The Legend of the Albino Farm

The Legend of the

Steve Yates

Unbridled Books

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events,or locales is entirely coincidental.

Unbridled Books

Copyright © 2017 by Steve Yates

All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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First Printing

Book Design by Peter D. Halverson

This book is for all my nieces,

especially for Lauren Grace,

who introduced me to Hettienne.

THE LEGEND OF THE ALBINO FARM

- 1 -

On the northern border of Springfield, Missouri, there once was a great house surrounded by emerald woods, lake, and meadow, a home place and farm that, to the lasting sorrow of its owners and heirs, acquired a nonsensical legend marring all memory of its glory days. The estate became known and is still known, if it is remembered at all, as the Albino Farm.

The legend, which began to circulate in town just after the Second World War, had no basis in anything like the truth. Albinos did not live on the farm. Never had. They certainly were never tortured there. No one ever was. And who in their right mind would hire an albino for a caretaker? A vast Irish Catholic family, the Sheehys, farmed on 330 acres and lived there in that thirteen-room mansion across the highway from Green Hills Cemetery. If they seemed pale, it was in the winter months. They were, even the women, strikingly tall, all with long faces. Aloof. Better than the rest of Springfield. And strange.

It was Hettienne that the Sheehys worried most about. The young girl had been vigorous, giddy, with fine and flowing blonde hair, and a penchant for any game that involved running and screaming. But when she turned thirteen, she suffered episodes of catatonia, somnambulism, and jags of mystifying talk. Lost in these fits, Hettienne saw what was coming for her family—a chaos, a curse, the legend that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

On the train with her parents in 1946, traveling down from Chicago for their annual summer visit to the Old Sheehy Place, she fretted. Beneath the tan sunlight lancing through the narrow windows, something was breaking open, she could sense it, like the rupture of peeling skin beneath which shone startling white flesh. This trip her legs cramped against tabletops. When she extended them, they jutted like two monstrous icicles.

As the dining car banged across trestles above the sparkling Osage River, a woman tottered around her with newspapers rolled under each arm and steaming coffee sloshing.

Sit up straight, her father whispered. Hettienne . . . John Sheehy paused and gave the apologetic traveler the flat hint of a smile, his lips tight as a stitch. Hettienne, he resumed once the woman passed, you may very well be the Last Sheehy.

Simon Sheehy ran the farm and household. And, sticking with tradition, all of Simon’s nine nieces and nephews—eight Ormonds and the one Sheehy child, Hettienne—returned to the thirteen-room sprawl of the farmhouse every summer. Maybe the trip exhausted her. But on the Feast Day of Saint Maelmuire O’Gorman, amid preparations for fireworks at the lake and plates of food streaming from the kitchen, Hettienne lost all connection with the joy and bustle around her. At dinner, her eyes capsized into a void. She stared so long at Cousin Lilliana Ormond that the toddler plunked her cornbread into her milk bowl, pointed, then wailed. When Hettienne did not relent, the toddler grew hysterical. The rest of the dinner table hushed. Bolting up like flushed quail, Agnes, Margaret, and Helen, the three spinster Sheehy aunts, murmured urgently.

Simon stepped behind Hettienne and placed both of his broad, knotted hands on her shoulders. All stilled along the dining table, down to the least Ormond cousin. All of you up! Help Agnes clear, Simon said. Dinner has ended. Children are excused.

Wide-eyed, they cleared, aunts whispering sharp instructions, frantic cousins slipping away to hide and watch. At last it was just Simon, her uncle James, and her father and mother there with Hettienne, the alarmed adults standing, the teen seated. How small her mother, Charlotte, seemed, dwarfed by redheaded Sheehy men. Behind them, casement windows flooded the dining hall with a green, swirling light.

Child, said Simon, tell me that you know where you are.

The whole dining hall, often gloomy as if its high ceiling were swallowed in a fog, glowed. Then all became a dazzling white, and she heard herself droning low: Up the Airy Mountain, down the Rushy Glen, / We daren’t go a-huntin’ for fear of little men.

At the table, decorated with its red, white, and blue tablecloth, for a long time the only sound was the simmering hiss of the wind passing through three willows that sheltered the house.

"Sídhe, Simon whispered. You have taught her the old legends, John?" he asked, his voice hinting at approval, one hand now stroking the poor girl’s head. Blonde, straight hair, from her mother, the first Sheehy ever to carry such a head of hair.

I don’t know what she means. It’s 1946. I’m not trying to make her more Irish.

Simon frowned. She’s read the poem somewhere, then?

She’s a very popular girl at Our Lady of the Angels, her mother inserted. No time for silly, blaspheming books. Tell your uncle, Hettienne.

