Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  “I’m sorry about the way things have been lately,” he said, sitting in the chair by the window. His movements were stiff and awkward, and Ava saw how difficult this was for him. At Bard he had been open and friendly, but here in Woodburn he seemed, at times, clannish and cold. Not proud, but every bit a Woodburn. Able to switch off his feelings at the least provocation.

  “You don’t owe me an apology,” she said quickly.

  He put one hand up as if to stop her. “I don’t want things to be difficult between us,” he said evenly.

  “I don’t want that either.”

  He sat back, crossing his legs, resting an ankle on top of one knee. “It’s hard to understand if you aren’t from around here,” he said. “People speak a hidden language. You don’t always hear what’s being said if you haven’t learned to listen for it.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out,” she said.

  He played with the frayed hem of his jeans, taking his time before he began again. He had broken with tradition and dressed casually tonight. Ava had the feeling he had rehearsed this. “We’re courteous, polite people, and we don’t give ourselves away to strangers. There’s so much history here, not all of it good, a lot of it terrible. And all our stories are mixed up together from having been in the same place for so long. They all overlap. And everyone has a different version of the truth. Their truth.” He gave her a swift, earnest look. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed, folding one leg under her. She said slowly, “When I asked you about Charlie Woodburn, I wasn’t trying to be rude or hurtful. I was just curious. It’s my job to ask questions, to try to figure out why people act the way they do.”

  He continued to play with the hem, wrapping his fingers tightly in the threads. “I know that, Ava,” he said.

  “I saw Help me carved on the headboard, and I wondered who could have done it. And it occurred to me that it might have been Charlie, that he might have had some kind of premonition about his death. Or maybe he suspected—someone.”

  He looked at her and Ava could see that he was angry, but he was fighting his anger. She had the sudden impression that he felt as if he was belittling himself, as if it should have been her apologizing, not him.

  “I’ve been hearing these stories all my life,” he said. “People in this town have always talked about my family. They say things that are untrue and hurtful. The thing with Charlie happened a long time ago, and none of it matters anymore, so let it go. I’m asking you. Please, just let it go.”

  She couldn’t let it go. He had no idea how tied to this story she was, how dependent on it she had become. And she couldn’t tell him why. She might never be able to tell him.

  He sat watching her and she stared back helplessly.

  Distantly, from somewhere deep in the house, she could hear the slow, somber music of Ravel.

  She was having trouble sleeping, and when she did eventually fall into a restless sleep, her dreams were wild and nightmarish. She had begun to keep the lamp on all night, although she knew from experience that this did little to banish her dark fantasies. It was an old trick she had learned in childhood soon after the episodes of sleep paralysis had first begun.

  She had suffered nightmarish dreams, but she had not had another experience of sleep paralysis, and for that she was grateful.

  The night after Will came to apologize, she sat in front of her glowing computer screen, willing the words to come. They wouldn’t, and after a while she stood, threw open the shutters, and raised the window. It was a beautiful night. Moonlight flooded the garden, and a chorus of crickets throbbed like a beating heart. Ava leaned her elbows on the sill and pressed her face against the screen. The air was hot and sultry, but occasionally a mild breeze stirred.

  It was on a night like this, a moonlit summer evening, that she’d had her first attack of sleep paralysis. She was twelve, sleeping with the window open on a hot, muggy evening. She had lain awake long after she heard Clotilde go to bed, listening to the increasingly sporadic sound of traffic in the street. Far off in the distance she could hear the mournful wail of a passing train.

  She fell asleep with her face turned toward the window but awoke suddenly in the middle of the night. She was lying on her back, taking short, shallow breaths. The room was a velvet blackness but, oddly, she could sense a light coming through the window. It was then that she realized that she couldn’t turn her head to look, she couldn’t move at all, lying stiff and wooden on the bed. There was a sense of something heavy resting on her chest; she couldn’t quite catch her breath. But this was nothing compared to the gradual horror, the dawning awareness that there was something in the room with her. She could hear whispering. Out of the corner of her eye she caught the movement of several small, shadowy figures. They didn’t move like humans; they skittered like crabs, and they were touching her cold skin with long, probing fingers and chattering among themselves, some strange language she couldn’t understand. Her terror was so extreme she thought she might faint. She tried to scream but couldn’t.

