House of Darkness House of Light Read online

  ***

  During the first year on the farm a garden spot went completely to waste, much to Carolyn’s dismay. There was too much happening in the house to be bothered with much else beyond it. The supernatural upheaval precluded turning over one single square foot of Earth. Not nearly as much interaction with the natural world as she would’ve preferred. The garden stared back at her through windows thrown open to welcome the spring. She mourned the loss. There it lay, untouched as if unloved, producing only pea green grass and the assorted ground cover, occasionally a few odd weeds thrown into the mix. Dandelions were sprouting in abundance, festive in color but otherwise useless. Carolyn was terribly disappointed. An opportunity squandered. She had come to the farm with high hopes, planning to restore it, to make it a working farm again, at least to some extent. She intended to till the land ’til death do they part, a real commitment on her part, one she took seriously.

  A second spring arrived to find the woman changed, sobered by events. She was determined to make her garden grow into an abundant food source, a cornucopia for family and friends. It likewise served a valuable purpose as an escape from the bizarre happenings inside the house, or so she thought. It never occurred to Carolyn that manifestations could happen beyond its walls, out in Mother Nature. Though the barn posed hazards of its own, she did not consider the garden a hotbed of supernatural activity.

  Roger roto-tilled the soil, an insurmountable undertaking at first. Hard-packed, unforgiving dirt did not yield easily. Indulging his desire to get that job done and over with, its unrelenting surface fought him, tooth and nail. Once the land was finally turned over, the aroma it released was intoxicating, filling the air with promise. God willing, the weather would cooperate. Frost is a mortal enemy of all New England farmers. Transforming the farmhouse into the harvest home barely three months later, everyone was astounded by what it was producing and equally overwhelmed by the amount of work involved to put it up for the winter. Simple seed lived up to its potential, transforming itself into a resplendent array of fruit and veggies of every hue. Swiss chard, tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, summer squash, butter and sugar corn, sweet peas: variety is the spice of life! A mind-boggling assortment of fresh, delicious food: an incredible accomplishment for a mom. No matter what, their family would eat. It put a mind at ease as she canned and steamed and froze the remains of a day spent picking her fingers stiff and sore. Hard lessons learned: the bountiful harvest required much tending and attention. Snap beans needed to be snapped. Canning is its own daunting task. The girls worked alongside their mother, generously imparting her knowledge.

  Because the kids were all in school, including April by the second spring, Carolyn did much of the planting alone. Hour after hour of back-breaking, knee-popping, bending and stooping was spent in solitude, rediscovering the pleasant and not as pleasant sensation of being so close to the essence of life, intermingling with planet Earth. While preparing supple ground to receive plants and seeds alike her slender fingers lingered, passing through cool dirt, breaking up clumps, removing the stumps of acorns staking a claim of their own. Deeply buried by diligent squirrels, the little suckers were taking root. Their destiny was in her hands. Those well-developed enough to find another home were given a second chance at life, to thrive, to become a mighty tree. A gentlewoman thoughtfully put them aside to later transplant into the forest bed. So like the mother, each one of her foundlings given an opportunity to reach full potential. She treated her plants as tenderly as she did her children.

  A journey through the darkness beneath her feet would yield more than a fruitful, opulent garden. She made a thrilling discovery, one warm afternoon, while turning a long row to hoe by hand. Striking something solid, laying her tool aside, reaching beneath the surface, Carolyn presumed she would fetch yet another rock to keep company with hundreds that came before it. Eureka! Instead, the land gave her a gemstone of sorts. There in her hand she held an exquisite artifact, a priceless relic in the form of a hand-struck pewter buckle which once belonged to a leather shoe. Spellbound, Carolyn studied her rare and precious gift from the land. An intriguing object from the past captured her imagination in the present, as a present, instantly lifting her spirits. In that moment she was transported in space, back through time, bewitched by an enchanting garden as it had been, two centuries before. Suddenly, in her mind’s eye, she was the woman hovering over the earth, nurturing plants as a leather strap snaps on her shoe and its buckle slips through without notice, buried. Lost and found again. Transfixed by the vision, for a time Carolyn didn’t know when, where or who she was in the garden’s ancient history. In that moment, she could have been retrieving something she’d lost long ago.

