He leaned back against the pew and grinned, then wiped more sweat from his brow. He wouldn’t have done that trick had mother been in the pew with them.
What was that about anyway? Church and steeple and door thumbs and finger people?
Michael’s father spoke from the side of his mouth as the nave began to fill. “You asked earlier, why we go to church? For me, it’s the people. I don’t pay much attention to what they’re doing up there in the front. But I’ve never been to mass where I didn’t feel better afterwards. You know, from having gone.”
Michael nodded like he understood, but he didn’t. Maybe one day he would.
His father wiped his brow again. “My friends are here, Michael. Church is people. People are the church.” He motioned toward the stained-glass windows. “Church is art too.” And then toward the choral singers warming up. “And church is music.”
He imagined his father smiling and shaking hands on the front steps after mass and realized that he too always felt better from having gone.
Michael’s mother returned to the pew. A minute later organ music soared, filling the cathedral’s belly with beautiful sound. The procession started down the aisle and mass began.
Michael’s father sweated all through church, until eventually mother made him take off his suit jacket. His shirt was stained wet, with deep pits under the arms and across his back.
He made it through mass, smiling on the way out despite the lack of color in his cheeks, and even got to shake the hands of a half dozen friends before he collapsed on the cathedral steps. The doctor would later call it a heart attack. But Michael’s mother would eventually explain, guiltily—when Michael was more of an age to understand the dimensions of the adult heart and mind—that it wasn’t so much an attack of the heart that had killed his father as it was a heart mistakenly broken.
Michael was first to his father’s side after he’d collapsed outside the cathedral. He guided his father’s sweat-drenched head to rest on the first step so it faced the clear sky. His eyes settled directly on Michael’s, and a look of peace swept across his father’s pale face.
He said, “Blue.”
Michael shook his head. “What’s blue?” He knew his eyes were blue—some said the bluest eyes they’d ever seen. But his father didn’t elaborate.
Instead he smiled at his son, and just before he took his last breath he said, “There is no land of Flem, Michael. They’re from Flanders. The pews. They’re Dutch.”
For the first time since the war, Ellsworth slept free of nightmares.
He awoke the next morning rejuvenated, fresh and alert, knowing the chapel visit had something to do with it. But is it possible? He tossed the blanket aside and sat up on the couch. Just a coincidence? Like the boy playing that Mozart sonata?
But he’d heard the voices. His parents’. And then Eliza’s. She’d said his name, and in that instant her voice had been as real as drizzle on a tin roof. If he’d stayed inside the chapel longer, she would have said more.
Anna Belle had been the brave one.
“He said you’re forgiven.” If only she knew what he’d done.
Ellsworth drank his morning coffee, and on his way into the kitchen he stopped before the stairwell and eyed the second-floor landing. Today was the day he’d go up.
He rested his coffee mug on the first stair and used the wall railing for support. He placed his right foot on the first step, followed by the prosthesis. It worked well enough, so he used that cadence all the way up, and he was sweating by the time he reached the landing. His bedroom was down the hallway to the right. A crack of sunlight shone under the door.
The last time he walked this hallway, he’d had two legs. A dream to one day pitch in the big leagues. A wife to cling to at night.
He turned the knob. The door clicked, swung open to sunlight, dust motes, and warm, musty low-country air. In the summer they used to move their bed to the middle of the room for better breeze. Eliza would stand at the window and watch the woods when she couldn’t sleep. Ellsworth would roll over in bed, pretend his wife wasn’t losing her mind.
Dust covered the floor and baseboards. The bedcovers were pulled back and tangled. They’d never gotten around to making the bed the morning of the fire. Eliza used to wait until night to do it, tucking and smoothing until all the creases were just right, only to pull back the covers minutes later. She couldn’t slide into an unmade bed. She had those adorable quirks.
“Ellsworth, there’s a black woman walking backwards in the woods.”
