Touched (11 page)

Elikah motioned to the other chair. “Sit down, Mattie. I was thinking maybe we’d go to one of the clubs and hear some music. Maybe dance. How does that sound?”

I sat on the edge of the chair. The whiskey had sent a rush of heat to my face, and I wasn’t certain I could manage an answer and maintain my grown-up dignity. “That would be … lovely.”

He laughed out loud, but there was the ring of pleasure instead of mockery in it. “Lovely. Well, you’ve budded all of a sudden into a young lady. And it’s a good thing.” He chuckled again as he handed me the glass. “I told everyone in town you’d make a good wife, and here I get a lady in the bargain.”

“I want to make you a good wife, Elikah.” A wave of earnestness swept over me, and I blurted out the words. He’d shamed me and hurt me, but that could all be put in the past. It was the future I wanted. Something of my own worth having, a handsome husband, a home; maybe, if we were really happy, I wouldn’t mind thinking about a child.

“That’s good, Mattie. You try hard, I’ll give you that.” He was suddenly serious, motioning for me to drink more whiskey.

I did, almost coughing, but managing to swallow it all. The warmth burned down my throat and then back up until it settled at the base of my skull, where fuzzy tentacles of warmth reached around and up my cheeks to the top of my head.

“Let’s go see about some music.” He offered me a hand and I took it, almost stumbling.

“Elikah, I don’t know how to dance.” I wanted to tell him before we got there and I embarrassed him.

“I think we can remedy that, Mattie.” And he opened the door into the hallway and the waiting night. We stepped out into the street, moving from pool of light to pool of light just as the people I’d watched from the balcony. The whiskey had made me light-headed, free, and the night and the city were like a disguise.

The music crept out the doors of the bars and moved along the old sidewalk in a thick fog that we walked into. Suddenly, it was as if the sounds were all around me, inside me, speaking to my bones.

Elikah steered me into a club through a shuttered door. We didn’t even go to a table. Elikah led me straight to the dance floor and pulled me into his arms. The music was slow, languid, and seemed to drift with the deep sounds of a giant fiddle, the night vibrating like the thick strings. Elikah’s hand on my back was firm, and he pressed and released while he guided with the other until I felt my own body slide into the easy rhythm.

In the darkened room others were dancing, and there was the sound of laughter and talk and the smell of cigarette smoke and perfume and the feel of Elikah’s hand drawing me closer until I was pressed against him and moving in a way that somehow wasn’t decent but was too good to stop.

“You’re a natural, Mattie,” Elikah whispered in my ear, his breath a shiver of pleasure.

I couldn’t answer. The music had pulled me deep inside where I shut my eyes and let his body tell mine what to do.

We went to a dark table where a woman brought us drinks in tall glasses filled with ice. The liquid was sweet, cold, easy to swallow. And we danced again, the skirt of the dress brushing the backs of my legs like a whisper while Elikah’s warm hands touched and guided. I gave myself to him, to the music and the night and the strange dark city that had somehow become a deep blue note spiraling from the mouth of a horn.

I don’t know how long we danced, but it seemed that my bones had softened in my flesh. At last, Elikah put his arm around me and walked me outside into the night.

“I think you’re drunk,” he said, laughing as he held me. “Can you walk?”

“Maybe.” I lifted my leg and removed first one shoe, then the other. On my bare feet I had better balance. “I can walk.”

Elikah’s laughter was like a kiss. In response, I put my arm around his neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I’m having a wonderful time.”

“And it’s only going to get better,” he promised as he led me back to the room.

Inside the bedroom he closed the door and helped me out of the beautiful red dress and into my gown. Then he walked me to the bed where I tumbled into it, laughing at the feeling of floating and the pleasure of the night.

Elikah pulled the sheet up over me and walked out to the balcony. Lying on my side I could see him, hands braced on the rail, staring down at the city. It was only ten o’clock. Late by Jexville standards, but early by the clock that ticked in the City that Care Forgot. JoHanna had told me that name. I knew exactly what it meant now.

“Elikah?”

“Yeah.”

“Aren’t you tired?” I wanted him in bed beside me, had grown used to the feel of him there.

“No, I’m not tired.”

“Go on out,” I told him. “It’s been a wonderful day.”

