The woman nodded. “Without Ezra, Missy Malia go down long before this. He works suitable. You had rather treat him right. Reasons you know. Reasons you don’t know.”
“What reasons?”
“You got to find them out for yourself.” The woman set aside her crocheting and turned up the radio. She closed her eyes, her chin on her chest. With her white hair and that dark room, she looked like a Kodak negative. For a time, she rubbed her hand back and forth across the open Bible. The hand stopped, and she began to snore.
The two little girls had given up their game of Jacks and were playing with a tin horn. One snatched it away from the other and blew it at me—a long, scratchy toot—as I passed. Near them, on a balcony, a man sat in his underwear, chewing tobacco. Every now and then, he leaned forward and spit into the street. A woman wearing only a slip came out and said something, and he waved her away. Walking back up the shadeless road, which now was bleached an acrid yellow by the sun, I panted a little, for the day had turned hot. Trapped between the blistering heat beating down from above and the heat that rose from the burning earth, I wondered why I was so caught up in Amalia’s murder. It was clear to me that I had grown bored with my solitary life at home and that coming to Natchez was an adventure, a diversion. But there was more to it than that. I was curious about these people, of course. Who was Amalia, and why had she never contacted me? Who was my father, and who was I, for that matter? But beyond those reasons, Natchez and Amalia seemed to offer me something, although I could not say what it was. I knew I might go back to Denver the following week and remember Natchez only as a strange interlude. But there was a feeling I could not shake that my journey here had a purpose. Perhaps finding out about Amalia’s demons would help me face my own.
Mr. Satterfield was seated at a table in the hotel dining room with his cronies, so I did not go in. Driving me home after Pickett’s dinner party, he had offered again to take me to Avoca, and I had agreed, but after lying awake much of the night wondering whether my father was illegitimate, as Odalie had claimed—and as I already had suspected—I had made up my mind to go to Avoca alone. There was prying to do, and Mr. Satterfield might get in the way.
I asked for my key at the front desk and checked for messages, not expecting any. Mother knew from my wire that I had arrived safely and was staying at the Eola, but it was too soon to expect a letter from her. Caroline didn’t know I was gone, and I was sorry that I hadn’t told her, because after months of keeping my feelings to myself, I suddenly wanted to confide in a friend. I wondered if Pickett were someone I could talk to. Not yet, but in time, she might become my confidante.
There was just one message, and it was from Mr. Satterfield. “I await your call,” he had written in a precise hand. Perhaps Mr. Satterfield knew best—that it would be safer if he accompanied me to Avoca—and for a moment I thought about changing my mind. But if I felt so strongly about doing this, then that was what was best for me. David had said those very words to one of the dowagers whose estates he’d handled. She had called him at home to complain that her children were pressuring her to sell her large house and move into the Brown Palace Hotel, but she wanted to stay where she was, and so she asked David what to do. “If you feel that strongly about it, then that is what is best for you,” David had told her. Perhaps one day, I would be one of those lonely old women with a small fortune, too insecure to make my own decisions.
As I pondered that, a tall bear of a man walked through the lobby and nodded at the desk clerk, who said, “Hot enough for you, Mr. Brown?”
“Hot enough to melt a grindstone,” he replied, then went into the dining room and sat down at Mr. Satterfield’s table.
I wondered if this were Odalie’s Mr. Brown, but I did not much care, as I had no desire to meet an eligible man. Besides, I had made up my mind to go to Avoca. I handed the key back to the desk clerk. There was no taxi starter outside the hotel, so I headed for the depot. As I passed a bank that looked like a Greek temple, a woman’s voice called, “Yoo-hoo.” Odalie waved a gloved hand at me from under the portico.
Remembering she was lame, I crossed the street.
“My old fellow said I was shameful last night. I ask you to excuse it,” she said without the slightest hint of an apology in her voice.
“That’s all right,” I replied, determined not to let the same bee sting me twice. “I had not realized that southerners were so interested in other people’s business.”
