The Elementals

by Saundra Mitchell

  Drawing herself up imperiously, Zora said, “Emerson Birch, where is our youngest child?”

  At once, Emerson stopped. His whole posture changed, lanky and gentle again as he reached for her. “Oh, Julian? He’s in the barn.”

  Exasperated, Zora asked, “You couldn’t have told me that in the first place?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And why not?”

  Emerson caught her hand and closed the space between them. Backing her toward the porch rail, he smiled as he leaned down to whisper against her cheek. “Because he’s in there with a girl.”

  “Elise?” Zora leaned her head back, her pale eyes sparkling. “How long have they been in there? Maybe I should bring them some cake.”

  Looping an arm around Zora’s waist, Emerson twirled her slowly, lazily, and said, “Maybe you should leave them alone and dance with me.”

  “But there’s no music.”

  “I’ll sing some for you,” he replied.

  Stepping into a waltz with him, Zora’s heart fluttered when he made good on that promise. His smooth tenor notes seemed to slip right under her skin; his familiar hands became brand-new on her as they turned and turned in the shadows of the porch.

  Glancing up, she caught him in her gaze. There was always something to find in his eyes—unexpected wildness, or teasing, or in that very moment, longing. Old infatuation raced through her skin. She felt light and beautiful and invincible.

  Emerson let the song trail off, murmuring a quiet confession. “I love dancing with you.”

  In spite of the blush stinging her cheeks, Zora pressed a finger to his lips. “Shhh. I can’t hear the music.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, lifting her again. “I can’t hear you over the music.”

  They laughed together and took a few more steps. There was still a cake to serve and ice cream to scoop, and a few small presents to give to the birthday boy to open. With a gentle kiss, Zora finally stepped back. But her touch lingered.

  Holding Emerson’s hand for a moment more, she said, “Things are good, aren’t they?”

  “Yes ma’am” He kissed her fingertips and smiled against them. “They always are.”

  ***

  Down by the water, Mollie stood framed in a sandstone arch. Pinned into a vaguely medieval dress, and crowned with a band of paper and foil, she shivered. The sea wind streamed around her, pulling her hair and her hems.

  “Do we have enough light?” she asked.

  She hadn’t complained all afternoon. Not when they’d had to flee when sea lions took over the beach. Nor when Kate asked her to lie down and let the surf wash over her. But the light was fading; the pleasant afternoon promised to be a chilly evening, and Mollie was still damp.

  Kate moved her tripod again. Though sand was a good base for it, the ground wasn’t level. She couldn’t afford to waste film, so everything had to be right. She glanced at the sky and sighed. Blue shifted toward slate gray in the east. Sunset threatened to be ordinary, a few plum-tinged clouds loitering above a hazy sea.

  A porcelain rattle interrupted Kate’s geometry. Raising her head from her camera, she saw Mollie clamp her mouth shut to try to stop the chattering of her teeth.

  Though she hated to admit it, Kate was somewhat torn. Guilt roiled in her belly, but her gaze sharpened. She couldn’t help but notice that Mollie suffered beautifully.

  She looked every inch the miserable Lady of Shalott. Her longing for . . . well, for dry clothes and a warm meal played out on her delicate features like the raw and unrestrained longing of a maiden cursed to see Lancelot, to love him, but to never have him.

  Perhaps a true artist would have ignored her muse’s torment. But, since Mollie was the first friend Kate had had, and she rather wanted to keep her, she abandoned art for the day. Covering the lens on her camera, she beckoned to her. “We can come back.”

  Throwing her arms around herself, Mollie huddled against the stone wall until Kate finished packing her gear. Then she darted up to her, skirts bunched in one hand. Painting herself against Kate’s side, she wanted to say something, but her teeth clattered violently instead. That set her to giggling, and Kate wrapped an arm around her to share her warmth.

  “Perhaps tomorrow,” Kate said, hustling her toward home. “We should build a fire to keep you warm between takes.”

  Mollie lit up. “Oh, let’s. We could bring potatoes to put in the embers. I adore a roast potato. When the skin is all crispy and lovely . . .”

