The Outcasts

by Kathleen Kent

  Jane arched a brow. “She’s teaching in your stead.”

  Lucinda said, “Oh, dear.”

  A movement at the door made Lucinda look up. Bedford was hovering at the entrance, looking worried. She was pleased to see his distractedness and the days’-old stubble on his face. Lucinda had not seen herself in a mirror yet, but she put on what she hoped was a grateful smile. “Bedford.”

  “Miss Carter. Lucinda. Are you feeling better?”

  “A little, thanks to your care.”

  “I’m…we’re happy to have you here for as long as you need to be. Until you are well.”

  There was a pause, and Lucinda felt Jane’s eyes studying the both of them, the spoon poised over the soup bowl. Her attentiveness had changed the moment her father called Lucinda by her first name. If anything good had ever come from her sickness, it was her being placed inside the Grant home as a patient to be cared for and fawned over. Lucinda knew that in her attempt to gain Bedford’s trust, his older daughter—who acted in all ways save one as wife to her father—could be her greatest ally or her greatest obstacle. She’d known many women like Jane, women who gave up their own lives to be caretakers and who could find surprisingly inventive ways to fend off those who tried to usurp their hard-earned places.

  Lucinda looked up at Jane and, reaching for her free hand, said, “I have the best possible nurse.”

  For days, both Jane and May brought meals to her room and small parcels of food, preserved fruit or baked things, from the settlers wishing her well. May would leave in the mornings for the schoolhouse but stay with her in the afternoons, telling her of each student’s progress or slide towards unruliness. The girl would sit, or lie, at the end of Lucinda’s narrow bed, and after she gave her reports, she would press Lucinda for details of towns and cities far away or of the latest modes of ladies’ dress and hairstyles.

  Several times a day, Bedford would appear at the bedroom door, awkward and concerned, staying only a moment to ask after her health.

  On the third day of her recovery, she walked with May out into the shorn fields surrounding the house, their rustling progress flushing mourning doves from their hiding places. When Lucinda felt tired, they lay together side by side, the air cool, the earth radiating the sun’s heat like an oven-warmed plate. They could hear Jane calling them back inside, and they shushed each other and laughed like rude children hiding from a playmate. Lucinda turned onto her back and looked up at the clouds, and May rested her head on Lucinda’s shoulder, like a sweetheart. They lay so still that soon they could hear the renewed burring of doves nearby.

  Lucinda then whispered into May’s ear the story of her own father taking her out into their hay field when she was a child and placing into her hands one tiny dove’s egg plucked from a nest that only his hunter’s eyes had seen.

  “The egg burned in my hand with a surprising weight for so tiny an object,” Lucinda said. “A pulsing globe with the hidden warmth of the chick about to hatch.” She reached over and stroked May’s cheek. “He told me that I was like the dove, trapped in the shell of my infirmities, but that someday, if I was good, if I cleaved to God and all His admonitions, I would escape, perfect and whole.”

  “But you did not escape,” May said.

  “No, I did not escape.” The shell remained, Lucinda thought. Not the brittle casing of a dove’s egg, but an elastic, permeable membrane, one that accepted light and air, sounds and awakenings, but that kept her body imprisoned. “He committed me to a madhouse,” she said.

  “Oh,” May cooed, and she wrapped one arm more tightly around Lucinda’s neck.

  Lucinda’s eyes closed with the pleasure of the embrace and the ambient warmth of the ground, and impulsively, she kissed the girl’s forehead. She then stood and gave her hand to May to preclude any more conversation, and they walked back to the house together.

  Later, Lucinda sat alone for a while on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, savoring the fragile warmth of the November sun. Lucinda could see, in the distance, Lavada and Sephronia pushing Elam’s wheeled chair on their daily walk, the twin bell-like motions of their skirts sweeping up the dust of the path. May stepped out onto the porch holding a hairbrush and watched the women.

  She said, “You would think they never had buzzards on their roof. But they do, and I’ve seen them.”

