Unbinding Abraham                            

                       "Mrs. Lincoln and friend"

(Author's note: What if family history were written differently? What if it wasn't our own history at all - but someone else's that defined us? Perhaps "history" is just a modern-day twist on an old ghost story?)

As always, unapologetically unedited.

                                                  

                    

“Beware of going down that rabbit hole. You may find yourself eaten by the rabbit at the end of your chase.”

 ~ PT Huedlach    

                                                                                                                             

HE CROSSED THE ROOM with a silent stride. Taking yesterday's gazette from the sideboard, he carefully sat down and moved to a chair near the fire. Molly sat staring into the fire at the edge of the davenport, ignoring him. The chair was too small for his frame, and he rustled uncomfortably with the papers in his hand as he too looked away. Glancing at the print, he grumbled at no one in particular, "What good is the news in these broadsheets?" The dispatches had already brought him yesterday's numbers at breakfast; still, rustling through the printed cries of public outrage and the terrible mortality of it all seemed his duty, and oddly, to somehow assuage his private misery. 

It seemed the very least he could do was to feel their pain.

Silly dear Puss, he thought, glancing her way. Couldn't she see that his heart was broken too? Couldn't she see that? His Molly, who knew him better than the axe knew the oak? He didn't show it; it was his job not to place his personal grief over the nation's. However, he certainly knew it in almost a Biblical sense of hurt. He shuddered against that hurt, closing it off in some lost corner of his mind and heart lest he go mad. 

"Damn it, little woman," he thought. "I'm not like you," he felt as if in the Devil's thrall. "I cannot afford the luxury of missing him!"  What right did he have to mourn his boy when so many boys had been forfeit? Honestly, Puss, he thought, you've simply got to understand... There's a damn war going on.

The black cloth of her dressing gown was wet with sorrow. She looked down, away from him and into the fire, half angry at him for the loss of her boy, both blaming and not blaming his ancient face all at once. Her nose raw, she sputtered, "I don't care about your damn war!" She clutched at the salty tears soaked into her handkerchief, unable to get the final images of their boy's gasps for life from her mind. Everywhere her mind turned, there was so much loss; there was no relief from it. He simply cannot understand my loss, she thought. Yet she knew this was not true. It was just the lie she told herself to cover the pain in her own heart. 

About that time, a steward they referred to only as Mr. Slade came through asking if they needed anything else before the house took to their beds. He smiled kindly toward the man, telling him no, that they would be fine, though looking back at Puss, he wasn't sure they would be. "Yes, Slade, all's well. Enjoy what's left of your evening," he said. "Give our regards to your goodwife." Molly just turned away further, embarrassed in her grief. 

               

                                 "Slade"

The room went quiet, isolating them. The dim glow of the oil lamp illuminated the fractured paint of the second Mrs. Adams' portrait, suspended over them, and the gentle crackle of the embers fading in the hearth. Breaking the silence, she spoke, "I've asked them back, you know." 

Treading lightly for an answer he surely already knew, he replied, "Yes, Little Woman, who have you asked back?" He flattened the gazette against one long leg, creasing its folds with his large fingers against bony knees. Be steady, he thought. She needs you now more than anyone else in this world, though his mind raced with the bloody details of accounts sent back to him this morning's dispatch report.

"Why Margaret Laurie and her daughter Belle, of course," she answered too shortly and with a breathless misery. "You know she saw him last time, but he slipped away before she could hear what he wanted to tell me. Belle was certain he was with us too." 

Shifting uneasily, his fingers ceased fiddling with the creases of the broadsheets. Reaching out toward her, he gently touched the fabric of her skirt, quickly withdrawing his hand back as if afraid of burning. "Little woman..." He said, stopping in thought and considering his next words carefully. "Molly, I miss the boy too, but he's departed now, dear. There's no amount of looking for answers from the heavens that's going to bring him back." He instantly recoiled at the delivery of his own words, regretting the terrible truth they contained. 

"Oh, you and your accursed war!" Puss sputtered half angrily his way. "You've cared nothing about him nor his memory since he's been gone." She knew she was striking deep at both his public and private pain. "What would I not give for just another brief moment with our boy? Can you not fathom that a mother should want that? Can you not fathom that Margaret Laurie is gifted seer and can reach out to the nether world? Can you not see the possibility that her daughter Belle is but a conduit... a way for us to be with our boy if only for the moment of a brief fare-thee-well? Really, Abraham, why do you torture me so? How can you be so callous?"

"I've no love of spiritists, Puss," he replied. Gently, he went on, "I do not discount universal possibility, nor that there are greater things in God's creation to which we are not privy nor meant to understand. However, the consolations you seek, dear one, are not found by consorting with spiritists the likes of the Laurie women or the Fox girls in the Red Room. Dear Little Woman, these are answers we will only find through introspection and prayer." 

His eyes watched as the air seemed to drain out of her. 

He knew the practicality of his words had cut. "Have I spoken too plainly?" he thought to himself. The boy's been gone nigh a year now. Perhaps a rail trip to visit cousin Harriet in Cleveland would distract her from this never-ending parade of mediums she sought answers from. He could tell, though, that she was undeterred. There would be no peace for either of them. 

                  

"Won't you join us, though dear?" She smiled as if she hadn't heard a word from him at all. It was the smile of the Molly Todd he'd fallen in love with so many years ago. "They'll be here tomorrow evening", she continued, lightly going on. "They've asked that all the mirrors in the house be draped by the time they arrive. Mrs. Laurie said it's done to better engage with the departed so as they don't get lost in their own reflections trying to reach out to us. We'll see to Mrs. Cuthbert removing the mirror coverings after. I've made all the arrangements." 

"Darling, I don't think..." He faltered a bit. "I'm expected in Philadelphia the following day. Wouldn't it be a better use of time to take an evening out?" But as he looked her way, he could see that she was lost, so utterly lost in the firelight and alone in the incessant cackle of her mind's quest to get their Willie back or any word from him somehow someway. He glanced up at the portrait of the second Mrs. Adams on the wall. It did not matter to lose this battle with her. The truth was that he could never afford to lose her. In the end, there was little choice. "Yes, Puss, if it brings us closer to our boy, of course, I will join you."

