In the Forest of Light and Dark (10 page)

Francis Barrett
April 12, 1842—March 19, 1894
Ellen Barrett
August 3, 1851—July 5, 1865
Virginia Barrett
May 21, 1723—October 22, 1802
 

These were several of the names etched into the graves that I could read, having not been to weathered by time and the elements.
    At the end of the oldest row, over by the very edge of the creek,
we came across a grave that I’d figured must have been the one—our ancestor—that my mama said she couldn’t remember her name. It was the grave of the girl who had allegedly been friends with Abellona Abbott and subsequently tormented for being so. The engraving on the stone read.
 

Emma Barrett
September 4, 1720—July 11, 1736
 

Now, there was nothing about Emma’s grave in particular that made it stand out any more than any of the others in the Barrett section of the cemetery. It was what someone had
written
across the marble headstone that made it stand out from the rest. Across the face of the stone in big capital letters was the word WITCH in red spray paint. It was a sloppy job too, because there were streaks of dried-up excess paint that had dripped down from each letter, giving it the appearance of it being written in blood, not paint.
   It was at that point, I had to assume that this was the girl. Mostly, of course, given the fact that some douche-bag had spray painted the word witch across her gravestone, and given Emma’s date-of-birth, which would have put her at about sixteen-years-old in 1736. The same age my mama had told me Abellona Abbott supposedly was when she had died. At least that’s what I had recalled my mama having told me, that Abellona Abbott was about my age when she had died for allegedly being a witch.
   My step daddy and I had been standing in front of Emma’s grave pondering just who would do such a thing for at most maybe a couple of minutes when my mama came walking up the row of graves behind us. Her eyes were morose and still somewhat puffy and a little bloodshot as if she’d been crying, and when she spoke to ask us whose grave it was that we were looking at; her voice had a touch of unease in it.
     As she approached closer, I watched as my mama’s eyes suddenly became wide and then seemed to light up in her skull when she saw the word WITCH strew across Emma’s grave.
     “Jesus Christ!” she cholericly spat out. “Who the hell would do such a thing?”
     “Ah, some asshole.” my Step Daddy Cade said firing his cigarette butt to the ground then crushing it under his foot. “The world’s full of ‘em.”
     My mama, then quickly pulled a Kleenex out from her purse and started aggressively trying to remove the paint from Emma’s stone, but to no avail.
     “Awe, hell, that ain’t gonna work.” Step Daddy Cade griped at her. “I thought I saw a pint of paint thinner left over in the garage. We’ll come back tomorrow and get this cleaned up properly. Just leave it be for now.”
     My mama vigorously kept scouring, not listening at all to him and trying her darndest to remove the stubborn paint, but she was soon fell exhausted to her knees where I heard the sounds of dead, dried-up old leaves from past autumns crunching underneath her weight. She pressed on continuing to work on the spray paint—determined, even after my step daddy had raised his voice at her telling her to stop. It wasn’t until he had finally grabbed her by the arm that she’d given up and said in a defeated tone, “I… I guess you’re right. This isn’t going to come off.” Then, I watched as she palmed a couple of tears from the corners of her eyes. She then used the Kleenex to wipe the end of her nose.
     My mama, then stood up and turned to look back at my step daddy and me, and the harrowed look on her face was like something I had never seen before. She had suddenly become pallid and very wan as if the blood pressure had suddenly fallen out of her and all her energy zapped. She stood there frozen with her mouth agape, gawking at us.
     “Mama, are you all right?” I asked as I reached out to take her hand. “You don’t look so good.” But, all she did was stand there staring through us like we were invisible—ghosts.
     I hadn’t noticed right then, but I would a moment later, that my mama wasn’t staring at me or my step daddy at all, but what she was actually looking at was what was going on behind us without any of us even knowing. It was
that
which had left her in such a somnambulistic state.
     From behind us a staccato of meows begun to ascend, and I turned to see what was making the sudden cacophony.
     They were everywhere, hundreds of them, a whole myriad of strays dotting the graves and trees. Cats, everywhere I looked! They were all over the headstones and grounds. They were in the weeds and nettles, and even up in the two enormous weeping willows that the gravel trail snaked its way through. Cats of all sizes and colors. If you could picture a cat in your mind, any cat, odds are there would have been one that looked just like it standing, sitting, or lying before us at that very moment.
