Touched (24 page)
We walked at our leisure, drifting from the shade of one big oak to the next. If JoHanna wanted to halt the gossip, she made no effort to do so by trying to appear less odd. She did wear her big hat, which was in and of itself a statement, but one less provocative than her close-cropped hair. Duncan’s head, now a silky fringe of black hair, was bare, and she bumped her heels in the bottom of the wagon in time to JoHanna’s walk. Had I been JoHanna, I would have taken the car, and I would have locked Pecos in the house.
There were thirty or so men gathered where the bank sloped gently into the river. They spoke softly among themselves, pointing out different areas of the river. Several men had waded into the water, their hands on the wooden sides of the fleet of small boats that were clustered there. As we approached most of the boats began to pull away, each with two or three men aboard.
The day was unnaturally still. No laughter rang out on the water, no jokes or teasing calls. As we drew closer we could hear the sound of the water lapping against the remaining three boats.
“Aunt Sadie asked me to tell you that she’ll be bringing over some chicken and dumplings at noon.” JoHanna spoke to a tall, angular man who had just waded into the water in preparation of boarding a boat. He was bronzed from the sun and carried a coil of stout rope over his shoulder. He turned her way, his gaze going past her to Duncan.
“The men will appreciate that.” He looked nervously back to the river.
“Come on, Diego.” The man in the boat signaled him impatiently. “It’s going to get hot as hell out on the water.”
Diego lifted the rope, swinging it high over the water. The sun glinted off the four prongs of a sharpened hook as it arced through the air and landed with a thud in the wooden bottom. He cast another look at Duncan, then turned his back. Hands moving quickly he made the sign of the cross before he got into the boat, shoving off with his foot.
“They won’t find him this morning.” Duncan’s clear voice carried easily on the water to the men. The one called Diego gave her a frightened look before he lifted his paddle and put his muscular arms to work.
JoHanna held the handle of the wagon in her hand and watched as the men fanned out along the river, beginning at the point where Red had disappeared beneath the raft and moving downstream.
“He could be halfway to Pascagoula by now,” Duncan said to no one in particular. “Once that river gets hold of something …” She didn’t finish the thought.
“Let’s go make those dumplings.” JoHanna started back toward the house.
“What about a swim? I want to exercise my legs.” Duncan had a hint of petulance in her voice.
“Not today.” JoHanna stopped and gave her daughter a long look. “I’ll come back down here with the food, and I’ll wait until the men come and eat it. And Duncan, you and Mattie will stay at Sadie’s, and you will say nothing that even sounds vaguely like you’re making a prediction.”
“They won’t find him this morning.” Duncan’s jaw had squared. Her brown eyes were filled with anger and a flash of hurt.
“They may never find him, Duncan, but I don’t want you to say that.”
Twenty-three
T
HEY found Red at three o’clock. When the sharp metal hook snagged him on the bottom of the river, it brought up something else, too. A cap, once white, carefully crocheted for a newborn baby. A girl. The tiny knotted brim was laced with the remnants of a pale pink ribbon. The treacherous current of the river had wrapped the long ties of the cap around Red’s hand, and as they dragged the body to shore, the white material floated beside him.
I’d gone down to the river to retrieve Sadie’s dumpling pot while JoHanna and Duncan took a nap. I had hardly loaded the big pot in the wagon when a wild cry echoed off the river. It was Diego’s hook that found Red’s body not two hundred yards from where he’d been caught between the rafts.
The boat came toward shore towing the body. I saw a hand lift from the water, almost as if Red were waving, or trying to swim. But he wasn’t. His arms were frozen in a position that looked as if he’d tried to shield himself from some terrible sight.
Diego cast me a nervous look before he leaped into the shallows and towed the body up to the narrow strip of sand. I couldn’t look away, not even when he bent to remove the hook. I heard a muttered curse and a string of Spanish as he pulled the body to the shore. The little cap clung to Red’s arm.
Diego’s cry brought the other searchers in, the small boats moving toward the shore with the somberness of a ritual. Red Lassiter was drowned. The river had yielded up the proof.
Jeb Fairley was waiting for me back at Aunt Sadie’s when I returned with the dumpling pot and the news that Red Lassiter had been found. Jeb abandoned his seat on the porch and went down to the river, returning less than an hour later, ready to head home. He paced the yard impatiently while I said my good-byes. Aunt Sadie gave me a brisk hug and attempted to catch Pecos to put in the car with me. Duncan waved from the porch while JoHanna came out to tell Jeb to keep an eye on me. They would wait for Will, she said, unless something unexpected happened.
We drove east. At our backs, the setting sun dusted the moss-draped oak trees with pink flames. Wrapped in sheets, the body of Red Lassiter had been placed in the backseat. There was no time to waste. The warm water of the Pascagoula and the September heat had already begun to do its work. Red was wrapped tight from head to toe. I didn’t ask how they got his arms down at his sides. Jeb had removed the baby’s cap from his arm and left it to dry on Sadie’s porch. Sadie couldn’t remember a baby drowning at Fitler, but there had been several ferry wrecks where trunks of clothes had gone to the bottom. And there was no telling what tragedies had occurred upstream. It was something I tried not to ponder as the light shifted and changed and the car moved steadily toward Jexville.
Dark had fallen before Jeb spoke, his voice soft, as if he didn’t want to disturb Red in the backseat.
“Jexville is in a stir about Duncan.” He looked at me. “And you haven’t been spared.”
“How’s Elikah?” I laced my fingers in my lap. My husband would not be happy that I had called attention to myself.
