Eliza had forced that boy through the tiny basement window and into the grass. But she and the boy’s mother had been too big for the opening, and they’d perished hugging each other.
He’d heard them screaming for help and set to work clearing collapsed bricks and boards from the basement stairwell. Flames had caught his left pant leg, and two firemen had dragged him out. He’d pleaded that she was just on the other side of that rubble. Couldn’t they hear her? Couldn’t they see her two ashy fingers protruding through the smoke?
Truth was, she’d stopped screaming several minutes before he began tossing aside the debris, and the two fingers he’d seen weren’t moving. There was nothing he could have done short of marrying a woman who didn’t have such a kind heart.
Ellsworth tried a few more keys, but they came off as clunkers. Nothing melodious like he’d imagined in his head. He’d had nightmares of her screaming. Those nightmares had pushed him toward the war, where he exchanged them for new ones.
She died from the smoke. Not the flames. I heard her coughing.
Telling himself that was the only way he’d found solace in the days after.
He needed a drink to wash down the cookies. He’d eaten all of them, although he didn’t remember the third. What he remembered clearly was the fireman’s voice. “You’re gonna get yourself killed, Ellsworth. She’s gone. Come on now, before the whole building collapses.”
He should have stayed in there to see if it was even possible to get himself killed.
Maybe he’d eat a bullet tonight and see.
But his dinner was still out in the mailbox getting cold.
He plopped down in his chair and swallowed a gulp of Old Sam, and then something caught his eye out the window.
Anna Belle hurried down her front porch, her voice filled with panic as she called that boy’s name over and over. “Raphael! Raphael!”
Linda May Dennison showed up a minute later. The two women headed to the backyard together, still calling Raphael’s name. Next they searched the road, peering into the shadows between the trees, and then stepped inside the town hall, only to come out a minute later disappointed. Anna Belle had her hands on her head, looking up into the sky, distraught.
More neighbors arrived in front of the town hall, even Alfred.
“Raphael!” they all yelled into the night, some in unison, some in alternating pitches, most of them facing the woods and probably praying the boy hadn’t gone in there alone.
Ten minutes later, six dozen men and women, including Mayor Bellhaven, had gathered with lanterns and torches. Berny Martino was out there with his mail pouch over his shoulder, wandering from person to person as if he had his own mission and agenda and it didn’t include finding the boy. Instead of letters and packages, he passed out what looked to be flyers. Mayor Bellhaven took one from Berny, quickly read it, and then crumbled it up as if he disapproved.
Maybe Berny the postman had turned communist like Alfred.
Ellsworth took a step, and the room spun. How much bourbon had he consumed? He used the wall as a crutch and eventually made it to the front door, where he could watch the goings-on more easily. Father Timothy was out there with Reverend Cane, and behind them stood Rabbi Blumenthal.
Charleston was known for its numerous churches—steeples soared above darn near every street corner. But it was odd for a small town like Bellhaven to have so many checkered along the main road—Catholics and Baptists, Methodists and Jews, and the black church with all that singing. There were even groups you hardly ever found in little Southern towns. A group of Moslems, most descended from a handful of Bellhaven slaves brought over from Africa, met in a small frame building a stone’s throw from the Jewish synagogue. A year before the town-hall tragedy, a group of Latter-day Saints had rolled into town on two mule wagons. And a month after that ten young men and women, members of some Watchtower Society, had shown up and taken root on the outskirts of Wally Luchin’s pumpkin farm.
Some said those Watchtower folks came from up north and were part of the Bible Student movement. But Ellsworth had complained to Eliza he didn’t much care where they’d come from. He just didn’t like the way they knocked on his door and told him he needed to be saved. Saved from what?
He’d told them he knew two people who were in desperate need of saving. “Calvin Roper, right there across the street, the blue house with the white porch. Oh, and Alfred Dennison, back there on the other side of the town square, the porch with the wind chimes. He needs to be saved more than anyone I know.”
Ellsworth smiled at the memory of his two pals chastising him the next day. “How come you sent them new religious folk to our doors, Ellsworth?”
