Lamentations

By Jonathan Woolf

“A cursed be ye, but through thy daughters trine, scary and wary be of this sign—for one man shall not satisfy they, kill will thy kin, forever slay, slay, slay!”

As her words stopped traffic, with a nearby horse falling dead, and out of fear of just what Eunice had said, Darius and Leda, hoping to fend off the curse, left town on the most convenient train, scared by Eunice’s verse.

Eunice retreated to the Delphine House, never to be seen on the village streets again. Some would say it was her that was seen by hunters’ in the night, sacrificing animals to the moon and running naked through the woods. But for the most part, this was a myth to scare little children away from the Delphine homestead, or so the adults agreed as a comfort to themselves.

Eunice’s solitary outburst condemned her to a most lonely life and she remained hidden in the house, terrified by her own eruption of that day; that single day that seemed to have changed her life, forever. But none of this had been her intended outcome. In kindness and remorse, she sent money to the dead horse’s owner with an apology. Only after the money was returned wrapped in a prayer of serenity for her, did she understand the gravity of her situation.

In her latter days, Eunice was reported to have leapt to her death from the upper most room of the Delphine House in her finest black taffeta dress and pearls; spiraling downwards with a sharp rock and hard earth breaking her fall and cracking her skull. The ground upon which her blood spilled was rumored to have never recovered and to this day, the cursed soil bears the silhouette of her fallen figure.

In fear, and hoping to leave the curse behind them, knowing that the town’s folk would forever remind them of the incident, Leda and Darius fled to a nearby parish and started their family, doing their best to forget the past by making a new life for themselves. But, with the birth of Leda’s third daughter, Andra, and still with no son in sight, both began to fear the worse and Eunice’s verse and so they began trying to find honorable suitors for their daughters when they became of age, suitors who had not heard of Eunice’s dire prediction. However, because of Helen’s remarkable beauty, when she came of age, she did not lack for a suitor. Rumor had it that every available bachelor, regardless of age, within five parishes, had attempted to court her—and that at one point, she had even been kidnapped by two brothers. But it was not until the dreamy-eyed, fair-haired Deutsche gentleman from New Orleans, Laus Menes, arrived, that her hand was given and she was carried away to his house in order to turn it into a home.

And the joy of the moment was not lost on Darius and Leda, for within nine months, Leda gave birth to a son, Castor Faye Archer. Thus, they began to feel more secure and somewhat spared from Eunice Delphine’s iron-willed and feral curse, and that their son would be spared the indignity that they had known.

And so, that is precisely (the search for a decent suitor) how Nestra came to be on that dusty road to Miceny, and to be the obsession of Schylus Masters on that fateful day. Darius and Leda were on their way to Miceny to chaperone Nestra and Tanner, when their shiny black lacquered buggy—a Surrey with red spokes, red cushions, and white tassels—wheel broke, sending the three into a ditch with the buggy itself came to rest on its side. Schylus who had been approaching them, after flipping up the brim of his hat, viewed the entire spectacle incredulously, and immediately rushed to their aid.

It is said that upon touching Nestra’s hand, a small spark erupted in Schylus’ finger that echoed in his heart which truly electrified the moment for him, as he helped to extricate Nestra from the ditch.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mystic Mustangs Publishing
• Release date: Jul 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476001449

Jonathan Woolf

Mr. Woolf is of Scottish descent and resides in Sarasota, Florida.

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Lamentations

(A Literary Novel)

Jonathan Orlando Woolf

Published by Mystic Mustangs Publishing

Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Orlando Woolf/John Lloyd Smith, Jr

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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Original copyright

© 2005 by Jonathan Orlando Woolf/John Lloyd Smith, Jr. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

From great suffering

comes great art.

Prelude

From the journal of Spencer Orestes Masters…

I suppose I should feel guilty. Any normal person would; anyone who had brought about the destruction of his own mother, and for being so instrumental in her downfall—and doing it so exquisitely. I mean that a normal person would, or should, feel some remorse, shouldn’t they? But as I sit here and gaze from my hotel room in the Upper East Side upon the city… that ubiquitous city with so many lives coursing through the streets, as if blood in the veins supplying subtle nourishment to the whole body, delivering and depositing the substances of life, with so many people and with so many stories… I feel more safe and a little more secure.

