Eliza was still seated in the corner and holding the baby. Her face contorted with rage when she saw Alice.
“Get out, damn you! You caused this. Get out!”
Alice retreated, stung. But she stopped when Eliza broke into sobs: “Oh, missus. Oh, missus!”
Alice went to her, hesitated, and then wrapped her arms around her. She wasn’t ashamed also to cry. Grief and anger were twin flames that forged an oath she now prayed to Jesus Christ: I’ll make you pay for this.
✽ ✽ ✽
Eliza started to shut down, her eyes growing wide and unblinking as she stared into space. When the baby wouldn’t stop crying, she automatically bared her breast for it to nurse.
Alice was frightened to see her like this. Eliza was always strong, even on the day of her baby’s birth, when she had acted as if she’d coined the word “stubborn.” But like on that day, Alice felt the need to protect her, to take care of her.
The first order of business would be the hardest. Sighing, she covered mother and child with the bed quilt to keep them warm, and then took a second quilt off the wall and went outside. Her duty was now to Eliza, and the way she saw it, Eliza would never leave this cabin so long as her husband’s headless body lay in the way.
Grasping Jonah under the shoulders and hauling him around to the side of the cabin was surprisingly easy, at least physically. He’s light because he has no head, she thought, and kept her eyes closed.
Picking up Jonah’s head was much harder. The lump, even wrapped in the quilt, was an obscenity between her hands. It was never meant to be handled this way, never meant to be detached.
Am I crushing his nose? Putting my hand into the bloody hole?
The moment after she dropped the head and quilt onto the body, she stumbled away two paces and vomited.
Then she cried, louder than before. Can’t believe he’s gone. And that Christ had so easily prevented their escape from this place.
When she’d quieted, Alice ensured that the quilt completely covered Jonah’s body and stared at it. Its pattern was the “tumbling boxes,” previously a signal for movement and action, but now a symbol for things falling apart.
The insects whirred and chirped as if nothing had changed.
✽ ✽ ✽
Late the next morning, she awoke upon the day bed in the foyer. She was still clothed from the night before and dimly remembered entering the house.
Her heart thudded as she ran upstairs and peered into Thorne’s bedroom. Not home yet.
She then went straight to the Tefera cabin to check on Eliza. She had asked Eliza to come into the Big House for the night, but Eliza’s obstinacy had already made a full recovery.
She knocked on the cabin door and called her name. There was no answer.
“Eliza?”
She went inside, and her heart leapt in her chest for the second time that morning when she saw that the surviving Teferas were not home.
Alice was more surprised to find Eliza in the kitchen building, hauling water out of the well as if it were any other day. The baby slept in a sling on her back. Alice felt a wave of deja vu as Eliza jumped at the noise and nearly let go of the bucket winch.
“Eliza.”
“Yes’m?” Her face was expressionless and puffy.
“You should go ahead and leave. Without me. It’ll be safer for you that way.”
The cook’s eyes filled with tears. “Iffen I wanted to, I’se alone and with baby. Can’t travel this way.”
Alice’s empty stomach turned over with more than simple hunger. Hobbling Eliza in this way, she realized, was exactly what Thorne had intended. Eliza would be his slave all over again, with no choice but to go on performing her chores.
“You can’t stay here,” Alice said. “I … I’ll go with you.”
A mixture of emotions played across Eliza’s features: disdain, grief. Hope. Alice felt profound guilt and vowed that if they did get on the road together this time, she’d carry her own weight. She’d learn survival skills as quickly as Eliza could teach them, and then she’d take care of all of them if she could.
“My Jonah goin’ get a proper burial ’fore we do anything.”
A beat of disappointment passed until she realized Eliza had conditionally accepted.
“Yes, yes! I’ll take care of it. Today!”
She turned her back on Eliza’s startled expression and ran for the house.
