CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I love Dan and Laurie’s relationship! From what I remember Loreal understands but I will have to wait and see if I am right. Great writing and I look forward to the start of the last chapter in a few days!
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The Beasts: A Winter Tale
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
So apparently I was so sleepy I wrote a response to this, and then forgot to hit send.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AS WE BEGIN THE LAST CHAPTER OF THE BEASTS, MARABETH AND THE STRAUSSES PREPARE FOR NATHAN'S FUNERAL, AND IN CHICAGO, CHRIS ASHBY REMEMBERS A FUNERAL AND TREACHERY FROM LONG AGO...
T H I R T E E N
R E Q U I E M
Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“Christophah! Christophah!”
When he was eighteen, Christopher Ashby wondered about the blue edge of sea that joined the blue edge of sky. It was half a day’s march across the fields to the sea, and he didn’t think he would get that far, certainly not to the water or over it.
“Christophah!” his sister called again.
He put down the hoe and turned around, taking his cap off to wipe his brow.
“Mothah says, you’d bettah git t' grandmothah ’s ouse o' thee want t' see ah afore it’s too lairt.”
Chris stared at his sister, almost as if staring at her would change things, and Evangeline cried out, “What are thee still starin a' us fah, thee fool? there’s no time! Come !”
They left the cart horse in the field. On the way back they would tell Old Bart to mind it, and after they did, they went from the long, low, thatched house, out into the wide dirt street, and past the small shops to the house at the edge of the trees. That’s where Gran had gone when she said the old house was too crowded and she wanted to be left on her own. On her own, under the trees, on the edge of the woods, she sang to herself and dried her herbs. She made her healing ointments, and wrapping her shawl about her, she would go out with Evangeline to birth the babies or, in some cases, to make sure the babies never came.
“Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn.
Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn, good Sirs
All of a Midsummer's morn!
Surely we sing of no little thing,
In Oak and Ash and Thorn!”
“What are you…?” Evangeline began. Then, “Gran’s song.”
The house was dark compared to the wide open outside, and it was filled with the smell of smoke from the hearth. Christopher squeezed through the door, and though he and Evangeline stood in the small house, trying to make themselves smaller, Gran raised her head from the bed, blinked and murmured, “There he is. There he is, and there she.
“Well,” the old woman turned to a woman almost as old looking, “Go now, lass, and let me see the children.”
“I’ll will send th’others,” Mrs. Ashby said as she rose.
“No. No, daughter. None o’ that. These be enough.”
As their mother left, she merely nodded to them. Emotional display and other gestures were scarce in the North Country. Seeing her in his mind’s eye, Chris thinks how quickly people aged then, how a woman in this present world who looked like her would easily be close to seventy though his mother was not then forty. But the Christopher Ashby on his knees, on one side of the bed across from his sister who laid his face to his grandmother’s breast while Evangeline laid hers on the other knew only these days.
“Reach undah tha' tabul 'n git 'um beads fah me,” she said with a small smile.
Chris did. He longed to hold onto the heavy beads at the same time he wished to hide them.
“Ah quicklih they forget,” the old woman said, taking the black beads and the silver chain and wrapping them around her hand. “Ah verih quicklih! When ar wur a girl they talked about t' auld religion, t' orned one, t' ladih , t' oak, t' ash 'n t' thorn. these wur spoken o' in ushed turns. 'and then kin enrih gets inta a fit o pique 'n suddenlih t' Virgin be t' Auld Religion, 'n t' beads 'n t' Mass 'n t' Latin. ar thurrt, fah so long, we wur so far awair frum it, t' new religion would not touch us. boot even ere people forget about it 'n turn frum t' Auld Ways, arl t' auld ways, t' Saints 'n t' Orned One. But Ar remembered. so thee names, Christophah , fah t' Auld saint ooh bore up t' bairn Jesus, 'n Evangeline. Evangeline, nah, receive t' blessin which none o' thee lads 'n lasss uhl get.”
She placed her bony hands on Chris’s head and on Evangeline’s, and suddenly the bony hand was heavy, was like a vice, was throbbing through his blond hair into his head, weighing him down as the old woman pronounced, “All o' our powah, we place upon thee, 'n upon thee.”
Chris rested under her lightening touch, her touch becoming ever lighter until there was a lightness, and emptiness in the room, and Chris lifted his aching head, blinking and looked to the old woman.
Evangeline, in her brown smock, her pale, dirty hair falling out of her bonnet, reached down and closed her grandmother’s eyes with two fingers.
“She’s gone, Chris.”
Christopher Ashby woke up, blinking at the yellow white sunlit ceiling that had been his midnight for three centuries. It was so vivid, and for a moment he did not know where he was. He turned on his side to see the brown nude form of Lewis Dunharrow, curled up like a child. He had already woken him, and Lewis said, patiently, “Yes, Love?”
“I don’t knah . Ar wur just…” Chris began, “in t' past.”
“What did you say?” Lewis turned to him almost frowning.
“I say,” Chris began.
“Oh, never mind,” Lewis had sat up. “You really were far back.”
Chris shook his head and cleared his throat, taking a moment to speak before his voice altered, raising an octave, into his usual American accent, though touched by something older now.
“I was dreamin’ of my home. Of… being a lad…. I need to stop talking like that. A kid. When I was a boy. When my Gran died. My grandmother.”
“I know what a Gran is,” Lewis said, pulling Chris close to him, “I also know that you’re over three hundred years old and from Yorkshire. Though, I tend to forget it until you wake up sounding like something out of Wuthering Heights.”
They lay together, Chris in Lewis’s arms, and Lewis said, “And how was it? To be back there?”
“A lot less sanitary.”
Lewis flicked Chris on the head.
“Evangeline. She was just a girl. But then I was just a boy. We had no idea what was going to happen to us. Before she died my grandmother blessed us. She said she placed all of her power on us, and then she died doing it.”
Lewis said nothing, and Chris turned around, his arms wrapped about Lewis.
“She was a witch. I sort of knew that then. I know it now. She was a witch. And a Catholic. She held to it. She gave me her rosary. She called them her beads. I wonder now if the reason Evangeline and I are still alive, are what we are, is because of what she did.”
“I wonder if the reason Kruinh chose you is because you are witch blooded,” Lewis said.
“And if that’s why we chose each other?”
“Yes,” Lewis said. “That probably has something to do with it. And then there’s the small detail that I love you.”
They do not hold the wake in that little house. They bring her into the larger house, the long house with the heavy dirty thatch that must be replaced in a moon’s time, where the more lanterns there are, the darker it seems to get, and the old woman’s body, on a table, is lit in dim red and gold. She would have been called a witch if there was no one to love her, no daughter with seventeen children, no two sons, no house to sing for her. But now she is a cunning woman, and a cunning woman gone.
“THIS ae nighte, this ae nighte,
— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.”
They pass the jug of spirits which has replaced the real beer which came after the small beer, singing.
“When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon.
Sit thee down and put them on;
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.
From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
And Christe receive thy saule.”
And outside the wind blows off of the high moors and makes a lonely howling which seems to join with the mourners at the same time it seems indifferent to things like death, and up on the hill by the forest, where the old hovel lies empty, another woman moves into the home that belonged to Old Woman Saxby, and a new witch takes her place.
When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last
In this present world, while they are eating breakfast, what has happened several times before happens now. What he missed the first time, he hears now. He does not know if this is something that happens only to Drinkers, but for him the memory remains, all of it, to be played back again, watched and played back like—well, until he saw a film for a the first time, he had no adequate description for it, but—like a film. Only he can loop back, look at it, make what was quiet louder, lower the volume on what no longer seems important. He watches from winter in the present, a harvest time funeral three hundred years ago, andd as they keen over his grandmother, Chris hears:
“The crop is failing, and there are too many mouths to feed.”
“What about the boy, the tall lad?”
“What of him?”
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Sit thee down and put them on;
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.
From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
“Wasn’t he to be apprenticed this summer?”
