The Swaying Canopy
Chapter Five: The Storm
By Christopher Mitchell
The next few weeks passed in sunrise after sunset. Oliver tended the fields, getting them ready for planting, while Penelope walked alongside him or sat in a chair when he had to work the forge. She read to him every day. And as their habits became intertwined, they began to work in perfect harmony without a single word uttered between them. Oliver would reach a hand out for the coffee mug, and Penelope held it ready for him while he checked the weather report. She was too busy to look up from the crosswords she’d taken to while Oliver scanned for inclement weather.
The rains should have arrived by now, but still, the Silverspring Gazette showed clear skies and record highs.
“This’ll be bad for harvest.” He said aloud, not necessarily to Penelope but the room at large.
“Still no rain, I take it?” Penelope asked, scribbling in a word with ink instead of a pencil. Oliver was amazed that, as of yet, she’d never gotten a single word wrong.
“Still no rain.” He repeated.
“It’ll come.” She said assuredly. “In the meantime, what’s an eight-letter word for intensely emotional? The fifth letter is an M.”
“Vehement.” He said, not looking up from the paper.
“Vehement!” She scribbled in the word, shaking her head. “How come you don’t do these yourself?”
“That was my father’s favorite pastime, not mine.” He smiled. “I preferred to read words over uncovering them.”
“How many of those books in the study have you read?”
He looked up from the paper, confused by the question.
“All of them.” He said matter-of-factly.
Her eyes were wide as her head lifted from the crossword. “All of them? You don’t have a to-be-read pile as tall as you are?”
Oliver shook his head. “I don’t buy a new book until the old one is finished… I’m weird that way.”
“Not weird,” Penelope said, reaching across the table and squeezing his hand. “Not weird at all.”
She let his hand go and rose from the table, clearing his plate.
He tried to stop her, raising his hand in protest. “I told you, today is my—”
“I know what you told me, Ollie.” She interrupted. “I do things because I want to do them, not because you need me to.”
He relented, nodding in acceptance of her vie for independence and returned to looking at the paper.
“Besides,” she continued, “we also need to discuss our living arrangement.”
“I told you,” He started, flipping down the corner of the paper to see her. “I’m completely fine with the sofa in the study.”
“And I told you,” She shot back, a small degree of heat in her voice, “so am I.”
“You’re a guest in my home, and guests in my home get the mattress.”
“I stopped being a guest last week, Ollie.” She clattered the dishes, her work becoming slightly more energetic. “At three weeks, you’re no longer a guest; you’re a roommate.”
“And what a roommate you are,” Oliver said, losing himself in her movements and the way that, even in the mundane, there was a zeal to her that defied the laws of nature.
“I’m serious, Ollie!” she said, dropping the plate in the sink. Oliver jumped at the immediacy of it…the violence in it…and he leaned back in his chair as Penelope stepped away from the sink. She dropped to her knees, wet hands taking his. “I want to feel like I belong here! Not as a guest, but as an extension of this farm. I’m not asking for anything out of the ordinary, but I want to know that my place in your life isn’t some temporary way stop between this moment and the next.”
He didn’t know what to say. So, he didn’t say anything.
“What do you want, Ollie?” There was a need in her voice.
“I want you to feel like you belong here.” He said, his voice soft and, surprisingly, fearful.
“Then why won’t you let me belong here?”
“Because…” He licked his lips, facing the ugly, naked truth. “The women who stay on this farm are cursed.”
“I don’t believe in curses, Ollie.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
Oliver let go of her hands and stood quickly, unable to face it. If he did, he’d set it all in motion. That’s how it always went. He went to the wash basin and scrubbed breakfast from his hands and dried them, then walked briskly to the door and shut it behind him.
He left her where she’d been, on her knees in prostration before the chair his forefathers had occupied long before his existence.
The wind was warm this morning, carrying chaff and pollen across the azure sky like New Year’s confetti. He found himself breathing rapidly, angry at her persistence. Couldn’t she see that he was right in this? Didn’t she know what would happen if he—
He stopped in place.
She didn’t know…
He turned and rushed back up the steps, taking them two at a time until he was back at the door and ripping it open to puffy eyes and salt-streaked cheeks. He moved toward her, heartbroken, but she shied back ever so slightly, and Oliver thought better of it.
“I’d like to show you something.” He said, standing perfectly still, waiting for her reply.
For a long breath, she didn’t move. Then, with an almost imperceptible nod, she allowed him to help her to her feet. He walked Penelope to the room she’d occupied since he’d invited her to stay in his home, then let her hand go, and walked to the far wall where the closet was. He kicked on the light and reached high into the darkness of the rafters above, pulling down an old dusty tome whose pages flared out from years of weathering.
“This is my family legacy.” He said, placing the book in her hands. “I want you to read it.”
He walked past her, Penelope still staring down at the book, stopping in the doorway. “Maybe after, you’ll understand why I’d prefer you were my guest and not something more.”
He left her there to discover his ancestry and the curse on the women in it. It went back generations, with its first entry in Salem, Massachusetts.
Agatha Ketch was stoned to death by her neighbors when the crops failed that year, and her children fled southward to Philadelphia. There, her only daughter, Katherine, died of pneumonia on her eighteenth birthday. Agatha’s son, Orin, had two daughters, and they were inseparable. So much so that, when the older daughter by two minutes, Katrina, was burned to death in her home during the war for independence, she took her own life at the age of fifty-five. And so it went, from generation to generation, each woman meeting some untimely fate or another, some worse than others, until at last he knew she’d reach Marie Ketch— Oliver’s mother.