In Thorne’s study, her hands trembled as she fished the money box key from its hiding place in the desk and then took down the box from the top library shelf. Inside, she found about fifty dollars—in U.S. currency, she was glad to see. She took it all.
Fifteen minutes later, she congratulated herself on having successfully affixed the mule cart to the mule. The animal, however, ignored her initial flicks of the reins—probably hadn’t been fed in two days—and Alice had to snap it hard.
She wasn’t sure yet who to hire. Obie would know, having always taken care of such things, but she wasn’t about to enter the Redger household to ask him. All she knew was that whoever might help would have to be someone in town.
That scared her, going into town. She could easily run into Thorne. But she had no choice.
✽ ✽ ✽
An hour later, she returned to the plantation with two negroes, Cain and Lyle, riding in the back. The boys, perhaps twelve-years-old, had saved her the trouble of roaming town in search of an undertaker, but what bothered her was that it seemed as if they’d been waiting for her.
She had encountered them at the outskirts of town, luckily sparing her the risk of seeing Thorne. They’d been standing in the rubble that used to be the Rockford Baptist. That alone had nearly sent her hightailing it back home. But what really gave her pause was that they had picks and shovels. Waiting for her, by Christ’s design? She hoped not.
Setting aside her suspicions, Alice had climbed off the cart and called them over. She met them at the edge of the blackened and weed-strewn lot, careful not to step within. The boys were covered with sweat and dirt, and said they’d been working since dawn to flatten the last of the church ruins. The town had hired them at two cents a day. Alice said she could beat that wage a hundredfold.
So here she was, rolling up to the Tefera cabin, listening to the boys’ excited gibbering about what they’d do with the two dollars apiece the missus had promised them. She planned to use the remaining cash to ensure her and Eliza’s safe travel.
Cain and Lyle quieted the moment they removed the quilt from Jonah’s headless body.
“Well come on,” Alice said with more confidence than she felt. “I’m not paying you to stand there.”
They exchanged a look but did as they were told.
As the boys loaded the corpse onto the wagon, Alice went to the woodpile by the kitchen building and hunted for an appropriate grave marker. She selected a piece that was nearly perfectly cylindrical, having been cut from the trunk of a young tree, but what set it apart was the sawed-off end. A flat and unblemished circle, it was a good six inches across. With the other end buried, the marker would resemble a tree stump, but it was the best she could manage under the circumstances.
She poked her head into the kitchen building long enough to grab a sharp knife. Eliza was nursing her infant by the fire and staring into the flames with a long, sad face.
“I have some people digging a grave,” Alice said. She didn’t wait for an acknowledgment before rejoining the boys.
It took the better half of an hour to whip the mule up the long incline to the graveyard. Once there, Cain and Lyle again hesitated by the waist-high stone wall that hemmed in the graves.
Cain peeked at Jonah under the quilt. “Ain’t this a white graveyard, missus?”
“Separate graveyards are forbidden under our new constitution,” Alice said, not knowing if they were or not. “Now start digging. Over … right there.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Worried that scavengers would be a problem if the grave were too shallo
w, she made the boys dig until the taller one, Cain, could stand in the ground up to his neck. By that time, it was well past noon, and Eliza had come and gone with a meal of whiskey and sliced bread, which she delivered with stone-faced solemnity. Alice didn’t ask her where she got the whiskey, already knowing the answer.
With Jonah placed at the bottom, Alice insisted they fold his hands on his stomach and place his head in the proper position. The boys obeyed, too tired and dirty to argue, before covering him with the quilt.
As they refilled the hole, Alice scratched the finishing touches into the grave marker, hoping she’d carved deeply enough for it to be readable for at least a year. It read:
JONAH TEFERA
Trusted Servant & Friend
She couldn’t remember today’s date, and the boys didn’t know either (“Thursday, missus? Monday?”), so she ended the epitaph with a simple, d. Mar 1868.
Work neared completion as dusk approached, and the boys grew quiet and grim. Lyle, especially, made frequent glances at the trail, as if expecting Thorne to surprise them.
