The Mirk and Midnight Hour

by Jane Nickerson

  I made myself take several deep breaths. “Laney and Michael are considered family. That’s how they should be treated.”

  Sunny rolled her eyes. “Y’all have always been outlandish here at Scuppernong. As if the rest of the world doesn’t matter. Remember how you and Rush used to go to Miss Reed’s school barefoot? Even through the mud.”

  I laughed a little in spite of the anger that still smoldered in my breast. “No one at home knew about that. Our shoes raised blisters, so we usually took them off and stuck them in the bushes on the way.”

  “It didn’t matter to you how often Miss Reed told you that shoes must be worn.” A pucker appeared between Sunny’s brows. “Rush always stood a little in front of you when she scolded. He made me wish I had a brother.” The wrinkle smoothed out. “I was sure a silly little goose.”

  It was time to return to the subject. “About the corset—I told you before that Laney hasn’t time to be your lady’s maid.”

  “Well, sorry, but she’s going to have to do it since selfish Uncle Frank wouldn’t let us bring Carlotta. I can’t fasten my own stays, after all.”

  “You’ve been making Laney do that all this week? Never again. Next time call me, or learn to do it yourself, as I do mine.”

  “I don’t mean to be ugly, honey, but no wonder your waist got the size it did during your awkward stage. A girl can’t cinch in her own laces worth a hill of beans. Surely you know that.”

  I opened my mouth to retort and then closed it. The fact was, I didn’t know that. Aunt Permilla knew nothing of such things, so no one had told me when to start wearing stays. When I began attending the academy and saw that everyone else wore them, I had scuttled to the dry goods store and made the purchase myself, scarlet-faced lest anyone should see me. I had always pulled the laces the best I could on my own.

  Without another word I turned on my heels and went off to the kitchen to find Laney.

  “Don’t forget!” Sunny hollered after me. “Tell her I want my breakfast!”

  Laney was not inside. I found her hauling a too-heavy basket heaped with wet clothes out to the line behind the barn. I grabbed up one of the handles. “Laney, why didn’t you tell me Sunny slapped you?”

  She hung two aprons before answering. “Same reason I would never tell my husband—what good would it do? Michael’d get all heated up and I’d have to stop him from making trouble. Then you’d start a catfight with Miss Sunny, and after all that, everything would be the same, except more miserable.”

  “You should’ve slapped her back.”

  Laney gave me a look and I lowered my eyes. I knew it was a stupid thing to say even as I said it.

  “Well,” I said, “I informed her she better never touch you again.”

  “Huh. I bet she’s so scared her big feet are shaking in her big shoes.”

  I shook out a head wrap so sharp it made a loud crack. Through clenched teeth I said, “She will not touch you again.” Then I laughed weakly. “Maybe we should go ask your aunt Anarchy for some herb to protect us from my evil stepsister. It would be nice if it involved something fun, like rubbing poison ivy between her sheets.”

  Laney laughed. “Ooh, girl, you’re mean. Or what about some of those other things Aunty says conjure men can do?”

  “Like what?”

  Laney removed the pegs she was holding in her mouth. “There’s a powder you can blow in folks’ eyes so they’ll only see what you want them to see. And ways to make folks forget things you don’t want them to remember.”

  “Such a shame we’re not mean. We could never really do any of that, could we?”

  “No. And I don’t see how those things would help, and Aunty wouldn’t tell us how to do them anyhow. She would never mess with dark stuff. Fun to think about, though.”

  “I guess we could always consult the VanZeldts,” I said, very low. “Well, stop tightening Sunny’s corset. I’ll do that from now on. And if she raises a finger against you, you tell me. I’ll take care of her somehow.”

  Laney snorted. She would never let me know if anything else happened. And there wasn’t much I could do if she did.

  My father sought me out soon after, as I packed his lunch in the kitchen. He said nothing for a moment, just rolled the brim of his hat between his hands.

  “Here’s your dinner,” I said, handing him the packet.

  “Thank you.”

  I waited, refusing to say anything else until he did.

