The Mirk and Midnight Hour

by Jane Nickerson

  But something … Another sound … It took a moment for my brain to register what it was—feet pounding up the stairs.

  “I’m coming, Master Seeley!” King’s voice boomed. I loved King’s voice. So deep. So reassuring. “Y’all stand back,” he hollered. “I got to bust this open.”

  At last our stunned minds could grasp the fact that we were being rescued. We scurried to a corner as the door came flying inward with a crash and the screech of hinges torn from the frame.

  King bounded to Seeley’s side, squatted, and put his big hands on the boy’s shoulders. “You all right? I couldn’t let Master Dorian burn you up. No, sir.” He picked Seeley up in his arms, thick as tree trunks. “Y’all come on out. We got to put out the fire.”

  Coughing and sputtering, we all dashed downstairs and toward the blazing, smoke-filled kitchen. Laney reached it first. Gasping, she backed out of the doorway and into the hall, her eyes huge. “The cradle’s gone.” She swayed on her feet.

  “Don’t you worry none,” King called back as he headed out onto the front porch. “Cubby’s safe—hear him caterwauling outside? I got him out first.”

  Laney raced down the steps and around to the barn, where Cubby yowled reassuringly. The rest of us stumbled outside and immediately formed a line to pass buckets of water from the well and douse the kitchen. Thanks to the recent damp weather, it was still the only portion of the house that had caught. King took an ax and hacked away the burning parts. Bucket after heavy bucket, we began to turn the tide, and then, miraculously, the weighty clouds finally let loose, and rain poured down to finish the job. It was over—the kitchen destroyed, everything blackened and smoke-damaged, but the rest of the house safe.

  We dropped to the front porch floor, out of the weather, exhausted, dripping, and relieved. A goose wandered past the steps; the kitchen yard fence was down. I didn’t even think of corralling it. I wasn’t going to do anything ever again. Except—I started up in a panic.

  Dorian.

  I said it out loud now. “Where’s Dorian?”

  We looked at each other blankly—Seeley, Laney, Sunny, Miss Elsa, and I. King was nowhere to be seen. I jumped up. “Let me fetch the pistol,” I said, and hurriedly grabbed it from the mantel. Outside again, I led the way around the house.

  King was kneeling in the grass beside Dorian’s body. It sprawled stiff and contorted with a dark bullet hole in the chest. Rain diluted the blood to a pale rose. Blood and water on the shirt, blood and water puddled beneath.

  The big man looked up, his eyes black as chasms and his mouth distorted. “I done it. I shot him. Couldn’t let him burn y’all up.” His homely face seemed to dissolve. Great, wrenching sobs racked his body.

  “It’s all right, King,” Miss Elsa said, patting his shoulder.

  He raised his head. “ ‘All right,’ ma’am? It ain’t all right. I done killed a man.”

  “You had to do it,” I said, “to save our lives. You’re a hero.”

  For a long moment Sunny, stunned, stared down at Dorian. with his bright hair spread in the grass. She turned slowly and went out of sight around the barn.

  Miss Elsa stood. “I’m going to get bandages to bind your wound, King. It looks like you got grazed.”

  Only now I saw that King’s upper sleeve was torn and showed ragged, bleeding flesh.

  “He tried to kill you as well,” I said. “The law would have hung him if he wasn’t dead already. Leave him, King. Come out of the rain.”

  King trudged after the rest of us onto the front porch. He slumped down against the rail, his head in his hands. Gently Miss Elsa bandaged him.

  Michael came home. Laney fell into his arms. After finally untangling all our scrambled explanations, he said, “So what are we going to do with the body?”

  No one seemed to have an answer.

  At last Miss Elsa spoke firmly. “If we fetch the marshal, there’ll be too many questions. So, Michael, would you please bury it out in the woods somewhere? Then, as soon as dear, wonderful King feels up to eating, we’re going to give him the best meal he’s ever had and send him off to the Yankee lines. They’re near Corinth, aren’t they? King, we’ve got a map somewhere that we’ll give you. Can you sneak through the woods without letting anyone see you until you reach the bluecoats? When you get to them, you’ll be free.”