“But that cost money,” his father grumbles, “and the farm can only go to Kevin. I can barely get the girls married off, but oh…”
“There’s a ship, come near Liverpool. Pay good money for workers.”
“What kind o’ workers?”
“Field, like whatchu do here. But you’d get paid handsomely. They say they let em go in a few years. They say they give em land and everything.”
If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.
“Is that a truth?”
“Aye! The lad could make his fortunes and make your future too….”
Naked at the table in the little hotel room, Chris Ashby drops his cup off coffee and he catches it in time not to break it, but not in time to prevent a mess. As the brown liquid goes across the table. Lewis stands up, goes to the sink, takes the dish cloth and rinses it, coming back to clean up the table, and taking the cup from him.
“Get yourself another cup.”
Chris nods absently and murmurs, “Sorry. Sorry about that.”
As Lewis watches him, Christopher wonders, “Did they really believe I would have a good life? Did they really believe I was going to be an indentured servant, or is it simply what they told themselves to make their treachery bearable?”
No, but if they had believed it they would not have hidden it from me, not sold me like Joseph’s brothers sold him. And anyway, what they believed did not matter. What they told themselves did not matter, they had sold him, for money, and they were dead these three hundred years.
“I know what we should do,” Chris said, while stirring creamer into his coffee.
Lewis looked to him. Chris was standing naked, his penis dangling, hair sticking up, and holding the coffee in his hands
“Alright?’ Lewis said. “Fill me in.”
“The piano,” Rebecca said, “Use the piano. Songs like that need the piano, and he loved that song.”
Natalie had said something, and Rebecca didn’t really care. She loved her, but sometimes the old woman was infuriating, and it was because of her that she had seen what she had seen, that she had seen her beloved Nathan in a way she never wished to see him. But in those last days before he left, there had been a lot of seeing him the way she didn’t want to see him.
This is a part of marriage I suppose.
Till death do us part, for richer or poorer, for sickness and health, but what if the sickness led to death, what if poorer lasted past the grave? So many ended a marriage well before the end of life, but what no one told you is how married you were long past the death of your loved one.
He was still here. She wanted to imagine him in that rayon Hawaiian shirt, with the palm trees that might have been silly looking, but fit on him so snug. She remembered his dark thick hair and the sharpness of his handsome face, the eyes you could fall into, eyes Marabeth had inherited.
She remembered how little she cared about church or God or anything like that, and she remembered coming into that church, Saint Agatha’s, not Saint Ursula, and the singing:
Glory and praise to our God
Who alone gives light to our days
Many are the blessings he sends
To those who trust in his ways!
She had met him in Miami, and so, despite everything, she associated Nathan Strauss with the sun. She had been running away from home in the way that young adults can, and at the time she was Rebecca Cunningham. She was high on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Nathan reminded her of them, with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson. They got high a lot and almost the first time they had met they went to bed together. Wouldn’t the kids be surprised by that! Though who knows what the hell Marabeth would be surprised by?
But then she had come to know him, because he wanted her to. And she didn’t really mind telling him everything. About her Irish father and her Jewish mother and a family that was done in by fear and depression and too much drinking, and how she couldn’t wait to be away from them, and it was hard to say what all had done it for her, but they were married soon after, and when Nathan had asked her if she wanted to come and live in Lassador, she said, well, hell, why not?
But if the children did not think of them that way, did not think of her that way, whose fault was that? The Rebecca Cunningham Strauss who had shown up in the late seventies in short skirts and long red hair that fell all the way to her ass was a wilder, crazier person who instantly felt cowed by the pale and dark haired Kellers. And they were all Kellers by then, except for Byron, who wasn’t long for this world, and the old and indomitable Pamela.
“You mean that your mother and her brothers married your father and his sisters,” Rebecca said one night in bed when she was still trying to think the whole arrangement was funny.
“Yeah, how do you like that?”
“I don’t,” she said.
But that’s what memory does. Memory makes you forget, and there was that business. The business of the Change. Of course he had told her. They were not married yet. They’d just been having their affair, and sitting in bed, in Florida, where warm air came through the window of their shitty motel room, one which she still remembered fondly forty years later. She had been telling him all sorts of things about herself. All about that time when she was fourteen and she had taken an entire bottle of pills because she didn’t think she belonged in this world anymore.
“Something happened to me too,” Nathan began, “when I was fourteen.”
And when Rebecca looks back she realizes this is why she married him. Not out of pity, and certainly not out of any sense that she needed to be married to a werewolf, but because no man had ever been this honest with her, and she knew no other man would again. So she knew, sort of, what she was getting into when she came to live in the house on Dimler Street, when she met the ancient Pamela, and her mother-in-law Natalie, who at first seemed so severe. Byron was as young and handsome as Jim was now, but more frail, and in those days, red headed like Rebecca, Delia was alive.
“Delia,” Rebecca murmured.
She saw so many movies of women and women’s friendship, but in her real life, the only woman friend she’d had was Delia, and if she was honest about it, the only friend, really, she’d had was Delia. Delia Strauss and Rebecca Strauss. The Strauss sisters they called them, or the New Strauss sisters because Maris and Claire and Pamela were the old ones. Some called them the twins, laughing, hair flying in the wind they could conquer anything, and in those days it seemed there was so much to conquer.
“There is a weight on this family,” Nathan said. “And in this house.”
OH, MORE TOMORROW... AND DUE TO SOME TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS NO BLUE TEMPLE UNTIL TOMORROW
T H I R T E E N
R E Q U I E M
Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
“Christophah! Christophah!”
When he was eighteen, Christopher Ashby wondered about the blue edge of sea that joined the blue edge of sky. It was half a day’s march across the fields to the sea, and he didn’t think he would get that far, certainly not to the water or over it.
“Christophah!” his sister called again.
He put down the hoe and turned around, taking his cap off to wipe his brow.
“Mothah says, you’d bettah git t' grandmothah ’s ouse o' thee want t' see ah afore it’s too lairt.”
Chris stared at his sister, almost as if staring at her would change things, and Evangeline cried out, “What are thee still starin a' us fah, thee fool? there’s no time! Come !”
They left the cart horse in the field. On the way back they would tell Old Bart to mind it, and after they did, they went from the long, low, thatched house, out into the wide dirt street, and past the small shops to the house at the edge of the trees. That’s where Gran had gone when she said the old house was too crowded and she wanted to be left on her own. On her own, under the trees, on the edge of the woods, she sang to herself and dried her herbs. She made her healing ointments, and wrapping her shawl about her, she would go out with Evangeline to birth the babies or, in some cases, to make sure the babies never came.
“Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn.
Sing Oak and Ash and Thorn, good Sirs
All of a Midsummer's morn!
Surely we sing of no little thing,
In Oak and Ash and Thorn!”
“What are you…?” Evangeline began. Then, “Gran’s song.”
The house was dark compared to the wide open outside, and it was filled with the smell of smoke from the hearth. Christopher squeezed through the door, and though he and Evangeline stood in the small house, trying to make themselves smaller, Gran raised her head from the bed, blinked and murmured, “There he is. There he is, and there she.
“Well,” the old woman turned to a woman almost as old looking, “Go now, lass, and let me see the children.”
“I’ll will send th’others,” Mrs. Ashby said as she rose.
“No. No, daughter. None o’ that. These be enough.”
As their mother left, she merely nodded to them. Emotional display and other gestures were scarce in the North Country. Seeing her in his mind’s eye, Chris thinks how quickly people aged then, how a woman in this present world who looked like her would easily be close to seventy though his mother was not then forty. But the Christopher Ashby on his knees, on one side of the bed across from his sister who laid his face to his grandmother’s breast while Evangeline laid hers on the other knew only these days.
“Reach undah tha' tabul 'n git 'um beads fah me,” she said with a small smile.
Chris did. He longed to hold onto the heavy beads at the same time he wished to hide them.
