“Can you tell me when your problems began?”
“The infidelity, is that what you mean?”
“We can start there if that’s what you want, John.”
I could feel the air leave my lungs then. Hear the incessant ticking of the analog clock on the wall. Count the amount of times my thumb ran against the picked skin around my other nails. The pattern was the same–the way she spoke was the same–hell everything was the same. The infidelity–that too had been the same.
“John?”
“Yes?”
“The last time we spoke, you said that Sam couldn’t have betrayed you because of the Blackbird song. That it had been the only proof you needed that the problems had gone away. Then, after the accident, you mentioned that it was where it all began, so let’s begin there.” She crossed her legs then, smoothing out her skirt in the manner that most did subconsciously. She had the same habit when we did our sessions. As if she was trying to cover something up as she analyzed me.
“What is the Blackbird song, John? When did your problems begin?”
My mother used to tell me of the Blackbird song. We would be sitting together out on the porch with the summer’s breeze blowing across us and the hum of nature filling our ears. Mother would still be wearing her Sunday’s best from church. Her fine shoes long gone with the dust of dried summer dirt coating her feet. I’d still be wearing my finest clothing too; my cloth, like my flesh, stained by Montana soil.
The cool stone of the steps and chipped painted porch of the house would act as our own altar as we merely existed. Our hands working away on the green beans that we had picked earlier as we separated them between our woven baskets. Building up a decent rhythm that was only beaten by the rest of the world.
Those were the good days. Good in how predictable they were.
I always knew that when we were finished we’d go inside, wash them, and cook them. That we would have a good dinner for the night before the week would start again. And somewhere in-between mother would tell me of the Blackbird song.
Although the time of day she gave it was in-consistent, I still considered it a part of the routine that I held dear, and I listened intently each time. I could paint the picture for you even: my mother, a fond smile on her face, her eyes dancing to the sunset or sunrise of the swaying of distant trees. The Blackbird song, she would tell me, was one that meant many things.
That it was comfort from family long gone.
That it was a promise of return.
That it was a reminder that even in isolation we were never alone.
She would hum the song then–or at least a short tune of it–before giving me a fond smile. She’d stroke my hair or kiss my cheek; promise me that one day it would come for me. Not once did she provide me with the lyrics. She would never whisper a single word of it. Not even when we would move the cattle or horses and she’d hum the song to completion would she say the words.
‘One day,’ she would always promise.
‘One day,’ I would promise right back.
Always loving and remembering and forgetting the Blackbird song until it, like our routine and my very life, came to an end.
It felt like an end anyways. Because by this point in my life, on the verge of starting high school, I had been left an orphan. Nothing really prepares you for something like that. People always go on about the old dyin’ or the sick. You’re prepared all your life truly for those around you to eventually go or to go before them, but no one ever prepares a child. Not to experience it so quickly without decades having passed; without the expectations. I certainly wasn’t prepared when the officer came to my doorstep with his hat in his hand. I knew, deep down I swear I did, but everything that followed felt wrong. I felt ill-prepared, as if my life had ended with theirs, when I had been informed what had happened. Car accident. Drunk driver. My father always had an issue with his liquor, and my mother had paid the price with him. My baby sister, I was told, was found yards away in a ditch. Her scalp removed from her head due to a rusted fence pole. Her body mangled in the old fence’s barbed wire. They said she was still alive after it all happened. That she died slowly on that gravel road, her body so badly meshed that the casket had to remain closed.
The funerals that followed all came and went within the church as if everyone was ready to put my family in the ground. To be done with them. A few spoke of how awful it was and offered to help me with anything I’d need. The majority though told me to my face that I couldn’t be sad for them. That there was no point in being sad when someone dies and goes to Heaven. Those same people turned to whisper in the others ear–to gossip–about the accident itself. The details carving themselves into my head until I finally asked the preacher why no one seemed to care that death had come and taken them.
That’s the whole point, isn’t it son? The preacher had told me before sending me on my way.
And in truth, for a split second, I agreed, I almost joined them. I spent the entire walk home from the cemetery wondering what would be the best course of action. It wouldn’t be an accident like theirs, but I was alone. Alone and forgotten. By the time I got back to the house I was sure that I must have hated myself because I had already made several plans. All of which were cowardly things.
I almost went through with it too until I met her: Eliza Harlow.
