Ellsworth hopped down from the tree limb and grabbed his rifle. “Break’s over.”
“You’re the one who wanted to stop,” said Anna Belle.
“Well, now I’m the one moving on.” He motioned with his rifle for them to move along. “Don’t think it’s a good idea to stop moving for too long.” He nodded toward Raphael. “I think that’s how come that white spot showed in his hair.”
Raphael scratched the white spot as if it suddenly itched, then smiled. “I like it, Mr. Newberry.”
“You would.”
Anna Belle stared at the white patch in the boy’s hair. She held worry in her cheeks the way a squirrel would hold a nut, but for Raphael’s sake she held her hands in the air, pretending to be a prisoner. Ellsworth was glad they were in front of him so they couldn’t see his smile.
Eventually she put her arms down, and for a good ten paces he watched her hips sway. Two minutes later, Ellsworth found it easier to breathe again. Anna Belle’s breathing appeared less labored too.
Best to keep moving.
Five minutes later they came upon a narrow stream lined with red and mauve asters. Anna Belle helped Ellsworth across. He liked the feeling of her hand around his arm, but as soon as they got to the other side, he pulled his arm free.
“We’re getting closer,” Raphael said in an awed voice. “I remember these funny-looking trees.” He nodded to several live oaks growing in hard, gnarled tangents that looked like arthritic fingers.
“The Indians bent them to serve as trail markers,” Ellsworth said, “and they grew that way.” He pushed aside a branch. “From what I was told, the deep roots spread out into a system under ground,” he said. “So these trees are connected. Makes them resistant to floods and such, and to the strong winds from the ocean storms.”
Raphael nodded, interested. For a moment Ellsworth feared the boy was growing on him. So he shut up, and for the next few minutes they moved in silence. Even this deep in the woods, redbuds bloomed in purple profusion. A speckled thrush hopped in and out among the blooms. A threesome of white-tailed deer watched from a nearby stream.
“Almost there.” Raphael’s pace quickened as a blue butterfly landed on his shoulder.
Ellsworth checked his timepiece. They’d been walking for nearly thirty minutes, and his nub throbbed. Up ahead he heard birdsong—loud like an exhibit he’d once seen at the menagerie, out of place even in these woods. His chest tightened again, so he moved on.
Raphael pushed a tangle of limbs aside to reveal a small clearing lit by the setting sun. Ellsworth lowered his rifle and stepped through.
His heart swelled.
Curtain-like tree moss surrounded the clearing. Hundreds of birds flew about—blood-red cardinals, sleek mockingbirds, royal eastern bluebirds, purple martins, and egg-yolk yellow warblers—all of them singing. Long-necked, stark-white egrets moved about on the edge of the clearing, far from their swampland home. Dogwood trees bloomed pink and white. A wide-growing butterfly bush showed flashes of purple beneath a cloud of colorful butterflies.
Anna Belle stood with hands over her mouth, tears in her eyes. “What is this place?”
The chapel rested near the back of the small, rounded clearing, in front of a trickling stream with a giant live oak slanting over the water. One of the limbs dipped down like a black elbow into the stream, disappearing for a yard under the water before swooping upward again toward the far side. Two silver-barked river birches leaned like fingers touching from either side of the stream.
The tiny chapel looked to be about eight feet wide and ten feet tall, stone-walled with a pitched roof and small steeple at the front. The long walls bumped out on one end so that the building would resemble a cross if viewed from above. Centered in the façade was a rounded wooden door that leaned slightly from a broken top hinge. A buttery yellow warbler emerged from the gap atop the door, sang for a few seconds, and then joined the rest of the flying birds. The leaf-bed clearing was spotted with bird droppings, as was the poorly shingled roof—there was a hole on the right side where rain could get in.
Anna Belle turned slowly in a circle, said again, “What is this place?”
Ellsworth stood speechless. Seeing it all made him want to paint. To sing. To do something. He looked up, turned as Anna Belle was turning. “Must be three hundred birds here, Anna Belle. You ever seen so much color?”
