Faier Forest
by Heather Pagano
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
My whole world went silent. The Chorus disappeared. The wind died. More than that, all the little sounds of life I was used to vanished: no distant call of bird, no sound of footfalls on leaves, no acorn falling. I couldn’t even hear my own breath.
I tried to clench my left hand into a fist, but from fingertips to my wrist my hand was completely numb. When I looked down, I saw that my body still stood outside the Forest, only my hand had entered. Yet everything I saw, felt, heard, came to me as though I was standing among the Faier trees.
I wriggled my left hand to pull it back out of the Forest, but it wouldn’t budge.
The ground vibrated. The spool of white twine rolled across the ground, leaving a length of pure white cotton string to draw a line across the tangled roots of the trees.
The Faier tree nearest me trembled. I would have stepped back from it, but I couldn’t move.
The tree twisted like a giant water drill boring into the ground. It spun faster and faster. Leafy branches folded down. Arms and legs unfolded from the trunk as it stopped spinning.
There in front of me, the Faier tree unfurled into Julia. Her face was streaked with wood grain. Her eyelashes were dried slivers of seed pods. Her lips were curls of bark. Her hands were bundles of kindling. Leaves sprouted from her fingers. Her long, leafy branches shuddered with each labored breath she took. A sticky bead of clear sap ran down her face.
“Don’t come in.” The words made no sound, but the sense of what Julia said rattled in the shocked emptiness of my mind. “Stay outside.” Julia held out both her twiggy hands in a gesture warning me away. “Celia, if you can hear us, don’t come in. Entering the Forest calls the next in line.”
“Us?” My heart pounded. “Is Mama here?”
Julia didn’t answer, and I realized my sister couldn’t hear me. My words emerged from lips still outside the Faier Forest. Only my hand had crossed the barrier.
Beside Julia, a Faier tree rattled its branches. A knot in its trunk peeled open, revealing a patch of twisted bark that formed a single, very large, grey human eye.
Even from that one eye, I knew my mother.
She gazed back at me with a look of mingled wonder and heartbreak. She hadn’t seen me since I was four. I saw loss flicker over that eye and delight at finally seeing how I’d grown. I would have felt the same way if Ada, all grown up, had come to greet me.
I stretched my fingers toward Mama. Her branch swayed to meet me. She cupped my hand in her fingers of jointed twigs.
My sister interrupted our reunion. “Celia,” Julia said, “if you’re here, then you must have a daughter. Otherwise the Forest wouldn’t let you in. It won’t take you until its next victim is assured.”
Mama and I ignored her. Mama stroked my fingers. “They told me you would come. They said I wasn’t leaving either of you girls, that we would be together always. And Julia has been with me, and now you’ve come.
A little lurch jolted my stomach. The Chorus had made the same promise to me. It was true, Julia had come, and now I had.
Your mother left you. Left. Your mother left you and Julia. The voice in my head wasn’t The Chorus. The Chorus had evaporated when I’d thrust my hand into the Forest. Now I heard Clyde’s voice in its place.
Julia’s branchlike-arms stretched toward me. Her brittle, twig fingers tried to pry my hand free of Mama’s. “You started hearing voices in your head after I was gone,” Julia said. “I started hearing them the day Mama left. They dogged me every day from the time I was seven. Those voices poisoned my childhood. Don’t let your daughter grow up like that.”
Julia had been seven years old, Ada was only seven months. What would a baby who couldn’t even speak make of The Chorus?
Mama pulled me closer toward her. Rough bark protruded from her trunk-like lips. She covered my fingers with little kisses.
“You are all that stands between your daughter and madness,” Julia said. “You owe it to her not to let the Voices at her. You’re her mother. Bear them in her stead.”
A thick roll of sap, like a tear, leaked from Mama’s single eye. Julia’s plea to me sounded like an admonition against Mama, that she hadn’t held out longer to shield Julia.
“I had to go,” Mama said. “You were both better off without me. Your father and I were never meant to be parents.”
“That’s her way of saying Papa only married her because he got her pregnant with me,” Julia said. “By accident, because he knew our family was cursed. The Voices told me I was an accident.”
Tiny leaves and bits of bark shed from Julia’s face. Her eyes jiggled as they migrated toward the center of her forehead, just above her nose. My presence had begun some second stage of her transformation into a Faier Tree.
If Julia had been a mistake, what did that make me?
Her shuddering transformation continued. She let out a pained, almost animal wail.
One day the same must happen to me.
After I was gone, The Chorus would invade Ada’s head. Would it tell my daughter her mother hadn’t wanted her? The midwife and my mother-in-law knew I’d refused to hold her when she was born.
If I stayed in the Forest, Ada would grow up thinking I’d run from her. The Chorus would tell her so, every minute she breathed.
“Clyde,” I said. I felt the words, but did not hear them. “Clyde, I’m stuck in here. Help me get out.”
