Tecumseh
By Tidia & MOG, May 2006
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Chapter 11/18
Visible shafts of afternoon sunlight filtered down through fading
clouds and warmed the interior of the car. Sam gratefully accepted the
change in the spring weather. He was still trying to shake the memory
of his experience in the mission that morning, and the buried emotions
it brought to the surface. Sitting in the passenger’s seat, he slowly
ate a peach and focused on Dean’s phone call as a way of redirecting
his thoughts.
“Hey, Frankie, it’s Dean….yeah, Dean…yeah, I do sound the same over the
phone.”
Sam tried not to laugh but he received a dark look all the same.
“Listen, we’re looking to get some directions. We’re at a fruit stand,
close to Road C and North 4525…yeah, that’s the one. Those three little
girls, where are they buried?” He listened quietly and Sam imagined his
brother mentally noting directions.
Dean began nodding and Sam quickly recognized his brother’s familiar,
impatient frown – Frankie was on a stream of consciousness tangent.
Dean finally cut in.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. Glad you got some afternoon delight…No, no,
dude, TMI. I gotta go, okay? Later.”
Dean hit the disconnect button and scowled at the smirk coloring Sam’s
face; however, it did not prevent Sam from tossing some of his
brother’s earlier words back at him. “What’s wrong, Dean, a little
senior love got you freaked?”
The older Winchester’s only answer was starting the car and pulling
onto the road. “Crown Hill Cemetery. It’s about 20 miles east of here,
off the main road as we’re heading out of town.”
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The driver’s side door of the Impala creaked when Dean pushed it
closed. The cemetery sat on a small rise overlooking U.S. 70, but only
semis and a handful of cars cruised the long stretch of road. Their
droning sounds blended with the breeze to create a peaceful white noise.
Sam was already out of the car, walking ahead. “This is the same
conversation of the last twenty-five minutes.”
Dean didn’t try to catch up. He followed behind his brother as they
walked the short gravel road into the cemetery. “All I’m pointing out
is - they make a living doing this. I mean, did you see that rig? Yeah,
they’re doing pretty well for themselves.”
Sam turned around and briefly walked backwards as he addressed his
brother. “Dude, they travel all around the U.S. They were going to
England.”
“So?” Dean finally caught up, prompting Sam to turn forward again.
“You don’t like to fly.”
Dean exhaled sharply. “For 100 grand I can get over it.”
Sam stopped and scanned the standing headstones for the marker that
Dean said Frankie described. His brow furrowed.
“That’s disgusting.”
“What?” Dean looked to the ground, expecting to see something he should
avoid stepping in.
Sam pointed to just outside the low fence at the far end of the
graveyard. “A cell phone tower next to a cemetery.”
Dean squinted at the tower, then surreptitiously dug in his pocket. He
glanced down at his phone. “Hey, look at that - four bars. I had to
stand in Ben’s kitchen, facing the refrigerator, before I got a signal
at his place.”
Sam closed his eyes briefly but chose not to say anything. He pointed
to a small angel atop a granite marker in the corner of the cemetery.
“That must be it.”
The headstone was two feet by one foot, a simple stone block that had
been cut larger than many of the other markers in order to accommodate
more than one name. The angel statue held her arms wide, as if to
accept the children into her embrace. Sam couldn’t help but think that
the girls’ rest was far from peaceable.
He pulled a pen and a small pad of paper from his inside jacket pocket
and squatted down beside the marker. Weathering and neglect had worn
down the edges of the engraved words. Some letters seemed almost flush
with the face of the stone.
Dean shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans and watched his
brother try to catch the memorial in just the right light in order to
read it.
“It’s tough to make out,” said Sam. “ ‘In God’s arms’. Then it looks
like their names - Marie Orie…Beverly Seale…and Paul? Oh, Paula
Menchu.” He wet the tip of one finger and rubbed it across a lower
section of the stone marker. “There’s a date, looks like May 17th,
1912.”
He carefully copied the information to his notepad. Behind him, he
sensed Dean wandering slowly away. There were times when Sam wondered
how Dean’s impatience would have served him in the real work-a-day
world.
Sam listened with half an ear as Dean spoke softly. “Hey, check it out.
It’s one of those mouse-rabbit things again, like what was in
Scarlett’s yard. See it? Back there.”
“I’m kinda doing something right now.”
“Uh, Sammy…”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Just use your phone to take a picture of it. We
can show it to--”
“Forget that. Look at this.”
Sam finished writing and looked over his shoulder to where Dean stood,
studying a gravestone near the fence. His brother’s demeanor had
changed and Sam went to see what he was looking at. Dean read aloud the
inscription on the marble stone.
“Florence Blackburn, age 12. ‘Taken too early’. Died May 17th, 1913.”
