Arthur opened the door. He blinked into the gathering darkness.
“Hello, Malachi,” he said, sliding his hand into his coat pocket. “What brings you out this hour?”
Malachi Bick’s form was swaddled in shadow, as if a piece of the night had torn itself loose and taken a human form.
“We need to talk, Arthur.” Bick’s voice was honeyed smoke. The sense memory in Maude flared—the sensation of utter dread, of feeling the dry, ageless, breath of reptiles fan her neck as she descended into the unknown dark of the well. For just an instant, her training fell away and she was truly frightened and she did not know why, which only intensified the feeling.
“I have received distressing news,” Bick’s voice continued from the shadows. “We need to talk, Arthur. I need to know if it is true.”
A hand, meticulously manicured and wrapped at the wrist in a white silk cuff, appeared out of the shadows, crossing into the light bleeding out of the open doorway. It beckoned.
“Now,” Bick said. “Alone.”
Arthur gave Maude a quick glance—a combination of terror, pleading and his best effort at reassurance. It was a pathetic gesture. The human being frightened beyond his capacity to reason past it, the little boy begging his mother to make the bad thing go away, and the man trying to assure his mate all would be taken care of. The look made Maude love him, made her need to help him, protect him, even as it disgusted her. Somewhere Gran was laughing at her again.
Arthur stepped out on the dark porch with Bick, his hand still in the pocket, still clutching the gun the way a little boy might hold himself in fear or anxiety. With his free hand he closed the door. The iron lock clicked and the darkness was gone and Arthur with it.
Eventually Father returned from his trip. He was surprised and a little disappointed that Maude didn’t want to leave Grande Folly and Gran Bonnie. He had naturally been worried about his daughter being in the care of a woman with such a reputation for eccentricity. However, after Gran explained to him that the girl simply was desirous of learning more about her mother’s history and childhood, Martin had agreed to allow Maude to stay. She loved her father and had missed him, but after the training, after learning of The Load, there was no turning back.
For Martin’s part, he loved his daughter but was grateful she had bonded with a female figure, even one as decrepit and unconventional as Gran Bonnie. He visited his daughter often over the next few years and Maude made a point to spend as many holidays with her father as she could. As he grew older and his health began to show the cost of so many long, hard voyages, Maude began to care for him as well as seeing to Anne as much as the old woman would allow it.
November 1850. It was a cold morning, bitter. Maude Cormac Anderton sprinted across the white dunes of the beach of Grande Folly. She was nineteen and she left not a single mark of her passing in her wake. She slowed, stopped, before the old woman who sat on the log that had become Maude’s classroom. Anne raised a pistol, an ugly, heavy thing with a brutish, flaring, snout of a bore.
“Loaded or unloaded?” Anne said.
“Loaded,” Maude replied, sipping in air but controlling her breathing so as not to gulp or gasp after the five-mile run. She had not allowed herself to sweat yet either, since Gran had not yet given her permission. “From the weight you are exhibiting by holding it, looks to be.… 54 caliber.”
The old woman said nothing and Maude knew she was correct.
“You ready to catch it?” Anne said, aiming the pistol at the girl’s chest.
Maude was fifteen feet away. She tried to ignore the faint tremble in the old woman’s hand. She nodded. “Yes, but it won’t fire anyway. Too damp out here today.”
“Oh, is it now, you smart little cherry?” Anne growled. Maude ignored the sexual epithet; it passed over her, through her, and did not touch any of her. Anne had taught her the secret of language and how it could bind as well as liberate, if you let it touch you. “And what, pray tell, makes you think I was daft enough to not keep this in a dry, secure place while you were flouncing up and down the beach?”
“I can see the moisture on the edges of the brass.”
“Really? Let’s see,” Anne said, and pulled the trigger.
The hammer snapped, but there was no explosion of powder, nothing, only the gulls’ mocking laughter.
“From the way you aimed it, I would have caught it with this hand,” Maude said, waving her left. “You know that’s my weaker hand.”
“No,” Anne said with a yellowed smile. “You don’t have a weak hand anymore.”
