"There is evil in this child," grandfather Baris had said when Thomas, fully named Thomasina, was born as the seventh daughter in a household where six daughters had already preceded her. Grandfather Baris often had such remarks, naming birthmarks the mark of the devil, and other irregularities the signs of evil. Thomas wasn't spared from such an observation either and her parents hadn't thought much of it, other than lamenting that it was yet another daughter.
Yet grandfather Baris would continue to insist; "there is evil in this child," he would remark, as Thomas continued to grow up. People blamed it on the mischief that Thomas tended to cause, being the youngest of a large family and needing attention somehow. After all, hiding spiders in the beds of her sisters wasn't exactly nice either. Filling the shoes, whatever sister had offended her the most the day before, with stable dung wasn't good either.
Grandfather was, after all, a little senile after the war had ended. Highly religious upon his return and superstitious to the boot. When Thomas jokingly hung the cross upside down, not knowing what it meant, she had received such a whooping from the man that she couldn't sleep on her back for weeks on end.
"There is evil inside of Thomas," her grandfather would insist and her mother would brush him off, gently wiping the corners of his mouth as she had Thomas sent out of the room. Grandfather Baris didn't like to see the seventh after all and his fragile body and age meant that he couldn't be excited.
In the little village near central Italy the Baris family settled the family was quite well known. Known to be good catholics who had a child once a year. Known for a big farm on which said children could run around and grow strong. Known for having a total of seven daughters, but no son.
"I'm the son!" Thomas would pop up to say, truly named Thomasina, for she wasn't actually a boy. Her family had just wished she would be, if only for the sake of variety. But even their youngest didn't turn out to be the boy they had so much wished for. After that there was no blessing to follow in her mother's womb. Seven was, after all, quite a number to feed and quite taxing on the body itself.
Those were the good things the Baris were known for. As far as one could call them good, for the whispers of the neighbours sounded more pitiful; for so many daughters and no sons, how was the Baris to survive?
"You didn't have to experience the hardships of those days," was a line that often prefaced the bad looming within the family. Which was true, as Thomas was born in the heyday of the European post World War II boom. She had the good fortune to know economic wealth with plenty of jobs to go around and a brimming hope for peace. The possibilities seemed endless, her own chances were innumerable, and yet there was a shadow hanging over the Baris household. A generational trauma inherited from the war that had just passed.
Father Baris, the head of the family, knew periods in which he would freeze. Periods of time, sometimes days, often mere hours, in which he would stare right ahead of him. Nothing would reach the man then and mother often said that he was reliving his days on the field, the days of war. Unlike grandfather Baris, father Baris internalised it, having denounced God for the cruelty had had to see in the spring of his youth.
Where her grandfather couldn't stand the sight of Thomas her father adored the youngest daughter, laughing heartily at the silly little pranks she played. "The evil of mischief!" he would call her, jokingly twisting the words of his own father when she would come to tell him about the abandoned church within the forest, where an old lady lived that had inspired her to turn the cross upside down.
When father Baris wasn't stuck within himself he was a pleasant father to be around, as mischievous as the youngest Thomas tended to be, though weighed by his own traumas.
"Run, run like the devil," he would tell the girl when taking a stroll in the forest. There wasn't anything ahead that Thomas could see, or had sensed. "Run," her father had urged her and for once she let go of all her mischief and ran. It was the last she would see of her father.
What had happened was always kept quiet. Her mother didn't want to speak of it, citing that she was too busy keeping a family of eight and an old man afloat. Her sister was pulled from school, taking over the care of the ageing grandfather who kept on pointing an accusing finger into Thomas's direction.
"Evil, evil!" he would gasp, for by then he had lost most of his motoric skills, withering away like a plant abandoned in a cold corner.
Thomas herself was soon sent away, her own ghosts unable to fit into the once warm house of Baris, where she was the chief mischief maker. "Run," she would say, repeating after her father she had so inexplicably lost, "run!" she would scream, startling everyone who hadn't been there that day in the forest.