  And then she could, screaming long after Clotilde had burst through the door and gathered her up in her soft arms.

  Remembering this episode now, Ava shivered. She rose and began to walk around the room, stopping to stare at Clotilde’s vase. She had not spoken to her mother since the letter from Frank Dabrowski had arrived but now, remembering Clotilde’s comforting presence all those years ago, she said bitterly, “Don’t think I forgive you. Because I don’t.”

  Clotilde maintained a knowing silence.

  Ava sat down on the edge of her bed. She could hear a soft tapping in the wall behind her, and it was then, while listening halfheartedly to whatever was making the sound, that a thought occurred to her.

  She rose, went into the small office, and took down one of the ledgers from the glass-cased secretary. On the spine was written 1919–1920. She opened it and began to read. The handwriting was more modern, more easily decipherable than the earlier journals she had studied. Colonel James Woodburn, the aunts’ father, had continued his ancestors’ habit of keeping farm journals, except that his entries had less to do with farming and more to do with the weather, business, and family events. She closed the journal and put it back, running her fingers over the spines of the books until she found the one reading 1927–1928. Nineteen twenty-seven. The year Charlie Woodburn first came to town.

  Ava opened the journal and began to read. The Colonel wrote in short, choppy sentences, in a rather somber, self-conscious manner.

  April 22nd—fair day. Wind from the west. Met with Attorney Atwood in the a.m. Lunched at the hotel with Jennings and Cates, who are trying to sell me a lumberyard. Josephine has spurned another beau, Harry Monroe, who she says has big feet and a cowlick, and is therefore unsuitable. I fear she has inherited the Woodburn pride. No man will ever be good enough for her.

  It was here then, hidden among trivial notations about weather and business, that Ava would find the clues to her story. She read on.

  April 28th—Dinner party at the Randolphs. Returned home to find the house in an uproar. Sweet Fanny observed a man beating a mule in the street and went forth in a rage to put a stop to it. He replied impertinently that it was his mule to do with as he pleased, at which point Josephine intervened and offered to buy the animal. He asked how he was to get home with a wagon and no mule, and Josephine made an offer on the wagon, too. Thus I returned home to find myself the proud owner of a mule Fanny and Celia have named Tulip, as well as a broken-down produce wagon! I despair sometimes of ever finding these girls suitable husbands. The fault is mine; they were raised without the gentle, nurturing presence of a mother. Celia is sober and steady. She will do fine. But Fanny is tenderhearted and silly, and Sister is proud and unforgiving. She especially seems destined for spinsterhood.

  And farther on, Ava found this:

  May 7th—Saw C.W. in the street today. His resemblance to Old Randal is uncanny. They say he’s on
ly recently come from New Orleans, where he spent his childhood.

  May 9th—Rain began around 7 a.m. A steady downpour all day. Called John to bring the car around twelve in the afternoon. Had lunch with C.W. at the hotel. Sister sick with a fever but will not allow Dr. Atkinson to attend her. Stubborn girl.

  Ava looked up, studying the dark square of window at the end of the room. Only two days after meeting Charlie in the street, the Colonel had had lunch with him. Which meant, surely, that Charlie must have made a favorable impression on his old kinsman.

  She took the journal to bed with her. It was two a.m. when she finished the last entry and, rising, went into the office and pulled the last slim volume off the shelf. 1929. The year the Colonel had died. The year Charlie Woodburn had eloped with Fanny. She padded back to bed with the book cradled in her arms. The entries here were less frequent, the handwriting less legible, as if in the last year of his life, the Colonel’s eyesight had begun to fail. A short time later she came across this rather odd entry:

  August 24th—I saw my beloved today. It was dusk, and she was standing at the edge of the garden in a long white gown, her hair undone. The dead are with us always. Their world touches ours, shimmering through. I am an old man, and I am weary of this life and ready for the next.