December, Winter Solstice, Christmas. Anne called it Dzon’ku ’Nu. On the beach under the ghost light of the swollen moon, Maude held Lilith’s blood in the ancient flask. She and Anne stood skyclad, nude, embracing the cold and the salt spray off the ocean, maiden and crone.
“With this, you set your feet, your will, upon the red path—the unbroken chain that stretches back to the first of us. With this, you take up The Load and dedicate your life to heal, to teach, to protect the Mother and all her children. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Maude said.
“Then,” Anne said, “drink.”
The ancient bone of the flask was warm and smooth against Maude’s lips, the old iron chain cold when it brushed her skin. She upturned the flask and felt something sticky and thick wet her lips, her tongue.
And then there was fire. Burning, blossoming, bright and tangy, like brass, or raw life, burning her flesh, burning through the roof of her mouth, into her brain. Images—a bloated, infant sun hanging over a dry, lazy, plain; a column of will-light brandishing a flaming blade, or the thought-form in this world of a sword of fire; cold mud, the smell of cool earth and the musk of live fur, soothing, the nuance of chilled, gurgling water near, the implied heat of life, savage life, beneath the rug of fur.
She swallowed the sizzling mass of molten copper and cobwebbed memory, felt it claw its way down her throat: a bird’s talons soaked in bile.
The blood filled, bloomed, in her, tried to devour her in bright ancient power and bright, silver, antediluvian thought. Before it she was puny and small, finite and stunted.
“No,” she said. “ I am not.”
She was startled to hear her own voice. Maude blinked, tumbling out of the cosmic hangover. The beach at night. The flask was still in her trembling hand. Her knees buckled, but she righted herself before she fell. She looked skyward. The stars shivered in the frigid black void. The tears welled, ran down her cheeks—hot and wet. They were beautiful: the stars, the tears. She was beautiful.
“You,” Anne said, embracing her, “are the first in all the long line, the first to take the blood and to never drop to your knees.”
“What does that mean?” Maude asked.
“It means no power in this world can lay you low, except yourself,” Anne said. “It also means I’m very, very proud of you, Maude.”
The Crone and the Maiden held each other while the stars rejoiced, the ocean wept and the Mother turned her face toward the sun.
Anne Cormac Bonny left the world on the morning of May1, 1854. She was 157 years old. She credited the blood of the first mother for giving her strength, vitality and preternatural longevity, but she was quick to also remind Maude that all things have to end and in that ending can be beauty and understanding and the seed of new beginnings.
“We must die,” Anne said, smiling her wicked devil smile, “so that we can truly understand what it means to live. Otherwise, what’s the bloody point of it?”
In the night Anne called for Maude and for Isaiah. She instructed them to carry her to her horse, that she wanted to ride out to the beach one more time.
Maude was attending the College of Charleston and had come home when she received word from Isaiah that Lady Cormac’s health had taken a turn.
“You look well, Maude,” the servant said as they carried Anne to her mount. “Schooling is agreeing with you, yes?”
Maude nodded. Her long hair was a
wig, beneath it, her own hair was short-cut in a fashionable men’s style—a soap lock. “It’s easier to pretend to be a man than I expected it to be.”
Anne laughed, a dry rasp followed by a long, wet cough. “It’s a different world when you move as one of them, isn’t it? Won’t let you learn in their schools unless you bind your breasts and cut your hair, will they? It’s worth it, though. Those things are not what you are.”
They helped Anne onto her horse. She grabbed the saddle and, with a fleeting burst of strength and power, hauled herself up into the saddle. Taking the reins, she turned the beast and regarded them with haughty power. In that moment, she was Anne Bonny, pirate queen—ageless and beautiful and, most of all, free.
“The best days of my life were fighting beside men, pretending to be one of them—brawling, fucking, swearing and drinking with them. And I did it all a damn sight better than the best of them.”
She looked out toward the grove, toward the beach.
“I’m ready to go home,” she said. “To the ocean, the only place that ever felt like home to me. One last time.”
