WILLODEAN (THE CUPITOR CHRONICLES Book 1) (40 page)

Maw Sue lived with her mother’s estranged sister, Aunt Raven, who I
was fascinated with. 
Aunt Raven was a tall, lanky woman with black silk hair in a bun and bulbous ears. Her wardrobe was as limited as her lifestyle, three black skirts, gypsy round with beads that clattered and signaled her whereabouts like cat bells. She rotated shirts, a gray stretchy sweater for winter, or a dirt colored poncho. She
wore a green scarf all the time, either around her waist, tied up in her hair or around her neck.  Maw Sue said she never took it off.  Maw Sue hadn’t heard her mother mention her sister at all, so it was a shock to know she had an aunt. 
She wondered what her story was and why no-one bothered to speak of her. Aunt Ra
ven was solitary and secretive which could have been the reason, she wasn’t sure.  She kept to herself most times, rarely with friends. 
She was well in her seventies,
but looked as if she was still fifty.  She had never married and neither did she regret it. 
She remained overly content with a solitary
lifestyle much like a hermit, if it hadn’t of been for Maw Sue staying with her, she might have simply talked to birds or wild animals. 
She rarely left the boundaries of her house, taking refuge in her wild garden which consisted of five acres of torrential vines, mass cascading trees and an abundance of wild perennials and evergreens.
No one came to visit.  The doorbell never rang, no knocks at the door except for the groceries and
household items
delivered weekly and prepaid. 

She reminded Maw Sue on a daily basis, that it was perfectly fine to be single
and content with oneself, the more merrier one would be, and the less they had to meet others expectations, lest they only fulfill their own.  Whatever that meant. 
She could barely hear the words, much less live a life of that nature. Maw Sue yearned for love. To be without love, without a person in her life, a man, a parent, someone—was an unbearable, unthinkable
burden. 
Never.

Over time, Maw Sue learned Aunt Raven was different, evolved in her a world of her own making, a lone wolf alienated from people and pl
easures. She did, however teach her to learn things.  Maw Sue
learned to sew and
fell in love with the loft library upstairs stuffed with walls and walls of old books.  They became her friends. 
She absorbed books and developed a love for words which perfected her art of storytelling later in life. When
she spoke of the library her eyes would light up. 
She read Hemingway, Plath and Wolf. It was there she discovered a tribe of people like herself, those who suffered
mind illnesses, people often labeled by society as crazy, unstable.   
Their works garnered an enormous impact on society and inspired their creative genius, for without the mutated gene, none of the masters would have created the masterpieces of art, so popular in novels, in paintings, in sculptures.
Their differences, made them stand out from the crowd.  As Shakespheare wrote, from the lips of Romeo, “So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows.”  They stood out from the crowd, a dove amongst crows. 
Their greatest works came through
their sufferings.  Maw Sue began to wonder if they too, came from a line of Cupitors. 
It was a relief to know that those who suffer greatly in the mind could create such great works.
This inspired her to read more. 
Vivien Leigh depressed most her life also wrote Gone with the Wind. Charles Dickens, the same. Vincent Van Gough had bipolar disease, a mind altering Doctor Jeckel and Hyde complex but look at his work. 
Incredible. 
Depression followed Tolstoy and Nash, Churchill and Donizett and even our President, Abraham Lincoln had his moments of clinical depression and thoughts of ending it all. Each one honed and chiseled and made their suffering into their best work. They were willing to touch the pain and thereby create genius. It was mind bending for
Maw Sue considering her mind, how dark and depraved she knew it could sink.  But it did, engage her, fuel her and yet in the same breathe, it scared her to death.  Touching
the pain
of her own heart was vast, wide and unthinkable. 
How did they do it?
 

One morning after reading A Far Country by Winston Churchill, she trounced into the oversized den, book in hand,
and mind full of questions.  She found Aunt Raven asleep in her chair.  Maw Sue
tip toed closer but with each step her vision
changed.  She saw a
dark ominous cloud hovering abo
ve Aunt Raven's tight black bun like stirred up gnats, black horrible gnats. 
 