  “Violet, I’ve never been good at expressing myself,” he said slowly, “but before I go, I want you to know that you and your mama will never be replaced by Anna Bess and Elsa, however much I do care for them. The circle’s simply expanded. I rushed all this—the marriage and all—because I couldn’t leave you alone with the dangers of war so near. I trust Michael and Laney, but …”

  Now I would help. “I understand. They might leave.”

  “I—um … yes.”

  I smiled. “Thank you for telling me this, Pa. It helps to hear it.” And it did.

  Michael drove the ladies to town in the buggy, while my father rode ahead on Toby.

  Spring was over. The glowing foliage had faded and deepened to a dark green. Mugginess weighed on us, along with a sense of oppression. Miss Elsa drearily fluttered her fan to move the sluggish air.

  When we reached town, my father went on to join his regiment at the Wyndriven campsite. He gave us only a hasty backward glance since he had already said his goodbyes at the farm. We would see him once more when the soldiers rode through town on their way north.

  I left Sunny and Miss Elsa to run into Maloney’s Mercantile for a paper of pins. The block-lettered name on the sign still gave me pause. Until five months ago it had read DANCEY’S. I was always curious (and, for some reason, apprehensive) to see what new changes Mr. Maloney might make. Even when my father kept it, the store had been dark and dingy. Now it seemed darker and dingier because the shelves were nearly bare. The floor was crowded with barrels and crates, most of them empty. The coffins that used to be displayed in the back were all long gone, as were all the guns and ammunition. There were still some bolts of cloth, cooking utensils, soaps, patent medicines, and tobacco, but prices were ridiculously dear.

  Only one other customer was in the store. The young VanZeldt woman stood at the counter with items laid out in front of her—a jug of molasses, an iron pot, a lantern, a long bone-handled knife. Her flowing skirt of some slightly glistening fabric was tied with a wide brown sash and was short enough to show slender, dusty bare feet and ankles. Her hair was elaborately braided and twisted, intertwined with a green ribbon.

  It seemed all wrong to see her like this. She should be blending into the trees in the wildwood. Not here. Not shopping at Maloney’s Mercantile, arguing with Mr. Maloney. I tried not to listen to the dispute in case it would embarrass me. The woman reached beneath the low neckline of her thin white blouse to pull out a leather pouch that hung there—along with one of red flannel. I turned quickly away to stare instead at the scythes hanging on the wall behind the storekeeper like so many gleaming new moons.

  However, I accidentally let Mr. Maloney catch my eye and was involuntarily drawn into the problem. He viewed me with relief. “Girl dear, it’s glad I am to see you!” he said in a voice that sounded unusually loud and blustering even for a loud and blustering Irishman. “Come right on up to the front of the line. This person can wait, to be sure. She’ll never figure out her money anyway. Now, what can I do for you?”

  I opened my mouth to request the pins, then closed it again. Yes, the woman was a VanZeldt and a servant, but this was too rude. I had to lean my head back to look up into her face, she was that tall. “Do you need help?”

  Her great brown eyes widened so that the whites showed around the irises. I had never been this close to a VanZeldt before. She was younger than I had thought—maybe in her late teens or early twenties, but it was hard to tell. Her face was narrow, her cheekbones high and sculptured, her nose long and thin. An
d she was so beautiful that I couldn’t help staring at her in awe.

  She raised one hand to tuck the dangling ribbon back in her hair. There was a grace about her gesture that I had noticed in all the VanZeldts when I had seen them from a distance. The grace that gave their slightest movement a liquid smoothness. However, the ribbon wouldn’t stay tucked in, and as she tried to fix it and it kept coming out, her dignity raveled. Standing so close, I saw her hand begin to shake. This simple thing—a trip to Maloney’s Mercantile—must be frightening for her. To this girl, we were the strange ones.

  Automatically I reached out to help. “Here,” I said. “Let me tuck it in.” I pushed the end of the ribbon deeper beneath a braid.

  She gave me a shy almost smile. “I thank you.”

  “Now,” I said, “what is the matter here?”

  “I have money,” she said in careful English. Her voice was unusually deep and lyrical. “I have money, but this man—I am afraid he will take too much.”