  May unpinned Lucinda’s hair and began to brush it. It had become an afternoon practice, and Lucinda, who most times did not relish being touched, had come to look forward to the ritual. The brush was made of old embossed ivory, the boar bristles gentle on her scalp.

  May said, “I’ve spoken to Father and told him I think you should stay with us. So we can care for you.”

  Lucinda had tipped her head back and closed her eyes, drowsy and relaxed. “And what did your father say to such a scandalous suggestion?”

  “Well, he didn’t say no.” She continued brushing Lucinda’s hair for a moment, and then said, “I found the letter you were writing to your brother.”

  Lucinda opened her eyes, her drowsiness gone. “Which letter?”

  “The letter you had been writing in the little storage house. Before you had your fit.”

  Lucinda searched her mind for her last few moments before losing consciousness. She remembered being inside the shed, but she had forgotten about the letter until May reminded her of it. And there was no clear memory of what she had written before hearing the noises that led her to find Tobias.

  May set the brush down and moved to sit on the railing across from Lucinda.

  Keeping her face expressionless, Lucinda asked, “Where is the letter now?”

  “In a book by your bed.” May tilted her head and smiled in a way that made Lucinda clench her teeth. “I put it there to keep it safe.”

  Lucinda’s tapestry bag had been delivered to the Grant home by Euphrastus during the first few days of her illness. As soon as she was able, Lucinda had searched to make certain that the money she had taken and the gun were still at the bottom of the bag. She had not thought to assure herself that her letters had not been discovered.

  May had been swinging her legs, idly kicking the railing struts, but she stopped abruptly. “I think I’ve tired you out. I’ll help you back to your room.”

  May led Lucinda up the stairs and into bed. After smoothing the bedcovers, she leaned down and kissed Lucinda on the cheek. She stood, brushing the hair from her neck, and asked, “What’s your brother’s name?”

  Lucinda paused for a moment before answering. “Bill,” she said.

  “Will your brother come and visit, do you think?”

  Lucinda reached out and cupped May’s face in one hand. “He may need to.”

  As soon as May had left the room, Lucinda picked up the book and saw it was one from Bedford’s library. She found the letter, pulled it out, and read what she had written: I progress as the Trusted Teacher. You will be pleased to know that I am now friend to the one who is of interest to you…

  Her impulse was to laugh out loud with relief. She couldn’t have written a more innocuous beginning to a letter if she had tried.

  Bedford appeared at the bedroom door, and seeing Lucinda reading the letter, he started to leave. But she called him back and he stayed for a while, talking of inconsequential things. The fading light cast doleful shadows under his eyes, and she thought perhaps he’d been losing sleep on her account.

  He told her, “Your stay in this house has, for me, been a gift.” He looked shyly down at his hands and she waited patiently through the long pause for him to continue.

  Finally he asked, “May I continue to call on you once you have returned to the Wallers?”

  She lowered her chin modestly and said, “Yes.”

  The next day, May insisted on a picnic by the bayou, and she packed a basket with the best of the neighbors’ gifted food for Lucinda, herself, and Jane. They moved quietly while passing the Waller house, May whispering to Lucinda, “Lavada will want to come too if she sees us, and it wi
ll be tedious beyond endurance.”

  They walked close to a mile along a narrow path to a clearing surrounded and shaded by tall trees, and Lucinda was astonished to see Elam sitting in his wheeled chair unattended. He was situated facing the water, rigid and motionless as usual, a quilt tucked around his lap.

  Jane shook her head. “They leave him like that, sometimes for hours. Mr. Waller says there are too many women in the house, and that solitude builds fortitude for Elam. It’s cruel.”

  Turning her back to the chair, May said, “It gives me the willies.”

  They began to eat the roasted meats and pickled vegetables, salty and still tasting of summer, but Lucinda watched Elam’s unmoving form, believing he was not as insensible as the women in his family believed him to be. Once, when he had been parked outside the schoolhouse, Lucinda noticed that he was in full sun and went to move him into the shade. She waved her hand across his face to chase away a wasp, and his nostrils flared at the smell of the scent on her wrist. She brought her face level with his and thought she saw the slightest gleam of recognition in his eyes. She told him, “I know what it’s like to be made a prisoner in your own body.”

