by Rhodi Hawk
“I don’t know how you pulled off that stunt under the bridge, Zenon, but you’ve got to stop it. You’re wrong about all of this.”
He shook his head, the shimmering light above casting shadows on his face. “Baby, I’m the best friend you got. Your cripple boyfriend’s gonna get you killed or crazy, sure as shit. Best thing, forget the boyfriend. Forget any friends. You give a shit about something it becomes your weak spot. They can use it against you.”
“Who’s they, Zenon? Isn’t that us? Children of the briar? Aren’t we the enemy?”
“Only if we’re doing it right.”
He laughed with sharp delight. It almost felt contagious. Inviting her to laugh, too, and she had to force the tickle of it from forming inside of her. Everything felt so backward here.
Zenon said, “There you go. Resisting your nature. Listen. I’ll make a deal with you. You kill off that lumen, the blind kid. Won’t be easy. That lumen way makes’m slippery.”
“I would never—”
He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “But I’ll come after him, too. Give you a little challenge. You win? You get him first? Then we can work together. Maybe go after Chloe.”
“Stop it, Zenon! You can just forget about—”
“But if I get to him first, if I make the kill, then I’ll be coming after you next.”
“Is that supposed to motivate me?”
“It don’t have to. You hearin me, girl? I’m helping you to be what you’re meant to be.”
She closed her mind to him and drew herself inward.
A memory. Sitting on the porch swing with Daddy in Bayou Black, watching the stars. The smell of wet grass and cedar and pine. Frogs singing the bayou. Crickets. A breeze.
And in her heart she said, I want out, let me out.
She felt herself fading from Zenon’s grasp. He couldn’t stop her. Severin could but must have chosen not to.
Even under water, Madeleine could still hear her singing: “… London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.”
Madeleine looked up as she moved toward the surface in a trail of pearl bubbles. Above she saw only a ring of light at first, and then it came into focus. Not briar. Her own bathtub at home.
Ethan was there. He was staring at her. The expression on his face was frustration. Impatience, even. After all, Ethan had just been forced to kill a man. He had other things on his mind besides dealing with a crazy girlfriend.
She looked back at him. Her attention span in the briar had grown more dreamy, like the drift of a butterfly. But as she drew back into her physical self the entire weight of what happened under the bridge hit her afresh. Shalmut, the policeman, Mako, Del, a volunteer from St. Jo’s. All of them shot dead save for Mako, who’d been rushed off in an ambulance. Madeleine trying desperately to answer the investigator’s questions while her mind spun down thorny rabbit holes.
And the baby. She’d held the baby the entire time, tight to her breast, while its mother, Del, was gunned down. A social worker had eventually taken the baby from Madeleine’s arms and after that, Madeleine didn’t know what had happened to it. She never knew its name. She never even found out whether it was a boy or a girl. Just a sweet, delicate, blank face.
Ethan reached into the water and pulled her up by the shoulders.
Garish light. Water peeling down her skin. Noise again, such different noises. The apartment was quiet but for the drone of air-conditioning, and yet it seemed so loud compared to the plush, isolated sounds of the briar.
“What exactly was that all about?” Ethan demanded.
She regarded him, blinking. Realized she ought to breathe. Her lips parted and her lungs filled. It made her cough.
He let go and sat back on the commode, wiping his hands over his hair and face. She ought to say something to him, she knew. Say something about what happened to Shalmut Halsey. Tell Ethan he had no choice. Tell him anything. That she loved him.
But what she said was, “It’s the blind boy. Bo Racer.”
Ethan looked exhausted. He didn’t speak.
Madeleine said, “He’s going to be killed if we don’t do something.”
“What were you doing lying there like that?” Ethan asked.
“What do you mean?”
He gestured at the bath. “Your head was underwater there in the tub. I heard a splash and came in to check on you. You were just lying there, had this strange smile. I waited but you stayed underwater.”
She gazed at him, saying nothing.
