Overcomer - The Journey by Judy Colella (novels to improve english .txt) 📖

“Great!” Celeste grabbed a rag. “How do you want to do this?”

“What do you mean? We’re not assisting at a childbirth here. Shake the can for a few minutes. It’s been sitting in that pantry for ages and the stuff in it must have separated by now. Then put some on your rag and start polishing.”

Celeste picked up the tin and gave it a vigorous shaking. “Guess we should try and keep it off the wood,” she remarked, her voice quaking with each jiggle. When she was done, she fought with the cap for a moment before it unscrewed, and picked up her rag.

“Don’t put too much on the cloth and pull it gently up and around each string,” her mother advised, picking up a rag for herself. “That should control it.”

Most of the dark residue came off easily, revealing glorious, pale reddish-gold metal that resonated and squealed with the passage of the rags over their length. Celeste found the sounds disconcerting, but her mother appeared unaffected.

Polishing from either end of the harp, they got to the last string together, which happened to be the middle one, and Mrs. Kelly stood back. “It’s all yours,” she said with a smile.

Celeste shrugged and set to work with her rag, but to her surprise this one did not shine golden when she was finished, but a bright, almost white, silver. She stared at it, curious, wondering, and touched it.

And was immediately somewhere else.

The sound of the silver string grew around her, turning into the main note of a melody. She was holding the harp on her lap, and beside her someone with a pleasant voice was singing to that one note, harmonizing with it. She guessed he was in his mid-twenties, and was wearing a long, soft blue robe with intricate silver stitching sewn on the wide cuffs and around the collar in the delicate pattern of Celtic knot-work. He had pale hair, blue eyes, and skin that might have been fair at one time, but now looked ruddy and weathered as if from constant exposure to the elements.

A few seconds later his song ended and he gave Celeste a wide smile. “The silver string is the key,” he told her. “You do well to let its light be seen.” He stood, turned away, and walked into the shadows.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder, and when she looked, she saw her mother frowning at her.

“Celeste, what is it?

And Celeste was back in the kitchen. She blinked, at once forgetting whatever she’d been thinking. “Nothing – look. This string is different.”

Eileen stared at her for another second, and then turned her attention to the harp. “Yes, I saw that! Maybe they ran out of gold ones.”

“No, this was supposed to be silver.”

“How – or why – can you be so sure?”

“I dunno. Seems right, is all. Anyhow, can we get Dad now?”

“Sure.” She pointed at the mess on the table. “I’ll call him after you’ve put the harp back in the box and helped me clean this up, okay?”

Eager to see her father’s reaction to their discovery, Celeste brought the harp back into the family room and replaced it with care, then returned to the kitchen where she balled up the newspapers, tossing them in the trash while her mother threw the rags into the laundry bag behind the cellar door. That done, they washed their hands at the kitchen sink to remove the black residue.

“Here.” Eileen tossed her a damp sponge. “Give the table a final swipe, will you?”

As Celeste complied, Eileen left the room, and a moment later Celeste heard her call to her father from the foot of the stairs, telling him to come down as soon as possible.

When he joined them, Eileen took his arm and led him back out of the kitchen, bringing him to his chair. “Celeste and I need to discuss something with you. Please sit.”

“You’re not going to tell me a walrus tripped and fell onto the hood of my car, are you?” He sat, giving her a narrow-eyed stare.

Eileen rolled her eyes while Celeste giggled, sitting opposite him on the sofa. “Hardly. Please take the harp out.”

His eyes widened. “Why? What happened to it?”

“No walruses,” Celeste promised, trying to look solemn. It didn’t happen, and a snort of laughter escaped.

“I see,” he muttered, reaching into the box. When he pulled the instrument out, he stared at it for a second before his eyebrows shot up. “Heavens! Is that… are these strings gold, do you think?”

“We do,” said Eileen. “And the middle one looks to be made of pure silver.”

“How did this happen?”

“We polished the strings.” Celeste gave him a casual shrug, like it was no big deal.

“Did you now?” As usually happened when he was taken by surprise, Donal’s native Irish brogue came rushing back.

“It happened by accident, really. I took the harp out to try and play it a little, and some of the dirt came off on my finger. The tarnish or whatever on some of the other strings didn’t come off that easily, which is probably why we didn’t see this when Katie plucked it.”

“Amazing. I… amazing.” Donal shook his head, saying nothing more.

In the silence, Tara came bounding down the stairs. She looked upset and started to say something, but stopped short, pointed at the harp strings and gasped. “How pretty!”

“I’ll say,” her father remarked. “You know, those strings are the same color as Celeste’s hair.”

After a quick glance at Celeste, Eileen nodded and sat next to her. “Think we should get the thing appraised?”

Celeste was outraged. “The ‘thing’?! And never mind that – will I still be able to use it for my lesson Saturday?”