  Had a stormy meeting with Atwood yesterday and told him to draw up the deed. Tomorrow I will tell C.W. I hope to right the wrongs of the past by giving back to C.W. what is rightfully his.

  May our sins be washed away in the Blood of Our Redeemer.

  There were only six more entries after that one, the last in October, a week before his death. None of them mentioned Charlie.

  The following morning Ava awoke early but lay in bed waiting for the others to leave the house. Fanny had a dental appointment, and Josephine and Maitland were scheduled to take her in at ten o’clock. They planned to make a day of it, having lunch downtown and then buying groceries, so Ava figured she had at least an hour to roam around in the attic looking for photos of Charlie Woodburn before the cleaning people arrived. She could have asked Josephine; she felt certain Josephine would have politely agreed to her exploring the house, but she didn’t want to have to explain what she was searching for. She didn’t know how to broach the subject, so in the end she said nothing, waiting until she heard the car pull out of the drive before rising and going to the window.

  To make sure she was alone, she went to the hallway and called out, but no one answered. The mantel clock chimed ten o’clock. She stood for a moment, listening, then slowly climbed the staircase, letting one hand trail along the banister.

  There was a peculiar stillness to the house, a heaviness, as if somewhere in the darkest corners a storm might be brewing. She thought of Fraser’s comment that Will had been afraid of the staircase as a boy, that he had often seen the ghost of the Gray Lady standing there, and it was not too hard to imagine how this might be so. The staircase curved sharply to the left at the landing, and ascended for many wide shallow steps to an open central hall on the top floor. The sharp curve of the staircase, as well as the placement of a tall stained-glass window on the landing, caused the lower portion of the staircase to be bathed in shifting shadows.

  Ava noted this now as she climbed, watching the way the swaying trees outside the colored window caused murky shadows on the stairs. It was not hard to imagine a child mistaking those shadows for a ghost.

  She stopped and turned around, staring at the bottom of the stairwell. A slight breeze puckered the back of her neck. She remembered the entry in Colonel Woodburn’s journal, the image of his dead wife standing at the edge of the garden in a long white gown. What was it he had written? The dead are with us always. Even now, if she stared long enough, she could see, out of the corner of her eye, a small dark-haired woman in a gray gown standing at the foot of the stairway.

  But no, Fraser had said Delphine Woodburn always dressed in black. She was constantly in mourning for one of her dead children. Ava reordered the image in her mind and now the woman was dressed in a dark, flowing gown that pooled around her feet. Her pale face, gazing up at Ava, was set in lines of despair and grief.

  Turning, Ava continued to climb.

  Despite her lush imagination, she had a hard time believing in ghosts. The rational side of her wouldn’t be swayed by something she’d never actually seen. Being raised by Clotilde, a woman who believed in reincarnation and divination, had made her a skeptic. And yet the imaginative side of her, the creative side that could imagine characters and dialogue and the way a landscape looked a hundred years ago, was willing to believe in an unseen world. Here, too, perhaps it was Clotilde’s influence, her stories of gnomes and changelings and lonely wandering spirits, that had shaped her.

  More than Ava cared to admit.

  She reached the top of the stairs and stopped. She’d been up here once before, when Will first showed her around the house, but she hadn’t climbed the stairs since then. There had been no need. She was comfortable on the bottom floor of the house. Her rooms were large and pleasant, and the other occupants of Woodburn Hall left her alone to work. Up here she felt like an intruder, a guilty thief.

  She stood at the top of the stairway, listening. If anyone came home unexpectedly, if Will showed up unannounced, she’d decided that she’d say she’d heard a noise above her, and, knowing the house to be empty, had gone to investigate. She would claim to have been worried that one of the cats was trapped in a room and wreaking havoc. Standing there now, she thought she did hear a scratching sound coming from one of the rooms. But as she began to walk stealthily along the creaking floor-boards, the noise stopped.