  Watching him sitting alone and helpless at that moment caused a sudden anger to fill her chest.

  “My own father couldn’t tolerate the sight of me,” Lucinda said. Jane averted her eyes at the outburst, but May looked at her, intensely curious. “When I was eleven, he sent me to an asylum for the insane, the simpleminded, and the crippled. In the mornings, we shook scorpions out of our shoes, and at night we chased the rats up and down the hallways. We were beaten when we didn’t improve. My father saw my weakness as his personal failure.”

  She stood up abruptly and walked to Elam’s chair. She wheeled him about, pushed him close to where they were eating, and sat down again.

  She was about to offer to feed him or at least try to give him some water when Jane, looking over her shoulder, said, “There’s a man walking in the trees, watching us.”

  Lucinda turned and saw that the man was staring at her as though he knew her. He was moving rapidly, almost sprinting, and was only a few yards away when Lucinda realized it was Mrs. Landry’s German.

  He grabbed her, pulling hard at her clothes, scattering food off the blanket with his heavy boots. May screamed, her hands defensively over her head.

  “You bitch. You goddamn bitch.”

  He yanked Lucinda partway off the ground, held her two-fisted by her collar, and shook her. She felt the back seam of her dress giving way.

  “Where is it?” His face was over hers, spittle flecking his mouth, lips cracked and raw. Fresh, knotted scabs threaded their way over his forehead and cheeks, as though he had fallen into a mesquite thicket.

  “Where is it?” He shook her again, brutally, causing her teeth to pierce her tongue.

  As he opened his palm to slap her, a small red crater appeared below one eye, accompanied by a meager popping sound. He staggered once, dropping Lucinda onto the ground. He touched his face with one hand; his fingers came away bloody, and he moved his mouth as though chewing taffy. Then he pitched over backwards and lay utterly still.

  Lucinda pulled her knees up to her chest, struggling for air. The whole attack had lasted less than a minute and yet food and broken cutlery were scattered everywhere; her dress was torn, her throat raw and burning. Both May and Jane were breathing raggedly, hollow-eyed in terror, but they weren’t looking at her—they were looking at something behind her, their mouths slack with disbelief. Thinking of another attack, this time by someone with a gun, Lucinda jerked her head around and saw only Elam in his chair, but he had his right arm outstretched. The lap quilt had been thrown to the ground, and in his extended hand was a small pistol.

  Whatever emotions had been resurrected in him during the attack still played across his eyes and mouth but were starting to evaporate, like water off a glass. In the few seconds it took Lucinda to get to him, his face returned to an expressionless mask. She gently pulled the gun from his outstretched hand, and the arm fell heavily into his lap. She stooped down, retrieved the quilt from the ground, and settled it around his legs. She put the derringer back under the quilt.

  She turned to the sisters, still clinging to each other in fear. Remarkably, she felt no signs of a coming fit, no trembling or heaviness in her limbs, only the exhilarating jab of rage. She had complete mental clarity and could envision the sequence of necessary actions, see them falling into place, like the solutions to familiar mathematical equations.

  Lucinda knelt in front of them and took both sisters’ hands into her own. “I knew this man from Fort Worth.” Her words sounded thick, and she realized that her tongue was beginning to swell. “He was a day laborer assigned to repair the schoolhouse where I taught.” She was warming to her fabricated story, the particulars unwinding as easily as thread off a spool. “I didn’t know how dangerously unbalanced he was until he mistook my kindness for permission to make advances towards me. He followed me everywhere and became the main reason I had to leave.”

  “He became obsessed with you,” May whispered, her color high.

  She’s finding the story exciting, Lucinda thought. Like a passage from one of her novels.

  Jane was shaking her head as though trying to cast the terrifying images of a deranged man from her mind. She said, “We have to tell Papa.”