I feel safe for being so far away from it all, safe because of the distances—that, and because it has become the distant past already in my mind. I feel secure because here in this the big city, this metropolis, I can hide. We can hide, and no one need know of our past, or care. They say the best place to hide is to hide in a crowd. Is there a larger crowd? Can there be a larger crowd than New York City—London, perhaps, or maybe Paris?

I had thought of New Orleans, but there would be too many business associates, too many reminders, too many people who might know, who might guess. And the proximity would make it too convenient to turn back, to return to the town just to see what had happened to everyone. I will keep the house there, make sure that it and the property is cared for. After all, someday, I will return to it, or possibly to the earth upon which it rests. A place that needs, that wants, children to run and play. For it needs that, in order to heal itself.

Yes, I probably should feel some guilt, but guilt implies responsibility. Besides, how can someone feel guilty over someone who was very guilty… so very guilty? How can I be held responsible for someone else’s actions?

But, I digress. If the story is to be told, and it must be told, it should be done so in its entirety.

From the beginning… all the way to the bitter end.

Chapter One

Out of the mouth of babes…

Well child, that’s another story, for another time…

I wanted more. I wanted to hear more about what had happened to the secretive rabbit and its misguided adventures. I wanted to hear more about its fluffiness and its coquettish nature, its mercurial and merciless tricking of others.

With the whisper of her words fading, I could tell as the wide grin appeared on Miss Cassie Mae’s jovial face, her big black eyes glowing and the hint of the devil laughing in her words, the parting of her thick lips and the whiteness of her bared teeth, that she had achieved her desired effect. I had the expression of incredible disbelief when one feels a sense of loss upon the completion of a story and unsatisfied that it has ended, riddling my little cherubic face.

But as I went to protest and to press for more details about the story and to request yet another, as children often do at playtime, the screen door squealed announcing the arrival of my aunt; a short spiteful woman who on this particular afternoon, seemed to have been mollified by the surreptitious errand which had landed me at Little Miss Cassie Mae’s and my flight into the fantastic worlds of words and imaginations. The gift of entering a world of Miss Cassie Mae’s making—a world where adults were nearly non-existent soul-less creations that lurked in the shadows, a world without ‘don’ts’, a world of ‘and do you know what happened next?’

The aunt, my aunt, Aunt Andra, whose short strawberry locks and pale thin skin, flesh so milky as to expose the crisscrossing of blue veins, contrasted greatly with the darker than midnight pigment and all but overwhelming massive girth of Miss Cassie Mae—who now had risen from her once creaking rocker, as quietly and effortlessly as a carnival balloon rises above the crowds and big top. Her long shadow and soft floor-length gingham skirt now partially hid me from view. Miss Cassie Mae’s very large, bulging and most unflinching lazy black eyes, when placed in the room with Aunt Andra’s green eyes which darted nervously about the place filled with apprehension and uneasiness, must have seemed awkward.

Aunt Andra chirped little phrases in high operatic pitches punctuated with machine gun sounding staccatos beckoning me to her as if I was a dog who had been lost from its master, and whom the master was overjoyed to see upon its return. She might as well have been whistling ‘Dixie’. I was not a dog.

And, it was a lie.

Aunt Andra and I did not get along as well as she liked to pretend to everyone. Aunt Andra was like that a lot of the time, pretending. She liked to pretend a lot of things. Things like she was beautiful and perfect, that it was a cruel cosmic and universal joke that others did not find her as wonderful and pleasant as she was. She had a hard time wondering why people did not like her more, or like her as much as she liked herself.

I resisted slightly as she approached me.

My imaginations might have been spoon-fed to me by Miss Cassie Mae and gleaned from the fables and proverbs of old. My imaginations may even have been born from the vellum of ancient and mythological text of crusty ‘want to be’ mariners. But the imaginations of Aunt Andra, as externally benign as they may have seemed to most, must have held a more cancerous malignancy which surely ate away at her soul, feasting daily.

She was tugging me towards the screen door, now.

And yet, each dawn, as if the previous days intrusions to her vanity had been a mere irritancy, an annoyance when one finds others to be ignorant and boorish, she forgave society and started anew, even welcoming the chance to inspire beauty in others through her own uniqueness.

