The Bell House

by Lori Titus

  He had no doubt that the bitch in question was Jenna or that she was talking about the house that Jenna owned. Diana called her that so much that even the kids had started to notice. “Don’t call my Aunt Jenna that Gramma. You’re mean!” Taleya said. That was enough to earn her two weeks punishment. No television, no music, and a whipping. “You just remember next time you wanna back talk me, when you get in trouble, it’s that bitch’s fault.”

  Henry got home a little after eight. When he pulled up in the driveway, all the lights were off except the ones in the living room. The lights had an ambient, gold glow behind the white curtains.

  He used his key to get in. Diana was sitting in a corner of the room, smoking. The bitter scent of reefer wafted across the room.

  “What took you so long?”

  “They needed me out in the field,” he said, which had long become the answer to everything. Work in the oil fields demanded long hours, and shifts changed weekly.

  “Well, that’s funny. Because I called Shorty a little while ago, and he said you’d been gone for hours.”

  Shorty, Henry’s boss, was a jerk. Of course he’d rat him out to Diana.

  “Shorty doesn’t pay any attention. He told me that you’d called him earlier when I was on my way out. He never checked to see where I was.”

  “And what? Your cell phone is broke?”

  “I haven’t looked at it since lunch.”

  “Well, we have a situation here, and you don’t bother to even look at your phone? What’s wrong with you?”

  Henry shrugged. “Because you’re mad at your sister? Baby, people get fed up with their folks all the time. Just leave her alone and let it pass. She lives out back. It’s not like she’s up in here with us and the kids. Y’all don’t really have to see each other if you don’t want to.”

  “No, see, you don’t understand how uncomfortable I am with her here! She’s filth. I want her gone.”

  “Come on now. Isn’t that overboard? She is your sister, and she owns that house. I don’t see how we can possibly get her out of there. You went and talked to a lawyer about it before, and he said there was nothing that you could do.”

  “Fuck the law,” Diana said. “That bitch is getting out of here, and I don’t care if I have to drag her out into the street myself.”

  Henry closed the door to the hallway. “Listen, you’re going to frighten the kids if they hear you talking like that. Now just calm down. She didn’t ever say how long she was going to stay here, and with the two of you not getting along she may want to move sooner than later. She’s gonna go back to work eventually, and that’s going to be a long drive for her, which means that she won’t even be around that much. Just let it be.”

  “Daddy told me she was just some trash,” she said. “He had it all wrong when he drew up those papers. He does not want her here anymore.”

  “What?” Henry turned on his heel. A chill crept down his back. Her dad was usually a taboo subject, like Ahmad. For her to bring him into this conversation as if they’d spoken yesterday bothered him -. “What do you mean, ‘anymore’? How long has your daddy been dead?”

  “I wonder how it is that she even got married,” Diana rattled on. “I mean look at her. Who would want to fuck her? And now that that asshole is dead, she ain’t gonna find nobody else. Little tight knot bitch.”

  “I don’t know what that weed you got is cut with, but you need to put it down.”

  “I paid for this shit. I’m not wasting it.” She laughed then, and her eyes watered.

  “How do you know what the hell your daddy wanted? He gave both of you a piece of land. And you weren’t even his wife’s kid. He was being generous to you, if you ask me. You wanna talk about filth, but that was probably your mama if it was anybody.”

  Henry regretted it before he finished saying it. But it was true, and he was angry. He couldn’t have stopped himself from saying it if he tried.

  “Hmph. Really? You think so, honey? Because you can take your little dick and stroll right up on out of here. Why don’t you? Think I’ll really miss the extra five hundred bucks a month? Because I won’t. Not when I don’t have to put up with dealing with your bullshit anymore.”

  “Bullshit? Are you serious? With the stuff you talk? See, this is why you can’t get along with nobody. Jenna has said all of ‘boo’ to you so far and you’re about ready to string her up. Ever wonder why you don’t have friends? Except them bitches round the way at Rhonda’s place? It’s because you’re fucking miserable.”

  He turned and slammed the door behind him.

  Diana’s voice carried out into the yard behind him, but he was thankful that she didn’t follow.

  “You’re supposed to stand up for me, you son of a bitch!” she cried.

  DIANA WAS OUT OF BEER. Another thing she was going to scold Henry for whenever he came back home.

  After Henry left, she went into the kitchen and found a bottle of pink Chablis. Not really what she wanted—she wanted a good stiff drink of some hard liquor—but it was something. She poured herself a drinking glass full and went back to her corner in the living room. There was a light breeze flowing in through the window. It was pleasant, but she was still hot. She closed her eyes and took a long draught of wine.

  “You know, in a way, your man is part right.”

  Daddy was standing there, in the shadow between the curtain and the wall. This was not the man as she’d known him as a girl. This man was far younger. His hair was still black. He was thin; his dark skin was smooth and unwrinkled. This was the version of Travis Bell as he must have been before he left for the army, before he married Louise or met Drea, Diana’s mother.

  A young, thin man with an angular face and proud chin, high cheekbones and deep set eyes.

  “What do you mean, Daddy?”

