Rice, Anne - The Witching Hour

by Greyspid

  Just go over there. Make the call. Maybe it is some silent memorial to that little girl. Don’t try to put it all together. Talk of devils from a small child still echoing in your ears after all this time! Once you’ve seen the man, you’re done for.

  Father Mattingly made up his mind. He put on his black coat, adjusted his Roman collar and black shirt front, and went out of the air-conditioned rectory onto the hot narrow pavement of Constance Street

  . He did not look at the weeds eating at the steps of St Alphonsus. He did not look at the graffiti on the old school walls.

  He saw the past if he saw anything as he made his way fast down Josephine Street

  , and around the corner. And then within two short blocks he’d entered another world. The glaring sun was gone, and with it the dust and the din of the traffic.

  Shuttered windows, shady porches. The soft hissing sound of lawn sprinklers beyond ornamental fences. Deep smell of the loam heaped on the roots of carefully tended rose trees.

  All right, and what will you say when you get there?

  The heat wasn’t really so bad today, given that it was August, yet it was just like the young priest from Chicago said: ‘You start out fine, and then your clothes just get heavier and heavier.’ He had had to laugh at that.

  What did they think of all that ruin, the young ones? No use telling them how it had once been. Ah, but the city itself, and this old neighborhood - they were as beautiful as ever.

  He walked on until he saw the stained and peeling side of the Mayfair house looming over the treetops, the high twin chimneys floating against the moving clouds. It seemed the vines were dragging the old structure right into the ground. Were the iron railings rusted more than when he last saw them? Like a jungle, the garden.

  He slowed his pace. He slowed because he really didn’t want to get there. He didn’t want to see up close the garden gone to seed, chinaberry and oleander struggling with grass as high as wheat, and the porches stripped of paint, turning that dull gray that old untended wood turns in the damp climate of Louisiana.

  He didn’t even want to be in this still, deserted neighborhood. Nothing stirred here but the insects, the birds, the plants themselves slowly swallowing up the light and the blue of the sky. Swamp this must have been once. A breeding place of evil.

  But he was out of hand with these thoughts. What had evil to do with God’s earth, and the things that grew in it — even the jungle of the Mayfairs’ neglected garden.

  Yet he could not help but think of all the stories he had ever heard of the Mayfair women. What was voodoo if it wasn’t devil worship? And what was the worse sin, murder or suicide? Yes, evil had thrived here. He heard the child Deirdre whispering in his ear. And he could feel evil as he rested his weight against the iron fence, as he looked up into the hard crusty black oak branches, fanning out above him.

  He mopped his forehead with his handkerchief. Little Deirdre had told him that she saw the devil! He heard her voice just as clearly now as he had heard it in the confessional decades ago. And he heard her footsteps, too, as she ran from the church, ran from him, ran from his failure to help her.

  But it had started before that. It had started on a dreary slow Friday afternoon when a call came from Sister Bridget Marie for a priest to please come quick to the school yard. It was Deirdre Mayfair again.

  Father Mattingly had never heard of Deirdre Mayfair. Father Mattingly had only just come south from the seminary in Kirkwood, Missouri.

  He found Sister Bridget Marie quickly enough, in an asphalt yard behind the old convent building. How European it had seemed to him then, quaint and sad with its broken walls, and the gnarled tree with the wooden benches built in a square around it.

  The shade had felt good to him as he approached. Then he saw that the little girls seated along the bench were crying. Sister Bridget Marie held one pale shivering child by the thin part of her upper arm. The child was white with fear. Yet very pretty she was, her blue eyes too big for her thin face, her black hair in long careful corkscrew curls that shivered against her cheeks, her limbs well proportioned yet delicate.

  There were flowers strewn all over the ground — big gladiolus and white lilies and long fronds of green fern and even big beautifully formed red roses. Florist flowers, surely, yet there were so many…

  ‘Do you see that, Father?’ Sister Bridget Marie exclaimed. ‘And they have the nerve to tell me it was her invisible friend, the devil himself, that put those flowers here, brought them right into her arms while they watched, the little thieves! They stole those flowers from the very altar of St Alphonsus -!’