I heard myself yelp a little as she pinched my arm.

Had it been this self-inspiration, self-awe, that kept other more despotic and depressive demons away? Or was she merely one of those damned souls feasting on the misfortunes and misery of others, an emotional vampire of the daytime, sucking the life and feelings away from dawn until dusk of both intended and unintended victims in the necessitated slaughter to feed her ravenous ego?

What story did Miss Cassie Mae tell you today, Cottontop?

We were in her car now, driving slowly down the dusty back roads with the hot dry wind blowing through the open canopy of her pale blue Ford roadster. I was impressed. Normally I had to ride in the rumble seat, but today Aunt Andra seemed to be in a generous mood and one could tell such by her singing aloud. Maybe it was because I had told her how pretty she looked when she had picked me up from my house earlier that day, or maybe it was not.

Needn't even think of tryin'…, she sang.

I fidgeted.

Was it her annoying attitude, her obnoxious voice, or the very inquiring of my activities in Miss Cassie Mae’s dream world, the world of imagination that my soul longed to return to at that precise moment, that irritated me so much?

To be a mighty social lion…

I stammered.

As much a child as I was, unknowing and a virgin to the worldly machinations of others, I still knew enough not to tell all my secrets. I knew enough to be selfish with the exploits of the rabbit I had heard about.

I thought of myself as my favorite rabbit, and what would he do?

Well dear?

I smiled.

I smiled in the sunshine to mask the distaste for having to be present with her at that moment, in that vehicle, in that situation. But the smile was easy, having been formed by the power I held to make someone as shameful and obtuse as she to beg. A child getting an adult to beg can be just as intoxicating as any liquor or brew to an adult—a mixture of relaxation and the casting away of inhibitions, the easing of propriety and restrictions.

I spoke.

Though the words I struggled to find and form would have to be repeated, I was well prepared. With the secretive rabbit’s tutelage fresh in my mind, I would begin. I would begin to tell her above the roar of the engine of the sports coupe, above the roar of the gentle breeze swirling by us and forming those curious dust devils in our wake, above all the sounds and fury involved with shifting gears while driving a car down a dirty Louisiana back road in the summertime.

The story about the rabbit with a secret…

Every so often I would become a human echo, repeating myself as Aunt Andra attempted to navigate the car and listen at the same time. It amazed me that she would actually listen to my retelling of the story, even asking questions about the rabbit—about its look, its texture, and such.

In the simplest and as concise terms as I could muster, I, at the ripe and sagacious age of four and one half years, I began.

There was this horrible marsh rabbit with dark blue button-eyes with fluffy brown fur and she thought she was better than everyone because she had a secret, but all the other rabbits knew the secret except…

I could see the look of captivation in her eyes and could feel the car slow down. However, it was neither my story nor the telling there of that had stolen her attention away from me. Nor was it the once straight and empty road that now curved and sprawled momentarily across the pastures before us.

The house now garnered both of our attentions. The house that solemnly rested to our right. The boarded up house with the sickly green moss that weighed heavily upon its dilapidated and decaying roof. Oh, what a magnificent house it must have been for its new owners at the time it had been built; a time just before the Great War, but after the War of Northern Aggression. It was built with the richness and opulence that goes hand in hand with prosperity, and the commentary it brings with it during boom periods—built with blood money and egregious transgressions. It was also rumored that both men and women had died in its construction.

Once upon a time, it had been a temple dedicated to the god’s of lucre and lusts, with its spires teasing the sun. The very sun that beamed so gloriously down upon Aunt Andra and me as it passed overhead. Taunting the golden orb that should it drop one jot, one tittle, the house seemed to promise that it would prick the sun, or worse, puncture it with the sharp wrought iron that stretched skyward; those receptacles and conductors of ionized air, carefully disguised as charming accoutrements.

Of a rich antebellum design, grandiose and reserved, and yet hinting at something foreign, possibly Victorian or French, the house did not quite sit squarely upon its foundation, or so it seemed—a gift of revenge, possibly caused by the suffering prisoners and former slaves who were condemned to the task of raising up such a monstrous beast upon the land, or the quirk of time and erosion stealing its life and returning it to the dust and ash from whence it was born.

