They’d never discussed it specifically, but it was obvious she wanted another child.
He wanted whatever would make her smile again.
They sipped dark coffee on that chilly winter day when the camellias were blooming. Fresh on Ellsworth’s mind was what they’d done last night and the way she’d wrapped her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear so matter-of-factly, “It worked this time.”
“I reckon so,” he’d told her, although how did she really know?
Ellsworth sipped his coffee and stole glances at her through the steam. And that’s when the cardinal bird arrived on the porch rail, a male by the look of the black mask and brilliant plumage. Its tiny talons clicked against the wood. The bird watched them both, and then took off into the woods.
Eliza’s smile finally returned in full.
Ellsworth recalled that winter day with the cardinal bird, and what Eliza said after it’d flown away. Cardinals represent loved ones who’ve passed. They visit you when you need them the most—in times of celebration or despair.
Eliza was a strong believer in signs. She was sure the bird represented their dead son, Erik.
Ellsworth leaned back in his chair and watched out the window. Watched all that color, the blooms tousled by the breeze. What would our boy have been like had he lived? Would he have looked like me or Eliza? Would he have been a baseball player—a pitcher even?
Ellsworth’s eyes pooled with moisture. He’d thought that his emotions dried up long ago. That he’d left those tears over in Europe, when he’d close wet eyelids in the trenches and dream Eliza and his boy were still alive back home. A make-believe reason to keep fighting that nightmare war.
The nightmare still wasn’t over.
Three cardinal birds landed on the steep pitch of the town hall’s roof. Ellsworth stole a gulp of Old Sam and watched them until they flew away a couple minutes later.
By the time Erik was born dead, some in town had already begun to whisper about Eliza’s sanity, and Ellsworth hadn’t known how to take that. But now he did.
He’d told Anna Belle the arrival of the redbirds was a coincidence, but that was a lie. He felt it too—that something was happening. And he was sure that the redbird who’d visited him the day before and stopped him from pulling the trigger had been a representation of someone. But who? Eliza? His mother coming to tell him he was forgiven? Or maybe his father coming to say he was sorry for dying on the church steps when Ellsworth was a kid—sorry they’d never be able to dust the gloves off for one last Sunday game of catch.
But you’d never look me in the eyes, would you, Papa?
Ellsworth cracked the living room window open an inch to allow fresh air into his stagnant home. He breathed in the distant sea, the brackish marshes. Smelled shrimp, crab, and oysters, cord grass and salty mud. The breeze was familiar, but somehow different, as if the pressure in the low-country air was a smidge off-kilter in a way he couldn’t yet determine, good or bad. The moss in the live oaks swayed and pulled and tugged almost cyclical, ushering in something unseen from the coastal salt marshes and tidal swamps where croaker, menhaden, and flounder swam through the muck.
The thought of fish made him hungry. The clock on the wall showed ten minutes after five. Almost time to eat again. But would Anna Belle still be cooking for him now that he’d told her she bumped her gums too much?
He reckoned so. The woman liked to cook, and somebody had to eat it. The boy Raphael was thin as a rail and didn’t look like he ate much.
Ellsworth leaned forward in his chair to get a good view of the plantation house up on the hill. That man Lou Eddington had wasted no time. Three hours ago, about the same time Omar and Alfred finally went home to their wives, a half dozen wagons had arrived on the hillside, and two dozen workers had been hammering and sawing ever since. The roof was already off the house, and they’d begun to put on a new one. They’d replaced boards on the picket fence and were repainting it white. Three men on ladders scraped at the paint near the roofline. Several men trimmed the hedges, and even more collected deadfall, debris, and weeds from the vast lawn and cotton field beside it.
Ellsworth would have put down tarps to catch the flakes of yellow paint those scrapers were no doubt producing. He would have replaced some of the wood around those windows too. He would have done a more thorough job than these palookas.