“In Natchez, we call that ‘being truthful.’ If the devil doesn’t get you, the truth will.”
“How interesting.” I wondered if Odalie had ever faced the truth that she was a graceless old busybody. “Then will you tell me the truth about something I’ve come here to find out?”
She dipped her head, looking self-important as she touched the corner of her lip with her finger, getting a tiny red smudge on her white glove.
“First, do you really believe Ezra killed Miss Amalia, or was it Bayard Lott?”
Odalie crimped her mouth as she thought. “I don’t trust Ezra, but I suppose Bayard’s my pick.”
“Then why? If they lived next door to each other all those years, why did he kill her now?”
“I need to think about that a minute to give me a better start in my mind.” Odalie studied the lipstick smudge on her glove. “It wasn’t over any goats.” She paused again, thinking. “Shadowland has gone to rack and ruin, you know. Never did I see a house in such rottendy shape, or folks so rackady, either. I called once out of the kindness of my heart to see how is Miss Maggie doing.” Odalie put her hand in front of her mouth and whispered, “Her mind has got feeble.” She nodded for emphasis and continued. “Old Demon Bayard was not gentleman enough to invite me in. I was treated something terrible. But I saw what had happened to Shadowland. A misdemeanor was done to that place. I remember of its prime.”
Thinking over what she’d said, Odalie corrected herself. “That is to say, I have heard of Shadowland in its prime.” She patted the hair at the nape of her neck, a switch, I thought, because in the daylight, it did not match the rest of her hair, which was dyed a poisonous red. “There was a path from Shadowland to Avoca.”
“A goat path?”
“Now, how should I know that?”
An old Negro man with a homemade crutch shuffled along the sidewalk, and I moved aside to let him pass. Odalie stayed where she was, forcing the man to go around her. She looked through him as she said, “Bayard Lott did not kill Miss Amalia over the goats. He had another reason. Like we said, there were secrets at Avoca, secrets at Shadowland.”
“Secrets so terrible they caused murder?”
Odalie tilted her head and stared at me, the impish grin of the night before spreading across her face. She waved to a black man standing next to an automobile, and he opened the back door for her. “How should I know? It’s not my business. I trust in God and hoe my row. I’m not one to gossip.” She limped toward the car. “It’s up to you to find out. They’re your kin.”
After Odalie’s driver pulled away from the curb, I continued on my way to the depot, where I got into a cab and told the driver to take me to Avoca. “Maybe so you want me to come back for you?” he asked when we reached the old house. Avoca did not seem so far out of town in daylight, however, so I told him I would walk back.
In the bright sunlight, the house was even larger and more imposing than at night, although it was less mysterious now. The vegetation that covered the house appeared to have become a structural part of it. If I stand very long in one spot, I thought, the vines will begin to grow up my legs.
Walking across the brick drive, I studied the house with a more critical eye than on my first night. My years as a property owner had taught me a great deal about buildings, and this one appeared too far gone to be restored. The roof had not been repaired in years, and water had destroyed the eaves and much of the trim. Exterior boards had fallen away, leaving gaping holes in the walls. The Corinthian tops of the columns were so rot
ted, they would have to be replaced, and the columns themselves would have to go, unless they had been built of a decent brick that had not crumbled. Many of the windows were broken, and the foundation looked unstable. Restoring just the outside would take the entire ten thousand dollars that Amalia had left behind in her bank account, perhaps more, and the house wasn’t worth that. Pickett had told me that Stanton Hall, the great white mansion near the hotel, could be bought for ten thousand dollars.
Ezra came from around a corner as I reached the house, and he stood silently by the ladder that had replaced the front steps, a hoe held loosely in his hand. He might have been working in the garden, or he could have grabbed the hoe as a weapon when he heard the cab stop. He did not respond to my wave, just stood there with the implement and let me approach him.
“We met the night before last,” I said, not sure that he recognized me. “I’m Miss Bondurant.”
