The Town of Splintered Bones

Chapter Two

       My first name is "Marie", which means bitterness. My mother (rather unfortunately) mistranslated the name, which she thought meant "strength". My middle name is Davida, a feminization of my Father's name. This means "cherished", and it is an ironic choice, considering that the father in question left the moment he found that the mother was pregnant. My last name is Dubois, meaning "from the forest", which is also a remnant of Mother's french ancestry. Marie Davida Dubois. A clumsy name, and full of contradictions.

        My name is even more of an embarrassment when one considers the amount of time and effort that the women of Fairview Falls put into the naming of their children, especially their first-borns, and especially their girls. Janitha Rogers (so named because her Mother, Petunia Rogers, had wanted something "original") won the Piedmont County "best name" contest for both girls and boys for five years running and prided herself very much on coming from Fairview Falls, from which winners had sprung year after year to claim titles at this most diminutive contest.

        The way my Mother tells it (on the rare occasions that she sits down to speak with me), Janitha was not at all pleased when my birth was announced in the Fairview Falls Herald. Since Janitha's Father owned the paper and her Husband was the editor, she retained the privilege of knowing all of the news in the town before almost anyone else, and often even before those who were directly involved in the affairs being reported. When Janitha read of my birth, she almost wept. Almost. Instead, she got drunk off of sips of Southern Comfort ("to calm my nerves, Reginald, darlin' ") and got spittin' mad and headed down to my Mother's home, a grandly imposing Victorian on the edge of the town boundary. 

        This house (as bougie and nouveau-riche as some people thought it) was really something special. Built in 1859, far ahead of the curve stylistically, for my great, great, great, great Aunt Manon, by her husband Oscar. There was nothing that Oscar wouldn't do for the very alluring (and very french) Manon Dubois, even if that meant uprooting his life in Maine and relocating to Virginia because Manon couldn't take the cold climate of New England, and even if it meant allowing their children to take her last name, which was unheard of in that time.

        When the pair arrived and the plans were drawn up for one of the most ostentatious homes that Virginia had ever seen, Oscar didn't even blink. The house was finished in under a year and they were soon wedded and living in the mansion. The earlier settlers of Fairview Falls were not terribly pleased - it was one thing to have newcomers, and quite another to have newcomers that lived in sin for a year at the town inn, but for them to then go and build an enormously extravagant home that dwarfed their good-taste-old-money federals? Out of the question. Oscar and Manon were shunned without any sort of pomp or circumstance, which was fine by them, because they preferred each other's company anyhow.

        The 1859-Victorian has three stories, and a porch that wraps all the way around. It has huge, soaring windows, with glass imported from Spain. It was built primarily from locally-harvested red cedar, a dense wood that Oscar chose out of practicality to keep away the termites. Miraculously, the wood has held up to this day without a single board needing replacement. The house has two enormous turrets (with real rooms inside), which Manon used as her art studios - one for the morning light and one for the afternoon light. Manon primarily painted nudes (primarily of Oscar). The porches all dripped with decoration; brackets and spindles and a fair amount of carvings were found in every column.

        The home was considered to be eccentric, even for a Queen Anne. Manon's favorite part of the house was the bay window on the west side, where she sank into the cushions every evening to have a moment alone while she watched the sun set. She was a woman who loved her creature comforts and who loved her husband, but life can be lonely when your husband is your only family and your only friend. For reasons undisclosed to Oscar, she left her life in France and came to America when she was quite young, only fifteen - and brought nothing with her, except for an impressive knowledge of art and literature, and a few trinkets of jewelry. She never mentioned her family, and he never asked.

        Like my Mother, Manon was incredibly beautiful. Her eyes were a deep, luxurious shade of green, fringed with thick lashes that would beat against her cheeks like butterflies. Her rosebud of a mouth was the world's sweetest thing to Oscar, whether smiling or sneering. Her skin, although not quite as pale as the fashion of the time, was smooth and luminous, without a single scar or blemish in sight. Her hair hung in thick, untamable waves down her back like a shining curtain of some exotic wood made soft and touchable. She possessed a combination of dainty arms, petite waist, and a most generous set of bosoms and hips that is so rarely found in nature. 

        When she was eighteen, a wealthy and prominent member of the New Orleans community that she wound up in after leaving France immediately got down on his knees and proposed marriage after glimpsing a peek of her slender ankle. On her nineteenth birthday, a duke visiting from England (with the solitary goal of finding himself a wealthy heiress) offered penniless Manon a title and his undying love when he caught the faintest scent of her hair on a breezy day. She followed that Duke to Maine, before she eventually decided that "returning to the continent" was simply not for her. That face and that figure drew men to her like flies, so much so that Oscar often found himself asking, why me? Why did she choose me?

        Perhaps all that beauty was too much for one world to bear, for Manon only bore male children (eight of them). Her children's children and so on down the line never laid eyes on a female Dubois, until my Mother.

I don't know much about her childhood. She never talks about it, and I rarely ask - I prefer not to draw my Mother's eye. Life is much more pleasant that way. I do know that she grew up somewhere on the West Coast, so far off that it seemed like a made-up place. When Manon's great, great grandson finally passed away in the hottest August of '94, Clara appeared out of nowhere a few months later with a four-year-old child (me) and a PhD in American Folklore, plus a claim to the house and to the remainder of the Dubois family money. With no other living relatives, and Joseph's will being as vague as it was, she was given the house and the money without much of a to-do. We've been living there ever since, and Mother keeps mostly to herself, if you don't count the men constantly passing through, but never staying long - normally just long enough to admire the furnishings before they're on their way back out the door, and they're glad to see it shut behind them.

Mother keeps a neat house. Most things are just the same as they were when Manon originally furnished her home - the foyer is delicately inlaid with Italian marble, a design representing the eight phases of the moon. The round spindle table hand-carved by Oscar's Grandfather for the happy couple always holds fresh flowers, and never seasonal bouquets, because Mother grows what she pleases in the roomy greenhouse attached to the back; that's a place where many of Manon's herbs still thrive, including the lemon balm, and the nightshade.

It's a mystery to some people in town how we live in such style (a maid and a cook don't come cheap, even in a small town like this), but to others nothing has ever been more clear. Mother's business is the family business that the Dubois women have always carried on - conjury, cunning, thaumaturgy - but never prestidigitation. Some might call it legerdemain in a low, evil hiss, but others will reverently whisper witchcraft. The secrets were forgotten, but not lost, with so many daughterless Dubois generations. However, Manon took such careful notes and compiled them so tidily in her diary that after the death of my great-uncle, Mother was able to learn almost everything there was to know about love spells and healing balms, everything that the women in her family had been discovering and carefully compiling for centuries.

It was lucky, really, that the Dubois women stayed out of America for so long. If they had arrived much sooner, they would surely have been caught up in the Witch Hunts that were sweeping the tiny nation, and that would have been a complication.