He turned to me, and I thought he might be mad. He didn’t need me to say what he could do. He came to me and caught the placket of my nightgown in his fingers, holding the material gently, as if he were afraid he would bruise it.

“Okay,” he whispered, then dropped his hand and left the room without his hat.

I got out of bed and went to the balcony and watched him cross the street, his boots sharp and clear on the cobbled brick streets. One of the ladies standing by a building stepped up to speak to him. He laughed and walked on, disappearing around the corner where the music seemed to come from.

Even as I stood there, after ten o’clock, the city seemed to grow more and more alive. Gas lamps on posts cast small pools of light, and I could watch the anonymous people move from pool to pool, like minnows in a vat, shifting without making progress.

The music teased me, reminding me of Duncan and her promise to teach me to dance. My feet were still throbbing from the beautiful new shoes and the dancing. It was all like a dream, and I closed my eyes and let the city invade my head.

When I found my head sinking to my chest while I sat in an iron chair on the balcony, I got up and went to bed. The sheets were heavy cotton, cool and smelling of sunshine. Crawling under the covers, I fell instantly asleep.

When the door to the room opened, I mumbled something to Elikah. The room was dark, unfamiliar, and my sleep as thick and heavy as a quilt spread over me.

There was the sound of his footsteps, a slight hesitation in the pattern that brought me fully awake. He came in with a host of smells, among them liquor and a heavy, sweet odor. Perfume. Perfectly still, I listened and watched the darkness.

Step, shuffle, step, step. Smaller, quicker steps that sounded as if he were being blown into the room. A confusion of noises, not like at home. But even in the strange darkness of the hotel room, I knew he was drunk.

The fear was like the prick of a needle. A warning. Elikah had been like a different man. In one day, I’d fallen a little bit in love with my husband, but I was afraid of him when he was drunk. We were alone in a city where no one knew us, no one cared.

Except we weren’t alone.

I heard her then, the breathless giggle of her laughter. “Shush, Eli.” She giggled as she made the sound. “She’s asleep.”

“And we’re going to wake her up,” he answered, laughing also.

Nine

T
HE rocking of the train was soothing, a sound and movement beyond my control. Without lifting my forty-pound hand, I was hurtling through time and space. I sat with my face turned to the morning sun, remembering how it was when Daddy worked the night shift and he would come home in the mornings. Mama would be up cooking bacon and biscuits, then making the red-eye gravy he loved, and I would hear them talking, the low current of their voices much like the movement of the train, the feel of the morning sun coming through the window on the clean sheets of my bed where Callie and Jane still slept beside me. I loved to listen to the kitchen sounds, the knowing that the day had begun and would continue, with Daddy going to sleep and us kids going out to pick the vegetables and help Mama with the younger children. We’d draw lines in the dirt, setting out the rooms of our make-believe house around the old oak tree in the backyard. The roots were gnarled, big and sturdy, making sofas and chairs and nooks where we could nestle Josh, the baby, in his own little room.

If I closed my eyes tight enough and gave in to the train, I could go back there and draw my own room around me, the walls invisible but respected by Callie and Jane, and even Daddy when he came out to see what we were doing. He always used the space where the door had been drawn, careful not to step on the furniture we’d outlined in the dirt. I squeezed my eyes to hold back the tears.

Janelle took the seat beside me as soon as Elikah left. “That rich food didn’t agree with you.” She spoke as if it was a fact. “Elikah said you ate too much.”

I gripped the edge of the seat and hung on to the motion of the train.

“I had the hotel make me up some tea. It’s warm now, but it might help.” She settled back against the seat.

“No, thanks.”

“Did you dance last night?”

I remembered the room with the covered lights and the band that seemed to blow smoke from the shining horns. “Yes. We danced.”

“I told you.” She touched my arm. “Had a little too much to drink, didn’t you? It wasn’t the food at all. You drank.”

I didn’t dispute her. What purpose would it serve?

“Vernell did, too, but I didn’t touch any of it. I don’t feel sick today either.”

We were pulling into the Bay St. Louis station, the first stop in Mississippi. We’d passed over Lake Pontchartrain, a mirrored sheet that stretched from horizon to horizon. Now the Sound waited out my window, glittering into the distance. The beaches were the color of muslin, not the pure white that I’d always imagined. It was a detail I’d failed to notice on the way over.