“Come back to bed, Eliza. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
On the far side of the bed was the easel Eliza had gotten him the week before her death—the easel he’d said he would probably never use, the type of painting he’d thought pointless. A blank canvas rested upon it, the red bow still secured to the top. A clean wooden palette, new paintbrushes, and several tubes of paint rested on the floor below it.
He ran a finger across the canvas, blew dust off, and then turned toward the bed. The mattress was lumpy and cold. Dust puffed out when he patted it. He blew into the cloud and particles scattered. He pulled his legs up and lay back on Eliza’s pillow. It still held her scent—the vanilla extract she liked to dab behind her ears, plus the jasmine powder from her nightly bath. Her dressing table was centered on the near wall next to the window. A tin of facial cream had been left open, now dried out. Next to it sat a small container of rouge, a stack of blotting papers, and the lipstick tube she’d been so pleased to purchase, that clever push-up stick. Ellsworth had said it looked like a bullet cartridge, to which she’d pointed a finger gun at him and fired a pretend shot across the bedroom. He’d acted like he’d been hit. She was upon him in a flash, her breath on his neck, her hair against his cheek as she leaned close to kiss his lips.
“I know you’re not dead,” she’d said, giggling.
He’d opened his eyes. “How could you tell?”
“I can still see your color.”
Ellsworth woke up starving.
The wall clock read five. He’d slept through breakfast and lunch.
Pots and pans clanked downstairs, accompanied by a familiar man’s voice.
Ellsworth sat up in bed and rubbed his face. His cheeks were like sandpaper. He stood and stretched. Dust no longer covered every surface of the bedroom. The hardwood shone and smelled of cedar oil. Two flies tapped against the inside of the window, and a third circled. He’d have to find the swatter. His father used to roll up newspaper and bop them.
“Your father was sterile, Ellsworth.”
He pushed it away, focused on the clean room. Anna Belle, no doubt, had cleaned while he slept. Food aromas wafted from the first floor.
Descending the stairs was more awkward than climbing them.
Raphael appeared at the bottom when Ellsworth was halfway down. He directed him toward the kitchen, where the table was full of steaming bowls, plates waiting to be filled, and glasses of sweet tea. Anna Belle wiped her hand on a dish towel and smiled as she took a seat at the table.
The man’s voice he’d recognized earlier was Alfred’s. He was at the end of the kitchen table next to his wife, Linda May, who sat with a giddy smile, her dark hair cut into a neatly parted bob. She didn’t look to Ellsworth like a woman Alfred had described to him, one who’d fallen into despair because of a blind, brain-damaged husband.
“Ellsworth.” Alfred held his hand out in the general vicinity for a shake. Instead of his war uniform, Alfred wore a suit. He didn’t look like the same troubled man who spent his days feeding the squirrels and filling Ellsworth’s living room with communist rhetoric.
Ellsworth shook Alfred’s outstretched hand and sat down in a chair next to Anna Belle’s, looking over the contents on the table. Mashed potatoes. Green beans. Hoppin’ John with chopped onion and ham hunks. Southern spoon bread. Baked ham with brown sugar and peppercorns. He piled food on his plate during Anna Belle’s prayer, oblivious to the moment, aware only when he fin
ally looked up and caught her glance of annoyance. Besides the clanking silverware, they remained quiet as they ate. After a few minutes, Alfred broke the silence with a quivering jaw.
“Ellsworth, I talked to Sergeant Bathoon this morning.”
They stopped eating, all eyes on Ellsworth, who shoveled a forkful of green beans into his mouth. Alfred was clearly still jingle-brained. “Bathoon’s dead. Got cut in half by a big gun in Château-Thierry.” He motioned to Linda May with his fingers. “His legs ran for another five feet even as the rest of’m blew back against a tree trunk.”
“Ellsworth.” Anna Belle covered Raphael’s ears.
“I don’t mind,” said Raphael.
“I talked to him all the same.” Alfred lifted spoon bread toward his mouth. “Inside that chapel. I knelt down on that floor.”
Ellsworth looked at Anna Belle. “You took them into the woods?”
“I did.”
“We don’t know if it’s safe in there.”
“Power in numbers.”
