In the Dreaming Hour

by Kathryn Le Veque

  But the man didn’t seem to notice any of it, including his daughter’s tears. He gazed at her emotionlessly.

  “You remember this night,” he said, his jaw flexing. “You remember what happened here tonight the next time you even look at a colored man. Do you understand me? Next time, I won’t be careful about it – I’ll cut him to pieces right in front of you. Are you listening to me?”

  “You murdered him!”

  “He was punished.”

  The young woman threw herself down onto her bed, weeping bitterly. Sitting on the bed next to her was an older woman, also in tears. There wasn’t a hair out of place on her carefully-waved hair but the expression on her face suggested she knew better than to speak out against the man. Lord, she knew better. She kept her hand on the young woman’s back in a futile attempt to comfort her.

  “Daddy knows what’s best for you, Victory,” the woman said as if trying to convince herself of such a thing. “You shouldn’t ought to have even talked to the man. It’s over now. It’s all over and you know what you did wrong.”

  “Does she?” the man snapped, coming over to the bed and grabbing the young woman by the arm. He raised his hand to her, open-palmed. “I should have done this when the doctor told us of your condition, you shameful hussy. The day you fainted at school and Dr. Latling told us why, I shoulda found the man that day. I shoulda found him and I shoulda punished him. And now you’re gonna have a half-colored bastard that tells everybody in town that you’ve spread your legs for the wrong kind of man? Lord have mercy. I should have beat that baby out of you when the doctor first told us about it!”

  The woman on the bed put her hands up, preventing him from striking the young woman. “No!” she screamed. “Laveau, no! You can’t do it! You can’t strike her like that! I won’t let you!”

  Laveau hit the older woman instead, mussing her neat Marcel wave. He hit her right on the side of the face, leaving a nearly-perfect hand print. As the older woman wept with pain and shame, the man kicked the bed but stopped short of hitting the young girl. He turned away from the bed, fists clenched.

  “Damn you,” he hissed, moving to the window that overlooked the dark front garden of the house. “Damn him, the black bastard. Now he knows. Now he knows what he shouldn’t ought to have touched.”

  There was an odd hint of satisfaction in his tone, as if he’d been perfectly justified in doing what he’d done. He’d punished the man for sins against him and his family, and that was exactly the way he looked at it. On the bed, the two women continued to weep, their painful strains filling the night air, as a soft knock echoed from the bedroom door. Someone stood outside the cracked panel, clearing his throat.

  “Mr. Laveau?” a man said. “Can I come in?”

  Laveau turned to the door, waving the caller in. A man in dark blue slacks, a white shirt, and a slender dark tie entered. He had a brown snap-brim hat in his hand and sweat beading on his forehead as he looked at Laveau Hembree, still standing by the window surveying his front garden. But there was no remorse in Laveau’s eyes, no hint of regret of what he’d just done. It was a look the man with the hat had seen before.

  “What ’cha want, Terhune?” Laveau asked impatiently.

  Terhune Meade was clearly uneasy as he fiddled with his hat. He couldn’t even look at the women on the bed, sobbing. “I’m going to be leaving now,” he said, sounding as if he was asking permission. “I’ll have some of my men take that boy back over to the family. Ragsdale, you said?”

  Laveau nodded. Then, he shook his head. “Damn him,” he muttered again, looking out of the window where a few men were on horseback. “I liked him. For a colored, he was a good man. He listened when I told him something. But the whole time he was lusting after my daughter. I should have known. I should have at least seen what was going on under my own roof.”

  Before Terhune could speak, the young woman on the bed lifted her head, her tear-stained face red with sorrow and rage. “What did he do to him?” she screamed at Terhune. “You’re the sheriff! You should have stopped him! You know what his men did to him, don’t you?”

  “Shut your mouth, girl,” Laveau growled. “Another word out of you and you won’t leave this room for the rest of your life. Do you hear me?”

