“Odie O’Banion,” the Black Witch said, the words dripping from her lips like poisoned honey. “And Julia. It’s so good to see you both again.”
* * *
DOLLIE HAD BEEN sent away and had closed the attic door behind her. The Brickmans and Aunt Julia and I, along with a profound sense of the looming Tornado God, filled that small room.
“You look so lost, Odie,” the Black Witch said. “And, Julia, your face is one big question mark.”
I was less afraid than surprised and angry. I spat out, “How did you find me?”
“I still know people from my time in Saint Louis years ago, Odie. When you vanished with Emmy and all the papers in our safe, I thought it possible this was where you might be headed, so I sent a telegram and hired a man to watch Julia’s house.”
Aunt Julia looked at me, understanding in her eyes. “The Black Witch?”
I nodded.
“Do you know, Odie, I’ve never minded that epithet,” Thelma Brickman said. “Fear is a powerful tool.”
“What are you doing here, Thelma?” Aunt Julia demanded.
“You know her?” I said.
“Julia and I go way back, Odie,” the Black Witch answered for her. Then her voice changed, became full of that twang Albert had told me he’d sometimes heard from her when she’d been drinking, the voice of someone raised in the backwoods of the Ozarks. “I still recollect when I first came to you, Julia. Do you? Brought to you by that brute my pappy sold me to. Was you bought my freedom. And for a while, we was like sisters.” Her voice changed again, became smooth and seductive. “You refined all the rough edges of a hillbilly girl, taught me about etiquette and books and the ways to please a man. You remember that, Julia?”
“What I remember, Thelma, is that you weaseled your way into my life, then tried to strike a deal with the local constabulary to steal my house.”
“You were the one who encouraged me to have ambition.” An animal look came over Thelma Brickman’s face. “I rose up from nothing, from dirt and filth and the kind of people who sold their children. That’s why I was a whore. You came up from something different, Julia. So, what’s your excuse?”
Aunt Julia glanced at me but gave no reply.
“You have no idea the hell I went through after you kicked me out,” the Black Witch went on. “I finally ended up working in a shithole of a brothel in Sioux Falls when a lonely man named Sparks asked me to marry him. He ran a school for Indian kids across the state line in Minnesota. A sweet opportunity I couldn’t let pass.”
“And is this Mr. Sparks?” Aunt Julia asked.
Clyde Brickman hadn’t spoken a word, but I could tell he was nervous. His eyes jumped around the room and back toward the closed door, as if he was afraid any moment someone would come bursting through.
“Mr. Sparks suffered a fatal heart attack a year after we wed,” Thelma Brickman said. “This is Clyde, my second husband. He ran a gambling operation in Sioux Falls and was one of my regulars. I needed a good right hand at the Indian school and Clyde . . . ?” She glanced at her husband. “Well, I could have done worse.”
“Minnesota,” Aunt Julia said in a way that sounded as if many things were falling into place for her. “Did you lure Zeke there, Thelma? Did you set him up in some insane plan to get back at us?”
Zeke. My father’s name. “You knew my father?” I asked the Black Witch.
“Your father delivered the liquor to this house. Bootleg liquor even in the days before the Volstead Act. When things went south between Julia and me, he was the one who saw me out the door without even giving me a chance to pack a bag. I left with nothing but the clothes on my back.” She’d spoken with venom in her words, but now she smiled, a thin line like a scar burned across her face with acid. “Clyde and I were expecting a delivery of liquor up in Lincoln, one of our side enterprises, and who shows up with his two boys in tow? When he recognized me, I was afraid he was going to spill the beans about my past.”
“So you shot him?” I wanted to strangle the Black Witch, and I tried to jump from the bed, but Aunt Julia restrained me.
“We’ll never know who pulled that trigger, Odie.” Then she turned her cruel smile to Aunt Julia. “One of Zeke’s boys looked so much like you, Julia, it made my spirit sing. I insisted that we take Odie and his brother under our protective care at Lincoln School.” She eyed me with cold glee. “Every pain you suffered there, every stroke of the leather strap was such a joy to me, because it was like a stab at your dear aunt’s heart. Now,” Thelma Brickman said, composing herself. “The reason I’m here. Where is Emmy?”
