A Widow's Curse

by Phillip DePoy

  Out of bed, bare feet on the cold floor, every breath like a cracking apple, I went to the window and stared out. There it was: the first moment of fall.

  “Andrews!” I called. “Are you awake?”

  I glanced at the clock. It was nearly one o’clock. I’d slept in my clothes again and really wanted a shower.

  A weak groan from the other room was my only answer at first, then: “I’m starved! Miss Etta’s!”

  Andrews was hungry: the dew of normalcy had refreshed the leaves of grass, and all was right with the world.

  “What day is this?” I couldn’t take my eyes off all the sunlight over the rims of the mountains.

  “No idea.” He yawned.

  “It’s just that if today is Monday—and I’m very afraid that it is—Miss Etta’s might be closed.”

  “Tragedy strikes,” he mumbled, coming to my doorway.

  He had slept in his clothes, too, and he looked like he’d been in a hurricane.

  “Not as badly as you might think.” I rubbed my face. “If I call June right this second, she might have us over for dinner. Hek doesn’t usually get home until about two o’clock from his services; we’ll be right on time.”

  “He has services on Monday?”

  “He has services every day.” I rubbed my forehead. “And when he comes home, they have their big meal.”

  “Isn’t it a bit—sounds rude: ‘Oh, hello, can we come to dinner?’”

  “The beauty of June’s hospitality,” I informed him, “is that she thinks it’s rude when I don’t come to dinner.”

  “But I mean, will she have made enough food?”

  “She’s a southern woman. She’s cooked for ten.”

  “Go to the phone now.” Andrews stepped aside.

  June knew there was more to my call than a visit for dinner. I hadn’t been to their house for a meal in months. She suspected that I had something to tell her, something to ask her; both. Andrews had wanted to leave right away, but I prevailed upon him to shower, shave, and attire himself in something other than a wrinkled Hawaiian shirt. When I explained to him that dinner would not begin until Hek arrived, he grumbled his way into cleanliness.

  We were out the door by two o’clock, dressed as nicely as the likes of us ever did: I in the only pale blue stay-pressed dress shirt I owned and Andrews in a polo shirt the color of a pistachio nut. We climbed into the truck and were on our way.

  The day, against any calendar evidence, did actually seem the first of fall. Overnight, the leaves had begun, just barely, to blush and bronze. It was unusual enough for Andrews to notice about halfway through the short drive.

  “A little early for autumn in Georgia, isn’t it?” He yawned, mesmerized by the long valleys he could see out his window.

  “It is,” I agreed. “But sometimes the weather conforms to a certain spirit abroad in the land.”

  “What the hell are you saying?” He turned from the scenic splendor to my profile. “You can’t go around talking in metaphysical clichés just because a scary man from the Celtic side of your family hit you in the head.”

  “He didn’t hit me in the head. I fell on a gravestone. And I only mean that it’s time for summer to be over; it’s time for a better season.”

  “All right.” He wasn’t convinced that I hadn’t slipped a cog. “By the way, listen to what I came up with in the shower. I think Professor Briarwood may be to his little village in Wales what Fever Devilin is to Blue Mountain.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Seems clear to me.”

  As it happened, I struggled a bit with his comparison, but I thought I mustered a fine response—more than enough to invalidate his proposition.

  “Except that I never traveled to another country,” I responded, diction crisp as ice, “to kill a man.”

  “Point taken,” he conceded, “but there he is, a nutty professor type, folkloring his way though the rye, and a bit obsessed with his family.”

  “Point in your favor,” I acknowledged.

  “Or several.”

  “And,” I said, topping him, “I realize that his psychosis is clear evidence that I come by my strangeness at least in part through the courtesy of genetics.”

  “Those little bastards,” Andrews mumbled.

  “What?”

  “Genes,” he said, mocking me. “You can’t escape them. I myself am doomed by the demon of grand breeding—a damnable heritage of beauty. There is no escape.”

  “I’m thinking of pushing you out of the truck,” I offered casually.

  “Wouldn’t do you any good,” he chattered on. “I was also born lucky.”

  “Lucky someone hasn’t thrown you from a speeding truck already.”

  “See?”

  Hek and June’s house swung into view around the long curve in the road, and I slowed me down.

  Their stark white house was a beacon against the black bottom soil, backed by three mountains. Everything about the place, as I had often observed, had an angel’s attention. Clear sunlight washed the tin roof. The air was new, lighter than summer air, and I imagined that I could smell the chicken roasting in June’s oven as we pulled off the road and headed toward the front porch.

  June appeared in the doorway before the truck engine was off, neck to knee in a flower-print apron, wooden spoon in hand. White hair haloed her head, and her eyes were like candlelight.

  “Get on into this house,” she demanded. “I’m so proud you could come for dinner.

  “She’s happy to see us,” Andrews marveled.

  “I told you.”

  I was on the porch in five steps. June moved aside. Even given the heartfelt joy she and I were both experiencing at the prospect of dining together, there was no maudlin physicalization, no outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual feeling.

  Andrews barged in, drawn by the delectable seduction of cornbread dressing and sweet onions.