Dust and ash, wood and mortar, brick and rock, silica and salt—the tools used to raise the once glorious mansion turned sepulcher—would eventually return to its basic principles, reduced by abuse and disuse to that of atoms and molecules born upon the winds of time and history.

As we rounded the curve that it was nestled in, the only two curves in our road toward the town, the house with a history was now partially hidden by flowing Spanish moss giving it the air of sadness encouraged by the weeping willow tree to the front in the right side of what surely had once been a finely manicured lawn; where adults had fanned themselves while sipping lemonade and cider on lazy Sunday afternoons as a reward for enduring the hellfire and brimstone of ministers obsessed with souls and Jesus, of the devil and worldly evils, in those turgid religious mornings. After all, prohibition ruled the land and the day, but not necessarily the country or the night.

The pungent smell of magnolia, of cedar, and of rosewood, temporarily overwhelmed the dust to fill us with a sense of longing, of comfort and of faded glory. But, that was short-lived as the scent of smoke and ash began to take hold, chasing away those pleasant thoughts and filling us with a quiet sense of impending doom and anarchy, and the sense that it was time to press onward, if ever so slowly, cautiously, as if not to waken the house.

Even from the short distance from the road, one simultaneously felt nostalgia for the former aristocracy that had graced the house, and yet sense the chill in one’s own spine’s tingling that something tragic and haunting had happened here that had made its residence abandon and flee in some terror or rage. What reputations and repudiations proceeded from its veranda, its stately door with ancient scrollwork and foreboding cornice and gables? For it was also the house with precisely that reputation—the reputation of rendering all who entered into it, insane.

Or so Andra whispered under her breath, as if reciting a Saracen mantra. It was a house with a larger than life story of its own, the House Delphine, and a house whose image and destruction still faintly burns in my memory to this day.

Its history would be forever shrouded in shame and mystery. Had it been the house of wealth and mirth or sordid brothel—a morgue, a sanitarium, or a pastor’s rectory?

Was it light playing a trick as we moved in front of its two large windows, a reflection of our slow moving roadster winding in front of it? Or, was it truly a person lurking in the house, someone dressed in white come to relive a childhood memory, someone come to see if a small vestige of the past could be salvaged and brought to life once more? Or, as some were fond of stating, was it a specter, and that great evil would follow and curse the person who saw the faint apparition waving to them from within its decaying walls?

Instinctively, as children do, I stood up in the seat and began to wave at the house; smiling, with every ounce of innocence flowing from me. An innocence that the house seemed to crave—to covet—because of the movement, the stirring from an upstairs window, which appeared to mimic my actions as if the house was waving back. Andra would later ascribe the motion behind the dusty panes to drapery blown by a breeze through a hole in the window.

I would feel, I would know, differently. And it would take an act of God to dissuade me otherwise.

However, it was no curse that landed a blow to the back of my little legs, or maybe it was? As I fell into the cushion, I turned to look at the scowl on Aunt Andra’s face; the lines forming in her forehead and around her eyes, the grimace upon her mouth.

She swatted again, but with chastisement and admonition, as she scolded, telling me to never look at that house again—to never even think of that house or go anywhere near it.

But I was waving at the woman upstairs…

My protest was met with a slap on the legs, reddening and burning them.

No you didn’t. You didn’t see anybody in the house. Are you stupid? Do you want bad luck? Do you want some ghost to come and get you in the middle of the night? Do you want the boogieman to get you?

I did not respond, because at that moment I would’ve preferred dealing with the boogieman to the flat of her hand upon me. The thought of a ghost getting me seemed more pleasant than her; at least with a ghost, the torment is brief.

Aunt Andra cursed in her benign ‘holier than thou’ expletives as she drove, speeding up ever so slowly until we were traveling faster than our initial speed. She kept on berating me, preferring to condemn me rather than to listen to the radio or to her own voice singing.

My legs felt raw. The stinging in them reminded me of previous times the Aunt had performed such an insensitive act upon them. Yes, as senseless as her actions seemed, a part of me felt that she was driven more by necessity than concern for my well-being; a need for control of not just me, but of the mundane that had slowly begun to creep back into her life.