  Lucinda pulled Jane into a tight embrace. “Of course you want to tell your father. But then he will have to tell Euphrastus about Elam. Elam might be tried as a killer and sent away to an asylum, at best, or even prison.” She took Jane’s face between her palms. “Jane, can you imagine Elam in prison? He saved our lives. Would we repay his bravery with that kind of hell?”

  Jane looked at her, stricken, and began to cry.

  “Only we four know what happened.” Lucinda looked at the body of the German. “How many times have you heard your father say that the bayou resurrects death into life in endless cycles? All we need do is drag the body to the water…” She looked at the sisters, waiting for them to comprehend that once the body was in the water, the alligators and fish would feed on it until there was nothing left of the German but his boots. And in time, even those would disappear.

  Jane’s eyes widened hysterically and she shook her head back and forth until Lucinda held her again and rocked her, assuring her that all would be well.

  Within a half an hour, the three women had filled the dead man’s pockets with stones and rolled him into the water. Jane was shaking and pale, crying noisily, but May regarded the sinking remains with a kind of fascination, with no tears or lingering signs of fright. Lucinda knew that if they kept their secret for even a few days, the likelihood was great that they would keep it for a good while longer, their collective silence working like the heavy stones in the German’s pockets against the revelation of truth.

  Chapter 14

  Deerling was buried in the city cemetery north of Houston. For a long time Dr. Tom stared into the pit where the coffin had been laid, ignoring the dust spray kicked up by the damp wind. He was supported by the doctor and the undertaker, one on either side, so he could stand through the brief service. If the ranger’s pneumonia had improved at all in the short while that Nate and Deerling had been gone to Harrisburg, Nate couldn’t see it.

  When the minister stepped away for the earth to be filled in, Dr. Tom turned and was helped into the wagon that had brought him to the cemetery. He lay in the back, eyes trained on the sky, wordless, for the mile’s journey into town. Nate rode with him in the wagon, his head buried in his forearms across both knees.

  Nate had given his full account of what had happened in Frost Town and Harrisburg to Dr. Tom in his sickroom the evening he had limped back into Houston bringing Deerling’s body. To the county sheriff, a man named Taggert, he later gave only a partial story. At Tom’s insistence, Nate did not reveal Prudone’s telegram to McGill in Lynchburg or his involvement in Deerling’s death. He was not questioned further, and
he had no idea what, if anything, the sheriff planned to do about finding Deerling’s killer.

  When the funeral wagon stopped at the doctor’s office, Dr. Tom was carried to bed, and Nate pulled the doctor aside and asked him what his expectations were about the recovery.

  The doctor took off his stiff collar to rub at his neck. “Well, he’s angry. Sometimes that helps, sometimes it doesn’t.”

  Nate sat by the bedside for two days before the ranger was able to speak to him again. Mostly he lay in a fever, unconscious. Other times, late at night, Nate thought the man’s lungs would appear through his mouth, so violent were the coughing spells.

  Following Dr. Tom’s spitting up blood on the second night, the doctor ordered Nate to hold him down while he forced laudanum down the patient’s throat.

  After swallowing the laudanum, Dr. Tom rested more quietly, but awake or asleep, he held on to the letter Nate had returned to him, clutching it until it was wilted with sweat.

  On the fourth day after his return from Harrisburg, Nate finally received a letter of his own, from his wife. It seemed it was the third letter she had written, the first two, he guessed, delivered to Austin after they had already passed through. He read the letter several times, lingering over the news about his daughter.

  Mattie wears the necklace you sent day and night. She will not take it off even at bedtime. Many times she has fallen asleep with her fingers wrapped around the beads. She misses you, Nathaniel, as do I. I wear a necklace made of the time spent without you, and though the beads are invisible, they are weighty on my neck, and it grows longer by the day.

  His throat closed at the last, but he imagined the delight in his daughter’s face at the moment of the necklace’s discovery. He held fast to that image, countering the memory of Deerling’s lifeless stare after he’d stopped breathing.

  “You’ve still got George’s blood all over you.”

  Dr. Tom’s eyes were open and Nate wondered how long he’d been watching him. Nate looked down at his coat sleeves and at the brown stains that mottled them.