One Minute Past Midnight

The great-grandmother alternated pacing and sitting in her rocker threatening to wear two rocker-shaped holes in the wooden floor. Her eyes were red from the crying and she twisted the small cloth clutched in her hands back and forth until her wrists hurt. She muttered in a sing-song voice that would have led any eavesdropper to think she was casting spells. Indeed, perhaps she was.

Certainly, if she could, she would cast a spell so that the baby about to be born would wait just one more day. She was terrified that her new great-granddaughter would be born on the Irish holiday. Although St. Patrick was a Christian Saint, and not even Irish, truth-be-told, the holiday that celebrated him was the biggest celebration of the Emerald Isle in the United States.

It wasn’t Patricus the Druid-Killer that she was afraid of. No, it was something much more ancient. Wasn’t it true that those who reveled in Paddy’s memory paid attention and tribute to the Leprechauns? What about the Bean sí? No! This child must be born after this day had passed!

She was an old woman, and there was nobody she could talk to who would understand. She told her daughter and granddaughter to pray, but neither had seemed to take her seriously. Perhaps if they knew the truth of their blood-line, they would also be afraid.

After what seemed like hours pacing and rocking, the great-grandmother padded into her kitchen and put on the kettle. Her family had hailed from Lincolnshire in the east of England and though she had been born in the Dakotas in the mid-1880s, her family had still enjoyed a restorative cup of tea. Tonight she really needed one.

Tea brewed, the great-grandmother stirred in cream and sugar, then wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and turned her rocking chair to face the window. The clocked on the mantle ticked loudly. Time was passing, but it was still light outside. Time was not passing quickly enough.

She sat back in the rocker and sipped her tea as she waited for the light outside to shift into evening. Alone in the quiet, she slipped into reminiscence…

She was eighteen again, meeting the man she was to marry in the small prairie town where she had been born. He was a new arrival, having traveled from Minnesota in search of a farm of his own. Her father owned the general store in town. She was helping out on a Saturday. She spent weekdays at the small grammar school where she taught. Surely, it was Providence which brought him into the store on the only day she would be present.

They were married the next year after he had purchased a small farm on the outskirts of town. A year later, she was expecting their first child. Her daughter would be the only child she bore, for once she knew the truth of her husband’s heritage, she would not give him another child.

He told her when the baby was about six months old. He had come in from the fields for dinner that night wearing a strangely sad smile and had a curious wild look about his eyes. He walked into the kitchen hat in hand. After hanging both the hat and his coat on the stand in the corner, he touched her shoulder as she placed the butter on the table next to the fresh bread which she had sliced moments before.

Taken by surprise, she looked up at him with a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“Sweetheart,” he began. She heard a sort of desperation in his voice. “Sweetheart, I…”

She could see his Adam’s apple move up and down as he swallowed. “I, well, I must go to the river, and soon. I have little time before…before…”

She looked at him curiously. “Before what?” Her voice trembled. She did not feel as if he simply wanted to catch trout.

“Sit down, dear,” he said tremulously. “I must tell you something. Something I should have told you before we married, before we had the little one.”

“What is it? Tell me!”

Then he had told her an incredible story. It was unbelievable, until he provided proof.

His family had emigrated from Scotland where they had lived in the Lowlands near a river. His father’s family had been in a position of prominence from the 12th century until just two generations before his father’s birth. They fell on hard times, losing their lands and the fortune that had once been theirs. In order to support his family his great-grandfather had become a fisherman who sold fresh fish at markets in small communities in Scotland and northern England. He traveled between communities fishing the waters and carrying his catch into the nearest town to sell.

The fisherman had a son and a handful of daughters. As the son grew older, he began to travel with his father, learning the trade and coming to understand the elements of business. It was on one of these trips that her husband’s grandfather met the woman he would marry, and who would bear him the children who would carry the bloodline forward in time.

The woman was no ordinary woman, however. After they had married, he discovered that she was a shapeshifter of a sort he had never heard of. There was no real name for what she was. The closest beings to what she was that had a name was a Selkie.

