THE WINTER OF LISTENING

by Carole W

Wait, for now …
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now.

   

      ~ Galway Kinnell

A bloom of jeweled light, amber and diamond; within its brilliance a lilting voice, iridescent trills and flutings – a benediction of songbirds.

She awoke with The Keepsake on her mind. Always, she knew of it; she was its Guardian. Often, she pondered and mulled its meaning, its reason, spiraling to a brown study that stilled her hands around uncast shells, stopped her mid-stride between herb table and tincture shelves. But years had passed since its call had come to her in dreams …

“I’m still here,” Narcissa crackled, her every-morning testament to the spirits … and herself. She reached for the cane she used now to lever herself up from bed. Her feet found her slippers, flattened at the heels, soft to the toes. “Is today The Day?”

Her chamber offered only Silence in reply. An answer in itself more often than not. This, she’d learned many years ago.

She slipped into the long, quilted robe she’d hung on the tall-post and scuffed across the stone floor, waving off the cold tea kettle as she passed the sideboard. A subtle shift of the earth caused it to rattle on the old iron hob.

“Soon, soon,” she assured her morning companion. At a doorway she parted the boxwood beaded curtain and stepped through. The strands fell behind her in an undulating rhythm – waves upon a white sand shore, the ocean’s breeze in the treetops. Its music, a gentle, hollow chitter, followed her in the corridor.

Such a maze of rooms, Narcissa. A veritable warren. And a ladder is required! So deep! We have chambers ready for you, close and comfortable. You’d have visitors, meals with the community. Or you could have your old rooms back. We would empty them in a heartbeat. Think, please. Think about moving. You could bring … everything.

He’d faltered a bit there at the last, his words more question than persuasion, dulled though they were by the internal hmmmmmm she employed when she’d heard enough.

“The Father … thinking what suits him best suits all,” she grumbled, having endured this entreaty for what, the millionth time? as young Kipper was fond of saying. “No wonder I make myself scarce up there, Winterfest or otherwise.”

Through a narrow, wandering passageway, past the third arched opening to a gated gap in the rock wall … The unlocking came with a pattern of twists to the iron bars only she knew. She sighed with the last thudding click. There’d come a time when someone else must know this key. A plan should be made, should have already been made, a successor determined, a student instructed …

“Ehhhhhhh,” she parried, dismissing her discarnate hectors with the flick of her fingers.

She stepped into the snug alcove, felt for the pull-chain that opened a louvered ceiling, the slats fashioned from the tambour of a roll-top desk. Light streamed down from a high oracle. Darkness reordered into but pearly shadows now, yet she remembered her delight at the discovery of what seemed gifts from home – the sensation of sun on her upturned face, the mirrors of mica in the chiseled Schist dancing like the swallowtails and hairstreaks that once favored her mother’s tended flowers. The cubbyhole’s finding had ended her search for new quarters then and there; she wouldn’t be dissuaded had anyone dared try. And it would still appear empty to any meddler – if one could get through the barred entry she’d constructed – but its walls of stacked, chinked stone housed her many treasures, large and small.

“Wrapped in rags,” she scoffed. “That’s how The Father puts it now. But we know better, yes?”

Anna couldn’t answer … or didn’t.

And no other voice whispered through.

The secret remained, still hers, hers alone.

Reaching out, waist-high, she felt for the starting point, the slab with five smooth depressions, dimples that just fit the wide spread of her hand. Gratified the stretch brought on no wince of pain, without a step left or right, she pivoted, slowly, slowly, her fingers trailing the cuts of stone, counting the flats and furrows over, up, over again to a jutting shelf of granite. From a trough behind its craggy face, she retrieved a mason’s margin trowel and began again to trace and count – over, over, down, down, down.

Yes.

The thin blade slipped in between the chinking and the rock. A gentle wedging north to south, north to south, a thumb of pressure … and the false front revealed a hollow.

Yes.

She reached in.

Yes.

More than three decades of age, yet the scrap of wool had suffered no damage, not from damp or moth. In the cup of her palm, beneath her stirring fingertips, the fabric was supple. She brought her open hand to her nose. The relic’s scent … faint but there … of moss and fern and morning mist, a honeyed warmth … yet an undertow of salt. Tears, she’d say. Certainly, the baby had soaked the cloth with his. Three days of crying … as miserable a child as she’d ever known.