“More color than the Magnolia Gardens up the river.”
Ten redbirds sat in a line atop the roof’s pitch.
“This is where I came,” said Raphael. “To forget all the bad stuff.”
Ellsworth recalled seeing Old Man Tanner enter the woods every day after lunch with a shovel and limb cutters. Could he have found this place? The grounds resembled the woods behind Tanner’s house, plucked free of weeds and cleared of vines, the woody tangles and brambles trimmed back and cleared. The exterior chapel walls were stained green and brown, as if they’d recently been covered by vines and deadfall.
Hidden.
Raphael reached for the door.
“Don’t,” said Ellsworth.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” Ellsworth said. “Beautiful don’t always mean safe, is all.” Mother told me not to be fooled.
Ellsworth placed his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I once went into a Kraut trench with some fellow soldiers. The Boches had fled. The dirt walls were full of lithographs. Peaceful landscapes. Hunters in the Alps. Winter cottages, windows aglow with warm light. Made us think for a bit that they were human. But next to those lithographs were some sketches so degrading and vile—”
“Ellsworth.” Anna Belle warned.
“Caricatures in positions of all kinds of coupling,” Ellsworth went on. “Demonic and evil. Images only a diseased mind could think of.”
“Ellsworth.”
“We come upon a young Kraut dead in the trench. Couldn’t have been more than twenty. In his hand was a picture of his wife and little son. One of our men, Private Barnich, felt bad about that. He knelt down next to that dead Kraut and reached out to take that picture. I screamed for him not to, but he did anyway. The Boches had placed a bomb under the body, put the picture there to lure us close. As soon as Private Barnich grabbed that picture, he was blown to bits.”
“Ellsworth, stop.”
“God rest Barnich’s soul.” Ellsworth stared at the chapel door. “’Cause we never found his head.”
Anna Belle said quietly to Ellsworth, “Was that necessary?”
“Everything’s necessary, Anna Belle.” He approached the chapel with his rifle. He curled his fingers into the door gap and ducked as two goldfinches and a painted bunting flew out.
Raphael said, “If you open your mind to it, Mr. Newberry, you can hear’m talkin’.”
“Hear who?”
“Those that already passed on. Like they trapped inside somehow.” Raphael looked up at Ellsworth. “She told me about this place ’fore she died.”
“Who told you?”
“Eliza.”
Ellsworth gulped, turned from the boy, and faced the chapel. Anna Belle’s hand touched Ellsworth’s shoulder, and they stepped inside.
A cardinal and two white sanderlings fluttered across the arched, rib-vaulted ceiling. Too ornate and overconstructed for such a small place. Sunlight beamed down at an angle through the hole in the roof. Dust motes floated in the light. Ellsworth reached his hand out as if to grab them. The air was warm, hugging him like a blanket.
How old is this place? The chapel seemed much larger than it had appeared on the outside. Set into the far wall was a circular stained-glass window that cast a colorful prism of light on the floor. Matching stained-glass windows lined the side walls. They made him think of the Charleston cathedral. Ellsworth looked down. The floor from wall to wall was tile, thousands of tiny pieces inlaid to form the picture of an angel with wings flying away from a family gathered around an arched doorway.
“A mosaic.” Ellsworth studied the fami
ly portrayed in the tiles. Were they praying? In fear? Thankful? He knelt awkwardly and brushed his hand across the floor. It was scattered with bird droppings, dusty and cold, yet when he pulled away his fingers tingled with warmth.
I knelt upon the healing floor.
Ellsworth stood.
Raphael had followed them into the chapel. At the right wall outcropping, the boy was on his knees with his hands folded, bowed in front of a five-foot-tall statue of a winged man holding a staff and standing on a fish. In the niche opposite stood another statue, Mary holding the newborn Christ. The plaster walls were painted white, peeling in places. Near the ceiling, a foot-tall bas-relief carving stretched around the entire chapel, a continuous scene of winged angels and serpentine devils in confrontation. Below the bas-relief ran a fresco of the same height and with similar themes portrayed in vibrant colors—brilliant white clouds and royal blue skies, blackened rocks licked by orange-red flames, lifelike figures.