Her parents exchanged a looked and Donal shrugged. “I suppose. I mean, it’s survived all this time, yes?”

“Oh, come on, Dad!” Celeste flopped back, arms crossed. “If the strings break, they’ll still be gold, won’t they?”

“W-yes, so they would.”

“She’s got a point, Donal. Anyway, they probably sound a lot better than regular ones, don’t you think?”

He nodded. “They’d better! I mean, golden strings –”

“And don’t forget the silver one,” Celeste added.

“Right. One would expect they were put on there for the sound as much as the value.” Donal pursed his lips, his accent back under control.

Tara went to the harp and bent down to get a closer look. “Wait a minute. Are you guys saying these strings are real gold?”

Celeste snorted, and her parents burst out laughing. Oh, awesome – we’ve turned into a TV Land family!

Tara, however, hugged herself and pouted, but finally smiled, the smile soon morphing into a grin. “You guys are crazy-weird, you know that?”

“Okay.” Eileen stood, still chuckling. “I think it’s time all of us got upstairs and settled in for the night.”

“Good idea.” Donal replaced the harp in its box.

After saying goodnight and giving her parents a kiss, Tara went back upstairs. Celeste said goodnight as well; it had been another long, strange day, and she had no objection to going to bed. She brushed her teeth, did her nightly face-cleansing ritual, and slid under the soft covers. Within seconds of turning off the light, she was asleep.

And dreaming about a harper – a different one – who sat atop a deep green hill, playing a song of warning.

*******

Cian stared at the moonlit branches outside his window. At some point after falling asleep, he’d begun to toss, restless, half-conscious twists of thought wrestling with his exhaustion. Sleep had fled, defeated, and he’d gotten up. In the wide space between the window and the foot of the bed he paced for a while. That didn’t help, so he returned to the bed, sitting up with his back against the headboard, frustrated.

His conversation with Celeste and her involuntary knowledge of Gaelic had not only convinced him she was the same Celeste he sought, but had also begun to stir up memories that until this day had been more or less forgotten.

What had brought him fully awake was the recurrence of a dream he'd had several years earlier. Since the day he'd been left with his second foster family, he'd experienced dreams that while comforting, were nonetheless bizarre. They always involved another place and time, but had been hazy and hard to remember the next day.

By the time he was fourteen, the dreams had become more vivid, a lot more realistic, and he was beginning to remember them longer and in more detail upon waking, convincing him that these were not mere dreams, but actual memories. The one that had awakened him, he realized, had been triggered as much by his conversation with George as by the one with Celeste.

The dream had to do with a storyteller, a man with a harp who traveled about the country, staying in whatever home would welcome him so he could sing of news from various parts of the land. People from the village and surrounding farms would come to listen. Those who got there first were able to squeeze into the small cottage with the family, leaving the rest to sit outside.

The cottage in the dream belonged to his parents, and people were packed into its one tidy room. Others stood or sat on the coarse grass and stony pathway outside the door, while those who had arrived late sat halfway up the hill by the side of the cottage. The man’s voice was deep and resonant, clearly audible even to the small crowd outside.

This was where dream had merged with reality. With a few exceptions that only a dream-state could produce, the rest had happened in each recurrence. What he’d told George was in essence a recounting of the dream.

A harper had, in fact, come to stay at their cottage; Cian had long since acknowledged that the man’s arrival had been the event that had changed everything. He couldn’t remember what his song-tale had been about, but he did remember everyone leaving when the moon was heading back down its dark path, and the harper creeping out into the night after his parents had fallen asleep. But Cian had been feigning sleep, and as soon as the door was pulled shut, he’d gotten up and as in the dream, followed the man out into the clear night air.

The harper hadn’t gone far – only to the end of the path leading from the door – and was met there by another man who had a long, tangled beard and was greyed with age. Niall. That was the older man’s name.

The first time he’d had this dream, Cian’s progress toward the pair was noiseless and he couldn’t feel the small rocks beneath his bare feet, yet somehow the chilliness of the night cut through him. He could also hear the low, deep thrum of their voices but not distinct words. And then suddenly, when he was almost close enough to distinguish syllables, the path seemed to grow beneath him, taking the two men even further from his hearing. He didn’t dare run or even walk faster for fear they would hear his approach. They were gesturing at each other as though arguing, and Cian’s frustration was such that he nearly cried with it. He knew without understanding why that they were talking about him, and that’s what upset him the most. He kept moving forward, sometimes getting closer, other times pulled farther away by the strange antics of the path. After three or four more tries, it appeared that he was finally going to get near enough to hear them, but the dream had ended.

He recalled that the cellar light had been switched, awakening him. In the winter, his foster mother had made him get up at five o’clock in the morning to start his chores even though it was still dark. Over the years, the dream had ended at the same place, because he always seemed to have it toward morning – never after first falling asleep.

This time, however, the dream had begun not long after he’d drifted off, but ended