I'm a racist white,

I'm a sexist male,

I'm a stupid American,

I'm a spoiled millenial,

I'm too young to understand,

I'm an uncultured redneck,

- - -

I'm human like you,

I live on the same planet,

I was born in the same century,

I've got time to learn,

I grew up close to nature,

Perspective is everything when using labels

I knock on the ornate, oaken door, with more than a hint of uncertainty.

“Come In. Come In. It is not locked.”

As I open the door to enter, not quite knowing what to expect, my senses are awashed with the scents of varying spices. Sage and nutmeg. Thyme and mint. It smells better than the kitchens of the castle.

I see a young woman sitting at a table, crushing some dry herbs with her fingers. She was more lovely than I expected, although I was not sure what I was expecting. She looks up at me and gives me an earthy smile, perhaps the most sincere one I have ever seen. “So, what are you seeking stranger, for I am positive I do not know you?”

“I have been told, you are gifted with potions and balms and such.”

“You have been told correctly. Do you have a grave injury?” she asks with a twinkle in her eye, as if she knows already I am not there for a balm.

“Just a heart that aches, for someone beyond my station’s reach. I was wondering how much a potion of love costs?”

“What is your name, young man?”

“Henry. Named after the Earl of Richmond at the time and now is the king. My family has served his House for decades.”

“Ahhh...a strong name tied to a strong man. You do not want what you seek though. For one, there is no such thing and before you say you have heard otherwise, I will explain. Does this woman you fancy shown you any hint of infatuation toward you? There is not a potion for love. Love either exists or does not. However...there are potions to either speed it along or make it impossible to resist.”

“She is always kind to me. And she always blushes and smiles sweetly when I fumble my words around her.”

“Henry, it would be wise to leave it at that. Enjoy your dreams, enjoy your life. Trust me, chasing after a love that crosses station will always lead to heartbreak,” she suddenly looks wistful and far away.

“But if…”

The witch suddenly eyes the crucifix that hangs from my neck. “The folly you seek costs greatly. Do you have such coin?”

I drop my purse on her table. She opens it and laughs, “Henry. Forget this foolishness. Find a nice girl, make a nice family, live a nice life.” She tosses my purse of meager wealth back to me.

“There is no one else. She has captured my heart.”

She gives a resigned sigh looking at my cross, “Would you pay for such a potion with your death?”

“My death?”

“Your passage to heaven.”

I feel crestfallen, “I try to live a holy life. I do not want to go to hell. I am sorry for wasting your time.”

“Oh, only you can decide if you go there. I just said, you won’t go to heaven, not right away.”

“Are you saying I would be stuck on earth as a ghost then?”

“No, but you may be haunted years from now for what you are about to do.”

“I will live with being haunted if I can taste her love now.”

“So be it.”

~~~

I lie in a secluded glade with my love, my duchess. My heart swells as she drops the last of her garments. Her beauty is without question. It seems a crime that she should ever be covered. Yet, knowing I am one of the few to see her this way. To know she loves me, that I just sped it along and broken the barrier of our stations for this…

“Gustav! Wake up!”

I rub my eyes, the image of the beautiful duchess naked already starts to fade from my mind. I look down at the book I have been scribing in. I ruined the last page falling asleep in my work.

“The abbot wants to see you. He is curious how you are coming with your translations.”

I look down at my translation of an accounting of Gustav III’s Russian War and think to myself, not well obviously. I wonder if I will ever get to work on bigger, more important things. I wonder if I will ever stop being haunted by some English duchess that is most likely a figment of my cloistered imagination.

~~~

I cannot stop the tears from flowing down my face.

“I cannot run away with you Henry, as much as my heart wants to,” she says as she absently strokes the swell of her belly. “I am to be married to a lord I have laid with after finding out I was carrying your child. It is not a match my father would of picked, and I know my future husband will only lust me, never love me. But, our son will have a life you would never be able to give him…”

I am losing my love, and my child that I will never know.

