Sadie got up and began to crack eggs in a bowl. “I’m going to get started in here. I’ve got things to do this morning.”
Standing, JoHanna took the bowl from her aunt. “I’m quite capable of making French toast for Duncan, when she wakes up. And you should go tend to your business.” She arched an eyebrow. “Even if it is monkey business.”
Sadie slapped JoHanna lightly on the arm. “I’m too old to be teased.”
“You’re never too old, Sadie. Never.” She leaned over and kissed her aunt’s cheek, then shooed her out of the kitchen. “Stay out of here, now, or I’m going to have to sic Pecos on you.”
Sadie’s voice came back to us from her bedroom. “If that damn bird puts one gnarly little claw in my house, he’s going to find himself swimming in a pot of dumplings.”
Duncan’s voice joined the fray. “Aunt Sadie, maybe if you kiss Pecos he’ll turn into Prince Charming.” After the laughter, she continued. “Mama, I’m starving. Will you come get me?”
I signaled JoHanna that I could manage Duncan. I couldn’t carry her with the effortless strength of Floyd nor with the sureness of practice that JoHanna showed, but I could get her fifteen yards from the bed to the kitchen table, even if I had to stop and rest. I rose too suddenly and found that the slightest effort set my head to pounding like Abe Woodcock was in there standing at his anvil and pounding on a hot horseshoe. I swear, my ears were ringing with the blows, but I went to Duncan’s room.
“You look sick.” Duncan greeted me with a grin.
“Headache.”
“Hangover,” she said knowingly. “You overindulged.” She laughed at my condition.
“It isn’t exactly funny.”
“No, it isn’t.” Her voice had lost its teasing edge. “I had the strangest dream.” She held out her arms to put around my neck, clasping me close to her. I froze bending over the bed.
“What kind of dream?”
“ ‘It was awful.” Her voice was a rich contrast to her words. She sounded completely at ease, unafraid.
I lifted her and started toward the kitchen.
“I’ll tell you and Mama at the same time. It gets tiring having to repeat something two or three times.”
“Right.” I jiggled her. “You love the attention.”
I put her in her seat just as JoHanna placed two batter-soaked pieces of bread in the sizzling bacon grease on the stove.
“I dreamed there was a terrible storm. The wind blew so hard it tumbled houses down and flung trees everywhere.”
Duncan’s words seemed to stop time. There was only the bread frying in the grease, the occasional pop and sputter. JoHanna didn’t move, and I was caught up in Duncan’s words.
JoHanna recovered first, flipping the bread expertly. “At least no one drowned.”
“Oh, but they did. Dozens of people.” Duncan leaned forward. “It was a horrid tragedy. Bodies everywhere, some even up in trees.”
“Duncan!” JoHanna turned to her, her voice sharp.
Duncan’s face, so lively and eager, fell into hurt. Tears welled in her eyes, and she blinked against them.
JoHanna dropped the spatula into the pan and went to her daughter. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you sounded so … excited, about death.”
Still fighting tears, Duncan looked up at her mother. “It was exciting.” She swallowed. “Am I evil?”
JoHanna pulled her child to her breast and held her. I got up and rescued the toast from the pan, stacking it on a plate before battering two more pieces and putting them into the pan. Now the sizzle of the grease was comforting, blending as it did with the sound of Duncan’s soft tears.
“Oh, baby, you’re not evil.”
“You acted like I was.” Duncan’s voice was muffled by her hurt and JoHanna’s chest.
“I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I’m a little on edge about your dreams.”
“I don’t ask for them to come.”
“I know.” JoHanna rocked her gently. “I know.” She drew back, wiping Duncan’s eyes with the front of her blouse. “Now tell us the dream while we have breakfast. Thank goodness for Mattie or the toast would be burned.”
I put a plate before each of them and put more bread in the pan for me. I was hungry, yet I didn’t want to eat. But I wanted to get over the hangover more than I wanted to mollycoddle my stomach. And I wanted to hear Duncan’s dream.
“It wasn’t as clear as the one about Red Lassiter.” Duncan took the pitcher of syrup JoHanna handed her and poured it over her stack of toast. “It was more confused. Like parts of it had been jumbled up and I couldn’t tell what came first. And I didn’t know a single dead person.”
