(A sample chapter from novella, The Juniper Tree.)
© 2007 asotir.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
10
Where did I go? What happened there? I can’t tell you much.
NOW YOU MUST remember back to Falco and to the last moments of his life.
When Rayn opened her Trunk and let him peek inside, for a moment, he had a taste of paradise.
He leaned against the side of the Trunk and dangled his head over the edge. It kind of scratched his throat but he didn’t even notice. He stretched his neck forward and thrust his head inside.
Inside the Trunk were Rayn’s most secret private things. Things made out of silk and lace, and old books from faraway lands, and little balls of scents and herbs, and chocolates and candies and the spiced dry apples that were her favorite, the things he never got to taste. His head was buzzing with the smells all rising up together like smoke from a fire where a hundred different woods are burning. He saw things in there he only dreamed about, and other things he never even guessed. It was like a flower opening up and breathing out its smells and he was like a bee buzzing around.
Then darkness filled it. What happened next came so fast he could hardly keep track of it all. It came in tiny glimpses. First the darkness filled the trunk. Then he started to turn his head to see what was up. He could remember Rayn’s face all crumpled up with hate and a rush of air on the back of his neck and the creak of the hinges of the Trunk. He had a glimpse of the black triangle of the lid coming down.
Then pain splashed over the dark in white and red. It was like it was blinding him and shouting in his ears. It was the worst pain he ever felt.
Then it was gone.
He didn’t know what happened next, it wasn’t all that clear. He couldn’t see anything. He could hear a sort of whisper or moan like a low wind in the branches, it rose and fell. It was kind of like people talking downstairs and he knew they were saying something only he couldn’t make out any of the words or the voices too good. There was a funny taste in his mouth, in the back of his throat if he had had a throat, which he didn’t – he didn’t think. It was like when you get a nosebleed and the blood drips down the back of your throat and starts drying up there, kind of like that. He felt a little cold.
For a while he must’ve hung around his body where it was, where Rayn and Greta dragged it. They must’ve dragged it into the hall and down the stairs bump bump bump, only it didn’t hurt him. He thought she took him in the kitchen. She took off all his clothes but he didn’t know what happened to them. Her hands were all over his body, touching and feeling. She never even let him sit in her lap before.
He got a headache when she took the hammer to his head. She had to beat on it a long time until the bones were in bits as small as she wanted.
After that there was the fire under the soup-vat and the fog got warm. It turned into smoke full of the smell of her spices and herbs, all the good things that only Rayn knew about. He kind of floated up higher. It was like he was spreading out like mist when the sun comes up.
He heard something back there. He was leaving and going away. There was a light far off in the dark, it wasn’t any ordinary kind of light because he still couldn’t see anything, only he had a sense of it like he could feel where it was coming from. He went toward it. He was leaving and going away. Then he heard something back there.
It was his Mother’s Song.
Dinner must have been over then. His dad had eaten him and cleaned up his bowl with the bread and licked up the last drop of gravy. Greta must have gathered his bone-bits in her napkin and taken them outside. That’s where he heard his Mother’s Song, outside in the yard under the Juniper Tree. If Greta hadn’t taken his bone-bits out there he never would’ve heard the song.
She was singing it. His Mother, that is, Ariela, his dad’s little witch.
‘Falco, Falco, veni, veni qua…’
She was singing it and calling him and he had to come back. If he had had eyes he would’ve been crying. Every part of him scrunched up.
‘Mom? Mom?’
‘Falco, caro, veni.’
He felt something. It was like her hand took his hand. Her hand was warm and soft and small. It was so tender. It was everything he never had before. She took his hand and drew him on.
They were outside the house somewhere. The buzzing that he heard was like the sound of the waves under the cliff. She must have pulled him closer to where she was in the ground under the marker beneath the Juniper Tree.
The Juniper Tree was there all right.
For the first time he was aware of him, really aware. He always had the feeling like the Juniper Tree was more than just a tree. There was always something bigger, kind of like a ghost or shadow hanging over the branches. Now he heard his voice.
‘Hello, Falco,’ it said.
The voice was deep and old. Some gruff but strong.
‘Hello,’ he answered. Then, ‘No, Mom, don’t—’
Her hand was letting go. He tried to grip harder because he didn’t want to let her go. It was like trying to grab onto a breeze.
‘Falco, go with the Juniper Tree, he will help you now. Falco, te adoro. Ti ricordi, Falco. Sventola, Falco, sventola.’
Her voice drifted off. She went back under the roots of the Juniper Tree and left him. He tried to follow but he couldn’t get past the big ball of roots just under the ground.
He was alone again.
This time it was worse. When she left him before he was only a baby and he didn’t know anything. He thought he could remember that, and it wasn’t as tough as this, but maybe he only thought he could remember, maybe all he knew was what the Juniper Tree told him.
For a while he was just hanging there, half in the ground and half out, nowhere really, in darkness without eyes to see. Then he started to hear the Tree’s voice again. He was whispering and muttering in his raspy deep voice. It went on a long time. It was like he was telling out an old poem that didn’t have an end.
The Juniper Tree told him everything then. He told him about the King Bear and his little witch, and the stone bowl with the apple and the snow. He told him when Giorgio came and how his Mother wanted him so much, she went through all that pain to bring him into the world.
He told him about when his Mother died because she was so happy. He told him about how his dad almost died because he was so sad. He told him all about Rayn and the voices that talked in her head and practically screamed her ears out when she slammed the lid of her Trunk down and cut off his head.
The Juniper Tree went on mumbling and grumbling and telling him everything. All night long he listened. He grew up that night. He learned a lot about Rayn and his Dad but he learned a lot more about him, about Falco. Before that night was over he could look back on Falco and what he’d been like, and he knew now he was somebody else. Falco was him and he wasn’t, not any more. Or maybe he should say he wasn’t Falco.
Something else happened in the night. He grew back together again.
Only he was different now.
The last thing he remembered, the Juniper Tree changed his song. The old tree-voice got a little softer and started singing Ariela’s Song, with new words to sing with it. The Juniper Tree sang the words over and over and he sang with the Tree, half asleep, until he knew the words backward and forward.
The song was still in his head when he woke up.
He stretched and cocked his head. His shoulders felt different. His head, legs, everything felt different.
He opened his eyes and looked out through the juniper branches. He watched the mists creep back from the house in the light before dawn.
The house sat quietly in the calm early hour. The early dawn was gray and misty. The sky quivered and the wind off the water held its breath. Even the waves were small and slow. It was as though the world was waiting for something to take place.
From his branch in the Juniper Tree the black bird raised his head and scrawed.