It was then that for a brief moment he watched as the sunlight returned to her eyes.                             

II.

Margaret Laurie and her daughter Belle were fearless hens, or so he thought as Slade escorted them into the Red Room deftly announcing their arrival. It was half past seven the following evening, and the sun was well set as he paced the floor. Though his mind was certainly elsewhere, Molly had asked him to await their arrival with her, still, his mind was filled with the horrors of the day's field reports. Slade had asked Mrs. Cuthbert to drape the mirrors as Puss had instructed, and everywhere he looked, the room appeared cloaked in a dismal candlelight. The draped mirrors only led to distorted flickers of memory and the unease that the entire room was about to be sent adrift.

The two women arrived dressed in the usual dour gray he'd witnessed before. He winced, hoping the evening's dark light would hide the rebel color of the woman's garb from Slade's discerning glance. The women were accompanied by an unctuous man whom Slade introduced as the woman's husband. Abe only half heard the introduction of a "Mr. Cranston Laurie" as the said man strode past Slade, offering an exaggerated bow to Molly and an unwelcome handshake to him. The man's handshake drew no further friendly reply or reaction from Abe, other than an unwanted coppery taste in his mouth and the feel of butcher's lard at the touch of the man's hand. To his credit, the smarmy fellow read the room and quickly took his place off to the side, nervously stroking the lackluster hairs of his balding head, and allowing "the hens" to get a better sense of what they murmured to Puss as "the intrepid disbelief" in the room.   

On Molly's cue, Mrs. Cuthbert asked the two women to be seated in straight-backed chairs arranged near each other in a brief semicircle. She and Abe sat across from them, he in his favorite rocking fiddleback and Puss in a well-worn Queen Anne that no doubt had long ago belonged to the second Mrs. Adams, she, who now watched on with steely enameled eyes from her perch on the wall. An awkward silence ensued, that is until a grief-stricken Molly reached out for Margaret Laurie's hand in a beseeching sign for the elder Laurie woman to begin her spiritualistic reach. As if on cue, Mr. Cranston Laurie retreated further into the shadows still stroking his hairless head, as their daughter Belle began to utter strange sounds under her breath. Belle's sharp dark eyes and ruddy features seemed to begin to undulate, moving against the air like the opening stanza of a well-rehearsed road show.

He felt himself startle at the histrionics of it all, indeed if not the utter evident theater. Before he could say a word, though, practical, polite, or otherwise, he saw Molly's face. Seeing that she'd already fallen into the rapture of the Laurie women's spell, he silenced himself, choosing instead to "rise above" as they say, and return to his inner thoughts, to those of the war, and to where he'd left off in his reading of Marcus Aurelius. After all, he didn't want to upset his Molly when she so badly needed to win this battle within herself and conquer some sort of communication with the ethereal around them.

   

It was about then that the woman, Margaret Laurie, turned to him and said with the chortle of a fishwife, "I see that you are not a believer, sir."

Slightly abashed, and as his Molly cast her eyes downward, he replied, "I hold no ill will nor forethought of malice toward you, your practice, or your messages, Mrs. Laurie. You are graciously here as I am to support my dear wife's call to the memory of our beloved son Willie."

Mrs. Laurie moved to face him, dislodging the phlegm crowded inside her waddled throat. As she did so, and with that phlegmish sound she made akin to a wolverine's growl, she squinted at Abraham's unease. Raising her eyebrows, she examined him like a midwife or wolf would a newborn; she carefully eyed him for any sign of weakness. Mocking his sincerity with the look in her eyes, she continued on with a soliloquy of her peculiar questions, if not her intent. All in the room was quiet in its restlessness, and still she spoke.

"Have you chosen to win or to lose this war between the brothers of the North and South?"

Abraham straightened his back, angling his long legs out from the seat of the fiddleback. He slowly regarded Mrs. Laurie, scanning her daughter Belle, and, in his periphery, he could see old man Laurie in the background waiting as if ready to pounce on a beggar's dropped penny. They all appeared not to move from their designated positions as he attempted his reply;

"Madame," he began somewhat sternly, "I take neither joy nor umbrage in your question. I pray only that you will understand when I say to you that who will win or who will lose this war is likely beyond the matter of my simple choice. That choice, as you call it, madam, belongs solely to the hearts of our good soldiers and to Providence."

"Is it not your choice, indeed, Mr. Lincoln? She replied, smiling the tidewater grin of a harpy cheating at cards. "It will be the choice of a nation that you will make, will it not? It will be a choice that will bind or divide brothers for centuries to come. Is that not so?"

"Mrs. Laurie, I assure you that I only pray that this union will be preserved," he replied, growing uneasy at her glib nature. 

"Listen well to your choice, good sir," she replied, not without some arrogance. "And listen well to the message here tonight. Consider only that, in the end, generations may benefit more from the loss of this war than a win, indeed from the loss of your so-called "union." Consider, sir, that you cannot bind that which does not choose nor wish to be bound."

Abe felt himself grow irritated. Who was this charlatan to first prey on his wife and speak so adroitly without respect or reservation for his office? He recoiled. How had they let this harpy through the door? He wondered if he shouldn't call for Slade and have the harridan and her like expelled from the house. He was in no mood for the simpering rhetoric of not-too-secreted Copperheads, seance or otherwise.

He turned once again to address Mrs. Margaret Laurie, but before he could say another word, a great shout and tumble of words broke out of her daughter. The younger woman, Belle Laurie, had begun to violently sway back and forth in her chair. Her head was cocked back oddly and to the side, and exposing folds of florid fat over the yellowing lace of her collar. Her mouth had fallen open at a peculiar angle too, and the skin of her neck seemed to ripple against the lace of her collar in a sickly yellow contrast against her ruddy pallor. A film coated her upper lip, and her face took on a disturbing mottled hue as her forehead appeared to grow further moistened and damp.

