Whispers of the Bayou

by Mindy Starns Clark

  “If you want some privacy,” I said, hating myself even as I said it, “you’re welcome to go in the library. I need to get on to bed anyway. I’m pretty tired after such an emotional day.”

  They bid me good night, Holt thanking me for a wonderful dinner. Realizing my father intended on spending the night here, I explained where Lisa, AJ, and I were all sleeping and said he could feel free to choose between whatever bedrooms were left.

  “I’ll just stay in my old room on the third floor,” he told me, and then I again said good night and headed upstairs. As much as I hadn’t wanted my father here for dinner, I was glad he’d be spending the night. I hated to be a big chicken, but with all that was going on, it was comforting to know that there would be a man in the house in case Jimmy made another appearance.

  As soon as I was sure the two men had relocated to the library, I made my way back downstairs to the laundry room. Quietly, I slipped inside and listened to a conversation between the two men that came through the vent so clearly it was as though I were listening to it on the radio.

  “…your motives,” Holt was saying. “You might be fooling everyone else, Richard, but not me. Willy was nothing to you, less than nothing. Why are you really here?”

  They argued back and forth for a while, Holt insisting that my dad had an ulterior motive for having come to town this week, my dad defending himself by acting insulted that Holt could even insinuate such a thing. Finally, however, Holt wore him down by spelling out his suspicions.

  “I know you, Richard. You’re going to try and weasel your way back into this house,” Holt said. “But that’s wrong. Mom and Dad gave you your share years ago. That was your deal.”

  “That was the deal at that time, yes. They’re dead now. It’s time to come back and establish myself and my family in the home that is rightly mine.”

  “Rightly yours? Richard, they left it to Miranda. Their will is ironclad solid. It’s a good document. You could never challenge it and win.”

  There was a long silence during which I couldn’t imagine what was going on. I had a feeling that my father was trying to decide how much to say to his brother about his intentions.

  “I’m not trying to rip you off, Holt. I hope you know that. Once I have the will overturned, we’ll split things right down the middle. I want the house, but I’ll be happy to give you the equal value in more land. I only want to be fair.”

  “Fair? Fair is leaving Miranda alone so she can do whatever she wants with the house and land her grandparents left to her. Not to you, to her.”

  I could hear the clomping of footsteps, and I realized that my father was pacing.

  “There’s just one thing wrong with that line of thinking,” my father said. “My parents left this place to their granddaughter.”

  “So?”

  “Miranda isn’t their granddaughter.”

  “What? What are you—”

  “I’ve never told anyone this before now, but it’ll all come out soon anyway. I’m sterile, Holt. I always have been, since I had the mumps at thirteen. The doctors told me then that I might be sterile, so when Yasmine was trying to get pregnant and she couldn’t conceive, I slipped off to Baton Rouge and had a sperm count done. A few months later, when she announced that she was finally pregnant, I knew she’d been having an affair. The truth is, there’s literally no way I could have fathered those children. Miranda and Cassandra were not mine.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  So, at the hoof-beats of fate, with sad forebodings of evil,

  Shrinks and closes the heart, ere the stroke of doom has attained it.

  My knees weak, I leaned back against the washer and slowly slid myself to the floor.

  “Richard, that’s ridiculous! Don’t you see the family resemblance? She looks just like Mother!”

  “Coincidence,” my father replied. “Who knows who Yasmine was sleeping with? It could have been someone with similar features. All I know is that the person who impregnated her wasn’t me. And I know it wasn’t you, Holt, because you were…well, you were a paraplegic by then.”

  “As if I would have slept with my own brother’s wife!” Holt shouted angrily.

  “Not so loud,” my father hissed. “Regardless, if it wasn’t me and it wasn’t you, then I don’t care who it was, Miranda is not a Fairmont.”

  I could hear a roaring begin inside my head, like a seismic shift of the brain.

  “What did Yasmine say about all of this?”

  There was a long silence, and I only wished I could see as well as hear the two of them.

  “You didn’t tell her, did you?” Holt asked finally. “You never said a word.”

  “She pretended that the babies were mine. I let her pretend.”

  “But why? Just so you wouldn’t have to admit that you were sterile?”

  Again, there was a long silence and then my father spoke.

  “Janet knows I wasn’t the father of those children,” he said. “Why else do you think she snatched up her niece and carted her away from here as fast as she could? To hide the truth, that’s why, the truth that her dead sister’s remaining child wasn’t a Fairmont. The whole time that Benochet was putting together Mom and Dad’s elaborate custody arrangements, changing their will, setting up their payment system, Janet must have been laughing all the way to the bank.”

  Could any of what he said be true? Could AJ have let me base everything I knew about myself and my parents on a lie? Was I really not a Fairmont?

  I was ready to run upstairs and throw open AJ’s door and demand to know the truth. But then the men were talking again, and I needed to listen.

  “Why now, Richard?” Holt asked. “Why now, after all this time?”

  “Willy’s dead,” my father replied. “I need to clear this up before Miranda sells off something that shouldn’t even be hers.”

