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When I was three years old, my parents moved to a house on the outskirts of a small town of Lebanon, Tennessee. This was back before Don Fox became mayor and brought lots and lots of booming business to the town. Sure, we had the usual suspects: Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King. But it wasn't the slowly declining, would-have-been-awesome-had-Mt. Juliet-not-beat-us-to-the-punch town that it would be some twenty years later. The fact is Don Fox did a lot of good for Lebanon. But somewhere along the way, businesses stopped coming, and the former reject town of Mt. Juliet suddenly picked up the torch and started running.
This process hadn't begun in 1984, when my parents moved into a practical, one-story house about 10 miles outside Lebanon. The house was a dingy brick home with a nasty car port on one end (a car port that would later be turned into an outstanding living room). The house sat on one of many hills that covered the 45 acres of land that accompanied it. It seems my parents had aspirations of running a farm. In my time in that house, I vaguely remember cows. I remember the large barn where the cows where kept and fed (and I remember occasionally feeding them). More vividly, I remember walking to into the barn one day to find a cow hanging from the rafters by its feet, its stomach cut open, its insides everywhere but inside. I remember having never seen a slaughtered cow before, but not thinking much of it. It didn't gross me out. It simply... was. Shortly thereafter, I remember there being no more cows. Just an empty barn.
Shortly thereafter, the cows were replaced by rabbits. Dozens of them. I remember being told that we were going to eat the rabbits. "Eat rabbits?" I thought. "That's disgusting!" But it wasn't disgusting to my parents. I remember growing to love the rabbits. I believe I even gave them names, although I don't remember any of them now. I remember how their poop looked much different than ours. I remember how they didn't eat the same things I ate (which likely contributed to the difference in poop). I remember being confused when, after being nursed back to health and returned, a baby rabbit was brutally attacked and killed by its mother. ("It's because she doesn't recognize him. She thinks he's an outsider," Mom would try to explain to me later.) And when the time came, I remember my grandfather ("Pepa" pronounced "PEE-paw") walking out to the barn with a big stick in his hand. I knew he was going to "beat the rabbits over the head" in order to kill them. I didn't watch, nor did I eat. They were my friends, remember. I had given them all names.
I remember finding two little kittens running around the property. I remember wanting them as pets. I remember Dad trying to tell me that they wouldn't make good pets. But they were kittens. Kittens always made good pets. So, against his better judgment, Dad caught the kittens and brought them in as pets. They seemed to make great pets at first. The problem (and the thing I didn't understand at the time) was that they were wild. They didn't know how to live in a one-story house with air conditioning and processed cat food. They knew how to eat birds and snakes and whatever else they found. After days of not having raw meat for food, they started to do what came naturally: they ate the meat that was there. They started to eat each other. I remember watching as patches of hair would disappear from their coats. I could see the raw, red spots where hair used to be. Before long, one cat was dead, and the other was close behind. While I still didn't understand why they wouldn't eat the food that we provided for them, I agreed to let Dad take the remaining kitten back out into the wild. I never saw it again.
I remember that animals weren't the only things to come and go at the farm. I remember walking into our living room one day to find Mom sitting in a chair, crying. Dad stood behind her, trying his best to console her. I remember asking what was wrong. The only response I remember getting was, "The baby's dead." I don't remember Mom being pregnant. But I vividly remember Mom losing the baby. Likewise, I remember the image that popped into my head as they told me (as best as they could back then) what had happened. I remember envisioning a little baby lying at the entrance of what looks like a cave. I remember the baby rolling back into the darkness of the cave, never to be seen again.
As I got older, I learned that this had happened multiple times, both before and after I was born. (In fact, my parents almost named me Samuel, for I was like the Samuel from the Bible. A special gift to a mother who had previously been unable to bear children.) After many miscarriages, my parents decided to adopt. They started off looking for children in the United States. But it wasn't long before they found Holt International (http://www.holtinternational.org). They became highly interested in adopting a child (specifically, a baby girl) from Korea. When I was eight years old, after years of waiting and preparing, my parents finally had the little girl they'd always wanted. After the arrival of my sister, Katherine, my parents no longer tried to raise animals on the farm. They knew farm life wasn't for them. What they could do, however, was raise children.
When Katherine was about 3 years old, something else came and went. Another child. An Indian girl.
Kalina.
I don't remember how it started. I just remember that Kalina was a "friend" of Katherine's. Living ten miles away from town, kids didn't often come over to play. All Katherine and I had were each other... and our "friends." Being the movie person that I am (and was), my "friends" were all celebrities that I saw on TV (for some reason, Farrah Fawcett was one of them). Katherine's "friend" was Kalina.
