Owl Rock

The night the town burned down we were thirteen. Shireen, Marta, Anna and I had all spent the night at my house. After my parents, who slept like corpses and retired each night promptly at nine, had reminded us to turn off all the lights and get to bed at a “sensible hour,” we gathered our supplies and headed out the front door toward Owl Rock.

Our plan had been three weeks in the making. Marta, who had a cousin whose ancestors came from real Salem witches and knew all about manifesting your desires through spells, had insisted that we wait until the new moon. Your intentions will grow with the light of the moon, she had said. If you don’t wait, the spell will be cut short before it ripens.

Really, we would have done it whenever Shireen had asked. By the rules of middle school girldom, she was our leader. She was, by most accounts, the prettiest- tall with a wide, white smile and dark, wavy hair. She was the only one who had kissed a boy, which gave her status in our group. That night we were embarking on her plan- a revenge of sorts- and we were happy to support her in it.

A month prior, we had ridden our bikes to the A&P to buy ice cream sandwiches. It was so hot, and nobody had air conditioning or anything fun enough at their house to entertain our newly awakened teen sensibilities. Gerald Kingston, the boy who was supposed to be Shireen’s boyfriend, had been in the alley between the grocery store and Walt’s Hardware Junction. He was kissing Ella Watkins, who had long red hair and wore a real ladies bra that was too big to be from the young miss section of the department store over in Richland. It had underwire and everything.

That day, Shireen had decided that we should cast a spell. Anna, who read everything and had a grandmother who was the best storyteller I have ever met to this day, told Shireen that love spells always backfired. A curse, however, had staying power. It could break them up and even keep anyone in his family from finding love for generations.

Over the next few weeks of summer, we gathered ingredients. We paid Gerald’s brother three packs of brand-new baseball cards to steal Gerald’s comb with hair in it and bring it to us. My Aunt Lila gave me one of her black pillar candles from the last Halloween. We went to the dried-out bottom of Carp Lake to scrape up some dessicated remnants of pond scum and set to rehydrating it. Soon, all that was left was the talisman.

This was the item that took us the longest to decide on. At first, Shireen thought we should use a broken heart, but Marta’s cousin told us that our spell would work better if we chose a god or goddess to speak to directly. We went to the library and read stories about the Celtic spirits, the Catholic Saints, the Greek and Roman Gods, the Hindu Deities and the Chinese and Japanese Gods and Goddesses. We asked Wren, whose grandfather still lived on the reservation nearby, who they called out to for cursing wronged loves.

It was during one of our library excursions that we came across the owl pendant tucked into a book about animal mythology. It was so thin and delicate you couldn’t even tell that it was hiding inside. Not only was the owl a premonition for great tragedy in many cultures, but it also foretold wisdom and prophesy for some. Not satisfied with the simplicity of a mere curse, we had morphed by then into cursing him out of any future loves and also asking for insight on who we might each be destined to be with ourselves.

The owl pendant also made us reconsider the venue for our spell. Originally, we were going to do the whole thing at the National Forest campsite in the woods behind Gerald’s house. It was there that he had first kissed her and asked whether, if he was faithful to her for six whole months, she might let him get to second base with her. But now, it had to be the Walker homestead. More specifically, Owl Rock.

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If we had a genuinely haunted place in our town, it was the Walker homestead. The building, abandoned for more time than we could fathom, sat in the foothills near a huge bulbous outcropping with two shallow, disc-shaped recesses placed symmetrically near the top. In the rainy season, the pools would fill with water and glow in the dappled sunlight like owl eyes.

Mr. Thomas Mapworth Walker had been a speculator and an adventurer. The legend said that he first went to Alaska and found gold and used it to buy the homestead land and make a huge home to fill. He returned north, got lucky one more time on his claim and came back with enough gold to buy the hand of a rich man’s daughter in Seattle. He took her from her city life, carted her east to the land of dry, hot summers and ponderosa pine logging.

Her name was Primrose, and she did about as well in our harsh country as a real, English primrose would do when planted in our dusty, red soil. When Walker set out for another adventure, this time for three full years, he returned to find his house empty and Primrose back in Seattle. She had convinced her father to annul the marriage and had gotten betrothed to a city gentleman.

