Heres the first part of the sequel to the novel I shared yesterday. This ones Wishing on Dandelions. amzn.to/1sYRk97 Chapter One I still can’t tell my story up close, like it was me in it, breathing the tangled Wisteria on the fence posts of Burl, Texas. There are times I still can’t bear to say it was me. The movie of my life continues to flash before me, painful episode by painful episode, like a malevolent comic strip. I get real close to retelling my story, where the screen and I coincide somehow—and that, only when Camilla and I are across from each other, a jug of sweet tea between us in that comfortable place called friendship. It’s Camilla who keeps me honest, who reaches for my wrist when a tear slips through. “It hurts,” she says. “The memories hurt.” She reminds me that I survived that story, and her presence reminds me of its horrid validity. Reminds me in a kind, wild way that this is my story. And that I cannot run from being Maranatha. No matter what I wish. *** Maranatha Winningham. You’d think the name would roll off her tongue, that it would undulate like lazy East Texas hills. Not today. As she pumped the pedals of her overused ten-speed in the summer of 1987, she staccatoed her name. Mara Natha Winning Ham. Mara Natha Winning Ham. Over and over until there lay more road behind her than loomed before her, thank God. The hot Burl breeze tangled Maranatha’s hair so that it whipped and wrangled about her face. She didn’t seem to mind, didn’t even brush a casual hand to her face to clear the hair from her eyes. At seventeen, she welcomed the wildness, wearing her tangles like a mask. A gust of sideways wind whipped the mask from her face. Now she could see. In front of her bike tire beckoned a serpentine of gray pavement radiating heat. She stood in anticipation of the journey, pumping her pedals until her thighs ached and her lungs yelped for cool air. Maranatha passed the out-of-place costume shop on her left, a dilapidated home with faded Santa suits and sequined 20’s dresses in the cracked front window. She pedaled past the farm implement shop whose yard was dotted with ancient rusty plows, leaving the suffocation of Burl behind her. The highway was seldom traveled this time of day, particularly in the 105-degree heat that assailed her forehead with river gullies of sweat. She longed for water and chastised herself for forgetting something so obvious. This strip of road held most of Burl’s broken dreams—a turn of the century white farm house, now converted into a bed and breakfast that no one visited, a hand-painted For Sale sign declaring the dream dead. A mobile home set way back on a fine piece of property tilted oddly to the left where the cement blocks had deteriorated. A goat stood on its roof, claiming it for himself. Maranatha felt the heaviness of slashed hopes. She had seen it all before. Burl cast a spell over its occupants, what her English teacher called a fatalistic attitude that permeated every pore of life. Once in awhile, someone would get a hair-brained idea to improve his lot in life, speculate on some property, buy a new piece of farming equipment, only to have bad luck rust it over like old barbed wire. No one left Burl. No one dared. Sure, For Sale signs attested to the pain of trying to improve life, but at least it was predictable. Folks even remained after the oil boom crash of the mid-80’s, preferring to work the registers at Value Villa than to risk life outside Burl’s boundary. But Maranatha was destined for something larger. She knew it. A dream needled into the back of her mind, always elusive, never clear. A passion locked up inside strained to shake hands with the world, but Maranatha didn’t dare explore that joy. She might unearth terror, instead. “Joy and pain, they’s married,” Zady had told her last week. “A gal lady has to embrace the pain to touch the joy.” I’ll choose neither. She looked down at the bike beneath her—a sorry excuse for transportation. Uncle Zane had swung on a wild pendulum from disinterest to overprotection the day her name changed from Mara to Maranatha. “No gal of mine’s gonna be driving a car. Might as well throw yourself off the Burl Theater. Cars are danger, Maranatha. Pure danger.” The bike wore a crudely shaped bow on her sixteenth birthday. A hockey helmet hooked around the bike’s frame. Propped near the kickstand were soccer shin guards, “in case you fall,” Uncle Zane said. If he only knew how many times she’d swerved away from tractors on this stretch of road. She’d wanted more freedom in the form of bigger wheels and greater responsibility, but he granted her none. This summer she begged for a job, any job, but he refused, saying he provided enough and she didn’t need to be around slumming for money. Needed to tend to the house with Zady. Like a caged bird. As