The Wind in the Willows

The sun is just beginning to bleed as I open my mailbox.

That’s how I’ve always thought of sunsets, even as a young girl. A bleeding sun that melts into the landscape of the bayou, streams of dying sun bouncing off the sluggish water and weaving cracks of light through the somber black willows. If Matt were here and I told him that, he would laugh and compliment me on my fanciful and wholly impractical writer’s brain. Well we can’t all be corporate robots, I would sling back at him. I laugh a little to myself and then frown. I wonder if I will need to break up with him, if he does decide to take that job in Atlanta. I’ve already told him that I don’t want to move. 

I shove that particular problem to the back of my mind as I snatch the letters from the mailbox. Not many people my age have an old-timey mailbox like this one, but I have to say I quite like it. It’s one of the many little remnants of my childhood scattered throughout the property. Now that my parents have passed, and I have no siblings, things like this mailbox remind me that my childhood actually did happen, that I didn’t always wander aimlessly through the small towns of Louisiana the way I do now. Well, not aimlessly. A free-lance copywriter does have a purpose, it just isn’t a purpose I particularly like. I should get a new job.

I shove that problem aside too. I close the mailbox and walk up the sidewalk leading to the front door. The house itself is small, built from brown timber, with white French doors and trimming. The slate roofing has given me more trouble in the past three years than everything else in the house put together. I should have asked my dad about it before he died. Oh, that hospital room was awful.

I toss my keys on the front hall table and look through the envelopes. It’s mostly garbage, although there is one notice for the electricity bill I forgot to pay. I’ll do that tonight.

I stop when I see a handwritten letter. It’s from my Grandma, the one over in Saint Martinville. I don’t see her as often as I should. According to my father, she and him didn’t get along all that well. I never really asked him why. As a child my Grandma and I got along just fine, but after my dad died I felt some less-than-fond feelings about her that I couldn’t really explain. 

Still though, it’s nice to hear from her. It’s unusual that she’s written to me–usually if she wants to talk she’ll call me on the landline, another childhood relic I’ve kept throughout the years. Maybe this is a birthday card? Even though my birthday’s not for another two months. 

I make my way over to the plush green couch in the living room and as I slide my pointer finger through the seal. The paper—no, papers—I pull out of the envelope are covered front to back in her scrawling handwriting. My forehead creases as I sift through them, searching for the beginning. It reads:

My dear Bernadette, there are many things I should explain to you but I imagine I have time for only one or two. When your father died I thought it was too soon to tell you, even though I probably should have. So here it is now. 

A tingling unease has started in my gut. I read on:

When our family first came here from Halifax, they were French Canadians looking for a new life, and they were a rough sort of people. They weren’t afraid of taking what they needed from others, or breaking the law in order to get what they wanted. And what they wanted was land, money, and power. They got the land and some money, and eventually a bit of power too. That was thanks to Alain, your great great grandfather.

Well not him, but the woman he married. Her name was Evangeline. She came from a family of wealthy Kentuckians. Her family became both rich and powerful when they began covertly selling arms and gunpowder to the Union Army during the Civil War. It did not make them popular among their Kentucky neighbors, but I guess when you have money you don’t need to worry so much about friends. They moved to Louisiana and continued their business here. 

Anyway, Evangeline married Alain for all the right reasons–I imagined she loved him, because he was substantially less wealthy than her. At the time of their wedding, our family had about twelve acres of land. The family’s house, the squat little thing you live in now, was the only structure on it. The rest was unfarmable swamp, and the family couldn’t do much besides sell soggy timber. 

To put it bluntly, they were broke. And it’s not hard to believe that Alain may have had an ulterior motive for marrying Evangeline. When they had kids, he was supposedly a distant, sometimes mean-spirited father. Your great grandfather certainly didn’t seem to admire him much. 

The children were 14 and 11 years old when Evangeline’s body was found one day, half-submerged in the swamp. I’m sure it was an awful sight–they say the doctor, when he came to examine her, vomited on the spot. Evangeline’s neck was broken and no one knew how it got to be that way. Except her husband, who insisted it had been a bad fall. From a willow tree. In the swamp. 