He tried to block her image from his mind as he stooped low to tug at the weeds that sought to infest his crop. Her bulging eyes, no longer like little drops of sapphire against a backdrop of white, but periwinkle petals in small pools of blood. Her tongue, distended and swollen, protruded from the side of her mouth as she swung listlessly from the rafters above.
“C’mon, Buckshot!” he shouted suddenly, standing straight up. “Let’s go for a ride.”
The horse whinnied and approached at a trot. He knew what thoughts Oliver wished to flee from, and he was more than eager to help him do it. Oliver mounted the horse, and they set out at a full gallop into the rising sun, where the forest canopy waited.
A short while later, he and the horse were securely nestled in the wood line, and Oliver stared up at the swaying branches above. He tried to breathe away the panic he felt at bringing Penelope into this world…what making her aware of his cursed bloodline might do to the bond that had only strengthened over the past weeks.
He watched Maple, Elm, and Oak wrestle for dominance as the sky above him drifted, and he closed his eyes, content that the image of his mother’s body no longer plagued him.
And all was finally silent…
He awoke to the sound of thunder.
He didn’t know how much time had passed, but the sound seemed distant and out of place. Hadn’t the paper called for clear skies?
He jumped up with a start and called for Buckshot, who had wandered a short distance away to graze at the wild grasses near there. The horse approached swiftly, and they exited the woods with Oliver on foot, guiding the stallion carefully over the rocky ledges until they breached the cover of trees and saw the looming darkness quickly approaching from the west.
“We gotta go, Buck,” Oliver snapped. “Now!”
He slung into the saddle and kicked Buckshot hard in the flanks. The horse was already moving and ignored his partner’s urgency, bolting as fast as his legs could carry him back to the farmstead. The wind was picking up, ripping the stalks of grass not firmly rooted in the soil from the ground and carrying them high into the sky, where distant lightning crashed in bolts of white energy, the reverberating peal of thunder shaking Oliver’s heart and sending Buckshot onward, screaming in fear.
“Faster, Buck!” He yelled into the horse’s ear and felt the stallion dig a little deeper until the house appeared. He could see Penelope. She had her arms wrapped about her shoulders as the wind pulled at her white dress. He kept his eyes locked on her, willing every ounce of his thought and energy into keeping her safe. How had he fallen asleep? He’d barely closed his eyes when—
Later. He thought and bent low to cut down the drag as wind roared in his ears, part storm, part pure, thoroughbred speed.
He leapt from the back of Buckshot as the horse skidded to a halt, letting momentum carry him in a barrel roll until he could pull the barn door open. Buckshot waited patiently until the strikes came at the same instant the thunder resounded, and the horse screamed in terror. Oliver finished pushing the door open, and Buckshot raced inside, barreling into his pen and lying on his stomach, panting and huffing heavily as sweat foamed from his overtaxed body.
“I’m sorry, boy!” Oliver called to the horse from the doorway. “I gotta get to Penelope!”
The horse whinnied, and Oliver shut and bolted the door. He sprinted back toward the house, where Penelope ran into his arms. Her eyes were wide with fear. “Oliver, are you hurt? Where were you!”
“In a minute!” Oliver yelled over a crash of lightning that rang in his eardrums and drowned out his words. “We gotta get to the cellar!”
The rain started then. The usually soft pattering of a spring storm came on abruptly in a deluge of wet, fat droplets that struck the ground with such impact that it worked to dispel the growing crash of thunder around them. Lighting struck an elm at the back end of the property, sending up sparks of red light as the base caught fire, and Oliver flung the doors to the cellar open with enough force to snap the bolt latch clean off.
“Shit!” he yelled and guided Penelope gently inside before following closely behind her. He grabbed the open door and struggled against the wind that tried to keep it ajar, to let the rain in and the lightning descend into the open maw of safety.
He felt Penelope reach past him and help pull the door closed, and with their combined effort, managed to shut it. The door made a resounding clang of security, but Oliver had no way to lock it now that the bolt latch had been sheared off.
“I’ll have to hold it!” He yelled over the sound of the rain trying to batter its way inside, the wind tugging and ripping at the door with such strength that Oliver strained his shoulder keeping it closed.
“I’ll help you!” Penelope called, reaching for the handle.
“NO!” Oliver roared. “DON’T TOUCH IT!”
She shied back, looking wounded.
Oliver felt a pang of guilt punch him in the gut. He fought against a sudden gust of strong wind, then continued. “If the lightning hits the door, it’ll kill us both! I can’t risk that!”
“Because of the curse?” Penelope shouted over another crash of lightning.
“No!” Oliver yelled, the door nearly prying itself from his fingers. “Bec— Because I love you!”
He hadn’t meant to say it. He wasn’t even sure if he was ready to say it.
But there it was, and here they were.
He closed his eyes against another pull of the door and screamed against the pain in his shoulder. Then he felt something warm and radiant touch the side of his face.
He opened his eyes to those verdant pools of emerald; her hand delicately pressed the side of his face.
“I love you too, Ollie!” She shouted over the rain and the lightning and the wind. “And if I die, at least it will be pressed against the person I choose to love!”
He stared into those eyes, so hard and unyielding.
And he relented.
He moved slightly backward so she could join him on the step’s landing. She lifted her arms to the cellar door and braced against the pull of the wind and stared long, hard, and unabashedly into his eyes. He could have sworn he and those eyes had spanned the breadths of time together, that they were once again back in synchronous existence with each other…
And against the beating of the rain, and the pounding of his heart, he leaned in.
And he pressed his lips against those of a woman he was willing to die for, having known less than a month in total.
Or to die alongside, in hopes they’d be together forever in the afterlife.
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