  The little girls began to scream. One of them stamped her feet. A chorus of ‘We did see, we did see!’ broke out with alarming fury. They egged each other on with their choking sobs into a regular chorus.

  Sister Bridget Marie shouted for silence. She shook the little girl she had been holding by the arm, though the child had said nothing. The child’s mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes rolling to Father Mattingly in a silent entreaty.

  ‘Now, Sister, please,’ Father Mattingly said. He had gently freed the child. She was dazed, utterly pliant. He wanted to pick her up, wipe her face where the tears had smudged it with dirt. But he didn’t.

  ‘Her invisible friend,’ the sister said, ‘the one that finds everything that’s lost, Father. The one that puts the pennies for candy into her pockets! And they all eat it, too, stuffing their mouths with it, stolen pennies, you can be sure of it.’

  The little girls were wailing even louder. And Father Mattingly realized he was stepping all over the flowers and the silent white-faced child was staring at his shoes, at the white petals crushed beneath them.

  ‘Let the children go in,’ Father Mattingly had said. It was essential to take command. Only then could he make sense of what Sister Bridget Marie was telling him.

  But the story was no less fantastic when he and the sister were alone. The children claimed they saw the flowers flying through the air. They claimed they saw the flowers land in Deirdre’s arms. They had been laughing and laughing. Deirdre’s magic friend always made them laugh, they said. Deirdre’s friend could find your notebook or your pencil if you lost it. You asked Deirdre and he brought it to her. And there it was. And they even claimed to have seen him themselves — a nice man, a man with dark brown hair and eyes, and he would stand for one second right next to Deirdre.

  ‘She’s got to be sent home, Father,’ Sister Bridget Marie had said. ‘It happens all the time. I call her Great-aunt Carl or her Aunt Nancy, and then it stops for a while. Then it starts up again.’

  ‘But you don’t believe -’

  ‘Father, I tell you, it’s six of one, half a dozen of another. Either the devil’s in that child, or she’s a devil of a liar, and makes them believe her wild tales as if she’s got them bewitched. She cannot stay at St Alphonsus.’

  Father Mattingly had taken Deirdre home himself, walking slowly, steadily with her through these same streets. Not a word was spoken. Miss Carl had been phoned at her downtown office. She and Miss Millie were waiting on the front steps of the grand house to meet them.

  And how lovely it was then, painted a deep violet color with green shutters and the trim all in white and the porch railings painted a shiny black so you could see the cast-iron roses so clearly. The vines had been a graceful etching of leaf and color, not the menacing tangle they had since become.

  ‘Overactive imagination, Father,’ Miss Carl said without a trace of concern. ‘Millie, what Deirdre needs is a warm bath.’ And off the child had gone without a word spoken, and Miss Carl had taken Father Mattingly out for the first time into the glass garden room for cafe au lait at the wicker table. Miss Nancy, sullen and plain, had set out the cups and silver.

  Wedgwood china trimmed in gold. And cloth napkins with the letter M embroidered on them. And what a quick-witted woman, this Carl. She had looked prim in her tailored silk suit and ruffled white blouse, her salt and pepper gray hair in a nea
t twist on the back of her head, her mouth neatly colored with pale pink lipstick. She put him at ease at once with her knowing smile.

  ‘You might say it’s the curse of our family, Father, this excess of imagination.’ She poured the hot milk and the hot coffee from two small silver pitchers. ‘We dream dreams; we see visions; we should have been poets or painters it seems. Not lawyers, such as I am.’ She had laughed softly, easily. ‘Deirdre will be just fine, when she learns to tell fantasy from reality.’

  Afterwards, she had shown him through the lower rooms. And Miss Millie had joined them. She was such a feminine thing, Miss Millie, her red hair in old-fashioned finger curls around her face, and jeweled rings on her fingers. She’d taken him to the window to wave to old Miss Belle, who had been cutting back the roses with large wooden-handled shears.