  ***

  Early June: time to stake the hot spots tomatoes had claimed in late May. They were literally growing like weeds. It was an unusually warm and windy morning. Hatchet in hand, she plunged another wooden stake deeply into the ground, about two feet apart. She expected a lot of her babies and gave them plenty of room to spread out. Soft dirt did not resist her efforts. Pounding the metal to wood, she worked like a man, staking her claim of the land, every precise and powerful strike punctuating her presence. This was HER garden! In time, it would nourish an entire community but it was her baby. Each line measured to exacting standards, each row meticulously planted. Her garden, admired by many, transformed from a vacant plot of land to a piece of living artwork. A wonder to behold. No one had to wonder what made her garden grow. It was obvious to all who witnessed the transformation. Love. It was true love.

  Working with her back to the back of the house, Carolyn faced the long, sloping route down to the river. No time set aside for taking in the scenery, she pressed on, head down, nose to the grindstone. Hearing the sound from behind her, carried by the brisk breeze, it was drifting from inside the house. Stooped over, she slowly twisted her torso around, to listen. It must have been the wind passing through the eaves. Roger was away. The girls were all in school. Not a living soul was in the house. There it was again, carried by the wind, delivering a message. A startled mother stood abruptly at attention the instant she heard the child’s cry; a virtual command made for a mother.

  “Mama” . . . steeped in desperation, pain and solitude. Sadness. Grief. Loss. Amazing how a single word could communicate pure, raw emotion. “Mama” Carolyn heard the call. She heard the word distinctly, uttered from the voice of a child… a little girl. No question. Her heart leapt. In mere seconds, a rush of adrenaline surged throughout her entire body with a jolt! Every motherly instinct she possessed kicked into high gear. Sensory perceptions were on alert. Remaining completely still and silent, she listened to the pitiful moaning, the sound of a little girl in terrible pain. Awestruck, Carolyn felt sickened by the pleas, her mournful cry for help. There was no mistaking the haunting sound. It had been reported before, heard by her daughters, coming from inside their rooms. Glancing upward, gazing at the portal into the middle bedroom, it was coming from within a wide-open window in the center of the dormer, overlooking the garden. She heard the wailing of a hopeless child in distress, bereft and weeping, left all alone in the house, beckoning a mother long gone but not forgotten. A shroud of darkness swept over Carolyn. Fade to black. A fainting spell cast from beyond the grave, she collapsed to the ground, losing consciousness… dead to the world.

  Carolyn does not know how long she lay prone upon the cool, moist earth that morning. When she finally regained her senses, it was only to discover a serious injury sustained in the fall, or so she presumed. Stretched on her side, a tomato stake protruding from her right hip, her blue jeans were rusty red, saturated with blood to her boots. Overcome by the panic and pain, Carolyn describes her reaction as being in shock. Disoriented, she did not know what to do or where to find help. The sharp point of the stake had impaled her so deeply, it wouldn’t budge. The more she tugged, the more it bled. It had apparently struck her with such force; the point went through the thick outer seam on the side of her blue jeans, straig
ht into her hip. With one solid yank accompanied by a mortal scream, Carolyn removed most of it, but the stakes were old, ones she had found discarded in the barn. The wood was rotten. It snapped off; a large shard of it remained lodged in her upper thigh, bleeding profusely. She knew she was in trouble.

  There was a cluster of houses nearby, about two hundred yards up Round Top Road. Surely someone in the neighborhood would help her. Hobbling at an urgent pace, as quickly as she could, Carolyn went to the front door of the first house she came to and knocked. Lori’s mother, Mrs. George, answered. She saw the wound and went all to pieces. She would not allow Carolyn to cross her threshold, frightened as much by the victim as she would have been by a perpetrator at her door. It was as if she had seen a ghost! No one could fault the frantic woman. It was a shock to her system, a horrible thing to see. Carolyn pleaded with her for some help removing what remained of a bloody shard protruding from her hip. Refusing assistance, anything other than her willingness to call for an ambulance, their traumatized neighbor was unable to overcome her own fears of the farm and its “occupants” in order to help extricate the intrusive wood from Carolyn’s flesh. It was out of the question. She began sobbing at the sight of it and then she closed the door.