     The cats started hitching and meowing in unison, like they were one giant entity. The sound of them steadily grew louder-and-louder encompassing the total area to the point where you wouldn’t have been able to hear the person right next to you shouting.
     I felt myself begin to smile, and I thought to myself,
this is amazing!
     Again, at the time, I don’t know why, but wasn’t scared of what I saw. I just knew that we were safe—that they weren’t going to harm us.
     My Step Daddy Cade apparently had other thoughts going through his empty head because he started to scream and yell like a maniac at them as he waved his arms up over his head like he’d caught fire.
     “GET OUT OF HERE, YOU BASTARDS!” he shouted at the cats, and then he went on to pick up and old tree branch that had lain in the weeds close to Emma’s grave. “I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU!” he yelled as he ran at the closest of them swinging the branch like a cudgel.
     “No, don’t!” my mama called to him. “Leave them be, Cade. They haven’t done anything to us.”
     My step daddy then stopped and looked back at her with an,
Are you fucking kidding me?
contortion of his face, but then he lowered his club.
     “We’ll be just fine.” My mama, then said lowering her voice.
     My step daddy reluctantly gave in to her wishes and we slowly headed for the gravel trail so that we could make our ascent back up the steep hillside that would lead us back to the main part of the cemetery. I had remained taciturn the entire way. I guess I was
still in awe of what I was seeing.
     As we approached the cats, they split apart like the Red Sea giving us room to walk, my Step Daddy Cade remained clutching his tree branch as we neared.
     By the time we’d gotten to the top of the hill, the cats that had been ahead of us, had slipped over the crest as we approached, but then just seemed to have disappeared when we’d reached the summit. When I had stopped at the top to look back down at the bottom where the Barrett family gravesite lay, all the cats that had been down there had, by now, also vanished.
     “C’mon, let’s get the hell out of here. I’ve had enough of cemeteries and cats for one day.” My Step Daddy Cade said sounding gruff and irritated.
     When we had gotten back to the house he went straight to work on firing up our charcoal grill so he could make dinner. (Grilling was something I had noticed he’d like to do to help take his mind off things.) Soon after, it wasn’t long before he seemed back to his old self, even joking about grilling up a couple of those cats from the cemetery and feeding them to the local dogs. I just ignored his lame attempt at being funny, electing to go to my room to retrieve my cell phone off its charger, and to my surprise, it had a voice message on it from Tucker, Owen, and Lettie.
     When I called them back I had gotten the tall-and-skinny on what had gone on in Saraland since I’d left. Lettie told me that Eron Durfee had broken his leg when he laid down his crotch rocket in the middle of the roadway while trying to do a pop-a-wheelie to impress some girls. She said he was going to be laid-up for at least eight weeks in a cast. She also told me that she, Marzie, and Gerralyn had all found temporary work with B.P. helping to clean up the Gulf, and that Owen’s summer school class in English had finished up with him receiving a passing grade. So, it looked as if he’ll be going into our senior year and graduating on time with the rest of us after all.
Well
...
With the rest of them anyway.
     But, it was Tucker that I found myself happiest to hear from even though he went on-and-on about how things weren’t the same in Saraland anymore now that I wasn’t there. He also kept asking me when he could come up to New York to see me. I had told him that I didn’t know. That things were still really hectic right now, and that my parents and I still needed time to just get settled in.
    I didn’t tell him about Caroline Hemstock, the crazy woman from the diner, or what was spray painted on one of my family members gravestone, or of the cats. I didn’t want him thinking I’d moved to the twilight zone.
     He did sound to me as if a little disappointed after I’d told him to hold off on a visit. But then I told him for the time being my Step Daddy Cade was going to get to work on getting us a computer and high-speed internet. So then at least we could Skype whenever we wanted to see each other. The news of that seemed to pick his spirits up a little. Eventually, we had ended our conversation with him playing that annoying game of not wanting to hang up first. Ugh! I fucking hate that, so I had no problem hanging up on him first.

