Touched (18 page)

“A dancer,” Duncan said.

There was a split second of awkward silence as her words called to everyone’s mind the fact that she couldn’t use her legs. Not yet. They were getting stronger. But dancing was a long, long way away. It was then I remembered her final image, the hot sand as she was running in her dream. Duncan wasn’t a prophet. She was a little girl with a vivid imagination.

“JoHanna’s brought that sweet boy Floyd up here with her. He’s down at the river fishing now.” China rattled and I knew Aunt Sadie or JoHanna was picking up the dishes from the table. “He’s a handsome boy, but innocent. Keep an eye on him, too. He doesn’t know the currents of that river, has no idea how it can snatch a man and pull him down and hold him.”

“Floyd will listen to whatever you tell him,” JoHanna added. “He’s no trouble, but if you do see him in a dangerous spot, just tell him. He listens.”

“Will do. Now those men are thinking I’m stealing all of Miss Sadie’s cake and coffee. They won’t work a lick out of jealousy.”

Footsteps traveled to the back door.

“Come back, Red,” Aunt Sadie said.

“Take care,” JoHanna added.

“Don’t drown,” Duncan sang out from the kitchen table where she still sat. “Take me in to see Mattie, please,” she requested as soon as the man was gone.

JoHanna was silent, but I heard the chair scraping. She was picking Duncan up. In a few seconds they appeared at my doorway.

“You’re awake.” Duncan was delighted. “You look much better. Last night you looked horrible. Put me on her bed, Mama.”

I nodded at JoHanna’s questioning look. I was feeling much better. The cramps were gone. I was starving again. I was delighted to see Duncan.

“Want to play cards?” Duncan asked. “Mama always plays cards with me when I’m sick.”

JoHanna stood in the door waiting to see if I wanted Duncan to stay or not. That simple gesture made me tear up.

“Mattie?” JoHanna stepped forward.

I laughed, letting the tears run down my cheeks. “You’re waiting for me to decide what I want. It just touched me.” I laughed, and Duncan and JoHanna joined in. “I’d love to play cards with Duncan.” I looked up, brushing the wetness from my cheeks with the back of my hand. “And I’d love a piece of that cake and some coffee.”

“Well I think we can handle that order,” JoHanna said. “I’ll get the cards first.”

She disappeared from the doorway, and Duncan gave me a serious look. “I really like Mr. Lassiter,” she said. “I got Floyd to bring me by your room before he went fishing, but you were asleep. I was going to tell you my dream.”

“I heard.”

She looked down at the cream-colored chenille bedspread, her fingers picking tufts of the pattern. “I think he listened.” She looked up, her brown eyes dazed and lost looking. “Sometimes, since the lightning, I can feel colors.”

I put my hand on hers as it had fallen motionless on the spread. “What do you mean, Duncan?” I wasn’t certain I wanted to know, but she’d decided to tell me.

“I feel them. Like hot and cold, only more.”

“More how?”

“Like Floyd took me out in the woods and we found this wildflower. It was so blue that it made me ache. I felt as if my heart were breaking in two.”

She was completely sincere. A little girl slightly afraid of the power of her senses.

“Has that ever happened to you?” she asked.

“No.” I tried to remember, but I couldn’t pinpoint anything like that.

“I saw a cardinal out the window day before yesterday. He was going from the clothesline to the chinaberry tree and then down into the yard to mess with Pecos.” She grinned. “Sometimes other birds mess with him because he’s not certain he’s a rooster.”

“Where is Pecos?”

“Aunt Sadie doesn’t like him in the house. He’s out under the porch, but I’ll get him inside by tonight.”

“What about the cardinal?” I was strangely compelled to hear this. Outside there came a burst of laughter, men working on the river. The echo had that wavery sound of being cast back from water.