He said, louder, “You can’t breathe underwater, Madeleine. You had your mouth and nose beneath the surface the whole time! I watched you!”
“How long?”
He shook his head, and when he spoke again his voice had softened. “Ten minutes. Maybe even fifteen. At first I was going to pull you out but I saw clearly that you were OK. I watched you, waiting for you to come up, but you never did. I finally couldn’t stand it any longer and pulled you out anyway.”
And then he said, “How…?”
fifteen
HAHNVILLE, 1927
THE EASIEST THING WOULD be to take a horse and cart to New Orleans. That would enable the four LeBlanc children to tote along some possessions and still have room for the dead man.
But, Patrice couldn’t allow it. Without the cart, Terrefleurs died. The cart provided a way to move cane, sugar, equipment, feed—and often the very workers themselves. To take the cart would be to clip Terrefleurs’ wings and leave it to starve.
The children could just ride out on horses, but then they couldn’t really pack them in such a way that a dead man might ride inconspicuously. Patrice wasn’t sure at which point the spirit left the body and a dead man stopped being a man at all, but it seemed that this point might be coming for the stranger. In abandoning its host, the stranger’s spirit would leave behind a rigid shell. Difficult enough to drape a pliable body over a horse and hide it with blankets; an entirely different thing when that corpse had gone stiff.
The only means left was the car. They would have to take Papa’s Ford, running or not, even if it meant pushing it all the way to New Orleans.
An hour had passed since Patrice and Gil had returned home from church, and Trigger and Rosie were already packed though Patrice had had to repack Rosie’s bag. She’d chosen four of her prettiest dresses and bonnets and a wooden horse, and completely neglected shoes or underclothes of any stripe.
Trigger was packed in under five minutes. Gil, however, was paralyzed by the upset and completely unable to choose anything to take along. Trigger took over his brother’s packing and told him to go say good-bye to Joseph.
Patrice said, “No! No good-byes.”
Gil gave her a hard look, but she said, “We can’t afford the risk. What if someone tells? We need time to get a head start in case Tatie Bernadette brings Mother here after the baptism.”
“Come on, we’ll each say good-bye to one person only,” Trigger said.
“And we’ll swear them to secrecy!” Marie-Rose said.
Patrice looked at her. “You don’t have anyone to say good-bye to.”
“Do so!”
“Who?”
“Francois!”
This gave Patrice pause. She clearly couldn’t say good-bye to Tatie Bernadette, but to leave without speaking to Francois, her father’s old friend and the ailing caretaker of Terrefleurs, that was hard to imagine.
“Alright. But we can’t tell anyone where we’re going. Or about the—you know, the stranger.”
Three nods.
Patrice thought about Eunice for a moment, but then let it go. “I waive my right to a farewell. I’ll just accompany Rosie when she goes to see Francois.”
“I’ll see Joseph,” Gil said.
“And swear him to secrecy!” Marie-Rose said, eyes wide.
Trigger said, “I waive my right to a farewell, too. Got my brother and sisters and that’s all I need.”
* * *
PATRICE THOUGHT FRANCOIS LOOKED like a sack of
bones. He was skinny like the twins with their recent growth spurt, but Francois was in his fifties and the diminished weight came from muscle and fat burning away under pain. It inflamed his lips and left bloodstains at his seat. He’d never quite seemed right after Papa died. Seemed tired and listless. But in the past two months he’d shrunk to paper and it had become clear that something deeper was wrong. The doctor’s medicine brought him no ease.
Patrice sat on the stool and tried not to think about the stench in his cottage. She was at least cheered by the fact that Francois hadn’t been sleeping when the girls had knocked on his door. Rosie stood next to Francois, hand on his arm, and it gave Patrice a pang because it reminded her of the way Rosie and Papa used to look together. Rosie turned and gawked at Patrice, suddenly childlike. Her eyes begged Patrice to say something to start the discussion.
“You’re lookin fine today,” Patrice said, because Francois was actually sitting up at the edge of his bed.