Selkies are shapeshifters who are sometimes human and seals at other times. They lived in the rivers, lochs, and along the ocean’s edge, sometimes getting captured by humans seeking fortune. It was simple enough to catch a Selkie when they were in human form — just find their seal pelt and hide it away where the Selkie would not find it. It was a horrible torture to deny the Selkie their alternate identity and to force them to stay exclusively on land.

The fisherman’s wife was like a Selkie, but she was not of the seal family. Her non-human form was an otter. Some in her family thought they might be the offspring of the Selkie told of in the Scottish tales, she who had been rescued from a cruel human man by the Otter King.

Like the seal-Selkie women who yearned to return to the waters of their birth, so the fisherman’s wife yearned to play in the rivers and lakes where she had grown up. Her heart fairly broke in two when her husband told her he wanted to leave Scotland and sail across the great ocean to a land of which she had never heard. She begged him to leave her, to return the gift of her otter-pelt which she had presented to him at their wedding so that she might put it on. If her husband was to leave her and cross the sea to his fortune, surely, she would never step out of that pelt again.

Theirs was a marriage of love. Her husband had lovingly placed the pelt in the oak and cedar chest he had built for his bride, and whenever she heard the call of the waters, he brought it out for her. He had been eager to please her, happy to make her happy. He had no desire to keep a captive wife.

Now, though, things were different. He was promised a good living in America. His cousin had written with an offer he would be foolish to refuse. He had a wife to support…and now she was carrying their first child. He could not leave her behind, and he could not stay.

He would not remove the pelt from the chest.

Their sea voyage was fraught with mishaps. Many of the immigrants found themselves curled like colicky babies crying at the nausea of both seasickness and homesickness. The choppy waters brought a freezing frothy mist which settled on the deck of the ship and into the bones of the travelers. The otter-wife spent the days sitting below deck twisting the ties of her dress with fingers red and frozen, worrying the fabric into tangled knots and frayed edges.

Her husband knew the once-lovely material was a reflection of the way his beautiful wife felt inside. By the time their ship docked in New York, his wife’s visage was wan and thin. She had eaten very little on the crossing; only enough to keep herself and her son alive. The husband loved his wife deeply and regretted the distress his decision had caused, but his desire to raise his unborn son in America was powerful.

The child was born on a wagon bound for Minnesota Territory where the infant’s father was expected to begin working for his brother. In spite of the hardships of the crossing, the boy was pink and healthy. He cried with robust lungs and drank of his mother’s breast with an insatiable thirst.

The small family arrived in the Minnesota city and began their new life together in a small home on a wooded property near a lake. It was this lake which saved the life of the otter-woman, for she was now able to don her pelt and play in the waters whenever she felt the need. While her husband was away working at his brother’s mill, she cared for their home and their son, taking him to the water and teaching him to swim before he learned to walk.

When the boy was three, his mother took him to the lake for a morning swim, as she did every morning once his father had gone for the day. She had packed them a small lunch of bread, cheese, and fresh milk which she set out on a blanket before taking the boy by the hand and leading him to the water.

They frolicked for a while, splashing playfully. Beneath the surface, the mother watched her boy as he zipped and zoomed through the water grasses, touching fish and reaching for the paddling webbed feet of the ducks and geese that made this lake their summer home. The sun shone above, glinting of the tiny waves and made rainbows in the spray the boy and his mother created in their play. Soon the mother thought her son would be ready to eat, so she rose out of the water and turned to call him to shore.

He did not appear above the surface. His mother felt a moment of panic. Surely, swimming as well as he did, he had not lost his bearing in the short time between her watching him play with the trout and standing on the shore! She fought the sense of hopelessness and began to step back into the cold water. As she did, her son burst through the surface, his little toddler eyes opened wide with wonder and his little mouth full of wriggling rainbow trout. He lifted his hands to take the small fish from his mouth.

That was when his mother knew that he had inherited her gift of shifting, for his hands were now small furry paws with claws right for gripping a fish flapping wildly between the tiny teeth of a toddler. He ate that fish raw, then lay on his back and floated on the water, his eyes closed in pure joy.

He didn’t fully transform that day, but his mother knew it wouldn’t be long before his tendency to shape-shift would press upon his heart and the desire to wear the pelt which had not yet developed would become an imperative when the tides were high and the song of the wind tore at his heart.