He dipped his chin a little.
“Mr. Satterfield said he would bring me here, but you could show me the house just as easily, couldn’t you? I want to learn more about my aunt.” Ezra did not seem to notice my stumbling over the word aunt. Maybe he didn’t know the circumstances of my father’s birth. After all, why should he? Or perhaps Odalie was wrong, and Amalia Bondurant was indeed my father’s sister.
Ezra laid the hoe on the ground and put his hand on my elbow to steady me as I went up the ladder. Looking over my shoulder to watch him follow me up the rungs, I decided he easily could be mistaken for a white man. His skin was the light brown of the Mississippi, and his gray hair was curly but not kinky, his nose narrow, and his lips thin. He was tall, and while he was stooped, he once had been a powerful man, perhaps still was. He would have been good protection for Amalia, or at least he had been until the end.
Ezra leaned his shoulder against the massive front door and pushed, lifting a little on the doorknob as he did so, and the door shuddered and opened heavily. He stepped aside and let me enter what Pickett had referred to as the great hall. A massive chandelier hung from the ceiling. The dust cloth draped over it had slipped, and I glimpsed crystal drops hanging from candleholders and imagined how the fixture must have sparkled in the candlelight.
Ezra looked up at the candelabra. “That ain’t brass. That’s gold. Old Marster sent away to Paris, France, for it.” There was a touch of pride in his voice.
“Was Old Marster my grandfather?”
Ezra thought that over for a moment. “His daddy.”
There were holes in the ceiling where the plaster and lath had fallen, but the debris had been swept away. At the end of the hall was a stairway, hidden in an alcove to one side. That was a pity, because the staircase was elegant, curving in a full circle as it rose gracefully to the second floor. I followed the staircase with my eyes, past the thick crown molding along the ceiling to the second-floor hallway. One could put a hand on the railing, climb the stairs, walk around the second-floor opening, and down the stairs again without ever removing a hand from the rail. In the curve of the staircase was an object as big as Ezra, covered by a dust cloth. I tugged at the cover, brushing the dirt out of the folds, until Ezra came over. Taking one end, he helped me remove it from the statue of Amalia and her dog—a dog with a cropped tail—which sat on a pedestal.
The marble image was nearly life-size, and I walked around it, studying the young woman, who had been half my current age when she posed. She was bold-looking, and there was that sense of impatience that Mr. Satterfield had described in her. She was tall, too. She had passed down her height to me.
“Is that really the way she appeared?” I asked Ezra.
“She was always looking fine as silk.”
More like osnaburg in her last years, I wanted to tell him, although I did not.
Ezra stared at the statue for a time, then turned and looked at me. “You ever favor her.”
“It’s possible. After all, she was my aunt”.
He did not react. “Yes’m.”
“Did my father look like her?”
Ezra rubbed his hands across his face. “Can’t say. I never saw him much. Bondurants mostly all look alike.”
As the two of us covered up the statue with the cloth, I thought it would be nice to keep the piece, but what would it cost to ship it to Denver? And where in the world would I put a life-size marble statue? The floor in my apartment would not hold the weight.
As if reading my thoughts, Ezra said, “It ain’t ever been moved from here. Never.”
I turned away from his intense gaze and looked at the stairway, which was blocked off. “Is it safe to go up?”
Ezra moved between me and the staircase. “Not safe, no. Now I show you the parlor.” He led me across the hall into double parlors, musty and shuttered, connected by pocket doors. With the doors open, as they were now, the rooms were the size of a ballroom. When Pickett had seen her waltzing through the parlors in her white gown, Amalia must have been replaying a scene from her youth. “Was my aunt a belle?”
Ezra smiled a little. “Oh, yes. They ain’t no lady in Natchez so fine.”