I take it back. I do remember how it started.
One day, my Mom walked into the dining room to find Katherine staring up at the wall. Mom looked up to see what she was looking at. Nothing stood out. All that was there was the newly-painted molding that outlined our newly-installed French doors. It wasn't long before Mom realized Katherine was laughing. But it wasn't a constant laugh. It was sporadic. She would laugh, it would gradually subside, and she'd eventually stop. A few second later, she would burst into laughter again, as if being suddenly tickled. But no one else was in the room. No one except Mom, who wasn't close enough to touch her.
"What are you laughing at, honey?" Mom asked.
"The little girl is making funny faces," Katherine replied.
"What little girl? Can you show me where?" Mom asked. Katherine then walked over to the door and pointed at a vacant spot on the wall.
Shortly thereafter, the little girl had a name. Kalina. We don't know where the name came from. Katherine didn't know anyone named Kalina. We didn't know anyone named Kalina. And we definitely didn't know any Indian families. But we went with it. It was probably just a word that she made up herself. Besides, Kalina kept her occupied. Kept her happy. They would play in her room. I would hear my sister talking to Kalina. Laughing. Playing. All that dumb little girl stuff. It didn't matter where the name came from. All that mattered was my sister was happy. No harm, no foul.
That is until one day, while my Mom slept (she was a night nurse in the newborn nursery), Katherine started screaming. Mom's impulse was to yell at me to stop aggravating her. It wasn't until she came to my door and realized I had been in my room the whole time that she rushed into Katherine's room to see what was wrong. Katherine sat on her bed, tears running down her face. When Mom asked what had happened, she said that Kalina had scratched her. When Mom took a look at her arm, there were fresh scratches all over it.
Mom always enjoyed learning about other cultures, and by then she had already built up a vast knowledge of Native American culture and history. We had attended numerous pow-wows, purchased multiple educational videos and "therapeutic" CDs of Indian music. Mom had even gone through the trouble of making Indian costumes for Katherine and me. (Making one for me could be rationalized by the fact that I was a boy scout; Katherine's was merely recreational.) The Kalina incident paved the way for even more research, this time on the legends of Indian spirits of those who have long past gone. Before long, she had come to the conclusion that our house was sitting on an ancient Indian burial ground. As a boy, I thought this was the coolest thing ever. I had recently watched Pet Sematary. I knew what Indian burial grounds could do. And although I knew the things that happened in that movie were pure evil, the thought of something eerie like that happening -- the thought of an actual Indian spirit dwelling in our house -- was the coolest thing ever. The next day, I told all my friends the story, not only of my sister's little Indian "friend," but that we were living on an Indian burial ground! My Mom, of course, didn't consider it to be something to get excited about. ("It might anger the spirits.") She quickly told me to stop talking about it to my friends. Then, she did more research.
I remember Mom coming home one day with a deck of what looked like Tarot cards. I don't remember much about what the cards "told" us. All I remember is that, for a good little church of Christ boy growing up in a good little church of Christ family in small-town Tennessee, this was extremely odd. Good little church of Christ boys don't play with tarot cards. They're of the Devil! It wasn't long before Mom "snapped out of it" and gave the cards back. She agreed; tarot cards were of the Devil. But that didn't change the fact that Kalina was still in the house... and she was still hurting Katherine.
After more research, Mom learned that the woman who ran the storage facility where we kept some of our unneeded stuff had gone through a similar situation as a little girl. In order for her to get rid of the spirit, she had to perform a sort of cleansing ritual. A bonfire of sorts. A ritual that gave the spirit permission to move on. ("Run to the light, Carol Anne! Run to the light!") This woman gave my Mom everything she needed to perform the ceremony.
The odd thing is, I don't think we ever needed to perform the ceremony. Within the next few weeks, Kalina disappeared. Katherine never mentioned her again, and before long she couldn't even remember who she was. And that was that (kind of a crappy ending to what was otherwise a pretty cool incident).
Most would read or hear that story (and most who did) would say Kalina was nothing more than a simple imaginary friend. And there's a part of me that believes the same thing. But there's also a part of me that wonders whether or not Kalina was real, and if so, who she was. Mom believed our property lay right smack dab in the middle of the Trail of Tears. In that case, it's possible there's more to Kalina than mere childhood fantasy. And I'll admit, part of me (that little boy inside) still thinks it would be cool to know she was real.
Lots of things -- animals, unborn children, imaginary friends -- came and went while we lived in that little house outside Lebanon, Tennessee. But the one I will always remember most is that little Indian girl. Kalina.
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