  By that time, he had marched over to the bed and grabbed the girl by the wrist, twisting it until she screamed. Terhune, seeing Laveau in a mood he had no desire to deal with, quickly turned and left the room as the women were beat upon. As Terhune took the darkened stairs down to the front door of Glory, he could hear the women screaming on the floor above.

  Turning a deaf ear to the sounds, he went out into the moonlit night. He’d rather deal with an innocent dead man this night than the anger of Laveau Hembree.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Present

  The ladies from the Presbyterian Church set up a post-burial giant buffet on Mamaw’s old dining room table, an antique big enough to sit twelve people comfortably. The massive table sat in the cavernous dining room of the house, dwarfed by the sheer size of the room itself.

  The whole house dwarfed everything within it, a larger-than-life structure that had a history nearly as old as the state of Mississippi. Built a half-mile from the Yalobusha River, the house known as Glory had been in the Hembree family since it had been built one hundred and eighty-six years earlier.

  The big house originally had fifteen hundred acres of land that was used to plant cotton, sweet potatoes, and sorghum, all of it harvested by slave labor and shipped down the Yalobusha to Greenwood, Mississippi for distribution.

  Glory had been the flagship home for the surrounding area, a stately Greek Revival with big white columns that could be seen for miles. But over the decades, and through hardship and necessity, the size of Glory’s acreage gradually shrank. A city popped up around it and, bit by bit, the land was sold off and homes were built.

  Now, several city blocks and hundreds of homes stood between Glory and the river. It sat on its last remaining three acres in the middle of a neighborhood on the outskirts of Pea Ridge behind a massive brick wall with barbed wire strung up on the top of it. It looked more like the neighborhood haunted house than the stately manor it had once been. But the truth was that the house was dying, just like the family who owned it.

  Victory Bondurant’s death brought the house back to life in a sense. On the day of Ms. Victory’s funeral, the house was full of people the way it had always been in the past. Lights were on, doors slammed as people walked in and out, and the smell of food filled the air. The grand old dame was living again, no longer lonely and vacant-looking, and the old iron gates were open with a multitude of cars in the driveway as people came to bring food and pay their respects.

  Lucy hadn’t seen the house since she had last visited about five years ago. Having dropped her parents’ rental car off after the burial, her parents were in the car with her as she pulled into the gravel driveway that wound its way up to the house.

  Once her gaze fell on the house, she couldn’t help but flinch when she saw the state of it. The overgrown trees hung all around the property and vines had grown up over one side of the house, pulling at the peeling paint. There was a broken window upstairs that had been patched with what looked like cardboard.

  Pulling the car around to the back where there were still the remains of the outdoor kitchen as well as two old slave cabins that served as storage sheds, Lucy came to a halt and put the car in park, still looking up at the old house. Massive columns loomed before her, imposing and silent in their gloom.

  “Wow, Dad,” she said softly. “This place looks like Hell.”

  Bill eyed the house as he opened the rear passenger door. “I know,” he said. “Mama didn’t want to spend any money on it with Daddy in the home. Any money they had left had to go for his care and her medical bills.”

  Lucy gazed up at the tall, proud walls. It hurt her heart to see this big, beautiful house looking so derelict.

  “So what are you goi
ng to do with it?” she asked, opening her driver’s door. “It belongs to you now. I’m guessing it needs a shitload of repairs.”

  Bill got out of the car, opening the other rear door for his wife. “Me, too,” he said, resignation in his tone. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. Your mom and I haven’t really talked about it.”

  Lucy climbed out of the car and shut the door. “Will you sell it to me?”

  Bill looked at her, surprised. “What are you going to do with it?”

  Lucy shrugged, turning to look at the massive ghost of a house. “It’s not like I’ve got anyone or anything to spend my money on,” she said. “It might be fun to restore the house and turn it into a bed and breakfast. Besides, I hate seeing it like this. Glory deserves better. It looks so… unloved and abandoned.”

  Like her. Unloved and abandoned. The words had more of a meaning to her these days but she didn’t bother to explain what her parents already knew – a husband who had up and left her six months ago for a variety of reasons, including two miscarriages in the past three years.

