This is not the story of Starling House.
I mean, it sort of is, but it’s not about Eleanor or her husband or whoever else. I don’t care about who built the house or why, or whether they were good or evil or insane. I care who came after and what happened to them, and making damn sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
This is the story of the Wardens of Starling House.
The first one after Eleanor was a guy named Alabaster Clay—do not shush me, Opal, how many of your stories have I sat through—who showed up in 1887. Alabaster was from Crow County, way east of here, and he’d been born with a rare skin condition where all the color drained out of him in big, milky patches. Which wouldn’t have been a big deal, except that the local preacher apparently accused him of devilry or witchcraft or something, and Alabaster was driven out of town. A little while later he started having these dreams—I won’t describe them, because I know you know what kind of dreams I mean—and eventually he showed up in Eden. He wrote to his sister that he “followed the starlings.”
And then in 1906 they found old Alabaster hanging on the front gates of Starling House with his throat ripped out. I looked up the date in Charlotte’s newspaper collection. They blamed it on wild dogs at the time; seems they’d attacked several people that same night.
After Alabaster came two young Osage women, Tsa-me-tsa and Pearl. Their family was originally from somewhere on the Ohio River, but they’d been driven west, and then farther west, and then came the Indian Appropriations Act and they were left scraping a living out on the big flat hell of Kansas. Pearl and Tsa-me-tsa were orphaned and sent off to one of those fucked-up boarding schools, but then Pearl started having these dreams. (This is what we might call a pattern.)
If you look their names up in the school records, it says they both died in a typhoid outbreak. That must have been some administrator trying to cover his ass, because they lived in Starling House for more than twenty years before they died.
Nobody ever found their bodies, but according to your boyfriend’s notes—ow! Jesus, it’s called a joke—they have headstones side by side on Starling land.
Then came Ulysses Wright, the son of Tennessee sharecroppers. He and his parents arrived in the early thirties, after their employer sold the land out from under them. His parents died of regular old age, but Ulysses was found with the sword still in one hand. Next were Etsuko and John Sugita in ’43. They were originally from California, but met in Jerome, Arkansas. After about six months of unlawful detention they climbed the camp fence and followed the Mississippi north. They had two daughters in the house before Etsuko was found floating down the Mud River. After them came Odessa Dixon and her wife, then Eva Jackson, then Lynn and Oscar Lewis.
Can you guess what happened to all of them? Are you starting to see the pattern?
A Warden falls. The house calls someone new—someone lost or lonely, someone whose home was stolen or sold or who never had a home in the first place. It calls them, and they come, and they are never homeless again.
All it costs is blood. I mean that very literally—Arthur’s notes mention some kind of blood oath (God, that’s embarrassing to say) to become Warden.
But it doesn’t stop there, does it? It takes more blood, and more, until another Warden is dead and some other poor bastard starts to dream of staircases and hallways and locked doors. Again and again, faster and faster.
It sounds okay at first, even sort of noble: a house for the unhoused, a home for all the people whose homes were stolen from them. It’s like a fairy tale, a dream. But then it eats them alive.
In her diary Etsuko called Starling House their “sanctuary.” But it’s not a sanctuary. It’s a grave. And Opal: it won’t be yours.
TWENTY-ONE
The last time I heard a story about Starling House I was sitting inside it. The night pressing at the windows, Arthur’s blood on my hands, his eyes wild on mine. It had all sounded so grand and so terrible, like a modern-day myth.
Told here, sandwiched between the cornfield and the football field in the mean light of noon, it just sounds sad and strange.
Jasper is watching my face closely. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I lift one shoulder and let it fall, showily unconcerned. “I got fired, remember? Haven’t been back since. I appreciate your concern, but this is all extremely old news.”
“Have the dreams stopped?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “What dreams?”
Jasper rubs his face so hard it looks like he’s trying to physically mold it into an expression of patience. “There are two more things you should know. The first one is that whatever’s going on in that house is getting worse. I looked at all the dates, went through more newspapers . . .” He rubs his face again, this time like he’s trying to remove something from it. “The Wardens are dying faster.”
My own pulse is suddenly loud in my ears. “Since when?” Screw waiting for a text, I’m going to call Arthur over and over until he picks up, warn him—but then I remember Arthur’s oath to be the last Warden, the pure panic on his face when I mentioned my dreams, and realize: he already knows.
“I don’t know, like the early eighties? But here’s the second thing.” Jasper turns until he’s facing me, his eyes heavy on mine. “All these people, every Warden, had a choice. They chose to act on their dreams, to follow the fucking starlings or whatever. They chose to swear themselves to that place—even Arthur.”
“Maybe.”
“No, not maybe. Look, there was something else tucked in the notes.” For the first time in this conversation, Jasper looks a little guilty. “I know I shouldn’t have read it, because of privacy or whatever, but . . .”
He pulls his Algebra II textbook out of his bag and withdraws a very familiar piece of notebook paper. I recognize the faded blue of the lines, the plain handwriting, the torn edge. But this isn’t the page I found before, the one that ended midsentence: This is your birthright, Arthur. That’s what I told you the night you ran away, isn’t—
This is the other half of the letter. I take it from Jasper without speaking, and read.
it? But—God forgive me, because I doubt you can—I was wrong.
There’s no such thing as a birthright. All you have inherited from us are your cheekbones and your stubbornness. You are free to make your own life, build your own home, fight your own battles. This House has no heirs; the next Warden will be whoever takes up the sword.
I’m sorry. I have loved this place for so long, and fought so hard for it, that I got all confused. I thought I was fighting for a home; I was only ever fighting for you.
Back in North Carolina, the dreams didn’t come to me when the bank took the house away. They didn’t come when we missed rent in the trailer park, either. It was only when I knew you were on the way that I started dreaming of Starling House, because that’s when I decided I needed someplace nobody could take from me.
I chose. So will you.
I love you.
Mom
P.S. Your father wants me to remind you to trim the roses before the last frost and stake the foxgloves by June. I told him you weren’t coming back and he said that’s fine but I should tell you just in case.
P.P.S. Wherever you go, I hope you’re not alone. If I was ever strong—if I ever did a single good or brave thing in my life—it was only because I had you and your father to be strong for.
The letter leaves a catch in my throat, an ache in my chest.