“Where you’ll never find her,” I shot back.
“I don’t care about you anymore, Odie. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. All I want is Emmy.”
“Emmy hates you.”
“In time, I’ll make her love me.”
“You can’t make someone love you, Thelma,” Aunt Julia said. “Love is a gift. It’s given.”
The Black Witch ignored her. “The police haven’t stopped looking for Emmy’s kidnappers, Odie. If they get their hands on you, you’ll spend the next several years in a place much more difficult than Lincoln School, I can guarantee you. But I’m offering you a chance to save yourself. And your brother and Moses. All I want is little Emmy.”
“You’re not getting her.”
“Then I have no choice but to turn you over to the police.”
“Albert has the ledger,” I said.
“You mean the ledger in which Clyde kept track of the donations our local citizenry made to Lincoln School? Sheriff Warford knows all about that ledger, Odie. He’ll be happy to help us explain all this to the Saint Louis police. You can save yourself a lot of trouble. All I want is Emmy.”
“She’s lying, Odysseus,” Aunt Julia said.
But I knew that already. She wouldn’t be satisfied until she’d destroyed us all.
“Why do you want Emmy so bad? She hates you,” I said. “And she’s not perfect like you want her to be. Sometimes she has fits.”
The Black Witch leaned toward me and spoke in a low voice, as if sharing a secret. “I know about those fits.”
I stared into her eyes, two coals of evil, and wondered how she could possibly know.
She said, “In the hollow where I grew up, we had a neighbor who lived off by herself, a hag everybody swore was a seer. They said that when she looked into the future, if she had a mind to, she could tinker with what she saw there. Emmy had one of her fits while she was with me. When she came out of it, she said ‘You won’t fall, Odie. He will but not you.’ I asked her about it later, but she didn’t remember. After we found Vincent DiMarco’s body in the quarry, I put two and two together and came up with a most remarkable possibility. If I’m right about her, she’s special, Odie. Am I right?” When I didn’t answer, she smiled in a way that made my skin crawl. “All she needs is the proper person to guide her, to make certain her gift isn’t squandered.”
“You’re not that person,” I cried.
“Oh, but I am. I had her once, Odie. I’ll have her again.”
“She was never yours.”
“Well then,” she said, as if bringing the discussion to a definitive close, “I guess we’ll just have to let the police sort that out.”
“You’re not going to the police,” Aunt Julia said.
“Who’s going to stop me? You?”
“Yes.”
“How exactly do you propose to do that?”
“I’ll kill you if I have to. Leave, Odysseus,” Aunt Julia said. “You know where to go.”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. Then added, “Mother.”
She gazed at me, and in her eyes I found what it was I’d been searching for all along, searching for without understanding. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, heart of my heart.
“Mother?” Thelma Brickman said, then grinned like a rattler. “Well, no wonder you two look so much alike.” She drew a small, silver-plated ha
ndgun from her purse. “I’m taking your son, Julia.”
Clyde Brickman, who’d stood the whole time in cowardly silence, said, “For Christ’s sake, what do you think you’re doing, Thelma?”
“Shut up, Clyde. If you were half the man I’d hoped, I wouldn’t have to do this. Odie, if you don’t come with me, I’ll shoot Julia, mother or no.”
“And go to the electric chair,” I said.
“For defending myself against a woman who brutally attacked me? I don’t think so.”
“She didn’t attack you.”
“That’s not what Clyde will say. And you kidnapped a little girl, Odie. God only knows what despicable things you’ve done to her. Do you think anyone would believe a story told by a depraved boy whose mother was a whore?”
That’s when I went for her.
