Little Blackbird

Table of Contents

Mystic Water, 1954

1 Waffles and Cane Syrup

Acknowledgments

About the Author

A Novel
Jennifer Moorman

Little Blackbird
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Jennifer Moorman
www.jennifermoorman.com
Cover Design by Julianne St. Clair
www.juliannestclair.com
First Edition
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise—except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles or book reviews—without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

For everyone who wanted
to know more about Mystic Water
and the enchanting people who call it home

M
YSTIC
W
ATER, 1954

K
ATE DRAGGED HER sandaled feet through fresh pine needles and leaves that still should have been a part of the canopy above her. Last night’s storm—in its desperate madness—had stripped the trees of their summer growth and coated the forest floor like a prickly, green blanket, stinking of sweet sap and dark earth. Kate’s mama said mid-summer storms blown in by east winds brought mischief and rebellion. Kate believed her because the oppressive summer heat had been replaced with a cool breeze, making it feel as though autumn crept in early and without permission, like the weather was up to something.

Gentle breezes in July could never be trusted. July was anything but gentle; July was intense, sweltering, burning. July made people in Mystic Water want to live in the water like mermaids. A few dozen people would dive into Jordan Pond in July and not emerge until Labor Day.

Normally, Kate loved summer vacation, the days that stretched out long and free. During the summer, she didn’t worry about whether or not her classmates liked her or if they would avoid her during group activities. She wouldn’t have to suffocate beneath their pity, wouldn’t have to hear anyone whisper the name
Evan
. It didn’t matter if she was the darkest face in the woods or if she was so skinny her sixteen-year-old body still resembled a boy’s. She could just
be
. And Kate chose to
be
outside as much as possible. Outside among the wildlife, Kate felt as though she belonged.

But today the world around her seemed to be plotting for a surprise attack, tugging her into a false sense of security, cooling her with its whispery breeze, coaxing her to relax. But she couldn’t. Her fingers tingled, and she felt as unsettled as a canary in a coal mine. The periwinkle blue sky stretched like a bowl over the too-quiet forest.

The silence reminded Kate of the caves upriver, but at least there she could hear echoes, the constant drip of water. Now she heard nothing but her own breath, which unnerved her so much she started humming one of her mama’s Cherokee songs.

Where the trees thinned, a patch of mauve flower heads stretched their blooms above darker foliage, testing the afternoon sunlight.
Eupatorium purpureum
, Kate thought.
And Joe-Pye Weed to everyone else
. July was too early for blooming Joe-Pye Weed, but the plants swayed their blood-red stalks and deep pink buds in the wind. Monarch butterflies darted in and out of the flowers, acting just as surprised as Kate was to see the plants.

Kate knelt in front of the blooms. The storm had not snatched the petals from their stalks. A butterfly fluttered above her, and she reached out her hand like a damsel in a storybook might to a prince asking for the honor of kissing her hand. The monarch butterfly landed on her knuckle, shivered against her skin.

A dark veil dropped over Kate’s vision, and she lay in the grass. The butterfly flapped its wings above her, sending sighs of wind across her cheeks. Before the darkness overtook her, Kate breathed in the scents of burning rubber, sour breath, and men’s cologne.

W
HEN KATE WAS five years old, she experienced her first premonition. She’d woken up on the floor of her bedroom, drooling on the threadbare rug, arms and legs crumpled beneath her. Broken images of her parents, a man with blue eyes, and a gigantic truck with shattered headlights tried to form in her mind, but they burned away like fog in sunlight. She didn’t have another vision for five years.

On her tenth birthday, Kate watched her older brother, Evan, swim through the gentle river rapids behind their house. He climbed onto a water-slicked rock and called her to him, laughing as the sunlight turned his skin to caramel. She shook her head, but Evan’s laugh could persuade a recluse to rejoin society, and she knew she couldn’t stay on the shore.

Kate put one foot into the water, but her vision tunneled, her legs collapsed, and she knocked herself out on the stones along the river. When Kate awoke, her clothes were soaked. The current had tugged her downstream until Evan pulled her onto the bank. Kate blinked up at her mama whose dark eyes were as large as walnuts and her lips were too taut and trembling; her sharp cheekbones angled and gleamed like polished obsidian. Evan hovered nearby; his grass-green eyes were overly bright, and the muscles in his neck strained against his skin.

Once inside the house, her mama forced her to stay awake and sit at the kitchen table. She wrapped Kate in a wool blanket like a swaddled baby to help battle the October chill and the shivers Kate felt every time she thought of blue eyes and fingers linked with hers, of an upside-down car and silence on the interior. Kate tried to remember what happened, but her thoughts were muddy. She kept seeing a man with dark hair, laughing, picking daisies from the forest and then headlights shining through the fog straight into her eyes, blinding her, and her heartbeat exploded.

