The Woman Who Was Afraid of Dying
It all began with the ghost of a bird. Cesar first saw it the night of his grandfather’s funeral, as he sat in the living room of his grandfather’s house. Even this small room, crowded with mementos and knickknacks and hundreds of framed photographs, seemed empty as he listened to his grandmother mutter and sob from her well-worn easy chair. As Cesar stood beside her chair and tried to make things better by rubbing the back of her age-speckled hand clenching the arm of the faded recliner, he saw the shadow darting back and forth in the corner of the room. At first he thought that the shadow belonged to a moth circling the bulb beneath the red, tasseled shade of the only lamp in the room. But, as he strained his eyes to peer past the glare and tried to listen for the frantic tell-tale tapping of the moth against the paper shade, he became aware of what his grandmother mumbled between the sharp intakes of breath as she stifled her crying.
“Why did you leave me, Papa?” she whispered to herself, “why did you leave me here all by myself?”
“Rest easy, Old Meja,” Cesar murmured as he stroked her hand.
“Rest easy?” the old woman croaked, suddenly wild-eyed as she yanked her hand from Cesar’s grasp, “I cannot rest easy. Your grandpapa and I have been together for fifty-two years. Since I was a young girl, hardly older than you, your grandpapa has been with me. The very first time we met, he promised me that he would never leave me, that he would be with me always.”
“And now,” she whispered, “I am all alone.”
“But Old Meja,” Cesar said, his voice small and choked, “he didn’t mean to leave you now. He couldn’t help it. You will see him again one day.”
“No,” she wailed, slumping to her knees “no, no, no. You cannot understand. It is me who has broken the promise. It is me who is selfish and afraid.”
“Old Meja, please...”
“No, you are right. I should see Papa again one day, but I am so afraid. If I were given the choice to see him again at my death or to live forever so I would never have to endure my spirit escaping in my last breath, I would choose to walk the earth until the end of time.”
The stillness of the room, at that second, burst with the cacophony of frenzied wings, and so many shadows darted around the ceiling it was if a horde of bats had been loosed in the tiny room. The old photographs, sepia-toned with age, lurched and quivered in the shimmer of the racing shadows. Cesar and his grandmother cowered on the floor, their heads covered with their arms.
“Heaven help us,” Cesar’s grandmother moaned and flailed the air with her arms.
Then there was silence, except for the infinitesimal scratching of sparrow claws on polished oak. But it was not a sparrow. There, on the carved frame of her wedding picture, twitched the apparition of a mockingbird. No longer merely a flitting shadow, the mockingbird had taken form and color, its back dark gray and its belly pale. The black bars on its wings became nearly solid, but the specter was transparent, the way the stained-glass image of a bird on a lamp shade is translucent when the bulb is burning.
“The eye, Cesar,” Old Meja whimpered, “can you see the eye?”
Cesar looked at the eye, and he could not answer. The coal-black bead of the mockingbird’s eye shone and flickered as if it concealed the conflagration of its very soul. As Cesar stammered to respond, the mockingbird opened its beak to call, and the sound that echoed through the room was not the sweet warble of the thrasher or the red song of the cardinal but a raven’s croak. That throaty screak made the walls tremble, and the mockingbird then wheeled on its strange perch and glared at the old woman cringing on the floor.
“Cesar,” gasped his grandmother, “I have seen this bird before, a long time ago, when I was young.”
The mockingbird caracoled to the back of the easy chair and curiously cocked his bright eye toward her.
“When we were first married, Papa and I worked the farms up north. At the beginning of our third season together, Louis, Papa’s little brother, was to be married to Maria, my little sister.”
Cesar’s gaze, from memory, went to the photograph hanging beneath his grandparent’s wedding picture. The image was faded from the decades it had spent hanging in the same spot on the newspapered wall, but it still clearly showed a gangly young man in a stiff dress coat gently holding to him a small, dark woman gazing fondly at something outside the boundaries of the photograph. A tiny ivory cameo necklace hung from the frame. This was their engagement picture, posed before the cavernous mouth of a dilapidated barn. Cesar knew this was the only picture of the couple, and he was startled when the mockingbird, with a devilish pirouette, landed on its frame and made the pendant tremble.