Folks were suspicious all right, but at that point the family was so wealthy and so powerful that no one pushed Alain on it much. A few years later, he squandered his wife’s fortune on gambling and bad business ventures. They say he died from shock one morning after receiving a statement of foreclosure on the house. I think it’s more likely he died from tuberculosis or something of the kind. The town felt so bad for the children that no one really mentioned the suspected crimes of their father. 

Years went by and still no one knew for sure what happened to Evangeline. And this is where our story gets a little murky, Bernadette. People started to report sightings of a woman wearing blue, or green, or sometimes white, wandering the swamp. They said she walked alone, not saying or doing anything, except stopping to stare at the willows once in a while. And of course the rumors started–that it was Evangeline, back from the dead, trapped in this world by a murderous and hateful deed. Your grandfather, my dear Albert, said that in grade school, children would whisper about the legend and tease him for it. Only as a young man did he feel that people had finally forgotten about it.

And that appeared to be that. The memory of Evangeline and Alain was starting to fade from our collective memory. That is, of course, until your grandfather began to see her.

I didn’t believe him. For two, three, four months it happened. He would look out the window sometimes, gasp, and turn back to me, white as a sheet. ‘It’s her’ he would say ‘Evangeline. She’s looking for me’. I would go to look and would see nothing.

I told him he was seeing things, that the cancer was affecting his brain. I told him to tell his doctor, hoping that the doctor would prescribe him something to stop the hallucinations. Oh, those months were horrible. He was getting more and more frantic, and I was getting more and more desperate. 

He disappeared on July 16th, 1987. Before you were born. Oh, Bernadette, it’s one of my biggest regrets that you never got to meet him.

When the police asked me all those questions, I didn’t even mention Evangeline. It sounded crazy, and I was too deeply in grief to be much help anyway. But a part of me has always wondered what that all meant, if he really saw someone.

When my son, your father, told me that he had seen a woman, dressed in green, wandering through the swamp, I couldn’t believe my ears. Neither Albert or I had ever said anything about Evangeline to him, and after Albert's disappearance I never said anything about it to anyone. I’ve never been afraid like I was then. Three months later, he and your mother were in that terrible crash. 

I can’t even begin to explain. I can’t begin to understand it. I don’t know what Evangeline’s purpose is–if it really is her. Does she prepare us for what’s coming? Is it her who delivers us to the grave? I don’t know but I may soon find out. 

Bernadette, I saw her. About a month ago. I was driving past an overview on the highway, and there she was. Standing, just looking out at the trees. I could see her for maybe two seconds in all. But there was no mistaking that green dress, the black hair. It was her. 

I want to prepare you because I don’t want you to face it blindly, as I did. Whatever happens, all will be well. I may be afraid but I’m ready to be with my family.

Please come and see me, whenever you can. I don’t know how much time I have left. 

All my love,

Grandma 

This cannot be true.

I’m shaking, my hands are shaking as I stare at her signature, unbelieving.

This is insane. This is absolutely insane. 

This cannot be true.

But that doesn’t stop me from hurtling across the room to get my keys. It doesn’t stop me from running to my car, starting the engine and beginning to backing out of the driveway, hyperventilating.

The twenty minutes it takes me to drive over there are the longest of my life. I call Matt and leave him a message, telling him to meet me at my grandmother’s address. My eyes dart side to side, to the foliage crowding the highway, straining in the darkness for a glimpse of a green dress. 

 My stomach is in knots by the time I pull into her driveway. Her tiny house on the edge of the town has always been well kept, and it looks no different now. In fact, nothing looks wrong at all.

Except….I get out of the car and step cautiously towards the front door. Except the front door is wide open. 

“Grandma?” I yell, running across the porch and into the mudroom. “Hello?” I screech, darting through the hallway, checking the bedroom, bathroom, and parlor. Nothing. 

I hear a car pulling up outside–it must be Matt. I’m about to run out to meet him when I feel a breeze caress my cheek. Where—?

The kitchen, the screen door in the kitchen is open. The one that leads to the backyard and the marshes beyond.  I walk towards it, hypnotized. It’s flung wide and flutters in the wind. The wind that now whistles through the kitchen. 

I peer out. I can’t see much of anything really, in the darkness.

All I can make out are the heavy arms of the willows, rustling faintly as the night closes in.