It was, however, not Belle's raw look that caused them all to gasp, but her words that forced them all (and most notably his dear Molly) to shrink back, clutching both Margaret Laurie's hand and her handkerchief to her breast. Even Abraham felt a disturbance in the air around Belle Laurie, but it was Belle's strange words that rang out to him in the dead evening air which brought them all asunder. Words that said...

"Poppa, are you there?"

III.

                                    

"What ventriloquist devilry is this!?" Abe stood up immediately, angry, and nearly stumbled from his chair. He moved toward Puss protectively and looked as if he might strike at Belle Laurie for her wild antics. Mr. Cranston Laurie looked wide-eyed at the mess of it all, but did not move from his exile near the window, and Margaret Laurie simply brought Molly's hand over, closer to Margaret's own breast, as if they were somehow women in arms or old cherished friends. 

It was Puss who broke the air first, saying, "Abraham, sit down!!! Can you not see that our boy is here with us? Can you not hear that he is trying to break through to deliver us a message from his long home? I simply can't bear it, Abe. You must stop now!" Mary Lincoln screamed. It was the scream of an agrieved mother, and it shattered the candlelit stillness and spilled out over the mumbling antics of Belle Laurie. Belle Laurie, who, by all accounts, appeared to have entered into the depths of some great fugue or trance.

"Darling boy, it's mummy," Molly spoke as if to the air around her. "Poppa is here too. We miss you so, dearest Willie!" She went on, entreating what she could not see and seeing only what she felt in her mind's heart. 

Belle Laurie, seemingly exhausted from her exertions, now sat upright, rigid in her chair and taken up with her fugue. Her eyes rolled oddly "this way and that," and soon she continued on in a voice not quite her own...

"Poppa, it's so cold here. So very cold. There's snow and ice everywhere and no trees or greenery. It's not home, Poppa. I know it's not Virginia. I'm so cold Da, so cold...Oh, Da, why have you sent me here?" It was Willie's voice speaking through Belle Laurie. The voice was heavily distorted, disrupting, with gasps of air that came out in between her efforts to form words. Still, one couldn't be sure who indeed was making them, either words or gasps, or the boy or Belle Laurie.

"Boy, yes, it's me, your Father," Abraham said. "I am indeed here, son." Abe continued, not believing necessarily that he was truly speaking with the departed spirit of his son, but unwilling to gamble on Mary's sanity in that moment. 

Molly spoke again, "Darling boy, can you not ask for help or take cover from the cold where you are? Oh, my darling, can you not stay here with us instead, where we can keep you safe and warm?"

Belle Laurie trembled a bit at this, and the voice of Willie Lincoln appeared to reply to both his parents in a question. "Why have you sent me here to see this cold?" he asked. "There are few people here, strange ones, Eskimo-like with dogs and furs, and many are not yet departed as I am. There are great metal birds that rise up and growl through the sky like flying dinosaurs and men dressed in green with helmets like Roman Centurions marching to and fro. I see great belching ships floating among the ice in the seawater. It is all so very cold here, Poppa."

I hear them talking too, Dad. They say that they are soon to be new states in the union. I hear them talking about the numbers 51 and 47. I hear them talking about Russia and China and some place called Panama. They say this is all because of what Lincoln did so many years ago. What can they mean, Father? What did you do so many years ago? They say this is what preserving the union wrought. What does wrought mean, Poppa?? There is a huge flag here planted in the ice, but there are too many stars on it. So many stars all crowded together. Poppa, why are there so many stars on our flag!??! They say that things are becoming unbound. Help me, Poppa! I am so cold. What does it all mean?

Why have you sent me here? Was I bad?

Abe felt a chill go through the room. The chill seemed to come out of no place. He opened his mouth to speak, to reply to the peculiar and ethereal questions the presumed voice of his departed son was asking, but he could summon no words. It was all too incredible. It was all too unimaginable. It broke his heart, these strange things Willie (or Belle) was saying. He watched too as his Molly looked on in horror, entreating the silence that overtook the room for more answers. 

There were none. Belle Laurie shuffled; her face regained it's ruddy color and her eyes opened up in a normal fashion. She straightened herself in her chair. Whatever had happened to her, whatever communication there was from Willie or from some icy Great Beyond appeared to have fled.

"Oh no!" Molly cried out gasping and clutching the hand of Margaret Laurie. "Tell me he isn't gone! You must get him back! He's not well, Margaret, and he's so very cold. Oh, please, do ask Belle to summon him again... I will give you anything you wish for, just get my boy back."

As Mary Lincoln sobbed into her handkerchief, Mrs. Cuthbert seemed to appear out of nowhere. Molly Lincoln stood up and, as if on instinct, went over to Cuthbert's comforting embrace. It seemed that the evening was drawing to an end. Abe could tell that Molly was a wreck, utterly drained in her emotions, and he nodded to Cuthbert that she should escort Mary from the room and allow her to retire for the evening. Slade made a sound too, and with crafted motions, both Slade and Cuthbert made efforts to conclude whatever had taken place there in the Red Room.

 Slade drew back the heavy curtains over the windows, letting the light from the soldiers' torches outside carry in through the window glass. The night was clear too, and Abraham felt grateful for the stars he could see. Slade lit more candles and stoked the hearth, and even Cranston Laurie moved, moving quickly to assist Belle to recover from her fugue state. In a surprisingly gentle move, Cranston Laurie assisted his daughter Belle by offering her water and shouldering her out into the ante-chamber.

Finally, it was just the President and Mrs. Margaret Laurie.

Abe began. "I'm not sure what you have done here, madam," he said. "But I will not welcome you back into this house again. I have no room in my heart for such cruel shenanigans or tomfoolery against my wife or family. And as to your political countenance, I suggest you take your morbid theater acts back to Hell's Bottom or Murder's Bay where I suspect they might play out for a nickel better." Abraham grimaced, angrier than usual.