“He’s been quiet.”
The road was rutted and the going slow, and Jeb wasn’t pressing the old car too hard. He cleared his throat, a warning to me, and I fought hard not to cringe. What had Elikah said?
“I should have married Sadie.”
I thought at first that I hadn’t heard him, but when I looked, I saw that I had. He was staring straight ahead at the small vanguard of light the headlights threw on the red dirt road. His hands were gripped on the wheel, looking relaxed, but not. For the first time I noticed that he was older than I’d thought. I also remembered that Aunt Sadie, hat perched atop her head, had been gone all day.
“Why didn’t you?” As far as I knew, neither of them had ever married.
“I’ve given that a lot of thought. I came up with a hundred good reasons, all to hide the fact that I was a coward.”
My hand started across the distance of the seat, to touch him, to give him comfort, but the set of his jaw stopped me. He did not want comfort from me. He wanted something else. Something far more difficult to understand.
“I came to Fitler in 1883, back when this area was still recovering from the ravages of the war. It was an accident that I happened onto the place, but the first thing I saw when I got off the riverboat was Sadie. She was standing in the shade of a big oak with another young woman, laughing over something one or the other had said. I’ve been told that Lillith was the true beauty, but I swear to you, I never saw her. There was only Sadie.”
The cooler air of the September night blew in the open car window as we motored along. The drone of the car’s engine, at first loud, had receded in my mind. There was the distant sound of frogs as we passed a small pond where beavers had dammed a stream. There was not another living soul for miles around, and I was riding in the car with a man lost in the past and a body wrapped in sheets. I wondered then if it was Red that Jeb Fairley was talking to as much as me.
“I fell in love with Sadie that moment. And I’ve loved her ever since.”
“Why don’t you marry her?” I still had not learned the art of governing my tongue. My question might have been ill-phrased, but it was sincere. They were both free to marry. There weren’t even any children—that I knew of—to object.
He glanced at me. “You haven’t heard the whole story.”
We rode along in silence for a bit, and I wondered if I should prod him on or let it go. Just as I was giving up hope that he’d speak another word to me, he started again.
“Lillith D’Olive was a strange girl. Her father was a tung oil farmer, and they owned lots of property north of Fitler. He’d brought his daughter to Fitler to stay with his sick sister and to meet some men. She was twenty and more than old enough for marriage. There was no dearth of proposals; it was just that Lillith couldn’t make up her mind. She had an idea of what it was going to be like to fall in love and get married. Lillith couldn’t pass down the street without drawing every man in town out of the stores and saloons to walk along with her. She could have had her pick of any man in the territory, and God only knows why she decided it would be Edgar Eckhart.”
Lillith Eckhart. I could almost feel the cool marble of her headstone beneath my hand. She’d died in 1885, only two years after Jeb had come to Fitler.
“She was very young. How did she die?” Sadie hadn’t told me that part.
“She was hanged.” He kept looking at the headlights dancing on the road. “The only woman ever executed in this part of the country.”
I felt as if my breath had been punched out of me. “Hanged?”
“They built a gallows in the main street of town.”
“In Fitler?” I sounded dumber than dirt, but I couldn’t help myself. In all of the stories JoHanna and Duncan had told me, in watching Sadie and her love of the town, I’d never thought of a hanging. Especially not a woman just twenty-two years old. “What did she do?”
“She was tried and convicted of murdering her husband.”
The pain in my abdomen almost made me cry out, but I gripped the door handle of the car and gritted my teeth. Sweat popped out on my forehead, and I moaned slightly, but the wind from the open window whipped it away from Jeb, taking it back to the ears of a man who no longer heard. It was not a real pain I felt, only the memory. It passed as quickly as it came.
“Edgar Eckhart was a son-of-a-bitch. He was a violent man, though he could be quite charming when he chose to be. Lillith loved him beyond reason.”
“She was a fool.” I made my pronouncement with no sympathy for this long-dead woman. How was it that a woman could love a man who hurt her? This wasn’t something I could understand. I did not love Elikah, though I wanted to. At first. I learned quickly, though, that while I could not protect my body from his belt, I could safeguard my heart. “She was a stupid fool.”
“No bigger fool than I.” He slowed the car, pulling off the road beneath the straight limbs of a red oak.
The big leaves blocked out the clear night sky, and I felt a twinge of apprehension. I didn’t want to stop. We would already be arriving late, after dark. If we tarried long, I might lose my nerve and never return to Elikah.
He sensed my apprehension because he turned to me. “Do you mind if we stop for a few minutes? Red doesn’t care.” He chuckled softly. “He was a patient man with his friends, but he told me almost forty years ago that I was a fool. He named me correctly.”
Jeb Fairley had been a kind neighbor, an older man who minded his own business but who always had a nod and a smile for me. His voice was raw. Whatever grief he was suffering needed attention now. “Did you love Lillith?”
“No, not Lillith. It was always Sadie that I loved. Even now.”
I remembered the perky hat, the hint of lipstick. Sadie loved him, too. They had obviously spent the day together. The feelings were mutual. What kept them apart? “You’re confusing the dickens out of me.” I couldn’t help the irritation in my voice.
“Everyone in Fitler soon knew the circumstances of Lillith’s marriage to Edgar. He would drink in the saloons and go home and hit her. At first she tried to hide it by staying home. But Sadie kept going down there and dragging her into town. She and Lillith would walk up and down the main street with both of Lillith’s eyes punched black and her hair pulled out in hunks.”