkin with the tomato pie still in it, in it, and ran away.”
My throat had grown too tight to speak. When I finally forced words from my lips, they sounded small and breathless. “Your Aunt June loves to gossip. She made it up.”
“Aunt June made my mother keep the story secret. She feared the truth would break Julia’s heart and yours. Dad said the truth would be better than letting two girls grow up under the shadow of a phony curse, with no man brave enough to marry them.”
Spoken like a true Poplar.
True or false, the story of Clyde’s Aunt June told me one thing for certain. “You laced ribbons with me because of your Aunt June’s story.”
Clyde crossed his arms. “I laced ribbons with you because I love you. Love being something I’m not sure you understand.”
His words were like a stinging slap. I wanted to hit back, but didn’t know how. “How do you explain Julia’s disappearance?”
“People do strange things when they’re scared of being alone.”
I couldn’t look Clyde in the eyes. His words had double meaning. He wasn’t just talking about Julia.
“Please stop coming here,” he said.
Clyde interrupted the litany. “If you won’t stop coming to Faier Forest for my sake, will you stop for Ada? All these hours you spend wandering are hours she has no mother.”
I tried to slap him.
He caught my arm.
The Chorus snarled in my head. In the end it is he who will lose the child, while you will spend eternity with her in the trees.
“Do you even see the irony? You come here to mourn a childhood with no mother, at the same time condemning your own daughter to the same fate.”
“Get your hands off me!”
He did.
I had begun to shake and couldn’t stop.
Ignore him, The Chorus said. Look into the Forest. Celia, look.
Since the night Julia had disappeared and The Chorus began, the voices in my head had never once called me by name. I turned my back on Clyde and peered into Faier Forest.
The Forest contained no life but the Faier tree and never had any weather: no rain, no snow, no wind. Now, suddenly, a breeze riffled through the forest. Branches bobbed. Faier leaves stirred, rustled, whispered. Clyde must have seen the unusual wind, too, because he grabbed my elbow and pulled me from the border.
I shook him off.
The breeze inside the Forest caught hold of something long and thin and white. It was neither a Faier branch nor a Faier leaf. Nothing could be in Faier Forest that wasn’t a Faier tree, yet behind the Forest barrier, where nothing from our world should have been, I saw a length of cotton twine. It had partially unwound from its spool. The spool was identical to that given to me by the funeral director on the day of Papa’s funeral.
It had to be the spool the director gave Julia moments before she disappeared.
The spool of funeral twine flapped in the strengthening wind.
Clyde ‘s hand closed on my shoulder. “Celia...”
I spoke to Clyde without turning to look at him. “Go away, Clyde.”
My Poplar husband ignored me. “That wind isn’t natural. We should go.”
A laugh bubbled up in my chest. I barely managed to hold it in. A Poplar frightened by a mystical phenomenon?
The Chorus told me how to get rid of Clyde. I turned to look at him and quoted what The Chorus told me to say, word for word: “I just found what I have been looking for. I no longer need you, and I never wanted you, anyway.”
Clyde took one step back from me.
The Chorus urged me to cut my bond with him. The necklace, the necklace.
I tore the Faier leaf carving Clyde had given me off my neck and threw it to the ground.
Clyde stared at the delicate carving he’d once tied around my neck, then looked up to meet my eyes. “Do you even know how to be loved?”
Silence, The Chorus ordered. If you ignore him, he will go away. A sense of delirious cruelty tingled inside me.
Then I thought of Ada. Her tangled dark hair and serious eyes made my breath catch.
You and Ada will be reunited, The Chorus said. She’ll come to you, just as you are about to return your mother. The two of you will spend eternity twined like grafted branches.
Clyde bent and picked up the carved Faier leaf. His grey eyes never left mine. A cold prickle of fear washed through me. What if he wouldn’t go? What if he dragged me back home, and I never found that spool of twine again?
I wouldn’t lose the only hint I’d ever had to finding my sister and mother. I spun back to Faier Forest.
The Chorus yelled. Wait!
But there wasn’t time. I pressed my branded left hand to the barrier between our world and Faier Forest.
My hand slipped inside
* * *
Copyright © 2022 by Heather Pagano