Exploring the Forest
 

It was the second week of August and my mama still hadn’t gotten around to taking me for a hike into the forest like she said she would. So, one afternoon I had finally had enough of waiting for her to do so and decided I would go check out the forest with or without her. I had been so bored out of my mind with just sitting around the house watching television that I really didn’t care about what she had said about how, the woods are really big, and how you could get turned around in them fast… blah blah blah.
     Puh-
lease
I remembered thinking of the thought of getting lost. Who was she kidding? Like this Southern girl couldn’t handle herself in the woods. Hell, I practically grew up in the woods with all the camping, hunting, and fishing trips Step Daddy Cade used to take me on.
So, I grabbed a bottle of water, put a generous amount of bug repellent on and took off to check out the forest for myself.
     At first, I followed the edge of our property line until I came to a little trail in the weeds that looked like it been made by a deer or another good-sized animal. It descended gently down the escarpment at first, but then I had to quicken my step as it became a little steeper, eventually taking me right down to the Genesee River.
     The river itself wasn’t as wide and as deep as I thought it would have been, and in spots, it looked like you could cross it without needing the aid of a bridge, the water perhaps coming up as high as my waist. But that was most likely because it was August and the heat wave we’d been experiencing had the area gripped in a drought.
     I had followed the river’s rocky shoreline for a little ways while listening to the sound of the rushing water flowing over rocks and deadfall. As I moved along, every so often I would see the occasional trout splashing up from one of the deeper pools, and as I hiked even further down the shoreline I began looking for a good place to cross over to the Mt. Harrison side of the river.
     Eventually, as I made my way past a bend in the river, I noticed that about three or four look-sees down the bank there was a walking bridge that I could use to gain access to the other side. But instead of using it, I had elected to climb up on an old, fallen down oak tree that spanned across one of the shallower sections of the river, and I used it to cross instead.
     When I had reached the other side, the terrain began to ascend up the northern escarpment ultimately giving way to the pine barrens that I had seen from our balconies.
     Brittle, parched brown and yellow pine needles crunched under my sneakers as I made my way through the trees and the air pleasantly smelled of Pine-Sol when the breeze picked up. In the distance I could hear a woodpecker assaulting one of the nearby trees, but I had failed to find it.
     I had stopped briefly to gather my bearings before, ascending up one of Mt. Harrison’s slopes. (The last thing I needed was to get lost in the forest after my mama had told me not to go in there without her. I would never have lived that down.) Then, I kept going determined to reach the top.
     Further up I came across about a dozen or so little, gray rabbits that darted and zigzagged about as I approached them, each having either dove into a hole or seeking the protection of the low-lying ferns where I could no longer see them.
     After what had felt like about a mile of hiking, maybe a little more, the pines gradually started giving way to oaks, maples, ash, black cherry, beech, and even a few Elms. At times the sun would break through the canopy of these trees and would cast yellow and orange glares of light down on the fallen branches and dead leaves that littered the forest floor.
    A little further up the slope I came across a garter snake that slipped past me to my right, and I have to admit, it had scared the crap out of me for a moment. Only given the fact that I am from Alabama and when we see a snake, there’s a strong chance that it could be a Cottonmouth, Copperhead, or even a rattler.
     As I continued on, moving through the maples and oaks, I had found a nice little walking stick that I then used to help me climb over rocks and downed trees.
     Stopping briefly, I checked my cell phone because I had a GPS app on it that I had used to take a mark when I’d first reached the river back near my house. The GPS now said that I was just over three miles north of the mark when I came to a clearing in the forest.
     At the clearing, the sun was looming directly over my head and I heard the sound of a crow caw a couple of times before I actually saw it fly across the sky before me.
     On the other side of the clearing the forest became even denser with thick, old-growth trees. They were much taller than anything we had back in Alabama and many of them at their bases were as wide as a car.
     After having leveled out, the forest floor began ascending up another hill and the small plants and ferns that had been, up to that point, pricking my bare legs with their sharp, little needles dissipated then disappeared altogether.
     At this point I had figured I would head up to the top of the hill to see if I could get a view of the village from up there. As I made my way, I stuck to the few open areas where the sun broke through the forest canopy. Halfway up, I had stopped to look up at the top of the hill, and I could see that the trees were beginning to transition from mostly maples and oaks to almost entirely that of birches with their peeling-white papery bark.
     The top of the hill gradually leveled out again, and I found myself now in a forest of Christmassy white poles having been surrounded by the birch trees. I thought of them as being enchanting and yet creepy at the same time, and I suddenly started feeling a malaise and wanting to go back down the hill to the relative safety of the maples and oaks.
     When I had turned around to start heading back down, out of my peripheral, lying at the base of a large birch I noticed a bulky, black stone. There had been a clearing in the canopy which allowed the sun to shine down upon it, and the light reflected off the rock’s shiny glass-like surface as if it was a mirror.
    I thought the rock seemed out-of-place where it lay because there were no other ones like it anywhere around, just the one. It was obsidian like, and it split the sun’s light that had reached it into a spectrum. I approached it slowly and as I did, I could see that there was something engraved on it, or possibly burnt into it, but I couldn’t tell just what it was. It was a symbol of some kind though. I didn’t recognize it or know what it might have meant, but it had reminded me of the weird symbols that I had seen in the pentagram painted on the floor our basement. Whatever it was, I figured I might have been able to look up at the village library so I took a picture of it with my phone. But sadly my phone was lost before I wrote this memoir so I’ve done my best to recreate it from memory. Here it is.