Margaret Laurie looked unfettered. Standing up, she appeared to shake free from the wrinkles and folds of her dour clothes but never lost her cold demeanor. She eyed him as Seward once had, or as one would an equal or a rival in business matters. Speaking abruptly and without caution, she said,

 "Did you not hear your message, good sir? I did advise that you should."                          

"What message?" Abe replied with unusual alacrity. "Do you not mean the message you concocted to "cheer" my wife? A message from my dear dead son speaking of giant metal birds growling like dinosaurs and of Eskimos and icy wastelands and of too many stars crowded onto our dear Old Glory? What message would that be, madam, other than the insane showmanship you and yours have attempted to shuck and purvey?

Your "union," my good, sir. 

That is the message your own son delivered to you from some far-off place. Did I not tell you that your war will bind that which does not choose or wish to be bound? Indeed, perhaps that which in the end should not be bound? Your union, sir, indeed your war of brothers, binds slavers and abolitionists together. Does it not? It binds Catholic to Quaker, and railroads to cotton? Your union shall bind zealots and charlatans from all walks of life, and thieves to honest men and atheists - and all this in the name of your intended righteousness.  Can you not see, sir, that not all things are stronger because of a "union"  - that all things will only evolve differently bound or unbound according to their purpose?"

"My good man, there is purpose in our diversity and much consequence in its lack," she sputtered on.

Abe scoffed, "I am not your good man, madam. For that matter, what is your madness, woman? Save your machinations and manipulations for some other sad rube. Is it not time you left this house?"

She laughed, another chortled and phlegmish sort of laugh, but a laugh just the same. "You will only move the post further down the fence line, sir. The boundaries of such things are set forth by God. I see by your colors that, yes, you will win this war, and well, perhaps you should." 

"You should, however, not mistake me for a sympathizer or Copperhead, Mr. President," she continued. "I assure you, I am neither. I will only tell you that in winning this war, you only postpone that which must happen because of it - because of your "win." Yes, you will postpone that which must happen. Your "union" will save you and this country from many terrible things for many decades to come. But your winning will create new ones. It will save you from two unimaginable wars with the Germans and thoughts of war with so many others. Your "winning it" will not hide you from these things any more than "your union" might possibly return these blessed shores home to England or France. Sir, as you are both bound and unbound to win or loss no matter. There will come a time too, sir, when your immortality will rise above the memory of your many imperfections. Perhaps then, sir, you shall see that all clocks, union or not, must become unwound."

"All skeins of thread must unwind," she said chiding him. "Consider the consequences of the action for that union and that which cannot be "unbound." In one hundred years, no, I say in two hundred years, would it have been better to leave things, as I said, without any union and unbound?"

"Would it have been better to have lost this war as you lost your dear Willie?"

"Perhaps, sir, your union will create a future Giant Power so large that it will seek to bind other things like Eskimos and Vikings, and to bind them all with giant metal birds that growl like dinosaurs while your union's future Roman Centurions are sent into other icy and cold places owned by others and places that do not wish to be bound? Centurions to take things and places that do not belong to them?"

Stunned, Abraham sat down. Margaret Laurie, smoothing her dress and smugly preening her hair one last time, affected to take her leave. She gave a slight nod to Slade as she walked out. The candlelight caught her wolverine-like sneer as she moved toward the door. "As to your son, sir," he does miss you, you know. It was he who spoke to you, not Belle. Consider only his message."

"After all, it is not he who is bound."

END

                                              

  

The gospel according to Sally 

(Author's note: On occasion, family history can simply mean getting lost with someone you never really knew.)

As always, unapologetically unedited.

IT COULDN’T BE too much farther. Or at least it seemed so as I watched the fog settle in along the coastal hills. The fog rolled across the highway and up into the crevice divides of an unapparent side road ebbing back and forth a bit, gathering and receding along the path of the road itself. The road was barely more than gravel, albeit still a path, it wasn’t much more than a collection of muddy ruts. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said this blind travel was only going to lead us further into the darker depths of some hobbit’s lair. I really didn’t know where we were. In truth, I had only the vaguest clue of where we might be going.

In the silent drone of the morning fog, I could hear myself answer her.

"Really, Sally? We’re going to “a pine hut” in the woods? Who does that?"

Shouldn’t we be getting back?

As I said this, she seemed to look off into some unforeseen distance. For me, it was just more a matter of how could anyone find anything” out here. I mean it was “pretty” and all that…but… Exactly why is there some random “Pine Hut” out here in the fogs of Mordor? I guess she’d been there (perhaps) more than once before - here to this “pine hut,” and into these “baked woods” with some random lover from her before. Looking back now, I’m not sure if she ever really said.

                     

Yet she seemed to remember it all exactly. She knew at which muddy rut we needed to turn; her eye constantly scoped out the pristine rot of the fence posts that lingered up and down the hillsides. She did this all the while looking for just that ‘correct one’ which would mark our arrival. "Just a little further," I can still hear her telling me. This, along with the snoring putter of the VW’s motor chugging its way through the mud and the foggy thoughts surrounding us (along with a few fence posts) was all there was to guide us anywhere.

I have to admit - that damp air did seem to hold a bit of adventure. And while I wasn’t too keen about leaving my car parked along some adjacent footpath of a Monterrey County highway there wouldn’t be many other options. Can’t we just go back to school? She looked at me like one would a lost waif who just might never understand - all while reassuring me that everything was going to be just fine.

So I drove in and off the road anyway, and parked 'off offsides' to one of those rumbling gulley ruts fresh outta Mordor that she kept pointing to. At long last, the VW sputtered to a stop taking refuge under a trifecta of mud, fog, and wide-mouth pines. The pines swayed like sirens; sirens whose voice was to invite me further into the fog and into what was to be this latest (if not for me the last) incarnation of the gospel according to Sally.

It was to be (no doubt) our last truly great adventure. Indeed, we stopped the VW at that one particular fence post she’d been looking for. The wires connecting to its boundaries had long ago succumbed to poignant rust, and gave us no trouble in moving through and on past. 

Stepping over that wiry ilk, the woods became thicker and the fog conspired with sunlight to guide and hide us along the path. The mud itself began to fade into a pebbled loam filled with bits of pine needles, and this, along with their mother cones, converged into an ancient sandy floor. 

