Touched (52 page)
I looked at Elikah. My gaze fell upon his feet, and I saw the boots. They were brand-new. He’d had the bootmaker who’d bought out Mr. Moses when he retired make the boots. They were exactly like the pair Floyd had made for Sheriff Grissham. The pair Elikah had worn every day until they had worn out. He’d just gotten the new pair only a few days before. The beautiful design of the vamp was struck by a slant of weak light from the window. Outside the storm was breaking up, and the sun was shining with a pale yellow light.
“Mattie! Mattie!” Aunt Sadie’s voice was tinny and worried. “Did you hear me, Mattie?”
I hadn’t heard her, but it didn’t matter. “I have to go, Aunt Sadie.”
“Duncan said she would call you later tonight. She was frantic, Mattie. Truly afraid. She was talking about trying to catch a train down here, but it’s so hard with the war.”
“If she calls you, tell her that I’m fine.”
“She hasn’t had a dream since they moved from Jexville, Mattie. What does this mean? She said she knew the man in the river, and that she had to talk to you.”
“Tell her I’m fine.” I hung up the telephone before she could continue. Later, much later, I’d explain.
I turned back to face Elikah, my gaze moving from those boots up to his eyes. For a long time now I had not allowed myself to feel even my hatred for him. I was surprised at the power of it. Twenty years had not dimmed it. He had also forgotten what I was capable of.
“I’m going, Elikah, whether you like it or not.”
“Not after all this time, Mattie. I’ve wasted too many years to see you leave now. We’re in this together, to the end.”
I would never understand why he hated me so. Me and JoHanna. And probably Duncan, had he ever known her as a woman. What had we done that made him willing to spend his life hurting us?
“At least we’re talking about this.” I went into the kitchen. “I’ll make some coffee.” The stove was gas now, and the blue flames shot up the minute I turned it on. The old cast-iron kettle had been replaced with a shiny silver one with a whistle.
Elikah took a seat at the table. “You won’t leave here alive, Mattie. Get it in your head; you’re not going anywhere.”
I put coffee in the pot. “I’m going out in the yard to feed the chickens. I’ll be back.” I pushed open the screen and went out to the barn. Mable had died ten years before, and we had buried her beside the barn. Now our only animals were the chickens I raised for their eggs and in honor of Pecos, who was buried in Natchez beside the Mississippi River.
I walked to the back of the barn where I kept the chicken feed and got a panful before I walked to the back of the yard.
“Chick, chick, chick.” I called the birds over to me. None of them had the sense of a flea, but I loved the soft murmuring noises they made as they pecked the dirt for the cracked corn I threw.
I’d covered Mable’s grave with some flowers, a weedy-looking plant that would produce, later in the summer, a tiny yellow bloom with a deep purple throat. I’d gotten the plants in Fitler, from the grave of a woman I never knew, Lillith Eckhart. She had been twenty-two years old when she was hanged for poisoning her husband. She had been young, desperate. Impetuous. I had planned better. And waited for a war.
Glancing up at the kitchen window, I made certain Elikah wasn’t watching as I plucked a big handful of leaves and stuck them in the one pocket of my dress beside my cigarettes. The juice of the crushed leaves stained my hand, a strong smell, a lot like tobacco.
Halfway back to the house I thought to drop the chicken pan before I walked in. Elikah sat at the table, waiting. His hard eyes calculated how far he’d have to go to stop me.
I braced my hands against the stove. “Maybe I haven’t thought this through,” I said. “I don’t want trouble for JoHanna or John Doggett.”
“Or yourself.” He grinned, leaning back in his chair.
I patted my pocket and spoke absently as I picked up a potholder to grab the kettle. “I must have left my cigarettes in the bedroom.” He hated that I smoked. Without a word he got up and went to the bedroom to find them. He took great pleasure in tearing them apart in front of me.
As soon as he left I opened the kettle and dropped the fresh green leaves inside. When he returned I had a cigarette lit. I blew a ring of smoke in the air.
“Put the cigarette out.” His hands were clenched at his sides.
Behind me the kettle screamed. Without looking away from him, I walked slowly across the kitchen to the back door. I took one last drag and flicked the cigarette out into the yard.