Anna Belle’s front door opened. She and the boy stepped out onto the porch and crossed the road together, empty handed. Where’s the food? They approached the porch, and Anna Belle didn’t bother knocking. She just walked in as if the house was her own.
Raphael stood sheepishly beside her.
“What do you want?” asked Ellsworth.
“Figured you were hungry,” said Anna Belle.
“Figured right.” Ellsworth leaned forward, squinted. “The food invisible?”
Anna Belle looked away. “It was his idea to come over. I was against it.”
Raphael stepped forward, smiled, his teeth as white as his eyes were green. “Mr. Newberry. I thought mayhap you’d like to join us for dinner tonight.”
“Where?”
“Our house. Across the road.”
“I know where it is.” He settled back in his chair. “What’d you cook?”
“Fried chicken,” said Raphael.
“He helped me,” said Anna Belle.
Ellsworth grunted. “What’s your last name?”
Raphael shrugged. “Dunno, sir.”
“You don’t know your last name?”
“No, sir.”
“How about a middle name?”
Anna Belle said, “Hard to have a middle without a last, Ellsworth.”
He grunted again. “So it’s just Raphael?”
The boy smiled again. “Yes, sir. That’s what I’m called.”
Ellsworth was dubious. “Where’d you learn to play the piano?”
“From some man named Jive.”
“Jive? What kind of a name is that?”
Raphael shrugged. “Name he was given. As Jive says it, I learned to play the minute I was born. But Jive taught me how to read the notes.”
“Is that so?”
“I reckon it is.”
The retort took Ellsworth aback. “I reckon” was his line. “Where’d you come from?”
Anna Belle said, “This isn’t an interrogation, Ellsworth. We can conversate over dinner. You coming or not?”
Ellsworth grunted. “Reach me my hat.”
Ellsworth sometimes wished second thoughts came first.
If they had, he wouldn’t have come. At Anna Belle’s kitchen table, he sat opposite Raphael and steamed. Piano virtuoso or not, green-eyed monster or not, the boy was the reason Eliza had run back into the burning town hall. And when Ellsworth asked him again where he came from, the boy’s only answer was “Somewhere down south.”
“How’d you get here?”
“I don’t remember.” Raphael bit into a crisp chicken leg. “It was nighttime, though.”
“You remember it was dark, but not how you got here?”
Raphael nodded, took another bite of chicken.
“Was it a train? A wagon? A car?”
Anna Belle sipped her sweet tea. “Ellsworth, we’re taking it slow. There’s a lot he doesn’t remember.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Roper.” He looked at Ellsworth. “Your ex-wife was nice.”
“She’s not my ex-wife. She’s my late wife. There’s a big difference. And what do you know about her?”
The boy shrugged so deep his neck might have disappeared between his shoulders. “She saved my life. And my momma’s. And she’s the one told me your birth name was Michael.”
Ellsworth felt better. The boy hadn’t inferred it after all. “Your momma died in the fire.”
Raphael nodded.
“How did Eliza know about you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Ellsworth leaned back in his chair and tossed his napkin beside his plate. �
��I think I need to leave. That story’s got more holes than Swiss cheese.”
“Wagon,” said Raphael.
Ellsworth said, “What’d he call me?”
“What about a wagon, dear?” asked Anna Belle.
“We come up from somewhere south in a wagon. Hid under a wool blanket that smelled like burnt leaves.”
“Who?”
“Me, my momma, and your ex-wife.”
The boy said ex-wife with a smirk, like he was trying to get under Ellsworth’s skin.
Ellsworth ground his teeth, thought about Eliza traveling the trains. “What was my late wife doing somewhere down south?”
“Saving us.”
“From what? From who?” Ellsworth leaned forward. “Did it have something to do with the Klan showing up here that night?”
“What Klan?”
“What Klan? How can you not—”
“Ellsworth,” cautioned Anna Belle. “He’s been through something terrible. I think his mind forgets out of necessity. I’m sure you know about that.”
“Would you like to play a game of catch sometime, Mr. Newberry?”
“Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?”