He shoveled mashed potatoes and hoped to let it go, but he couldn’t. “How could you?”
“Do you own the woods, Ellsworth? Is it your chapel?” He clenched his jaw, then stuffed his mouth with ham. Seeing that Eliza had apparently found the chapel years back, he did feel it was more his than theirs. She had no right to show anyone else.
Anna Belle said, “Look what it did for you, Ellsworth.”
“What did it do for me, Anna Belle?”
She scoffed.
Raphael said, “You slept in your room for the first time since your ex-wife passed.”
“Late wife.”
“What?”
“Late, not ex.”
Raphael didn’t follow. “Did you have nightmares last night? About the war?”
“Close your head, boy.” He knew his refusal to answer the question was answer enough. He’d slept like a baby all night and then again during most of the day. “How’d you know about my nightmares?”
“Mrs. Roper told me.”
“Well Mrs. Roper needs to zip her gums.”
Alfred pointed with his fork. “There’s a slice of heaven inside that place, Ellsworth.”
“You’ve been dipping the bill in too much giggle juice, Alfred. It’s just a chapel.”
“I’m not out on the roof today. I promise. That ship done sailed.”
Linda May said, “He hasn’t had a drink since yesterday.”
What about the morphine he injects between his toes while you’re asleep?
Alfred said, “At first the place gave me the willies, but then . . .” He teared up. Linda May gripped his hand and he pulled it together. “I’m just sayin’, for the first time since I come back, I feel proper in the head.”
Anna Belle said, “We can’t pretend it’s not there, Ellsworth.”
“You plan to go back?”
“Of course I do. I’ve never felt so . . .” she put a fist to her mouth to steady herself. Raphael patted her shoulder and she smiled lovingly at him.
Ellsworth asked, “Never felt so what?”
“Safe, Ellsworth. Never felt so safe. And peaceful. Is that so bad a thing?”
Ellsworth rubbed his face. “Did you go in there again?”
“Yes. Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
Anna Belle stabbed her fork into the table, the tines a quarter-inch deep in the wood. “Like I’m some easy mark. Like we’re a bunch of saps. I know what I saw, Ellsworth. I know what I heard. Calvin didn’t speak to me this morning, but I felt him in there. The air was like a hug, and he was so close I could smell his cologne.”
Ellsworth pulled the fork out of the table, staring at the tiny holes it’d produced.
“I’m sorry,” said Anna Belle. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
Ellsworth wiped the fork off on his napkin and rested it on her plate. She picked it up again and this time used it to scoop mashed potatoes.
Ellsworth said, “We don’t know anything about that place. We don’t know who built it. We don’t know why they built it. Or how long it’s been there, or who all has been inside it.”
“Does it matter?” Linda May asked, rubbing her husband’s back. “Today’s the first day in forever I feel I have my husband back.”
“And it could be sap poison. There’s two sides to every coin, Linda May.”
It grew silent. They all resumed eating, chewing, drinking. Silverware clanked again. Wooden chairs shifted beneath their weight. No one looked up from their plate. After a few uncomfortable minutes of it, Ellsworth turned to Alfred. “What did he say?”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Bathoon. You said you talked to him. What did he say?”
“Told me it was kill or be killed, Ellsworth. And I’d done right by my country. And . . .”
“And?”
“And that I was forgiven too.”
CHAPTER 10
Eliza was lifeless when he pulled her from the rubble.
Ellsworth’s tears dripped grooves through the gunk on her cheeks. He carried her outside to place her on the lawn. Kneeling beside her, he stared vaguely at the chaos surrounding him.
Trees burned nearby, sparked by the burning building. Sheriff Pomeroy, Bellhaven’s first Negro sheriff, hung from a live oak next to the jailhouse, crooked-necked and limp, stripped of his uniform and covered with tar and goose feathers as white-cloaked figures circled on horseback. Half-drunk from the town hall party, they’d been overwhelmed, unarmed against Klansmen with shotguns, clubs, and steel pipes. Hundreds of cardinal birds circled the trees, spiraling in and out of the smoke.