                        

The ground became drier as the elevation sent us slipping downward, even as we appeared to move deeper into the shade of the forest. I could smell salt in the air and in the tiniest of distances I could hear the slamming of the he ocean telling me that wherever we were going, Pine Hut or not, we couldn’t be too far away.

“I ain’t tellin’ no lie

Mine’s a tale that can’t be told

My freedom I hold dear

How years ago in days of old

When magic filled the air

‘T was in the darkest depths of Mordor

I met a girl so fair…”

I watched her pick up her dress as she moved against the mud and through the woods. It seemed so damn silly to me now. This dress of hers and the mud. Yet she was so well-assured and sure-footed in seeking our destination - a veritable Athena. It was just so fucking incongruous that her skirts were long that day. I mean was she trying to make a statement as we traipsed through that muddy entry and towards this sandy retreat of hers? How delicate ‘an action’ it seems now, indeed how very sensual. How she lifted her skirts as she moved across those barriers and the bob-wire fence. Who was this girl? How impractical and unnecessary too, for her to stop and pick a wildflower for her hair amidst the muddy green reeds to compliment her tresses and clothes. And me, her not-so-humble patron stumbling along slightly stoned and behind her simply trying to keep up.

You do know I have a major mid-term next week, right?

As the clearing in the path came into view - I saw it. You know, I saw that “Pine Hut” that she had implored us to seek out. And yes, it was holy magnificent! I should correct myself here to tell you that there truly was no clearing at all, or rather that the clearing itself was a sheltered one. You see in the center of it all was of course “the” Pine Hut - but stretching over and above it (and indeed over all of the clearing) was a great canopy of primitive firs. The ancient canopy covered the hut so well and so deeply that light from the sky barely shone through.

The hut itself was somewhat round, and in many ways, I suppose you could say that it was built like a yurt. While its geometry was roundish, whoever had built it had taken freedom in creating extensions with its form. A yawn in its needlework led from one entry to another on its opposite sides. And yes, from earth to sky, the hut was made of absolutely nothing but pine needles, with pine branches interwoven together upward to form the shape of a dome. Its roof line was low; its open center no higher than say about five of six feet. In its apex was a hole, a good-sized aperture to allow smoke to escape from the small campfire placed in the center of the Pine Hut’s floor below it. The place appeared to have been there for literally years.

How the f’ did this get here? Had aliens built it?

Nope, just hippies.

House Hunters International - “The Hippy AirBnB” tonight at 6.pm on a channel near you.

It was incredible.

Not to be outdone was the smell and roar of the ocean nearby, and indeed with just another brief walk down the trail an expanse of beach opened up that led to high and stoic rock formations leading out into the Pacific. Here the mists that had brought us here still flowed outward, and serene trees watched from bluffs overhead. It was nothing short of stunning.

                      

There was not another soul in sight.

And yes, if you must know we’d brought some of that silly old lysergic acid diethylamide with us on the trip that day. I have no good excuse for this, other than to say that we were very young and that this is what adventurous young people sometimes were wont to do “back in the day.” So yes, we retired to the dome, into the yurt if you will, and into “that Pine Hut of a place” to experience that drug, and each other in ways that now seem like only a dream from some other life in some other long ago place.

It was an incarnation. It was Sally’s gospel. And it was fucking beautiful.

I don’t remember when it all ended, or how it was that we returned to our more normal lives. As it was I think we absconded into a nearby campground before dawn to shower and make our way back home to dorm life.  I remember as we drove home that day and as the VW sputtered along the alameda I realized it had all felt like a dream. You see as I drove that highway and the VW sputtered, and it along with our thoughts pulled up alongside a brand-new Cadillac. I heard Sally ‘scoff’ into the gospel as she told it. I heard her disdain for such a material thing and for that Cadillac’s world as she assumed it to be.

It was then that, well, I kinda knew the dream was over.

You see I liked shiny things? I wanted that Cadillac.

It just wasn’t gonna work.

II.

I didn’t know who she was but she seemed to be everywhere. I will admit, though that I was pretty clueless. I’d just come through a lot of that bullshit with “the son of an aging child film star,” so I was keeping my head down and a pretty low profile. (Not to mention that I was pretty fucked up in the head anyway.)

All I could think was: Who the fuck can you truly trust around this place anyway? I had just come into the quad complex to eat dinner after all. Whatever you’re offering I don’t need your weird stalker drama. I’m just here to hang out with Steve or Ken or see what Dan is up to. For the most part, I tried not to see or notice this very pretty young lady looking at me.

At least not a first.

But she was frickin’ everywhere. She was certainly there every time I left the dorm and everytime I went in to eat. I’d seen her on the floors and in the dorms hallways a couple of times too. Why are you looking at me chick? was all I could think. Still, she was and still, she did. There was no doubt she was very, very pretty. She had a faraway look in her eyes like some fairy princess locked in a tower. Hell, she even looked like a fairy princess who might have been locked away in a tower.

I must admit, she was way too much the hippy flower child for me - not that I didn’t often feign the hippy flower child myself. It was just that I preferred (and was way more attracted to) a more “conventional” type, you know, like the “girl next door.” I certainly preferred one less “earthy” and less “patchouli oiled up” and maybe I liked a bit of a more bitchy sort of woman a whole lot better. After all, I like shiny things. I wasn’t really into the "peace, love, and Haight Ashbury” sort of looks. I mean it was nice and all that…but…

Still, there she was. Why didn’t she just go away?

I think it must have been Steve who said to me one day at, “You know that girl really likes you. Dude, she’s beautiful.” Oh yeah, I guess she does was all I could think back.

So soon enough I meandered over to Sally there among the cafeteria trays and beef tongue and cole slaw for dinner and somehow struck up a conversation with her. I’m not sure that any of it felt natural - I mean I think Steve and Ken were watching to make sure I didn’t fuck it up and not score with this very pretty maiden. Yet after a bit, I guess even I fell victim to her charms. She was after all an alluring woman and I was a very stoned young man. What the heck was all my twenty-year-old self could think.