“There was more rain that spring than even the oldest men could remember,” his grandmother continued, her voice distant, her eyes glazed, “and we were worried because the fields we were working were bottom land near the Kings River. Louis and Maria were to be married on a Sunday morning, and we had planted in the rain all day on Saturday so the bosses wouldn’t complain about our taking the next afternoon for the wedding party. It was still raining Sunday morning as we gathered inside the seed barn for the priest to marry them. I was Maria’s bridesmaid, and she had fussed at me all morning about keeping her bridal train from getting muddy. They were husband and wife for less than half a day.”
Old Meja paused, and her vacant eyes welled with tears. The mockingbird impatiently whirled and scrabbled from his perch. The room filled with the humid scent of rain.
“I had just finished serving the cake, and we were standing at the door of the barn, watching the rain, when we saw the strangest sight. From the trees by the creek, wild animals fled in every direction into the muddy fields. Three deer raced right through the barn, nearly touching us as they passed. Then we heard a roar over the rustle and splash of the coyotes and rabbits and deer rushing from the tall grass into the fields, and we saw the big trees bend double and fall. One bear came scrambling out of the brush, and, no sooner than we saw him, the water rolled up behind him and lifted him up like a toy, and I heard him bawl until he went under.
“Papa grabbed my hand and pulled me through the barn, but I fell. And instead of following him, I foolishly ran to the ladder to the loft where Papa and I slept. I climbed into the straw and snatched my velvet jewelry bag from the box at the head of our blankets. Then, when I stumbled back to the ladder, the barn, the whole world, spun around and came loose.”
Cesar, though transfixed by his grandmother’s rasping monologue, became aware, through the periphery of his sight, of the gathering of shadows again in the corners of the ceiling. Faintly, they flocked with the barely audible rush of flowing water.
“Everything was floating. The loft had come apart, and I clung to an empty cider keg. The water was dark and full of brush. Everything was grasping at my legs beneath the water. Snakes swirled by wrapped around limbs of fallen trees. A washtub bobbed up and banged my head. A rope with laundry still pinned to it wrapped around my barrel then caught in the top of a tree and spun me around like a top. Finally I was snared in the branches of a huge oak. The current pressed me against the trunk and raged in a torrent over my back and head. I climbed until I was out of the water. My legs were bleeding, and I had lost my best shoes.
“It was then that I saw the mockingbird. He was perched above me in the tree, and he had gone mad. He croaked and cawed as he skittered from one branch to another. He hung upside down and snatched at my hair. He was trying to drive me from the tree, as if he had forgotten that he could fly to safety and was afraid that my weight would tumble his sanctuary from the flood. His incessant caterwauling petrified me, and I closed my eyes and hugged the tree with all of my strength.
“As I perilously clung above the rushing water, I heard voices through the mockingbird’s din. The voices were desperate and calling my name. I tremulously shifted my position on the tree and saw, over my shoulder, that the turmoil of the deluge had washed Maria and Louis into the limbs of a tree nearly within reach of me. A rope was tied to their refuge and stretched taut above the water to the bank where Papa had secured the other end to another tree. They were so close. Maria straddled a branch and inched her way toward me, her arm outstretched. The freshet had stripped her of her wedding train and dress, and she crawled toward me in her muddy petticoat. I tried to loosen my grasp on the trunk and reach for her hand, but the mockingbird pitched and swooped at my tenuous grip on the rough bark. I could hear Maria pleading with me to try to reach her. I could see her eyes, frightened and determined, the same expression she wore when we were children and Louis dared her to jump into the pond from the highest branch of the pine tree. She inched even closer and shouted at me to reach for her hand. I never loved her more than I did at that second, but I was too afraid to let go of the trunk. I was too afraid of the muddy, roiling water. I was too afraid of that sinister bird. As I clung selfishly to that cold haven, Maria crept ever further out toward me, and the branch she cleaved to, under her weight, dipped into the turbid rush, and she was ripped away. Louis lunged for her hand, but he too was swallowed by the deluge. Fishermen found them a week later, embracing one another beneath a sunken log.”