  “We need to find a canoe,” Kate replied, distracted. Mollie was a stunning Lady of Shalott, but they needed a boat for her to die in, and a Lancelot to die for.

  There were so many things to manage, so many details to cover. Plotting the final reel, imagining it in all its glory, consumed every stray thought in Kate’s head.

  With a little pinch to catch Kate’s attention, Mollie said, “We’ll find one. Stop worrying.”

  “It’s not worrying,” Kate said. “I’m managing the production. That’s how films get made, you know. Careful stewardship, a keen eye for accounting, a knack for solving sticky staging dilemmas . . .”

  At that, Mollie dropped her head and pretended to snore.

  Kate pinched her back and laughed when she bolted away from Mollie. Calling to her, Kate said, “Someone has to mind the details!”

  Hurrying up the cliff walk, they cut through dune grass, ignoring the way it bit their ankles, because that was the shortest path. The house was a rich, amber jewel set among a jade field of sand verbena and Torrey pines.

  Lights flickered in a few of the windows, chasing away night before it had even come. There were no automobiles in the yard today; no music drifted from the open windows. Mollie disappeared down the hall to change before Kate even reached the door.

  The candied richness of sautéed onions wafted over her when she walked in. Her father stood at the stove, surveying his kingdom of pots and pans. Holding a wooden spoon aloft, he didn’t raise his head when he said, “Good day?”

  Circumspect, Kate put her tripod against the pantry. “Yes, it was very clear.”

  “What are you working on?”

  Now suspicious, Kate studied him. He was in shirtsleeves and spattered with paint, the same as he always was. A smudge from Mimi’s charcoals darkened his cheek. Everything about him seemed ordinary and usual, including the question that had no right answer.

  So long as Kate worked on motion pictures instead of dead, dull gouaches, he would find her art lacking.

  Pulling her leather satchel off, Kate said, “An adaptation of a Tennyson poem.”

  “Oh, Tennyson?”

  And there it was. “It has nothing to do with the Pre-Raphaelites, Daddy!”

  Tension rippled briefly across his face, but when he spoke, he measured his words. Slipping the towel from his shoulder, he wrapped his hands in it as he turned to her. “Did I say it did?”

  “No, but I know exactly what you’re thinking.” She counted her reasons out for him. “I’ve only the one actress and no actors at all. It was Lady of Shalott or La Belle Dame sans Merci. I can manage the former without an actor better than the latter, that’s all!”

  Nathaniel pressed his lips together. “There’s always Ophelia . . .”

  “That’s a monologue, Daddy, not a—”

  A shriek cut them off. Forgetting their quarrel, they hurried toward the back of the house, where another scream erupted. Kate’s bedroom door was closed, and she pushed herself between it and her father.

  “No! She was changing,” Kate said, then opened the door enough to slide through the crack.

  In a rush, Mollie stumbled toward her. Her tangled curls bounced on her shoulders, and her face had gone entirely ashen. Tripping over clothes discarded on the floor, she all but crashed into Kate. Clinging to her, she whispered, “This house is haunted!”

  As that was quite possibly the last thing Kate expected to hear, she shook her head as she set Mollie on her feet again. “No, it’s not.”
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br />   “It is! I tell you, it is!” Mollie jabbed a finger at the back wall, toward the changing screen. “I was down to my combination, and I heard a man say something! I turned around, and there was no one there. So I thought, I must have overheard something from the kitchen. Or perhaps I’m weary from working so hard today . . .”

  “You did work hard,” Kate agreed, petting her hair.

  “But then it happened again! It was awful! He said I was going to die!”

  When Mollie said that, Kate dissolved into laughter. She backed toward the open window, hands up as she reassured her. “No, no, I’m not laughing at you, I’m not. But I know what your ghost is.”

  “Do you?” Mollie asked, brittle.

  Kate leaned out the window. “Come on, get down here!”

  A great black bird dropped from the eaves of the house to land on Kate’s outstretched arm. The creature was massive, bigger than a house cat, and dark as sin. When Kate pulled him inside, she smiled as he nudged his head against her cheek. Her arm bobbed beneath his weight, but she kept him aloft as she carried him toward Mollie.

  “This is Handsome, and he doesn’t want you to die.”