  King nodded slowly.

  Miss Elsa paused before turning again to Michael. “And, it’s awful to ask, but can you find our money on the body? We’ll need to send some with King.” Her shoulders sagged suddenly. “I think I’ll go in now. First I’ll open all the windows to air out the smoke. And then …” Her voice trailed off.

  I couldn’t blame her for seeking laudanum tonight.

  It all played out as Miss Elsa had said. We prepared to rebuild our lives. And the kitchen.

  During the following days, we scrubbed the house until everything smelled only a little of smoke, and a few charitable men from church began coming out daily to rebuild the kitchen.

  With Dorian’s final and forever departure, we should all have felt more peaceful and secure. Somehow, though, peace eluded us. Four days later Seeley didn’t seem to have recovered at all. I didn’t know if it was still the original poison or the nightmare Dorian had put us through. Whatever it was, Seeley did nothing but lie on the sofa, wan and languid, with a sheet covering his face. He whimpered if I left the room and would hardly speak. He wanted nothing to eat. He even pushed Goblin off every time she tried to lie on him.

  My worry over Seeley tangled with that nagging sense that there was something I needed to be doing or somewhere I needed to be going. Someone …

  I watched Seeley, pondering what I could do for him. “Shall I read to you?”

  He barely shrugged. “I guess.”

  “What do you want me to read?”

  “Maybe Castle Sliverbone.”

  “That’s a book you brought from Panola, isn’t it? Is it up in your room?”

  He nodded.

  Upstairs it took me a few minutes to find the book under Seeley’s bed, mixed in with dust, peach pits, and dirty undergarments. As I held the volume in my hands and read the cover, an odd feeling came over me. The author’s name—Thomas Lynd—seemed so familiar. I shook myself. Seeley must have mentioned it before or else I had caught a glimpse of the cover.

  Downstairs, when I started to read Castle Sliverbone to Seeley, he stopped me. “I guess I don’t really want it.” He turned his face away.

  I tapped my fingers on the book for a few minutes. Then I slammed it down and announced, “Time for you to go outside, Squid. There’s something I need to do and you’re going to help me. Do you have any of those lemon drops left from the other day?”

  Sluggishly he rose up on his elbows. I thought he was going to rebel, but instead he told me where to find the few remaining pieces of candy in a twist of paper. I got them.

  Seeley’s legs gave way when he stood. I started to lend him some support, but he pushed me away. “I’m not a baby.”

  However, when he almost keeled over on the porch steps, he let me assist him down. We made our way across the yard. As we went, I remembered.…

  Rush is about to leave for the last time, although we don’t know that’s what it is. His gray uniform is too big across the back and his rifle is shiny new. Laney prepares his favorite meal, but no one really eats it. It’s time for Rush to go, but still we scrabble to delay. I play the songs he loves on the harp.

  Pa stands finally, stretches, and says, “Well …”

  “Soon, Pa,” Rush says. “Violet and I need to take a walk first.”

  He and I walk down to the river, and then along the edge of the woods.

  He puts his arm across my shoulders. “It’s been a long time since we visited the bees.” We head toward the gums.

  “Don’t forget them,” he says, halfway there. “There’s something in the bees that’s very wise, and if you’re the right sort of person and you treat them with the right sort o
f respect, they’ll be with you when you need them. And Violet”—he stopped in mid-stride and faced me—“if I don’t come back, don’t think it’ll be betraying our secret to share this with someone else.”

  I shove him. “Don’t even say that.” He knows I mean the part about not coming back.

  He gives a faint, sad smile, but says nothing.

  He did know it was the last time.

  “Now,” I said to Seeley when we stood on the slope above the gums, “the hives are the city of the bees. They are wise far beyond what most folks believe. I’m going to teach you to do something that Rush taught me. No one else knows I can do it. You talk to the bees. You tell them all the news and give them little gifts. And if you’re the right sort of person, you can also call the bees to you when you’re in need. I think you can do it. It’ll take some courage on your part, but you’ve shown how brave you can be through all this business. Now put the lemon drops on the ground by the gums.”