  Carl explained that Deirdre would be going to the Sacred Heart sisters just as soon as there was a place. She was so sorry for this silly disturbance at St Alphonsus and of course they’d keep Deirdre home if that was what Sister Bridget Marie wanted.

  Father had started to object, but it was all decided. Simple matter to get Deirdre a governess, someone who knew children, why not?

  They walked along the deep shaded porches.

  ‘We are an old family, Father,’ Carl said, as they went back into the double parlor. ‘We don’t even know how old. There is no one now who can identify some of the portraits you see around you.’ Her voice was half amused, half weary. ‘We came from the islands, that’s what we know for certain - a plantation on Saint-Domingue - and before that from some dim European past that is now completely lost. The house is full of unexplained relics. Sometimes I see it as a great hard snail shell that I must carry on my back.’

  Her hands passed lightly over the grand piano, over the gilded harp. She had little taste for such things, she said. What an irony that she had become the custodian. Miss Millie had only smiled, nodded.

  And now if Father would excuse them, Miss Carl did have to go back downtown. Clients waiting. They walked out to the gate together.

  ‘Thank you so much, Father!’

  And so it had all been waved away, and the little white-faced girl with the black curls had left St Alphonsus.

  But in the days that followed it had bothered Father Mat-tingly, the question of those flowers.

  Impossible to imagine a gang of little girls climbing over the communion rail and robbing the altars of an enormous and impressive church like St Alphonsus. Even the guttersnipes Father Mattingly had known as a boy would not have dared such a thing.

  What did Sister Bridget Marie really think had happened? Had the children really stolen the flowers? The small, heavyset round-faced nun studied him a moment before she answered. Then she said no.

  ‘Father, as God is my witness, they’re a cursed family, the Mayfairs are. And the grandmother of that very child, Stella she was called, told the very same tales in this very same school yard many a year ago. It was a frightening power Stella Mayfair had over those around her. There were nuns under this very roof who were scared to death to cross her, a witch is what they called her then and now.’

  ‘Oh, come now, Sister,’ he had objected immediately. ‘We’re not on the foggy roads of Tipperary, looking out for the ghost of Petticoat Loose.’

  ‘Ah, so you’ve heard that one, Father.’ She had laughed.

  ‘From my own Irish mother on the Lower East Side, Sister, a dozen times.’

  ‘Well, then, Father, let me tell you this much, that Stella Mayfair once took my hand, and held it like this, she did, and told me secrets of my own that I had never told a living soul this side of the Atlantic. I swear it, Father. It happened to me.

  There was a keepsake I’d lost at home, a chain with a crucifix on it, and I’d cried and cried as a girl when I’d lost it, and that very same little keepsake Stella Mayfair described to me. "You want it back, Sister?" she said. And all the time smiling in her sweet way, just like her granddaughter Deirdre can smile at you now, more innocent than cunning. "I’ll get it for you, Sister," she said. "Through the power of the devil, you mean, Stella Mayfair," I answered her. "I’ll have none of it." But there was many another teaching sister at St Alphonsus school that took another tack, and that’s how she kept her power over those around her, getting her way in one thing and another right up to the day she died.’

  ‘Superstition, Sister!’ he’d said with great authority. ‘What about little Deirdre’s mother? You’re going to tell me she was a witch too?’

  Sister Bridget Marie shook her head. ‘That was Antha, a lost one, shy, sweet, afraid of her own shadow - not at all like her mother, Stella, until Stella was killed, that is. You should have seen Miss Carlotta’s face when they buried Stella. And the same expression on her face twelve years after when they buried Antha. Now, Carl, she was as smart a girl as ever went to Sacred Heart. The backbone of the family she is. But her mother never cared a fig for her. All Mary Beth Mayfair ever cared about was Stella. And old Mr Julien, that was Mary Beth’s uncle, he was the same. Stella, Stella, Stella. But Antha, stark raving mad at the end, they said, and nothing but a girl of twenty when she ran up the stairs in the old house and jumped from the attic window and dashed her head on the stones below.’

  ‘So young,’ he’d whispered. He remembered the pale, frightened face of Deirdre Mayfair. How old had she been when the young mother did such a thing?