  Returning home, anxious to tend to the gruesome wound before the girls arrived from school, Carolyn drew herself a bath, carefully peeling the denim away from a gaping hole in her hip. It was a repulsive sight. Climbing slowly into the steaming water, as hot as she could tolerate, Carolyn gently lowered her torso as tears poured down her face, unbridled cries of pain escaping her quivering lips. She appeared to be swimming in a pool of blood; the residual coating on her body blended with what kept seeping through an open wound. The puncture was deep, perhaps an inch and a half or more, with another half an inch of wood protruding above the surface of the skin. A severe injury, it required medical attention. A doctor with sterile instruments needed to probe it to remove jagged fragments of the offending object, as quickly as possible, before infection had a chance to set in. It was not to be. Roger had planned to be away for at least a week and left his wife with twenty-five dollars in cash, for emergencies . . . the meager amount, inadequate even by 1972 standards. It certainly would not cover the costs associated with a trip to the hospital. No. Carolyn was left to her own devices and she knew it, having earlier declined the offer of a call for help. Though not in the budget, it qualified as an emergency.

  Pervasive despair, a painfully real sense of lack and deprivation staked its claim beside a dreadfully injured, emotionally battered woman who thought she was alone, steeping in the bloody brew… a bitter cauldron of discontent. Unfortunately, hot water caused the opposite effect intended; her tender flesh reacted by swelling. Carolyn had hoped the heat would draw the object out. Instead, her skin appeared to pucker up, sucking the fragment further inside the hole rather than expelling the tip of the spear. After five days of constant care and attention, while sitting in an intensely hot bath, her body finally rejected the piece of wood. It suddenly shot out of her hip, as a projectile, from beneath a flap of overlapping skin torn open during impact. The worst of her ordeal was over, even though it took weeks for the exposed puncture to completely close. Not a mortal wound but a wounded mortal, to be sure, Carolyn gingerly nursed the point of impact. Roger arrived a day or so after the extraction to find his wife limping and healing and wholly pissed off, with a sordid story to tell.

  Believe it or else! An origin of a wound inflicted while gardening remains a mystery. Unless a physicist would explain how such a thing could happen, she’ll continue to believe as she does: it was no accident… not a coincidence. There was a malfeasance afoot, a deliberate intention to injure. She feels it in her gut as she once felt it in her hip, to the bone. Carolyn well remembers how awful it was, the incessant, throbbing pain endured, how much it bled. Whatever caused the incident, its effects on the woman were as profound as permanent. She believes the only natural explanation is utterly implausible; she’d collapsed onto a tomato stake that had already been pounded into the ground, buried at least a foot, maybe as much as eighteen inches deep. It would have had to flip up out of the ground then fly up into the air, spin into a vertical position then plunge back to Earth with significant velocity; the force necessary to impale her body, nearly two inches deep, through a thick side seam of heavy denim blue jeans. Nothing could explain the perfectly square hole in the ground left behind where the stake had been impaled; dirt undisturbed, as if pulled straight out then plunged into her. Taking a moment to pause and reflect, she cannot help but wonder if someone was trying to make a point or stake a claim of their own. Based on what was yet to come, Carolyn wonders if she was the claim staked, stalked by a woman not of this world.

  Convinced of the nefarious nature of this bizarre event, evil incarnate responsible for the brutal attack, she is too pragmatic a person to discount or dismiss the remote possibility she is dead wrong. If this actually occurred as a freak accident, she could have been killed. Had the tomato stake pierced a lung or punctured her temple, the vision of a potential disaster is disturbing. Carolyn considers herself a fortunate woman while counting her blessings.

  If memory serves, and in some cases it does so too well, Carolyn has no recollection of feeling a presence around her during the rude awakening she suffered… whatever had come was gone… needle and the damage done. If it was a threatening message, it was straight to the point. The memory of the incident spooks her still. Carolyn struggled to comprehend the true nature of the dangerous encounter. She finds it far more plausible that this occurrence was supernatural phenomenon; perhaps as punishment for the presumptuous mistress of the house, staking a claim where she didn’t belong. Intimidation tactics as an overt threat issued. A promise made as a cryptic voice heard or a contemptuous message received by its intended victim? The startled mother still remembers the call of a little girl coming from the eaves of a not-so-vacant farmhouse.