The brothers exchanged a glance before wordlessly separating and
scanning other headstones.
“Got one over here,” called Sam. “Ruth Rose Gehrig. ‘Beloved Child.
Returned to God’. May 17th, 1914.” He looked at her birth year and
calculated her age. “She was ten years old.”
Dean’s eyes swept the various grave markers as he moved down the rows
of the small cemetery. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered, then spoke loud
enough for Sam to hear. “Helen Mary Karl, 1916. Age 12.”
Sam found the final one near the entrance. Dean joined him and stared
at the engraving on the yellowed marble as his brother read.
“Mary Elizabeth Cohan. ‘Born of God’s breath, Returned by God’s
waters.’ May 17th, 1915. She would have been nine.” Sam looked at Dean.
“What’s going on?”
Dean shook his head. “Ya got me. There’s a newer cemetery, close to
town. We drove past it when I was bringing you to Ben’s. ”
Sam nodded. “Let’s go.”
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The Winchester’s were not surprised by what they found in the second
graveyard - the headstones of young girls, some years unaccounted for,
but the same month and day.
Dean yelled to Sam, “Hey, did you find anything later than 1954?”
Sam jogged to his brother. “Jeez, man, could you be a little quieter?”
Dean spread his arms. “Sammy, look around. I’m not waking anybody up.”
Sam sighed. “No, nothing after ‘54. You know, it might be worth it to…”
His voice trailed off and he slapped Dean several times in the arm.
Dean’s focus was directed toward re-reading the closest grave markers
and, without looking, he brushed off Sam’s hand. “What? Cut it out.”
Sam tugged hard at the sleeve of Dean’s coat until his brother turned
to look.
“Whoa,” whispered Dean. A tingling sensation crawled up his arms and
across the back of his neck.
A few rows away, a semi-opaque ball of pale yellow light slowly floated
in mid-air. From their distance, Dean judged it to be approximately the
size of a large grapefruit. It moved on a bobbing trajectory toward the
middle of the graveyard.
“Always heard about people seeing orbs in cemeteries,” said Dean in a
hushed tone. When the orb hovered above one headstone, he glanced at
his brother. “We gonna check it out?”
Sam shrugged, he didn’t sense anything malevolent. He walked towards
the grave marker with Dean following behind. However, as they
approached the grave, Dean adjusted his pace to move himself between
his younger brother and the orb.
The shimmering ball hung in the air at eye level, moving around them in
a figure eight. “Hold still,” Sam stated. “It’s not going to hurt us.”
“He said, just before the glowy thing killed them….” Dean muttered. A
second later he heard a soft, echoing voice, throaty and feminine.
‘Ne-noth'tu…Maya'musigi skweta…’
Dean looked at Sam, but his brother seemed only to be aware of the
orb’s hypnotic glow and movement. The voice came again - around him,
yet in his head at the same time.
‘The Warrior and the Seer…’
The orb held still for a few seconds, then dissipated, leaving no sign
that it was ever there.
“Did you hear that?” Dean asked.
“What?”
Dean looked around. “You didn’t hear anything just now?”
Sam repeated his brother’s searching action, but saw nothing. “No.
Should I have?”
Dean shook his head. “Never mind. It’s nothing.”
Sam didn’t pursue it, choosing instead to direct Dean’s focus downward.
“Did you notice the name?”
The marble gravestone in front of them marked the burial plot of three
family members. The surname carved into the stone was familiar to them
both - Metis.
Sam crouched down and touched the third name etched in the marker.
“Check this out – Louise Ann Metis, May 17th, 1921.”
Dean shrugged. “Frankie never said anything about her. Maybe they
aren’t related?”
“We should ask him,” Sam said, looking over the names again.
“After lunch.” Dean was trying to convince himself that he’d only
imagined the orb speaking to him, that it was actually just hunger
talking. Low blood sugar bringing on auditory hallucinations that spoke
a foreign language.
“I want more than soup this time,” Sam stated, as he stood. He hadn’t
stopped thinking about the porterhouse that he’d been forbidden to
have. His throat was still sore, but he had no interest in a liquid
lunch.
“That steak sure was good last night…” Dean teased, while they walked
back to the cemetery’s parking lot.
“I wouldn’t know. Your friend the doctor made me eat soup.”
Dean shook his head as they reached the car and climbed in. “Yeah,
okay, Sammy…you’re on to us. I told Ben not to let you have the steak.”
He shot his brother a hard look. “Two days ago you couldn’t swallow
water! But, no, you’re right…it’s all a conspiracy - the cows were in
on it too.”
Dean pulled out of the parking lot and headed for a small diner that
had caught his eye that morning. They rode in silence for only a minute
before Sam spoke.
“So now cows are talking to you?” he asked, a small grin played across
his lips. “You and Uncle Frankie sharing the peyote?”