Brother Fox Bannerman walked among the crowd outside. He had a copperhead coiled around his right arm, and most everyone steered clear of him. Recently a cluster of Pentecostals had moved into Jimmy Claret’s old home—a mere sign hammered in the front yard had converted it from residence to church overnight—and Brother Bannerman, all six-feet-nine inches of him, was the leader of their lot.
Because of all the different places of worship, Linda May Dennison had jokingly renamed the avenue of oaks the Highway to Heaven. And despite their religious differences, they had always somehow pulled together. That was always Bellhaven custom. And whenever the town folk got together at the town hall, you could find members of every church in attendance. But now Bellhaven was more of a mixed bag of nuts than a melting pot. The peaceful town had grown silent since the tragedy—sleepy and indifferent.
Ellsworth pinched his eyes closed, and along with the darkness came a memory. Black tar and goose feathers. The bald eagle tattoo on the side of a Klansman’s neck. That acrid smell of smoke, like something overcooked on a spit. He swallowed two gulps of Old Sam to forget. Focus on the now. The people crowding the street and searching. Do they even realize this is the largest gathering since . . . ?
Ellsworth hobbled out the front door for the second time of the day. Anna Belle was mouthy, but she was a friend. He probably should be out there with them. Probably.
He watched the crowd split into six groups and scatter with tentative steps and lanterns into the Bellhaven woods. Another memory. The night of the tragedy they’d gathered to celebrate because a boy who’d ventured into the woods had been found. Timmy Tankersly, twelve years old then, had gone in on a dare, and he’d disappeared for two days. He’d turned up with rashes across his back and arms and scratches on his cheeks and a baseball-sized patch of white in his hair above the neckline, but no recollection of what he’d done or where he’d gone, other than into the woods. He just kept muttering something about the air being bad medicine.
Reverend Cane said the boy had been so badly scared he’d lost pigment in his hair. Ellsworth didn’t know about that, but he had noticed that Timmy’s right eye was stalled. The boy’s father, Tommy Tankersly, had been too overwhelmed with joy at first to notice the thing with his son’s eye. He’d simply corralled him in his arms and hugged him tight and insisted they celebrate his return with music and food in the town hall.
Not everyone had ventured into the woods. Half a dozen had stayed behind at the town hall, most likely to keep an eye out in case the boy returned on his own.
How old was the boy anyway? Ten? Eleven? He’d looked to be about eight on the night Eliza died saving him.
Ellsworth made it down the porch steps with no plan other than stopping at the road for a closer look. The cluster of people waiting in front of the town hall waved. Probably wondered why he wasn’t out there helping.
Ellsworth had been the one to find Timmy Tankersly that day, sleeping a few paces from the boundary of trees their ancestors had marked with yellow paint. No one was to go past the yellow trees. Timmy, now a teenager, was out there now with the rest of them. Not hunting—he was too jingle-brained and skittish to focus on any task more mundane than putting one foot in front of the other—but standing by himself and staring up at the moon, tapping the meat of his right palm agains
t his right temple.
Poor kid never recovered.
Ellsworth shuffled onto the sidewalk, tripped because of the leather traction on the ball of his prosthesis, but managed to catch himself. He took another drink and slid the bottle back into his pocket. He blinked for too long and nearly fell over when he opened his eyes again. He righted himself and stayed put for a minute in the middle of the sidewalk while his brain leveled. That’s when he saw Old Man Tanner emerge from the shadows of his backyard, walking backward around his house.
The old coot showed no sign he knew what was going on or had any idea that the boy was missing. He was too busy walking backward, carefully, as if backtracking in the snow and trying to find his old footprints. As he walked, he tapped his fists against his temples in a gesture not unlike Timmy Tankersly’s. What is he doing? Old Man Tanner continued toward the front of his house and disappeared around the other side.
And then Anna Belle screamed from the woods.