Calvin lay in the grass, moaning. Alfred took a punch to the jaw and spun against the grill of the tractor Berny Martino had driven to the party. Omar lay in the middle of the road unconscious. Even Gabriel, with all her size and strength, was losing her fight against four men swinging clubs and lit torches at her. She’d consumed an entire bottle of Old Sam by herself during the party and been nearly passed out with her head on the table when the Klan arrived.
A car revved, squealed, and swerved as if driven by a blind man—Reggie Vargus fleeing in a panic, clutching the wheel of his brand-new Model T. Kenneth Rapido, screaming about the smoke in his eyes, stepped in the car’s path, and his body folded under the vehicle’s front left wheel. Kenneth writhed on the ground, legs pinned, while Reggie cried and screamed, still gripping the steering wheel, “I didn’t see him. I swear I didn’t.”
Ellsworth jumped to his feet and ran over. He squatted down for leverage and gripped the front fender of the Model T, yelling as he raised the car front inch by inch off Kenneth Rapido’s body. His feat of strength put a pause to the goings-on all around him, but it was clear he still needed help. Gabriel freed herself from her attackers, and together she and Ellsworth walked the front of the car five feet to the right, away from Kenneth’s legs.
Except for the fire hose spraying water on the town hall flames, everything else went quiet. Even the Klansmen held still, their eyes focused on Ellsworth. He’d later claim it was adrenaline, but the town folk weren’t so sure. In their minds it had given credence to thoughts they’d had all along. About him being different from everyone else. A special kind of different that had always made him the leader while they all followed.
Just as Reggie’s car tires settled in the dust, a hooded Klansman came at Ellsworth with a steel pipe and cracked him hard across the back of the head. Ellsworth staggered but didn’t fall, which stunned the Klansman into a stutter.
“W-where you got’m—where’s that black boy?”
Ellsworth plucked the pipe from the Klansman’s hand. He spotted Eliza in the grass, and his heart splintered. The chirping and twittering from the cardinals went mute, and all he heard was his heart thumping. He swung the pipe in a violent arc toward the Klansman’s right shoulder, dropping him to the middle of the gravel road. He hit him again and again and again, screaming with every swing even as the white-cloaked
Klansman begged for mercy.
No one moved, not even the man’s robed cohorts, who still stood stunned from when Ellsworth had lifted the car. After what must have been twenty blows with the pipe, it was Anna Belle who talked him down. By that point she’d already hidden Raphael in Calvin’s closet.
The bloodied Klansman moaned in the middle of the road. His brethren, careful to avoid Ellsworth, pulled him away and draped him over the haunches of a tall mare. The hood on one of them slipped, and Ellsworth glimpsed a bald eagle tattooed on a sunburned neck. The Klansman frantically tugged the hood back into place.
And then the earth shook.
It was just a quick one, a three-second tremor that left everyone steadying for balance. The area wasn’t unaccustomed to a quick rumble every now and then. But there was still no getting around the suddenness of it.
In the lull, the cardinal birds attacked, swooping toward the white-cloaked men, flapping and pecking and clawing until the Klansmen thundered away on their horses without the boy they’d evidently come for.
The town folk stood still, watching each other, watching the ground, watching the birds they’d seen gather for days.
After a while, Ellsworth went to cut Sheriff Pomeroy from the tree.
His lifeless body dropped heavy into Gabriel’s arms.
Ellsworth stared at the blank canvas.
Painting a picture had been a bad idea.
He was a baseball player, a soldier, a house painter, not an artist. But Anna Belle and the boy had been persistent, and he’d caved just so they’d close their heads about it. So here he stood for his third attempt in as many days, without the first notion of what to paint.
Today he’d set up the easel on the veranda. That was the boy’s idea—said the sunlight and trees might inspire him. But so far Ellsworth just felt frustrated.
“What about that dogwood?” Raphael pointed at the tree blooming pink in the middle of his yard. Ellsworth shrugged and stared at the canvas while the boy chattered on.
All Things Bright and Strange Page 9