  “But you know how these things go. This could drag through the courts for years. If you really wanted to challenge the will, you should have done it sooner, like right after Mom died.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  My father rattled off some elaborate story about Willy and his faithfulness to the family and wanting to let him reap the rewards of his long labors, but it didn’t seem to ring true with Holt, nor with me. In any event, their conversation soon drew to a close. When I heard them move outside so that Holt could get in his car and my father could retrieve his suitcase, I dashed through the darkened parlor to the stairs and up to my room.

  I stood there with my back to the door until I heard my father come up the same stairs, go around to the next flight and up to the room above mine. There were footsteps over my head for a little while and then the creaking of bed springs as he climbed in, and then all was still.

  Quietly, I went to AJ’s room and tapped on her door, pushing it open to see that she was sound asleep in the dark, one arm flung over her eyes. As I listened to her gentle breathing, I could hear my father’s bed creaking somewhere above us as he turned over, and I realized that the acoustics of this old house made it a bad place for the conversation AJ and I needed to have. Even if she and I whispered, the things we needed to talk about might be overheard by the man who was sleeping right upstairs.

  Closing her door, I decided we would talk in the morning when we could go outside and take a walk or something, far from any listening ears. If my father really was going to challenge his parents’ will and my inheritance, then I needed to know the truth, the real truth. No more lies.

  Far too agitated to sleep, I returned to the mural and went back to work. Lost in the repetitive motions of what I was doing, I wasn’t sure how much time had passed before I heard the crunch of a car in the driveway. Startled, I dropped my tools and ran to the window to see Lisa’s little Honda rolling around the side of the house. Worried for her safety, I rushed down the hall to the back bathroom, just to watch over her until she got inside and locked the door behind her. From the window there, I could see her g
etting out of the car, but rather than racing into the house, she took her time, fiddling with her keys, and even pausing to readjust the headband in her hair.

  I was about to tap on the glass and tell her to get herself inside when she finally reached the door, though still in no hurry. I could hear her key in the lock and the door open and shut, and then the outside light clicked off and all was still.

  All except for the light that flashed somewhere up high in the trees, off in the distance.

  I raced down the hall to meet Lisa just as she appeared at the top of the stairs. Holding one finger to my mouth, I led her to the bathroom and pointed toward the source of the light.

  “Just watch, out this window. Tell me what you see.”

  She did as I asked, but nothing happened for the next several moments.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “A light. High up in the trees. I’ve seen it there before.”

  Together we waited, but it did not flash again. Finally, Lisa turned from the window, assuring me that there was a radio tower in that general direction, not to mention an airport, either of which could have been the source of that light.

  “Either way, I don’t know how you have the nerve to stand around outside in the middle of the night like this. It’s just not smart.”

  Competing emotions seemed to pass across Lisa’s features until finally she just looked chagrined.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking,” she said. “I’m so tired, and it’s been a tough night.”

  “Are you feeling better?”

  “Yeah,” she replied, pulling off her watch and rings and earrings. “Sorry for ruining your dinner party.”

  I assured her that she had done nothing of the kind, that I was just sad she hadn’t been there to see everyone enjoying her delicious food.

  “We all ate way too much.”

  Lisa kicked off her shoes.

  “Oh, I forgot to tell you, I talked to Mike. So far, everything he’s tested for has come back negative. Looks like it really was plain old food poisoning.”

  “Does that mean you and Deena can make up and be friends again?” I asked, watching as she bent down to pick up her shoes.

  “Were we ever really friends?” she asked, holding them wearily over her shoulder. “Housemates, yes. Sharing in the care of Willy, yes. Friends, not really.”

  With that, she headed off to bed and I went back to work. Lost in a haze of thought, I kept at it for hours.

  By three a.m., my hands were throbbing and my arms were so tired I could barely lift them. Except for a few large, difficult patches that I’d had to leave alone for now, I had managed to remove the enamel paint from all four walls of this room. Tomorrow, I would tackle the hallway and the other rooms, but for now, this was the most I could do. Gathering my tools, I placed them in the cabinet and then brushed off my pants, crossed the room, and turned, to take in all that I had revealed.

  The mural was not a continuous, circular one, despite the fact that it went all the way around the room. Instead, I could tell from the elaborate gold-colored scrollwork that periodically separated the scenes, this painting had a beginning and progressed along from there, telling a story as it went, almost like a big, gorgeous comic strip.

  That first panel, to the right of the door, showed a group of people in colonial-type dress, gathered in what looked like a town hall, listening as a man wearing similar clothing stood at the center and spoke. Around the fringes of the scene, several women were crying and one man stood with his head somberly bowed.

  In the next panel, the same people were in the streets of a quaint little town, the buildings there hewn from rough logs. Two men were carrying a large white sack, and the townspeople were running toward that sack, tossing in a variety of items, each of them gold: gold candlesticks, gold necklaces, gold nuggets. At the end of the street, in the direction that the men were going, was a store with an anvil out front, no doubt the blacksmith shop. In the background, further down the road behind them, was a church, a tall building with a wooden bell tower and a cross on top.