I never knew of any other Harlow’s. My mother’s family had all been dead aside from her, my sister, and myself. My father didn’t have any family to begin with. I had been alone for an entire day and an entire walk home and then suddenly I wasn’t.
Eliza claimed that we were cousins. That she was here to take care of me. I can gratefully state that I stood there on the porch, sweat collecting beneath the cotton of my suit, as she smiled up at me. She couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than me in her late teens. Her light blonde hair was pulled back in a braid, tan round face scattered with freckles, with a smile that was all too white. All too sharp. Her brown eyes matched mine though and they were warm and I was alone. I didn’t care whoever Eliza was, if she even truly was my cousin, because at the time I was just happy to have family. To have some slither of life brought back into me.
I didn’t think of the Blackbird song for a long time after that. A full year had passed before the memory of it came curling within my chest. A full year I had spent carrying on as if my life hadn’t changed and ended. Eliza lived in the house and kept company with me. She’d tend to the crops and the livestock and ensure that I had dinner. Even on the nights when she would simply walk off into the darkness of the plains. Though she always returned, bringing groceries and news, and ensuring that I continued in my schooling when winter came. It wasn’t until one specific night when I caught her humming that I felt a pained chill fill my bones.
Eliza hummed the Blackbird song from the porch. Her gaze lost within the sunset as the sound reached my ears. Bringing with it a hollow kind of sorrow as the knowledge that it had died with my mother carved itself into my soul. Only it hadn’t died, had it? Just as all my family wasn’t dead, the song wasn’t dead either, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. To speak. To ask.
I contemplated the song, feeling it dance across my tongue, before I finally got the courage to ask.
“Do you know what that song is? The one you were humming the night before.”
Eliza looked at me then, a warm smile crossing her face, “The Blackbird song?” She questioned though it didn’t feel like a question. I already knew deep down that she knew what the song was. That she knew perhaps more than she should have. I could only nod.
“It’s a song of remembrance. Of calling when you feel alone in this world, a calling to family.” She says it as if she’s said it a thousand times before. The words feel scripted no matter how much calm emotion she places behind it.
“Do you know the lyrics?” I asked, feeling temptation creep in as if I was a young child again.
“Why do you ask all of a sudden? I’ve been here for a year, yet you never spoke of it.”
“I thought it died with my mother. She kept the knowledge to herself of the lyrics. I didn’t expect to get it–”
“Until you were older? Holding her at the edges of death? That usually is how it goes, but she died too early for her time.” Eliza purses her lips, folding a strand of hair behind her ear, before turning away from him.
The chimes on the porch blew in the wind. The birds and the crickets began their own song. Eliza didn’t dare look at him.
“Something like that…” I feel knots form within my stomach. Hot molten led dragging me down as every warm memory of my mother seemed to surface. Words like that bring out a certain kind of feeling in your soul. Make you wonder if the wording has any meaning or if it’s merely for show like a preacher standing on a pew. Only in my case, Eliza was the preacher and I was the follower in the pews.
“If I tell you the Blackbird song then I will have to leave you. You will never see me again, say from your deathbed should you be the last, and with that I will never be able to help you.”
“Why?”
“You don’t need to know why, John. You just will. If I tell you, you will understand, but then I will have to leave.”
“Can I think on it?”
She huffs then, a shrivel of annoyance flaring in the way she holds herself, “Go to bed, John.”
“You’ve never spoken of your family, but I imagine Eliza held importance to you. Though from what you have said it would seem that you thought on it and accepted it.”
I swallowed then, counted the books marking the shelf on the back wall until the entire row was completed. Traced the outline of the Niitsitapi dolls that sat imprisoned forevermore on the shelves above it.
“Eliza told me everything and then she left. I never thought I would see her again until long after Sam was dead and our grandchildren were roaming my family’s land. The weight of it, the importance of such a thing, is why I didn’t think Sam would cheat.” The laugh that threatened to claw from my throat brought a sickening kind of dread as the words left me. The image of Sam drifted into my mind with it. As if she herself was crawling from my throat.
“I trusted her with something that wasn’t hers to take.”
“Well let’s start with the beginning for Sam and lead up to the end.”
Sam. Sam. Samantha. She never liked going by the name Samantha, but always insisted on it when her maiden name was involved. ‘Sam Miller sounds like a man,’ she’d say on our long walks home. To which I would usually joke that Sam Harlow was no better. A terrible come back really, but that’s what builds relationships from what I have found.