  ‘They buried Antha in consecrated ground, God have mercy on her soul. For who’s to judge the state of mind of such a person? Head split open like a watermelon when she hit the terrace. And baby Deirdre screaming out her lungs in the cradle. But then even Antha was something to fear.’

  Father Mattingly was quietly reeling. It was the kind of talk he’d heard all his life at home, however, the endless Irish dramatizing of the morbid, the lusty tribute to the tragic. Truth was it wore him out. He wanted to ask —

  But the bell had rung. Children were lining up in proper ranks for the march inside. Sister had to go. Yet suddenly, she turned back.

  ‘Let me tell one story about Antha,’ she said, her voice low on account of the hush in the school yard, ’which is the best one that I know. In those days when the sisters sat down to supper at twelve noon, the children were silent in this yard until the Angelus was said and after that the Grace Before Meals. Nobody has such respect for anything in this day and age, but that was the custom then. And on one spring day, during that quiet time, a mean wicked girl name of Jenny Simpson comes up to frighten the poor, shy little Antha with a body of a dead rat she’d found under the hedge. Antha takes one look at the dead rat and lets out a chilling scream, Father, such as you never heard! And we come running from the supper table, as you can imagine, and what do you think we see? That mean wicked Jenny Simpson thrown over on her back, Father, her face bloody and the rat flying out of her hand over that very fence! And do you think it was little Antha did such a thing, Father? A mite of a child, as delicate as her daughter Deirdre is today? Oh, no! ‘Twas the selfsame invisible fiend did it, Father, the devil himself, as brought those flowers flying through the air to Deirdre in the yard a week ago.’

  ‘Sister, you think I’m the new boy on the block’ - Father Mattingly had laughed -’to believe something like that.’

  And she had smiled, it was true, but he knew from past experience that an Irishwoman like that could smile at what she was saying and believe every word of it at the same time.

  The Mayfairs fascinated him, as something complex and elegant can fascinate. The tales of Stella and Antha were remote enough to be romantic and nothing more.

  The following Sunday he called again on the Mayfairs. He was offered coffee once more and pleasant conversation — it was all so removed from Sister Bridget Marie’s tales. The radio played Rudy Vallee in the background. Old Miss Belle watered the drowsing potted orchids. The smell of roast chicken came from the kitchen. An altogether pleasant house.

  They even asked him to stay to Sunday dinner �
�� the table was beautifully set with thick linen napkins in silver rings — but he politely declined. Miss Carl wrote out a check for the parish and put it in his hand.

  As he was leaving he had glimpsed Deirdre in the garden, a white face peering at him from behind a gnarled old tree. He had waved to her without breaking his stride, yet something bothered him later about the image of her. Was it her curls all tangled? Or the distracted look in her eyes?

  Madness, that’s what Sister Bridget had described to him, and it disturbed him to think it threatened that wan little girl. There was nothing romantic to Father Mattingly about actual madness. He had long held the belief that the mad lived in a hell of irrelevance. They missed the point of life around them.

  But Miss Carlotta was a sensible, modern woman. The child wasn’t doomed to follow in the footsteps of a dead mother. She would, on the contrary, have every chance.

  A month passed before his view of the Mayfairs changed forever, on the unforgettable Saturday afternoon that Deirdre Mayfair came to confession in St Alphonsus Church.

  It was during the regular hours when all the good Irish and German Catholics could be counted upon to clear their consciences before Mass and Communion on Sunday.

  And so he was seated in the ornate wooden house of the confessional in his narrow chair behind a green serge curtain, listening in alternation to the penitents who came to kneel in the small cells to the left and the right of him. These voices and sins he could have heard in Boston or New York City, so similar the accents, the worries, the ideas.

  ‘Three Hail Marys,’ he would prescribe, or ‘Three Our Fathers’ but seldom more than that to these laboring men and good housewives who came to confess routine peccadillos.

  Then a child’s voice had caught him off guard, coming rapid and crisp through the dark dusty grille — eloquent of intelligence and precocity. He had not recognized it. After all, Deirdre Mayfair had not spoken one word before in his presence.