Chapter 1
Land Enough, and Time – 1937
Prophecy scours through a family like a glacier scours the land. Tearing rough grooves in the firmament, pulling great chunks of stone from the mountain, reshaping the thing itself, and sometimes washing it totally, utterly away.
When I was much younger, when the touch of it was still fresh upon my forehead, I imagined that prophecy pulled order from chaos. Conquered the great mercurial scattering of fates and pre-ordained us as a family to greatness. God forgive me my hubris, and us our iniquities.
The touch, as it were, came upon me first at Easter when I was seven. In my youth, holidays meant great family dinners, even in the lean war years since Uncle Frederick owned the grocery. Mother would clear the couch and chairs from the living room, pull the long dining table out of the dining room and place the two leaves into the center. Places would be set, even for the children, of whom there were only the three of us, some small servings of wine would be poured, sweet pickles and olives placed into serving dishes and the family would feast.
Great Aunt Clara, my Father’s Aunt was peculiar. Her mind, while apparently never truly salient at the best of times became unhinged sometime around the time that I was 4 or 5. This, coupled with her penchant for petty theft made her an entertaining component of any family gathering. Often at the close of dinner as she crossed the front step of our house on the way out, items which were unsecured inside her dress would tumble out – a saltshaker, two nutcrackers, a decorative soap piece in the shape of a rose. But this entertainment was to be the smallest, and most benign of her gifts to me.
It was her touch that spring day, which would, like a forge-fire burn through my life and the lives of my children. I had excused myself from the diner table while the adults were waiting for coffee and wound my way back into the house to the bathroom. Not having noticed Clara’s absence at the table, hearing her voice leak from around the partially closed bathroom door startled me. It was low, but melodic, more song-like than conversational and in a language completely foreign to me.
In retrospect, I believe that the language was completely foreign to her as well. Her denial of the event in later years, in her harsh whisper, her breath smelling of dinner mints and cigarettes, her voice low and raspy with emphysema, convinced me of it. Instead, I believe that this terrible thing came upon her like a waking dream. Not something she cultivated, nor even of which she was aware. But startled like some great beast out of its slumbering lair, it anointed her with it’s fire-tongue from the plains of her youth and her distant ancestry.
I hesitated only slightly at the door, but Clara’s chant, siren-like, drew me toward it. When I pushed open the door, she was in front of the sink, silhouetted by the light streaming in the window. Her blouse had been unbuttoned and hung around her waist like a discarded skin. Her chest was bare in the sunlight. Her breasts dripped with water. Her arms moved rhythmically back and forth beneath the faucet, her hands and their semi-translucent skin were held together, palm up, as if receiving the Eucharist. But it was the water from the sink, not the Body of Christ, which pooled in her hands and which she poured out upon her skin. The water splashed against her chest with the force of her movement and slicked down between her breasts and curled along her stomach where it soaked into her hanging clothes. She swayed slightly in her frail frame as she moved and her song-chant rose and fell ever so slightly in keeping with it.
The sight of her, in her half nakedness gave me pause at the door. But the spectacle only held me captivated for a moment before I realized I needed to stop my crazy Aunt from flooding the house. I crossed the threshold and approached her with some reserve. As I drew close enough to restrain her, she stopped her chant and her arm movements, turned and stepped close to me.
I could feel the cold of the water on her stomach close to my face. I thought to step back, but could not for fear and startlement. Instead I looked up into her face. Clara stared down on my, some strands of her white hair had pulled free from her clips and shown in the sunlight like a crown. Her dark eyes stared down on me, water dripped along the lines carved by age in her pale dark throat. Then the palm of her hand was upon my forehead, pulling my long hair back with her fingers. The cold and the dampness shot into me from the touch and anchored me to the tiles. My shoulders seemed to draw back and my arms to hang loosely at my sides. I made to speak, but her words were first. No longer in an unknown tongue or a sonorous voice. But in a deep resonance that seemed to echo in my very bones she spoke, or perhaps she did not actually speak, but there were suddenly words between us, as if they had appeared in the gulf between thought and act, between intention and speech. There were words, and to me they felt like the first words spoken to me across the darkness of the womb. I cannot explain them except in such esoteric terms. They felt like what I have imagined a spell must feel like to informed ears. Words of making and unmaking, of the place beyond the born and the unborn, beyond the light and the dark, where all things come together and you can see the halves put together in their wholeness. The words came crashing across this divide, and even in her whisper roared in my ears.
“The child of your child shall dream the great dream. He will bring us great and terrible times.”
Then she was away from me, her hand no longer upon my brow, my hair still damp from her touch. She stepped back a pace and seeming to come around as if this were commonplace she pulled a hand towel from the rack and began to dry herself off. I remained rooted to the spot, a small drop of water rolling down between my eyebrows and down beside my nose like a tear.
She turned to me again. Her face, just a moment before stern and pointed, now had a relaxed somewhat bewildered look upon it. She glanced at me quickly and then down at herself. Her countenance took on a shocked look and she mumbled something incoherent and fumbled with her clothes.
“Oh my, what am I doing here?” she said as she straightened out her wet blouse.
I found my voice then and said hesitantly, “Aunt Clara?”.
“Jane? Oh. Dear, do you need to use the restroom?”, Clara asked with a confused smile as she looked cautiously around.
I must have stammered something, though I can not recall what because Clara nodded and gently tottered around me towards the open door. Absently as she walked by the vanity she reached out with her hand and snatched a small brooch which she deposited into the waistband of her skirt. Then, trying to smooth out the small concealed bulge, she walked out of the room.
The words she spoke stayed with me, long after the cold and the force of her touch and the wetness of the water faded. They smoldered like some dark coal in the pit of my belly, slowly burning in the dark and the fog. They would grow to a conflagration which would in time raze my life’s work and kill my daughter. They would grow to consume me and in their maddening enigmatic phrasing doom me to a life of questioning half-steps and second guessing.
How I would strike that day from my life had I the power. But now, I must live through these twilight years with their legacy fresh and bloody, and their truth still untested and unknown. Though the child grows even now in this springtime. How great, how terrible shall be his works? Was I mistaken, and my pride and my fear merely manifestations of some old betty’s dementia fueled ravings. This would be the cruelest turn of all. And yet I cannot say, even at this late date. And I cannot face him, him nor his grandfather. Visiting days are few and I have requested that I be left alone with only my room and the peacocks in the yard as company. Perhaps it was madness which coursed through her fingers that day, not water. Perhaps it was not cleansing and rebirth which her arcane blood poured forth in some ancient tongue, but the transference of a curse upon the later generations. The Bible claims a cursed family, one who has been doomed by the Lord shall even unto the seventh son of a seventh son be bound to the fate set by their wickedness. Perhaps Clara in her delusions knew some truth about my fate, knew even then that I was bound by my weaknesses to be a betrayer, a Mother who would kill her own child in her selfishness.
My only wish is that they would unbind my hands that I might wash myself clean of these sins. I would strip half-naked and wash my breasts as Clara did. I would not harm myself again, only hope to wash myself clean. Lord let me wash myself clean. And, Lord may the child of my child dream the great dream. May he bring us through the great and terrible times ahead.