I didn’t think much of Sam at first. I’m not even sure of when we exactly decided to become friends or if we had just been brought together by one-too-many school projects. Though it didn’t matter much to me. She was all long-limbed and thin-boned. One of the only red-heads I had ever seen. With pretty green eyes and skin that stretched over herself too tautly. As if she had been starved for the majority of it. That was my belief at least considering she was, by all accounts, a hippie and the daughter of one.
We made for an odd pair when we’d press our desk together or eat by ourselves in the cafeteria. The same went for outside of school: the gas station, the supermarket, the long walks to my home. We had joined at the hip during our junior year of high school and the oddness just stuck all the way up until graduation.
That was when our first problem started; if you could call it that. The cold dry winter was sweeping across the lands and Sam was caught dead in it on my front porch. Her lips were dry, hair frozen, and if one had ever seen a corpse she certainly looked the part. Clutching that fancy, flimsy paper within her hands as if the wind would take it away and incase it in ice.
“College, John, don’t you ever think about such things?” She would ask and my response was always the same.
“I can’t leave this place, Sam.”
“Because of some family member that abandoned you years ago? John, can we please talk about this instead of dancing around it.”
“We are talking, Sam, don’t you get that? It’s more than just Eliza, okay.”
It was his mother, sitting on the porch. His baby sister laying bent and butchered in the road. His father roaming the backyard for some tool he lost. It was his family, the memories of them, and all those that came before him. Each one singing that same song until they too passed and were sung for. Leaving for college just seemed like closing the door on it all.
It felt like abandoning them. Like forgetting.
Sam didn’t understand that though. She never did.
“John,” Sam ran her hand along her head before slapping it to her side. She seemed to give up in a defeated slump at the small kitchen table; abandoning her acceptance letter right next to the salt shaker.
“I love you, John. I love you and I never let it stop me before. Not when it led to me being bullied more than I already was. Not when it left me feeling isolated out here.” Her green eyes welt up with tears. Even freezing and on the verge of tears she was as beautiful as the fresh green of spring coming into the world.
“I want this one thing and I want to understand it. You. I just don’t know if it’ll be worth it when I’m giving up my entire life for it.”
“The Blackbird song,” the words felt heavy across my tongue. I had rarely spoken of it when Sam was involved. Oh, don’t get me wrong, she knew of it. Knew the importance it held and what she’d have to do to get her hands on it. She had even heard a brief melody caught within my throat a summer back. It had actually been one of the reasons she came back to me in the beginning.
One slip up, one small mention, and that’s all it took. Sam was hooked on the mystery as if my family was some mystery novel that she couldn’t quite skip to the end of.
“You know what will have to happen for me to tell you that song. The bond we would have then.”
“John, just fucking marry me already then. Be a man and marry me.”
“She married you to get to the song, then?”
“She married me because she loved me. The idea of me at least. I wouldn’t lower her into being that obsessive and willing to throw her life away for a simple family tune. She did love me, somewhere in that heart of hers, I just wasn’t enough. Clearly.”
“Alright. We have the start, typically I don’t jump to the end, but why don’t we bring clarity to the matter. The Blackbird song showed you that Sam wasn’t being faithful. Let’s re-start there then.”
Our marriage came with the summer sun that following year. Sam pushed off going to college, but it wasn’t solely due to her marrying me. That night that she had placed her college acceptance letter on the table and asked me to marry her had simmered down to an agreement. She would do community college while I ran the family farm. Then after two years, I would take care of our first child, while Sam would begin online university courses. She’d never have to go too far, and I’d get to have my new family by my side. I’d never have to leave the place where I had walked the earth for so long and she’d get to not be so strapped down to me. A win-win for everyone involved.
And it had been good.
Sam made for a beautiful bride and our honey-moon had been spent with us chasing the other around the outside of the house with a paint brush. We’d have movie nights in the living room with wine that we kept saying we would save but never did. I’d ask her how her day at school was and kiss her good-bye when she’d need to head off to classes once again. There wasn’t anything spontaneous in our lives other than the odd meals Sam liked to make and I enjoyed that. I really did. I never saw any problems until the problems made themselves abundantly clear.
Our first problem was when the pregnancy test came back positive.
Have you ever seen the Angelus painting? It was created by a french painter during the late eighteen-fifties. The oil-painting depicts two individuals, a man and a woman, standing in the Great Plains. The man has a hat within his hand. The woman prays. Buried in the ground between them is their dead child.