  “What we want is blood. And you talk really big, Bugaboo, but I haven’t seen you draw a drop yet. Did you get that from your mama? Because when I was amongst the living, I was a man of action.”

  She laughed at that.

  She thought the image would waver, but he only seemed to grow stronger, more flesh than wraith. With a shaking hand, Diana put her glass down and stared at him.

  “You realize there are consequences each day you fail us,” he said.

  “Who is us?” Diana cried. “I don’t understand.”

  “Child, you will soon. The Ancestors are here. And our blood cries out. Give us our revenge, or we will take it.”

  ALONE IN HER HOUSE, Jenna slowly re-surfaced from sleep.

  This time, she’d had a pleasant dream. Stephen had been holding her in his arms, kissing her, with his palms pressed against her back. She had felt the rhythm of the breath in his chest as he leaned into her. He chuckled softly into her ear, and the warm sound of his voice was the sweetest comfort. Again, she was unable to speak, but this was the shared wordlessness of an afterglow, not the frightened feeling of being in need of communication and unable to reach out.

  Maybe it was that she was in the deepest realms of sleep, or because she did not want to leave him, that it took so long for her to wake.

  When she did, she sat up, stunned.

  Someone was pounding on her front door.

  And they had been for some time.

  The clock read 3:21 AM.

  She put on her robe and went downstairs.

  The constant banging had moved from the front door to the back door in the kitchen. The porch light cast a shadow on the figure outside. She could just see the form through the window.

  Diana.

  “What do you want?” Jenna screamed. “What’s wrong?”

  The beating did not stop or even pause.

  Jenna watched as the doorknob jiggled, moving back and forth.

  She ran to her phone and dialed 911.

  AFTER HIS FIGHT WITH Diana, Henry was only gone for an hour. He drove around to the supermarket and bought a can of coffee, a loaf of bread, and a fresh pack of cigarettes. He drove past his frien
d Joe’s house, but nobody was home. Passing the liquor store on the way back, he thought about buying some beer for himself but decided against it.

  When he pulled into the front yard, the lights in his house were all out. A sense of dread poured through his stomach like acid. He went down towards Jenna’s house and immediately heard the banging.

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  Diana was only a few feet away, pounding at Jenna’s back door with her fist as if her life depended on it. In her other hand was an empty wine bottle. She paused to look at him, and for a moment, he could only see the whites of her eyes. She blinked.

  “Come on, woman,” he snatched her around the waist and started dragging her away. She didn’t say anything, but her hysterical laugh made him cringe.

  “IF IT’S OF ANY COMFORT, ma’am, we see this all of the time.”

  The police officer leaned forward on his feet, making sure to look Jenna in the eye. “I understand you have to be pretty upset, but we’ll go up to the front and talk to them. Rattle their door and see if they like it.”

  “You two haven’t been getting along?” said the second officer. His hands were crossed over his chest. Good cop, bad cop, Jenna thought.

  “We have been getting along great until a few days ago. I realized she was upset, but not this upset. We haven’t spoken to each other since.”

  “Alright. Well in the meantime, just stay away from her. These things tend to blow over.”

  Jenna closed the door and stood there for a minute, listening to the officers retrace their steps back up to Diana’s house.

  What would have happened if she hadn’t changed the locks? She hadn’t told anyone, but then again, it was her house. She didn’t have to inform them. No one was home up front when the locksmith came by, and she didn’t mention it.

  What the hell was Diana’s problem anyway? All this because she asked what happened to Ahmad’s things?

  Of course, people grieved in their own way, but she didn’t understand Diana. After all, Diana was the one that had burned Ahmad’s things, not her, and this was after she had offered to help pack his things away and Diana refused letting her pay for storage.

  If I had anything left of Stephen’s, she thought, I would have a very hard time throwing it away. And I’d absolutely never burn it.

  She’d never lingered on it, but Jenna wondered: If Diana was the great mom that she claimed to be, why was one of her children dead and the other a drug head? What kind of grandmother beats her sister’s door down in the middle of the night with her grandchildren sleeping alone in the house?

  Diana was acting like someone who’d had a break with reality.

  It took some time, but Jenna made her way back to bed. This time, Stephen was nowhere to be found in her dreams. Only darkness, a void filled with dangers that she couldn’t see.

  Fall, 1967

  Travis Bell returned home from Vietnam with shrapnel embedded in his skin, a scar that ran from the edge of his temple halfway down the left side of his scalp, and a metal plate that had been inserted into his head to replace the part of his skull that was destroyed in an explosion.

  No one was at the bus station to meet him but his mother, Kamila. He noted the look of worry when her glance lighted upon him. There were new lines on her face as well. She was a bit smaller than he remembered. When he embraced her, she felt as little as a bird. But her backbone was- straight as an iron rod, and when he hugged her, he felt that her center, the core of her strength, was still there.

  Once she got him home, she explained how things had changed since he was away. Tensions were high, and there was sentiment against the war. When looking for a job, it might be better not to mention that he had been in Nam. It seemed that people not only disagreed with the conflict but the men who risked their lives to fight it.