Anna Belle ran her hand across the fresco and then the sculpted panel, walking alongside them until she’d paced the small chapel in full. More birds had entered—two more cardinals and a bluebird. A woodpecker stared down from the hole in the ceiling. A purple finch sat on one of the ribs above, whistling as three purple butterflies spun past.
A memory flashed like a lightning bolt, exiting just as soon as it entered. “Your father was sterile, Ellsworth.” The voice of his mother was in his head.
Ellsworth blinked it away, just as he’d tried to do the first time his mother said it.
Too real. Too close.
His father’s voice this time: “Doctor said we wouldn’t be able.” Ellsworth didn’t remember the exact timbre of his father’s voice. He’d died before some memories started to stick. So why could he hear it now?
“Ellsworth?” It was Anna Belle now, in the present.
That’s why he could never look me in the eyes.
“Ellsworth, what’s happening?”
He gripped his rifle in both hands, turned in a circle. Dust motes spun in rays of dizzying light. Suddenly the air seemed suffocating. His heart slow-thudded and his palms went clammy.
The chapel grew brighter. Colors faded and then swarmed back full and deep like fresh oil paint. He felt the flutter of bird wings, but he couldn’t hear the birds. He heard a heartbeat though, loud like a drum, echoing off walls that were now alive and moving, the bas-relief and fresco angels and devils clashing with swords and shields.
And then he heard another woman’s voice.
“Ellsworth.”
This one wasn’t a memory forced back to the now, but Eliza’s voice strong and true, as if she stood right beside him. Voices of those who’d passed on. He closed his eyes, dreamed up her face, then shook it away. Refused it. He kicked open the door and stumbled outside, fell to the ground and sucked in the Bellhaven air. It was fresh but somehow not as pure as that inside those walls.
Pure but deadly. Not of this world. “Don’t be fooled.” He panted, wiped his dry mouth.
He could hear the birds now. They circled above, singing. They perched on colorful branches, on the roof. He made it to his feet, brushed off his hands, tried to deny the clarity he now felt inside his head. The peace and tranquility.
It’s just a chapel. Just a small chapel in the woods.
Raphael stood beside him. “Did you forget the bad stuff, Mr. Newberry?”
Ellsworth shook his head. No, I didn’t. All he’d heard was a voice that had no business being boxed inside those walls, walls that had somehow churned up stored memories he’d thought long forgotten.
The chapel door trembled in the breeze. Anna Belle was in there. The bottom of her feet were visible, the pale flesh of her calves as she knelt on that floor. He should get her. He should run in there and pull her out before she took in too much of it.
Just as he started forward, the chapel door opened and Anna Belle emerged. She wiped her eyes, eyes so clear she appeared a different person. She smiled and then placed her hands on Ellsworth’s arms.
“I talked to him, Ellsworth.”
“Talked to who?”
“To Calvin.”
Ellsworth shook his head, spun away from her hold. Don’t be a pushover, Anna Belle. Don’t be such an easy mark. He clumped out of the clearing and reentered the Bellhaven woods, where dusk seemed to overtake him. He could hear Anna Belle and Raphael behind him.
He was tired, his leg throbbed, and he needed to get back home to his chair and bottle of Old Sam. But he couldn’t seem to distance himself from those voices. He refused to believe, but still they haunted him.
Voices of the past.
Voices of the dead.
“Ellsworth, I heard him.” Anna Belle hurried into the woods after him. “He spoke of you. Calvin did.”
Ellsworth froze. “What’d he say?”
She looked at him cockeyed. “He said the war was to blame. And that you’re forgiven.”
CHAPTER 9
Sunlight cast rainbows across the nave of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist.
Colorful stained glass sent directly from God—or so his mother had said about Broad Street’s soaring new cathedral.
Michael rested his head against the pew. The creamy columns stretched to an arched ceiling that looked like an overturned boat. The pews were hard and uncomfortable. His mother said they were meant to be that way, that church was not a place to lounge about. His father said they were Flemish pews. The cathedral was built of chiseled brownstone from Connecticut. The three altars were made of white marble from Vermont.