She kicked the horse in the flank, snapped the reins and with a snarl that would have made a South Indies cannibal flee in terror roared into the dark woods, toward the sea.
By the time Maude and Isaiah reached the beach Anne was wading out into the black, foaming water, the moonlight casting a benediction on her, her horse pacing where the water and land clashed.
“Anne!” Maude called out over the thunder of the waves. Anne turned, smiled and raised a hand. She turned, laughing, and dived into the dark surf. She was gone.
They found her body the next morning. Maude carried her to the small family graveyard on the hill overlooking the beach and the ocean. She weighed almost nothing, even waterlogged.
Maude dug Anne Bonny’s grave and buried her as she and Anne had often discussed—in a simple pine box, filled with a king’s ransom in pirate treasure. Isaiah poured cask after cask of gold and gems into the coffin as well as Anne’s brace of old pistols and her sword. The last artifact added was a bottle of good red wine, which Maude placed in the dead legend’s crossed hands.
“Enjoy it,” Maude said. “Safe passage.”
Isaiah and Maude nailed the lid on the coffin and climbed out of the grave. They picked up shovels and silently filled the hole. The only sound was the metallic crunch of the shovel blades as they lifted the dirt, the swoosh of the dirt as it rained down on the pine box.
The servants of Grande Folly came to bid the mistress of the house farewell, leaving bowls of fruit, white candles and flowers at the head of the grave while Maude and Isaiah continued their task. The servants sang an old African song Maude had heard Anne hum a few times over the years. She didn’t recognize most of the words. The sun was low in the west when they finished the burial. The servants departed, singing.
“This is yours now,” Isaiah said, handing Maude the ancient flask holding Lilith’s blood. “Lady Cormac was very specific that you were to care for this now.”
Maude took the flask, examined it and then hung the ancient chain around her neck.
“Grande Folly is yours as well,” he said. “The land, the mansion, the slaves, the remainder of Lady Cormac’s considerable fortune. She instructed her attorney that it is all to go to you.”
“It can’t,” Maude said. “I’m a woman. They won’t allow me run of the estate!”
“Lady Cormac has instructed her attorney to approach your father to act as your proxy in the matter and hold the estate in trust for you,” the servant explained. He smiled, one of the few times she could recall him smiling. It was beautiful. “Lady Cormac said to tell you men had their uses besides in the bedroom.”
And it was at the attorney’s office in Charleston that Maude, with her father at her side to represent her in the transaction like she was a child, had met young Arthur Stapleton.
The door opened and Arthur, gaunt and disheveled, stepped back into the house. There was no sign of Malachi Bick.
“What happened?” Maude asked.
Arthur walked woodenly back to the cabinet and refilled his glass with scotch. He stared at a point in space and absently drained the tumbler.
“Arthur!” Maude said, grabbing him by the shoulder.
“He knows about the deed,” he finally said. “He knows I know about all of them. He trusted me with it and I … It was a good straight. I should have cleaned up from it, not lost the deed. I lost the … deed.”
His face contorted and darkened with blood. He began to sob, big soul-heaving sobs that made his entire frame shake. Maude gathered him and pulled him into her arms. It felt strange, and yet it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do. She hated this man. She loved him too.
“Shhhhh,” she said. “It will be all right.”
“He’s going to kill me,” Arthur whispered. “Like that prospector he killed, like the others. No one even recalls. He cl … cleans up his messes, Bick does. Nice and ti … ti … tidy … Awwww, God!”
Another wave of sobs wracked him.
Maude found the nerve plexus at the junction of his neck and shoulder and firmly pressed, sending calming sensations through her husband’s body. Arthur shuddered and the sobbing gradually subsided.
“Arthur,” she said gently in his ear. “What deed? What are you talking about?”
Arthur stepped back, untangling himself from her arms. His eyes were red and wet. He wiped them with his shirtsleeve and then his nose.
“The less you know, the better,” he said. “I know too many of his secrets, too much that could ruin him. I have to go.” He returned to their bedroom.