“No,” he said. “Mrs. Roper said you used to play baseball.”
“Well . . . not anymore.”
“How come?”
“One of my legs is made of wood, smarty-pants.”
“But she said you have two gloves, and you still have both your arms, don’t you?”
“I don’t have to listen to this.” Ellsworth made as if to get up.
Raphael said, “I know how to make you not remember the bad stuff, Mr. Newberry.”
“What are you talking about?” The boy had stolen Anna Belle’s attention too.
Raphael finished his tea. “That’s why I went into the woods last night. I prayed that I’d forget all the bad stuff. And I did.”
“Prayed to who?” asked Ellsworth.
“I don’t know exactly. I can show you. It’s in the woods.”
“What’s in the woods?”
“The healing floor.”
Blood rushed from Ellsworth’s face.
Anna Belle touched his arm, asked if he was well. He didn’t answer. He was remembering what Eliza had said after she insinuated she’d talked to their son, Erik—the one born dead, not the one they’d created in passionate winter silence, only to miscarry four months later.
“He’s with the angels. I knelt upon the healing floor.”
Anna Belle reached across the table and held the boy’s hands. “Raphael, what are you talking about? What healing floor?”
“In the chapel.”
“What chapel?”
“The one in the woods. It’s not hidden anymore. I think that’s why everything’s blooming.”
CHAPTER 8
They’d agreed to meet behind the town hall.
Ellsworth showed up with a flare and two canteens of water attached to his belt, his revolver in his holster, and a rifle in his hands.
“Is all that necessary?” asked Anna Belle.
“Everything’s necessary.” Ellsworth straightened his brimmed hat and stared into the woods.
Anna Belle seemed distracted by the goings-on at Eddington’s house—the hammering and painting hadn’t slowed a bit. Ellsworth touched her arm. “We best get along. I don’t want to be caught out there after sundown.” He nodded toward Raphael. “Lead the way.”
Raphael went right in. There wasn’t a definitive path to follow, but the woods weren’t very dense. Between the trees were open spaces accentuated by red azaleas, purple redbuds, and delicate drifts of dogwood. Unlike the evenly spaced trees of the avenue of oaks, the live oaks here were more scattered. The canopy of limbs and moss allowed in cross-hatchings of sunlight, casting shadows across the leaf-and acorn-covered ground.
Ellsworth walked carefully, on the lookout for mud because his prosthesis was prone to stick. Every time Anna Belle and Raphael turned to wait for him he urged them onward, pointing with his rifle.
“Keep that thing pointed low.” Anna Belle walked with her skirt hiked up to her shins.
“Krauts hide behind trees, Anna Belle.”
She rolled her eyes. But the deeper into the woods they walked, the more he could have been back in Cantigny. He flinched when a squirrel skittered past. Raphael said, “Just a squirrel, Mr. Newberry.” He pulled his revolver on a copperhead snake hanging from a limb. “He’s more scared of you than you are of him, Mr. Newberry.” Two minutes later Ellsworth pointed his rifle at a deer.
“Don’t shoot, Mr. Newberry.”
Ellsworth had already lowered his gun. I’ll shoot when I want to shoot.
It had been years since he’d gone this deep into the woods to find that Tankersly boy. Now they were a good two hundred yards past the trees marked with yellow paint. So far, nothing had seized control of Ellsworth’s mind like Alfred’s mother had once told them would happen if they entered the woods—that the air would kill brain cells just like cocaine would, and soon they’d be unable to remember the simplest of things. His hair hadn’t turned white like Timmy Tankersly’s had.
Anna Belle walked hand-in-hand with Raphael now, but her free hand covered her mouth and nose while her skirt hem brushed the deadfall. Her mother had told her the woods would cause cancer if too much of the air was taken in. Old habits die hard.
Seemed like the breeze would lessen there among the trees, but it only grew stronger the deeper they walked. Red, white, and purple blooms reflected majestically in a nearby stream crossed by a small white bridge. Who built it? The bridge was dilapidated, with a few missing floorboards, but it still gave the scene the charm of a beautiful painting.
