The Yellow Mother WIP

June 8th, 1955

The only time Father told me about how he found me and told the truth, I was sixteen, and he was about as drunk as a man can be and still live to tell the tale.

In 1929, the stock market had collapsed, sending most working men and women into the streets, jobless. Father had worked at a lumber mill outside his hometown of Denton, Oregon for fifteen years, since he was the age of six, when he was laid off.

Mother and him had been married for six months at the time, and her father, my Grandfather, had given them a parcel of land that totaled about forty acres of scrubland in the backwoods of Oregon, as a wedding present. He died in about 1930 or so.

My father had been out in the woods past dark, half-lost and half-frozen from the December cold, trudging back to what he thought was his and his new wife's home, when he came upon a cabin made of unfinished logs half-rotted and sporting a roof that had disappeared long ago.

In the blustery cold, to his fatigued eyes and dying lantern, it looked enough like his house, but coming upon it, he quickly realized his error. The doorway into the cabin's only room had blown off its hinges long ago, and it gaped in the guttering light, seeming to howl silently at him for his intrusion.

He had no reason, he said, to go inside such a dilapidated building. With it as old-looking as it was, if it were to come down on his head, he would be trapped, leaving his Marsha at home, all alone.

But he went in, anyway.

At this point, my father paused, drawing a deep swill of rotgut whisky into himself, either to forget, or to steel himself. I didn't know at the time, but it was a bit of both.

Inside, he found a scene that defied all decency.

Six bodies, all in various stages of putrefaction, were arrayed around the floor, all missing body parts. The fingers, toes, heads, and in the cases of the three women, breasts, were cut from them, and we're arranged around the floor in obscene patterns, all circling a pile of fresh hay. On the wall, in blood, was a six-fingered hand.

The strangest part, he remarked, in the middle of a long, stony silence, which was bracketed in the stench of illicit hooch, was the blood was still fresh, and the bodies radiated steam in the bitter cold.

And in the middle, swaddled in fresh silk, was me. In the middle of December, where the temperature was fifteen below on a good day with no wind, a baby swaddled and sleeping peacefully, in dumb defiance to the obscenities surrounding it.

My Father slowly approached me, he said, and picked me up. I shifted slightly, cooing in my sleep, while my Father thought over what to do.

"Remember, Louis," he said, "T'weren't no pleese back in de day. All t'were was a shurriff an' mebee a dep'ty. On'y law was de law of de Lor't"

I nodded, listening closely, as a good son should.

He went on, saying that him and Marsha has wanted a child, but nothing had come yet. And he wasn't about to let a 'wee in'sent soll' die in the cold. So, tucking me into his great jacket, he turned away from the scene, and started to the door.

It was then he noticed the footprints.

He stopped again, pausing to sip idly at the unmarked bottle he held loosely in his hand. His head dropped to his chest, and I could hear the beginning of a snore.

"Father, what about the footprints?" I asked, gripping his knee gently.

"T'were thems of a hoss, son," he grunted, pulling his head up. "But no hoss fittn' in de house dat small, no sir."

Draining the last of the liquid from the bottle, he set it carefully on the floor beside his rocking chair.

He cleared his throat, and continued. "Hoss got four feets, dere. Dis'sun on'y had two." He coughed, hard, leaning forward with the force of it.

His coughing quieted, and he relaxed slowly into his chair. His eyes were sleepy slits, his nose red as a hot coal. "T'ain't de least of it, do," he muttered quietly.

I leaned in closer, desperate to hang onto his every word. "What's that, Father?"

"De hooves were d'size of a pine trunk," he mumbled, and promptly fell asleep.

June 9th, 1955

Mother and Father raised me on their plot of land, which, during the Depression, should have been rough. We were ten miles away from the town, and Father only ever went in to buy more supplies and to sell whatever he had panned from the river, or managed to grow.

While all the lumber companies dried up, and the town died, Mother and Father worried about moving to the city to provide for us. It never happened, either because once the lumber mills left, the town prospered quietly (which makes no Godly sense), or some other malign influence had a hand. It matters little.