“Since we’re talking, it’s time you stopped that vulgar habit. Smoking makes a woman look cheap.” His small victory made him hungry for more.
I ignored him as I went to the stove. I poured the water into the coffeepot and turned off the gas.
“I think a lot of things are going to change around here.”
By allowing myself to feel again, I’d signaled to Elikah that I was vulnerable. He’d waited twenty years for that sign from me.
He took his seat at the table and waited for the coffee. My hands were shaking as I poured the cup, strong and black, just as he liked it. Twenty years had passed, but I hadn’t forgotten. He watched my hands, taking pleasure in my fear. I poured another cup for myself and leaned against the counter, holding the hot cup in hands that visibly trembled.
He sipped the coffee and made a face. “Everything you touch smells like cigarettes. That’s the last one you’re going to smoke, you hear?”
The coffee steamed in front of my face, the smell of tobacco clearly present. Elikah drank again. “I’ve got to get back up to the shop. It was closing time when you ran by like a scalded cat, but I need to put the combs in the disinfectant and bring the towels back here. I need you to wash them for me.” He took another swallow and pushed the cup aside. “I’ll be home for supper tonight, and I expect you to cook something.”
Fear blocked my throat. Not even a sound could escape. I swallowed repeatedly, but it didn’t help.
Elikah stood. The plant had had no effect. I don’t know what I had expected, but something. He lifted his cup and drained it, never one to waste expensive coffee. Without looking at me, he started down the hall. It was only at the front door that he staggered.
I think he knew it then, but it was too late. Hoping to get out onto the porch, he slammed into the screen door and lurched outside. I ran after him, grabbing him around the waist and barreling as fast as I could down the steps and to the car parked at the front of the house.
“What’s wrong, Elikah?” I asked him. His face was covered with a sheen of sweat and his eyes bulged. “You look sick. I’d better get you over to the new doctor’s.”
He was barely able to walk, but I got him into the passenger’s seat and shut the door. I ran back into the house for my keys and then climbed into the driver’s seat. Taking the back road, I headed to Fitler.
Dusk was settling in with a sky swirled pink and gold. The evening had cleared, a cool April twilight that carried the smell of wisteria and honeysuckle on it. A beautiful night as the Ford hummed along the paved road to Hattiesburg. At the turn-off to Fitler, the road changed to rutted gravel, and the car bounced from side to side on the narrow road.
In the twenty years that had passed, Fitler had been left far, far behind in the progress of the state. I pressed the gas harder as we bounced toward the river. Beside me, Elikah was either unconscious or dead. There was something I just had to tell him. One last delicious thing. “You know, Elikah, I never would have thought of this if it hadn’t been for you, shooting off your mouth to Janelle. Picture her face when I go up and ask for my flag with a star to hang in the window, when I tell her my man has gone to war.” I glanced at his pale profile. “Not a person in the world will suspect me of a thing since you told everyone you had already packed to go.”
I passed the turn to Aunt Sadie’s house and kept on. Jeb kept a wooden fishing boat chained to a cypress stump in one of the small landings. The chain weighed at least a hundred pounds. Jeb laughed that he’d rather have his boat sunk than stolen. But he’d given me a key for the rare times I wanted to fish. I backed the car down to the landing and then pushed Elikah out the door. He rolled to the edge of the water.
Fear gave me the strength to get him in the boat. Fear and hatred. As the boat drifted out into the current, I wrapped the chain around him as best I could, hauling it around his chest and between his legs and locking it tight with the big padlock. The boat was upriver from the bridge, and just as I finished, the moon broke over the horizon of thick trees and I saw the pilings silhouetted against the moon-shot water of the river.
Using the paddle to guide the boat, I drifted to a piling and grabbed the rope that some fisherman had tied there for a makeshift mooring. Elikah’s body was still, motionless, but I knew that he wasn’t dead. I knew because Duncan had never predicted anything but drownings.
Using every bit of strength I had, I heaved him over the side at the very base of the piling. There was the rattle of chains and the shush of air trapped in his clothes as he sank. Then, one last bubble of air, as if the river had suddenly swallowed him.