“That’s Mr. Lassiter’s men. He has six or seven camps in the woods cutting the trees and getting them together. Then he has men who float them down to Pascagoula.” Her smile slowly faded. “Anyway, the cardinal was out there, and I was watching him. Suddenly it was like the rest of the world lost color. There was the bird, and the red was so red that I could feel the bird’s heart beating. He was too red to live long. His heart beat so fast. And I started to cry because he was so beautiful and born to die so soon.” Her eyes had filled even as she talked.

“And this color thing has happened to you before?”

“Since the lightning. I have to be alone, and …”

“And what?”

“It’s like it feels wonderful, but it hurts so much, too.” There was a question on her face. “At first, the color feels like … like all the joy in the world is inside my chest. It’s that way for just a few seconds, and then the pain comes.” She looked at me as if she expected an answer.

“I don’t know, Duncan. Can you stop it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to.”

I heard JoHanna moving in the kitchen, the rattle of dishes. She was fixing my cake for me. “What does JoHanna say?”

Duncan looked down at the spread and picked once again at the tufts of creamy fabric. “She says that in life pleasure and pain are twins. One comes, but the other is never far behind.” She looked up at me. “She said to experience feeling intensely is a gift, but that I have to learn when to feel, that I have to learn to guard myself.” She took a deep breath. “Because, she said that if I don’t protect myself I’ll become afraid to feel, and that I’ll die by degrees.”

I could hardly believe that JoHanna had told Duncan such a thing, but I saw it plain on Duncan’s face. She was frightened, and it scared me. “It’s always good to guard yourself.” I tried to pick a path through emotions and fears I didn’t understand. What was JoHanna trying to warn her daughter of?

“Mattie, have you ever been afraid of your feelings?”

Yes, oh, yes. I caught a shimmer of the night in New Orleans. My shame had almost killed me. I was afraid. Of Elikah and what he had done to me, but also of myself. Of what I had become capable of. Duncan was watching me with such intensity that I knew I didn’t have to answer. She saw it on my face. “Duncan, I think maybe it’s other people’s actions you have to guard against.” I faltered. “The colors you feel are pure. That’s you. If you feel that … completely about others, you put yourself at risk.” I wasn’t certain I was helping. Either of us. I heard JoHanna’s footsteps and felt an immense relief. I didn’t want to talk about this. I didn’t want to think of Elikah. I shifted in the bed to a better sitting position and I felt his mark all over me. I could not escape him, but I would not bring him into this day, this morning, this moment with the sun shining out the window and slanting across the bed. “Here’s your mother.”

“It’s pound cake,” Duncan said, her mood already shifted. “If Floyd can find another wagon, Mama said we could go to the river later today.”

JoHanna appeared in the doorway with a tray laden with a quarter of a cake, steaming coffee, and a rose in a tiny vase. I didn’t see the October-sky pink as intensely as anything Duncan had described, but the sight of that beautiful flower stung my eyes.

“I said Mattie could go to the river if she felt like it and
if
Aunt Sadie said so. But give her a chance to eat her cake and see.” She gave me a look.

“Maybe walking would do me some good. I’m kinda sore.” There were places where the sore was bad, but there were other places that felt like if I could move around, they’d limber up.

“We’ll see.” She put the tray down on my lap and lifted the deck of cards from it to hand to Duncan. “A couple of games. Then you and I are going to the store.”

“When’s Floyd coming back?”

“Lunch. Then we’ll see about the river.” She walked over to the window and looked out. “If you stand up you can see her,” she said.

“The river,” Duncan interpreted. “Mama says water is a female.” She saw she had my attention. “She said calling the Mississippi the ‘father of waters’ was the only mistake the Indians ever made, except not killing the first white men who came here.”

“I don’t think the Indians meant father of waters.” JoHanna spoke to the window. She turned toward us, and I saw the light of mischief in her eyes. “Father is the interpretation that the Spaniards put on the Indian term. Spain was, at that time, and still is, I should add, a very patriarchal society. Any figure of reverence or authority would naturally be male.” She lifted her eyebrows. “According to the men who heard it.”

