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Hilda, South Carolina, 1999; Blazing Calyx Carnival, 1984
Leah had imagined it for years, the way some girls imagine the ordered rituals of their weddings—the dress, the march, the ordained officiant, the declarations, the dance, the toss, the waves goodbye before crossing that threshold—but here, in her dark iris velvet dress, in her small candlelit apartment in the tiny town of Hilda, South Carolina, where Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor was moving toward its crescendo and the beat-up ebony grandfather clock she’d lugged home from a roadside sale was gonging through the hours, she was the sole officiator and attendee of this, the grand ceremony of her last breath.
Why not Mozart? This was a celebration, after all, one deserving of a timeless and lofty orchestration. Though this day, April 4, 1999, marked Leah’s twenty-first birthday, it was not her birth she was celebrating. Having lived more than half her life feeling penned in by the impenetrable wires of solitude, weighted by the kind of shapeless helplessness only the abandoned know, she felt powerful now to claim her own death, to schedule it on her own watch, her own grandfather clock as it were. What she didn’t know yet was that her plans were about to be undone by a more powerful force.
There was no one to say goodbye to. She had never made friends in the small town of Hilda, though at first she tried. Shortly after her mother left her there, in the care of the saintly-patient Edward Murphy, who would become, through a peculiar marriage of force and kindness, a father to Leah, she was invited to the house of fellow second-grader Cynthia Lewis, in whose flouncy bedroom Leah unveiled her most prized possession by lifting it from its wrapping in one theatric sweep of the arm: a fox skull she’d found in a field. Her eyes gleamed as light touched the bone, but before she could tell Cynthia and her friends about how beautiful she thought it was, how amazing that its jaw still hinged open and shut, one of the girls said “Ew,” and that was followed by a series of yucks and additional ews, along with tears from Cynthia Lewis, who begged her to “put that dead thing away,” and finally Cynthia’s mother, who suggested Leah go back home and find something else to share with her new friends, something not dead. But death hadn’t scared Leah then, and it didn’t scare her now.
She held nothing back on this day, moving through her death rituals with a rapt intensity, not unlike the way Mozart’s quill must have moved through each of his compositions, all the notes now mounting in their urgency alongside the whole of her collected days, which had coalesced here to form a swiftly moving current that would carry her out to an unknown sea. She had initiated the ceremony by lighting the two red candles Edward Murphy had once given her for Christmas. “Smell ’em,” he’d urged excitedly as she pulled them from their wrapping. “Just like cinnamon!” That year she’d given him a new Mozart album to add to his record collection, the same album she was now blasting through her apartment. He had been attempting to branch out from the reliable rock classics to something “more cultured,” as he put it, but now it was completely her own.
When Edward Murphy died and she had to move out, she took the candles from their small dining table, wrapped them in tissue paper, and stowed them on the top shelf of the nearly bare pantry in her new apartment. They had never been lit. But now they flickered dangerously, leaping toward her each time she came wildly gesticulating past, then threatening to go out. She had never moved this way before—all body, flinging herself back and forth through the small space of her living room, her arms darting up erratically, painting invisible pictures in the air, as if to finally answer every question about her sanity that had ever been lodged in her direction by the various small-towners who wondered why, even in the thickest heat of South Carolina summer, she always wore black. Why those heavy combat boots? Perhaps more than anything, people wanted to know “what on God’s green earth” she was doing wearing that “ridiculous” nail-studded belt and collar. “You’ll poke someone’s eye out with your neck!” said Dr. Hammershire, the local dentist who found his comment so amusing that he repeated it every time he saw her.
As she came thrashing again past the candles, a loosened flame herself, even her hair, ink black, shaved close on the right side, spiked longer on the left, seemed to be participating, each barb moving like its own baton, conducting along with Mozart on the fringe of abandon. She couldn’t remember dancing before. She couldn’t remember being so sure of anything.
The rituals, long-planned in a thoughtful order, had begun at 4:44 that morning with the lighting of the two red candles and would continue for one full rotation of the earth, one sunrise and one sunset, twenty-four hours that she would peel each minute from with Herculean intent. She’d chosen this time not only because her birthday fell on the fourth day of the fourth month but also because the number four struck her as whole—four chambers of the heart, four ventricles of the brain, four elements, four seasons, four winds, four principal phases of the moon—and she wanted to close her life feeling like she, too, was whole.
After lighting the ceremonial candles, Leah recited aloud Mary Oliver’s “Sleeping in the Forest,” which Edward Murphy had first read to her when she was a child. “Your mama was nuts about Mary Oliver,” he’d told her. “She was carrying this beat-up old book of hers in her purse when we met.” It had been almost fifteen years since Leah had heard her mother’s voice, though she could still conjure it from fifteen birthdays before, her sixth birthday, the last one she would spend with her mother.
*****
It was April 4, 1984, in the Alabama fields of the Blazing Calyx Carnival, and Leah had just blown out the six candles adorning a chocolate-covered mound of fried dough. Her wish was the same wish she wished each time she saw the first star appear in the sky: to meet a real live elephant. “Did you wish for elephants again?” her mother asked, tapping her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray. Leah plunged her fingers into the melted chocolate. She didn’t answer because Perilous Paul had told her that you should never tell a wish if you want it to come true. Her mother reached across their little fold-up table and stroked Leah’s cheek. Her eyes went shiny as they sometimes did when she felt what she called “a little love spell” coming on. “When you were born,” she said, “right here, in this very trailer, I had no idea what to call you. You were such a sensitive baby. I could tell right away you were different.” Leah watched the tip of her mother’s cigarette glow orange as she pressed it between her lips and was mesmerized by how the cigarette changed before her eyes, just like one of her mother’s magic tricks. “You were always looking around with those big eyes of yours as if you already knew everything there was to know, secret things. And you never wanted to sleep. That summer, when you were only a few months old, you’d stay up all night just looking, not making a sound. And I thought of a legend I once read about, how if you find the seed of a fern in bloom on a midsummer night, you get special powers.”
“Powers?” Leah asked, pushing a handful of dough into her mouth.
“You become invisible, and then only will-o’-the-wisps can see you.”
“Will-o’-the-wisps?”
Jeannie nodded slowly for emphasis. “Yep, that’s right. Will-o’-the-wisps. Spirits made of light. And when you find them, they lead you to hidden treasures that no one else can see.”
“What kind of treasures?”
“I don’t know,” said Jeannie, pulling hard enough on her cigarette to make it crackle. Her voice crackled, too, when she exhaled. “You’ll have to tell me when you find the seed.”
Leah smiled. “I’ll take you with me,” she said, “to the treasure.”
“Nah, I’ll always be just a person,” she said pensively, tapping her ash and looking out at a distance Leah couldn’t see. “But you, Miss Fern, are different. That’s why you’re not named after a person. You’re named after magic.”
“Did your mama name you Jeannie Starr because she knew you’d be a magic star?”
Leah’s mother stubbed her cigarette out in a small orange ashtray. “My mama never knew anything about me.”
“Why not?”
She reached for Leah’s face again but stopped midway, as suddenly as if something had bitten her hand. “You just eat your sweets, okay? That was a long, long time ago.”
Leah thought for a moment. “Do I have a dad?” she finally asked.
Leah’s mother laughed the kind of laugh that isn’t really a laugh. “Ah, your daddy,” she said, “could have been any one of a few handsome cowboys.”