For a long time I sat in the boat, waiting for my heart to quiet and my fear to calm. It was done. There was no going back. For twenty years I had paid the price of this murder. I had done my time, and now I was free. Sitting tied to the piling, I got a cigarette from my pocket and had a smoke.
The butt sizzled in the river, and I untied the boat, guiding her slowly toward the shore. When I was almost to the bank, as far from the treacherous current as I dared to go without stranding the boat in the too-still shallows, I jumped clear of her, kicking her back toward the faster current as I swam to the bank.
The night was chill as I staggered out of the river and turned to watch the boat drifting slowly in the silvered water, drifting down the Pascagoula toward the Sound and eventually the Gulf. Jeb would report her stolen, chain and all. Some scavenger farther down the river would find her and keep her.
It was a long walk back to the car, and the woods seemed to close down around me. I kept walking, unable to think or plan. The only picture in my mind was a spit of white sand and a small isolated beach house with bright red flowers ruffled by a strong wind. I would keep the house in Jexville. I would need a place to come to each spring, a place to wait for the waters of the river to run high, for the time when secrets were brought up from the murky depths.
One day Elikah’s body might surface. One day. But until that time I was free. Truly free.
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Summer of the Redeemers
One
M
AEBELLE
VanCamp Waltman disappeared from Kali Oka Road one October day when the grape smell of kudzu rose thick over Chalk Gully. The afternoon hung suspended forever in the golden light that happens only during Mississippi’s fall.
Halfway buried in a small cave I was excavating, I heard Agatha Waltman’s shrill cry of discovery when she realized her baby was missing and not just misplaced. The shriek of fury and fear traveled the quarter mile from the Waltman house to the gully. Abandoning all of the clay I’d worked so hard to collect, I grabbed my bicycle and pedaled fast for home, the scream still echoing in that place beneath the tongue where fear can be tasted. Even then I knew what had happened. Without a single specific or detail, I understood what that long wail of despair had to mean.
And I knew I was to blame.
Word of the baby’s disappearance rushed down that red clay stretch of road flanked by barren cornfields all the way to Cry Baby Creek, the end of the road. The place where that other little baby had been found more than ten years before. Though I rode as hard as I could from the back of our property, through the woods and pecan orchard to the house, I wasn’t as fast as the gossip. Mama Betts was waiting at the screen door for me.
“Somebody’s stolen the youngest Waltman,” she said.
“Maebelle?” I could picture the infant, only eight months old with brown eyes and a thatch of red curls. She was a frisky baby but hardly big enough to support her name.
“Effie’s gone to town, but when she gets back, she’s going to want you to go over to the Waltmans with her.”
My knuckles burned against the screen door. I’d meant to push it open, but my arms were jerky, unable to respond, and I’d rasped my fingers down the screen. “No. I can’t.”
“Alice will need you.”
Mama Betts’ eyes bored into me, watching, calculating. I finally opened the door and walked past her to the other side of the screened porch. Her soft voice held me prisoner.
“It was ten years ago almost to the day that Evie Baxter was stolen. Everybody on Kali Oka remembers, but nobody wants to. They’ve forgotten that baby’s name.”
Mama Betts remembered everything that had ever happened in Chickasaw County since the turn of the century.
“That’s the baby in Cry Baby Creek, isn’t it?” I knew parts of the story, what I’d overheard listening to adult conversations and in the whispered warnings from Mama Betts. My brother and I had spent many a night down at the creek listening for the ghost of the poor murdered baby. We’d heard it, too, one clear night when we’d almost given up hope. It had made my skin prickle, that pitiful crying of a helpless creature in distress.
“I knew when those church folks moved on Kali Oka it was going to be trouble,” Mama Betts said. “I told folks about the past and how it charts the present, but no one wanted to listen.”
“That first baby, Mama Betts, how did they find her?” Barking came from the backyard, and I walked to a corner of the porch where I could look for my dog. I’d been so busy hoofing it from the gulley I hadn’t thought to wonder if Picket was with me. But then Picket was always with me. There wasn’t any tricking that dog.
“They found that other little baby in the tree roots along Cry Baby Creek. If it hadn’t of been for those roots, that baby would have floated on down the creek to the Pascagoula River and right on out into the Gulf of Mexico.”