Cesar’s gasp made his grandmother abruptly stir from the daze of her memory. The shadows swarmed the walls of the room hysterically. Cesar and his grandmother seemed to be in the eye of a storm of hellish moths, and their dappled rush caused the parlor to spin sickeningly. Then, from out of the rim of the cyclone into the still eddy where Cesar and his grandmother helplessly waited, wafted the diaphanous forms of Maria and Louis. Old Meja threw herself before the stern-faced apparitions and wailed. The mockingbird cackled and crazily gyrated around Old Meja’s prostrated figure.
“Please leave me,” Old Meja keened, “please leave me alone. Seek no vengeance on this old fool. I have suffered enough. I have suffered every day of my life for my part in your tragedy. Please leave me.”
But the wraiths glided even closer to Old Meja, until they hovered directly before the place where she cowered. Cesar clearly recognized the couple because they appeared exactly as they did in the old photograph. Louis wore the same stiff coat, and Maria still nestled in his clasp, but now she no longer gazed abstractedly away into the distance. She glared down at Old Meja with the same dour expression that cloaked Louis’ face, a countenance shaped by uncomfortable waiting in scratchy clothes, for what seems like an eternity, before the photographer’s flash explodes into the back of the eye and lingers there, a ghost floating before everything the eye gazes upon. The mockingbird worried the air above Old Meja’s lowered head. It plucked at the thin wisps of gray hair between her laced fingers as it swooped and looped back to its perch on the picture frame, as if it were gathering dross for its nest.
“Old Meja, listen,” exclaimed Cesar.
The old woman raised her head slightly, to listen but avoid the stares of Maria and Louis. Faintly, a sound insinuated itself in the realm of her hearing. It was, at first, a thin sound, like the rustling of twigs heard beneath the rush and babble of a stream, but the sound grew stronger. As Old Meja strained to listen, the sound became familiar, and it took the shape of Papa’s voice, calling out her name. The old woman peered between the gauzy legs of the phantoms looming over her and scarcely discerned the silhouette of her husband when he was young. From behind the swirling squall of shadows, Papa called, and Old Meja struggled to see him as if she were squinting through the crystalline substance of fifty years.
At that moment, Cesar recognized the tableau from his grandmother’s memory. He saw how she cowered before Maria and Louis as Papa called from a distant shore.
“Old Meja,” Cesar cried, “look up at your sister. Look up before it is too late.”
Old Meja forced herself to lift her face to the grim ghost of her sister, and, as she did, Maria moved toward her, out of Louis’ embrace. Old Meja flinched and clenched her quivering eyelids.
“Old Meja, open your eyes. Please, open your eyes.”
The old woman, with an obvious force of will, opened her eyes to see Maria kneeling before her, offering her hand.
“No, no,” sobbed Old Meja, “I cannot.”
“Old Meja, take her hand.”
Old Meja, trembling uncontrollably, slumped forward.
“Please leave me,” she wept, over and over again.
Cesar knelt beside his grandmother and gently cradled her forearm with both of his hands. He tenderly raised her hand toward Maria’s, but, before her hand was halfway up, Cesar felt Old Meja raise her arm out of his grasp, and, with her head still hung toward the floor, Old Meja finished raising her hand on her own.
Old Meja and Maria touched each other’s fingers then joined their hands in a fond grasp.
At that instant, the cataclysm of shadows ceased. Cesar was alone in the silent room with the cold form of his grandmother. When he looked up at the photograph of Maria and Louis, he saw that the cameo pendant was gone. Outside, in the calm of the summer night, a mockingbird mimicked the red song of the cardinal.