Three of Swords
Part One
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Part Two
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Part Three
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Part Four
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Three of Swords
She shuffles the cards again, holding them face down for a moment as she closes her eyes. She splits the pack in half and turns one half over, revealing The Fool, upside down. That means indecision, the wrong choice. But wrong to keep her mother at home or wrong to take her to the murky green hospital? She reforms the pack and shuffles, replacing one deep purple card-back with another and another, trying to confuse the fates. She lays the cards face down on the wooden tabletop in a new spread, jewel inlays against the timber. She turns them over, one by one. The Fool, again, and then the Nine of Wands. Ill health, or perhaps lack of preparation. Her pale brow creases into a frown beneath the red headscarf; she knows she is not prepared, not able to treat her mother at home if her condition worsens. The cottage is small, miles from the town, doctor’s surgeries, chemists. The nearest neighbour is a mile away, nearer the edge of the wood. And she knows it is getting worse. But a hospital…they could hardly be unprepared for a sick person, could they? The next card is the Nine of Cups, signifying good health, a positive future. She spreads the cards again and again in different forms; a Celtic cross, a three card spread, a golden dawn, a horseshoe. The Fool keeps appearing, on his head or on his feet. The wrong decision, a rash decision, no decision – all could be disastrous. And the Nine of Wands bothers her the more it appears. She is not ready for what might happen. But convincing Othila to leave her home will not be easy. The old woman is getting weaker, but Early knows that at the mention of the hospital Othila’s bony hands will clutch at her blankets until her knuckles whiten, as she has done every time. But Early also knows what the cards have said.
Early Wednesday had in fact been born quite late on a Sunday night, but her mother had consulted her tarot cards in the last weeks of her pregnancy and discovered that the small hours of a Wednesday morning would be a most auspicious time to be born, and Othila wasn’t about to let the facts get in the way of a lifetime of good fortune for her daughter. Early herself had consulted the cards again and again, as Othila had taught her, before deciding to take her mother to hospital. She knew it wasn’t what Othila wanted, but it was, apparently, what the fates had decided.
The hospital sat low between the hills, a squat sprawling sludge-green building that seemed to glower at Early as she helped her mother out of the truck and into the wheelchair. She tried to ignore her misgivings as she hurried into the building alongside her mother, a nurse pushing the chair from behind. This was the right thing to do. She was meant to bring her mother here, the cards had told her to. But now as they rushed along the hospital’s sickly yellow corridors, Early couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. The nurse pushing Early’s mother swung the chair left and they entered a ward. The light in there was dim, shining weakly through grimy windows. It gave the patients’ skin and bedclothes a jaundiced tinge. The nurse pulled up beside an empty bed, and Early began to help manoeuvre her mother onto it. Othila wheezed and moved limply under her daughter’s hands.
“It’s okay, Mama,” said Early quietly, leaning forward and smoothing back her mother’s hair. Hair that she knew to be white but which in here looked yellowed, tarnished. She leaned further forward, out of earshot of the nurse who was busily arranging the bedclothes around Othila’s thin frame. In her mother’s ear she whispered, “Uruz, Algiz.”
With her mother settled between the off-white sheets of the hospital bed, Early walked back down the yellow corridor to reception, where the counter was trimmed and the signs were written in a slightly paler green than the outside of the building. Jono was waiting for Early on the moulded green plastic chairs. Early and Othila had no phone, no car, and Jono had been kind enough to drive them to the hospital after Early had walked the mile to his farm to ask him. He was a big, quiet man, his large forearms exposed by his rolled up shirtsleeves. He waited for Early to speak first, and when she sighed and said “Could you take me home now, Jono?” he just rose from his chair and said, “’Course.”
Jono was Early’s only way into town to visit the hospital over the next few weeks. The journeys in his pickup became a shutdown space for her; there was no need to talk, as she felt there was beside her mother’s bed. There was no need to think – she was just a passenger, no decisions to be made. She could simply lean her head against the window and feel every bump and pot hole in the forest road gradually smooth out to the even vibrations of the tarmac road into town. The gentle and textured greens and browns and yellows of the countryside slowly fell away to the angular dirty greys of the buildings as they travelled, only to be greeted again by the dank depressing green of the hospital, hulked on the other side of town. Every time, Jono dropped her at the front entrance and went back into town to run his errands, or simply to wait until Early was ready to come home again. He was patient.