They know whose land this is, Alice thought.
When the evening star appeared, they actually seemed to speed up. Their small arms shook with exhaustion, and she sensed in them fear and the need to get home to their mothers. This had been a fluke to them, an adventure like boarding a homemade raft and seeing how far downriver it would float. But this had gone on for too long. The raft had carried them to the sea, and the water smelled of death.
After patting down the last of the dirt, Cain hurried to help her drive the marker into the ground. Alice thanked them both, feeling guilty, and doubled her originally promised fee. The boys didn’t bother to count it before rushing off.
Once they were gone, Alice sighed, feeling desolate and alone.
✽ ✽ ✽
Her stomach grumbled as she trudged back down the graveyard path and found Eliza in the kitchen building. She returned the knife she’d used and helped herself to the bubbling cauldron of vegetable stew, all the while taking in Eliza’s swollen eyes and old-woman movements. Eliza had been working herself hard today, Alice realized—cooking, tidying, and chopping wood, to judge by the replenished pile outside.
“Jonah’s buried,” Alice said, feeling quite tired herself. But she was also triumphant. Eliza would be willing to leave now, right?
“Thankee, missus. I’ll go see ’im in the morning.”
She felt a stab of disappointment, but she held her tongue as she assessed Eliza’s haggard appearance. It was too much to expect departure tonight. Neither of them were rested. But she wondered about all the housework Eliza had done today, as if she planned on staying. She hoped it was only the busywork of a widow trying not to suffocate in grief.
Well, we’ll go soon then, she thought. Thorne would leave on another trip before long.
Alice started back for the Big House with her bowl of stew. “Good night, Eliza. Rest easy.”
✽ ✽ ✽
She tried not to feel defeated, but it was impossible to contain the anger that grew as she entered the house. In the dining room, she slammed her bowl on the table, slopping water and chopped onions onto the fine wood. She surprised herself by bursting into tears as she sat down. But it wasn’t Eliza she was mad at, she realized. It was Thorne—or more precisely, his master, because surely Christ was behind even this latest turn of events.
And as if he knew she was thinking about him, Thorne Norwick stepped into the dining room.
Alice didn’t startle right away, thinking that the presence she felt behind her in the darkness was again her tall mirror. That changed, though, when the hard scent of liquor reached her nose.
“Someone’s been in my whiskey,” her husband said in a phlegmy voice. “Bottle label always faces out, and it wasn’t.”
She kept her eyes on the point the wall’s molding made in the corner of the room. Blood hummed in her ears.
“You hear me? Face me so I can read your lips.”
When she remained still, Thorne stepped closer. He lifted something heavy over her head—and for one heart-stopping moment, Alice thought he would club her with the whiskey bottle.
Thorne belched softly, reached over her shoulder, and set the bottle next to her bowl. His voice puffed hotly against the back of her neck:
“I chanced upon two nigger boys leaving a while ago. Said they was diggin’ a nigger’s grave in my cemetery, and the missus paid ’em.”
Next to the bottle, Thorne dropped eight dollars in wadded bills. Alice’s breath whooshed out as she realized it was the cash she’d stolen from him to pay Cain and Lyle.
The hand retracted and then came back with a dark form she thought was a piece of chicken wing. He dropped it by the money.
“I told him, ‘That’s for obeying the presumption of a thieving whore.’”
Gasping, Alice closed her eyes against the sight of the bloodied human ear. She wondered which boy’s it was.
“You dirty son of a—” she said, rising, but Thorne punched her face the moment she turned.
She fell into the tall china cabinet in the corner. She screamed when it rebounded off the wall and overturned. The cabinet smashed apart on the table. She closed her eyes against the shattering glass and pulled her feet out of the way. Its load of crystal and silverware showered to the floor.
“You clumsy wench!” Thorne shouted.
Alice’s cheek felt too big for her head. “Thorne, you monster, what are you doing!”