Maude followed him. “No, you don’t. We can fight him, Arthur. I can help! We’ll go to the sheriff.”
Arthur was opening the chest at the foot of their bed. He removed a small, worn leather-bound Bible. He stuffed it into his coat pocket opposite the pistol.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He pushed past her, back to the hallway, to the front door. “I have to get to the Chinaman,” he muttered. “He’s the only one who I think Malachi might even consider an equal. That’s my only chance.”
He turned to her as he opened the door. “I love you, Maude.”
The words sounded flat and fake. He didn’t love her. He loved himself. His entire universe was, and always had been, the story of Arthur Stapleton. She was a prop, Constance was a prop. He was afraid right now and that fear made him reach out to her for reassurance, but there was none to be given for his wife or daughter, who might also be in danger from his stupidity and recklessness and secrets, who might also fear. Maude wanted to spit on him, snap his neck.
“I love you too,” she said, and meant it and hated herself for it. “Be careful, Arthur.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and closed the door behind him.
The Six of Cups
It was already dark when Jim slipped out of his room at Mrs. Proctor’s boardinghouse. He padded quietly down the carpeted steps, past the curtained parlor, where he could hear many of the other borders, all men, laughing and talking about the events of the day. Someone was plinking “The Flying Trapeze” on the piano Mrs. Proctor kept in the parlor.
There was the comforting, mellow smell of pipe tobacco swirling around the parlor curtains. It reminded Jim of Pa. Sometimes when Pa was sad, or couldn’t sleep ’cause of the pain, he would climb up and sit in the loft next to Jim and Lottie, stroke their hair and puff on his pipe. The smell reminded Jim of warm blankets, calloused, loving hands and home.
He opened the front door, as softly as he could, squeezed through the opening and closed the door behind him with a faint click.
The few streetlights had been lit on Dry Well Road, but only Jim was out to see them. The few homes he could see from the boardinghouse’s porch had ghostly lamplight shining through their small lead and paper windows. The livery shop, the blacksmith, the butcher—all were dark and locked.
Jim glanced ba
ck at the parlor’s window and its light. The Widow Proctor seemed like a fine lady; she reminded Jim a little of Ma. That’s why he knew he’d get a scoldin’, if not a whupping, if Mrs. Proctor caught him sneaking out and heading where he was thinking of heading in the middle of the night.
Mutt had introduced him to the widow in the evening, after all of the ruckus at Auggie’s general store had died down. After they had locked Earl up in one of the jail cells, Sheriff Highfather had looked down at Jim with eyes like he figured he’d see on Judgment Day.
“So, what are we going to do with you?” he said.
“Sir?”
“Don’t ‘sir’ me, boy,” Highfather said grimly. “Mutt tells me you’ve been nothing but trouble since he scraped you up off the desert. That true? You trouble, boy?”
“I … Well, no, sir, I mean I ain’t trying to be.…”
Mutt returned from the cool shadows of the back of the jail, where the cells were. He settled on the edge of Highfather’s desk, and crossed his arms. The sheriff and the deputy both stared at Jim sternly and silently.
“I … uh, that is I just wanted to … Uh.…”
Both men broke into laughter. Highfather crossed the distance to Jim and smacked him gently on the shoulder.
“I reckon grown-ups in these here parts are all just plain tetched,” Jim said glumly while Highfather wiped a tear from his eye.
“You had him,” Mutt said to Highfather.
“Oh yeah,” Highfather said. “I figured we’d be needing the mop to clean up the mess.”
“Okay,” Jim said, his cheeks flushing, “Ha-ha.”
Highfather sat next to Mutt on the edge of the desk. “Jim, you seem like a decent boy. I’ll put Mutt liking you aside and figure you’re square.”
“I’m wounded,” Mutt said flatly.
Highfather continued. “Seriously, though, you helped us out in a tight scrape and you handled it like a man. Here.”
He fished a dollar out of his pocket and handed it to the boy. “Your first pay. Mutt ain’t much of a housekeeper—”
The Six-Gun Tarot Page 11