However, in spite of the economic downturn, Mother and Father managed to barter for everything, if there wasn't any gold nuggets to be had. When I was six, I was given agency over the small garden we had, which Mother toiled over, day in and out, but never managed to get anything substantial from.

Mother sat me down, showed me how it was done, and washed her hands of it. Two weeks later, the ground seemed to vomit vegetation from below. I remember, her standing in her cotton dress, wooden spoon in one hand, and a washrag in the other, staring mouth agape at what I had gotten to grow.

"Louie, what did you do?" She asked.

I shrugged, and said, "What you told me to, mama."

It was from this crop we were able to barter for a cow from a neighboring dairy farm, and Father worked out a deal to fell timbers for the owner to keep the grazing land clear at the same time.

It was then, that Father discovered my proclivities for the 'arts'.

Now, with the cow in the barn, and me milking it daily, Father had little reason to go into the barn, except to pull out the Model A Ford we had to go on one of our rare trips to town. And, to be truthful, I doubt he noticed immediately, but never the less, I heard my name shouted across the farm, "Louis! Bring yourself to the barn!"

I trudged over, my bare feet sticking in the April mud, and slipped through the door of the barn, and into the warm, musty interior. "I'm here, Papa."

He looked me over, mild confusion twisting his face. He pointed half a gnarled finger at the cow. "Care to explain?"

I put my arms behind my back, and looked bashfully at the oiled dirt floor. "I painted her, Papa."

Father dropped his hand, fished for a handkerchief in his Jean pocket, and sighed, wiping his forehead. "Yes, I suppose you did."

And indeed, the cow was painted. Somehow, and I have some idea how, I had managed to source yellow pigments, more than likely from flowers, and painted the cow in handprints.

The part that probably disturbed my Father was that each handprint had six digits, and was circled in dirty yellow.

He stuffed his hankie (a word which delighted me as a child) into his pocket, and looked at me in the way only a parent can, with a "Lord-what-am-I-going-to-do-with-you" look.

"Louie, why did you paint the cow?"he asked, and I suspect trying ever-so-hard not to laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation.

I looked at him, bashful as ever, and my cheeks rosy with embarrassment. "Yellow Mama told me to, to make the cow feel better," I replied.

My father lost his slightly humourous expression, his face hardening in concern. "What did you say?" He almost whispered.

"I said Yellow Mama-"

He grabbed me by the arm, gently but firmly, and ushered me into the house, and told me to attend to my room for a while, while he and Mother talked.

They talked, back and forth for the better part of an hour, with me desperately trying to catch any amount of the exchange that I could. I caught very little, with my mother incredulously asking who in the hell was this 'Yellow Mama' was, but Father bid her to keep her voice low, granting me precious little information.

All the more I gained was hushed tones: Mother inquiring, Father stating, indignation from Mother, and so on. After a span of two hours, I heard the conversation stop, and I heard Father's footsteps coming to my door. I scrambled over to my bed, sat on it, my heart pounding.

Father opened the door, looking the most exhausted I have ever seen him in my entire life. He smiled at me, and strode across the room, to sit on my bed.

"Lewis," he started, "You painted the cow, yes?"

"Yes, Papa," I replied. "But it was the-"

"Yellow Mama," he finished. "I know."

He sighed, and stared off into space, past the faded plaster of the wall.

"She showed me how, Papa," I ventured. "She said the cow was sick."

I did not know, until years later, that the cow did indeed have a foul case of thrush in her feet, which is why Father was able to get her so cheap.

Father nodded, scrubbing his eyes. "Alright, son. And what else did she say?"

"To leave it on until the full moon rises," I replied, matter-of-factly.

He nodded again, and Rose from my bed, dusting off his thighs. "Mama's got dinner on, son. Go wash up and help her, and we'll talk more about this later."

"Yes, Papa." I followed him out of the room, and washed up, like he said to. We never talked about it again.