Thomas Walker was not the kind of man to take such an insult lightly. In town, he had gained a reputation for being as ruthless as he was wealthy. This had served him well among other prospectors, and some who had also tried their luck swore that none of the gold that he returned with had come from Walker’s own claim. Whether he had obtained it by stealth, coercion or brute force was never discussed. Others still believed that his luck was not from mere criminal activity but that he had made a much more sinister bargain with forces of the occult.

Walker’s legend took on a new infamy with what he did next. The night before Primrose’s new wedding, she was kidnapped by her first husband and brought back to the homestead. When her father hired some bounty hunters to take chase and return her, they could not find either one of them. Instead, the house was full of his things and new items for her. There was food in the larder and the fire was lit. Though no human was inside, the house was filled with dozens of ghostly pale barn owls that escaped, one by one, from the house as the posse searched for hiding places. The couple was never seen or heard from again, though the owls have inhabited the house to this day.

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I can still remember the winds that blew that night as we headed to owl rock. They weren’t gusts but instead a persistent force, blowing the sugary smell hidden deep within the crevices of the ponderosa pine bark into the air. Walking against it in the starlight, it was like we were immersed in amber honey- slowed by sweetness. Thinking back, I wonder if a well-meaning entity was making one last attempt to stop us.

We took our places on the rock. Marta guided us to the positions that matched each cardinal direction. Shireen was in the north, Anna and Marta were east and west and I took up the southern spot. She pulled out the notebook where she had carefully written the instructions from her cousin.

Before she began describing the ritual steps, she looked up. Her cousin had shared a bit of advice and told her that she must share it before we began or take the full burden of risk onto herself. Curses, she said, required sacrifice. We had to be willing to give up the thing that we didn’t know was important to us. We could not gain without losing. The curse would also take its fee without notice; something would be gone one day, possibly that very night. She said that this was a scary prospect for many, which was why people only did curses when they had nothing left to lose. The only way to reverse such a thing was to put enough good back into the world that karma felt we earned it back for other reasons. And this could take a lifetime.

This felt like heady wisdom to us; Marta’s cousin was a mature fifteen and knew much about a world that we were just beginning to experience. But Shireen’s steely gaze made it clear without speech that we would proceed. And to lose her favor would be worse than losing anything else we could imagine.

And so, with fear tickling deep in our guts and stars overhead, we began. The candle was placed in the middle, scratched with Gerald’s name and a big heart with an X through it. Shireen wrote the word “NEVER!” in block letters, embellishing the exclamation point with a tiny heart, as she always did. The pendant was pushed deep into the wax, as far as we could get it without breaking the candle. The spell would be done when the wax cleared from around it and exposed it once again.

We gave thanks to the elements- dirt from near his home for earth, water (mixed with the pond scum), and air from our four breaths, plus the constant wind. At first, the fire did not want to light, as the breeze was constant and persistent. Marta stood her notebook on two sides, blocking the wind as we spoke the incantation that her cousin had written for us and used Anna’s father’s zippo to light the flame.

Two shapes appeared inches above our heads as the flame took to the wick. A pair of barn owls swooped overhead and turned for another pass. We screamed and ran, sure that Walker’s ghost was after us. On the rock, we left the candle, weakly flickering, and Marta’s notebook. At last sight, it was tipping precariously toward the flame.

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The green phone on the kitchen wall starting ringing at 3 AM. The pounding on the door began at 4. Trucks with lights filled our front yard, and my dad, in pajamas with an overcoat, threw a suitcase into my room and told me that I should take whatever I didn’t want to lose. A fire marshal borrowed from the next county drove Anna, Marta and Shireen back to their homes, warning them on the way that they might have just minutes to fill their own suitcases, and that they should think carefully about what they could fit in a single bag each.

That morning had no dawn, as the horizon looked the same in the glow of flame as it did when the sun approached. We sat huddled between pews at a stone church three towns over, refugees, waiting to see what would be left of our homes when it was over.

Is this what we would lose? Everything? Our whole town? It seemed a large ask for such a small bargain as a breakup. Our suitcases were piled in a grocery van somewhere nearby; they had been tagged with our names and piled together with all the other families in the neighborhood to make it easier to move us when they found us sleeping quarters. We whispered together all that day, holding hands because we didn’t know what else to do with them. Gerald did not come to the church with us, we assumed he had been sent to another location. Ella appeared later in the day, soot and tears striping the length of her face, sitting alone. That would be the last time we ever saw her.