I was surprised by my own laughter. “Where do you think of these things?” I asked her.

She grinned, a real complete grin. “Will asks me the same question. But he doesn’t wait around for the answer. I don’t think he really wants to know. Do you?”

I was suddenly aware of the risk. What she offered was not a simple answer to a question—it was revolution. I felt my smile slipping, and I tried to hold on to the lighthearted moment.

JoHanna left the window and came up to the bed. She put her hand on my forehead. “Cool,” she said. “You’ve weathered the worst, Mattie. Aunt Sadie promises. I do believe you can get up after lunch, if you want.”

“I want.”

“Good, then we’ll go to the river.” Duncan’s eyes were bright, an imp of mischief dancing there with the same abandon that Duncan had once danced the Charleston.
“She
wants to meet you, Mattie.
She’s
heard lots about you this summer from me and Mama.”

Seventeen

T
HE Pascagoula was not what I’d expected. In my mind’s eye it was a deep blue river with willows bending over the banks, a picture-book river winding placidly past small towns. I was correct in visualizing it as low on one side with high bluffs on the other, but that was as far as my imagination took me into fact.

We had come to the end of the road where the bridge was to have been built some thirty-odd years before. It was the easier route for us, because of our disabilities. Before us, the water was a mesmerizing element.

The river itself was yellow-red, sluggish looking. Looks were deceiving. Rains north of us had clouded the river and bloated it, giving it that lazy look, JoHanna said. But it wasn’t slow, she warned us. Far from it. The current wasn’t a steady flow, as I had imagined, but a confusion of small eddies. In places, it was smooth as glass. Suddenly a churning motion would break the water and a swirl of suction would be revealed. Whatever luckless object happened by would be suddenly sucked deep into the river. It could be a floating branch or a bottle, or a man. The river took whatever it could, JoHanna said. Sometimes the object would disappear, the vortex closing as fast as it had come. Later, it might be released far downstream, or it might not ever be seen again. JoHanna said there was a treasure of riches and broken dreams on the bottom of the Pascagoula.

JoHanna said the water would clear by tomorrow and that then we could swim, if Aunt Sadie gave her permission for me to get in the river water. A hot bath was definitely in order, JoHanna said, but Aunt Sadie didn’t believe in the healing properties of the Pascagoula, and she feared some infection would get me.

Since I tended to agree with Aunt Sadie, I was relieved. But I was glad to sit on the bank and watch Duncan and JoHanna and Floyd, and even that crazy Pecos, as they ventured closer to the murky depths.

Since JoHanna had insisted that I be hauled in a wagon by Floyd while she pulled Duncan, we didn’t go as far upstream as Duncan wanted. There was a place with a sandbar that Duncan loved. JoHanna said we would go there tomorrow if we could walk and swim. For today, though, we were to look only.

The enormous brick and mortar pilings that reared out of the current were a melancholy reminder of the bridge that was never built. More than fifty feet in height and wide as half a locomotive, they rose above the river, still resisting the constant tug of the current. Set in twos, there were fifteen pair. I couldn’t begin to imagine how the men got them down to the bottom of the river without being swept away.

“Daddy drew the way the bridge would look,” JoHanna said. “He wasn’t an architect, but he had a flair for being able to conceptualize things. He had it all, down to the little decorative iron touches.” She smiled. “I’m glad he never lived to see these barren supports here. That would have broken his heart.”

“Do you think Mr. Senseney is alive somewhere, building other things?” I was still wondering about the hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that had disappeared along with him. JoHanna’s sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars included in it. I’d done the arithmetic.

“I don’t think so.” JoHanna held the handle of Duncan’s wagon. “I don’t think he’s alive at all. I think he was killed up in New Augusta, when he went to buy the supplies. That whole neck of the woods is fraught with outlaws and their kin. I think Mr. Senseney had too much money on him, and he was the kind of man who liked to show off a little.”