Sam had insisted on it. A burial behind the house. We’d stand there like that couple from the painting as if we were recreating it.
The first time, Sam had silently wept.
The second time, a single tear ran down her face.
The third time, she had asked me to sing the Blackbird song to her.
We had looked at each other then as if time had stopped. As if we both had nooses around our necks as the winds of the plains blew away the top layer of soil at our feet. And the horrific part, the part I still wonder about, is the fact that I wanted to say no. Without even thinking I already knew the answer that I was going to tell her. I hated myself for it. Bit the inside of my cheek until the taste of copper filled my mouth and slid down my throat.
“Don’t make me regret this, John.” She’d say it as if it was a warning towards me rather than a damnation.
Which leads into the second problem that came. Because I didn’t say no to telling her the song. I took her out that night as the sun began to set and our third child lay to feed the carrion-eaters. And I sang the Blackbird song. Repeating the lines over and over until the lyrics drifted into the darkness.
We both cried then as we held each other—the worst of it all, being that this was the first time in our entire existence together that we truly felt for each other.
After that, the next morning to be precise, I almost regretted finally telling Sam. Anxiety beat around my chest and made me chew my nails down to the quick. I feared that Sam would leave me now. That maybe it had been for nothing–that Sam was obsessed—or that it just hadn’t been worth it. All of the pain and sacrifice. The walk down the stairs into the living room was like my own personal funeral. How fitting it would have been had the divorce papers sat where her acceptance letter had once been.
Only Sam didn’t leave me.
I found her sitting at the kitchen table, a brilliant smile on her face that I hadn’t recalled for so long, as Eliza sat across from her.
She hadn’t aged a day despite the near five years that had passed since she left. She hadn’t even changed the clothing that she wore.
“Well good morning, John. I must admit that I’ve missed you.” Eliza’s smile felt like deja vu. Like I was that young teenager once again that had thought he was alone in the world. Only I hadn’t been alone for a while and now the last of my family had returned again. It should have brought me mirth, but I couldn’t help the sinking feeling that something was wrong. That I had done something that I shouldn’t have.
“Eliza…I didn’t expect to see you here.” I did. I knew what singing the song would bring and she knew it too. She cocked her head to the side and gave me a look that said she was calling me out for it. Only before either of us could speak up, Sam had interjected, turning to me with a pleading look of horror across her face. As if she was begging for me to help her get away from some unheard conversation that they had had.
“She just stopped by and I couldn’t turn her away. John always went on about you during high school.” Sam began to shake then. Her hands were overlapping. Her right knee was bouncing. A nervous sweat was even breaking out along the back of her neck.
“I doubt that.” Eliza pursed her lips as she studied us. Like a tiger studying its keeper at a zoo.
“Eliza, Sam has class today, why don’t we catch up while she heads on out?”
Eliza smiled at that then as Sam practically jumped from her seat at the opportunity to run.
“I’d like that.”
“So your wife suffered miscarriages, you didn’t notice any infidelity before then, or any issues at all. The only thing I find odd is that Eliza re-appeared. It sounds like you didn’t call or text her, yet she came the following morning that you told Sam the song.”
“Sam couldn’t keep a baby in her if she tried. It didn’t change anything for me–I still loved her just as I always had.”
“Tell me about Eliza, John. You ignored my comment on her, but I want your opinion on why Sam was afraid of a family member that she had never met before.”
“When I sang the song to Sam, I had to tell her about the Blackbird song, the true meaning of it. That’s why Sam knew why Eliza was there. That’s probably even why she feared her.”
My tongue rolled across my teeth then as that last night painted itself across my eyes. The three of us standing alone in the living room as Sam truly entered my world.
“I learned of Sam’s infidelity, due to the song, on the last night that we were together.”
Fate had never been something that I had believed in. Not when you get down to the over-specific details and heavy religious implications that typically come with it. I tend to apply that same mind-set with many things in my life. Herding cattle upon a horse. Re-calling the last moments I spent with my family. Monsters, being in our world.
Sam returned home as if fate had declared it. She entered the house with heavy feet, not even bothering to hang up the keys as she always did, as she caught sight of us in the living room. Her face scrunched up as it did when she stumbled upon a problem that she didn’t understand and those green eyes were drowning in unshed tears. I wanted to go to her then. To take her face within my hands and promise to her that everything was going to be alright just as I did on our wedding night. Only I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Something inside me tore as Eliza frowned at my wife.