  He did as I told him. I taught him the rhyme and we repeated it together.

  “My lady queen and noble bees,” I said, “this is Seeley Rushton, whom you probably already know a little. Please care for him and let no harm come to him. All right,” I told Seeley, “you’ll have to hold very, very still.”

  I showed him how to lie down in the grass, hands flat against the ground, feeling the earth, imagining blossoms and honey-sweet smells.

  “We summon thee.…”

  They came.

  Most landed on me, but several alighted on Seeley. I heard his sharp intake of breath at first and then his steady, soft breathing beneath the humming.

  Afterward, on the way back to the house, Seeley shambled a bit but smiled and shook his head when I made a move to help him.

  It continued to tug at me—that restless, fearful sense that there was something I was forgetting. Something important. Urgent even. I would try to pin my mind to whatever it was, but it always slipped away like an oily, elusive dream.

  No one else had any idea as to what it could be or what commitment I might have made.

  Well, there was plenty to keep me busy these days without borrowing some problem that didn’t exist, and I tried to shake myself free of it. The cotton fields were growing cushiony and puffy. We were still putting things to rights in the new kitchen and canning the first harvest from the garden.

  A large basket of withered poppies sat in Miss Elsa’s room. First she pierced the capsules with a needle. Next she dropped them into a glazed crock near a small fire that she kept burning on her hearth, in spite of the heat, to allow the opium to sweat out. Afterward she mixed it with sugar and alcohol to make her medicine.

  However, nothing enabled her to escape completely from the aftereffects of Dorian. Finally she requested details about what had happened between him and Sunny. She listened, with pain lining her face. “It’s all my fault,” she said sadly.

  “How is it your fault, Mama?” Sunny demanded. “You couldn’t know what that vermin was up to.”

  “I spend so much of my time in a fog from my medicine. Maybe—maybe I would have seen something if I’d been lucid. I should never have left you to deal with him alone. And you didn’t even think you could tell me anything. I’m a terrible mother.”

  “Don’t you dare blame yourself!” Sunny cried, throwing her arms around Miss Elsa and squeezing hard. “I won’t let you.”

  “You were quick-thinking when you knew what to do with King and Dorian,” I said. I would never forget how my stepmother had acted in those moments when the rest of us were at a loss.

  “I’ll try harder. I really will,” Miss Elsa said, sobbing. “I’ll take less and less until I stop completely. This time I will do it.”

  Even Goblin was having a hard time. I had left Seeley with Laney in order to attend Miss Ruby Jewel’s funeral and brought home two cats—the least moth-eaten-looking ones—whom Goblin did not take to at all. They were to stay out in the barn. “Now, my kitty,” I had told Goblin, “you may not have wanted new cats around the place, but you may grow to love them. It happened to me.”

  I should have had no time to worry over anything. I worked in the house and in the barn, sewed a new shirt to send to my father, and finished a pair of stockings.

  Maybe I had given someone a promise. Someone who needed my help. Perhaps that was what caused the prickling sensation that wavered at the back of my brain. Who is it? I was on edge and weepy.

  The unsettled feeling was soon compounded by the weather and an unpleasant discovery I made because of it. For three days, a violent storm raged, toppling trees and bombarding Scuppernong with sheets of black rain and flotsam and jetsam torn from the woods. We huddled inside and worried that shortly the wind might form a funnel and blow us clean away.

  When the deluge finally stopped, the cotton fields looked battered and beaten, mushrooms had sprouted all over the yard, and a gray fungus, which grew back nearly as soon as I scrubbed it away with carbolic soap, clouded the walls of the parlor.

  The river had topped its banks and gushed foaming brown, littered with roiling, swirling, tangled muck. We had been hauling branches and trash to a fire for burning when I took a break to stand on the edge of the bank, watching the endless flow and listening. Just barely, if I strained my ears, the faint, faraway booming of cannon sounded. The war crept closer.

  Something pale caught my eye, wedged in a massive clump floating my way. At first I thought it was a child’s rubber ball, mud-spattered and trapped within the twisted debris. But as it approached, I realized with horror that what I had taken for muddy grass stuck to the ball was actually filthy hair and that a stiff hand reached through the sticks farther down. It bobbed closer and the face emerged, blanched, puffy, and swollen from a long time in water.