Mama Betts had blue eyes, like mine, and they were almost like a touch as she waited for my response. She waited for me to turn around, but I wouldn’t. “In the roots?” I saw it clearly. Those willows grow out of the bank and make a canopy across parts of the creek. It’s a snake haven, and in low water the roots would make a perfect little nest for a dead baby.
“A piece of ricrac on the baby’s little white gown hung up. The creek was low and the current couldn’t tug her free. Hadn’t of been for that ricrac, they’d never have known she was dead. They could have gone on pretending she’d just simply disappeared.”
The oak tree beside the house was ready to drop its leaves. Acorns littered the ground, a feast for the gray squirrels. In the distance the pecans clustered against the sky. Daddy had said it would be a big crop this year. We’d have to find workers to help pick them all up.
“I told you to stay away from those people at the end of the road, didn’t I?” Mama Betts asked. “Those fanatics.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And that crazy woman. Her too. Didn’t I?”
“Nadine doesn’t have anything to do with this.” I could hear my heart beating. My ears were drums. Nadine Andrews was different, a single woman with a barnful of prize show horses and some strange ways. But this business with Maebelle was something else. Something more sinister.
“That remains to be seen. But you remember, I told you.”
“Yes ma’am, Grandma, you did.” I could hardly speak. She had warned me to stay out of all the comings and goings that happened along Kali Oka Road in the summer of 1963. Bad influences had been stirred, she said, giving her head three little nods that meant business. Bad results were on the way.
Maebelle VanCamp Waltman was gone.
In a way no one else would understand, I knew I’d brought it on. If it wasn’t for me, Maebelle would be sleeping snug in her pillows on the bed in the room Alice shared with four of her sisters.
The best way to explain any of it is to start back at the beginning of the summer. That was when the bad influences began on Kali Oka. Or maybe it was just the time for old deeds to rise up again. Mama Betts is always saying not to stir the past. She says it was never as great as we remember it, and if we have to meet it again, it won’t be with smiles.
That summer two things happened. The Blood of the Redeemer churchers and Nadine Andrews. It wasn’t hard to steer clear of the church folks. With their tall hair and gray dresses, they seemed gruesomely cheerless. No point in lying and saying they didn’t prick my curiosity, they did, and I spent many a summer afternoon spying on them. But Nadine was another matter altogether. Not the threat of
the Blood of the Redeemers’ hellfire could have kept me from biking down to Nadine’s whenever Mama Betts or Mama blinked an eye and I could shake free of them. The Redeemers were a curiosity; Nadine was a craving.
Mama Betts said right off the bat when Nadine moved in the old McInnis place that she was unnatural. No one in their right mind would move into that place alone, with all those cats, dogs and horses.
What she meant was no woman. No single woman without a man. No twenty-four-year-old single woman with bleached blond hair, tight pants and boots who rode horses like she thought she was Jacqueline Kennedy, yet lived in a house that Mama Betts said she could smell from the road.
Nadine was an amazement to me, too, but not for the reasons Mama Betts listed. It was the horses, plain and simple. They were the most wonderful creatures I’d ever seen. Shiny and tossing their heads.
Those horses had come straight from my dreams to land not a mile away from me on Kali Oka Road. Mama Betts knew about the past, but I recognized destiny when I saw it.
Nadine and the Redeemers hit Kali Oka at the same time. Actually, the Redeemers came first. Six old yellow schoolbus-loads of them, women and children staring without a twitch or a smile as they passed the house. It was a bad omen. There’d been talk up and down Kali Oka all spring that the church property at the end of the road, closed since Evie Baxter’s untimely end, had been sold.
Property changing hands on Kali Oka was always good for rumors and speculation. Folks clung to their land like it was blood kin. Old feuds were a matter of pride and there wasn’t room for newcomers.
Kali Oka was farmland, most of it from original homesteads when the southeastern portion of the state had been settled back in the late 1800s. Jexville, with a population of two thousand, was a stable town. No crime. No trouble.