She knew before she knew.
 Before it could confirm itself, sink from her mind, to her heart, she knew the horrible, terrible had happened. 
She stood in one place, frozen in fear, her mother’s face forming in the cloud of gnats. 
Her thumbs rippled the pages of the book in her hands making a dreadful flapping noise. Her mind went to the place of the dead. 
Like a lifeless zombie, she stepped in front of her hoping it wasn’t true.  Hoping she’d raise her hand or rock her chair, or blink her eyes or something but in the place of the dead, no one moves, no one stirs but the shadows. 

Aunt Raven sat stiff and lifeless in the same position
Maw Sue remembers from the night before, when she told her goodnight.  Aunt Raven replied with a smile, as usual and then Maw Sue would rub the ends of her g
reen silk green scarf around her neck. Aunt Raven had never been the touchy-feely type to begin with so when Maw Sue came to live with her,
her clinging nature became a bit overbearing.  So instead, Aunt Raven
would let Susannah sit beside her and touch the ends of her green silk scarf, rubbing it tenderly, to soothe her troubled mind. It’s as close to Aunt Raven as she could get. 

Finding Aunt Raven dead was the crack that split
what was left of her in two.  She collapsed beside her on the cold plank floor and between her fingers, she kneaded the scarf and wept. 
In that moment, she did not want to be alive.
Alone in the world. 
She felt the trauma of her mother’s
death again and again and again, blending and converging with Aunt Ravens, more than she could bear.  She rubbed the silk scarf until it felt like sandpaper, no longer silky and no longer soothing her mind.  It was like rats scratching at her brains, as if they were trapped and trying to find a way out. 
It was hours, or days later, she
did not know. Time simply lost—fading in and out into the dark of the house.  The ravaged mind thoughts had their way, leaving her in a catatonic state of being, loss of feelings, numb to all.  Her fingers were
raw
and left holes in the silk scarf but she did not let it go.  She stood up with the scarf wrapped in her fingers, the house inside her,
frantic and disturbed, chanting with restless voices, a multitude of unfamiliar lips occupying the rooms.
Her nostrils lingered with the smell of death.  S
he stood in front of Aunt Raven, weaving on bare feet,
and feeble legs wearing her white thin gown.  She held the scarf and
leaned down to touch her
head and move it to the side so she could unwind the scarf.  Instead of turning, it
flo
unced downward in an ugly flop. 
The wretched sound made her stomach lurch. She shook limb to limb
but she had to get it.  It was a lifeline to all she knew.  All she had left in this world. 
In that moment, she saw her life in scratches and claws, trying to hold and keep something precious but it always slipping away. 
 She gently leaned her
head upward and to the side, fighting waves of nausea.  Aunt Raven’s eyes were diminished like
aged glass marbles. She closed her lids as to not stare into the bitterness of a passed soul for fear it would take her and she would
not fight it. 
She unwrapped the scarf from her neck,
and slipped it around her own.  For a
mere second, she felt it tighten
like a noose. 

“I will take my hug with me Aunt Raven.”
She said with a cracked voice.  I
t was then she saw the red pulsating beat of the stone necklace.
She had noticed it before, many times since it was the only jewelry Aunt Raven owned and never removed.  But it looked different, faded like a heart slowing in beats, as if it was
crossing over to the otherworld
following its owner to the other side.  Without thought, she unlatched the necklace and put it inside her pocket. 
She bent down and kissed Aunt Raven on the cheek. “Goodbye Auntie. You’ve been good to me. I will miss you.” And she ran upstairs, retrieved her favorite books from the library, and packed what little belongings she had, changed clothes and walked solemnly downstairs for the last time.