  The ceilings on the second floor were lower than on the first, maybe nine or ten feet high. Two large bedrooms opened off the hallway to her left, separated by a bath. On the right was a large room, the old nursery where Josephine and Fanny had slept as girls, and next to it was a small, slope-ceilinged room where Will had slept as a boy.

  “The nurse’s room,” Fanny and Josephine had called it, giggling.

  At the end of the hall was a door, and behind it was a set of narrow stairs leading to the attic.

  “You don’t want to go up there,” Will had told her the night he’d showed her the house. He had opened the door so she could peer up the narrow staircase into the darkness, but he had not stepped inside.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s dusty and filled with broken-down furniture, and the light isn’t very good.”

  Ava stopped on the threshold of Will’s room, ducking her head inside. The bedroom was a time capsule. She imagined that it hadn’t changed since Will left home for college. Led Zeppelin, The Melvins, and Soundgarden posters plastered the sloped ceilings, and in one corner a full-size cutout of Janis Joplin stood with several school ties looped pompously around her neck. A neatly made twin bed was pushed beneath the window, and on one wall a tall bookshelf covered in sporting trophies, photos, and tattered paperbacks stood next to a small maple desk. Above it hung a bulletin board plastered with cartoon cutouts and newspaper clippings.

  Ava turned and continued to the end of the hallway, knowing that she had little enough time to explore the attic. Will’s room would have to wait for another day. The housecleaners would be arriving soon, and she didn’t want to be up here when they came for fear that one of them might say something to Josephine.

  She stopped in front of the attic door, standing with her hand on the knob. Will and Josephine might not have minded her wandering the house, but they certainly would have objected to her looking for evidence of Charlie Woodburn, and this knowledge filled her with a sense of guilt and foreboding. And yet, she told herself, if they had been open about Charlie from the beginning, there would have been no need for subterfuge.

  It was easier to blame them than it was to admit her own treason.

  The attic door stuck, and she had to pull on it forcefully before it swung open. A sudden blast of hot, stale air greeted her. She peered into the gloom, trying to adju
st her eyes, and fumbled in her pocket for her key chain flashlight. She flipped it on, and a thin beam of light shone weakly over the planked walls of the stairwell. She could see a string hanging from the ceiling, and she pulled it, switching on the overhead light. It was nothing more than a bare suspended bulb and gave off little light. The stairs were covered in dust, but there were footsteps clearly visible, no doubt from the day Will had climbed to hunt for the plans of Longford.

  She stepped inside, leaving the door open behind her, and began to climb the narrow stairs. Her breathing was labored in the sultry heat. The light from the overhead bulb bled into darkness at the top of the steps, and the thin beam of her flashlight was barely enough to illuminate a few feet in front of her.

  Will had been right. She didn’t like it up here. It was dark and dusty, and the air felt as if it was too thick to breathe. She imagined mold spores growing on the dark beadboard walls and ceiling, poisoning her lungs. She stood peering into the gloom, filled with a vague sense of dread.

  She understood why, as girls, the aunts had been afraid to play up here.

  The room was long and narrow, and had a coved ceiling covered in dark pine. Along one wall, two dormered windows overlooked the drive and the back lawn. The walls were dark, too, giving the room a drab, dreary feeling that the light falling through the small windows could not dissipate. A tall bookcase stacked with medical journals and apothecary jars stood along the opposite wall. She remembered that Will’s ancestor, Jerome, had once used the room as a medical laboratory.

  At the opposite end of the room were several old leather trunks and stacked boxes, and beyond that, a narrow passage led into a large open room under the eaves filled with broken furniture and discarded household goods. Ava had no intention of exploring that space; it was too dismal and dank.

  She concentrated on the boxes and trunks, which were mostly filled with moldy shoes and clothes, delicate hand-stitched linens and silks ravaged by time and insects. A tower of round boxes filled with ornate, wide-brimmed hats occupied her for some time. There was a treasure trove of vintage clothing here, although most of it had been left to rot.