“Come here,” Eliza ordered and Sam followed. Those heavy feet dragging against the old wooden floor as she came to stand in the center of the room. Her eyes no doubtedly burning as she refused to blink. As if doing so would cause her to lose sight of us.
“Do you want to tell him what you have been doing?” Eliza tilted her head to the side. She appeared like a teenager then, all innocent and confused over the world, yet it was nothing more than a mask. We both knew that.
Sam opened her mouth as if she was going to speak before closing it. Several more times her lips moved like that before Eliza slowly stood. Placing herself infront of Sam as if she was now the priest. The family home the altar.
“Tell him what you have been doing.”
The pupil’s in Sam’s eyes widened into large saucers before collapsing into pinpricks. Over and over until Sam’s mouth fell open and bloody drool fell from those lips that I had traced over for so many nights.
“I-I….I’ve been cheating. I haven’t been going to classes, I’ve been cheating, and–” An ugly, gurgling cry left her mouth as blood and vomit seemed to rise from her throat. Sam couldn’t seem to move though as her body fought to cough it up. Frozen in place, yet fighting to stay alive. To hold command over herself once again.
“The children you lost were not yours. She’s been cheating, lying, even trying to place poison within your food. She wants to steal the land. She wants every piece of you, right down to the song.” Eliza’s tone was lowly, menacing even as a southern drawl bled into the words. Like sticking a knife into a carcass and slowly cutting down into the darkness.
“Thankfully you’ve never liked her cooking.”
Eliza looked at me as if she had been watching it all from the start rather than from pulling it from a confession. I knew–of which deep down I knew—that it wasn’t an entire lie in my own observation.
She may have disappeared all those years ago, but I knew she never truly left.
“She knows everything, Eliza.”
Eliza looked at me then as my mother had when I told her I was sorry for so many small, irrelevant things. A pitiful look that one usually received from a parent or elder when the realization of reality and fate was met with a child’s painful understanding of the world.
“I’m going to deal with it, John. Then I’ll come again when you sing the song on your deathbed. Just promise me that you’ll do better for yourself next time? I hate seeing my family hurt itself.”
“I promise.” I vowed to Eliza, and in that same motion Eliza told Sam to follow her. She took her hand and walked her out the back door into the Great Plains. Like death leading a lost soul back to the grave. And I let her.
Dear God I had let her.
“You’re saying that Eliza is responsible for Sam’s death. That it is because of this song that the infidelity was exposed and Sam was murdered for it.” There is a heavy pause. The sounds of intercoms threatening to come on with the continued ticking of a clock. A pen snapping.
“John, when I looked up Eliza Harlow, I couldn’t find anyone by that name in the entire state system. I even looked in surrounding states and I can’t find anyone, even a second or third cousin, with that identity.”
Dr. Jensen seems more upset than curious as the revelation of it all settles between us. I wish that I could say that she understood, but I knew then that she didn’t. She wouldn’t. Not unless I told her.
“You wouldn’t find her in anything modern. The Blackbird song is Eliza’s song, and she died back in 1882 right before my family settled on our land.”
“She’s not my cousin, doc, she’s my ancestor. The sister of my ancestor. Killed along the Oregon trail, only she didn’t stay dead, her killers made sure of that.”
“John–”
“I never left the house that night. I only went out searching the next morning. Hoping, praying, that Eliza had spared Sam, but I knew she wouldn’t let her go now that she knew the family secret about Eliza. I knew how I would find Sam, and it wasn’t because I killed her.”
“Her body was drained of blood, John. Her brain showed significant brain damage. You knew those things when the Sheriff pulled your body off of hers. You told the county court system those things before the autopsy even came back. You did those things. You can’t blame it on Eliza. Not when she doesn’t exist.” Dr. Jensen looked as if she was going to be sick as she slid the pictures across the metal table. Sam. Sam. Samantha.
“You want to know the Blackbird son, doctor? I’ll sing it to you. Then you can tell Eliza that I told you everything. From my beginning to my very end. Right down to the fact that a vampire is going to kill you for it.”
“And what will it matter to me,” I wondered, “when those cops outside the door are going to take me right back to prison once we are done? I guess I’ll let you think on that one. Just promise me, you’ll get rid of that report before Eliza comes in and finds it.”
“I’d hate to have broken the family secret for a second time.”