“See the menfolk standin’ in line

I said they come to pray to the Lord

With my little girl, looks so fine

In the evening when the sun is sinkin’ low

Everybody’s with the one they love

I walk the town, keep a-searchin’ all around

Lookin’ for my street corner girl”

The days went on and she and I become a couple. I did enjoy her soft “come hither” voice and her “I could care less what anyone thinks of me” attitude. And while I didn’t always relate well to it, "We must save the world” seemed to be her mantra. 

There was a lost child quality about her too, like someone who had been forced to take refuge in an ideal fantasy world at a young age to escape some terrible hardship or pain. The trouble for me was that I wasn’t sure I shared those same values. While saving the planet was a great idea I also wanted to live in it too. Too much fantasy earth-saving and social justice championing just didn’t work for me. It just felt impractical.

I did like the looks we'd get when we’d go places and there’d be a lot of jocks or stuck-up upperclassmen. (The university had a good mess of those.) I remember sitting on the banks of the Lexington Reservoir for some major college kegger blowout. Here the jocks got drunk while Sally and I wove flowers into each other’s hair.

God those dumbass jocks hated us for even being there. I think that’s when I loved Sally most - when we didn’t care about what the rest of the world was thinking.

But it just didn’t work.

III.

I could hear the band warming up. The Holy Ghost of my friend Dan had insisted that we come up into the Santa Cruz mountains not too far from Lexington Reservoir to enjoy a music venue he’d put together. I’d borrowed a huge RV, driving it down from Sacramento. I wanted to make sure that I and my new lady friend were comfortable and a good place “to camp” while we listened to the music. It’d been several years now since we’d all graduated from college and left our time there behind. I wanted to play the big shot with the RV - though I sure as hell wasn’t. 

I liked this new lady a lot. I liked being with her. She was normal. How she tolerated some of my past I will never know. I parked the RV and we got out and began to enjoy the music. admit. Old Dan had done a Hell of a job in putting it all together.

It was good to see everyone again and to catch up a bit. As we poured another beer and fired up another doob, I saw her again, Sally, coming out of the forest and the brush like some native princess or wood nymph. Her long skirts flowed incongruously once again.

 She drifted toward us, ever dreamy, ever alluring, and asked if I would step aside with her for a private conversation.

What a mistake.

She didn’t like my girlfriend. What are you doing with her? She’s totally wrong for you!

It didn’t go well.

When I returned, my new lady asked: How could I just walk off and leave her in the company of Dan "The Holy Ghost" and a bunch of strangers -AND to go off with some other woman?

Yeah, that didn’t go well either.

But I made my choice. Nancy and I went home. And forty-five years later, she is still my choice.

IV.

It’s kind of funny looking back. There was so much beauty to it all. I mean, who gets to drop acid in a Pine Hut on the beaches of Mordor with a fair hippy maiden? Who gets a beautiful woman to weave flowers in your hair while you both get to basically tell a bunch of drunk college jocks to fuck off? Hey, for me those memories are frickin priceless. I don’t believe I would ever want to trade those experiences for much of anything. 

I hope that when senility overtakes me and my mind doesn’t know where it is, or where it's going, that it might find its way back to that muddy path through the hills and that I will once again sit around the fire in that Pine Hut. After all, I’d never dropped acid on the beaches of Mordor before.

“Will you meet me in the middle?

Will you meet me in the air?

Will you love me just a little?

Just enough to show you care?

Well, I tried to fake it

I don’t mind sayin’, I just can’t make it”

                  

         As they say, though, you can’t go back. I’ve already written about the tragedy that came to Sally at a young age - her mother, the young opera singer's murder - so there’s no reason to go into that again here. I've also attested as to what a remarkable life Sally has gone on to lead - sailing the Pacific with her husband and son and writing a book to tell of her adventures. Yes, Sally, and her championing of environmental causes. Well done old friend, well done. I just felt that as I grow old and recollect my days gone by that it wouldn’t be right not to remember her and our times a bit, and to surely tell the tale of the Pine Hut.

                        

                                     

It was, after all, simply the gospel according to Sally.

It just wasn’t my book.

END

           Capturing Grandpa

(Authors note: Sometimes these tales are just for fun.)

As always, unapologetically unedited...

Okay, as you might have guessed, I get bored.  While the big wild world of family history is always fascinating, seriously though, just how many Pilgrims or witches can one hope to shake out of Ye Olde Branches without going to sleep? And all those very distant connections to Hollywood notables, dumbass serial killers or superheroes, or, God forbid worse, (gross) politicians, well, in a word after a while they just kinda make me "snore." 

Nah, what I've been needing these days is to find one of those epic tales. You know, one of those "ancestral trips" that make you say, Aha! Now it all makes sense! I have to believe that there are plenty of these stories out there among the branches and that with a little luck and elbow grease, they can be found.

So where to begin? 

I figured to "get there" I'd needed to shuffle the deck a bit. I wanted to go at it a little blindly and to see (randomly) just who might catch my eye. So I perused "the tree" and hopped back and forth from various names, lives, and geographic locations. It was about then that I heard a distant voice "calling to me from the cairns." It was the that I saw the name of James McCall high up in the branches and I noticed a little place called Dunbar.               

Now I've always had a thing for Scotland. I can't tell you why. Maybe I've been watching too many soppy episodes of Outlander, or it's the latent wannabe William Wallace in me, or even the wish to emulate Agent OO7 that drives it. I cannot ken. Nevertheless, while most of my friends were honoring Eerie and their ties to shamrocks and the Snake Charmer of the Emerald Isle, I was musing about the damn Vikings invading Inverness and the Loch Ness Monster. So maybe it should come as no surprise that it would be my ancestor James McCall 1620-1660 - there in my own DNA - that would try to call me home.               