JoHanna’s eyes had a rare distance in them, so I thought of something else to talk about. “When we go back, can we stop in the town?” We’d passed through it as fast as they could pull the wagons in the sandy road. JoHanna had said very little about the gaunt wooden frames that were left, skeletons of the past. I couldn’t tell if JoHanna wanted to race through the town because she didn’t want to talk about it, or because she was so eager to get to the river. Duncan had told me how much she hungered for the water, just to see it.

“I’ll give you a tour,” JoHanna said.

“Then I want to come back and fish.” Floyd looked at the water. “There’s a big one in there. I’ve heard the stories about that big tabby.” He looked at us all, one by one. “He weighs over a hundred pounds. If I could catch him, I’d be somebody.”

The handle of Duncan’s wagon hit the dirt with a soft thud. JoHanna was at Floyd’s side in one swift step. Her hand was on his cheek, directing his gaze deep into her eyes. “You are somebody, Floyd. You’re very special. You don’t need to catch a fish or do anything to prove it.”

Floyd’s grin was lopsided, and a flush warmed his cheeks. “You say that all the time, Miss JoHanna.
You
think I’m somebody, but the people in Jexville don’t. They think I’m a fool.”

I looked down in shame. Floyd wasn’t as simple as I’d thought. He was aware of the way people spoke of him. How could he not be? They did it to his face, as if he couldn’t understand.

“You can’t be responsible for the shortcomings of others, Floyd. You’re who you are. That’s plenty. You give some folks honesty, and they don’t realize the value. Give them a pretty dress, and they think they have something worthwhile.” She brushed her fingers across his jaw. “You’re very special. Catch the fish if it makes you happy, but do it for you.”

“Maybe I’ll get my picture in the paper.” Floyd turned away from her and looked into the water. “Now that would be something. Maybe my mama would read about me and know that I’d grown up to be someone she shouldn’t have left behind.”

Down river there was the sound of men rafting the logs, someone whistling a ragged tune. I looked at my hands, so pale in the bright sun.

“Let’s head back to town,” JoHanna said. “We’ll see what the river has to tell us tomorrow.”

“I’ll be back today.” Floyd made the promise to the river before he turned the wagon I rode in and started back toward the ghost town of Fitler.

The town proper of Fitler, or where it had been, was only half a mile from the river. Unlike Jexville, where all trees had been chopped down to make Redemption Road a straight line, Fitler’s main street snaked around the huge oak trees. The buildings had once been set back from the street where unruly shrubs now dominated. We were in no hurry as we meandered along the road, stopping to look at wild flowers or the prickly pear that could pierce thin shoe leather. I had the nagging sense that someone followed us, just beyond the shelter of the trees that grew on both sides of the road. In my perch in the wagon, I looked up often but saw nothing. My own guilt was playing games with me, as if Elikah had left his barbershop to come to Fitler and spy on me. As if he knew what I had done. I tried to ignore the sense of being watched.

At the middle of town, JoHanna stopped the wagon Duncan rode in and looked around. “When I was a little girl, there was a piano in that bar. Mr. Senseney’s bar. All evening long it would be going with the lively songs the men liked to hear. But sometimes, early in the morning, one of the whores would come down and play it. I always wanted to ask her the melody, it was so strange and haunting. I would sneak out of Aunt Sadie’s and come over and hide in those old bushes in my nightgown and listen to her play. I could see her through the curtains, and she didn’t look much older than me. She was killed, though, before I ever got to talk to her.”

“Killed?” I asked.

“Some man cut her with a knife, and she bled to death before the doctor could get there.” JoHanna stared at the two-story frame. “Corpses would float up, down in Pascagoula, sometimes two a week. The high-stakes card games brought a lot of violent men here. A lot of the killing went on at the floating saloons. There were houseboats that would dock, pick up a load of gamblers, and then move back out into the river, where they could tie up at some out-of-the-way place. No law ruled those hellholes.”

“There’s pirates’ treasure, too,” Duncan said.

“That tale drew plenty of fortune hunters up to Fitler,” JoHanna agreed. “Floyd knows some stories about that.”