I wake with a fevered sweat and a lurch in my heart.

“Frank! Thank God you are awake. I did not think you would make it through the night. I brought the Mohegan medicine man, as you asked.”

I tried to focus on the medicine man, he looks at me with a serious stare.

“I cannot fix how closely tied your spirit is to the earth, but I can make your fever go away,” say the native that I had only met one other time.

The chills come when he takes my face in his hands, but it pales to the coldness of the dream of the feeling of losing a child to be raised by another.

~~~

I look upon my lost love and the little girl that is in her tow. My heart breaks all over again. My daughter and my love.

“My dear Henry, you look well. I...needed to see you before we leave court. I wanted you

to have a chance to see her, in private one last time.”

I look upon my daughter, she has the look of her mother, thank God. But, this little girl looks back at me with my eyes…

I look in the mirror and for a moment imagine a little girl’s eyes staring back at me. I shake the cobwebs from my ancient head. I walk back to the chair and pick up the book on William III’s war, feeling that within a few years the colonies will be drowning in war as well. I hope my aging body is dead before I see it happen.

~~~

I look at my wife and think to myself that I do not deserve her love. Especially when my thoughts always drift back to my first love and my daughter. Soon I will be a father for true, not just by seed. I hope my love for this new child is as grand as the love for a daughter I’ve only held once...

I wake to gunfire. Mr. Madison’s War has finally reached my homestead. I leave my bedroom and see my daughter crying in fear in the hallway. I lean down and hug her fiercely, cannot help but to recall a hug that seems from another life.

“Abigail, it’ll be ok. Go to my room and sit with momma.”

I am filled with fear as I load my pistol. I am hoping the soldiers knocking at my door are American soldiers. I wonder if I’ve hugged my daughter for the last time before I open the door to meet my destiny.

~~~

My son and I visit his mother’s grave. His eyes are filled with tears mine are filled with a different sort of sorrow, for she never got to hold her son alive. He has her soul though, her eyes, and seems to be cursed with my sense of the romantic. He should not mourn so much for a woman he never knew. Perhaps he mourns all of the what-ifs. I know how those thoughts taste like ash.

I kiss Abigail’s soft lips, aching that I cannot go with her. I look deeply in her brown eyes for the last time, I take in her coffee colored skin that matters not to me. Or perhaps, it means everything to me. I know my father would kill me if he found out I was part of the underground, part of smuggling slaves to their freedom. He would flay me senseless if he knew my heart belonged to this girl. I cannot help wonder what our life might be like if I decided to run with her. But, there are so many more I need to try to save. I kiss her one last time, wondering what if, as I feel her tears mix with my own.

~~~

I bury my son, his wife, and their daughter next to my wife. I have no more tears to shed for them. Plague has claimed their lives and I feel so alone. I cannot help but wonder after my daughter and if her life has been good and kind and safe from sickness, safe from me.

“Yep. I was born on the eve of the Civil War and it feels like I am going to die as the world goes to hell!” I say, tossing the king of hearts on the table.

“Don’t be so dramatic, Jon. We still have years left. I am sure we will be around well after the world been through hell!”, David replies, tossing in the queen.

“Well, if I were sixty years younger, I would love to kick Hitler right in the ass,” counters Al, as he tossed in the ace.

“As would I,” replies David with disgust as he loses another hand.

“As would I,” I say, thinking back to the family I lost to smallpox sixty years before and thinking how easy it would have been then to go off to war.

~~~

I offer the last person communion during the Mass. I have been in a daze the entire time. My thoughts on all the people I’ve lost, all I’ve cursed. Giving myself fully to God after burying my son and his family. The priesthood has given me purpose, if not direction.

I stumble into the hotel room, high as a kite and drawn to the girl’s honeyed laugh or perhaps wanting to dip into the honey I know she has between her legs. The more I have dreams of ancient priesthood and woe of lost, the more I drown myself in drugs and drink and promiscuous sex.

She pushes me onto the bed, she is nearly as high as I am, “What is your name again?” she asks.

“Henry, my name is Henry.”

She giggles, “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Henry!” and she lowers herself upon me, letting me feel just how warm her honey is.

I get lost in this stranger’s lust, almost forgetting how much woe a soul can bear. Almost.

