The Curse of the Brunswick Springs

Brunswick Springs

Afterglow                                                                           The year 1868

 
Bracket stood at the base of the long stone lined stairway leaning on one crutch and counting the steps ahead of him,  thinking about nothing in particular except how tired he  felt and  then  remembering why – it was the long walk from Wells River and the train station back to the family farm.  Listening to the water running from the springs  he wondered why he had walked once more for so damned long a time , all the way up to these healing springs.   Looking down at his knee high leather boots  and thinking  about  how at one time they were shiny black , now worn and  wrinkled, he thought of all the miles they had traveled.     What were those  names, Gettysburg ?   Antietam,   the Wilderness, the Plank road,  as if he would ever forget those names.   As if he would ever forget those sights.  And  he thought of all wars  and all of the stories  of war his father had told him as a kid there in the fields,  of the glory and  the camaraderie of his fathers own experiences .

“I wish you’d of’ told me about this too dad”  was all he could think.

Today though, he just felt tired and as he stomped his foot on the bottom step he  wondered if the pain would ever go away again in his legs.  It seemed that the only thing that helped was that he’d stomp his foot once in a while and what good did it do anyways, other than to jarring,  the  nerves in his hips loosening  once in a while to stop that damned ache?    The doctors at the army hospital said  that the pain might never go away again and he wondered how in the hell he would ever work the farm fields  with his father again?   He raised his eyes to the pine bows high above him as the wind began to blow, swaying the big tree limbs and making the needles  moan softly in the wind currents.  As his vision  clouded over  he saw other images, too.  Images of men exploding  from the cannon fire ahead of him in the front lines. He saw the bodies and the legs, arms and other body parts  lying around the fields after each of the battles.  As he looked at his boots his eyes wandered up to where the  top one of the brass buttons was missing from  his blue wool army coat.  He reached and loosened the scarf around his neck and thought it was growing warmer.

He had read about the curse of the seven old Brunswick  mineral springs and their reputation of healing powers. And he knew well the story and  that the Abenaki  Indians  ghosts were still here too, he could feel them, after all, this was sacred ground  wasn’t it?   Bracket looked down at shiny dangling  strings of beads hanging  on different  limbs by the stream. Across the way and up into the pines he thought he could see shadows moving in places that they shouldn’t be in.  Although he had been seeing shadows like that for months on end.  Rumor had it that once a revolutionary soldier  had shown up here at the Brunswick springs, carried by  some Indians who had found him dying on the trail somewhere in Victory Hill and they had brought him here to heal.  Although he had survived the story had it that it had ruined the powers of the natural  healing springs.   After the soldier  had  long gone away,  they had found a young native mother and her baby dead here at the stream and knew that the powers of the Brunswick springs had been poisoned.

Bracket was  concentrating so hard on the shadows  and on the  sounds of the still  draining  mineral waters  from  the ground and into the stream that he began to see the magical  array  of colors in the water and streaming across the stones and tree roots.  He realized  something was pulling at his coat sleeve.  He couldn’t  have heard  the approach because of the water noises.  Turning, he saw that a young Indian woman with a child on her back had taken hold his coat sleeve.  He turned to her and she looked up at him  their eyes meeting.  She nodded  once at him and he turned  to the stream once more and began to climb.  He began  to feel a sensation in his legs and wondered what it was  and  yet as he approached the top of the path he realized the pain in his hips that had been there since the bullet wound had taken him out of the war once and for all was gone for the first time.   He turned again to the tree trunk beside him and leaned his cane  on the tree.  Turning  to her again he realized she was gone!

He remembered other things, too.  Like since the soldiers had begun showing up at the Brunswick springs a couple of years into the civil war and that they were all coming a way from the springs  healed  and he knew now why.  No one else had told him outside of the  army hospital  of the curse to the springs and of the sacrifice of the Abenaki  Indians.    Bracket turned at the top of the springs,  stepped into the stream  and felt the cool waters as they soaked right through his warn Calvary boots.  He looked  away to his right  and once again  into the distant pine trees, the  old growth brown, beautiful tree trunks melting one into another and he realized something else.  For once not only did he not feel the pain in his body,  but that the dark shadows he had seen in all of the forests, were gone.

EdF
Latest posts by EdF (see all)
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedintumblrmail

EdF

Sometime in my life, I started to write about my life journey, in poetry, in story perhaps to sort them out and enter them into a place of safekeeping. The soul of the writer is perhaps best described in their words, emotions and thoughts. If these poems or stories touch something inside you then maybe I have succeeded in sharing. I will not write about my self in profile, because self isn't so important in writing. Only the journey in words and the sharing are important. Why would we say "Now about me!"... I'd rather write about life, nature, serenity ...

7 thoughts on “The Curse of the Brunswick Springs

Leave a Reply

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

Our cookie settings are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. By continuing to browse this website you are accepting our cookie policy.

Close