  Pulse surging, I moved on to the next wall, and as I looked at it my skin raised up in goose bumps: Inside the blacksmith shop, as several of the townsfolk looked on, two muscular, sweating men poured what looked like molten gold into a black mold.

  In the next panel, covering the third wall, those same men were doing something else in the shop. Part of that picture was covered by one of the stubborn areas of enamel, so I grabbed the sandpaper from the cabinet and risked harming the tableau as I carefully sanded down to the acrylic underneath. Brushing the dust away, I could see that the men were holding paintbrushes, applying gray paint to the shiny gold, curved surface of what I simply knew must be a bell. With a gasp I understood: They had forged a bell from pure gold and were camouflaging it!

  The next scene, on the fourth wall, was particularly heartbreaking, a line of people being marched from their village by red-coated British soldiers on horseback. Off to the right, near the switch plate, were the two dogs that I had uncovered when I first began. At the very center of the wall, at the head of their procession, was a priest wearing a white robe and carrying a scepter on top of which was a cross—the same cross of my tattoo. Behind the priest, four men shouldered the load of a heavy wooden box affixed with carrying poles. That box, just about the size and shape to hold a large bell, was obviously made of wood, and its lid had been carved with the now-familiar image of the cross inside a bell.

  My mind raced, remembering what I had read about Colline d’Or, that it was the only village where no one had tried to escape. Now I knew why. Pretending to be pious by claiming peace and nonviolence, they must have convinced the soldiers to let them cart off their most precious religious memento, what they had claimed was the simple iron bell from their church’s bell tower. Sure enough, far behind the marching group, sat the church, its tower now empty, its eaves on fire.

  Off to the left, two young men were emerging from the woods to join the procession. Behind them, further down the path from which they had come, was a newly disturbed mound of dirt, obviously the burial place of the real church bell, the one made not of gold but simply of iron.

  The citizens of Colline d’Or had managed to smuggle out their most valuable possession—their gold—right under the noses of the British soldiers. Judging by the tattoos on the boys’ feet and the oath that had now been revealed in full, I had to guess that when the citizens of that village made the choice to pool their gold, they decided to stick together and use that gold as their insurance policy for their future. Once they finally settled in Louisiana and the years continued to pass, the two appointed guardians of the bell had been charged with making sure that it remained hidden and protected but ready at a moment’s notice, just in case they had to use it, as the oath said, “to serve as our protection and to guarantee that we will never again be forced to leave our homeland.”

  Fortunately for them, that fear had never come to pass. Louisiana had been sincere in its welcome, the region safe, the land bountiful. In the generations since, the descendants of this village had scattered far and wide, many of them not even aware that the legend their grandparents and great-grandparents told of the golden bell wasn’t legend at all—as so many other Cajun tales were—but was in fact true.

  I closed my eyes, picturing Willy before he died, exclaiming in French about the story of the bell: “L’angelus!” he had cried from his bed. “Is not a chucotement de bayou at all! Is la vérité! And I am the last surviving gardien.” The bell was not a myth at all, he had said, it was true. And he was the last surviving guardian.

  The duty of hiding and guarding the bell had been passed down through the generations of the descendants of Colline d’Or, ultimately to Willy and my grandmother, finally landing squarely at the feet of Lisa and me.

  She and I were the new guardians of the angelus.

  My mind reeling, I simply paced around the room, taking that in. No wonder Willy and Portia had tattooed m
y head. They must have done it when they knew for sure that I would be moving away for good, as insurance that one day I would return when summoned. A tattoo to the head would have hurt a lot, so I had a feeling that they had either drugged me and done it as I slept or simply taken advantage of my wordless, traumatized stupor and done it while I was awake. I sincerely hoped it was not the latter. I couldn’t imagine that two adults would be that cruel, even if their motives were noble. No doubt, most other gardiens in the past had gotten their tattoo voluntarily and after the fact, once they were an adult and understood the responsibility, not before.

  Willy’s summoning of me all these years later was finally understandable in its full magnitude. With Portia dead and her replacement dead—the stubborn fellow who had been killed on his boat during Katrina—the only surviving person who knew that the myth was true, and more importantly knew where the bell was hidden, was Willy. He was determined not to die until he gave us the oath and then revealed the hiding place. Someone else, however, had had other plans.

  Willy’s life had been cut short before he finished saying all that he had to say. Obviously someone else knew where the bell was—or at least knew that it existed—and they were willing to kill in order to keep that secret for themselves. I wondered what that bell would be worth today. More than likely, its value as a historical artifact would be even greater than its value as a big honkin’ load of gold: In short, it would be priceless.

  Already, one man had been killed for it.

  Who else could the killer be but Jimmy Smith? Obviously, he knew something, why else would he have come into my office under false pretenses just to show me the symbol and gauge my reaction? No wonder he had rushed off, saying he’d come back later: He was hoping that in the meantime I might remember where I had seen that symbol before. He must have thought that I knew more than I did. Having already placed a bug in my telephone a few days before, he probably hoped to catch me discussing it on the phone and steal that information for himself.