“Ah quicklih they forget,” the old woman said, taking the black beads and the silver chain and wrapping them around her hand. “Ah verih quicklih! When ar wur a girl they talked about t' auld religion, t' orned one, t' ladih , t' oak, t' ash 'n t' thorn. these wur spoken o' in ushed turns. 'and then kin enrih gets inta a fit o pique 'n suddenlih t' Virgin be t' Auld Religion, 'n t' beads 'n t' Mass 'n t' Latin. ar thurrt, fah so long, we wur so far awair frum it, t' new religion would not touch us. boot even ere people forget about it 'n turn frum t' Auld Ways, arl t' auld ways, t' Saints 'n t' Orned One. But Ar remembered. so thee names, Christophah , fah t' Auld saint ooh bore up t' bairn Jesus, 'n Evangeline. Evangeline, nah, receive t' blessin which none o' thee lads 'n lasss uhl get.”
She placed her bony hands on Chris’s head and on Evangeline’s, and suddenly the bony hand was heavy, was like a vice, was throbbing through his blond hair into his head, weighing him down as the old woman pronounced, “All o' our powah, we place upon thee, 'n upon thee.”
Chris rested under her lightening touch, her touch becoming ever lighter until there was a lightness, and emptiness in the room, and Chris lifted his aching head, blinking and looked to the old woman.
Evangeline, in her brown smock, her pale, dirty hair falling out of her bonnet, reached down and closed her grandmother’s eyes with two fingers.
“She’s gone, Chris.”
Christopher Ashby woke up, blinking at the yellow white sunlit ceiling that had been his midnight for three centuries. It was so vivid, and for a moment he did not know where he was. He turned on his side to see the brown nude form of Lewis Dunharrow, curled up like a child. He had already woken him, and Lewis said, patiently, “Yes, Love?”
“I don’t knah . Ar wur just…” Chris began, “in t' past.”
“What did you say?” Lewis turned to him almost frowning.
“I say,” Chris began.
“Oh, never mind,” Lewis had sat up. “You really were far back.”
Chris shook his head and cleared his throat, taking a moment to speak before his voice altered, raising an octave, into his usual American accent, though touched by something older now.
“I was dreamin’ of my home. Of… being a lad…. I need to stop talking like that. A kid. When I was a boy. When my Gran died. My grandmother.”
“I know what a Gran is,” Lewis said, pulling Chris close to him, “I also know that you’re over three hundred years old and from Yorkshire. Though, I tend to forget it until you wake up sounding like something out of Wuthering Heights.”
They lay together, Chris in Lewis’s arms, and Lewis said, “And how was it? To be back there?”
“A lot less sanitary.”
Lewis flicked Chris on the head.
“Evangeline. She was just a girl. But then I was just a boy. We had no idea what was going to happen to us. Before she died my grandmother blessed us. She said she placed all of her power on us, and then she died doing it.”
Lewis said nothing, and Chris turned around, his arms wrapped about Lewis.
“She was a witch. I sort of knew that then. I know it now. She was a witch. And a Catholic. She held to it. She gave me her rosary. She called them her beads. I wonder now if the reason Evangeline and I are still alive, are what we are, is because of what she did.”
“I wonder if the reason Kruinh chose you is because you are witch blooded,” Lewis said.
“And if that’s why we chose each other?”
“Yes,” Lewis said. “That probably has something to do with it. And then there’s the small detail that I love you.”
They do not hold the wake in that little house. They bring her into the larger house, the long house with the heavy dirty thatch that must be replaced in a moon’s time, where the more lanterns there are, the darker it seems to get, and the old woman’s body, on a table, is lit in dim red and gold. She would have been called a witch if there was no one to love her, no daughter with seventeen children, no two sons, no house to sing for her. But now she is a cunning woman, and a cunning woman gone.
“THIS ae nighte, this ae nighte,
— Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.”
They pass the jug of spirits which has replaced the real beer which came after the small beer, singing.
“When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon.
Sit thee down and put them on;
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.
From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
And Christe receive thy saule.”
And outside the wind blows off of the high moors and makes a lonely howling which seems to join with the mourners at the same time it seems indifferent to things like death, and up on the hill by the forest, where the old hovel lies empty, another woman moves into the home that belonged to Old Woman Saxby, and a new witch takes her place.
When thou from hence away art past
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last
In this present world, while they are eating breakfast, what has happened several times before happens now. What he missed the first time, he hears now. He does not know if this is something that happens only to Drinkers, but for him the memory remains, all of it, to be played back again, watched and played back like—well, until he saw a film for a the first time, he had no adequate description for it, but—like a film. Only he can loop back, look at it, make what was quiet louder, lower the volume on what no longer seems important. He watches from winter in the present, a harvest time funeral three hundred years ago, andd as they keen over his grandmother, Chris hears:
“The crop is failing, and there are too many mouths to feed.”
“What about the boy, the tall lad?”
“What of him?”
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Sit thee down and put them on;
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane.
From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
“Wasn’t he to be apprenticed this summer?”
“But that cost money,” his father grumbles, “and the farm can only go to Kevin. I can barely get the girls married off, but oh…”
“There’s a ship, come near Liverpool. Pay good money for workers.”
“What kind o’ workers?”
“Field, like whatchu do here. But you’d get paid handsomely. They say they let em go in a few years. They say they give em land and everything.”
If ever thou gavest meat or drink,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
—And Christe receive thy saule.
“Is that a truth?”
“Aye! The lad could make his fortunes and make your future too….”
Naked at the table in the little hotel room, Chris Ashby drops his cup off coffee and he catches it in time not to break it, but not in time to prevent a mess. As the brown liquid goes across the table. Lewis stands up, goes to the sink, takes the dish cloth and rinses it, coming back to clean up the table, and taking the cup from him.
“Get yourself another cup.”
Chris nods absently and murmurs, “Sorry. Sorry about that.”
As Lewis watches him, Christopher wonders, “Did they really believe I would have a good life? Did they really believe I was going to be an indentured servant, or is it simply what they told themselves to make their treachery bearable?”
No, but if they had believed it they would not have hidden it from me, not sold me like Joseph’s brothers sold him. And anyway, what they believed did not matter. What they told themselves did not matter, they had sold him, for money, and they were dead these three hundred years.
“I know what we should do,” Chris said, while stirring creamer into his coffee.
Lewis looked to him. Chris was standing naked, his penis dangling, hair sticking up, and holding the coffee in his hands
“Alright?’ Lewis said. “Fill me in.”
“The piano,” Rebecca said, “Use the piano. Songs like that need the piano, and he loved that song.”
Natalie had said something, and Rebecca didn’t really care. She loved her, but sometimes the old woman was infuriating, and it was because of her that she had seen what she had seen, that she had seen her beloved Nathan in a way she never wished to see him. But in those last days before he left, there had been a lot of seeing him the way she didn’t want to see him.
This is a part of marriage I suppose.
Till death do us part, for richer or poorer, for sickness and health, but what if the sickness led to death, what if poorer lasted past the grave? So many ended a marriage well before the end of life, but what no one told you is how married you were long past the death of your loved one.
He was still here. She wanted to imagine him in that rayon Hawaiian shirt, with the palm trees that might have been silly looking, but fit on him so snug. She remembered his dark thick hair and the sharpness of his handsome face, the eyes you could fall into, eyes Marabeth had inherited.
She remembered how little she cared about church or God or anything like that, and she remembered coming into that church, Saint Agatha’s, not Saint Ursula, and the singing:
Glory and praise to our God
Who alone gives light to our days
Many are the blessings he sends
To those who trust in his ways!
She had met him in Miami, and so, despite everything, she associated Nathan Strauss with the sun. She had been running away from home in the way that young adults can, and at the time she was Rebecca Cunningham. She was high on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Nathan reminded her of them, with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson. They got high a lot and almost the first time they had met they went to bed together. Wouldn’t the kids be surprised by that! Though who knows what the hell Marabeth would be surprised by?