she pedaled past a quaint farm, a farmer raised his shovel as a hello, and she nodded. I could always marry a farmer and live a happy life. In this, she realized she wasn’t much different than the scared Value Villa workers. She felt her heart willing to settle, to become like Neville Chamberlain of her history book—peace at any cost. The tyrant of difficult memories demanded to be pacified. Or could it be ignored? Covered in salty sweat, Maranatha slowed her pace as she ascended one of Burl’s piney hills. To her right was a happy grove of crepe myrtles in flaming pink, signaling the entrance to another broken dream. She veered to her right onto the gravel driveway and stopped, straddling her bike. She listened for cars, but heard only the labored noise of a tractor far away. The silence of the day roared at her. It should have blessed her with peace; instead she worried that something would burst from the silence and grab her. She hated that she always looked behind, like some phantom crouched there in the immediate past ready to overtake her. She’d been running since before she could remember, running from monsters bent on destroying her. Even though she was sheltered in the big, white house and safety was no longer elusive, she felt the presence of evil five steps behind her. Ready to suffocate her. She glanced at her wrist to soothe her fears. Circling it was her name. MARANATHA, each sterling letter separated by a bead. Zady’d given it to her a year after she found out her real name, that it wasn’t Mara, it was surely Maranatha. Part of her quest in learning her identity so many years ago was a need for a name that meant more than bitter. When she found her real name meant Come Lord Jesus, a part of her heart enlivened, as if it knew she was named that all along. She touched each letter, thanking God that He added Natha to the end of her name, that He changed her from bitter to a heart where Jesus could live. Faint hints of tea roses welcomed Maranatha. In front of her stood a wrought iron gate, black and foreboding, with an out-of-place silhouette of a squirrel at its arched top. It reminded her of Willie Wonka’s gate, the gate that prohibited children from seeing the mysteries within. She laid her bike in its familiar dusty place behind the crepe myrtles and approached the gate. Locked. As usual. Heart thumping, she tried the frying-pan-hot handle, a ritual she’d performed over the past several years. Why she thought it would magically open today, she didn’t know. When she tugged at it, the gate creaked in protest, like a warning. Looking back toward the road, she listened again. Nothing. Only the sound of a dove calling to its lover and the hot crackle of too-dried grass rubbing against itself like a fiddle against its bow. She breathed in the warm smell of roses and touched the angry wrought iron, but it was too hot. She returned to the bike, unzipped the pouch behind her seat, and stretched on her bike gloves. Attacking the gate again, she pulled herself up, up, up until she could swing her leg over the gate’s pointed top. She scampered down, preferring to jump the last three feet. She threaded her gloves through the gate’s narrow bars. Refuge. Maranatha smiled. Before her was an open field whose hair was littered with dandelions past their prime. Bits of dandelion white floated in front of her like an idle snowfall, only these flurries drifted toward the sun away from the ground, in lazy worship. Beyond the field stood a charred mansion. Near the house’s shadow she remembered the day she discovered its charred remains, four years ago on a day like today. She was thirteen. She and her best friend Camilla had begged Uncle Zane for a ride to the County fair, but he had banking business to attend to. Still, they pestered. In a rare flush of words, he said, “If you’re so dang bent on going—walk! It’ll do you good to know how far five miles is. Take Highway 78 outside the Loop, and start walking. You’ll be eating cotton candy and wasting your money on Styrofoam-filled stuffed animals in no time. Now, git!” They never made it to the fair. When Camilla saw the wrought iron gate and the burnt house, she smelled mystery and promptly named the house “Black.” “All scary houses have names. This one’s Black, sure as night.” In lieu of cotton candy, they searched the scene, pretending to be arson-investigators. They concluded a cat had set the fire to take revenge on an evil master. Camilla bothered Maranatha to return, misquoting AC/DC. “Let’s go back to black.” When she said it, she wailed and screamed like Brian Johnson. Camilla’d always been known for her theatrics, but more so for rhymes that mirrored truth. Maranatha pretended indifference to Camilla’s truth, hoping her rhyming friend would forget about Black and get on with life. Camilla