  “Your timing is perfect.” June steered between us toward the kitchen. “Hek’s home and washing up.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to this meal,” Andrews intoned as if he were in church.

  “Now,” June demurred, “we don’t have much to eat.”

  That disclaimer, I knew, was obligatory, a bizarre example of modest manners from a bygone era.

  A single step past the threshold of the kitchen door revealed the truth: a table so laden with earthly delights that not a centimeter of surface was visible. A tablecloth made from exactly the same material as June’s apron hung nearly to the floor, and June had set out her wedding china—a gift from her mother—which was certainly a hundred years old. Considering that I was capable of breaking at least a plate a week in my own home, I had always appreciated the fact that June had kept these dishes sparklingly clean her entire marriage without ever so much as scratching the delicate golden pattern around the edge. Four large dinner plates were stacked at the head of the table, where Hek would sit.

  I thought Andrews might pass out.

  “You said it was only chicken and dressing.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off the pork roast. It was covered with an arranged pattern of baked apples and looked more like a gallery piece than an item of food.

  “June’s eyes danced, though her mouth remained a straight line, “Well, I always cook a little extra, just in case.”

  She stepped to the oven, opened it, and drew out a long golden baking dish.

  “Here’s the dressing.”

  White steam rose up like the sigh of a sleeping child.

  Andrews may have had tears in his eyes.

  Hek sauntered into the room, rubbing his belly.

  “My, don’t all this look good,” he said, staring at the table with the same abandon as Andrews.

  Without ceremony, we all sat. Hek’s grace was a single sentence.

  “Lord, let us take from Junie’s food all the love she put into it.”

  He immediately began to carve, first the roast, then t
he chicken. Everyone got equal portions of everything, and plates were passed around. For the rest of the bounty, we were on our own—field peas, boiled new potatoes with fresh parsley, baby pattypan squash that looked like white flying saucers, raw spinach mixed with quartered hard-boiled eggs and bacon, crisp sugar snap peas salted and buttered. I knew that everything on the table had come directly or very recently from Hek and June’s garden, including the bird and roast.

  For a while, there was no talking. It would have been unimaginably rude to try to wedge words between the diner and the dinner.

  But just as Andrews began to reach for seconds of half the items on the table, I managed my first strategic shot.

  “So, we found the person who killed that man Shultz in my house the other night.”

  Of course it was awkward and obvious, but they’d been expecting something, and I wanted to give them a sense of my own discomfort.

  “You’ll never guess who he was,” I went on. “A family member. Distant. He was a Briarwood from Wales. Looking for that coin we talked about.”

  Hek nodded. June got up from the table under the pretense of fetching the pitcher of iced tea. Andrews stared at me as if I had strangled a kitten at the table, angry that I was wrecking the pristine beauty of the meal.

  In the ensuing silence, I could hear the oven timer ticking. It meant that June’s dessert was still cooking—blueberry cobbler was my guess. I waited a moment, taking in everyone’s discomfort.

  “He’d been hunting down that coin for decades,” I went on, taking a bite of chicken, “because it was something of a family heirloom, as it turns out. Minted in the 1600s by our brood in Wales. It may well be the only one of its kind left in existence. He seemed to think it was priceless. So I was thinking, now that everything is over, you wouldn’t mind telling me who sold that coin to Mr. Shultz’s father all those years ago.”

  I was absolutely certain that they knew.

  “Well…” June looked out her kitchen window.

  Hek had stopped shoveling food onto his fork.

  “A man was killed in my home because of it.” It came out of my mouth with a much harsher sound than I thought it was going to.

  Hek set down his fork; June nodded.

  “You were off at college when your daddy died,” June began. “I don’t know what I expected from your mother—she was so strange. Maybe I thought it wouldn’t bother her. She didn’t live with your daddy no more, and, you know, what with her ways—”

  My mother had not been faithful to my father, perhaps, ever in their marriage—that’s what June meant by “her ways” I should have known at that moment where the story was headed, but the truth was invisible to me, the way family truths often were. And I was slow-witted from a long night’s sleep.

  “Only she fell apart.” June looked into the porcelain sink as if she might have lost something there. “I reckon she wasn’t quite so hard a woman as…as some used to think.”

  June meant herself, of course.

  “She come over here,” Hek said, continuing the story while looking at his plate, “busted up. You know, your daddy just closed his eyes and went to sleep when he passed on. He give not a warning nor a word of farewell. Just left.”

  His final vanishing act, I thought.

  “I can understand why you would have been surprised by her emotional response,” I began.

  “I don’t need your help with this,” Hek snapped. “Do you want to hear what was said, or not?”

  Clearly Hek had something to say that was difficult for him, and he didn’t want to be interrupted.

  I nodded.

  “She come over here busted up is what I’m saying.” He tapped the tabletop for emphasis. “But a part of it was about money.”

  “She was worried about the funeral expense,” June added.

  “The short of it is this: She’d heard Conner talk about the things he’d bought at the auction and—”

  “At the Barnsley estate,” I said, interrupting pointedly.

  Hek drew in a breath.

  “So you know about that’s where the auction was,” June pronounced. “Good.”