“Shut up. We get something to eat and then go talk to Frankie.”
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Between the increasing warmth from the afternoon sun and a stomach full
of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Sam felt good with his place in the
universe. He allowed himself to doze off during the drive to Frankie’s.
The slamming of the driver’s side door startled him awake. By the time
he’d gotten his bearings and looked around, Dean was waiting for him by
Frankie’s front door. Climbing slowly from the car, Sam felt the weight
of his sickness clinging to him. He ran a hand down his face and met up
with Dean, who was knocking none too softly on the screen doorframe of
the single-story home.
“I’m coming!”
The main door swung inward and Frankie stared at them for a second.
“Aw, you’re not front door company. Come around back.”
Dean and Sam watched speechlessly as the door closed and they were left
standing by themselves.
“Around back, I guess,” said Dean.
“Looks like.”
Against the back of the house, a gas kitchen stove had been installed.
A ten-gallon stainless steel pot sat on top. The lid was clamped on
with nearly 35 small, black binder clips and a two-foot copper pipe was
mated to it with, what looked like, a modified, upside down kitchen
sink drain and a slip-nut. The pipe rose up from the middle of the lid
and had two other, narrower, copper tubes dipping down from it.
Frankie was reading a thermometer that jutted from the main pipe and
scribbling something down in a battered notebook.
“What is that?” asked Sam, while they were still out of Frankie’s
earshot.
“That’d be a still,” Dean replied casually.
“Aren’t they illegal?”
“Here in Oklahoma? Yeah, probably.” Dean tossed a wave as Frankie
looked up. “Hey, who’s Louise Metis?”
Frankie stopped working on the still and pulled off his aviator
glasses. “You met Great Aunt Louise! How did she look?”
“Good,” Dean answered, then made a vague round shape with his hands as
he continued, “as a…shiny, orby thing.”
Frankie looked contemplative as he gestured for the boys to sit at a
weathered, wooden picnic table. “Sounds better than when I saw her
last. That time she was kind of a white mist near the hall closet.
Scared the crap out of me.”
He stared at an unseen spot in the distance and shook his head. “You
know, I just thought , the Metis clan, we’re cursed like the
Kennedy’s…only better looking.”
Sam interrupted Frankie’s odd thought before he could drift off on a
tangent. “So she is related to you?”
Frankie sat down next to him, forcing him to move over. “My grandfather
said she was fifteen when she died – drowned, or so they say.”
“Maybe not,” Dean commented. He refrained from speculating until he and
Sam could learn more.
Frankie drummed out a slow rhythm on the table with the fingers of his
right hand. “This is turning into an interesting article for you
boys…am I getting a cut of the action?”
Dean laughed sarcastically. “I think Scarlett is already paying for
your services.”
“Jeez, you make me sound like some kind of gigolo.” Frankie elbowed Sam
mischievously, but was studying Dean. “So what did she say to you?”
“Who?” Dean asked. Frankie didn’t miss the younger man’s uncomfortable
expression.
“Whaddya mean who? Great Aunt Louise. And don’t tell me ‘nothing’
because that girl always has something to say. Yeah, sure, it’s only a
word or two, but I’d give my best batch of gin if she’d quit waking me
up in the middle of the night just to whisper something prophetic and
then fade away. Takes me half a god-damned hour to fall back asleep.”
Dean steered around the topic of a glowing orb speaking to him and
redirected the line of questioning to focus on the girls at the
mission. “I heard something in the mission…mat-ou-oui-sah elene.”
Frankie’s bushy eyebrows knitted together. “You’re sure?”
“Dude, when the voice of a disembodied little girl whispers something
to you – you remember.”
“It’s Shawnee…it means bad man.”
Sam perked up from his slouched position of leaning on his arm. “I
thought Scarlett said the girls were Cherokee?”
“Scarlett says a lot of things. But to be fair - back then, when the
murders happened, those white people in charge wouldn’t have been able
to tell a Native American from a Chinese holyman. Those words are
Shawnee. I damn well don’t speak Cherokee.” Frankie stood up, stretched
and glanced down at Dean. “So…I was asking if Great Aunt Louise said
anything to you?”
Dean ran the tip of his tongue along his bottom lip and did his best to
look innocent under Frankie’s steady gaze.
“Not a thing, man.” Dean looked to his brother, grateful to see Sam
only yawning and not reading anything into Frankie’s persistence.
“Listen, we’re calling it a day. Sammy needs to rest up and I still owe
Ben some more yard work.”
Frankie nodded knowingly and patted Dean on the shoulder. He looked
skyward as the boys headed for their car.
“So you can talk to a complete stranger in the middle of the day, but
you have to wait till 2 a.m. to speak to me?”
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