The Yellow Pine

Chapter 3 - The Birth of A Dream

"Oooh! Kitties! Daddy, look!" Skinny legs pumping, skirt and hair flying out wild behind her, eight-year-old Maisie Carter bounded down the sidewalk toward the cardboard box bearing a hand-written sign which declared "FREE TO GOOD HOME". Inside, half a dozen skinny kittens mewed and bumbled over one another. Steeling himself and preparing for the inevitable tears, Roland stepped up behind his only daughter stoically and prepared to break her heart. "Honey," he began softly and apologetically. What he meant to say next, what he was supposed to say, what he needed to say was that they couldn't possibly adopt a kitten right now. They were getting ready for a big relocation, she was too young for the responsibility, he'd be too busy starting a new business to care for it... With one look at his little girl's beaming face, as she snuggled a mewling ball of fuzz, all those responses dried up on his lips and floated away on the cool, spring wind. Sighing, he instead muttered, "Find out if they need their shots."

Later, after shopping for the two tiny kittens ("But Daddy, if we get only one, he'll be lonely!") and spending more than he intended on food ("I don't want them to get sick"), litter ("This one! It changes color!"), toys ("Ooh! They'll love that!"), and a dozen other items he'd had no intention of buying today, he finally settled into his comfortable recliner and watched Maisie play with her new friends on the empty floor, in between stacks of moving boxes. He felt silly for caving in on the new pets, but she'd been through so much. She deserved a bit of joy.

The past year had been an absolute nightmare in the Carter household. If he were honest about it, Roland would admit that the nightmare had really started in the months before Maisie was born, but that admission would feel too much like blaming the light of his life for the darkness in it. Lily had been the best thing to ever happen to him, and when she'd announced that she was pregnant, he thought he might burst from the sheer joy of it. At first, it seemed like a normal-enough pregnancy; she gained the appropriate amount of weight, experienced normal cravings and the expected mood swings. Then, without warning, right around the end of the first trimester, the last thing they could have expected happened. Roland's mother showed up for a visit.

Clara Whateley had not deigned to speak to her only living child since the day he'd abandoned the family's secluded homestead and left New England with his young, new bride, and then, adding insult to injury, took her last name in utter defiance of all reasonable tradition. His father, Eckert, had darkly admonished him that he would "reap only sorrow" from his decision to leave the family and their old ways behind. But, Roland had become overwrought with frustration at the strange superstitions and with the way his family was viewed around the general area. They stayed to themselves on a roughshod farm on the outskirts of South Hamilton, except for the forays into Georgetown and Ipswich for basic supplies.

From a young age, Roland was painfully aware of the whispers that followed his family whenever they went to town. Even worse were the stories that he heard about his supposed ancestors and the strange events surrounding his family over the past hundred years. It certainly didn't help that his mother was perpetually pregnant, and almost always delivered stillborn and horrifically deformed children who died shortly thereafter. With each new bloody, traumatic, and ultimately unsuccessful homebirth, Roland found himself more and more detached from his parents and their never-ending dramas.

Even worse than his mother and her insane drive to populate the world with monstrous and short-lived horrors was his father's craving for expensive and hard-to-find books. The man himself was barely literate, and had the education of a mule, but sought out dozens of rare tomes, most in unreadable and unknown languages. Every penny the struggling farm could produce went into procuring the next valuable and inscrutable manuscript, leaving less than nothing for Roland's upbringing. Late at night, young Roland would lie awake, unable to sleep while his father read aloud from the books he'd purchased in a loud, booming voice. The words themselves were gibberish, but there was a certain dark implication to what he thought of as his father's "sermons", because cadence and rhythm of these nightly readings reminded him of a feverish Southern Baptist preacher declaiming hellfire and brimstone. If he closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the passages, and less to the words, strange and frightening images would flood his mind, making sleep on those nights an impossible and terrifying prospect.