  He wanted a family Lucy couldn’t seem to provide for him. They’d met in college, they’d fallen in love, and they’d gotten married. Everything was fine until they tried to have children. That’s when things began to fall apart and, after the last miscarriage, he decided he didn’t want to be married to her anymore.

  Now, Lucy was as vacant as this old house.

  “Well,” Bill said reluctantly, eyeing his daughter and knowing that she was trying to fill that hole in her heart that her husband had left. But he didn’t want her trying to fill it up with a worthless project. “We’ll talk about it later. Let’s go inside and get some lunch. I can smell the food out here.”

  Lucy didn’t push it. Her depression was growing, feeling a kinship with this old house that she didn’t want to feel. She didn’t want to feel forgotten and neglected, either.

  Collecting her purse, Lucy followed her parents through the back door of the home. There was a slowness to her movements, like she wasn’t emotionally ready to enter the house.

  As she came in through the big screened door, she stepped into one end of a long, wide hall that bisected the house, a straight shot from the front door to the back door. Up towards the front of the house where the dining room was, people milled about.

  Lucy’s parents were already heading for the group of people and Lucy could hear voices being raised in greeting. At that moment, the pungent scent of food assaulted her nostrils and she was semi-interested in finding the source of the delicious smell until she caught sight of her creepy cousin up front, a middle-aged man who was a son of one of Mamaw’s cousins.

  At that point, no Presbyterian chicken smell in the world was going to lure her up into the dining room where Cousin Clyde was, so she took a detour. Quickly, she made her way up the back staircase, a big, wide thing that doubled back on itself as it led up to the dark and humid second floor.

  As she emerged onto the second floor, the memories began to come fast and furious. The old flowered wallpaper and the smell of mothballs reminded her so much of Mamaw. She closed her eyes, inhaling the scent, feeling her eyes sting with tears. She felt closest to Mamaw here in this dim, mothball-smelling corridor, and the grief she felt for the woman was magnified. She thought she had been doing pretty well at keeping her sorrow in check until this moment. Now, her guard was down and the sorrow was rolling full-force.

  Tears filled her eyes but she fought them, struggling to stay on an even keel. Other than getting away from Cousin Clyde, she’d come up here with another purpose in mind and she didn’t want to be distracted from it.

  There was an old chifforobe that had something that belonged to her.

  Quietly, she made her way past the three other bedrooms on this level. Those bedrooms hadn’t been touched in fifty years. They all had the same old chintz wallpaper with matching curtains that, back in the sixties, had been the height of interior décor. Now, they just looked old and battered. Even the bathrooms were stuck in a time warp with their garish tile and ancient hardware.

  As Lucy neared Mamaw’s room, up at the front of the house overlooking the driveway, she kept an eye on the front stairwell, making sure no one saw her from down below. There was a beautiful self-supporting staircase in the front entry and she could see people moving about. She didn’t want to have to explain why she was trying not to be seen. Given that a funeral in the south was a social occasion, she wasn’t sure anyone would understand.

  Mamaw’s bedroom door was shut and she quickly opened it, slipping inside and closing the door softly behind her. Once inside, she paused, taking a moment just to look around, to absorb the last place her grandmother ever saw alive.

  The room was neatly made up but the blinds were down, giving the room a hazy glow. Her gaze fell on Mamaw’s massive, antique bed, a piece with a half-tester on the top of it, all of the rich mahogany posts carved in a pineapple and palm frond motif. The bedspread on it, however, was a cheap polyester cover from a dollar store, utterly out of place on the lovely furniture.

  Lucy’s attention moved away from the cheap spread, noticing that all around the bed, on the nightstands and even a small table against the wall, were remnants of the last days of Mamaw’s life – prescription pills, aspirators, an oxygen tank, an I.V. stand, dusty fake flowers, and a bedside commode. There was a bathroom attached to the bedroom and a glance through the open door showed more medical equipment in the pink-tiled, run-down bathroom.