I was unsure what had transformed her from the seemingly jolly soul earlier into the histrionic creature that I now longed to escape from. Was it the house itself or the apparition in the upstairs window? Was it the legend of the insanity generated by the house or her very silly superstitions?

It had been a sudden jolt and with great swerving that she narrowly escaped the oncoming vehicle; fenders dodging each other as if knights jousting, tilting lances that never touch. As the vehicles danced in their dusty paths, her roadster and the transport as they skidded past each other, and each struggling to maintain control, the blaring of the truck’s trumpet was answered with the higher pitch of a bugle sounding from the roadster. The two vehicles continued on their courses, partially mesmerized with disgust and contempt for the other motorist.

Did one need to actually enter the Delphine’s old manor to be cursed, or was just looking upon it sufficient for condemnations? Was this the ill effects of the apparition that I had seen taking effect reaching from beyond and into our lives? What really did happen to the Delphines that caused the curse and pox upon both their house and their souls?

The momentary distraction assuaged the aunt, my aunt, Aunt Andra’s anger, freeing me from her sudden and swift wrath. She paused briefly to check her strawberry locks, touching her hair with those fingers draped in white gloves which protected and hid her gossamer fingers, her alabaster hands marbled with blue veins.

Ain't got the least desire...

She returned to singing, sadly.

To set the world on fire...

She truly was an unbearable creation. Only when the car once more was in motion and some semblance of normalcy returned, did I let out a long sigh of relief. Yet all to brief was this moment of sanity.

Now, what was that story Cassie Mae was telling you, child? Huh, Cottontop?

The mental rollercoaster had returned to its point of origin, and seemed to be ready to embark once more on its trek through my psyche, a trek I refused to endure again to placate her. And as I questioned whether or not—and indeed, given my limited memory at that time—I could do the rabbit, and those rabbits associated with it justice, the scenery outside the roadster began to change with a slight bump in the road; changing from low country fields that would normally have had produce, but because of the poverty and the depression of its owners and society, had been left to fend for itself in the humid heat of a late delta summer into paved streets and sidewalks of boarded up storefronts and warehouses—reminders to those adult enough to know, that it takes more than simple economics to keep a roof over head and food in the belly.

The story about the rabbit with a secret…

That much I could tell her. That much she knew, already.

There was this horrible marsh rabbit with dark blue button-eyes with fluffy brown fur and she thought she was better than everyone because she had a secret, but all the other rabbits knew the secret except…

She listened again as I repeated my earlier monologue, silently and let me continue without so much as a peep of hindrance, but with a queer look upon her face as if she vaguely remembered such a tale from her own childhood.

…Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightiest still the enemy and the avenger... boomed into the vehicle, drowning my own story and once more scattering its plot to the wind.

The voice that drew our attention, as we had come to rest at a stop sign on the corner of Wilmot and Sullivan with the car engine humming, was from the Priest Calchas who had taken to standing on the corner proselytizing to would be parishioners and passersby.

Aunt Andra politely nodded to him before stepping on the gas and motoring our way to her house where she breathed a sigh of relief and smiled at me upon our arrival. I had safely returned from my second visit to Cassie Mae’s for that week.

Chapter Two

Miceny, Louisiana

Oh, what homespun evil can lurk in tiny hamlets and quaint boroughs? More so than any cinematic grotesqueness or gratuitously violent reels, because such evil is not only real, but also slightly incestuous; because of the nearness, the proximity of those involved, tends to erase any and all objectivity. Those involved are our neighbors, were our neighbors of one community, were once of our community, and once were held in some vague esteem in our society. And it is in their fall from grace, most abrupt and without warning, that frightens some into the common belief that what is truly evil not only could happen to them, but lurks within their own souls, waiting to reveal and to relieve itself through transgressions.

No, no, no, it could not be! And yet, it must be!

People will often set their minds into motion in a vain attempt or in pointless exercises, to wrap consciousness around the concept that one of their very own, their very own, had or had not committed such a heinous and permanent crime, and place fault in their evaluations for either side. People tend to forget that all societies are not too distantly removed from the very savannahs and jungles, the primitives and wildebeests from which they were originally born; nurturing the concept that because they are removed from such primordial beginnings, they are somehow better, somehow beyond the laws that govern the jungle, and reside in a realm protected by individual civility and the rule of