I don’t recall hearing the report from the gun, but I still remember the sting of the bullet in my right thigh and tumbling to the floor before I reached the Black Witch. In the chaos of that small room and the confusion of my mind as it processed the stunning realization that I’d been shot, I felt the air around me swirl as if a great storm were passing, and I was sure the Tornado God had descended.
But it wasn’t the Tornado God. It was my mother. She rushed past me and threw herself at the Black Witch. They struggled, reeling across the room. Then they were at the open window, writhing as one fiercely grappled with the other. And in the next instant, they were gone.
I tried to rise, but my wounded leg would bear no weight. Clyde Brickman ran to the window and stood looking dumbly down. I crawled across the floor, leaving a trail of blood, and grabbed the windowsill to pull myself up. Brickman, whose heart had never been as black as his wife’s, lifted me so that I could see what he saw. Together on the stone of the old patio three stories below, the two women lay unmoving, their bodies as entangled as their lives had been.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
THEY LET ME sit beside my mother’s hospital bed, my wounded leg bound thick with gauze. She hadn’t returned to consciousness. The doctors weren’t sure she ever would. Dollie was there with me, keeping vigil. The hospital wards were crowded, but because Aunt Julia had money and some influence, we were in a private room.
The Black Witch was well and truly dead, her head smashed like an egg against the patio stone. A fortunate circumstance had saved my mother from the same fate. She’d landed atop Thelma Brickman. In her departure from this world, the Black Witch had done something almost redeeming. She’d cushioned the impact of my mother’s fall. The doctor had called it a small miracle.
I’d been at her bedside for hours when Albert entered the room. Mose and Emmy and Sister Eve were with him. When I saw them, I broke into tears.
“How . . . ?” I tried to ask.
Albert knelt and put a comforting arm around my shoulder. “We finally got John Kelly to spill the beans and came downriver on the Hellor as fast as Tru could make her go.”
From the doorway, I heard, “Lucky the river was high and clear.” Truman Waters poked his head in, and I saw that Cal was with him.
I looked at Sister Eve with some bewilderment. “You found them?”
“They found me. The same way you did. All those posters Sid insists we put up everywhere we go.”
“She took us to Aunt Julia’s house,” Albert explained. “The women there directed us here.” He looked at Aunt Julia, who lay so still it was as if she were already dead. “I was afraid we might be too late.”
“I have so much to tell you,” I said.
A nurse pushed through the gathering and demanded that everyone leave.
Emmy put her hand on mine and said, “But he’s our brother.”
In the end, the nurse shooed Cal and Tru away but allowed the rest to stay.
I shared everything with them. When I told them the truth about my lineage, I watched Albert’s face closely and didn’t see at all the surprise I’d imagined. “You knew we weren’t really brothers?”
“I’ve thought about it from time to time. You just showed up one day. I was only four years old, so what did I know? But now I understand why you drive me crazy sometimes.”
I didn’t laugh.
“Listen, Odie, you’re the biggest part of every memory I have. You are my brother. The hell with everything else. I love you so much it’s nearly killed me sometimes. Until the day I die you will be my brother.”
Mose stepped in and signed, And mine.
Emmy smiled and said, “And mine. We will always be the four Vagabonds.”
* * *
THE OTHERS TOOK turns sitting with me while I kept vigil at Mother’s bedside. Once, when it was just Albert and me, I shared with him what Sister Eve and I had discussed about Emmy and her fits.
He looked at me as if I were insane. “You’re saying she kept your bullet from killing Jack? And the snakebite from killing me?”
“Think about it. It required such a small shift of circumstances. A fraction of an inch for the bullet to miss Jack’s heart. A little extra time for you so the antivenom could arrive.”
He mulled that over. “She had one of her fits on the Hellor on the way here. When she came out of it, she said, ‘She’s not dead now.’ I asked her who wasn’t dead, but she just gave me that blank stare, you know the one, like she’s not really there. Then she slept. I had no idea what she meant.”
