Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Forty four
Nana’s and the villager’s largess showed up later that week. A small procession of sullen faces marched up the lane to Phillip’s house carrying or pulling along the atonement bounty. Six chickens and not a rooster in the mix. Two male goats well past their use as anything but stew meat. A tiny stack of silver dollars, just enough to buy a few hand tools in town. The last item was brought by two men pulling a small cart behind them. The trunk was unceremoniously dumped in the dirt and left unchecked until those who drew the short straw took their leave.
Phillip’s boy opened the lid and then shut it with a grunt of disgust.
“That’s all yours.”
The youth nodded dismissively at the chest as Phillip barked orders for the goats to be tied to the porch and the chickens gathered under Felecia’s old lean too until a coup of some kind could be built.
Felecia still found herself winded by walks down the lane but a sick and all too familiar curiosity took hold of her all the same. Gifts? From Nana? There was never such a thing. Little curiosities and distractions from father’s trips abroad, always. Carefully crafted if ill-fitting garments made by mother, made ever so subtly to remind Felecia that a girl had to constantly consider her figure, sure. Even small stacks of carefully written letters from Bartholomew, tiny printed time tables of his actions and mishaps at sea, yes and always read and reread. Gifts from Nana though. Only her wisdoms doled out sparingly with a sharp tongue or ever whisked out briskly with the dreaded spoon or a good starving otherwise.
The trunk was an old one, something from the dreaded cellars of Rotary house. The ancient stamps barely legible on one weathered handle told Felecia that it was one of her grandfather’s sea chests, the man owned dozens of the things over his life time, including many that were inherited from his father and simply restamped with his separate beginning initial. This was one of those eldritch trucks. The whole thing stank of mildew and was adorned with aged spiderwebs as well as the moldy imprints of rat turds stenciled along its bulgy exterior.
Felecia, already vexed and tired from the trek made from the porch down to the edge of Phillip’s fence line, huffed and sighed and then had to hold her breath so as not to wretch as she got close to the trunk’s putrescence. She dared to lift the lid and was immediately offered a painful snap shot of her interrupted childhood. There was no chance for misinterpreting the purpose of this gift.
The contents of Felecia’s childhood dresser and desk had been dumped into the trunk. Not merely upended drawer for drawer though, oh no. Bartholomew’s treasured letters weren’t there, or father’s many valued but largely worthless tokens from abroad. No, the trunk was a mass of old clothes that wouldn’t fit, soft house shoes and garments that had no place at all in Felecia’s new world, and her collection of private letters. Letters written yet never meant to be read, letters carelessly folded open without their parchment envelopes. Letters left to catch the rat turd infested air of the trunk and poignantly dashed with splashes of quill ink still drying from the now spilled contents of a broken ink well that father gave to Felecia the same year he disappeared.
The trunk was the worst sort of matriarchal poison, neither a careless accident or a full-on assault. The trunk was a reminder of what would never be. Something lost forever hence. The sour, stained remains of a life Felecia had thrown away by daring to speak up for herself, and furthermore, the telling separation of herself from everything she used to know and trust and love.
That was her real dowry, a box of old junk, stained and smelling of rat shit. Everything else offered was for the assault, the attempted murder in the village. The chickens that would never breed, the goats that wouldn’t last the winter, the coins that wouldn’t last a season. Those paltry things were given over for the sake of peace but the trunk and its contents, those were the last awful reminders of Felicia’s insolence.