But his mother had once told him that the beauty of the Bellhaven woods was like a desert mirage—an optical phenomenon inviting trouble, an illusion of light rays that disguised the truth. She’d warned him not to be fooled.
After all, people disappeared in these woods. The legends went back centuries to the town’s founding in 1682. Winds with voices. Fog taking on human silhouettes.
Nonsense, Ellsworth told himself, but he still watched the gnarled, oddly shaped trees as if they were about to do something.
“Are you sure there’s a chapel out here?” he asked Raphael.
The boy nodded. “We’re halfway there.”
Halfway there? We’re liable to end up at the coast. Or in the Ashley River, depending on which way we’re headed. He’d long passed knowing where they were. Still, the boy showed no sign of fear.
They pressed on. Honeysuckle with red flowers and yellow centers coiled around the trunk of a slanted live oak. Raphael stuck his nose right in among them, and Ellsworth told him to be careful. Three hummingbirds hovered near a patch of bright red cardinal flowers. To the right was ground cover of deep blue and green foliage that Ellsworth couldn’t place.
He was getting short of breath and anxious, and his brain began to feel muddled. He decided to take a break and told the others to go on. They waited. He shared his water canteens and took in the surroundings. Moss sparkling silver in the threads of waning sunlight. Tree bark so dark it was nearly black. Leaves green, stiff, and leathery.
The limbs of the live oaks had always reminded him of arms, the way they often grew sideways and went in any direction they wanted, large and spreading. He spotted one tree whose limb dipped inches from the ground for five yards, only to take a sharp upturn toward the light again. Ellsworth sat on that horizontal limb. It moved beneath his weight but then settled.
He wished Eliza was with him. They’d often walked the outskirts of the woods and occasionally ventured just past the yellow trees. But they’d never gone this far together, although now he knew Eliza had traveled here on her own at least once.
It was magical. But it was a magic that made his heart beat slower rather than faster.
Anna Belle turned in a circle, surveying the trees. “Maybe we should go back, try again in the morning when the sun
is fresh.”
“We’re close now.” Raphael squeezed her hand, the child protecting the adult.
Raphael hadn’t grown up in Bellhaven. He hadn’t heard the tales as they had. Amelia Jeffers had seen werewolves. Connie Vargas had seen spirits. Trudy Valient had told her son that there was a man in there dressed as a hooded monk who took children every full moon, so never go past the yellow trees.
Raphael watched them both. “Old Man Tanner warned me not to go into the woods.”
“When?”
“Right before I went in,” said Raphael. “Told me little boys who enter the woods never come back out.”
Part of the woods’ aura came from all the stories people told to keep kids out of them—unworldly stories, all of them, but fun to repeat. Which was no doubt why they grew more fantastical with every generation.
Raphael climbed atop the limb and sat so close to Ellsworth their legs touched.
Ellsworth scooted an inch away from the boy.
Anna Belle laughed. “Room on there for me?”
“There’s room, but . . .” said Ellsworth.
“But what?”
“Not sure if it’ll hold.”
Anna Belle sat on it anyway, with Raphael in between them. She bounced to prove she wouldn’t break the limb, which amused Raphael. Ellsworth slurped water from his canteen and wiped his mouth. He’d propped his rifle next to his leg. Part of him wished for a Kraut to jump out so he could shoot something. Some deeply strewn seed longed to see blood splatter against a tree.
Two cardinals flew beneath the canopy, chasing a sparrow. A cloud-white egret slow-walked behind distant trees. The sun ducked behind a cloud, and the woods darkened.
Sundown wasn’t far off.
Ellsworth sucked in a deep breath but couldn’t fill his lungs. His chest tightened, and his heartbeat slowed even more. Sweat dotted his brow. Anna Belle looked to be struggling for breath too.
Stay still too long and your heart will stop. That’s what Berny Martino’s father had told him when he was seven.
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