In my body outside the Forest, a familiar, smooth leather cord slipped over my head. The delicate carving of the Faier leaf settled in the hollow at the base of my neck.
Julia was too distracted by her transformation to see what Clyde had done, but Mama noticed the necklace appear.
She hissed. “That doesn’t belong here,” she said. “It looks like a Faier leaf, but it is alien wood. Poplar wood.”
My pulse beat beneath the carved Faier leaf. Outside the Forest, where everything but my left hand still stood, I had a body and breath. There was a husband holding my hand, his mill calluses and blunt nails rough where they dug into my skin.
The whites of Julia’s eyes bled into each other. Her pupils spread, then joined like drops of oil converging in water.
I heard Clyde’s voice again. Do you know why I gave you this leaf?
I shook my head. I had never understood why.
“To keep you in your place,” Mama said. “To remind you that he laced ribbons with you when no other would. That you had no choice but him.” Her words were something The Chorus would have said to me.
The Faier leaf brand is a part of yourself you couldn’t love, Clyde said. The necklace was my promise to love all of you, especially the parts you cannot.
To love all of me. The girl with the hidden brand whose mother had abandoned her. The woman who was fated to disappear just like her mother and sister before her.
I squeezed Clyde’s hand tighter. “You love me even after all the evenings I left you alone to walk to the Forest?”
You always came back.
My mother snatched at my hand. Thorns on her branches drew blood. “Will he still love you when he knows you refused to hold your newborn daughter?”
My heart clenched. Clyde loved me, but he loved Ada, too.
I already know, Clyde said. You came back to Ada. Come back to her now. That’s all that matters.
“She will come to you one day,” Mama said, her thorns driving deeper into my flesh.
“I will go back to her now,” I told my mother. “Now is all any family has or is.” I wrenched my hand free of Mama’s thorns and branches.
Clyde pulled me backward, out of the Forest, back into our world.
The stillness of Faier Forest broke like an egg shell. Light and noise, stink, softness, hurt, and beauty rushed into my eyes and ears and nose.
I stumbled backwards into Clyde’s arms. We both sprawled in the tall, dry grass. Wind whipped loose strands of hair from my braid and stung my eyes.
Clyde’s mouth pressed against mine, hot and wet. His chin was stubbled with cotton where he’d cut himself shaving. The sweet poplar smell of him wrapped warm and soft around me.
We kissed, and I put one hand on his shoulder to pull him even nearer.
That’s when we discovered that my left hand had turned to wood.
* * *
I left my flesh-and-blood hand behind in the Faier Forest that early September day. In its place, a wooden stump was grafted onto my wrist. There were knobs on the stump where the shoots of finger branches might have sprouted had I remained in the Forest, but I’d been there such a short time, I had to make do without fingers.
I left behind more than my hand. The voices in my head were also gone. I never heard The Chorus again.
Ada grew. When she was three years old, I bought a glove to cover the pale pink brand on the back of her left hand. Snipping off the fingertips with only one hand and a wooden stump wasn’t easy. The first time I wrestled her tiny fingers into the glove, Clyde plucked it off and dumped it down the latrine. He wouldn’t let Ada’s brand be covered.
I watched my daughter’s brand, hour by hour, day by day, year by year. It never grew the fiery red color that mine had when Julia disappeared. I watched even more carefully for some sign that voices unheard by others were intruding on my daughter’s peace, but I could detect no distress in her apple-cheeked face. Ada’s eyes were never drawn to Faier Forest, nor were her feet. I was careful not to let her know she must not stray there, fearful that my interdiction would draw her attention, and then she’d be locked into those whispering voices, telling her not to stay where she was loved.
As the years passed, I became convinced that Clyde had pulled me out of the Forest just in time to save Ada. He’d brought me back before I became a planted Faier tree, which would have triggered the next in line of the curse to be called.
I lay awake nights wondering whether the next child I gave birth to would be a daughter, and if she would bear the brand. But I never learned the answer. Clyde and I were unable to have another child. I was sad about that, but Clyde never seemed to be. He said he was happy with me, and I know he was happy with Ada, pleased with her choice of a Spruce husband, and delighted becoming grandfather to their three little sons.
I don’t know how Faier Forest populates its groves these days. I’ve often wondered if the curse tinged some other family. Or if ours was the only line to bear the curse. I hope not.
When Clyde passed away, Ada tied his knots, and his seven nephews carried his cedar log to the funeral pyre. I tied the Faier leaf necklace Clyde had whittled for me around his wrist and let it go up in flames along with his body.
I was frightened when I saw Clyde’s smoke rise toward Faier Forest. Perhaps the trees would learn that Clyde was gone, and that I was without the protection of his love and his talisman. I sat awake, waiting for The Chorus, but it never came.
Still, I stay far, far from the Forest. I keep close to Ada and her Spruce, and to the three little spruce sapling grandsons. And I remind myself that being with them every day what it means to love and to be loved.
Copyright © 2022 by Heather Pagano
