writing_shadows

I was going to complete the Rea triplet: first was Rea fractured, second was Rea as wife and mother, this was going to be Rea as pagan/tree surgeon, but Shine jumped into my head. This started out as a Shine-as-vampire story, getting her own back for the husband who left her. Possibly because of my phobia, it mutated. It's based on what if Shine had died, as she nearly did, during one of her encounters with evil ghosts, an episode not known to anyone currently IC. For those who don't know, Shine married John Smith, Moros Councillour for London, only for him to leave her 18 months later. The song mentioned is one of the inspirations for the character, "Yr. Mother Called Them Farmhouses" by Robin Holcomb.

If a Woman Walked

The Devil’s Punchbowl, an unexplainable circular depression in the bluffs above the Mississippi River, lies a mile to the north of the city of Natchez, Mississippi. Legend has it that the notorious bandit John Murrell used to hole up there, often in company with free or runaway slaves, in his alleged attempt to conquer New Orleans and instate himself as magnate. Near the Devil’s Punchbowl there is a very old tree, not as old as the Friendship Oak in Long Beach, but some say the Natchez took a seedling from the Friendship Oak and planted it there. Others call it the Hangman’s Oak, on the grounds that the slaves discovered hiding in the Punchbowl were hanged from it. Others still call it the Preachers’ Oak, and say that, hearing of the evil alleged to harbour in the punchbowl, one of the itinerant preachers the Natchez Trace was famous for swore that he’d always protect the good folk of Natchez. Whether he was turned into a tree, or whether it’s just his spirit that walks at night—well, you get as many stories as you ask people for.

John Smith, seminary student, had been to the Punchbowl and found himself caught up in a story. Turned out Murrell’s mistress, the one that he buried alive for being unfaithful to him, did really walk the bluffs during the full moons—or at least at this full moon. He’d listened to the plea that he’d grown up knowing about: that if he’d find her body and bury it at home, he could have all the treasure she was buried with.

It wasn’t in the Punchbowl he’d seen her, admittedly. It was a little ways off; an easy walk, to the irregular patch on the ground that was as bare as if God had decreed it be barren evermore. He crossed himself, but unbidden the words of a local song came to him: Nothing will grow where anyone has suffered. Nothing will grow where anyone has died.

She’d been so beautiful in the moonlight, translucent and ethereal and tragic, the sort of stuff Vivien Leigh could only have dreamt about. And young—not even twenty, he reckoned, when she died. And the whisper of her voice…he felt changed, that’s for sure. Like he’d found—what? Half of himself? Don’t be stupid, John. So you’ve seen a ghost. In the Deep South, that was hardly unusual. But he’d set to with a shovel, half in a dream, half berating himself for lunacy. He’d found the bones, frail—were they supposed to be so white? it was like the dirt couldn’t touch them—and put them in his backpack.

The roar and the lull of the Mississippi River was now muted. It could have been just the situation of the house: atop Silver Street, it’s true, and thus in the affluent part of Natchez, rather than Natchez-under-the-Hill, the dark underside of Southern society, but not immediately on the bluffs’ edge. But Smith, as he strode through the old, neglected garden, felt it was more than that, somehow. As if the ancient trees with their shrouds of Spanish moss not just survived hundreds of years but stood outside them, somehow. Or inside them, but—insulated was the word that came to his head, even though just at this moment, with the heady smell of gardenias and the hum of cicadas occupying his senses, he wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by it.

He pricked himself on one of the many thorn plants, and swore.

Finally he came to the place she’d mentioned, by a rotting old seat-swing, one chain detached and groan in the slow-moving wind. He started digging.

Sweat began to pour off him, but he kept on. The ground was hard-packed in the autumn’s heat. They’d not had much rain. That’s the other reason that the garden seemed so odd. It was so green. Evergreen, he thought, even the accursed thorns whose roots he kept having to chop through. At last, he had a hole, maybe not quite six feet deep, but big enough for what he carried. He placed the bones in the pit with as much reverence as he could muster, placing them as anatomically correctly as he could, and said a prayer over his gran’s rosary beads, the ones she swore had been blessed by the Pope himself. He dropped the rosary in for good measure.

It was just before dawn. In the last moment of darkness, She came at last, with all the plants bowing at her feet. She was smiling that sweet smile that She had, the one that turned him inside out. She reached him in the very last moment of darkness, and lifted her insubstantial face to his. Not thinking, not thinking anything at all except yes, he bent his lips to hers.

When at last their lips parted, John Smith fought for breath, his heart feeling two sizes too big for his chest. The first rays of sun sifted through the trees overhead. She tilted her head in a way he knew he’d remember forever, sat in the swing, and vanished into the morning light as if she’d always been part of it.

There was the sound of something like a coin dropping. He looked down. At his feet, a ring shimmered in the sun. He bent to pick it up. Platinum, or white gold, studded with tiny diamonds. On the inside he read the legend Amor meae vitae.**

He put it on a chain around his neck and walked off, feeling reborn.

_____

**love of my life