Clarke had never given much mind to the consequences of man.
Her mother said that it was due to her having been born during the Dust Bowl years. The devastating droughts, dust storms, and erosions had welcomed her into the world. Corrupting any early childhood memories that she imagined typical children had. Her father though said that it was due to her own mother’s sins. That the heavy alcoholic drinking, amphetamine, and whoring had sunk so deep that it corrupted her before she came crawling out of the womb. Clarke didn’t have much of a belief in it herself though—consequences were usually the best part, the messy part—which made for a rather interesting thesis.
Especially when, by whatever account it may derive from, Clarke in the end was unholy. And the most unholy—taking aside dictators and rapist and pedophiles—were murderers.
~
The Dust Bowl had swept through during her birth, and by the time she was ten, although it had left the Great Depression hadn’t. Poverty ate away at the people as if it was a virus and people themselves were a part of the contagion. Her family, sick like all the others, starved just the same. Food was always hard to come by no matter where she looked. Though she could tell by looking, in the way that only a child can, that the rest of her family was affected by it more than she was.
Her mother would lean over the sink at night and sob until her shoulders shook with the force of an earthquake. The faded floral dress that Clarke loved so much hung across her body until the bones in her spine would press against it. Sinking against her flesh like a sheet over a corpse.
She never would make a sound though on these nights and Clarke always found her pressing a thin-lipped smile by the next morning. Her bloody nails would dig into the washcloth as she set what would be their breakfast down onto the table. As if the heavy weight of wondering how the bills on the table were gonna leave so little left didn’t haunt her.
Then there was her father and brother. They were the same, from their looks, right down to how they saw the world. They never bothered to hide how hungry they were.
Starvation and gluttony carved their hearts and hollowed their cheeks.
They’d give Clarke that same look too. As if they were trying to keep something from her–some deep family secret only spoken between the three of them–as if Clarke was unworthy.
And that same cycle would repeat from the time she is ten until the day that she finally awakens to an empty home. Her family, gone. Any semblance of who she had been before that time, nowhere to be found.
~
If you take a look at any history book recalling the Great Depression you will no doubtedly find at least one line mentioning the unholy horrors. Fathers killing themselves as their families suffered. Mothers selling their children. Women selling themselves. Clarke witnessed it first hand from the back of her father’s pickup truck when they would stop to buy one.
‘They’ll help tend to the crops,’ mother always reassured her as father took them to the shed.
‘Do not mind them,’ her brother would follow up with once their mother walked back inside. ‘Many don’t make it. Just like the livestock. Can’t afford such things in this life–not even people.’
Clarke always agreed in the way that a child growing up in an environment such as her own always agrees to avoid conflict.
She didn’t protest during the days to follow either….
~
If it brings any comfort: Clarke would try to recall her childhood in a manner that was recommended by a war veteran that she met in a run down diner on the Mississippi. She’d take out her well-worn journal and write down a year–narrow it down to the seasons–then try to piece things together from what she already knew.
In the Autumn, in a year that she cannot recall, she went stumbling into the dark one night. A coyote had been hit by a car with its spine twisted beyond belief. Its body was already frozen in time and layered in crop dust from where her brother drugged it from the road. Fascinated she had gone to it as the stars dusted the sky. Poked and prodded its corpse with her fingers until she remembered her hands sinking into its skin and flesh. She hadn’t killed it, but it was the beginning of a sequence within her mind. Something inside of her snapped.
In the Winter, the days were shortened and the nights ungodly long in a manner that had her mother praying before their fireplace. Father would give sermons since they couldn’t travel to church. Her brother took her out to the shed. A sickness killed off all of their chickens in one day. They celebrated Christmas in the barest of ways that they always had. A tree in the corner. Hand-made or traded gifts. Father would drink to avoid looking at any of them while all mother did was look. Her brother took her out to the shed. The following weeks were spent in brittle isolation within her room.
She wants to say that it was due to an illness, but she cannot recall ever being sick.
~
In the summer of 1954, Clarke had found herself in the heart of blues country, walking along the fields of northern Alabama and southern Tennessee. She carried a suitcase that was mostly filled with knick knacks and souvenirs. Her beloved worn journal sat tucked beneath her arm. Field workers would pause to watch her go by and men would stop in their cars to offer her a ride. A welcoming trend, she found, that typically came when she dressed well and played the part.
Not that she always accepted—do not mistake her for a hitch-hiker.
Clarke loved seeing the world, walking the land, grazing upon the people that fell within her arms. She treated herself as a character upon its grand stage: a pretty young brunette girl, with a pretty floral dress and heels, and a hat that covered her face well enough to lure them in. Walking through dirt roads and fields, hollows and city streets. Her face masked by sunglasses and makeup that she imagined her mother would have worn had they been wealthy. The men who would stop, old and young with all manners of life, usually would ask the same questions. Why is a pretty woman such as yourself walking out here? What are you doing in the middle of no-where? Would you like a ride ma’am, I’ll take you anywhere. And Clarke—sweet, innocent Clarke—would peer at them from beneath her own shade to tell them that she was fine. That she knew where she was going and that she was where she needed to be. And, because she hated the term of being called a hitch-hiker, she would only accept if it meant she could deal with the problem at its source. Get them to accept following her towards an old, run down mill or restaurant. Get them to dance with her to Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup or to whatever Beale Street singer she could hum a tune to.
Because at its source, men were just as unholy as she was with impure intentions.
~
Because at its source, Clarke figures that if one of them was truly evil then getting rid of them before they can do harm upon an innocent girl is certainly the least that she can do.