“So the pews came from Flem?” asked Michael.
His father smiled but didn’t look at him. He never really looked him in the eyes. “Yes,” he told Michael, “that’s exactly where they came from. Pews from the land of Flem.”
Michael’s mother gave them a stern look.
Father and son straightened against the hard-backed pews from Flem, and Michael tried not to laugh. Why did they have to get to the cathedral twenty minutes before mass anyway? The first few times, Mother had just wanted to take in every nook and cranny of the newly completed church. Last week they’d ventured down to the crypt and found a chapel there as well. But what was there left to see?
Dust motes floated through colorful light. The Opus 139 pipe organ warmed up in the rear gallery. The colored windows across the nave represented the life of Christ from nativity to ascension. Above the high altar was a series of windows duplicating Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, The Last Supper, and higher up Saint John himself baptized Jesus while angels played musical instruments. Rose windows, the Gallery of Saints—his father had explained them all over the past weeks. He seemed to know a lot about religious art, but not so much about religion. When Michael asked him why they genuflected before entering the pew, his father had looked confused and said, “That’s a question for your mother.”
Michael’s father had big-knuckled hands, broad shoulders, and thinning hair he typically kept combed beneath a brown bowler. He was a builder and made little pretense of being smart on topics such as religion or politics. He and some friends had built the town hall where they lived in Bellhaven, and he’d helped rebuild many of the houses in Charleston after the earthquake in 1886 leveled it.
Michael’s mother touched her stomach and leaned toward her husband. “I’m feeling a little unsettled. I’ll be back promptly.”
“Where’s Mother going?”
“To the bathroom,” said his father, his eyes focused a familiar spot just above Michael’s right shoulder. And then he smiled and waved to another suited man across the aisle.
His father had a lot of friends who attended mass at the new cathedral.
Michael ran a finger along his neckline. His tie was too tight. This morning while his father tied it, he’d asked why they even went to church.
Papa had smirked. “Because your mother makes us.”
But it was more than that. Other than the building of it, his father didn’t have man
y answers on what went on inside the new cathedral every Sunday. He didn’t understand Latin and hadn’t even tried to learn as Michael was doing now at school. Sometimes his father dozed off during mass. Mother would nudge him awake and he’d snort in the pews from Flem, mumble something about praying with his eyes closed.
They had a small Catholic church in their hometown of Bellhaven, which was only about ten miles outside of Charleston, tucked and forgotten in the woods surrounding Middleton and Magnolia and the Ashley River. But even his father insisted they take the carriage ride into Charleston to the cathedral every Sunday.
Truth was, Michael had never seen his father smile more than he always did after church was over. He’d mingle on the sun-drenched steps on his way out to Broad Street, shaking hands and patting backs and giving hugs, chinning with one and all as his chest swelled with joy and their bones hummed from the choral music escorting them out the doors.
Michael looked up at his father. “Why are you sweating?”
His father wiped his brow. He looked pale and clammy.
“I’m not sweating.”
“You are.” Michael looked straight ahead as more people arrived. “You going to be able to play a game of catch when we get home?”
His father nodded.
It was something new they’d begun—playing catch every Sunday after church. Michael could already feel the hard baseball in his grip, the stitched thread beneath his fingers. His father was throwing harder now because Michael had proved he could catch it. Michael’s pitches were gaining steam as well. His father’s glove popped every time he caught one flush. He’d pretend the impact broke bones in his hand, and Michael would flush with pride.
What was taking mother so long? Mass would be starting soon.
His father leaned closer. “Watch this.” His hands were out in front with the fingers interlocked. The two index fingers were extended upward and touching at the tips like a steep house gable, while the thumbs ran upright and parallel to each other.
“Here’s the church,” said his father. “And here’s the steeple.” The upright index fingers. “Open up the doors.” He moved the thumbs apart and wiggled the rest of the fingers hanging downward from his coupled hands. “And here’s all the people.”
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