“Vernell told me to leave you alone, but I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you.”

I tensed, feeling the involuntary pain curl through me. “I don’t feel well,” I told her.

“It’s JoHanna McVay,” she continued, ignoring me. “I know you’re tenderhearted, Mattie, and a tad naive, but you can’t go around with that woman. Everyone in town knows you were at that baptism with her when Mary Lincoln drowned. And that Duncan all but cursed her with it. Look, Elikah has suffered a lot of shame because of you. Don’t you see, honey, you have to watch yourself? Everything you do reflects back on him.”

My fingers dug into the seat, holding on, holding me back. I couldn’t look at her or I would smash her pert little nose between her blue eyes. In my hot brain I could feel the flesh give beneath my palm, the point of her nose both hard and soft.

“Mattie, I’m not trying to lecture you, but there are some things you need to know about that woman. She’s got a reputation. A bad one. Everyone in town knows she’s had lovers. At least two.”

I ignored her, keeping my gaze out the window where the pine trees passed in a blur. Off in the distance there was an occasional house, and along the beach there would be some of the bigger homes. Mansions.

“JoHanna flaunts herself all over town. Why even the way she walks is designed to bring attention to herself. And she’s raised that child to be an outcast. The only friend that young-un has is that nasty old rooster.”

“Pecos loves Duncan.” I wasn’t saying it to defend the rooster. He wasn’t my favorite creature on earth, but he did love Duncan. “He’d kill anyone who tried to hurt her.”

“That’s ridiculous, Mattie. Roosters don’t have sense enough to act like a watchdog. You’re being silly. And even if the rooster was as smart as Thomas Edison, it still doesn’t make what’s happening at that house right. Two lovers! And I could name names.”

“Does Will know?” I didn’t believe such a thing. What woman would choose another man over Will McVay? It was just more of Janelle’s gossip.

“Who knows what Will knows or why? Everyone in town says she has a cooter-lock on him anyway. And it’s common knowledge that she got rid of a baby before Duncan was born. That’s why she’s so obsessed with that child.”

The things she was saying were wicked, evil. Lovers were one thing, but getting rid of a baby was something else again. JoHanna would never do something like that. Never. Decent people didn’t even think about such things. Not even when they were desperate and so afraid they thought they might die. Killing an unborn baby would be the biggest sin, the worst thing a woman could do.

“JoHanna can act like she doesn’t give a damn, but she knows in her heart that God is going to punish her, and He has.”

“Punish her? What do you mean?” Janelle had finally frightened me. I knew all about a punishing god. JoHanna didn’t believe in such a thing, but Janelle did, and I wasn’t certain exactly what I believed. It seemed to me the world was mostly made of punishment, whether a person deserved it or not.

“Look at what happened to Duncan, and that was just a warning. But JoHanna hasn’t mended her ways at all. She’s unnatural. She doesn’t behave in a respectable way. I mean she dresses like a slut. She may think it’s fashion and all that, but she’s forty-eight years old and she dresses like she’s a model from some Paris whorehouse. Those hats and those dresses, they’re just indecent.” She fluttered her hands in her lap. “God don’t hold with such behavior in a decent town. She ought to go on over to Paris or Europe or wherever she thinks is so grand and fine.”

“She’s beautiful.” I spoke so softly I wasn’t sure she heard.

“Beautiful? If you like that all the men in town watch the way you move. Why, you can see her butt jiggle under those flimsy dresses. And no sleeves, and that little hellion of hers dancing like she’s been possessed by Satan.”

“Duncan can’t dance anymore. She can’t even walk.”

“In that wagon with that rooster. It’s ridiculous. She makes a fool of herself and a fool of you—and Elikah—when you’re seen with her.”

I let go of the seat and turned to her. “Why are you so afraid of her?”

She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out. “How dare you speak to me like that when I’m only trying to do you a service by warning you? How dare you?” She got up, holding to the back of my seat as the train lurched. “Well, I can tell you one thing. I won’t waste my breath any further here, but just you mark my words; the day will come when you regret you ever spoke to that woman. And if you keep it up, you’ll be ruined in town. No decent person will invite you into their home.” She whirled around and fled.

“No decent person should invite me in,” I answered her when she was gone.