June 10th, 1955

I ought to explain my knowledge of events that I was either a baby for, or would have no knowledge of. My father, may he rest peacefully, left his brother all of his journals when he passed. My uncle, whom I have only met once, when he gave the journals to me, kept them until I was finished with seminary. I myself keep journals (one of which you are reading) much like my father, however, I am far less adept at keeping myself dedicated to it like he was.

I received the journals three years ago, and in them I saw a side of my father I have never seen before. I saw a man who dutifully noted everything that happened in his life, from the birth of a distant cousin to the election of FDR. My uncle, whom I never learned the name of, handed me all forty-one volumes in a carton for oil filters, on a clear day in Seattle. He professes to have never had read them, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. I think it's better that he has abstained from perusing these dusty old notebooks. Madness is the only gift I've received from within.

I took the journals to the small home provided for me by the parish, and immediately began perusing them for the next three days. Father Joseph, my teacher and predecessor, noted that I took to them like I had my studies for the Church, and I resolved to pursue the contents more in private.

It took six weeks before I had read each journal, cover-to-cover. I finished at just before two in the morning on a Monday. I closed the rear cover of the book, which detailed my father's decline and subsequent death by cancer in 1949. I know it hurt him terribly, the cancerous tumors chewing on his bones like a dog, destroying the man.

I leaned back in my office chair, and lit a cigarette. I knew I wasn't supposed to smoke in there, but after seeing the pain in my father's handwriting, and that of the saintly nurse whom he dictated to after his hands ceased functioning and his eyesight left him, it wounded me worse than ever. Here, before me, I had a record of a man's life, from age ten until fifty-one. And I wept with the agony of it.

I had the 'Yellow Mother,' as he put her, dimly remembered in the back of my mind. I was in Texas, out in Dallas when my uncle deigned to drive them here in his Packard as opposed to mailing them. My life was almost normal. My life was almost simple.

Since my defrocking, I've moved back to Denton, as of last week, still trying to build the courage to face what has become of me. What's still on that old farm.

I hear her calling through a lifeless moon, and I see her eyes in the bloodsoaked shine of long-dead stars.

God help me.

June 13th, 1955

Sleep has been coming fitfully lately. In the hours where I cannot sleep, I take to the yellowed halls of my father's memories, striding down words and pages that I've been over many, many times before.

Why do I retread ground I've been over? It serves no purpose, yet I find myself turning pages more and more in my spare hours outside of work.

Speaking of, I have found work in the paper mill Mother worked at before she met Father. It is gruelling work, tearing my fingers apart, yet I do it anyway, so I can continue this object lesson in insanity.

That is the definition of insanity, no? Doing a thing, over and over, expecting a different result.

It's reflected in my visage, as well. My face is gaunt, through malnutrition and sleep deprivation, and a scraggled beard does nothing to improve my image. I see women ushering their children away from the tall, cadaverous man who stalks the streets in broad daylight, as if I am an offense to decency.

Perhaps I am. After all, I cannot remember the last time I showered, I smoke too often, and my hands and fingers are scarred and scabbed over from my toils. I understand their revoltion at the walking corpse that never meets their eyes.

I keep seeing the farm in the very few dreams I have.

Always as it was, with the barn rising over the humble roof of the house Father built, with the great mahogany rising over it all, dwarfing the pines that surrounded the property.

I see

June 15th 1955

The documents are final.

The farm is fully mine, and the lawyers encouraged me to go visit it, to look it over, so on, so forth. I do not think I am ready to go. Not yet. But soon.

The Yellow Mother. Why do I keep hearing her name? Why does she follow me? I cannot begin to guess.

Reading through Father's journals, I came across something that caught my eye.

"August 16th, 1935.

Found Lewis stark naked in the woods last night. Surrounded by all manner of debris, bones and the like. He was curled in a ball, fast asleep, at the foot of an elm on the property I have not seen before.

Marsha asked me to check on the lad, saying he had fits of fevers the last two days. Since I was away with helping Moses George raise a barn, and stayed off the property, I was unaware of the boys' fate.

Entering his lodging, I immediately saw he was not in the covers, which were as neat as he customarily does I the morning, leaving me to the conclusion that he had not made it to bed.