But then she had come to know him, because he wanted her to. And she didn’t really mind telling him everything. About her Irish father and her Jewish mother and a family that was done in by fear and depression and too much drinking, and how she couldn’t wait to be away from them, and it was hard to say what all had done it for her, but they were married soon after, and when Nathan had asked her if she wanted to come and live in Lassador, she said, well, hell, why not?
But if the children did not think of them that way, did not think of her that way, whose fault was that? The Rebecca Cunningham Strauss who had shown up in the late seventies in short skirts and long red hair that fell all the way to her ass was a wilder, crazier person who instantly felt cowed by the pale and dark haired Kellers. And they were all Kellers by then, except for Byron, who wasn’t long for this world, and the old and indomitable Pamela.
“You mean that your mother and her brothers married your father and his sisters,” Rebecca said one night in bed when she was still trying to think the whole arrangement was funny.
“Yeah, how do you like that?”
“I don’t,” she said.
But that’s what memory does. Memory makes you forget, and there was that business. The business of the Change. Of course he had told her. They were not married yet. They’d just been having their affair, and sitting in bed, in Florida, where warm air came through the window of their shitty motel room, one which she still remembered fondly forty years later. She had been telling him all sorts of things about herself. All about that time when she was fourteen and she had taken an entire bottle of pills because she didn’t think she belonged in this world anymore.
“Something happened to me too,” Nathan began, “when I was fourteen.”
And when Rebecca looks back she realizes this is why she married him. Not out of pity, and certainly not out of any sense that she needed to be married to a werewolf, but because no man had ever been this honest with her, and she knew no other man would again. So she knew, sort of, what she was getting into when she came to live in the house on Dimler Street, when she met the ancient Pamela, and her mother-in-law Natalie, who at first seemed so severe. Byron was as young and handsome as Jim was now, but more frail, and in those days, red headed like Rebecca, Delia was alive.
“Delia,” Rebecca murmured.
She saw so many movies of women and women’s friendship, but in her real life, the only woman friend she’d had was Delia, and if she was honest about it, the only friend, really, she’d had was Delia. Delia Strauss and Rebecca Strauss. The Strauss sisters they called them, or the New Strauss sisters because Maris and Claire and Pamela were the old ones. Some called them the twins, laughing, hair flying in the wind they could conquer anything, and in those days it seemed there was so much to conquer.
“There is a weight on this family,” Nathan said. “And in this house.”
OH, MORE TOMORROW... AND DUE TO SOME TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS NO BLUE TEMPLE UNTIL TOMORROW
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CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great start to this final chapter! It’s always interesting to read about some of the characters past history. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope you've been having a good night.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
AS OUR FINAL CHAPTER CONTINUES, SO DO REBECCA'S MEMORIES AS WELL AS HER CHILDRENS' RESOLUTIONS TO LIVE A NEW LIFE
She had met him in Miami, and so, despite everything, she associated Nathan Strauss with the sun. She had been running away from home in the way that young adults can, and at the time she was Rebecca Cunningham. She was high on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Nathan reminded her of them, with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson. They got high a lot and almost the first time they had met they went to bed together. Wouldn’t the kids be surprised by that! Though who knows what the hell Marabeth would be surprised by?
But then she had come to know him, because he wanted her to. And she didn’t really mind telling him everything. About her Irish father and her Jewish mother and a family that was done in by fear and depression and too much drinking, and how she couldn’t wait to be away from them, and it was hard to say what all had done it for her, but they were married soon after, and when Nathan had asked her if she wanted to come and live in Lassador, she said, well, hell, why not?
But if the children did not think of them that way, did not think of her that way, whose fault was that? The Rebecca Cunningham Strauss who had shown up in the late seventies in short skirts and long red hair that fell all the way to her ass was a wilder, crazier person who instantly felt cowed by the pale and dark haired Kellers. And they were all Kellers by then, except for Byron, who wasn’t long for this world, and the old and indomitable Pamela.
“You mean that your mother and her brothers married your father and his sisters,” Rebecca said one night in bed when she was still trying to think the whole arrangement was funny.
“Yeah, how do you like that?”
“I don’t,” she said.
But that’s what memory does. Memory makes you forget, and there was that business. The business of the Change. Of course he had told her. They were not married yet. They’d just been having their affair, and sitting in bed, in Florida, where warm air came through the window of their shitty motel room, one which she still remembered fondly forty years later. She had been telling him all sorts of things about herself. All about that time when she was fourteen and she had taken an entire bottle of pills because she didn’t think she belonged in this world anymore.
“Something happened to me too,” Nathan began, “when I was fourteen.”
And when Rebecca looks back she realizes this is why she married him. Not out of pity, and certainly not out of any sense that she needed to be married to a werewolf, but because no man had ever been this honest with her, and she knew no other man would again. So she knew, sort of, what she was getting into when she came to live in the house on Dimler Street, when she met the ancient Pamela, and her mother-in-law Natalie, who at first seemed so severe. Byron was as young and handsome as Jim was now, but more frail, and in those days, red headed like Rebecca, Delia was alive.
“Delia,” Rebecca murmured.
She saw so many movies of women and women’s friendship, but in her real life, the only woman friend she’d had was Delia, and if she was honest about it, the only friend, really, she’d had was Delia. Delia Strauss and Rebecca Strauss. The Strauss sisters they called them, or the New Strauss sisters because Maris and Claire and Pamela were the old ones. Some called them the twins, laughing, hair flying in the wind they could conquer anything, and in those days it seemed there was so much to conquer.
“There is a weight on this family,” Nathan said. “And in this house.”
Part of Rebecca had wanted to say, “Well, then why the hell not leave it?” But then, of course, the weight was in the blood. And also the best cure for it only seemed to be here.
“We can overcome it together.”
She often said that when it was her, Nathan and Delia. “We can do anything together.”
None of them would be terribly old now. She was not very old, certainly not young, but not ancient, and yet, out of the four of them, the four musketeers, she was the only one remaining, and all of her shine was gone, she had to admit that. There was no more fighting, merely accepting, and she often felt as if there was nothing left to be done. She had fought something like the good fight and she had waited faithfully for her husband to return. Nathan had returned, and now what was there for her to do? Start a new life? Walk away from this? How? How, when one had spent over forty years being a Strauss did she walk away from it and become something else?
She reached into her pocket and began to untangle the old blue glass bead rosary. Rose had given this to her. It’s beads were light and small, and it wrapped easily around her hands, the little silver cross with its blue enamel shone like a small gem. When Nathan had wanted to go back to church, he had chosen Saint Agatha’s which was prettier anyway. There was an organ, but they didn’t use it. These were still the days of the folk guitar Mass. Old Rose, dark as mahogany, had been born into that parish, and on the Easter vigil, when Rebecca had come up from the baptismal waters, this had been her gift.
I never learned to love saying the rosary, but I did love to have one.
Now someone might mistake her for one of those old pious women, and in the last few years she had occasionally gone to Saint Ursula’s with her husband’s large family, but she wished that the funeral was at Saint Agatha’s, with the people they had known and the pastor who had helped her all the previous times it seemed like Nathan would never reappear.
“It’s your call,” Marabeth said. “I’ll stand right by you and see it’s your call.”
Yes, Marabeth was good like that, and really, Rebecca reflected, she hadn’t been a very supportive mother, not supportive enough to deserve that. But there were some things Marabeth still did not understand, like that it was not her call, that Nathan belonged to the family more than to her, and that Natalie, who had been the first to go to Saint Agatha’s, would have still not approved of a Strauss being buried out of any church but Saint Ursula’s.
Kristian strauss was getting dressed, and he had turned around and looked at Jenean twice before he said, “You’ve got something on your mind. You really ought to say it.”
“No, ” Jenean sat on the bed, and she took up all of that ash blond hair he was coming to love, even when he found strands of it in his mouth. “It’s too soon. It’s silly.”
Kris turned around and suddenly cupped her chin, kissing her.
“Tell me.”
“I wished that I could come with you, come to the funeral. Be by your side, for your dad. Let people know you had someone. And that….” She shook her head, “is a little too clingy, and a little too soon.”