Chandeliers draped with dust cloths hung from the ceiling. Sheets covered large pieces of furniture. Dim mirrors in gilt frames hung on the walls, and tiny gold chairs with dusty velvet seats were stacked in the back parlor. Along the outside wall was a fireplace mantel constructed of a pretty pink-and-wine-streaked marble, but it was broken and badly water-stained. Nearby stood a grand piano, and I touched a key, then played a chord. The piano was badly out of tune. It was not covered with a dust cloth, and I asked, “Did my aunt play?”
“She have a talent for most things.”
“Including the piano?”
“Miss Amalia play in the twilight. Almost can I see her now. She tell me when she play, she think about the days gone by and the life that’s to come.” He went over and touched a key, then another.
“Do you play?”
“I never has.” He closed the lid over the keys before taking me into the dining room, which was dark because matted vines covered the windows—or where the windows had once been. The glass was gone, and boards that had been nailed over the window frame had fallen away, allowing the wind and rain to ravage the furniture. The table was cracked and warped, the chairs broken. The only piece of furniture that seemed intact was a huge breakfront on the wall across from the windows. It held even more china than I had seen in Pickett’s dining room.
The glass in the breakfront was broken, so I reached in without opening the doors and took out a plate, then another, since the top plate was so filthy that I could not see its design. The second plate was rimmed in blue and edged in gold and had a tulip hand-painted in is center. I blew the dust off the first plate and saw the lily painted on it. The third plate, which was visible through the glassless door, had a rose in its center. There were no hallmarks on the backs of the plates.
“Old Paris. Capt’n Bondurant order ’em in France,” Ezra said. “Old Mist’ess, she just beg and beg for them dishes.” He smiled to himself. “He give her rows and rows of ’em.”
“Old Mistress?”
“Miss Emilie,” he replied formally. He took the plates from me and carefully set them in the cupboard, the dusty one on top. “Not one piece ever got broke.”
“Imagine that.”
“Yet,” he added, looking at me as if I were a threat to the crockery.
“I’ll do my best to continue the tradition.” I raised my eyebrow a little, but Ezra did not find that amusing. So far, my sense of humor had not been very successful in Natchez.
“You wants to see Miss Amalia’s room? That where she keep everything.”
We went into the room I had stumbled into on my first night in Natchez. The French doors to the front porch were open, and the room seemed fresher than it had earlier. The smell had been mold and rotted wood, not goat filth, I realized, because the room was scrubbed clean, the furniture polished. The velvet drapes I had touched were not dirty, only old, the pile worn off in place
s. I was sure the room had not been cleaned just for me.
“In the captain’s time, this the library,” Ezra explained. But that was obvious because hundreds, perhaps thousands, of leatherbound books were stored inside bookcases. A wood-inlaid desk decorated with ormolu was littered with papers and boxes and odds and ends. I picked up a pocket watch set into a shell, touching a spring on the side. The workings had been removed and the inside lined with pale blue silk. Diamond earrings rested on the silk. Clicking the watch shut, I set it back on the table and picked up a silver card case. Ezra moved the watch a few inches, to where it had rested earlier.
Across from the desk was a massive half-tester bed with shredded and water-stained silk draperies hanging from a crown attached to the ceiling. Mosquito netting hung from the bedposts, and an umbrella was suspended from the ceiling.
“What?” I asked, looking at the umbrella.
“It keep the rain off. I willing to fix the roof, but Miss Amalia say stay off the toppen part of the house. She scared most to death I fall off, and then who’s to look after her and Aunt Polly? She catch the water in these.” He pointed to mason jars and tin pails scattered around the bed.
I put my hand on the top of the footboard, which looked a little like an oversize rolling pin. Ezra lifted the object from its resting place and rolled it back and forth over the bed. “This even out the feathers in the bed. Miss Amalia always was keeping feathers in the mattress, not moss. That mattress sleeps soft.” I took one end of the rolling pin and, together, we set it back on the footboard. “It supposed to go on the top of the bed, but it fall off on Old Mist’ess one time, so I fix it to the bottom.”
“Good idea.”
“This bed made by Prudent Mallard.”
New Mercies Page 10