Memory rushed in. The baby’s finding, Anna’s appearance in her entranceway, the howling newborn testing the will of her arms. Naked he was within the swaddling they removed, the material in ripped, wide pieces, stained to be sure, the snow and the street – at least – leaving such sorrowful marks.

But … rags, as The Father says now?

No. The wool was fine. Soft, silky, tender against the skin. Pure white and shining, the warp shot through with wisps of gold and silver, here and there a strand of green, a filament of purple. And clutched in his tiny hand … a knotted length of the same woven wool. Oh, how he fought to keep it, his argument ear-splitting.

But they’d prised it free. Teased open the ties.

Smoothed it out on the table while he wailed.

Bent to peer and ponder, to look from it to each other and back again.

It seems on-purpose, Anna began. The knots and all.

Voiced agreement seemed unnecessary.

Do you think his mother–

But she’d cut Anna’s question off with one of her own.

What does it mean?

What does what mean? Anna asked.

Those symbols.

With narrowed eyes, Anna restudied the scrap. Shrugged.

You don’t see them? The red-gold thread, the three-stitch stems, the tiny cross-strokes?

Anna shook her head, raked her sweaty hair with agitated hands. “Maybe it’s a … a pacifier. Give it back, see what happens.”

His fingers curled in on the mystery. His squalling abated to keening sobs.

There’d been a time when she’d seen differently, more in the ways of women and men. When that began to change, she’d been sent to doctors, none of whom could stay the course she was on, but on that day, at that moment, she welcomed this expanding range of view. The scrap held meaning, its message embroidered with a coppery thread as fine as a single strand of human hair. Runes she was sure, but runes she could not read.

And then, on the Bridge of Whispers, the child in his third day of life, his third day of crying, her jostling him in her arms, trying, trying to soothe, to make up for … oh, she hadn’t even known what. She’d looked in to the distance and despaired. What to do, how to help, what will happen now? She’d felt her own wail rising.

Until she heard the voice almost singing, at once near and from afar. Words of lullaby. At least that had been their effect on the sad, wild, singular baby boy.

He’d quieted; his hot, rigid body cooled and softened at the Whisperings, and he lifted his arms in what she could only describe as an embrace. A goodbye to what might have been? A welcoming of what would now be? His grip on the one gift he’d been left with relaxed. The edges of the swatch fluttered up …

At the loosening the Abyss sent up a biting laugh, full of greedy acquisition and dark triumph, but she’d plucked it from the snatching swirl of winds. The chasm roared; the rope bridge bucked and swayed. But safe in the crook of one arm, the baby cooed, while safe in her hand, the fabric warmed. A faint, golden glow bloomed between her fingers … and faded away. She uttered a simple vow of responsibility.

She would become The Keeper, until the day it should be returned to him.

* * *

“I’m here.”

She stood in the center of her room of treasures, the once-folded fabric in her open hand, breathing away her notions of a sign.

Just as she had when the child was five years old and brokenhearted to learn he was not like the other boys who could go Above to play and explore.

Just as she had when he despaired over Devin’s disappearance.

Just as she had when the first Darkness descended, filling the hollow in him that Lisa’s leaving had carved out.

Just as she had when The Father would not stop with his nevers … Vincent, this cannot be. You have to let the woman go. Let her; let her fall in love.

And now, as then, the scrap of wool lay cool and lightless in her palm. She sighed with inadequacy. Its pull had seemed so strong …

If only she knew the runes’ meaning, perhaps then she’d know what to do and when. She could only hope she had time enough left to fulfill her promise.

She chuckled. “Can’t take it with me, hmmm?”

A whispery breeze circled the niche.

Is that my task? To find … an interpreter? An … apprentice? I’ve never thought to share this. To share anything.

The cascade of light shifted and what she could see sharpened.

She nodded.

A flurry of air spiraled closer.

“One day someone will come,” she repeated, adding to herself, and I’d better do my part.

Winterfest was but days away. There was a new candle outside her entry, only half-buried in the sand. This year she’d not ignore its call.

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Author’s Note: The Winter of Listening will become part of an arc … eventually. There is more to come. The first story in this series is Homecoming, written for CABB’s September 25th, 2021 Challenge ~ Who Said That?! You can read that HERE.

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Title taken from The Winter of Listening by David Whyte. The House of Belonging. 2002.