Her mama sent her daddy and Evan to the store for traditional remedies, but Kate knew Evan had disobeyed. Kate felt her brother’s presence in the hallway, just out of her mama’s sight in the kitchen.

Her mama brewed a steaming cup of lavender tea and told Kate the truth. “Little Blackbird,” her mama said, “you are cursed.”

“What?” Kate had asked, lowering the cup of tea. Her fingers prickled, and she reached up to touch the purple bruise on her forehead.

“My grandmother had premonitions. Her life was a tragedy because of it. You will see slivers of the future. Both your own and futures belonging to others. You cannot change them. You cannot interfere with what you see. That alone will drive you crazy.”

Her mama walked to the suncatcher hanging above the kitchen window. She spun its string with her fingers, twirling the suncatcher round and round before letting go, and colorful flashes of light danced across the kitchen floor. “Sometimes you will see the future in broken pieces. It will be like trying to make complete pictures out of the shattered glass in a suncatcher. Impossible. Other times the future will be a clear path, but you cannot change it. You can only see and know, but never act.”

Kate’s hands trembled on the mug. The words
tragedy
and
broken
hammered in her skull like a woodpecker on a mature pine. Her tongue tasted like dry earth and bitter leaves.

Her mama walked to her and stood beside the table. Her steady, strong gaze locked onto Kate’s face. “No matter what you see, you cannot try and alter it. Interfering with the future is forbidden. There are no exceptions.”

“What if I see something bad happening to someone else?”

Her mama shook her head. “No exceptions. Changing the future could have terrible consequences.”

“But what if I could help–”

Her mama stamped her foot. “No exceptions. Now, drink your tea.”

Kate glanced up and caught Evan’s eyes in his hiding place just inside the shadowed hallway. His brow wrinkled and he frowned.

“Can I control when these visions happen?”

“No.” Her mama returned to the stove. “They will come whenever they want to, even at the most inconvenient times. But the tea will help.”

Kate imagined having a vision in school and grimaced. “But I don’t want to be different. I want to fit in.”

“Fit in with whom?” her mama asked.

Kate shrugged and looked away from her mama’s knowing gaze. “Other kids? The kids in town?”
Anyone
.

Evan waved at her from the hallway. When she looked at him, he mouthed, “You fit in with me.” Kate almost smiled.

“Little Blackbird,” her mama asked, “why would you ever want to be like them?”

She looked up at her mama, but she had already turned away shaking her head.

After that, Kate had premonitions at least once a month, sometimes as often as once a week if she forgot to drink lavender tea daily. Her mama explained how the tea would slow the premonitions, perhaps even put them to sleep for a while. Kate fretted she would have
an episode
—as she’d named them—during school. Wasn’t it bad enough that she was already outwardly different with her too-black eyes, hair as dark as ravens, and skin the color of Georgia clay? Now her insides were jumbled, broken, and manic. Now she saw familiar faces in her visions—her schoolmate Sally’s blue eyes haunted and lost, her neighbor Adam skipping rocks across the river, her daddy’s tears on his fingers.

None of her visions made sense. Most of them frightened her. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night and eat dried lavender by the handfuls just to stop seeing anything at all.

Kate never had the same vision twice, and she never had premonitions that seemed to go in a sequence until three months after Evan turned eighteen. First, she saw a man with heavy eye lids wearing a ball cap, hands loosened on a faded leather steering wheel, headlights veered across solid yellow lines on a blacktop.

Two weeks later, she blacked out while planting roses in the backyard and saw wheels spinning on a car crushed like an accordion with a blurry face seen through the shattered windows. Without his ball cap, the man’s bald head shined like a light bulb in the moonlight as he staggered away from a tractor trailer and across the road, blubbering sloppy, broken prayers.

Then, a week later, Kate stumbled into her bedroom and collapsed like a Slinky. That night she saw the color of the car—thistle green—with the paint chipping in the shape of Texas above the front tire wheel. Kate had traced that outline a dozen times because it was Evan’s car. When she emerged from the vision, her face was wet with tears and she lay curled up on her bedroom floor, wrapping her arms around her knees, pulling them to her chest.
You can’t change the future. You can’t interfere
, she told herself over and over again.

As silver moonlight turned her tears to glitter, she prayed that her vision wasn’t the future. She prayed Evan would be safe and not trapped inside his busted up car, but maybe nobody was listening to her prayers.