Jono was not alone in his patience with Early. As she sat with Othila, someone watched her from the doorway, again, just to one side, dressed in the sludgy green of the hospital’s porters. Against his pale skin the colour made him look as if he should be one of the patients. He was watching Early as she held her mother’s hand. He couldn’t hear what she was saying, but he could see her lips moving gently and he knew they would be words of comfort. He longed to hear them. As he watched, Early shifted in her seat as if to turn around, and he hurried off down the pasty corridor.
As the weeks fell off the calendar, he edged closer and closer to the small pale woman with the red headscarf and her ailing mother. At the end of his shift he always found a reason to walk past Othila’s ward, even when visiting hours were over. But when the daughter was there… She always pulled her moulded grey plastic chair up close to the bed and slipped the old woman’s paper hand between her own pale ones. It didn’t seem to matter whether Othila was awake or not – the young woman would talk to her, softly, for hours on end. He assumed she spoke about the details of her time away from the hospital. In truth it didn’t matter to him what the words were – he wanted only to be within the loop that they created. The two of them seemed to him enclosed by a private bubble of comfort, of love. What passed between them was personal, exclusive, enveloping them both as he watched from the periphery. He found small things nearby to busy himself with, a little nearer to the glow of their closeness each time. A few times he caught her eye, not looking away quickly enough when she glanced up from her gentle monologue. Now that he was closer, he could make out more of what she said, although his intention was not to eavesdrop, but just to know, to hear the comfort and take something from it. More and more often, now, it was always the same two words he caught: Uruz, Algiz, over and over again, like a prayer.
He was close by, removing wilted flowers from the vase of the patient next to Othila. She caught his glance in a pause. Emboldened, he asked,
“What’s that you’re saying to her?”
“They’re Viking words. The names of runes; Strength and Protection. That’s what she needs now.” I should never have brought her here.
“How is she?”
“The infection’s getting worse. It’s getting more difficult for her to breathe.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. She’ll be all right. The fates will look after her.” I did what they told me to and she’s not getting better.
He visited them regularly after that first contact; overtly, obviously, he sat by the bedside instead of hovering around the fringes. As Othila sank deeper below the surface of consciousness it was a relief to Early to have someone left with her. When Othila was, as most of the time, unable to respond to her daughter’s words, there was now someone there to fill in the silences. His name was Noah, Early learnt, and in those gaps of time where her mother was just a wisp beneath the sheets, Early and Noah spoke of other things; distracting, mundane things, like how and where and with whom each lived their lives. He as a porter in the hospital, in the town, alone. She as a painter, in the wood, not usually alone, but at the moment… She explained the significance of the runes she sometimes brought and slipped into her mother’s delicate hand, or the cards, or the crystals. That these things were their faith, these acts their prayers. Noah said little when Early began one of her detailed explanations – she didn’t need him to. It was as if she was talking more to herself.
As the weeks passed, their conversation spread to the less mundane – that was of course if there was any conversation at all. They could sit quite comfortably in silence, the three of them. Having him there made these silences bearable to Early, as she was no longer alone in them. On this visit, however, Early was explaining the details of her Tarot cards to Noah, who had stopped by after his shift and was dressed, as usual, in his murky green uniform.
‘The ones I’ve put under her pillow, the Wheel of Fortune and the Four of Swords are for good luck, a turn for the better, and recuperation, you see.’ As she spoke she folded her mother’s hand around the rest of the pack. There was a pause that, for once, Noah was unsure how to fill. He watched Early perched on the edge of her chair, eyes anxious, and he asked,
‘Will you show me, sometime? How to read them?’
Dark had begun to steal through the wood when Early got home. She sat at the wide, worn table in the kitchen with a cup of tea and pushed her red headscarf back off her dark hair. The cottage felt very still. Outside the wind was stirring the trees, making a sound like breaking waves. Early closed her eyes and wrapped her hands around the hot mug of tea. She sat that way in the thickening dark until the tea grew cold.
