My mother and I sift through old records, boxes of photos and forgotten jewelry. Bits of her grandmother Margaret Taggart’s life. A kindergarten graduation certificate, a marriage deed, an obituary clipped from a newspaper, yellowing at the edges. A string of fake pearls, a pair of white lace gloves, a little vile of holy water. Some army ration blankets, pressed flowers, an old navy cap. From these, we try to piece together a life we were rarely privy to. We try to trace our matrilineage, to learn what lessons lie in our blood.
Margaret Taggart was born in Alma, West Virginia in 1896. She survived in Appalachia until the bridge collapsed, until her brother died and she couldn’t bear the wreckage. And then she left. Each generation, as far back as I can track, runs and resettles. Back from Ohio to Gary, Indiana; Paris, Illinois; Kentucky; Alma; back to the northern Irish coast. From womb to womb, a curse or a spell is passed: the need to run and the desire to return.
I ask my grandfather what he knows about Alma. I’m going to Davis, West Virginia to find what I left in the hills years ago, after running there, drunk and paranoid. And I want to stop in Alma. I want to know if Margaret left something there too. My grandfather says Alma is a town that keeps to itself.
***
Drunk and paranoid, I ran to West Virginia. My time there comes back to me in whirls and snapshots, its context lost to time and drugs and the psychosis that would follow. It comes fragmented and begging to be pieced back together.
I remember naked bodies and drinking games. So high we spit on the floor and jumped off the balcony. I remember screaming and loving. Letting our toes go numb in the cold. I remember holding myself close and feeling myself empty. I remember a portrait, blobs of pink and green, mother and child. Letting an old lover hold me, tell me what we could’ve been. I remember deciding, for the first time, curled up on the bathroom floor, that I needed to find a home. To piece myself together. To settle and to mend.
After that trip, I lost all those I traveled with. An affair, an assault, a move. They’d be gone to me. And I’d fear something of me went with them.
* * *
Granny witches are Appalachian women who teach us how to mend ourselves. I imagine Margaret was one. I imagine she mixed our Celtic practice with Appalachian tradition. Each generation has something to teach the next, my mother says.
As a kid, I learned to pot jade in window sills. To pull mulberries off of trees and make Queen Anne’s tea. My mother taught me to jump over fire on the full moon. To lay with my butt against the wall and my feet overhead. To wash dogs in tepid water and suck the backs of honey clover. To thicken my blood and pray before each meal.
We take salvation in every form, my family does. From God or from the plants on our back door.
* * *
I’m going back to West Virginia to try to reclaim the bits of myself I’ve lost there. I’m sober then, late summer, and my life returns to me slowly, driving towards Davis. The trees shake with cicadas and spirits as I drive past billboards about Black Lung. Every restaurant has a poster about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Every highway on driving drunk. Something deep in me aches to rest, to lay amongst the boneset and yarrow on the highway’s shoulder.
Granny witches use hemlock to cure the pain of teething. Queen Anne’s Lace to cleanse the blood. They seem nearly identical to the untrained eye. Both span and flower delicately and thrive in neglect (freeways, waste sites, the forgotten edges of farmlands). But Hemlock is deadly. It carries a musk on the wind and a curse in its roots.
As I drive, I imagine myself born a few generations prior, living in every farmhouse I pass. I imagine a future iteration of myself chasing a daughter through the pasture. I imagine myself: the discarded boot on the side of the road.
Hemlock kills slowly. Like an overdose. It quickens the heart rate and stiffens the muscles. Steals speech. Thins and salts blood. Spins and lies flat. Hemlock is invasive in the Appalachian region. It was never meant to come here. But now it litters the fields, drying into hollow stalks and littering black seeds. It’s most lethal at its beginning and its end.
I drive with double vision. The past veiled thinly over the present. As I pass cliffs and rivers, images whirl back. Us, driving out to the cliffside before the sun rose. Walking through overgrowth, tripping over ourselves and laughing. Climbing over a fence, out onto a rockface. We sat. Held one another. Let out a gut clearing scream. An all consuming fog. We met two men from the Carolinas. Traded our acid for their weed and shrooms and then spent that night taking it all in the row home. It snowed for the first time that night. The trees twisted above us and I felt small and childlike, in the mix of things much too large for myself.