                    My most significant DNA ancestral origin as of July 2024 - per Ancestry.com

I'd seen "Grandpa Jim" before, but it had always been his great-great granddaughter Anna MCall (1752-1819) who'd caught my eye. Anna McCall married Eliphalet Murdock (1748-1822) and their daughter, the lovely and talented Clarissa (1776-1851) married Alfred Young (1770-1832). They were the "generations before" what was the start of my Mayflower ties through the Young family. But Grandpa Jim had always escaped me. It wasn't that he was so far back in time as to only be anecdotal. It was more that, like a dumbass, I failed to see an ancestor who was way freaking interesting. 

As usual, I digress.

So the other day, after stumbling upon Grandpa Jim again, I did a quick Google search for him and his wife, the hauntingly beautiful, Mary Farr. I followed the line down to their grandson,  another man who (wouldn't you know it) was called "James MCall" (1690-1755) and to the descendants of this second James' two wives, Rachel Turner and Hannah Greene. 

It was then that the image of a well researched website came into view: 

Holy shit!

(Okay, obviously I geeked out over the thought of a new lineage society to explore.) But there he was, our immigrant ancestor, "the original" JAMES MCALL aka "Grandpa Jim" right smack dab in the middle of them - and connected to the Battle of Dunbar where he was fighting against the great pretender of that age, the terrible and most reviled Oliver Cromwell.                    

Could I get more Scottish than that? Yeah, not much.

So it looks like things went kinda bad at Dunbar, and suffice it to say Grandpa Jim got caught as a prisoner of war. He was then placed on a prison chip called Unity and sent to Massachusetts where he was sold/indentured out for somewhere between five and thirty pounds. This was nuts to me - to have an ancestor who was a POW in a foreign country and then basically sold into slavery here in the soon to be U.S. of A - crazy.

I decided that I wanted to know more about the original James McCall, so I started looking further at the lines extending off of his grandson, the next "James McCall," (the III) and his two wives. 

This "Grandpa Jim" was married twice (and) my branch extends paternally through his second wife Hannah Greene to my dad. It was about then that I noticed something odd - another name extending off the descendants of his first wife, Rachel Turner. The name caught my eye because it was also connected to my family - albeit indirectly to me. The last name was Ward and it meant that these two guys below were also connected to James McCall - not once - but twice making them not only (obviously) brothers to each other and cousins to me - but in this instance cousins to each other and some might say "a cousin of themselves."

Yeah, I know. Weird, huh?

Anyway, in case you weren't wondering who I am talking about, here you go:      

 

Yes, my first cousins (l-r) Kerry Record and Todd Record, (and obviously in addition to being brothers) are also something like our ninth half cousins, and in addition to this, also a cousin to each other and, at least impractically speaking, "a cousin to themselves."    

The genealogy shapes up like this:

Now this is kind of weird, but honestly it isn't all that unusual. You see, if submitted family trees are to be believed, both of Todd and Kerry's grandmothers, Nancy Eloise (Ward) McMinn and Katheryn Elizabeth (Ogle) Record are both also descended from Mayflower passenger John Howland. This means a similar chart could be shown for the same lines from John Howland and doubling up all these relationships once more.

Okay, so maybe it's not all that earth shattering. And you can save all the "incest is best jokes." Hey it happens. I just thought it was really cool to have a Scottish Prisoner of War show up in the tree. So there you have it. This week's useless tale about people who lived a long time ago and how they relate to us today.

Yeah, but I gotta go.

Outlander's on the telly.

☮

 Goodnight deer moon 

(Author's note: Sometimes family history isn't recorded in official charts or pedigrees. Sometimes it's written in simple happenstance, and its stories told under the moon.)

As always, unapologetically unedited...

She was dying.

There was a bareness of moonlight that shone down around her; its hues gray and green, with shades of runny black colored in between. As we headed up the road's grade, our headlights made out her futile movements against the pavement. In a way it was a good thing that we had arrived too late. I'd been trying to pay attention to the road and senselessly paying too much attention to the cell reception to check on the dog at home. Seeing her in the road, we'd been startled. Our car, however, seemed to strain against the incline as if hurrying to reach what had been caught in someone else's headlights.

My wife was quiet. I could hear her sigh as we approached, knowing what was in front of us. I remember thinking to myself, "There's a lunar eclipse tonight. I think they called it a Blood Worm Moon. Weird, huh?"

Then we saw her, a young doe in the road. Her struggles for life on the pavement weren't easy to see.

Ahead of us, a truck had pulled off to the shoulder not far from where the deer was. The truck (or the person in it) sat there still, like some sentry from another world. It was a shiny new work truck, white, with the inconspicuous lettering of some company called Ventana scrambled on its door side. The darkness drank up the light around the truck's windows, so that passing by I could not see inside. I'm not sure why, but at that moment I pulled over, almost too quickly, and pulled up alongside the road not far from where the deer lay but ahead of the truck. I looked back at the truck behind us, and said to my wife, “I can't just keep going. I have to offer to help.”

She was quiet, not saying a word or even worrying as dear ones do when one decides to step out into some portion of the unknown dark.

Getting out of the car, my shoes crunched in the graveled incline toward the deer and the truck further below. I slowed a bit as I walked past the doe and her suffering. She appeared to be close to the end, but it was dark and what was left of her life force or what was simply just the darkness I couldn't say. I'm no vet, nor have I watched a lot of things dying. It was just too hard to tell. Still, her struggling presence in the road felt intrepid to the scene of my walking past her, the truck behind us, and my car ahead.

They all felt like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle I couldn't quite fit together.

The Blood Worm Moon begins - March 13, 2025

Arriving at the truck, the driver rolled down his window. He was on his phone, on speaker, and he was trying to reach the local police via their recorded message to advise them about the dying deer - a dying deer, which would surely prove to be a hazard to other drivers on the moonlit dark road.

The man in the truck didn't say much more than what he was attempting to do, that is trying to contact the local people in charge. I asked him if he needed some help moving the deer out of the road before the authorities arrived, and, without cause, asked him if he had been the one who'd been unfortunate enough to hit her. He quickly said he had not hit the deer and had only pulled over to help. I asked him if he had a shovel or some other tool, thinking he or we might need to move the deer out of traffic, or worse, to help release the doe's spirit on her journey to God.