“A slight twist of Thelma Brickman’s body as she fell, Albert. That’s all it took.” I put my hand on my mother’s hand. Although the current was weak, I still felt the electricity of life coming through. “It gave her a chance at least. And here’s something else. The Black Witch knew about Emmy and her fits. She told me Emmy had one while she was with the Brickmans.”
“Did she tell you what Emmy saw?”
“Not exactly, but I figure it was me and DiMarco at the quarry. When I went over the edge, I landed on that little tongue of rock just below. It wasn’t much but enough to keep me from falling all the way.”
“So, you’re saying Emmy put that rock tongue there?”
“Or just put me in the place that when I fell, it was directly below me. If I’d been to the right or to the left even a little, I would have missed it.”
He thought this over a moment, then said, “If she saw the future, she would have seen the tornado coming. Why didn’t she do something to save her mother?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she tried but couldn’t. Maybe the tornado was just too big for her.”
He shook his head. “You know how crazy all this sounds?” I could see his engineer’s brain trying to accept a possibility that no mathematical calculation could ever prove. And, in truth, he never admitted to me that he believed the things I told him about Emmy. But he must have seen desperation on my face that night, because he said, “Whatever happens, Odie, we’ll still have each other. We’ll always be brothers.”
* * *
SISTER EVE SAT with me. It had been nearly two days since she’d first come to the hospital. My mother’s condition hadn’t changed.
“I pray,” I told her. “I pray with all my heart. It doesn’t seem to help. Do you think there’s any chance Emmy could have another one of her fits?”
Sister Eve smiled. “She doesn’t really understand this gift she’s been given, Odie. Not yet. She will someday. I would love to help her in that, but it’s up to her.”
“Maybe you could just hit me on the head and I’ll get a gift of some kind, too. One that’ll help my mother.”
She smiled again, gently. “I don’t think it works that way. And you’ve already been given a gift.”
“What gift?”
“You’re a storyteller. You can create the world in any way your heart imagines.”
“That won’t make it true.”
“Maybe the universe is one grand story, and who says that it can’t be changed in the telling?”
I wanted to believe her, and so I imagined this:
My mother finally woke. Her eyes slowly opened, and she
turned her head on the pillow. When she saw me, her face lit with a brilliant radiance and she whispered, “Odysseus, Odysseus. My son, my son.”
EPILOGUE
THERE IS A river that runs through time and the universe, vast and inexplicable, a flow of spirit that is at the heart of all existence, and every molecule of our being is a part of it. And what is God but the whole of that river?
When I look back at the summer of 1932, I see a boy not quite thirteen doing his best to pin down God, to corral that river and give it a form he could understand. Like so many before him, he shaped it, and reshaped it, and shaped it again, and yet it continued to defy all his logic. I would love to be able to call out to him and tell him in a kindly way that reason will do him no good, that it’s pointless to rail about the difficulty of the twists in that river, and that he shouldn’t worry about where the current will take him, but I confess that even after more than eighty years of living, I still struggle to understand what I know in my heart is a mystery beyond human comprehension. Perhaps the most important truth I’ve learned across the whole of my life is that it’s only when I yield to the river and embrace the journey that I find peace.
My tale of the four orphans who set sail together on an odyssey isn’t quite finished. Their lives went far beyond the rolling farmlands and high bluffs and river towns and remarkable people they encountered on their meanderings that summer. Here is the end of the story begun many pages ago, an accounting of where the greater river has taken all the Vagabonds.
* * *
CLYDE BRICKMAN, IN his full confession to the Saint Louis police, maintained that it was Thelma who’d shot Albert’s father, the man I think of as my father, too. It didn’t matter. Brickman still went to prison, not just for his part in that killing but also for the embezzling he’d been party to with his wife while they ran the Lincoln Indian Training School and the bootlegging and all the additional crimes revealed by the ledger and other documents Albert had taken from the Brickmans’ safe. When asked why he’d held on to all those letters, Brickman said he’d thought that someday he would try to repay the money he and his wife had stolen from the Indian families. I considered it just another lie meant to mitigate whatever sentence might be handed down, and I hated him all the more.
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