When Hettienne did not answer, her father stepped forward and held a hand out to her. She took it and rose from her chair. She has been speaking in rhymes lately. Losing her concentration. Daydreaming. Turning, he pointed at her mother. Once we are back in Chicago, Mother will get her to a doctor.

- 2 -

That Hettienne could post to the correct diagonal so naturally in her stirrups and ride better and longer than any of her rural cousins was a constant source of chafing to them, especially considering Hettienne was from the great big city of Chicago. And even today, despite all this strangeness at dinner, Simon announced Hettienne was to ride the testy black colt, Questa Volta, the only thoroughbred on the farm. Though the cousins observed an instructive moment between Simon and Hettienne at the mounting stone, it was conducted in a whisper. She leaned into him, holding back all that yellow hair, which ought to have been braided or rolled up in a bun under a pinned hat. Instead she wore it loose beneath a man’s Hooligan driving cap twisted backward. In her white and flawless skin, in the hint of muscle at her shoulders and forearms, in her sure movements, round Ormond cousins could project and already envy a stunning, tall woman soon to be. She wore such citified riding gear—a white blouse, a tweed blazer, brown leather boots to mid-calf with hardly a crack. That long face, those icy blue Sheehy eyes. Simon gripped Hettienne’s knee with a steady confidence.

Cousin Johanna, who rode sidesaddle and tortured her poor old Morgan with all her extra pounds, marshaled her young Ormond sisters around her. The vast stone stable smelled of biting limestone, cedarwood, and last autumn’s hay. What if one of us throwed that fit? To be born a Sheehy! Johanna griped. The Ormond girls then all clamored for a leisurely ride to the lake while Cousin Johanna offered to recite the tale of Princess Emily and the Moan of Palamon. But damned if rather than a trot around the lake and waterfall, Simon and Hettienne headed the riding party straight for the oval racetrack.

On the dirt track, Simon, riding an old chestnut gelding, ordered Cousin David, on a young black filly, out across from him with a rope stretched between them. Far off at the start of the home stretch, Hettienne warmed up Questa Volta. The Ormond ladies groused in a knot. In Simon’s hand, the silver of the stopwatch gleamed.

At Simon’s nod, Cousin Hal dismounted and cupped his hand around the bell’s breast-like orb, then pulled the lanyard to test its muted clapper, brrrrrrippp! Simon nodded. Hooking two fingers at his lips, he let tear a hunter’s whistle. Then he waved his hat to Hettienne and circled it around his head. Hettienne pranced to them on Questa Volta.

David. Hal, Simon said as Questa Volta approached the taut rope, which now became a starting line across the dirt track. The colt was so muscled that watching his hide move was like staring at the transformations in the raw charcoal of beams razed by fire.

When the black colt steadied behind the rope, Simon raised the silver stopwatch. With a click of his thumb, he brought the watch down in a silver flash. Hal pulled the bell. Simon and David dropped the rope. At the rip of the bell, Questa Volta lunged. In no time, the colt and Hettienne were full out, shooting toward the first turn, then shrinking to a distant dust boil along the back side of the dirt oval, hand riding, the horse taking all the ground it wanted.

Straightening in the homestretch, she coaxed, and Questa Volta switched leads without any hauling. David’s and Hal’s faces both went blank; the Ormond girls all sullenly tucked their chins to their collarbones. Simon straightened his shoulders and in that moment seemed to shed decades.

In her hand, the riding crop flashed. She showed it to the colt, popped it once hard to Questa Volta’s black rump. Then suddenly, as she brought the crop forward and back to snap the leather with all the volume but none of the sting, a slip. A scramble. And the crop tumbled to the ground. All gasped but Johanna. And she braced up her posture and smugly waited for the worst to unfold.

Yet Hettienne crouched and urged with the horse, rocking, elbows sometimes up around its ears, the reins flourished as if she might cast them like ribbons of lightning. The horse, crop or not, found its second gear, blowing: pluh, ppluh, pppluh, ears forward.

Simon raised the watch high. The colt’s stretched nose, neck, and then Hettienne crossed the finish line. Clasped to the colt’s back, she rowed her arms onward again. The colt seemed not to touch the dirt but floated. Though they all knew the vision impossible from the pounding of hooves, there it floated: A black streak, a white rider flashing by.

Simon consulted the watch while Hal and David eyed him in wonder. Simon scowled at them, then coldly scanned the Ormond girls fanning themselves at the rail. Now, that, Simon said to all, is a Sheehy. Standing to her full height in the stirrups, Hettienne rode Questa Volta to them, jouncing sideways as if the all-out run on the farm’s only thoroughbred had been no effort at all.

Though everyone scoured the dirt track for the bobbled riding crop, the heat forced their surrender and withdrawal, and its loss was but a minor disappointment.