“Where did everyone go?” I looked at the rambling structures, what looked like the town had been thirty or more businesses. The only thing left was a small grocery that also served as a postal and telegram office with a bait shop on the side. The wooden frames of buildings past were like a mirage. They gave the idea of a town, but when I looked closely, it wasn’t there. I wasn’t certain it ever had been. The contrast to what I’d come to know in Jexville was too extreme.

“Most of the folks went to other river towns. The coast.” JoHanna pulled the brim of her ever-present hat lower to shade her eyes from the afternoon sun. “I heard Lonnie and Frank, the bartenders at the Last Chance, are working for Tommy Ladnier. His private home. I remember them as handsome young men. I’m sure they add a note of elegance to Tommy’s little soirees.”

“Mr. Ladnier has nice clothes,” Floyd said. “I’m making him a pair of boots. Very special.”

I looked up and down the abandoned street. “What would have happened to Fitler with Prohibition?”

JoHanna shrugged. “Nothing. Like the coast. Like Jexville. There’s liquor in every cabinet, folks just hide it and pretend not to drink. This country is in love with hypocrisy.”

The skin on my neck prickled just as Pecos shrilled with alarm and flew off the back of Duncan’s wagon. All of us were startled, and we all swung around at once to find a tall, dark-haired man standing not five feet behind us. He’d come up so silently that we hadn’t heard a thing.

“You’re right,” he said, as if he’d been part of our conversation. “The people in this country want to live the life of what they see in the film-strips, but they don’t want others to know what they do.”

JoHanna should have responded. She should have said something to the man for frightening us, for sneaking up on us and eavesdropping on our conversation. Instead, she looked at him and caught her breath as if she had a sudden pain. His dark gaze was proud, direct. Effective. He spoke to her, communicating something that made my skin prickle. Her lips parted to speak, but whatever she’d meant to say did not come out.

“Who are you?” she asked instead.

Before he could respond, Floyd swung around on him. Dropping into his gunslinger’s crouch, Floyd inched his hands up until they hovered over the wooden pistols he wore wherever he went.

The stranger’s face shuttered, his eyes narrowing as his legs bent slightly and he lifted his hands to his sides. “Can we talk?” he asked, his voice a threat and a request.

“Be careful, Floyd,” Duncan warned.

Floyd hesitated, shifting just enough so that his body protected JoHanna if the lead began to fly. “Put your hands in the air.” He drew his right pistol and pointed it at the stranger’s chest.

The stranger complied, large hands moving slowly into a position of surrender, though surely he could see that Floyd’s guns were wooden. The stranger wore no weapon that I could see. His face registered no trace that this was a fool’s game. He treated Floyd as if he had a cannon. Floyd’s face was flushed with success, and pride.

“Easy, Floyd.” JoHanna placed a steadying hand on Floyd’s arm, as if she too believed he carried a loaded weapon.

I wondered if they had all gone insane.

“Now maybe he’ll tell us his name,” JoHanna prompted, “before you have to do away with him.”

The stranger stepped forward, left hand still in the air while he extended his right to her. “John Doggett. And you are JoHanna McVay.” He looked at Duncan. “You’re the daughter, Duncan. And?” He looked at me and Floyd. I found that I, too, was holding my breath. He was a highwayman, a figure of dark fantasy. Surely if I blinked he would be gone.

“Mattie and Floyd, my friends.” JoHanna finally stepped forward as if to shield all of us from his too obvious interest.

He gave Floyd a nod. “You did an excellent job of protecting Mrs. McVay.” He looked at me, assessing my place. “And her family.” He returned his attention to her. “I’ve heard many things about you.” He spoke to her as if they were alone. Then he instantly dispelled that notion by giving Duncan a smile. “And your beautiful daughter.”

“I’m sure you have. Gossip, like hypocrisy, is a delicious little sin, isn’t it?” JoHanna’s voice held a strange note of haughtiness.