Ellsworth knew her well enough to know it was a relief scream and not one of panic or fear. He took four careful steps toward the road but stopped when he saw Gabriel Fanderbink hurrying from the woods with Raphael cradled in her powerful arms. The boy appeared lifeless at first, but then shifted in the crook of her arm.
Ellsworth had always thought Gabriel was a funny name for a girl. Truth was, she didn’t even look like one, not from afar at least. She was tall—well over six feet—barrel chested and thick limbed, and he’d never seen her in anything but overalls. During a baseball game four years prior—she was the only woman who played—Ellsworth had accidently plunked Gabriel on the shoulder with a fastball, and she’d acted as if it was a mere bee sting. Hardly even flinched before readying herself for the next pitch, that easy-to-please grin etched across her boxy jaw. Gabriel was girth and muscle, and some wrongly said her brain was no larger than a dung beetle’s. But all agreed her heart was too big to measure.
Gabriel spotted Ellsworth at the street—he’d unknowingly made it that far—and jerked him a nod. Ellsworth nodded back. Then he spotted Anna Belle hurrying behind Gabriel. Her eyes shot daggers at him as she stormed inside.
He knew why she was angry. Except for Old Man Tanner, who was on another backward lap around his house, Ellsworth was the only one who’d acted as if he hadn’t given a hoot that Raphael had gone missing. But truthfully—and maybe this was a repercussion of the war—he hadn’t given much of a hoot. He’d never met the boy. It had been a minor level emergency, if it had been an emergency at all. The boy had simply wandered off. It wasn’t as if a mortar shell had blown a soldier’s head into the coiled barbed-wire. Not like Private Latchett taking one in the gut and running across no-man’s-land cradling intestines like a football.
Maybe Anna Belle was right.
The war had taken more than just Ellsworth’s leg. What rattled inside his head now was like a coin clinking in an empty tip jar.
Too much dead space. Too much had grown numb.
Gabriel carried Raphael into Anna Belle’s house, and the door closed.
One of the flyers Berny the postman had been handing out skittered breeze-blown down the street and clung to Ellsworth’s prosthesis. He stared, then bent over to snatch it.
Too drunk to read every word, Ellsworth crumpled it into a ball and shoved it in his trouser pocket, having ingested the gist. Berny had left First Methodist to join the newly arrived Pentecostals, and he’d bought into their ramblings.
Apparently the end of days was here.
Oh well.
Ellsworth opened his mailbox, retrieved his dinner, and hobbled inside to eat it.
Good thing fried chicken still tasted good cold.
CHAPTER 5
The Cantigny forest was small but dense, and the charred-limb canopy did little to keep out the stench of dead Huns.
Ellsworth trudged on, leg-weary, following the piano music as trench mortars exploded all around him. A flamethrower whooshed, igniting nearby trees. Fog drifted. He reached out to grab a swirl, but it slithered through his fingers like he imagined a cloud would.
The music grew louder. He blocked out the whistle of bullets, the shaking of the ground, and focused on the familiar notes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 8 in A Minor. According to Eliza, it was one of the composer’s darkest, written when his mother died and his father blamed him for her death. She had played it often.
His gear weighed heavy. He dropped his shovel and, three paces later, his flare. He moved low boughs aside and entered a clearing. A leafy floor and more fog swirls. He followed the haunting music—right, then left. Louder. He dropped his two canteens on the ground—one empty, the other full. Five paces later he unloaded his four sandbags and the rest of his ammunition rounds. He dropped his belt—only one of his grenades remained.
Through the brush he saw the corner of an upright piano that had no business in the middle of a battlefield. His pace quickened. He sidestepped more limbs. The piano rested in the center of another clearing, where five Kraut soldiers lay dead on the ground, the surrounding leaves and grass darkened blood-black.
It wasn’t Eliza playing the piano, but a man. A slump-shouldered soldier, helmetless, with a gaping red wound at the neckline.
“Calvin.”
Calvin turned on the bench, looked over his shoulder, but continued playing. “Been thinking, Ellsworth. About what you told me on the boat. I think I know what it means. Some got that special spark and aren’t meant to go.” His fingers danced across the keys as if he’d been playing for years, when in fact it had been his wife, Anna Belle, who’d taken lessons from Eliza.