Kris smiled at her.
“I wish more of the women in my life had been more clingy.”
“And I realize that right now is not the time,” Jenean said. “This time is for your family, and we’re not there yet.”
Kris pulled on his jacket.
“Would you like to be?”
“Huh?”
“Would you like to be?” Kris said. “Because, I think you’re good for me, and I hope I could be good for you, and maybe we can move on to more than we are right now. If you’d like.”
“I haven’t even seen your place.”
“I don’t actually have a place.”
“Cause you haven’t had to get one. But... do you think you might?”
“Is it important?”
Then Kris said. “It’s important. Yes. I haven’t had to keep my own place for a while.”
“You’ve been in your university office and then banging chicks when it suited you. You’ve been a damn bachelor.”
“I could make a nest,” Kris was tucking in his shirt. “I’ll start to make a nest.”
He leaned into the bed and kissed her before he left. This was her late day, and she was going into a long shift at work. She needed to rest, but falling into her arms he was ready to make love again, to climb into that bed and begin again what they had started. Yet there was no time for it, and he had to get out of these clothes and into the shower and into his good clothes for this day.
He would tell her, he decided as he drove home, heading down Ashton. He had to tell her the truth if they were going to stay together, and he believed they would. Or could. He’d stopped believing in things like that. There hadn’t been any woman where he’d known her long enough to even consider telling the truth. With Jenean he felt so at home and with Jenean he also felt that there were things she needed to share, and that she could not share them with him until he could share himself with her.
I ought to feel worse. I ought to feel so terrible today!
And he does. His dad is gone. But Dad has been gone a long time. Now something is ended. The long waiting is over. He crosses the Main Street Bridge into downtown and thinks about going to visit his sister. She’ll be at the house soon enough, though. The old shops are giving way to the larger buildings and the tall downtown riverfront buildings are ahead of him when he stops at the red light and calls his sister.
“You need a ride to the house? I’m in the area.”
“Kristian!” Marabeth sounds incredibly happy, and then he can tell next that she’s trying to take that happiness down, knows what today is. “No, no, don’t worry about it. I’ll be there. I’m hardly even up yet. You have a good night?”
“I… the light is green.”
“I’ll see you at the house. We’ll have a good talk before we go to Saint Ursula’s.”
“Love you, Sis,” Kris said.
He hangs up before Marabeth can say anything and heads into downtown. A block later he crosses Birmingham knowing that four blocks west on it is Marabeth’s place, and traveling south on Buren Avenue, coming out of downtown, he knows Germantown is to the east and Little Hungary to the West. Traditionally Blacks lived on either side and now live everywhere, and he turns into Germantown when he sees Saint Agatha’s, the old pink bricks and the wide rose window, light and beautiful on a winter day as it is in the summer. There is the church he loved. Dad should have been buried there. And why the fuck is Marabeth in such a great mood, as he turns east on Dimler and sees the Schiller beer factory behind the houses, he thinks, I wonder if she’s getting any. I bet that’s what it is. But Marabeth is four miles north now, and he’s coming down the long row of stately townhouses toward the large old one he has spent most of his life in.
He turns, and the car rumbles through the alley, over snow and pebbles, and he parks in the garage and comes out of it, passing the coach house. What if that became his place? But would Jenean like that? But does that matter? What if he liked it? What it he had his own separate space? He was so used to having that third floor and calling it his own separate space, moving around the fact that he had to walk through the kitchen and be seen by his family, wondering what they were thinking. What if he were to have this space which could be, after all, entirely his own?
The kitchen is strangely quiet because it is not empty. His grandmother and mother are there. He remembers the other night, when Peter and Marabeth came to the house together, when he and Jim and Grandma and Mom were together and Peter had simply said, “We have to talk.”
And there it was, and there he was looking at Jim, looking at cousin Myron and Peter, all of them knowing what each of them had thought was a very private struggle was a family one. He remembers Jim looking at him, Jim the golden cousin, the blue eyed wonder. And now, today, Jim enters the kitchen. He is already dressed, but of course he is, and he looks good, but of course he does. What is more, Jim has been through the same grief, and Jim only says, “You want some coffee?”
“Yeah,” Kris says. “That’d be great.”
Jim nods.
“I’ll bring it up to you.”
“You don’t—” Kris begins, and then he says, “Bring yourself a cup up too. I’ve got cigarettes, or are you too healthy for them now?”
“Not today,” Jim gives him a brief smile. “I’ll be up when the coffee’s ready.”
SO MUCH MORE SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY AFTERNOON
She had met him in Miami, and so, despite everything, she associated Nathan Strauss with the sun. She had been running away from home in the way that young adults can, and at the time she was Rebecca Cunningham. She was high on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and Nathan reminded her of them, with a touch of Hunter S. Thompson. They got high a lot and almost the first time they had met they went to bed together. Wouldn’t the kids be surprised by that! Though who knows what the hell Marabeth would be surprised by?
But then she had come to know him, because he wanted her to. And she didn’t really mind telling him everything. About her Irish father and her Jewish mother and a family that was done in by fear and depression and too much drinking, and how she couldn’t wait to be away from them, and it was hard to say what all had done it for her, but they were married soon after, and when Nathan had asked her if she wanted to come and live in Lassador, she said, well, hell, why not?
But if the children did not think of them that way, did not think of her that way, whose fault was that? The Rebecca Cunningham Strauss who had shown up in the late seventies in short skirts and long red hair that fell all the way to her ass was a wilder, crazier person who instantly felt cowed by the pale and dark haired Kellers. And they were all Kellers by then, except for Byron, who wasn’t long for this world, and the old and indomitable Pamela.
“You mean that your mother and her brothers married your father and his sisters,” Rebecca said one night in bed when she was still trying to think the whole arrangement was funny.
“Yeah, how do you like that?”
“I don’t,” she said.
But that’s what memory does. Memory makes you forget, and there was that business. The business of the Change. Of course he had told her. They were not married yet. They’d just been having their affair, and sitting in bed, in Florida, where warm air came through the window of their shitty motel room, one which she still remembered fondly forty years later. She had been telling him all sorts of things about herself. All about that time when she was fourteen and she had taken an entire bottle of pills because she didn’t think she belonged in this world anymore.
“Something happened to me too,” Nathan began, “when I was fourteen.”
And when Rebecca looks back she realizes this is why she married him. Not out of pity, and certainly not out of any sense that she needed to be married to a werewolf, but because no man had ever been this honest with her, and she knew no other man would again. So she knew, sort of, what she was getting into when she came to live in the house on Dimler Street, when she met the ancient Pamela, and her mother-in-law Natalie, who at first seemed so severe. Byron was as young and handsome as Jim was now, but more frail, and in those days, red headed like Rebecca, Delia was alive.
“Delia,” Rebecca murmured.
She saw so many movies of women and women’s friendship, but in her real life, the only woman friend she’d had was Delia, and if she was honest about it, the only friend, really, she’d had was Delia. Delia Strauss and Rebecca Strauss. The Strauss sisters they called them, or the New Strauss sisters because Maris and Claire and Pamela were the old ones. Some called them the twins, laughing, hair flying in the wind they could conquer anything, and in those days it seemed there was so much to conquer.
“There is a weight on this family,” Nathan said. “And in this house.”
Part of Rebecca had wanted to say, “Well, then why the hell not leave it?” But then, of course, the weight was in the blood. And also the best cure for it only seemed to be here.
“We can overcome it together.”
She often said that when it was her, Nathan and Delia. “We can do anything together.”
None of them would be terribly old now. She was not very old, certainly not young, but not ancient, and yet, out of the four of them, the four musketeers, she was the only one remaining, and all of her shine was gone, she had to admit that. There was no more fighting, merely accepting, and she often felt as if there was nothing left to be done. She had fought something like the good fight and she had waited faithfully for her husband to return. Nathan had returned, and now what was there for her to do? Start a new life? Walk away from this? How? How, when one had spent over forty years being a Strauss did she walk away from it and become something else?
