~ Ancient Secrets ~

by

Billie A. Williams

::What is in your heart emanates from each stone. Only the purest heart can hold these stones.:: The sound echoed from somewhere not audible, and registered only in his mind it seemed. He didn’t hear a sound in his ears, of that he was very sure. With that the small box whisked out of his hand and deposited itself back in the lingerie drawer under layers of her personal silk undergarments. Daringer stood long, looking at what had happened and wondering if he had imagined it. Perhaps the grief he held, the fear for his mother’s life, clouded what he thought he saw, what he thought he heard--did it really occur?

Where would she have ever come up with such trinkets? Her trips took her to worlds she knew intimately and we never knew at all. We were too busy to be interested in what we called her eccentricities. Her travel journals on the book shelf beckoned him; at least he thought they did. What magic force did she encounter to come away with these stones? He toyed with the idea of removing the box and putting it in his pocket to ponder their significance later. Do I dare leave them behind and never know what became of them?

Guardedly, he slipped his hand back into the drawer, withdrew the box, and tucked it into his pocket. He felt warmth where it touched against him. He noticed no sound, no further wind with garish cries to chill his soul or slights of hand depositing the box where it chose--merely warmth, penetrating warmth radiating into his skin. He felt it safe to take the necklace with him then. He gathered the travel journals in his arms. Perhaps she recorded the source of these stones; he left the room with them.

He dared to glance one time around the room. It’s emptiness without her presence was more than he could bear. He wanted to run away, to be gone from here and not look back. If she was to be buried; there was little else he wanted of her left behind life. Let the rest of them deal with her possessions, he had the memories and that was enough for now. The box moved slightly in his pocket. He patted it. “And you, of course,” he murmured to the emptiness.

~ * ~

In the days that followed the house was flooded with well-wishers, condolence-spouters--as though there were already a wake. Never noticing her before, they did now. Daringer could not sit through a torturous semi--or pre--wake. She isn’t dead yet, he wanted to shout, but held his tongue.

Instead, he walked until he couldn’t walk anymore and found himself at the outdoor market. He watched the colorful streams of marketers. He walked hopelessly in the crowded streets. The serapes and parasols bumped and prodded him. The sights and sounds blurred past him. The haggling drone of the venders soothed his grief more than all the well-wishers with their pasty gray faces, false, sad furrowed brows and crocodile tears.

People squeezed, smelled, pinched, and prodded the colorful array of fresh produce. They held the bright fruit up to the sun as though they offered it in prayer to Ra or the deity of fruit, before they dropped it into bags, boxes, and sacks or snuck them into pockets while they thought no one watched. The market was alive and vibrant with everydayness. A wake was not awake, why call it that? It was dead and still, silent and sad, painful and pointless. Even the spirits of the dead do not visit at the wake. There is too much sadness for them to bear. So why should we? Listen to people’s lies. “She looks so peaceful lying there,” they say. I want to shout, “Did you ever see her sleep?”

Isana and Trudchen were already preparing her wake--when she lingers still this side of heaven’s gate.

“Prepare for the inevitable,” Isana said. Always so practical and organized with her hand out for whatever she could grab and pocket.

“Isn’t it enough,” he said. “This steady stream of condolences and well wishers hovering at the door like vultures waiting for scraps of her life to be tossed to them to savor after her death? What if she lives?” He wanted to shout, to no one in particular, but to shut out the sound of Isana’s drone about what we must do when.

“Out damn spot,” so like Macbeth, I want to purge that woman from my life, she who shared one third of our mother. She didn’t deserve her share, she was like the blood-red stain that wouldn’t wipe clean.

“She looks good. Her hair is very nicely done,” they say.

He wants to shout, “Did you know the skin melts when a curling iron touches the scalp of a dead person?” He drew his attention back to the joyous hubbub of the market square.

Green, yellow, and every shade in between, bananas hung in huge clumps hacked from the trees that very morning. “Too much,” one yelled over the din of bartering hordes. Not to a starving child. They’d gladly pay any price, if they only had it, for the spoils that littered the ground and beckoned the insects and rodents and robber birds. Children starve, not allowed to enter the market square. They wouldn’t let the children in to clean up the dropped fruit. The starving hordes of brown little faces with eyes as big as moons and arms as gaunt as scarecrows standing at the periphery of all that luscious fruit rotting in the sun... Weren’t they as good as the insects, rodents and birds? They lined the streets outside the market begging like so many little brown beads strung on a string of starvation within inches of salvation. No one noticed, or so it seemed. Daringer was sure God must have. Was He waiting for a tender heart to care, to step in and save these street urchins? Daringer cared and did. One large bunch of bananas found its way to excited outstretched hands.

Why do we not see, feel or hear until it’s too late? Like the string of beads, or the sheaf of papers that was so like life--if life stops? Littering the ground and hiding in drawers, rotting in the sun, all the sum total of a life lived while no one noticed. Daringer felt despondent, growing weary with even the noisy bright marketplace.

~ * ~

There were things he could do while he waited for word that his mother had crossed one way to life or the other way to eternal life. He could do some of the repair and maintenance that needed doing around her home. Before the old place could be sold, it would need to be restored, not for a better market price but for them, the spirits. If the souls or spirits stay behind to wait, they need a good place to do that, he reasoned. Daringer wanted to repair the railing on the seldom used back stairway.

He could incorporate the box with the necklace of strange stones; He could hide it below the spindles. Why he had the urge to bury them where they couldn’t be found again he didn’t know. It was there though, the urge strong and insistent. These beads seemed to possess a power he wasn’t sure he was man enough to tamper with.

When he began to remove the damaged stair railing to replace it, the stringers toppled like dominos clanking heavily to the bare wood floor. They looked like so many dead soldiers lying exposed after the war. Bodies helter-skelter having fallen where they stood--shattered lives, beads in a box, beads on a rosary, dots on the planet earth. What was their reason for being? Where did they go and why? Who traversed these steps? How many hands have held this railing? Were some of them those dead soldiers, and what war were they--Civil, WWI or WWII? Or were they none of these? Perhaps deserters, perhaps charlatans and rogues who hid beneath the cellar and let their wives be liars instead, while they fathered children who would have been better off dead than become fodder for another war. A time when their bodies, boxed, returned fallen heroes from another time.

Where did these thoughts originate? Why are they my concern? His mind whirled with confusion. Daringer began to wonder about his sanity and if the stones were powerful enough to cause him to become delusional. He shuddered and pulled himself back to what he was doing.

He couldn’t plant the necklace beneath the stringers on that stair knowing what he knew. That thought, too, was foreign. What was it he supposed he knew? He did not know. Daringer kept them in his pocket, and the heat along his thigh grew. It seemed they were content to know that he would keep them longer.

He mended the broken railing. Would that it were so easy to mend my grieving heart. She isn’t gone yet. The phrase cried in his mind and he prayed again for life.

“When will you give me grandchildren, my son?” she’d asked.

He was too busy with his career to be tied down yet. He had said, “Soon, Mother, soon. There is plenty of time, Mom. Oh is there? Now he wondered at his flippant attitude.