When it was over, our woodland town was mostly coal-black ash and silhouettes of memory. Government people with red bands on their sleeves put us in tents, made calls, and found us families to stay with around the county. Church groups and neighboring towns found jobs for the people whose places of work were gone forever.

Though the spring rains brought new sprouts and hope for some, many of the families moved away. Marta’s family moved back to Connecticut, in with the cousin who had been such a help in creating our spell. Shireen’s family moved one town over, but as she fell in with a new group of girls, ready to follow her irresistible charm, we saw her less and less. Anna’s family said they would come back, but we didn’t hear where they ended up for many years. My own family headed to the coastal cloud forests. My father could not imagine a home without fish-filled rivers and trees overhead, but he found a place where the duff was perennially damp and the air smelled of moist soil, hope and fire-resistance.

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Twenty years after the fire, our town had rebuilt themselves into a makeshift Phoenix of what it once was. Metal roofs and concrete buildings studded the town center. The forests had flourished, triumphant, building themselves upon the fertile graves of their ancestors. That summer, the chamber of commerce held a ceremony marking the date. Gerald’s mom worked tirelessly for over a year to plan the event. She tracked down every family who had lost a home and left, inviting us back to mark the occasion. We all did.

Though it had been decades since we spoke, the four of us had taken similar paths in life. All of us, it seemed, had taken the warnings of Marta’s cousin to heart; we all were sure that we were the cause of the wildfire that night and had lost our homes, our towns, our friendships. But we had all dedicated our lives to undoing the curse, to a path of endless rights to even the balance of one life-altering wrong.

There was a symmetry- a theme- to our choices. Anna, our bookworm, became an attorney and fought to find homes for the homeless. Shireen became a nurse in the burn ward of a Seattle hospital. Marta had stayed in Connecticut and opened an herbalist shop with her cousin. While she dispensed teas and lotions, she also had a reputation for listening to broken-hearted customers and helping lost causes to find love. She mended relationships, one by one, with kind word and a caring ear. I became an architect specializing in fire-resistant designs. As a charitable act a few years back, my firm had gifted this town the design for their new fire station, complete with subtle accents to honor what we had lost. An additional anonymous donation secured the funds to build it, though I never found out who had given it.

We saw Gerald that day. He was now the town sheriff. He invited the four of us to lunch at his house- a buffet of gourmet offerings crafted by his new fiancée. She was a woman who bore a striking resemblance to Shireen, and his first real girlfriend since the fire. We sat on his backyard deck, sharing smoked trout and grilled vegetables fresh from the garden.

At one point, the fiancée went inside to place fresh berries on the shortcakes she had made. Gerald turned to us, face flushed, and apologized. He had been the source of the fire, he said, and had spent a lifetime giving everything he had to rebuild the town and community. That day, he had seen Shireen and she had told them that they were over. She said that she knew about what he had done behind her back. He had gone to the woods then, to the place we had first planned to perform the ritual, with a bottle of something brown from his dad’s liquor cabinet and a lot of fireworks.

Though my friends and I did not speak throughout most of the day after that, I could sense that the same thoughts were running through all of our heads. Were we innocent? What would have happened if we had gone to the campsite and not Owl Rock? Would seeing Gerald in the woods have stopped both of our adventures that night or would we have ended up trapped in the flames?

An hour before sunset, the four of us walked toward Owl Rock one last time. The trails that we knew as kids had disappeared with the fire and reformed with the sprouting landscape. We had to use a map from the ranger station to find it. The grand, haunted home we knew as kids had burned to a single river rock chimney. As we approached it, we heard fluttering inside. Perhaps it was bats. Or pigeons. Perhaps the barn owls had relocated.

The creamy granite of the rock blushed orange in the setting sun. The evening light caught and shimmered on the region of the owl’s third eye. We approached the rock in single file, in the same order we had walked there that night, though we stopped short of our cardinal positions.

The owl pendant gleamed atop the rock, alone, as if it had been waiting all this time for us to return.