She reached into her pocket and began to untangle the old blue glass bead rosary. Rose had given this to her. It’s beads were light and small, and it wrapped easily around her hands, the little silver cross with its blue enamel shone like a small gem. When Nathan had wanted to go back to church, he had chosen Saint Agatha’s which was prettier anyway. There was an organ, but they didn’t use it. These were still the days of the folk guitar Mass. Old Rose, dark as mahogany, had been born into that parish, and on the Easter vigil, when Rebecca had come up from the baptismal waters, this had been her gift.
I never learned to love saying the rosary, but I did love to have one.
Now someone might mistake her for one of those old pious women, and in the last few years she had occasionally gone to Saint Ursula’s with her husband’s large family, but she wished that the funeral was at Saint Agatha’s, with the people they had known and the pastor who had helped her all the previous times it seemed like Nathan would never reappear.
“It’s your call,” Marabeth said. “I’ll stand right by you and see it’s your call.”
Yes, Marabeth was good like that, and really, Rebecca reflected, she hadn’t been a very supportive mother, not supportive enough to deserve that. But there were some things Marabeth still did not understand, like that it was not her call, that Nathan belonged to the family more than to her, and that Natalie, who had been the first to go to Saint Agatha’s, would have still not approved of a Strauss being buried out of any church but Saint Ursula’s.
Kristian strauss was getting dressed, and he had turned around and looked at Jenean twice before he said, “You’ve got something on your mind. You really ought to say it.”
“No, ” Jenean sat on the bed, and she took up all of that ash blond hair he was coming to love, even when he found strands of it in his mouth. “It’s too soon. It’s silly.”
Kris turned around and suddenly cupped her chin, kissing her.
“Tell me.”
“I wished that I could come with you, come to the funeral. Be by your side, for your dad. Let people know you had someone. And that….” She shook her head, “is a little too clingy, and a little too soon.”
Kris smiled at her.
“I wish more of the women in my life had been more clingy.”
“And I realize that right now is not the time,” Jenean said. “This time is for your family, and we’re not there yet.”
Kris pulled on his jacket.
“Would you like to be?”
“Huh?”
“Would you like to be?” Kris said. “Because, I think you’re good for me, and I hope I could be good for you, and maybe we can move on to more than we are right now. If you’d like.”
“I haven’t even seen your place.”
“I don’t actually have a place.”
“Cause you haven’t had to get one. But... do you think you might?”
“Is it important?”
Then Kris said. “It’s important. Yes. I haven’t had to keep my own place for a while.”
“You’ve been in your university office and then banging chicks when it suited you. You’ve been a damn bachelor.”
“I could make a nest,” Kris was tucking in his shirt. “I’ll start to make a nest.”
He leaned into the bed and kissed her before he left. This was her late day, and she was going into a long shift at work. She needed to rest, but falling into her arms he was ready to make love again, to climb into that bed and begin again what they had started. Yet there was no time for it, and he had to get out of these clothes and into the shower and into his good clothes for this day.
He would tell her, he decided as he drove home, heading down Ashton. He had to tell her the truth if they were going to stay together, and he believed they would. Or could. He’d stopped believing in things like that. There hadn’t been any woman where he’d known her long enough to even consider telling the truth. With Jenean he felt so at home and with Jenean he also felt that there were things she needed to share, and that she could not share them with him until he could share himself with her.
I ought to feel worse. I ought to feel so terrible today!
And he does. His dad is gone. But Dad has been gone a long time. Now something is ended. The long waiting is over. He crosses the Main Street Bridge into downtown and thinks about going to visit his sister. She’ll be at the house soon enough, though. The old shops are giving way to the larger buildings and the tall downtown riverfront buildings are ahead of him when he stops at the red light and calls his sister.
“You need a ride to the house? I’m in the area.”
“Kristian!” Marabeth sounds incredibly happy, and then he can tell next that she’s trying to take that happiness down, knows what today is. “No, no, don’t worry about it. I’ll be there. I’m hardly even up yet. You have a good night?”
“I… the light is green.”
“I’ll see you at the house. We’ll have a good talk before we go to Saint Ursula’s.”
“Love you, Sis,” Kris said.
He hangs up before Marabeth can say anything and heads into downtown. A block later he crosses Birmingham knowing that four blocks west on it is Marabeth’s place, and traveling south on Buren Avenue, coming out of downtown, he knows Germantown is to the east and Little Hungary to the West. Traditionally Blacks lived on either side and now live everywhere, and he turns into Germantown when he sees Saint Agatha’s, the old pink bricks and the wide rose window, light and beautiful on a winter day as it is in the summer. There is the church he loved. Dad should have been buried there. And why the fuck is Marabeth in such a great mood, as he turns east on Dimler and sees the Schiller beer factory behind the houses, he thinks, I wonder if she’s getting any. I bet that’s what it is. But Marabeth is four miles north now, and he’s coming down the long row of stately townhouses toward the large old one he has spent most of his life in.
He turns, and the car rumbles through the alley, over snow and pebbles, and he parks in the garage and comes out of it, passing the coach house. What if that became his place? But would Jenean like that? But does that matter? What if he liked it? What it he had his own separate space? He was so used to having that third floor and calling it his own separate space, moving around the fact that he had to walk through the kitchen and be seen by his family, wondering what they were thinking. What if he were to have this space which could be, after all, entirely his own?
The kitchen is strangely quiet because it is not empty. His grandmother and mother are there. He remembers the other night, when Peter and Marabeth came to the house together, when he and Jim and Grandma and Mom were together and Peter had simply said, “We have to talk.”
And there it was, and there he was looking at Jim, looking at cousin Myron and Peter, all of them knowing what each of them had thought was a very private struggle was a family one. He remembers Jim looking at him, Jim the golden cousin, the blue eyed wonder. And now, today, Jim enters the kitchen. He is already dressed, but of course he is, and he looks good, but of course he does. What is more, Jim has been through the same grief, and Jim only says, “You want some coffee?”
“Yeah,” Kris says. “That’d be great.”
Jim nods.
“I’ll bring it up to you.”
“You don’t—” Kris begins, and then he says, “Bring yourself a cup up too. I’ve got cigarettes, or are you too healthy for them now?”
“Not today,” Jim gives him a brief smile. “I’ll be up when the coffee’s ready.”
SO MUCH MORE SATURDAY NIGHT/SUNDAY AFTERNOON
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
It looks like the Strauss guys have a lot to talk about. I am glad that they have gotten to the place of having it. I am also happy about Kris and Jenean. Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yes, and it's easy to forget, but little more than a week passes in this story, so they really do get through a lot.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
James B Strauss did not particularly remember his father, Byron. In many ways, he did not remember family history the way others said they did. To him it seems as if the Strausses had taken his grandfather Steiger in, though it turned out they had a very long history with the Freys, and that Pamela, whom so many had said they feared, had only had a kindness and a certain warmth for his grandfather. This was how old she was. She had known Jim’s old grandfather since he was a boy, and Jim remembered the year she died, coming into her little living room in the coach house, He remembered the white lace curtains and the old rugs and the strange statues, the warmth of the fire, and her soft accent that carried the remnants of Bavaria. By then she was bone and skin as thin as onion paper, and all the time she told stories. She loved the German stories, the Volsungasaga, the Niebelungied, that’s what others said. But he was so young she told him the tales from Grimm, and he remembered once she told the story of the seven kids.
There was, once upon a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and loved them with all the love of a mother for her children. One day she wanted to go into the forest and fetch some food. So she called all seven to her and said, "Dear children, I have to go into the forest, be on your guard against the wolf, if he comes in, he will devour you all - skin, hair, and everything. The wretch often disguises himself, but you will know him at once by his rough voice and his black feet."
The kids said, "Dear mother, we will take good care of ourselves, you may go away without any anxiety." Then the old one bleated, and went on her way with an easy mind.