  “That’s a bird, Kate! Oh, put him back outside!” Mollie kept backing away. “They’re dirty!”

  Kate stroked her fingers along his velvet feathers. “Oh, not him. Ravens love a bath; at least, Handsome does. He’s terribly smart, too. Tell her, darling.”

  Raising his broad wings, Handsome shook himself out a bit, then turned his head nearly upside down. Keen eyes blinked, and then he opened his beak. An eerie, rattling voice issued from him. “I can talk. Can you fly?”

  Mollie slumped against the door. “How on earth . . . ?”

  “Isn’t he fantastic? He can say a few more things, but he usually doesn’t.” She laughed when Handsome interrupted her again to ask if she could fly. “Daddy taught him that. He thinks it’s absolutely hilarious.”

  “It’s bad luck to have a bird in the house,” Mollie said.

  Kate made a kissing sound and nuzzled Handsome right back. “I raised him from a chick. He’s not bad luck at all.”

  Unconvinced, Mollie said nothing. She kept Handsome in her sight, creeping around the edge of the room to get back to the dressing screen. When she picked up her dress, Handsome spread his wings and cried out.

  Mollie let out another shriek, then one more when Nathaniel rapped on the door and demanded to know what was going on in there. Trying to soothe everyone at once, Kate let herself out and smiled at her father.

  “All’s well,” she sang.

  Nathaniel sighed as she walked away, and said, to himself alone, “Of course it is.”

  ***

  With a pop and a bite of sulfur, a match sprang to life between Julian’s fingers. A single point of fire spread inside the glass walls of the lantern, casting a soft circle of light in the middle of the pole barn.

  It revealed a working space with bales of hay stacked in the corners and up in the loft. In the dark, the plow and hay cutter seemed like exotic beasts—the cutter’s head a dragon; the plow’s handles a bull.

  A wooden swing drifted lazily, wide enough for two and dangling from the loft with a pulley at the side.

  Hanging the lantern and shaking out the match, Julian turned. Outlined by the golden glow, Elise stood in the middle of the floor, looking toward the ceiling. She’d laced ribbon in her hair, and her earbobs swung as she moved.

  “You have mourning doves up there,” she said.

  Julian rubbed his hands dry on his pants. “They’re hiding from the owls.”

  Gathering her skirt in one hand, Elise moved through the barn as if she’d never seen one. Her fingers trailed the poles, and she stopped to read what the Birch boys had penciled on them over the years.

  Suddenly, she burst out laughing. “C dropped the baby 1900.”

  Julian said, “He probably wasn’t the only one.”

  Still giggling, Elise tipped sideways to read another. “H broken arm 1908.”

  Julian sat on the swing and pushed his crutches back into the dark. “He likes to say Sam pushed him out of the hayloft, but it’s not true. Old Man Henry lost his balance. Lucky he didn’t crack his skull open.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Elise said. “C + S 1910. That one’s in a heart. Was that Sarah?”

  Julian shook his head. “A girl from out of town; came out to stay with Mr. and Mrs. Routh a while back. Sofia, I think? Brown hair, done up in a bunch of loopty braids . . .”

  Pressing against a pole, Elise laughed. “Loopty braids.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I do. I’m just reeling at your way with words.” She cast her gaze toward the loft. There were notes written there, too. “Aren’t any of these about you?”

  Heart racing, Julian patted the empty space beside him. “Most of mine are up top. Come here, I’ll show you.”

  The mourning doves chirred in the rafters as Elise crossed the floor. It seemed like a faint buzz surrounded her, as if she carried open current on her skin. Pinning her skirts between her knees, she sank down with him and smiled. “Hiding a telescope over here?”

  Feeding off that current, Julian grabbed the secondary rope and pulled. With a faint squeak every half turn, the pulley above them rolled, and the swing rose into the air. It was perfect for loading hay into the loft, and for scribing secrets into raw wood.

  Julian hauled them up easily, savoring the burn of exertion. There was something primal about proving his strength to Elise. He wanted her to notice the breadth of his shoulders and the certainty in his hands.

  They’d grown up together, and he remembered when Elise was nothing but elbows and knees. Whatever memory like that she had of him, he wanted it to burn away for good.