That night, she told her husband what had happened. So began the line of American Otters.

Somewhere along the line the family had taken on the name of Otter as their own. The great-grandmother didn’t know if it was before or after the family came to America, for it was not her family, but her husband’s. Perhaps it had always been so, a precognitive coincidence. All she knew for certain was that she feared for her soon-to-be-born great-granddaughter in spite of the fact that there had not been a shape-shifting child born in a generation.

Her own daughter had birthed four children, none of whom showed signs of shifting. The boys were all conventional young American men who had served their country with pride and married well. All had started in normal careers that would lead them directly into middle-class split-level houses in nice neighborhoods.

That girl, though…her granddaughter had been a problem from the time she turned thirteen. Obstinate and imaginative, that girl had run away from home whenever she was disciplined in the slightest. The great-grandmother sent the boys after her and they would return with her, sullen and angry. The judges deemed her incorrigible. Even so, she had not been a Selkie. Perhaps it had ended with her husband.

Now she was married to a good country boy, a Danish Lutheran. The great-grandmother hoped he would be a good influence even though he wasn’t a Scots Presbyterian. Thank goodness she didn’t marry that Irish Catholic boy she was engaged to before this boy.

The great-grandmother stood up from her rocking chair and began to pace the floor. The sun had been down for some time now, and there had been no phone call. The baby wasn’t born yet. Hope was beginning to grow in her fearful heart.

It was getting a bit chilly in the room. She turned up the thermostat and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders. Sitting back into her rocker, she let herself relax a bit. Closing her eyes, she drifted into sleep.

A loud ringing jarred her peaceful slumber. Jumping from her chair, she moved to the telephone nook and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” She spoke into the heavy black barbell.

“Mother?” The line crackled a bit. “Mother? It’s a girl!”

“A girl, you say? What day is it? Has the Irish day passed?” She almost regretted her words. Certainly, they sounded silly. Superstitious. Well, so be it. The Fae were nothing to laugh at.

“Yes, Mother, a girl…”

The great-grandmother broke into her daughter’s words. “And the day…the date?”

“You can relax, Mother, the day has passed. The child was born at one minute passed midnight.”

The great-grandmother’s fears subsided with the news. She felt herself relax. “That is good, then. Give my granddaughter my congratulations. Kiss the new baby for me.”

Her daughter promised to do so, and the two women wished one another well. Her daughter would be returning home soon. Placing the receiver back into its cradle, she chuckled to herself.

After a second cup of herbal tea, the great-grandmother sat down again to await her daughter’s return. She would turn in once she was not alone in the house.

An hour or so later, the two women happily shuffled into their respective bedrooms, satisfied that the first child born into the next generation of their family was robust, healthy, and fully formed.

“Goodnight, Daughter!” the great-grandmother called through the slight opening in her bedroom doorway.

“Goodnight, Mother!” her daughter answered.

About an hour into her sleep, the great-grandmother had a dream.

A young girl with strawberry blonde hair sat alone on a rock at the edge of a forest. In her hands she held a pad of paper and a writing instrument. Her hair blew softly in the wind and the child sang a strange, unearthly song. As the great-grandmother looked on, the girl’s visage turned to mist, then re-emerged as a creature with a button nose, whiskers, and tiny feet like hands, perfect for holding onto a fresh rainbow trout…

The great-grandmother awoke, pulling the covers up to her neck, eyes wide.

One minute past midnight! Had it truly been that time when her great-granddaughter was born? Was it enough time past the witching hour of midnight to avoid the curse of the Pixies? What if the clock in the hospital was wrong? What if the time was too close to the passage between the worlds? What if the child is pixilated after all?

What would happen then?

The great-grandmother lay awake the rest of the night, terrified by the visions conjured by the second-sight, a gift she had inherited from both of her Scottish parents. It was a gift that rarely lied to her, though she sought to avoid it. What would it all mean? Should she talk to her daughter? To her daughter’s daughter? Would it make any difference for her great-granddaughter?

One minute past midnight…

© 2023 by Suzy Jacobson Cherry