Queen Anne’s Lace came to West Virginia from Europe, much like my grandmothers before me. It naturalized, dug in its roots and made a home for itself. When it dies, it curls itself into a soft nest, offering sanctuary and protection to the Goldfinch and Grouse that carry its seeds.
* * *
Sarah Malloy came to Ohio from Donegal, Ireland in 1810. She was likely one of many refugees, fleeing the political upheaval and poverty that followed the Great Famine. My matrilineage begins with her arrival in the U.S. I can find no record of her life in Ireland, as if the moment she landed in America, her past ceased to exist.
What does it mean to naturalize? Or to invade? I doubt Sarah did either. Perhaps the spell begins with her need to flee. Passed to my great-grandmother’s grief. Or my grandmother’s divorce. My mother’s faith. To me. Somewhere along the way, our family failed to naturalize, to settle in and take root. So we run, one generation after the next, temporarily invading and deserting, place after place, always searching for home.
* * *
Davis changed while I was away. The stores reopened. The river thawed. The flowers bloomed. There’s ragweed and wild cabbage by the riverbank. When I was last here, I sat drunk by this river, warming my hands in my armpits and skidding rocks over ice.
Queen Anne’s Lace makes blood like tree sap, cleansing and thickening. It flushes both body and spirit, carrying away pain and uncovering what was once lost.
I take the town memory by memory. We got burritos here, wine there. Cried in one another’s arms and kissed in the Dollar General. We were all so young then.
Hemlock isn’t only lethal. It can stop a baby’s cry. A panic attack. A bout of mania. Healing is often born of a deadly thing.
And Davis has grown without us. I walk store to store. I stumble into an old gallery and meet an elderly woman who lives there, upstairs. She gifts me Hawthorn and Jade and shows me her garden. She once wrote children’s books, she said, made teddy bears out of people and walked her dog by the halfway house. I tell her I work with addicts now, people who’ve lost most everything, and she asks if it makes me sad. I tell her every once and awhile something so beautiful happens that none of the rest of matters.
Hemlock and Queen Anne’s Lace. We need them both. The hurting and the healing. The experience and the memory. They so often look the same.
I hike out to a waterfall, one I once stood under, screaming. I find it busy with life. Old couples walk their dogs, kids run up and down the forest steps, a young lady in a long skirt passes out bits of scripture. I stop on the path and take it all in. It’s beautiful here. Wild schefflera and aster crowd the path. Lichen kisses moss. Water rumbles down, crowds itself into an ever-growing lake. I am not the same person I was all those years ago.
* * *
My mother and I drink fire cider on Samhain, when the veil between the living and the dead is said to be thinnest. In Celtic practice, Samhain is rarely about evil spirits or ghosts. It’s about honoring the dead. I found Sarah Malloy’s mother, my mother tells me. She was named Sarah O’Connor. She stayed in Donegal when her daughter left.
Fire cider, like Queen Anne’s tea, thickens the blood, brings back memory. Perhaps the past never quite leaves us. Perhaps we can’t take root without honoring the past. Or maybe there was never a curse or a spell, but a wish, passed from mother to daughter, from womb to womb, that those who follow us may live a better life, a free life.
* * *
I drive through Alma on my way back home. I find little there but a one room church. Three pews and an open Bible on a red runner. For the first time in years, I kneel and pray, like Great-grandma Taggart would’ve liked me to.
In a hillside cemetery, I look for headstones. Searching for those who could’ve been relatives or past loves. There’s not a Taggart among them. But Queen Anne’s Lace and hemlock grow at the unkempt corners of the site, spanning and flowering. We take salvation as it comes.
–
Josephine Birdsell is a queer, nonbinary artist and essayist in recovery. Their mixed-media artwork and personal essays primarily deal with issues of queer and feminine liberation, life and sobriety in subculture, and rest and recovery in the face of trauma. They currently live in Columbus, Ohio.
© 2024, Josephine Birdsell
Halfway Down the Stairs 