did. And Maranatha had been visiting her refuge ever since. She ran to the middle of the field, letting her hair tentacle itself around her head and stood still. She picked one dandelion, held it to her mouth, and blew a warm breeze over its head, scattering her wishes toward the had-been mansion. Jesus, You know my wishes, my heart. You know my name. I want to live up to it. I want my heart to be a place where you want to come. Would you show my heart today that You love me? I’m sorry I’m so needy, but I have to know, have to know it in my gut. Please show me Your love. It had been her wish for so long she couldn’t remember not wishing it. She met Jesus under the pecan tree at her home, the big white house owned by Uncle Zane and home-ified by Zady, its housekeeper. Zady had dished out helpings and helpings of His love every day at the Winningham table, but Maranatha never seemed to be able to digest even a scrap. She experienced Him at church, surrounded by Mama Frankie and faces darker than her own. When dark-skinned Denim spoke or his pale-faced stepdaughter Camilla rhymed truth, she thanked God for making unique folks, for giving her friends. Still, Jesus’ love seemed far away, unattainable. She didn’t know how long she could exist without having that knowing Zady seemed to possess. A portion of her little girl’s heart had been abducted by General, the boy-turned-man who violated her so many years ago. His pocked face visited her in nightmares where she had no voice, no safety, no escape. He seemed to lurk behind every stray noise. He didn’t haunt Burl anymore, but he lived firmly in her mind, igniting dread. She feared he’d stolen the only part of her that could understand God’s love, like he held the middle piece to the puzzle of her life. Am I wishing for something I’ll never have? Maranatha shielded her eyes from the pursuing sun and walked toward the burnt house. Four once-white pillars stood tall, blackened by angry flames. She remembered when she’d first seen Uncle Zane’s home nearly a decade ago, how it loomed large on its street, how she’d longed to be the matriarch there someday. But, as in life, reality was more complicated than that. Sure, she lived there now. Little by little, she was renovating it to splendor, but lately the joy of transforming it had waned thin, like a pilled swimsuit at summer’s end. Fixing things was hard. She’d painted and painted until her fingernails were permanently speckled. Then, the pier and beam foundation settled further, cracking the once-new paint. As she gazed upward at the four pillars that kissed sky where the abandoned house’s roof once lived, she wondered if she’d ever have a home of her own, children about her legs, a husband to love her. The thought of marriage both repulsed her yet pulsed through her. Hatred and longing—all in one girl. She walked through the rubbish, darkening her red-dirted shoes, looking for a sign from heaven. She played this game sometimes, asking God for signs, for sacred objects that showed her that He saw her, that He knew she existed. That He cared. Just then, something glinted off and on as the sun played hide and seek through the pecan trees. She bent low to the ashes, her body blocking the sun. The glinting stopped, so she stood and let the sun have its way again. There, spotlighted beneath the gaze of the pillars, was a simple thick-banded ring. She retrieved it, dusted the ashes from the gold, and examined it, turning it over and over in her hand. Inside the ring, was a faint engraving. Forever my love, it said. “Thank you,” she whispered, but her words melted in a hot wind. Dark clouds obscured the sun. The sky purpled. She slipped the ring into her shirt pocket and ran toward her bike, pulled on her gloves, climbed the hot gate like a criminal pursued and dropped on the other side. She mounted her bike. From behind she heard a bustled scurrying, like the furious bending of too-dry alfalfa. Then darkness. Someone’s hands suffocated her eyes, obscuring the day, stealing her screaming breath. She kicked her leg over the ten-speed, struggling to free herself from the firm grip and tried to holler. Like in her nightmares, she was mute from terror. Though she knew General’s presence was illogical—he’d been shipped off to some sort of juvenal-offender boot camp—she could almost smell his breath as she gasped for her own. She heard a laugh, but couldn’t place it. It sounded familiar, like family. She kicked and elbowed like a kindergarten boy proving his manhood against a playground bully, but the hands stayed enlaced around her eyes. More laughter. Even more familiar. She took a deep breath and screamed. Real loud. Thunder answered back.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 16:09:00 +0000
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