Page 90 of Night Songs

I held my breath.

You are cursed.

31rhea

2009

SIX MONTHS LEFT

I don’t recall coming home from the hospital, or slipping into bed, but these things must have happened, because I remember lying on the mattress, weightless, and the feeling of floating out to sea.

I was certain that what I’d seen at the hospital was not a dream, but a real memory from my childhood.

I searched for my old Discman in the bedside drawer, dusty from lack of use. I put on the headphones and pressed play.

My mother sang “Folk Song” in her hypnotic voice,

There was a woman in town who sang so sweet

Her beauty was beyond compare

But one day a bright specter she did meet

There aft she was no longer fair

She ranted and raved and ran over town

Chased by somethin’ not seen

She ran so far that she came to a cliff

And it chased her over to free’n

The low tone of prophecy vibrated beneath the words now, still echoing in the earpieces after the track had gone quiet.

The Cursed Womanwas not just a concept album—it was also a confession. A story passed down through my mother’s family, only just now reaching me.

The next tracks played—“Duet with the Devil,” “Black Gum Tree,” “Mountain Girl,” “Let Me Out”—and instead of imagining my mother conjuring these stories, I saw the real people behind them.

My ancestor meeting a devil at a crossroads and exchanging her soul for a beautiful singing voice, the same cursed soul that she would pass down from girl to girl like a tattered wedding dress.

My grandmother getting hit by a truck and landing in a tree on her 33rd birthday.

My mother growing up alone and unloved in the mountains with her aunt and uncle, reviled for her curse, her only consolation the music that damned her in the first place. Her deep desire to escape her little town, and to live freely out in the world and become a star.

A few images kept recurring in the songs: a white dog, a bright specter or a man in white, and a big, hulking tree.

I remembered my mushroom vision: the white dog leading me to the tree in the moonlight, and the man in the white suit leaned against the trunk, waiting for me.

The man pulling me deeper into the quarry, my body drenched in blood.

Then the high, joyful chords of the title track rang through the mesh, and this time I did not feel lifted.

It told the story of a woman damned from birth who, try as she might, could not escape her fate.

It was better if she did not try to hold on to things, to have people who needed her, because everything she touched crumbled in her fist.

I thought, What if it wasn’t random? What if this curse had done thisto my baby? Perhaps it was the creature that had haunted me all this time. Perhaps it had taken this beautiful, sweet thing inside me and poisoned it.