  “I spent last night at the Barnsley estate,” I explained, “trying to keep the man who killed Shultz from killing me, too.”

  “So there’s more to the story.” Hek was impatient with me.

  “Sorry.” I didn’t sound it.

  “Your mother knew from Conner that the things he’d bought at auction were worth something. The picture painting had already been sold, you know, for your schooling; the other thing, the Cherokee cross, she was scared of that.”

  “Made my father bury it in the backyard, as it turns out,” I said.

  “If you keep interrupting me,” he warned.

  I nodded, held a finger to my lips.

  “Only thing left was the coin.”

  Stupidly, it was not until then that I realized where he was going. I had a sudden catch in my throat, like a hand choking my neck.

  “Wait.”

  But Hek ignored me.

  “She found it in that old trunk of your great-grandfather’s, put advertisements in some of these newspapers, and sold it to that man from Atlanta.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Andrews exploded. “Your mother sold the coin?”

  It seemed obvious now that it was out in the open.

  “Son!” Hek rose out of his seat. “You blaspheme in this house and I get my shotgun on you!”

  “Oh.” Andrews was stunned by Hek’s vehemence. “Right. You’re a preacher. Sorry a thousand times. I—I have absolutely no manners and ought not to be allowed to roam freely.”

  “Hek,” June said soothingly, “it most likely come as a shock, your news.” She lowered her voice. “And you know that boy’s from over there in England,” she added, as if that were the perfect excuse for all of the patented Andrews foibles.

  But it worked on Hek. He sat back down, even if his face was a little flushed.

  “Your mother sold the coin,” he concluded, as if no one else had yet thought of it.

  “She only thought she’d get funeral money,” June concluded. “But that man give her five thousand dollars, she said.”

  “That was about the last time we seen her, your mother.” Hek nodded once, his benediction, and went back to work on the field peas.

  “Her final words at the funeral were words of anger,” June said softly. “Some people are that way about death—mad at the one who’s gone. Last thing I heard her to say was to call your father a bad name.”

  “A curse,” Andrews said softly to himself.

  “And of course at that point,” I murmured, looking directly at Andrews, “she was a widow.”

  Skid called not long after Andrews and I got home from Hek and June’s. Professor Briarwood was being held in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. Apparently, his Mr. Hyde persona had interfered with an emergency room doctor’s care. Burly orderlies were dispensed; Briarwood was sedated.

  The man calling himself Detective Huyne, along with his friend, had checked out of the Mountain Vista Hotel in Pine City and had disappeared. Skid was pursuing the issue, but he held little hope of finding the false policemen, given the limited resources of a small-town sheriff’s office.

  I asked if he knew anything more about lawyer Taylor. Skid told me that Taylor had filed half a dozen legal documents to block anyone, myself included, from ever looking at Briarwood or Devilin files in his office. If I wanted to fight him, of course, I could. I would eventually prevail, but it would be a considerable battle. The primary ingredient in a successful legal war of that sort, Skid reminded me, was always funding. Taylor had it; I didn’t. And Taylor’s bid for governor was proceeding very nicely, so he had every reason to keep me from exposing his foibles. Skid concluded by suggesting I let it rest, then telling me to fix my living room window.

  So Andrews and I spent a bit of time covering said broken window with plywood and also looking at the damaged lock on my door. They both would be p
roperly repaired later in the week; our stopgap measures would hold for a day or two.

  As the sun was going down, we sat in the kitchen, deliberately talking about nothing—bad movies we loved, good books we hated, people we thought were funny. Anything to avoid a reexamination of recent events.

  I knew Andrews wanted to go home, but I was glad he was going to stay one more night.

  Just as I was about to tell him so, I noticed a strange shift in the shadows behind my house—a pattern of light like a giant swan in the pine trees. I squinted into the woods, and the image came clearer. I only saw her for a moment, through a hard slant of white from the setting sun, but there she was: the woman from the Cotman portrait, Eloise Barnsley. She was wandering slowly around the perimeter of my house, so pale that she was nearly transparent. I instantly thought of the Welsh story of the Widow of the Swans, the enchanted woman who outlived everything she loved.

  Before I could make my voice work to alert Andrews, she was swallowed by the darker leaves; gone into the first black of night. But he could see my face, and noticed the odd expression there.

  “Fever?” Andrews stared into my eyes, then over his shoulder out the kitchen window. “What is it?”

  “I saw Eloise Barnsley.” I could barely form the words.

  “Oh.” He relaxed, turning back toward me. “Jesus. The way you looked, I thought maybe Professor Bizarro had escaped from the hospital and was out there in your yard. Gave me a bit of a startle. Your imagination is going to be the death of you and me.”

  “I saw her.”

  “Which, you realize, is completely impossible, right?”

  I looked down at my fingers. They were shaking.

  “Right,” I admitted.

  “What you saw, boy-o,” he intoned, “was an echo of the past few days. And I guess I can’t fault you for that.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look,” he said, trying to explain, “it’s all part of a kind of pattern, the way the mind—no, wait, you’re the one who doesn’t believe in patterns.”

  “Please shut up.”

  “What’s your take, then? What did you just see? And please don’t feed me a ghost story. I’m already full.”