  Chrysalis was home, and Travis couldn’t muster the energy to care much for the larger world. “I want to know about the family,” he said simply.

  Kamila sighed. When she excused herself to get a cup of tea, he knew that whatever news she had to bring back was worse. Without asking, she brought him back a bottle of bourbon and a glass with ice.

  She sat down and folded her arms in her lap. In a resolute voice which she seemed to have practiced, she laid out the facts with the coolness one would use when speaking of someone else’s family.

  “Helena’s husband decided to move her and their children out to Clemson, but then we’d been expecting that. She’s been gone about six months, and you know she does not like coming around here much.”

  “It’s not that far of a drive,” Travis said. “What else?”

  “Morgan moved out to Florida,” she said, her words falling like careful steps on a shaky bridge. “I think he may have met a young lady out there that he likes.”

  “What’s wrong with Jeremiah?”

  Here, Kamila stumbled over her memorized script, and she could do nothing better than to blurt it out. “He’s dead, that’s what’s wrong with him.”

  She leaned forward, poured his drink, and pushed it across the coffee table to him. He noticed that her fingers shivered as they fell away from the glass.

  “How?” Travis finally asked.

  “A bullet to his brain,” Kamila said. Her eyes went dark, the rest of her face sagged with the effort it had taken to feign composure. “He went back up to Philadelphia after he got out of the hospital, you know, and we had no idea where he was for three years . . .”

  “Well he’d already left town before I enlisted,” Travis said. “He killed himself?”

  Travis could have never imagined that his brother would have the gumption to do such a thing, but he doubted even more that Jeremiah would have annoyed anyone badly enough to get himself killed. Accidents, however, did happen, and he was half prepared to hear that his brother was felled by a shot intended for another man.

  “It was the scars,” Kamila said. “He was having a hard enough time forgetting about Willow, but he couldn’t deal with having those burns. And there was pain, I know about that. All down his back and his arms. He couldn’t work construction anymore. And what woman would want him, disfigured like that?”

  Travis shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, women forgive those kinds of things sometimes, especially if a man will take care of them.”

  “And how the hell was he supposed to do that?” Kamila challenged.

  “Mother, it wasn’t your fault . . .”

  “Yes it was. I was going to throw water on him, but I grabbed the skillet instead. With that damn hot grease. It wasn’t worth it! All over some little whore that was never good enough for either of you anyway!”

  Travis bit so hard into his bottom lip that it bled. He wanted to tell her that Willow was probably too good for either him or Jeremiah, and that she was innocent until he got a hold of her. Thinking of her sent chills up his spine. Willow with her soft skin and sweet voice. He could smell her perfume as if she were in the room with them. He could never tell anyone that sometimes he still dreamed of her. Dreams filled with erotic pleasure until her hands began to choke the life out of him.

  Instead, he tried console his mother, though the words sounded false to his own ears.

  “Torturing yourself about it now won’t help anything. He was out of his mind to do something like that. It’s sad, but we can’t undo it.”

  Chapter Seven

  Daddy was quiet.

  Diana saw him quite clearly. This was the first time that she’d been aware of him in the daytime. She kept the girls in the room with their door closed, but this time she did allow them to watch television. She didn’t want them seeing him.

  It annoyed her that Henry was totally oblivious.

  Is it because he’s not our blood, Daddy? She asked him once, when Henry was out of the room.

  No, it’s just how it is. Most people can’t see us.

  She could speak to him now without making a sound, which made things easier. His smile, his hands folded over eac
h other, told her that he was very pleased by what she had done.

  It’s a move in the right direction, he said. Next time you’ll do what you set out to.

  She leaned back on her couch, her comforter wrapped around her. As long as Daddy was happy, she didn’t give a damn about anyone else.

  FOR ONCE, THE TABLES were turned.

  Henry was fussing with Diana, and she was sitting quietly, pretending to listen.

  “I can’t believe the cops were actually here last night. What the hell did you think you were going to do if she had opened the door?”

  Diana shrugged.

  “I don’t know what you want to do, but we can’t have the police coming up here. That warrant in Tennessee never really got cleared up. And I’m not having somebody take my ass off to jail because you got some kind of beef with your half-sister.”

  “Beef?” she said. “You think that’s all this is? This is fucking war!”

  “I don’t really care. You know what? If Jenna won’t move, maybe we should.”

  “Now I know you’re crazy. How are we supposed to afford it?”

  “Rent this place. Or sell this lot. We have lived here ever since we got married. Look, we deserve someplace new. There’s good memories here, but there’s a lot of bad as well. Maybe a fresh start would be the best thing. The girls are getting big. Taleya could use her own room. And we could use a bigger bedroom, maybe a second bath. A decent sized kitchen that you can move around in.”

  “I can’t believe you’d suggest that . . .”

  “Well, it’s not like we haven’t talked about moving before.”

  “Not because of that bitch out there.”

  “Alright, then you gotta calm the hell down if you want to stay here.”

  “Or what?”

  “Or I am going to leave here without you. Without the kids. And you’re going to have to find a way to deal on your own.”