Though Jexville was the heart of the county’s business, in the summer of 1963 it was far removed from my world. Kali Oka was south of town, and that long stretch of red clay led directly from the present to the past. Our last taste of religious sects had resulted in scandal, murder and the pathetic cries of a dying baby that could still be heard along the creek on clear summer nights. The ghost of Evie Baxter still haunted that twisty little creek. Mama Betts said when poor little Evie was thrown into that cold artesian water, she fulfilled the prophecy of
the creek. If anyone except her murderer had been around to hear her wails and cries, she might have lived. As it happened, though, she spent her last minutes crying to the black heart of her killer.
All of that happened when the Live for Christ Church owned the property at the end of the road. The Lifers, as they were known up and down Kali Oka, built the original church and parsonage down at the end of the road and set up what Mama called a commune. That was a word that upset Mama Betts, so whenever she said it, she’d make her eyes round and act like she was callin’ up Satan.
At any rate, after Evie Baxter’s murder, the Lifers were run off the road by public sentiment, and the church remained empty. No one was real excited to see the Redeemers move in, and I guess that Nadine arrived with her nine horses, fourteen cats, and five dogs without creating the stir she would have if the Redeemers hadn’t stolen center stage.
That summer was one of the hottest folks could remember. The first week or two, Alice and I rode our bicycles, tended her baby sister Maebelle V., and tried not to sweat to death. It started as a typical Kali Oka summer. Daddy had gone to school in Missouri, but it was something we didn’t talk about to anyone. Mama had grown up on Kali Oka, but Daddy was a different case. He was a Yankee. He was always winning trips to schools to study or teach. Since Arly and I couldn’t talk about it, I never paid much attention to what he was really doing. We just said he was working away for the summer, and that satisfied most of our friends. Lots of daddies on Kali Oka were working offshore or over at the shipyard in Pascagoula.
Mama wrote books for children. We didn’t talk about that either. It wasn’t a secret, but Mama said it made other people ill at ease, so it was better not to talk about it. Maybe one reason Nadine held such appeal for me was because we were a family of secrets. Even our names had been changed. Mama Betts said she had been under the spell of fairies when she named Mama Erin Clare after the old country. Mama Betts said it affected Mama’s brain and that she’d grown up fey and with a wandering mind and had earned the name Effie. That was why she could think up all those stories for children but couldn’t remember when she’d put a pot of dumplings to cook on the stove. When Mama Betts would get mad, she’d say that Mama would get “caught up in the raptures of a sentence and burn the house down.”
The other extreme could aggravate her just as much. She called
Daddy the Detail Man ‘cause he was always so precise about getting every little fact. I think that was how he came to be called The Judge, ‘cause his name was Walter Arlington Rich the third. Everyone just called him Judge, even though he didn’t have a thing to do with the courthouse at Jexville or the law. He was a teacher at a university and a writer for those magazines that folks put out on the living room coffee table but never look at. He and Mama met at some writers’ gathering, and his family was still upset that he’s moved off to Mississippi, where Mama Betts said they thought we still dug a hole in the woods to do our business. Details and Daddy’s family could work Mama Betts into a righteous frenzy at times.
So that leaves Arly, whose name was Arlington and caused him to get into at least one fight every school year. And my name is Rebekah, from the Bible, and Brighton, from some of Daddy’s kin, but everyone calls me Bekkah, the full name being too solemn for Mama’s taste in the 1960s. Oh, yes, and Mama Betts. Her name was Beatrice O’Shawnessy McVay, but everyone calls her Mama Betts, except for her oldest friends and they call her Beatrice. She said she lets them do it because their bones are too brittle, and if she hits them they might break.
All of those secret names twisted up inside our big old house must have counted toward my penchant for secrets. Mama Betts said that there were times when I didn’t know the truth. She said if the truth and I walked down Kali Oka Road together, neither would recognize the other. Mama said I had a healthy imagination and to leave me alone. Daddy wanted to know “the specifics” about my “lies.” Mama Betts was the one I had to watch out for whenever I started going down to Nadine’s house to see the horses. Mama Betts was the one who’d check my blue jeans for horse hairs and the smell of leather and sweat. She knew me best, I suppose. Knew how hard I fought to get something I really wanted. If I hadn’t been so intent on getting my way, maybe Maebelle V. wouldn’t have disappeared.