“I feel fine. Mighty fine today. Think I’ll go fishin.”
“Oh, that’ll be nice!”
“Where y’all goin?” He was looking at the brown sack of a dress Patrice was wearing.
She hesitated, but then Rosie blurted out: “We’re leaving Terrefleurs, Francois. We all are. Us children.”
He said not a thing. Just cut his eyes away.
The cottage was all oak, wide planks on the floor and slats making up the walls, and long sheets at the ceiling with roofing nails jammed through. It was dark.
“So, I’ve come to say good-bye,” Rosie added when Francois kept up his silence.
He was a man of few words in French, and even fewer in English. He just sat there blinking. Patrice had to turn away. She looked instead at the enameled basin he used for washing up. Aside from that, the lantern, the bed, and the stool, there wasn’t much else in the whole cottage. Patrice wondered what he did all day now that he was ailing. He never came to the main house to listen to the radio. He couldn’t read. The plantation school started up only a few years ago and no adults had ever attended.
Francois cleared his throat and finally spoke. “When you … When you…”
But he didn’t finish whatever he was about to ask: When you comin back? When you leavin? When you decide to do a damn fool thing like that?
Patrice rose and turned, seating herself next to him on the bed. There were questions spinning at the back of her mind, too, but she had no idea how to voice them. So she just sat next to him. Wondered how he’d fair. Tatie would look after him, for sure. Francois’ wife had left long ago, headed up to Chicago with another man who’d been a Terrefleurs field worker under Francois’ lead. That was a scandal folks never seemed to tire of talking about.
“Where you go?” he finally asked.
“We’d rather not say,” Patrice said before Rosie could reply.
“Just as well, just as well. How you gwine get there?”
“We’ll … drive?”
Dead, stone, staring silence. No one so much as blinked.
Then Francois said, “I’ll help ya get the Ford goin.”
And he rose, bless him, and Patrice stood, too, putting a hand to his arm. “No thank you, Francois. Let us manage it.”
“No ma’am. Can’t oblige that.”
He took a moment to let his body adjust to being upright. And then he went down again, carefully to his knees, and retrieved something from under his mattress. Patrice was surprised to see that it was a Bible.
“Hold that.” He handed it to Marie-Rose with both hands as though if he weren’t careful it might take flight.
Rosie held it in the same way. The thing had a worn embossed cover and warped pages that looked like they’d often made the rounds from damp to dry and back.
“It was hers,” was all Francois said, which Patrice took to mean that it had been his wife’s, and then he was regaining himself to a stance.
He took a walking stick by the door and stepped outside, and Patrice and Rosie followed with the Good Book. The stick was too long to be a cane and seemed better suited for spear-chucking if you sharpened an end. It looked freshly carved from young wood.
“Where did you get the cane?” Rosie asked Francois.
But then in it occurred to Patrice that Francois was heading straight to the barn where the Ford and the dead man were waiting, only the dead man wasn’t altogether hidden just yet. He was wrapped in blankets and curled in a wheelbarrow.
“I’ll just run on ahead and get the door,” Patrice said and stretched out her gait.
Francois inclined his head toward Rosie as Patrice scooted ahead for the barn.
Francois said, “Ole Trigger brung me this cane. Carved it himself.”
Patrice glanced over her shoulder and saw that Francois was grinning. Actually grinning.
sixteen
HAHNVILLE, 1927
MANY ON THE PLANTATION believed that Francois’ illness stemmed from the children’s mother unleashing her wrath on Terrefleurs, though none of them knew that it was the children who’d kept her away. Patrice supposed many of the plantation dwellers had their suspicions. The believers of river magic thought the witch might claim the lives of all the Christians of the plantation. The Christians prayed for deliverance.
On it went.
Though Francois moved slowly, the walk to the barn was only a few feet and Patrice arrived just steps ahead of Rosie and Francois.
The wheelbarrow was empty. No sign of the dead man. Trigger was standing over the open hood of the Ford, hands stained and face sweaty.