Before she walked out, she went to the kitchen and collected the stash of money Aunt Raven kept for emergencies inside a mason jar. She stuffed 
it deep into her bag. 
She heard a rattling noise coming from the living room.
Spooked, she crept inside.  A shadow of Aunt Raven appear ghostly, barely there, and floated above her corpse holding a solitary white rose.  Maw Sue’s breath left her.  She
backed up towards the front door, unable to take her eyes off the apparition
.  She wasn’t sure it was real or imagined. 
A rapid thump pulsed
against the inner folds of her bag where she had placed her nightgown, with the red stone still inside the pocket.  Before she ran out, never to return,
the ghostly apparition of Aunt Raven
spoke loudly in her cursed ears. 
“See…in the end it is better to be alone. No attachments, no pain.”

Maw Sue turned and ran wildly through the maze of gardens, fighting thick overgrown shrubs and briars but on impulse
came to a halt in front of a rose bush. 
The lump in her throat nearly choked her and without knowing why, she clipped off a long stemmed yellow rose. She ran and never looked back.
Fate with its curses and gifts intervened shortly after.  Days came and went without recognition, simply vanishing from her memory, great lapses of time gone.  And then, one day she woke up inside a hospital ward. 
She had no
recollection of how she came to be there or the days past. 
Doctors at the clinic said she checked herself in but she implied she would have
never done that.  Months later they released her. 
Her frame of mind
no longer altered and she was a peace.  The doctors put her on medications to help her
mind wanderings, the
visions and the voices silenced. 
A woman at the clinic even helped her
find a job at a sewing factory so she had a good start. 
She found the mason jar still inside her bag and had enough money to
find a small room to rent that was close to her job.  She walked to work, day in and day out.  Just when the loneliness sought to sink her in despair, on her walk home after work, she ran into her first husband and it was literally a run into, a crashing of two bodies on the corner of third and Bryant Street.  Jefferson Starbuck Adams came to the same corner every day to run into her again and again, and
pursued her endlessly until Maw Sue accepted his proposal.

She was happier than she ever knew she could be but most importantly, she wasn’t alone. He brought out the best of who she was and she loved him dearly. The first year was more than sh
e dreamed a marriage could be.  Next, came a house full of children and the world was good.  Three years later, it fell apart.  God gave—and then he took.  Jefferson Starbuck Adams died of pneumonia.  Maw Sue fell apart, literally in body, mind and spirit. 
The darkness ate at her soul. The lesser light cas
t its grimy film over her eyes.  She
cursed it all, the light and the lesser light,
for its greed.  Maw Sue said she was never
quite the same again. She admitted her heart grew hard at God’s demanding choices for her life, the crosses she had to bear. Meanwhile, while this happened, the Mirror bin never let up on its requirements, its purposed plan for her, so it continued to press her with its demands, rules, and channeling methods until she broke. 
The voices, the visions, the mind wanderings returned and she checked out of this world. 
Broken.
 When Maw Sue told me this part of the story—I think I broke too.

***

Growing up, I was bombarded with stories, antidotes, metaphors and other peculiar things that always pointed to the gift. “Never take the easy way out.” Maw Sue said. “Confront it head on—straight on. Upfront. Don’t back down. Get it over with. Push through it because if you don’t you’ll regret it later. Life will give you every opportunity to take the easy road.” It was an endless word analogy of something or another. 
She was warning me.  She
knew the great cost to be appointed such a seekers gift, to receive it, yet
leave it dormant.
 
Unused. 
She knew the utter sadness of leaving a gift unwrapped, unopened, unfulfilled and hidden in obscurity because of fear, insecurities, and obstacles. Cupitor’s are born to pursue and fulfill a quest stirring inside them from the day they are born. It is a divine spark of passion and pursuit that will render them restless until it is acted upon. 
If unused—it will turn to a curse.
 Maw Sue, the woman, the child, Susannah Josephine Worrell, my great grandmother had squandered her gift. But before she died, she swore she’d make certain I didn’t squander mine.