~
In the Spring, the last Spring that she spent with her family, she recalls that death had been more prevalent than in the previous years. Unless she is remembering it wrong which she was told by that war veteran was equally likely. Their mule died out in the fields. She would catch mother picking up crow after crow that had fallen from the sky around their house. The dog down the road that she’d like to think that she liked was put down due to old age. The path between the house and the shed was filled with a river of dead serpents that her father would pile up and burn until his alcohol bottle was empty. The mouse that squired within their cabinets had finally died from a trap that was placed out ages ago. An owl would be seen every Thursday with its face bashed into the glass of her brother’s window. Death after death it seemed surrounded their family farm as if the land itself had decided that it wasn’t worthy to harbor life any longer. And in truth, Clarke cannot recall a previous Spring before she turned ten, so perhaps she was exaggerating a bit.
The shack though would remain empty. And Clarke couldn’t figure out why or when, but the fear lingering within her family’s eyes was better with the shack empty than it had been when it wasn’t.
And in the Summer, three months before she would awaken to an empty home, Clarke would recall a pivotal day when the sun was at its peak. With her mother sobbing over a grave that her father and brother refused to look at. One that she could not visit as if it had been her
own.
~
Clarke walks and roams and dances, luring and drinking, until eventually the years become decades and the decades become years once again. Her thesis on the reality of things shifts ever-so slightly though she doesn’t change in her belief of consequences and unholy things. Not even when she has filled every piece of her journal with the same entries that she always has and the old diners on the roadsides of fields have been replaced by industrialization.
She is fond of the barest gifts of humanity though. Amusement parks and circuses that she could not have experienced as a child; the sweet scent of cotton candy and animals and the taste of popcorn. The continuing evolution of music and entertainment and automobiles. Man touching the moon. Man trying to find God through the continuity of war. The pet snake she found in a pet shop. The way the clouds appeared in April of 1973.
She tries to record it all, but eventually settles on the knowledge that eventually she’ll have to look back.
That old veteran from the diner all those years ago had recommended traveling back for closure. It had just been the last thing that she had wanted to do at the time.
~
In 1989, inside the record office of Morton county, Kansas, Clarke found herself with a pile of history sitting before her. The lady at the front desk had assumed she was some up-beat college student from the east. Or a journalist looking to make a quick buck. Quickly waving her towards certain sections and pulling out others from storage when Clarke informed her that it was more-so for a family history project rather than to fill in missing gaps of memory. All of her journal entries were the same after all. What remained of her memories from before were the same.
“I apologize for the wait, I have never had to dig these out aside from what a few authors come stumbling through here.” The lady at the front desk gives her a half-witted smile as she carefully sets files down. Her name tag reading in fine letters that Clarke had not noticed before: Evelyn.
“That’s alright. I haven’t been here in a long time. Please, sit.” Clarke offers, demands really. Offering Evelyn an apple that Clarke never truly intended on eating anyways.
Evelyn hesitantly smiled at her then–as if she was thrown off guard or having to overcome her own hesitations–before accepting the offer. Taking the seat. Taking the apple. It’s as refreshing as water in the complacent of dirt roads and old blues streets.
“Thank you,” Evelyn mummers, crossing her hands together as she rakes her brown eyes across the documents and county records.
“You said this was for a family history project. Do you mind me asking how you are related to them?”
“Distant relatives. I finally completed a therapy exercise that I have been doing for quite some time. I figured that it would be in my best interest to just come back to the source. Find out what I can.”
Evelyn nodded along as if she had nearly forgotten something, “You mentioned you had come from Boston, of course. Well I can tell you what the rest of everyone in town knows if that’s any help. That family might as well be a part of our folklore.”
“American folklore is an odd thing.”
“Well…we haven’t been a country for too long. When people were forced here and immigrated here, it’s only really logical that we would get what they brought over too, and make it into our own.” Evelyn let out a huff of air then. Her shoulders sinking as if she had caught herself in a horrendous act that Clarke had seen one too many times. “Sorry, I ramble a lot. Most who come here don’t ask me for help.”
“Certainly,” Clarke feels herself smile before she can help it, “tell me what you know. I don’t mind the talk.”
Evelyn clears her throat, peering towards the aisle of books and folders as if someone would walk past and catch them. As if the words upon her tongue were a taboo.
“The family is one of many really, our area was hit hard during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression affected everyone. What made it stand out was during the late fifties the property had been dug up with the intention of placing a building there. Land contractors didn’t even dig deep before they found graves.”
“Family graves?”
“Women and children. There isn’t much, most of it’s just speculation, but county records showed that the last owner and his son had been arrested for assault and…”
“They didn’t do much about rape back then. Especially when one could say that they paid the woman for the service during a time when everyone needed money like air.”
“It’s just believed that the father and son had been taking them in, sexually assaulting them, raping them, and then leaving them to die. There was a record of the daughter too; only the entire family disappeared around 1949. We just have this statement here from a neighbor that caused the death records to be recollected by the county court system.”
Evelyn slid the paper over then, allowing for the blocky dark ink to fixate towards Clarke’s gaze with an old faded newspaper to accompany it.
“Lilith Clarke, daughter of the Clarke family, was found with a grave marker indicating that she had died, but no remains were found within the coffin.” Clarke read, tasting pennies and rotten apples within her mouth just as easily as she could recall sand against her feet.
“Words had been marked across her birth certificate found hidden behind the sink. Resulting in town-speculation of what could have become of the little girl although most simply believe that her remains were placed with the others.”
And sitting beneath that statement, copied from a photo of the original document, was a series of titles. Unholy and true. Consequences of men just as she was because when it came down to it, Clarke knew in whatever heart she had, that it was true.
Lamia. Belili. Allu. סוקובוס.