“Where is he?” Patrice whispered.
“In the back,” Trigger replied, pointing to the rumble seat.
She looked, and recognized the dead stranger only by the blankets they’d used to wrap him. He was strapped in with twine and the children’s bags were tied down over him. Trigger must have done all that by himself.
Patrice fingered the twine and found it good and snug. She grinned at Trigger despite the macabre absurdity of it all, and he grinned back.
“Francois is coming,” Patrice said, and stepped back to the barn door to open it wide for him.
Another sun break cast a sheer white light in the dust motes that swirled beneath the wide barn door’s swing. Francois and Rosie approached the entry.
Francois paused, looking straight at the rumble seat, and then he gave a grunt and turned his gaze to the motor. Rosie stepped forward and peered into the convoluted pile of black metal and rust.
“Did you start it?” Francois asked.
“No sir,” Trigger replied.
“Give it a crank, then,” Francois said.
Trigger obeyed, using his entire back to work the crank and making quite a racket.
While Trigger was grinding away at the Ford, Francois leaned over and whispered into Patrice’s ear, “Who he?” and he gave just the subtlest gesture toward the rumble seat.
Patrice blanched. Though the stranger had seemed perfectly concealed when the barn door was closed, the now-open flood of light reflected against a gap in the horse blanket covering the man’s head, revealing brown hair with golden red highlights.
All three children were now staring at that hair. The Ford coughed four more times and died. Francois reached down and tugged once, hard, on the exposed hair.
“He’d come for us,” Patrice blurted, and bit back the rest.
Francois threw Trigger a glare and then cocked his head in the direction of the barn door. Trigger scrambled to close it, fast as a jackrabbit.
“Throw the latch, too,” Francois said, and Trigger obeyed.
Francois stared at the barn door as it closed. Just wavered there in his bone sack for a long moment. Then he hurled his cane across the barn so that it clattered against the door and fell back to the dirt. A dust cloud came up where it landed. The children looked on in awe.
Francois circled the Ford once, his weakening body seeming to have been restored. With fury.
Patrice could see the dead man’s hair in th
e rumble seat now that she knew to look for it, but it was quite camouflaged. She took a disintegrating horse blanket from what used to be a chicken coop but now wasn’t anything, and she draped it over that horrible, vulgar, splayed mop of hair and tucked it in like she was keeping biscuits warm in a basket.
Finally, Francois said to Trigger, “You put gasoline in it?”
“No sir. Just some oil.”
“Show me where you put the oil.”
Trigger showed him and Francois looked satisfied. Rosie watched, too, as though she might be the one to do it next time.
“Now put the gas,” Francois said.
When Trigger gave him a blank look, Francois pointed to the corner behind the old coop where a barrel stood. Rosie slipped her hand in Patrice’s and they watched while Francois showed Trigger how to run the hose down to fill the tank.
Patrice said, “But it doesn’t run.”
“Liable to be fine. Just need the gas.” And then Francois climbed into the passenger’s side of the Model T and released a sigh that seemed to outfox his very lung capacity.
“Tell me what happened here, girl,” Francois said.
Patrice told him all of it. Every speck. Marie-Rose listened with wide eyes, having missed the details of the church service this morning. She was still gripping Francois’ Bible. Trigger finished putting gas in the tank and cranked the motor car to life.
“Your mother sent a letter to me,” Francois called over the rumble of the motor.
“She did?” Patrice was surprised.
He listened to the motor for a few moments, then nodded and told Trigger to turn it off.
Francois said, “Couldn’t read no letter. Miss Bernadette read it for me. She’d got one, too.”
“What did it say? They say?”
“She told me I got to come to New Orleans, your mama. Supposed to tell a judge that your papa married your mama, good and proper. Miss Bernadette thinks a cousin of your daddy’s was trying to get Terrefleurs. Sayin your mama don’t really own it, seein as your daddy wasn’t in his right mind and she a colored woman.”