  “The nerve of her!” Mr. Maloney said. “ ’Tis change in Confederate dollars you’ll be getting, but ’tis the correct change. No one can be saying Rory Maloney is not an honest businessman.”

  “Of course you are,” I said quickly. “How much does all this add up to?”

  “Twelve dollars gold, twenty in paper.” He eyed me defensively. “And hardly making a profit I am, neither.”

  “Will you let me see your coins?” I asked the girl.

  She nodded slowly and reached up to lift the pouch from around her neck. Several silver bangles clicked together.

  I drew out a single twenty-dollar gold piece and placed it on the counter. Mr. Maloney counted out the change in currency. He did this awkwardly since he was holding something in his left hand. He suspiciously eyed the girl all the while, and I now felt included in the suspicion.

  “There,” he said. “Barely making a profit I am.”

  “Times are trying for everyone.” I smiled brightly.

  The hard lines of his mouth softened. “Well then, now that’s done, will you be telling me what you need, dear girl?”

  I made my request. While he was fetching the pins, I helped the VanZeldt girl pack her purchases in her basket. After she had slipped out the door, Mr. Maloney said, “For all their fancy gold, I wouldn’t be after having them VanZeldts coming in here. They’re ill to deal with. Makes the hair stand up on me arms. I’d as lief they took their business downriver. When they come in, I hold to my bit of cold iron to ward off all unnatural beings.” He opened his left hand to reveal a piece of horseshoe. “And him they call Dr. VanZeldt ain’t even a proper doctor.”

  “I’ve never seen him before. What kind of improper doctor is he?”

  “If ever he learned real medicine, he’s forgotten it. He came in here himself once—a little, puny fellow—and he told me he lived in the back hills of Africa among the natives for years to learn their outlandish methods. Said how grateful he was they were willing to accept him. When the Morgans’ little girl took the typhus, they ran for VanZeldt on account of they couldn’t find Dr. Hale. VanZeldt mixed up a foul-smelling brew he said was made from some kind of crushed beetles.”

  “Did she take it?”

  “To be sure, she did, they were that desperate, and she got well, but for the rest of her life she’ll know she ate beetles. No one trusts him after that.”

  I shook my head, hoping it was the right response to his story, paid him, and left the store.

  A shadow fell across my path as I was walking briskly past an alley. The VanZeldt girl had been waiting just around the corner.

  “Please, miss,” she said, “may I speak to you?”

  I hesitantly stepped into the gap. “Is there something else you need?”

  “It is only that you are the first person in this place to treat me kindly. I want to thank you.”

  I smiled and nodded, uncomfortable, and would have hurried away but she plucked at my sleeve.

  “My name is Amenze. What is your name?”

  “Violet Dancey.”

  “Violet Dancey. I will remember that and I will remember you. Does your man leave today?”

  “My man?”

  “All the young white men go to die. All the husbands. All the beloveds.” A strange note crept into her voice and a strange look into her eyes.

  I took an involuntary step backward, farther into the alley. “I don’t have a man—a sweetheart. It’s my father who’s going.”

  My heart lurched, although outwardly I remained perfectly still, when she suddenly tossed an object from hand to hand and then flung it at my feet. It was an amulet of unpolished amber, golden as hardened honey, strung on a leather thong. She squatted down and studied it as it lay there. I stood unmoving while Amenze somehow communicated with mystic forces. I could not see her eyes well, but they seemed to shift oddly as she stared downward. She gave a nod, scooped up the amulet, and stood. I flinched when she slipped it over my head.

  “Your father will return,” she said. “And you will have a sweetheart soon. I give you this grigri as a sign of our goodwill one to another. It will help you in the days that come.”

  “I don’t—I don’t really believe in that sort of thing,” I said.

  She gave a faint smile. “The spirits do not need you to believe in order to do their work.”

  I thanked her awkwardly, turned, and started to leave the alley, tucking the amber beneath the neckline of my dress. I didn’t look back but still could feel her eyes following.

  “Something else,” she said. Her voice, quiet yet clear as crystal, stopped me in my tracks. “There is one who is anxious for you. Because you yet weep. Rush …”

  I whirled around, my mouth hanging open, and returned to her side. “How—?”