“That’s comforting.” JoHanna’s voice was crisp, but her hand shook as she took the syrup. “Then perhaps it wasn’t Jexville or Fitler where the dream took place.”
A wad of toast in her jaw, Duncan stopped chewing. “That may be it,” she said, licking a dribble of syrup from her lips. “I didn’t recognize anything. And it was sort of like … flying. I could see things but they moved by so fast I couldn’t really remember them. If I ever knew where they were to begin with.”
“Things?” JoHanna waited, her plate untouched.
“Trees blown over. Buildings knocked down.” Duncan put her fork down and hesitated. “The bodies in trees, it was as if they’d been picked up and hurled there. Like in the stories when old Zeus gets mad at the mortals and pitches a fit.” She lifted her chin in a gesture that was pure JoHanna. She met her mother’s worried gaze. “It was terrible to look at, but it didn’t make me feel bad.”
“Then,” JoHanna hesitated, “it wasn’t like the dreams about Mary Lincoln or Red? I mean the bodies were all on land, not drowning?”
“There were people on the boats out in the ocean. They were having a terrible time, like waves fifty feet high, crashing down on them. The wind was blowing so hard. But I don’t really know what happened to the boats or the people in the houses. I sort of moved on. But all around me there was the sound of wailing and crying. Like an entire town was carrying on.”
JoHanna pointed toward the glass of milk beside Duncan’s plate. “Drink it,” she said. There was relief in her voice, in her manner. “It sounds as if you dreamed of a big storm. Perhaps Floyd has told you about the hurricane that hit these parts twenty years ago. It did terrible damage, even as far inland as Fitler.”
Duncan’s eyebrows lifted. “Floyd did tell me.” She nodded, and I could see that she was as relieved as JoHanna no matter how blasé she’d been when recounting her dream. “I’ve dreamed before about some of his stories. Especially Miss Kretzler, down under the Courting Bridge, all drowned and lonely.” She shivered.
JoHanna’s balance was perfectly restored. She got up and refilled our coffee cups. “Drink your milk, Duncan. For your bones. I think your dream is just something Floyd told you and it came back to you while you were asleep.” She rubbed Duncan’s head. “And you said it didn’t frighten you.”
Duncan’s mouth was too full to answer. She shook her head, swallowed a big gulp, and took a breath. “No, it was like I was up above looking down.” She spoke carefully, choosing her words. “I couldn’t help anyone, even the ones crying and begging for help. I could only see what had happened.”
“Well, since it hasn’t upset you, I think we should forget it. You need a bath. Jeb Fairley is coming today, and we need to go down to the river with him.”
“They’re looking for Mr. Lassiter, aren’t they?”
My coffee cup clattered into the saucer. Duncan was too astute for her own good.
“Yes.” JoHanna pushed her half-eaten breakfast back. “And we’re going to take some food down there. I don’t want people to think we’re afraid or that we’re hiding.”
“Because I told him the dream and then he told other people. And then he drowned.”
JoHanna nodded as she got up. “That about sums it up.”
“Are people going to say that I’m evil?”
JoHanna had picked up her plate and was shifting toward the sink. She stopped and gave her daughter a long look. “They might. We don’t want to encourage such talk by acting afraid, but we aren’t going to let it bother us if they do say such things.”
Duncan didn’t say anything, but she pushed her plate away, her French toast only halfway eaten. “I guess I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”
“I’ll take care of these dishes while you give Duncan a bath,” I said, sliding between JoHanna and the sink before she could take her place there.
“Jeb should be here in an hour or so. He’ll want a cup of coffee, and Sadie got up this morning and baked a pound cake.” JoHanna’s face softened into a smile. “Now let’s get cleaned up and we’ll take ourselves down to the river and see what they’re saying for ourselves.”
Duncan rode in the wagon, Pecos perched beside her with all the pride of a vain rooster. Aunt Sadie had disappeared out the back door half an hour before we were ready to leave. She’d been in a big hurry and was wearing a straw hat with wild lupine and asters around the crown. It was too modest to be one of JoHanna’s creations.
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
THEY 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.
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.”
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