He was silent.

The man in the truck simply looked flummoxed, not like he was unwilling to help, but more so that he hadn't thought that far ahead. He was dull eyed and seemed to have to think hard about what he should do next. The recorded voice of the police department’s answering machine droned on in his hand and he just looked back at me - nearly as lost looking as that doe must have been a few minutes before.

For some reason I walked away from him.

It wasn't that our brief conversation had concluded, but I walked away anyway, heading back up the crunchy incline of roadway and back toward the deer. To my left, cars were beginning to accumulate heading up the hill and swerving around the dying deer, and now swerving around me too. I had almost made it back to the deer when a small black car pulled off to the side of the road ahead of me. The car's window rolled down and a kid with a shock of long curly blonde hair yelled out to me. I could see his phone glistening in the dark of his dashboard.

“Hey, do you need some help?” He said.

Not really knowing what I needed, and more or less praying that the doe had finished in her passing, I said to the kid, “Not really sure." I continued making my way up the incline, past the kid in the car with the open window and moved toward the piece of pavement where the doe no longer seemed to be struggling. I could see that the doe's neck was broken. It was oddly crooked in the darkness. Its angle was wrong and too loose. Undaunted, the young man got out of his car and followed behind me toward the doe. I could feel him behind me more than I could see him. His spirit was different than that of the man in the work truck. It felt like he was studying me for some future lesson. There was no movement from the white truck further downhill.

Reaching out, I touched the doe's fur. I could feel the recent death. I began speaking to young deer, telling her that she was okay now but that I still needed her help. I told her that her work wasn't done yet. I told her she needed to help me to get her body off the road. I told her I was sorry this had happened to her, and I thanked her for her sacrifice. I told her that she did not deserve this. I don't know why I felt so compelled to talk to the dead deer. It felt like her presence was still near, and that she hadn't quite left the scene of the accident. I felt an odd comradery to her, and I spoke to her in a quiet, determined voice I almost didn't recognize. As I spoke to her, I realized I was speaking to her passing life as if she were somehow my kin.

I knew that I needed to move her.

Her body was large and I wasn't sure I could do it alone. I felt the young man with the shock of blonde curly hair move back away from me. The doe's back lay towards me, so I grabbed handfuls of her hide in my hands to tug on her, hoping I could pull her body back off the road and away from the swerving cars. Her neck flopped to the side unnaturally. It was so damn dark out there too. The full moon was hidden in the clouds now and for a moment it was just me and the dry corpse of this friend I'd met on the journey of life. As I pulled at the doe's back her fur came off in clumps in my hands. It was dry, and brittle, and it made me think she'd been dead for much longer than she'd actually been.

Hadn't she just died? Hadn't I just watched her struggle against the road and the night?

I reached down again and grabbed deeper into her fur and into her hide. I heard the kid with the shock of blonde hair yell to me, "Hey, I have a towel if you want," as another chunk of fur crept out of her hide and into my hands. "Nah, I'm okay," I softly yelled back to the kid. For some reason, touching the now dead deer didn't matter to me. I had asked her dying spirit to help me, and now it was my turn to live up to my end of the bargain and get her body out of the road. She wanted dignity. It was all she wanted. She'd told me so. I wanted to give her that, even if it only meant the dignity of a crunchy incline where the turkey vultures would surely feast at sunrise.

I gave her body a few last pulls, my legs straining against the dark, and finally I tugged her body over and back off to the soft dry grass beyond the rocky side. She was safe, or at least as safe as I could make her. She was after all only a deer who'd been killed on the road, but for me, in those final moments she had become "some sort of something" that felt like, well, if you must know, like family.

The kid with the shock of blonde curly hair jumped back in his car and waved me off, returning to wherever young people go. The man in the white truck just watched from behind, never approaching, never offering more than the busy signal of the police department on his phone. I walked back to the car shaken a bit and rejoined my wife. It was so dark. As I opened the car door I saw a glint of silver in the ground. Funny I thought. It must be a piece of metal or a candy wrapper. It was so bright, but it was also so dark outside. I was shaken a bit from the adrenaline. I needed to get home and check on the dog, and back to normal life. As we went to leave, the man from the white truck approached us. I rolled down the window and he thanked me for helping him and told me that the police would remove the doe's corpse tomorrow. It was all good.

We had each done our part.

We were close to home and as we turned into the neighborhood I shook off what I could of the darkness and the dying deer from my mind. We weren't quite home yet when I said to my wife, "Have you seen my phone?" Pulling over, we looked but quickly realized the phone was nowhere to be found. It was about then that I remembered that shiny piece of something lying in the road near the dying deer. It was then that I realized that it was my phone that I had seen, turned face downward in the roadside and into the gravel of the scene of a white truck, a blonde haired teenager, and the last gasps of life of a dying deer.

Making a quick u-turn I sped back up the other side of the incline in the full moon's darkness. I admit. I was in a bit of a damn panic. Where was that damn deer at? It was hard to see the side of the road now. The white truck and the kid with the shock of curly blonde hair were gone. Finally, and with my wife's help, I spotted a small black casing off to the side, and up the incline away from the body of the doe. Flipping another turn, I retrieved my phone, not worse for the wear. Its light illuminating the shadowy body of my friend the doe as I walked back to the car. He life passing but now awaiting the next chapter of her journey off to the side of the road.

I don't know what the message was here but I feel there was one.

Maybe it's just as simple as don't worry about your damn phone while you are driving in your car. Maybe it says we are all in some way, nothing more than a dying deer hit by random objects in the moonlight. Maybe it's about the people who will stop to help, or give a shit about you on your dying day. Maybe it's about no good deed going unpunished. Maybe it's not about anything at all or that the universe seeks balance. I had thought I was doing a good thing to help the deer and give her some dignity off the road.

Looking back now though, I think she was helping me too.

ET phone home?

Beware the Blood Worm Moon?

Goodnight, sweet deer moon.