~~~

As soon as I see her, I know it is my daughter. I see my eyes staring back at me and I thank God that mine are so old and starting to dim that she doesn’t recognize mine back.

“Father, I...need to confess a secret.”

“Confession is usually done in anonymity, child.”

“You are a man of God, should I not trust you not to judge?”

“You are wise. Perhaps your secret is not so bad.”

“My mother...told me the father that I grew up knowing, is not my own. That the only royal blood is hers. That she loved a servant a long time ago. That she never stopped loving him.”

My heart catches and flutters to life as if it were dead all this time, “I...see. When did your mother tell you this?”

“On her deathbed. Shortly before my husband brought us back to here to join the court. How do I tell him? How do I share that shame of my bastardy? The sin of my past.”

My throat tightens, I try to keep the tears from spilling. “My dear. This is not your sin. Has your life not had value? Has the love for the only father you have known suddenly diminished? Your mother made a choice to raise you as you have been raised. The burden was hers. Live your life. Let your children live theirs. I cannot forgive you, because you did nothing wrong.”

“But…”

I hold up my hand to silence her, “Would God have given you life, if He felt the act that created you was a sin? Any sins were carried by your mother and your birth father.”

“Thank you, Father!” and with that, she hugs me and for the second time in my long life, I hold my daughter again, and I have no way of telling her who I really am. The joy and the woe of the moment is almost too much to handle. Still, I whisper a silent prayer of thanks for the gift of it.

I knock on the door, feeling a bit silly for doing so. I am nearing my 44th year, I have a wife and children and am happy.

“The door is open, come right in.”

The woman on the other side is dressed as I would expect, in a bohemian style, looking too much like a gypsy. I already regret walking through the door.

“So, how can I help you?” asks the woman.

“Well, I keep having dreams of a sort. Vivid dreams of lives of long ago. The are haunting me. They are too real. I have tried doctors to help...”

“...but how can doctors help you with dreams that are really memories, right?”

“I didn’t say…”

“Do you doubt it? Do you doubt you have lived these other lives? I can see how your spirit is anchored to the earth in ways few are.”

“Is there anything that can be done?”

“I cannot do anything about the dreams. They are your memories. Memories should not be forgotten.”

“In the memories of the first life that I remember, I went to see a witch, for a potion. She said I would give up heaven.”

“It appears that you have.”

“Is there anyway to get it back? Is there any way to make sure this is my last life.”

“Perhaps all you need to do is live this life as yours. Do not burden it with the choices you made in the past ones. Perhaps share with me the tales of the others, or at least the first that started this path.”

I share the tale of Henry and his love. She listens contently, she weeps the further I go into it. She smiles bittersweetly at the ending.

The medium stares at me for a long while before she asks, “Would you believe me if I told you I was a descendant of a duke and duchess at the time of Henry VII? Would you believe me that a rumored story carried down from mother to daughter, from that day to this, that we were only descendants to the duchess? The duke only by name, not by blood.”

I look into the eyes of the medium, as if I am noticing for the first time. She has eyes as green as the sea. She has eyes just like Henry’s eyes. She has eyes just like mine.

I smile, knowing that Henry’s love led eventually to this woman. “I just might. Can I ask, have you had a good life?”

“Actually, the best! And it just got a whole lot sweeter, especially since in a round about way, I should be thanking you for it.” she smiles, a faint reflection of a duchess Henry always loved.

These words that I have written,

Are merely the fallen seeds

Of a fruit…

Nurtured and Ripened

Upon a single branch

Of an enormous tree.

Thank you for planting me,

Giving me strong roots,

And for pushing me up…

For without you, I would not be.

As you are

Both my Earth and my Sun.

All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 1986-2017. Alan Salé

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