  A little below the loft, Julian wound the rope on its hook. He tested the knot, then looked to Elise. “All right?”

  Twining her arm around the rope on her side, Elise leaned forward to measure their height. The swing tilted with her, and she laughed in surprise. It sounded delicate and thin, nothing like her usual laugh. “Don’t let me fall.”

  “I wouldn’t ever,” Julian swore. Then, brazen and brave, and perhaps a little crazy, he slipped an arm around her. His hand fell to her hip; his thumb grazed the curve of her waist. That glancing touch, drawing off her warmth and her softness, intoxicated him.

  Elise swallowed a soft sound, craning to look past him and behind herself. “You promised me inscriptions.”

  “I did, fair enough,” he said. His knee brushed hers as he turned the swing. “All the way that way, at the corner. Do you see it? J can fly 1907.”

  “Julian, how did you get that there?”

  “I flew!”

  With an expectant smile, Elise leveled a gaze at him. She didn’t say anything, and she didn’t have to. Her quirked eyebrow spoke for her.

  “I laid out in the loft. I have a gift for writing upside down,” he admitted.

  Relaxing, Elise searched for another marking. The thin light danced, revealing and hiding handwriting that went from unsure to confident, growing bolder by the year. Crinkling her nose, she puzzled over another cryptic note. “J DITV 5-6-1911.”

  “The first time my father let me play ‘Down in the Valley’ on his fiddle after Sunday dinner.”

  “I do love listening to you on that fiddle,” Elise said. She leaned against him, her head brushing his shoulder.

  The lantern below was only so bright. It cast its fullest light on the floor and faded to an intimation of illumination above it. Elise and Julian were drawn in stark lines—faint light, but inky shadows. Her soft mouth became lush; her brows arched in pure, clean strokes.

  Julian drank in her every detail. But for all his admiration of her clear eyes and the sable wing of her lashes, his gaze ultimately lingered on her lips. She was so close—so warm—he skimmed his thumb against her waist again. Everything inside him tightened, like he was being tuned to her key.

  Fingers fl
uttering against his arm, Elise filled half the space between them. Julian filled the rest, his breath tracing warm against her skin as their lips met. It was barely a caress, more discovery than anything else.

  Hanging above the barn floor, the swing drifted a lazy pattern. Nudged one way when Julian finally kissed her, it jolted abruptly when Elise broke away.

  The current faltered.

  His head still all white noise, Julian stared at her. He had no words in his mouth; everything was a jumble. In retreat, he asked, “What’s wrong?”

  All the warmth between them drained away. Elise looked at the ceiling, then took a deep breath. Her graceful hands turned fidgety, pulling at the neck of her dress. The pretty cream lace there cast shadowed barbs on her throat.

  “Elise, what?”

  “I shouldn’t have come in here,” she said. Her voice wavered, and her lips, so lush with anticipation in the moment past, now trembled. “I’m sorry.”

  Numb, Julian reached for the pulley rope. With clumsy hands he unmoored them and struggled to lower them to the ground. He wanted to let go, to go crashing down and shatter on the floor.

  Doubts and questions careened through him. He bled from the inside, and the only thing he could think of to say was, “I thought you liked me too.”

  Elise jumped from the swing before they reached the ground. She spun, wild shadows climbing the walls as she moved through the lantern’s light. Catching the swing’s ropes with both hands, she faced Julian, trapped him. “I do. I probably love you; I’ve been sweet on you my whole life.”

  “Then why . . . ?”

  “I’m the only one,” Elise said distantly. She swiped tears from her face, harder than she needed to. “My great-grandfather built our farm, Julian. The house, the barn, everything we have . . . it’s been passed down to the firstborn, and sooner, not later, it’s coming to me.”

  Struggling to understand, Julian stared. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Slowly, Elise backed away. “I can’t be selfish and do as I please, Julian. I have to think about what comes next.”

  “I’d never ask you to give up your farm,” Julian said.

  “I know you wouldn’t.” She hesitated, and two more tears slipped down her face. Finally, resignation laced into the words, she said, “But I can’t work it alone. And you can’t do the kind of work it needs.”