  “He is not a loa—an earth-trapped spirit who must do our bidding. Still, a thread ties him here, spun by your grieving. Come with me.”

  Amenze was edging backward, beckoning me to follow. I went with her behind the building, where no one could see us.

  She grabbed my hands and held them tightly. “I will bring him to you,” she whispered eagerly. “Right now I will do this thing. You may talk to him, hear that he is well. Ask him what you must do.”

  A fierce longing welled in me. To see Rush once more as I did in life, to grasp without doubt that he still existed somewhere, to know his feelings at the moment of his death …

  Amenze must have read assent in my face. She dropped my hands and reached into her mojo pouch to bring out a pinch of something powdery. She rubbed it between her fingers, breathed it into her nostrils, and then blew it away in a little puff. Murmuring low and sibilant, she raised her long, bony arms to the sky. An ethereal yellowish-green light suffused the air around us.

  I did not speak or move, except to tremble a little.

  A sighing sounded that might or might not have been the wind whooshing around the corner. A beam of light that pierced through overhead clouds gathered brightness between Amenze’s arms.

  Her voice deepened in intensity, as if the words were tugged out of her throat. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She dropped to her knees. The shapeless glimmer before her gained form, a column roughly the shape of a man, the height of my brother. In a moment I would see his face.

  I gasped and cried out, “No! No! Stop! Don’t do this to him!” I covered my eyes with my hands.

  I had almost done a terrible thing. A Witch of Endor—like terrible thing. Because of King Saul’s encounter with the witch and the spirit of Samuel she conjured up, Saul despaired completely, and he and his family all died shortly after. Only bad could come of wrenching Rush from heaven because of my selfishness.

  I lowered my hands. Amenze was watching me. She slightly lifted her shoulders. “As you wish.” She stood.

  “Thank you for trying to help,” I babbled. “It’s only that it couldn’t have been right.”

  Without another word, she left me alone and shaking.

  “Rush,” I whispered to the
breeze, “I’m so sorry for that. Don’t worry about me. We miss you, but we’ll be all right. I’ll try not to cry about you anymore. Be happy, and when it’s the right time and place, I’ll see you again.” Against my chest the amber amulet glowed with its own warmth.

  It took me several minutes to pull myself together before I could move slowly out to the street to face other people.

  “Where have you been?” Sunny asked when I found her and her mother waiting in a crowd at the square. Her speech sounded especially shrill after Amenze’s melodic tones.

  For a second I couldn’t speak. I shook my head a little and could feel the amber, still warm. When I finally spoke, my voice was hoarse. “I bought my pins and then—and then I had to help someone.”

  She seemed to lose interest. “Had Mr. Maloney any new shoes in?”

  “No. Not a single pair.”

  Sunny looked pleased. “I bought the last, you know. For the wedding.” She displayed her high-heeled slippers, which she was tapping about in for everyday use.

  For the send-off some children were having a warlike parade down the street, complete with wooden swords, rifles, and small flags on poles. Some wore miniature Confederate uniforms. Most of the onlookers smiled upon them fondly, but the sight made me shudder.

  The sound of horses’ hooves and marching feet reached us. Over the hill they came, long lines of men clad in ghostly gray, some on horseback, some on foot. Sunny, Miss Elsa, and all the others waved handkerchiefs and shouted goodbyes and God bless yous. I shrank back against the brick wall of the building behind me, watching, frozen, as my father and the soldiers moved through town, leaving us behind.

  A year ago, when Rush’s company left, newly sewn Stars and Bars flags hung from every balcony, along with paper rosettes and streamers. We showered them with flower petals as if it were a celebration. “It’ll be over in a month,” the boys had bragged, all jaunty and proud. We were free and independent. We hoped for little or no bloodshed, that they’d let us depart from the Union peacefully. We were innocent and stupid then. And sinful to be jolly over such a terrible thing. But we didn’t know. No more than Addie, the Northern girl whose letter I had read, had known as she and her friends played at war, with their military fashions and fancies.