  It was a lot to take in, the snapshot of the room in its current state. Lucy wasn’t sure what she had expected but, somehow, this wasn’t it. There was something so terribly disheartening about it. Mamaw had been born in this house, more than likely in this very room, and it was the same room that ushered her out of the land of the living. There was irony in that thought.

  Saddened, Lucy went to the windows and raised the blinds. Light streamed in from the floor to ceiling windows, all four of them opening out onto the balcony beyond. In the heyday of Glory, Lucy could imagine the soft night breezes upon that balcony, filling the house with the scent of blossoms and greenery. As she pulled up the last blind and let the sun come in, she caught sight of a massive piece of furniture against the nearest wall.

  The chifforobe!

  It was an exquisite piece of furniture made from tiger oak, with five drawers and a small cabinet on one side and then a single long cabinet on the other. It had claw-and-ball feet in the front and ornate carvings on the cabinet doors. Lucy remembered hiding in that long single cabinet as a child, playing games with her younger cousins. The old chifforobe held fond memories for her.

  Now, it held something else for her. Quickly, she went to the piece of furniture and dropped to a knee, opening the bottom drawer as Vivien had instructed. Inside, there was neatly folded lingerie of some kind, camisoles and slips, and a lavender sachet was tucked into the side of the drawer.

  Lucy began removing the underwear, piece by piece, stacking it on the floor beside her after she ran her hands along the fabric, looking for the note that was supposed to be inside the drawer somewhere. She’d managed to pull out several pieces of lingerie, soon coming to the bottom of the drawer without having yet seen the note she’d been told about.

  As the drawer emptied, she realized that she would be horribly disappointed if the note wasn’t here and she scolded herself for getting her hopes up. That had been a stupid thing to do. But just as she pulled out the last slip, a piece of paper fluttered from it and fell onto the floor.

  Startled, Lucy swooped on it.

  Snatching it off the floor, it was, indeed, a small white envelope but it was thick, as if stuffed with more than one sheet of paper. There wasn’t any name on the envelope but Lucy opened it anyway. Carefully, she pulled forth two sheets of college-ruled paper, noticing right away that there wasn’t any writing on them but as she fully unfolded them, a small iron key fell out.

  The key hit her on the foot. Curious, Lucy picked it up, lo
oking between the key and the notebook paper as she tried to figure out what in the world the key was for. Curiosity turned into puzzlement, and puzzlement into frustration.

  So… there was no great deathbed note, no literary masterpiece welcoming death and giving advice to those left behind. Lucy turned the papers in her hand over at least twice, wondering if there was some secret cypher she had to figure out for invisible ink. Surely Mamaw wouldn’t have given her two pieces of blank paper as a parting gift but, truthfully, she wasn’t sure. She didn’t know the woman’s mental state the last few weeks of her life so maybe she had lost her mind a bit. Maybe she thought she had written a note when she’d stuffed the paper into the envelope along with an old-fashioned key and, with that thought, reality hit her.

  There was no note.

  Oh, God… seriously…?

  Disappointed, Lucy leaned back against the chifforobe, looking at the key in her hand. It was tiny and it was very old; that much she could see. It was fairly ornate as far as keys went, with an interesting motif on it. In fact, the closer she looked, the more she thought it looked like the carved motif on the chifforobe.

  Could it be a key for one of the drawers?

  Hope was back. Lucy looked up at the chifforobe, at all of the drawers, and each one had a key hole, but the keyholes were too big. Lucy was coming to think that maybe one of the cabinets held a little locked cubby that the tiny key was meant for and she rose to her knees, turning around to open up the big cabinet to see if there was anything inside that the small key might fit. As she moved, she happened to glance into the open bottom drawer where she’d found the envelope.

  And then, she saw it.

  On the bottom of the drawer near the junction where the horizontal bottom met with the vertical front of the drawer, there was a tiny hole, just small enough for the key she held in her hand.