home_and_away | Masks and mead

A few months ago, I'd met a woman in the Publix checkout line who needed to break down and cry on someone, and I fit the bill. This is not the odd part. I apparently have one of those faces. It was okay: I held on to her and let her cry and tell me about her husband who'd fallen ill and was slowly dying. People flowed around us touching her shoulder and muttering condolences. We all thanked chance that neither of us had frozen foods in the basket. Afterward, she wiped her eyes, laughed at the absurdity, thanked me, and went on.

So there I was in Publix again, feeling restless. I'd seen a book of quotations in an impulse-buy aisle once and felt compelled to find it again. So I was slipping around folk in line, looking down the shelves to see whether it was still there. Impolite, certainly, but there was something driving me. Someone who worked there caught me by the shoulder and asked if he could help me in that tone that suggests a boot to the arse might work. I apologised and told him what I was after. He frowned at me as if I were asking for something strange, but then a woman said "Here, dear, is this it?" and handed the book to me.

Relief! "Yes ma'am, thank you, it is!" I said, taking the book and looking up at her. "OH! It's you!"
The woman from months before laughed, "And it's you! What timing we both have."

As I paid for my stuff, we talked. She was in town again buying supplies for a mask for her husband's body so the Summerland would accept him. She'd been hoping for someone to help, would I happen to be free?

Again, the pull of rightness. I'm free now, as a matter of fact. I don't know how to do what you need to do, but if you'll direct me, I have hands.

She hugged me hard and quick and gave me directions to their place in the hills.

Through all of this, a fellow who looked quite a lot like Mr. Odom stood over her shoulder, watching. I got the impression he was her son. He didn't try to stop her, so I'm guessing he was accustomed to her way of picking up strangers, but he did give me the eye.

So, still following wordless driving impulse, I ducked home long enough to pick up sinew, leather scraps, a few huge tulip poplar leaves I'd been saving, some cedar sticks, and the string of aventurine I've had since I was 12 that has yet to find a home. I waved at Mark as I went through the house gleaning, then it was back out the door for me.

They swept me in when I got to the house. The dead man's body had been washed and dressed in undyed cotton. I gave the son what I'd brought and he smiled at me before he set to work. Weaving and sewing and cutting and braiding, he made of the things I'd brought and the things they'd had to hand a mask and a cloak. I brushed his father's hair while he worked and his mother told me about the man's life. He'd been a doctor, complete with degrees and such, but up here in the hills, he did as much business with tinctures and food and bits of red string. For a while, he'd been just what the community wanted and needed. But slowly, folk stopped coming. That's alright, he'd said, things cycle. And here he was now, a doctor laid low by a creeping illness he wouldn't treat. Things cycle.

The son had finished the cloak. He lifted his father's body while his mother and I spread the leaf-and-velvet cloth below, then his mother wrapped the cloak round her husband and laid the mask over his eyes. They took my hands, then, and closed their eyes. I felt energy rise like I do when people around me pray; I opened up and added mine to the wave, wordless still because what could I say about a man I'd never met? His family love him; let there be peace.

Then the son threw a white cotton sheet over the body. For a moment the body was hidden from my sight. Then the son flapped the sheet to straighten it, and where the body had been, instead lay three acorns and some dirt.
I sat down hard.
It's one thing to believe in other worlds that lie enmeshed with but separate from this one; it's another to watch something from here physically leave.

The mother went off to write thank-you notes for all the casseroles she'd been given. The son patted my shoulder and said, "You didn't know it was real, did you?"
"I had hoped. But no, not till right then, I didn't know."
"Take some time with it. But not too long. There's still work to do."

Somewhere in there, Mike and Mark showed up. The work yet to do was apparently mead-brewing. We set up with carboys and funnels and a cauldron, jugs of apple juice and of honey, packets of spice. Lit a fire in the hearth to heat things; sang over the yeast as it started. For a few minutes, there wasn't room for thought amid the flurry of measuring and mixing and pouring.

Now, in waking life, the space between the first fury of combination and the first racking is a few weeks. Here, it was about an hour. By sunset, we had a two-year-old cyser to toast the dead man with.

And to my knowledge, nobody ever exchanged names with anyone else.