Later that evening, she gathered all the divination tools they had in the house and put everything on the kitchen table. Her own Tarot cards, tealeaves, runes, crystals. She took her mother’s numerology books down from the shelves, she tried to read her own palm, looking for a break in the heart line that could signal great loss, great pain. None of the readings made any sense. The last item she consulted was the runes. She dipped her hand into the small felt bag and pulled out a tiny tablet of stone. She turned it over between her fingers; it was smooth and blank. The Unknowable. She let it fall onto the table before putting her head in her hands.
In the morning, Jono knocked on the kitchen door and quietly pushed it open. He went inside and saw Early sleeping with her head on the table amongst the cards and stones and books. He woke her gently, waiting until she had pulled her long dark hair back under the red scarf before telling her that the hospital had phoned. Othila was dead.
Jono liked Early. She was a quiet girl, but friendly, polite. Had cared for her mother deeply – Jono respected that in a child. He had known Othila since she had moved into the abandoned cottage, alone, years ago. He had been concerned, in his quiet way, about a young woman living alone in the woods, and called around – Othila had quickly put his mind at rest, and it occurred to him now as he drove along the track to the cottage that he had never met such a capable person, before or since. Eight months after she had moved in, baby Early Wednesday had arrived, and Othila had started to accept the small offers of help Jono extended –the odd lift into town, the occasional heap of logs split. He had kept an eye on them both, over the years, so now he parked his truck in front of the cottage and made his way around the back to the kitchen door, knocking twice against the green painted wood before pushing it open.
‘Early? You home?’
Her blank face greeted him, dark eyebrows and eyes like charcoal slashes against her grey skin. She was sat at the kitchen table clutching a browny-red shawl around her shoulders, the paraphernalia of Othila’s divination spread out before her, as she had been when Jono came to tell her her mother was dead.
‘You all right, Early?’ he asked, one large hand still on the door.
Early made a tiny movement, perhaps a shrug.
‘None of it works, Jono,’ she said flatly. ‘We were fooling ourselves all along.’
Moving slowly, as he would with a nervy animal, Jono took a seat beside Early. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked gently.
‘All this.’ She waved a hand over the table. ‘It doesn’t tell us anything. Mama lived her life by it, and I tried to, and look what happened.’
‘Your mother held great store by it, as I understand.’
‘But it’s wrong.’ She stood up suddenly, her chair falling back noisily on to the flagstones. ‘Everything told me I should take her to the hospital. I tried the cards, the tealeaves, the runes. They all said I wasn’t prepared, that I couldn’t look after her here. I did what they told me and she still died!’ The shawl had slipped off one shoulder, and Early gathered it more tightly around her as she righted her chair and sat back down again. ‘I’m getting rid of it. All of it.’
‘Well now, it would be a shame to throw away your mother’s things.’
Early sat stiffly on her chair, hands clenched with a fistful of shawl at her chest.
‘I don’t know much about this sort of thing,’ Jono continued, ‘but maybe they weren’t wrong. Maybe what you weren’t prepared for was her dying.’
There was no real reason for Early to go back to the hospital, but the cottage was so quiet, and so full of her mother. And Early had been at home when she should have been inside the stained and faded building with Othila. She knew going there now could not make up for that, but something, perhaps habit, perhaps her subconscious, perhaps fate, guided her feet along the same yellowed corridor to the ward Othila had been on. Right up to the bed she had lain in. Noah was there, changing the sheets.
‘How are you?’ he asked when he saw her standing opposite him. He did not ask why she was there.
‘I don’t know.’
He searched for something that would comfort her, some words that would explain that he knew the grief she felt. Knew it well.
‘No one knows…no one knows why people they love die.’
‘It was fated. It must have been.’
‘Do you believe that? That she was meant to come here and die?’
‘No.’ Early’s mouth began to twist with the pain of admitting what she had really believed, what she had really wanted. In a small and strangled voice she said, ‘ She was meant to get better.’
Gently, Noah pushed a little harder. ‘Maybe it wasn’t down to the fates.’