Riding back to the stable alongside his Sheehy niece, Simon told her and the Ormonds The Tale of the Sickbed of Chuchulain and how Sheehy ancestors at combat tournaments sang ballads of all the foes they had slaughtered and claimed proof of each victory by cutting off the tip of a bested opponent’s tongue. From a leather pouch strung around the neck of a Sheehy warrior, these bits of gristle were brandished at high points during a triumphant song, the legends of the vanquished clearly the property of the victor.

As Simon went on, Hettienne slowed Questa Volta to ride beside glum Johanna. She leaned to Johanna with a wink. How’s that for a tale of yore, Cuz?

Never yet bested, Johanna stuck out her tongue. Then, from behind her back, she brought Hettienne’s dusty riding crop. She wobbled it. Drop something? Cuz?

After hot walking and washing the colt with Hettienne, Simon ordered his dearest niece to minister the white analgesic liniment, Roy Boy. This she did with the care and drama of an acolyte at an altar despite the nervous eyes of the Hungarian groom and the riveted focus of Simon. The two men monitored the girl’s long arms and graceful fingers dipping into the crock of Roy Boy and salving the thoroughbred’s legs white. The colt gave only a shiver and a stamp.

Johanna, smoldering, turned away to walk her horse to the stables alone.

- 3 -

In the dead of night, Aunt Agnes found Hettienne in a chemise and boxers standing before the open icebox, arms dripping wet, mouth agape, and eyes like saucers. Puddles of water trembled around the child’s bare feet. Agnes called the girl’s full name, Hettienne Ellery Sheehy. No reaction. A still, white streak in the musty dark of the kitchen ell. Agnes spat upon the floorboards at her niece’s bare feet, then made the sign of the cross. The instant she finished with the Holy Spirit, she clutched her dressing gown up at her hips and rushed to fetch James, her heart as frantic as a sparrow in a fist. James had studied sleepwalking and had, in fact, brought Simon to safety many times.

Oh, Hell, said James in a whisper on seeing his niece. Agnes released his hand, then smacked his knuckles. Remember, James whispered, the pain of growing that fast?

Agnes’s lips puckered. I remember the switch. My back’ll soon remember the mop and bucket!

Tell no one, James said, then held his finger to his lips for a long while to be clear. Last thing we want’s for her mother to fly into a rage and take her forever from us.

Bitch! spit Agnes.

Yes, but the girl’s mother as well.

   Hettienne did not come down to family breakfast—a breach unless gravely ill. Young Ormond cousins whispered and wondered. Johanna smarted most from this unprecedented privilege and became so wound up that David at last asked, "How do you know she isn’t ill, heifer? The Ormond children landed at the table in a foul mood. Agnes was in a muddle, dropping plates, leaving milk to scald at the back of the stove. Simon kept an eye on them all, tense and silent. A memorable breakfast, Helen Sheehy remarked once the spinsters were shut in the kitchen. For unknown reasons."

With the meal cleared, the three spinster sisters were nibbling and gossiping in the kitchen amid the leftovers and dirty dishes when Hettienne entered from the back ell, dressed for riding, her hat in her hand and her hair woven in a bun, of which all three spinsters instantly approved.

I’ll be direct, snapped Margaret Sheehy. Helen and Agnes moved in echelon behind her. In their long brown dresses, they appeared to Hettienne as human approximations of the round-bodied, drab female wigeons bustling on Lake Michigan. Just what is the meaning of all this, young lady?

Hettienne bowed her head but could not stop the emotion flooding her. I love you all so very much, she whispered, her voice quaking. For all her summers, all the blazing months away from Chicago in the paradise of the Sheehy farm among family, she had been their infallible favorite, the one Sheehy child. She knew her episodes made for a confusing, alarming disappointment.

I’m so sorry to have caused all this trouble. She covered her face with her hands.

The kitchen smelled of live yeast, flour, bacon, peppery sausage gravy, and cantaloupe. Hettienne cupped all those soothing smells to her.

Like a flock, the three sisters nestled forward, and their long arms swooped around her shoulders and waist.

She let them lower her hands, and Margaret then lifted Hettienne’s chin. Oh, dear child. We sisters agree. This staring, this rhyming, the gaps. It is just manifestations of the change. Her voice dropped to a low whisper. From girl to woman. Sheehys change hard.

The spinsters all nodded.

Agnes, I swear, sent the moon awry, said Aunt Helen.

Not at all ready for the circle into which she had just been admitted, Hettienne shuddered. I’m hungry, she managed. Lightning fast, fried potatoes, sausage, milky coffee, and the remains of a pyramid of melon balls—orange, green, and red—flashed before her. The sisters