  I screamed and screamed and screamed.

  Michael came running and managed to snag the mass and pull it to shore. I fled to the house, sick and shaking, while Michael fetched help from town.

  Somehow a part of me had feared the body was Dorian’s, come back to torment us, but it turned out to be that of a stranger with a bullet hole in his belly. It was probably a soldier, but whether Southern or Northern could not be determined since his clothing had been torn away.

  The sense grew that something terrible and unknown was brewing, waiting just around the corner. A vague and shapeless doom.

  One morning I pulled my journal from its hiding place. Perhaps some clue might lie there as to what was nagging just below my consciousness. My most recent entry read:

  June 18, 1862

  I’m going to tell him I’m his if he still wants me. I don’t care. I don’t care if he loves me only for a month or a week or a day. I need to love him and let him love me as long as he can. If only I haven’t spoiled everything.

  I riffled back through my other entries, and each was familiar, although some were a little puzzling. I wrote of secrets, but I could not imagine what I meant. And this entry …

  It was my handwriting. I had written it ten days ago, just before Dorian and the fire, yet I had no idea who “he” was. I must have been imagining some pathetic daydream. Similar to practicing writing my name as “Violet Phillips” when Ben had been interested in me. How embarrassing. But why couldn’t I recall doing it? A new, nasty anxiety attached itself to my growing collection—that something was wrong with my mind. Crazy people lived in dreamworlds and had melancholic humors and experienced memory lapses. My nerves were taut as harp strings.

  The weight of a terrible loss fell on me, so that I sank to the bed. Maybe it was myself that was misplaced. Here I was in my own well-loved, familiar home, and I was hopelessly lost. I pulled at my hair as if I could yank the forgotten thing from my foggy brain. A physical pain exploded in my head.

  I lay, moaning, until the agony subsided. Slowly I rose, dabbed my drawn face with water from the basin, and threw on one of my black gowns. I had begun wearing mourning again. These dreary days demanded it.

  A sewing circle was being
held in town today and I planned to attend. Seeley had done all right with Laney when I’d gone to the funeral, and I hadn’t been to the circle in ages. Other people, the latest gossip, and war news might help take me out of myself. I had urged Sunny and Miss Elsa to come as well.

  My stepsister troubled me. She had lost her sparkle. Today she came downstairs in a faded cambric gown much too large for her. Her hair was stuffed into a snood, and even her green eyes seemed dull, as if a dusty film coated them.

  “No, Sunny,” I said. “You can’t go out in public wearing that.”

  She rallied enough to flash back, “You should talk. Look at what you’ve got on.”

  “I’ll change if you will.”

  She shrugged and trudged upstairs. I followed.

  In my room I took the china-blue taffeta off its hook. It hadn’t been worn since the bazaar. I shook out the folds and saw how the skirt had been snagged and how much dirt and how many burs and bits of grass clung to it. Had I rolled in a field of weeds? I didn’t deserve nice things. I spread it out on the bed and brushed my hands over the fabric. As I did so, I bumped a hard bulge in the pocket. Puzzled, I reached in and drew out an amulet. My amulet of raw amber.

  That was where it had got to. I remembered now—Sunny wouldn’t let me wear the thing since it showed above the gown’s neckline, so I had stuffed it in the pocket. I held it up by the leather thong. The honey gold spun and glowed translucent in the light pouring in from the window. I squeezed my other hand around the stone and dropped it immediately to the floor with a cry.

  Thomas!

  The amber had burned my skin as if it were a living coal. Before it had left my fingers, his name flamed through my mind. And everything about him, every detail, flooded over me like lava—the warm, steady look in his gray eyes, the way his shirt set on his still-bony shoulders, his expressive hands, and his smile just for me. He was what had been flickering in the back of my brain. It was him. Of all the people in all the world whom I might have forgotten, how could it have been him? I staggered against the wall.

  The words Laney had once said when we were speaking of hoodoo came back to me: “There are ways you can make folks forget things you don’t want them to remember.”