Calvin said, “It’ll all make sense soon enough.”
“Calvin.”
“Look into his eyes.”
“Whose eyes?”
Calvin finished the sonata abruptly, then slumped unmoving over the keys.
The piano music drifted to silence. And then the static-crackle began, intermixed with unseen voices, but familiar.
He smelled vanilla and buttery Cavendish.
Felt himself falling . . .
Ellsworth startled himself off the couch and hit the floor with a thud. His revolver spun across the hardwood and stopped against one of the piano bench legs. He’d only intended to nap last night, but he must have dozed off longer because the sun was up and the birds were singing.
“You okay der, Ellsworth?”
Ellsworth looked up toward the muffled voice across the room and choked on a scream. He knew the face well—Omar Blackman visited as regularly as Anna Belle, Alfred, and Gabriel—but it wasn’t the most pleasant face to see first thing in the morning. Omar had been a Buffalo Soldier during the war, a member of the all-black Ninety-second Infantry. He’d fought bravely in the Meuse-Argonne offensive before shrapnel took off the upper portion of his face. He wore a plaster-molded mask that stretched from his hairline to the dip of his chin below the lower lip. There were nostril holes at the bottom of the fake nose so he could breathe. The slit-opening for the mouth was so that he could talk. When he ate he removed the mask, which meant he never ate in front of anyone. The sculptor had fastened glasses to the mask, all part of the leather contraption that held the clunky ensemble on his head.
Ellsworth would never get used to the contrast in color. Omar’s mask was porcelain white while his skin was dark as coffee grounds.
Omar and Alfred sat in the two living room chairs by the window, tinkering with the knobs on Alfred’s radio. Omar wore a brown suit with white pinstripes, white shoes with brown spats, and a matching white fedora. He liked to dress to the nines to make up for his face. He smoked a curved pipe, the stem of which fit perfectly into the mask slit. He puffed. Smoke escaped the mask holes, filling the room with the smell of vanilla and butter.
“You want dat der leg o’er yonder, Ellsworth?”
“No.” Ellsworth pushed himself up to the couch, noticed his leg leaning against the piano, not far from where his revolver had just ended up. “Thanks. I’ll get it in a minute.”
“Okay den.”
Omar had a funny way of talking, his English infused with hints of Jamaican gobbledegook and capped off with a bad French accent he’d adopted from the war. The American soldiers hadn’t wanted the blacks of the Ninety-second and Ninety-third fighting with them, so they’d cast many aside to fight with the French. The white French civilians had treated them well, and Omar had befriended several. His newly acquired accent was a tribute.
Ellsworth rubbed his face and yawned. “How long you two been in here?”
“Since sunup,” said Alfred.
“Time is it now?”
“Noon thirty,” said Alfred, craning an ear toward the radio. “Caught a clear station for thirty minutes.” He fought the static, twisted knobs and straightened wires. “It’s gone now.”
“Static der in den pop dat voice come.”
Ellsworth rubbed his face. “I should really lock my door at night.”
“What’s that?” asked Alfred, eyes to the ceiling.
“Nothing.”
“He said him der should lock dat door at night.” Omar exhaled pipe smoke and laughed. “No matta. We jus’ dem break dat window, Ellsworth.”
Ellsworth didn’t doubt it. Omar and Alfred were here more than they were home with their wives. They’d all spent the entire time overseas wishing to be back home, but once they returned they hadn’t known how to interact. Omar, the leader of Bellhaven’s black Moslem community, was one of a handful who’d stayed behind when others went north for jobs or fled the night the Klan burned the town hall. Those who remained followed Omar’s every word whether faceless or not. Before the war, he’d been a virtuoso on the double bass, with a singing voice so deep it produced cold chills. He could juggle anything, and when he danced the Juba inside the town hall and got to energetically stomping against the floorboards, everyone had stopped to watch.
All Things Bright and Strange Page 4