The cabinet’s broken carcass lay against the table, and he tried to roll it on top of her. Alice leapt out of the way. It hit the floor in another crash of splintering wood and fragmenting finery.
“Should’ve killed you instead of Jonah,” he said.
“I hate you!”
Roaring, Thorne heaved the dining room table out of his way. It flipped onto its side, throwing soup, whiskey, and unlighted candelabras against the far wall.
Rage and power swelled in Alice’s chest. She reached out for his head the moment he came near. She’d cook his brain like Reverend Forney’s.
But Thorne easily batted her hands away. He punched her again, same side, driving her head-first into the wall. Tasting blood, Alice felt a tooth loosen as she slumped to the floor.
“No,” she whispered.
And willed the angel’s wings to
launch
from her eyes into his, driving him back.
Thorne screamed and covered his eyes—and then his ears as the wings slammed through his head like a ricocheting bullet. They pinged against his deafened auditory nerves, reawakening them. Pain sizzled as he heard his first noise in years.
A million seagulls swarming the same beach couldn’t make such a shriek. Alice felt delicious agony pierce deep into her husband’s head. Thorne grabbed his now bleeding ears.
Driving him crazy, burning—
He screamed again and fainted. He landed on top of her, breaking her concentration.
Then she was lost in the space between them, her perspective spinning through swirling darkness.
✽ ✽ ✽
In the moments before she regained control, Alice saw the house with the eyes of Heaven—the eyes of the wings. It wasn’t like before, when she’d followed the horsemen back to the house. She saw much more this time.
From this perspective, light and dark had no meaning. These were different eyes, and all things merged in all ways. Light mixed with dark, sound with scent, touch with taste, and hatred with fear. The world was death and birth, intelligence and instinct all linked together in chaos. And that’s why she didn’t trust what she thought she perceived.
What she thought she perceived was the noise of her rage, vibrating out of Thorne’s body in concentric circles. Like ripples on a pond, they expanded into the surrounding woods, passing individual flares of thought and feeling, sight and noise—small tempests of sadness and confusion.
Spirits? she thought. People?
Deep within the woods, th
e ripples encountered one such being, yet it wasn’t a flare like the others. It was hard, sharp, and filled with water. It was Christ’s dagger, she realized, the entity she had encountered the previous night just before Thorne appeared with his horsemen. With the wings’ eyes, she watched in surprise as the invisible soundwaves slammed into the weapon, making it vibrate in sympathetic harmony, as if it were a tuning fork being reunited with its notes. All of the same source. Strange.
The thing responded to the soundwaves with movement—tracking them, it seemed, like a dog sniffing a scent.
But everything blended together from this perspective—all things equaled everything else—and Alice didn’t trust these impressions. She was sure she dreamt most of it. After all, those weren’t really soundwaves (that was only how she thought of them), and that thing wasn’t really a dagger or an icicle. An entity, perhaps, but she wasn’t sure.
She was finally able to recall the angel’s wings to their roost. She opened her eyes and pushed Thorne away, hoping he was dead.
“Uhnn,” he said.
Alice felt like finishing him, but she was fatigued. The rage that had given her power had dissipated. It wasn’t gone, but she felt like a spent gun, empty of powder and bullet. She would need rest before more psychic acrobatics, so if she wanted to kill him, it would have to be the old-fashioned way.
She shook her head. “What am I doing? I’m not a killer like him.”
She climbed to her feet—dizzy, head hurting, blood pooling in her mouth.
I was justified, she thought, and looked down at him. Self defense.
Thorne groaned like a drunkard and rolled over until he was face-down. A hand came up to cover an ear. He would be all right. He’d probably be up and about before long.
“Bah,” Alice said and left the room.
Upstairs, she lit a candle and sat on her bed. She listened until she heard Thorne rise, swearing. A moment later, the front door banged as he left.
Perhaps I should have killed him.
Cursed by Christ Page 21