  ***

  Carolyn’s garden was resplendent, a wonder to behold. She still feeds a neighborhood. Having bid a not-so-fond farewell to New England long ago, forsaking its thick, rich black dirt, she now works diligently to replicate it in Georgia, augmented by mixing bags of manure and topsoil into red clay and sand by hand, preparing the ground to receive seed. At harvest her daughters hear the same words they were weaned on, a super-sensory revisiting of the past, listening as she makes light of time gone by. Her children still gather to learn more about the cosmic secrecy of seed. Leaning over the tomato stakes, cradling the swollen fruit, ripe for the picking, they will linger in the comfort zone to hear the soft voice they’ve known lifelong, repeating the sage words of advice she has passed to her ancestors: To every thing there is a season and a time for every purpose under Heaven. Carolyn still sings to her girls.

  “Affliction comes to us all, not to make us sad, but sober;

  not to make us sorry,

  but to make us wise; not to make us despondent,

  but by its darkness to refresh us

  as the night refreshes the day; not to impoverish,

  but to enrich us.”

  Henry Ward Beecher

  ~ hallowed ground laying fallow for winter ~

  making matters worse

  “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not;

  and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Always a bit of a rabble-rouser, one way or another, Roger found lights out, nobody home, no one to raise but the dead. He could certainly stir them up! He’d returned to the farm in good spirits, only to find it empty of living souls, save his wife, who he found injured, not quite as cheerful, working out in their garden. Her mood was foul, her mouth more so when she realized he was there. He’d had a lucrative trip, sharing the spoils in the form of a big smile, at least for the moment. Concerned that she was limping, he asked her what was wrong. What was right? Cursing him beneath her breath, the blame game had
begun. Using the hoe as a crutch, she hobbled up to the farmhouse without saying a word. Once in the kitchen, Carolyn slowly lowered a flimsy fleece, the softest fabric she found to cover a wound while working in dirt. Better safe than sorry. Removing a bandage, Roger had a few choice words:

  “Holy Jesus Christ!” His emphatic prayer issued on her behalf, no doubt. The ultimate flesh wound reared its ugly head, and it was a week (or more) healed when he first saw it. Shocked, stunned into submission for a moment, he did not know what more to say. The eye of the beholder was offended by the sight. He’d cringed, wincing with her as she replaced the gauze bandage, securing it in place with yet another strip of Scotch tape from the sideboard, all she had on hand, serving the purpose well enough. A first aid kit emptied days earlier lay sprawled open on the bathroom shelf, awaiting replacements. It was one of those rare occasions when Roger had been rendered speechless.

  Carolyn told the story well. She picked up where he left off, propped up against the old black stove, telling him things he didn’t want to know about. After all, if she was right, it meant the spirits could maim and wound mortal souls. He’d refused to go there, and even though he heard her out, in graphic detail, Roger never accepted the notion that this accident was anything other than an awful, eerie, freak accident. His demeanor belied his opinion on the matter. Twisting his lips into a sardonic curl, a gesture with which she was all too familiar, Carolyn accused Roger of being insensitive to her plight, which was not true. He cared. He just didn’t believe it happened the way she described it, complicating matters. More than just semantics, there was an ongoing dispute, a difference of opinion to consider, the basic tenets of cause and effect. Because of her husband’s predisposition to argue every point she made since their time together began, Carolyn expected it. Skepticism was his calling card. She tried to explain this encounter as yet another hit and run moment, when the spirits come then go, very quickly, leaving their mark. A wound of this nature was certainly going to leave one hell of a scar behind, inside and out… for life. Finally, punctuating her end of their debate with an exclamation point, as a long piece of wood, Carolyn handed her husband the sliver of the stake that languished in her body for a week. It had dried out by then and was as sharp as a needle at the tip. His wife had been stabbed with a weapon and he knew it in his gut, something he’d failed to admit for thirty years. He had done the math. Calculating the trajectory, velocity it would’ve needed to attain in order to penetrate the seam of her blue jeans. No way. It would have had to be traveling from too great a distance to do such damage. She had exposed a hole left behind in her hip and the one in her denim jeans, too. It was inexplicable. There was only one logical explanation.