It was not long before some one knocked at the house-door and called, "Open the door, dear children, your mother is here, and has brought something back with her for each of you." But the little kids knew that it was the wolf, by the rough voice.
We will not open the door," cried they, "you are not our mother. She has a soft, pleasant voice, but your voice is rough, you are the wolf."
Then the wolf went away to a shopkeeper and bought himself a great lump of chalk, ate this and made his voice soft with it. The he came back, knocked at the door of the house, and called, "Open the door, dear children, your mother is here and has brought something back with her for each of you."
But the wolf had laid his black paws against the window, and the children saw them and cried, "We will not open the door, our mother has not black feet like you, you are the wolf."
Then the wolf ran to a baker and said, "I have hurt my feet, rub some dough over them for me. And when the baker had rubbed his feet over, he ran to the miller and said,
Strew some white meal over my feet for me." The miller thought to himself, the wolf wants to deceive someone, and refused, but the wolf said, "If you will not do it, I will devour you."
Then the miller was afraid, and made his paws white for him.
So now the wretch went for the third time to the house-door, knocked at it and said,
Open the door for me, children, your dear little mother has come home, and has brought every one of you something back from the forest with her."
The little kids cried, "First show us your paws that we may know if you are our dear little mother."
Then he put his paws in through the window, and when the kids saw that they were white, they believed that all he said was true, and opened the door. But who should come in but the wolf. The kids were terrified and wanted to hide themselves. One sprang under the table, the second into the bed, the third into the stove, the fourth into the kitchen, the fifth into the cupboard, the sixth under the washing-bowl, and the seventh into the clock-case. But the wolf found them all, and used no great ceremony, one after the other he swallowed them down his throat. The youngest, who was in the clock-case, was the only one he did not find. When the wolf had satisfied his appetite he took himself off, laid himself down under a tree in the green meadow outside, and began to sleep.
Soon afterwards the old goat came home again from the forest. Ah, what a sight she saw there. The house-door stood wide open. The table, chairs, and benches were thrown down, the washing-bowl lay broken to pieces, and the quilts and pillows were pulled off the bed. She sought her children, but they were nowhere to be found. She called them one after another by name, but no one answered.
At last, when she came to the youngest, a soft voice cried, "Dear Mother, I am in the clock-case." She took the kid out, and it told her that the wolf had come and had eaten all the others. Then you may imagine how she wept over her poor children.
At length in her grief she went out, and the youngest kid ran with her. When they came to the meadow, there lay the wolf by the tree and snored so loud that the branches shook. She looked at him on every side and saw that something was moving and struggling in his gorged belly. Ah, heavens, she thought, is it possible that my poor children whom he has swallowed down for his supper, can be still alive?
Then the kid had to run home and fetch scissors, and a needle and thread and the goat cut open the monster's stomach, and hardly had she make one cut, than one little kid thrust its head out, and when she cut farther, all six sprang out one after another, and were all still alive, and had suffered no injury whatever, for in his greediness the monster had swallowed them down whole.
What rejoicing there was! They embraced their dear mother, and jumped like a sailor at his wedding. The mother, however, said, "Now go and look for some big stones, and we will fill the wicked beast's stomach with them while he is still asleep." Then the seven kids dragged the stones thither with all speed, and put as many of them into his stomach as they could get in, and the mother sewed him up again in the greatest haste, so that he was not aware of anything and never once stirred.
When the wolf at length had had his fill of sleep, he got on his legs, and as the stones in his stomach made him very thirsty, he wanted to go to a well to drink. But when he began to walk and move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against each other and rattled. Then cried he,
"What rumbles and tumbles
Against my poor bones?
I thought 'twas six kids,
But it feels like big stones."
And when he got to the well and stooped over the water to drink, the heavy stones made him fall in, and he had to drown miserably.
When the seven kids saw that, they came running to the spot and cried aloud, "The wolf is dead, the wolf is dead," and danced for joy round about the well with their mother.
“So they got the bad wolf,” Jim had said.
“They got the wolf because the wolf was part of them,” the old woman had said.
Jim had not understood this and the confusion must have been on his face.
“There is another story, of a god, a great Titan who ate all of his children or most of them, but who was given a great potion and threw them up, and so they did something like that to him. When you eat a real meal, then you chew it up, gobble gobble gobble. But the Titan and the wolf were simply swallowing up something that was part of them. Sometimes a thing that is part of you can take all of you, and you can lose control of it. That is when the mother goat comes and rescues you, brings you back to yourself. When the wolf comes to swallow you, remember that, Jimmy, and set yourself free.”
All these years later, Jim wondered, had she called him Jimmy because, in her old age, she had confused him momentarily with her brother, his grandfather? But one thing he knew now, as he sat in Kris’s room drinking coffee beside his estranged cousin, she had known what she was talking about. Pamela had been warning him.
“This is….”
“The worst coffee you’ve ever tasted?” Jim said.
“Actually, it’s a pretty good cup,” Kris said, looking out of the window of the kitchenette that looked down on Dimler Street.
“I was going to say that this is the damnedest day.”
Jim only nodded.
“I’m,” Kris started. “I’m happy. You know. I feel sort of at peace, even with those leafless trees and that grey sky. And then I think, but Dad is dead. We’re on our way to his funeral. You know? And I have to remember to be torn up again. Only, I feel weird. But not torn up.”
“I don’t really know how I feel,” Jim said, half into his cup, while he looked out onto the street.”
“We have to stop this,” Kris said. And then he said, “I mean, I have to stop. Being an ass. I want to stop. The way I… the stuff I said to you. The way I’ve acted toward you.”
“It’s okay,” Jim put down his coffee cup and took one of Kris’s cigarettes.
“No,” Kris said, “it’s not.’
“You were going through some stuff.”
“We were all going through the stuff, and anyway, I haven’t been going through it for thirty years. It’s just,” Kris shook his head. “Fuck, you make it look so easy. You make it look easy to… lose your parents and everything, and I seem to not be able to get happy. And so I just…” Kris shook his head. “I ended up being a real dick to you, and I don’t know if I can stop. No,” Kris corrected himself, looking at Jim, his cigarette hanging from his hand. “I don’t know myself another way. I… want to be the fun person. I want to be the guy with the jokes. I want to be that person. Even Peter can be that person, the one who throws his arm over someone’s shoulder. Or Myron. Myron makes an ass of himself on a daily basis and doesn’t even seem to realize it.”
Jim laughed, “Remember when he led the liturgical dance team at Saint Ursula’s?”
Kris snorted and muttered, “Oh, shit.”
“You remember that. Him and six other boys in leotards, and the girls in the white robes, and they were just doing kicks and pirouettes and shit, up to the altar during Communion.”
“Yeah, and then Aunt Maris leans into Grandma and whispers about one of the dancers, ‘I can see that girl’s panties.’”
They are both laughing now and Jim says, “How do you think Myron will handle…. Being what we are?”
“A werewolf?” Kris said baldly, frowning and shaking his head.
“It’s going to be hard telling him. He won’t believe it.”
“Maybe it’s not so bad to be the grey cloud at the party,” Jim suggested. “I just thought you hated me.”
“I don’t hate you, Jim!” Kris said quickly. “I could never hate you. You’re my brother. And you are my brother,” Kris insisted, “No matter what I said after Christmas. I’m just not good with my emotions.”
“You’re very German.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. But so is Myron, and he’s still a wackjob.”
“You’re more like, Nietchze German.’
Kris, who had been looking mildly regretfully suddenly burst into a laugh again.
“Well, if you see me crying over any dead horses, check me into a sanitarium before I hurt myself.”
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There was, once upon a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and loved them with all the love of a mother for her children. One day she wanted to go into the forest and fetch some food. So she called all seven to her and said, "Dear children, I have to go into the forest, be on your guard against the wolf, if he comes in, he will devour you all - skin, hair, and everything. The wretch often disguises himself, but you will know him at once by his rough voice and his black feet."
The kids said, "Dear mother, we will take good care of ourselves, you may go away without any anxiety." Then the old one bleated, and went on her way with an easy mind.