She fell silent, and they stood facing each other across the empty bed, the crumpled sheets rising up in a heap like a dirty iceberg between them.
‘You can’t keep blaming something else.’ He knew he should stop pushing, but it was like picking a scab for him.
‘What the hell would you know about blame? About responsibility?’
‘Plenty.’
Early was silent for a moment, realising the only way Noah could know so much was if he’d been through it, somehow.
‘Who?’
‘My sister.’ His head dropped and the shadows on his face grew deeper, as if he was shrinking away from the surface. In a low voice he began, ‘There was a fire here, years ago. Emmeline was a patient – nothing serious, just having her tonsils out. I had only just started as a porter, still learning my way around. The fire took out a whole wing of the hospital – including Emmeline’s ward. I found her… but I took too long. I didn’t know the building that well,’ he paused, looking up at Early across the iceberg bed. His eyes seemed darker somehow.
‘When I found her, she was on the floor…her dressing gown was…she was in bad shape, burned, but alive. I had to get her out. I had to get her out, but I was afraid to touch her.’ His voice was faltering now, his breath catching in his throat as he relived the fire. ‘Her skin…I wrapped her in a blanket.’ He looked straight at Early, eyes black as he said, ‘It was the worst thing I could have done. What was left of her skin became infected later on by the blanket fibres. And she died shortly after that.’ His voice has harder now, unwavering. ‘It wasn’t fate that made me pick up that blanket. It wasn’t destiny that the fire started – it was a pyromaniac from the psychiatric ward. I wasn’t being guided by some higher force. My actions caused her death, I’m responsible. We make decisions and live with the fallout. You made a decision to bring your mother here when she got ill. You knew it wasn’t what she wanted, but you did it anyway. It was your decision.’
‘No. The cards told me it was the right course to take.’
‘Then why is she dead?’
She left him alone by the dirty iceberg.
She couldn’t shut down on the journey home. Head against the glass, the scenery blurred, the same thoughts kept running through her mind. I interpreted it wrong. I should have kept her at home, I should have prepared myself for what was coming. I read it all wrong, and then I never said goodbye. I was at home when she died; I didn’t get here until the morning after. I was unprepared, the cards were right. I got it wrong. It’s my fault she died there, alone.
Weeks had passed since Early left Noah alone by the dirty unmade bed in the hospital. Nervously now, he raised his fist and knocked on her front door. Nothing happened for several moments, and he was just debating whether to walk away or knock again when the door jerked open slightly.
‘Sorry,’ came Early’s voice from within, ‘nobody comes in this way, it’s a bit stiff – ’ She yanked the door open enough to see who was standing on the other side, and stopped talking.
‘Hello,’ Noah ventured. ‘I thought I’d come by for that Tarot lesson…’
Cautiously, she let him in.
She showed him some simple ways to spread the cards, explaining the meaning of each as it appeared. At first she was reluctant, afraid of ridicule, but he asked so many questions and seemed so interested. He particularly liked to know the meanings of the Major Arcana, and the court cards of each suit. They did not talk about Othila, or Emmeline, but they tried to be comfortable again in each other’s company, as they had been at the hospital before their ghosts came out to trip them. Before they knew each other’s pain. It was like walking around in a nearly new pair of shoes, that had given them blisters once before, but which they knew would be comfortable once they’d been worn in. Noah stayed all afternoon, and Early was glad of the company.
She takes her cards out again. They are like stained glass windows against the plain wood. Each one edged in deep purple, their pictures inked in jewel colours. The Priestess in her cobalt robes, the Empress in blood red.
Some are missing. She runs through the Major Arcana again – the Hierophant, the Lovers and Temperance aren’t there. Quickly she thumbs through the Minor Arcana; the King of Swords and the Knight of Coins are nowhere to be seen. Her fingers tremble as she gathers the remaining cards back into their box and she realises that Noah was the last person to hold the complete deck. Then she stops, and sees what he has done.
Forgiveness, comfort.
A change of attitude.
Peace after a troubled time.
A calm old man in a pickup truck and a steadfast friend in murky green scrubs.
She sees what he has done. She has a complete set.