It was not long before some one knocked at the house-door and called, "Open the door, dear children, your mother is here, and has brought something back with her for each of you." But the little kids knew that it was the wolf, by the rough voice.
We will not open the door," cried they, "you are not our mother. She has a soft, pleasant voice, but your voice is rough, you are the wolf."
Then the wolf went away to a shopkeeper and bought himself a great lump of chalk, ate this and made his voice soft with it. The he came back, knocked at the door of the house, and called, "Open the door, dear children, your mother is here and has brought something back with her for each of you."
But the wolf had laid his black paws against the window, and the children saw them and cried, "We will not open the door, our mother has not black feet like you, you are the wolf."
Then the wolf ran to a baker and said, "I have hurt my feet, rub some dough over them for me. And when the baker had rubbed his feet over, he ran to the miller and said,
Strew some white meal over my feet for me." The miller thought to himself, the wolf wants to deceive someone, and refused, but the wolf said, "If you will not do it, I will devour you."
Then the miller was afraid, and made his paws white for him.
So now the wretch went for the third time to the house-door, knocked at it and said,
Open the door for me, children, your dear little mother has come home, and has brought every one of you something back from the forest with her."
The little kids cried, "First show us your paws that we may know if you are our dear little mother."
Then he put his paws in through the window, and when the kids saw that they were white, they believed that all he said was true, and opened the door. But who should come in but the wolf. The kids were terrified and wanted to hide themselves. One sprang under the table, the second into the bed, the third into the stove, the fourth into the kitchen, the fifth into the cupboard, the sixth under the washing-bowl, and the seventh into the clock-case. But the wolf found them all, and used no great ceremony, one after the other he swallowed them down his throat. The youngest, who was in the clock-case, was the only one he did not find. When the wolf had satisfied his appetite he took himself off, laid himself down under a tree in the green meadow outside, and began to sleep.
Soon afterwards the old goat came home again from the forest. Ah, what a sight she saw there. The house-door stood wide open. The table, chairs, and benches were thrown down, the washing-bowl lay broken to pieces, and the quilts and pillows were pulled off the bed. She sought her children, but they were nowhere to be found. She called them one after another by name, but no one answered.
At last, when she came to the youngest, a soft voice cried, "Dear Mother, I am in the clock-case." She took the kid out, and it told her that the wolf had come and had eaten all the others. Then you may imagine how she wept over her poor children.
At length in her grief she went out, and the youngest kid ran with her. When they came to the meadow, there lay the wolf by the tree and snored so loud that the branches shook. She looked at him on every side and saw that something was moving and struggling in his gorged belly. Ah, heavens, she thought, is it possible that my poor children whom he has swallowed down for his supper, can be still alive?
Then the kid had to run home and fetch scissors, and a needle and thread and the goat cut open the monster's stomach, and hardly had she make one cut, than one little kid thrust its head out, and when she cut farther, all six sprang out one after another, and were all still alive, and had suffered no injury whatever, for in his greediness the monster had swallowed them down whole.
What rejoicing there was! They embraced their dear mother, and jumped like a sailor at his wedding. The mother, however, said, "Now go and look for some big stones, and we will fill the wicked beast's stomach with them while he is still asleep." Then the seven kids dragged the stones thither with all speed, and put as many of them into his stomach as they could get in, and the mother sewed him up again in the greatest haste, so that he was not aware of anything and never once stirred.
When the wolf at length had had his fill of sleep, he got on his legs, and as the stones in his stomach made him very thirsty, he wanted to go to a well to drink. But when he began to walk and move about, the stones in his stomach knocked against each other and rattled. Then cried he,
"What rumbles and tumbles
Against my poor bones?
I thought 'twas six kids,
But it feels like big stones."
And when he got to the well and stooped over the water to drink, the heavy stones made him fall in, and he had to drown miserably.
When the seven kids saw that, they came running to the spot and cried aloud, "The wolf is dead, the wolf is dead," and danced for joy round about the well with their mother.
“So they got the bad wolf,” Jim had said.
“They got the wolf because the wolf was part of them,” the old woman had said.
Jim had not understood this and the confusion must have been on his face.
“There is another story, of a god, a great Titan who ate all of his children or most of them, but who was given a great potion and threw them up, and so they did something like that to him. When you eat a real meal, then you chew it up, gobble gobble gobble. But the Titan and the wolf were simply swallowing up something that was part of them. Sometimes a thing that is part of you can take all of you, and you can lose control of it. That is when the mother goat comes and rescues you, brings you back to yourself. When the wolf comes to swallow you, remember that, Jimmy, and set yourself free.”
All these years later, Jim wondered, had she called him Jimmy because, in her old age, she had confused him momentarily with her brother, his grandfather? But one thing he knew now, as he sat in Kris’s room drinking coffee beside his estranged cousin, she had known what she was talking about. Pamela had been warning him.
“This is….”
“The worst coffee you’ve ever tasted?” Jim said.
“Actually, it’s a pretty good cup,” Kris said, looking out of the window of the kitchenette that looked down on Dimler Street.
“I was going to say that this is the damnedest day.”
Jim only nodded.
“I’m,” Kris started. “I’m happy. You know. I feel sort of at peace, even with those leafless trees and that grey sky. And then I think, but Dad is dead. We’re on our way to his funeral. You know? And I have to remember to be torn up again. Only, I feel weird. But not torn up.”
“I don’t really know how I feel,” Jim said, half into his cup, while he looked out onto the street.”
“We have to stop this,” Kris said. And then he said, “I mean, I have to stop. Being an ass. I want to stop. The way I… the stuff I said to you. The way I’ve acted toward you.”
“It’s okay,” Jim put down his coffee cup and took one of Kris’s cigarettes.
“No,” Kris said, “it’s not.’
“You were going through some stuff.”
“We were all going through the stuff, and anyway, I haven’t been going through it for thirty years. It’s just,” Kris shook his head. “Fuck, you make it look so easy. You make it look easy to… lose your parents and everything, and I seem to not be able to get happy. And so I just…” Kris shook his head. “I ended up being a real dick to you, and I don’t know if I can stop. No,” Kris corrected himself, looking at Jim, his cigarette hanging from his hand. “I don’t know myself another way. I… want to be the fun person. I want to be the guy with the jokes. I want to be that person. Even Peter can be that person, the one who throws his arm over someone’s shoulder. Or Myron. Myron makes an ass of himself on a daily basis and doesn’t even seem to realize it.”
Jim laughed, “Remember when he led the liturgical dance team at Saint Ursula’s?”
Kris snorted and muttered, “Oh, shit.”
“You remember that. Him and six other boys in leotards, and the girls in the white robes, and they were just doing kicks and pirouettes and shit, up to the altar during Communion.”
“Yeah, and then Aunt Maris leans into Grandma and whispers about one of the dancers, ‘I can see that girl’s panties.’”
They are both laughing now and Jim says, “How do you think Myron will handle…. Being what we are?”
“A werewolf?” Kris said baldly, frowning and shaking his head.
“It’s going to be hard telling him. He won’t believe it.”
“Maybe it’s not so bad to be the grey cloud at the party,” Jim suggested. “I just thought you hated me.”
“I don’t hate you, Jim!” Kris said quickly. “I could never hate you. You’re my brother. And you are my brother,” Kris insisted, “No matter what I said after Christmas. I’m just not good with my emotions.”
“You’re very German.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. But so is Myron, and he’s still a wackjob.”
“You’re more like, Nietchze German.’
Kris, who had been looking mildly regretfully suddenly burst into a laugh again.
“Well, if you see me crying over any dead horses, check me into a sanitarium before I hurt myself.”
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CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
The story about the wolves is fascinating. I am glad that Kris made up with Jim. I am also happy with where this story is leading. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
It's a lot of wolf stories here, and most of them are important. It is good to see Kris and Jim finally behaving as they ought, and pretty soon... let's not get ahead of ourselves, is the next part of the story where all sorts of good things will be happening.