All Things Bright and Strange

by James Markert

  Ellsworth shook his head, didn’t want to hear it.

  “Clear as a daylight sky,” said Gabriel.

  Ellsworth dropped his fork and pounded the table with his fist. “The town was fine . . .”

  “Town’s never been fine, Ellsworth. It was built on hate. Founded by evil. Those original Bellhavens were terrible people. They built this town on the sweat, blood, and oppression of slavery. It’s no coincidence that it was your father’s idea to build that town hall out there. It’s why you’re here just as we are.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Me and the boy.”

  “Why? Why are we here, Gabriel?”

  Tears welled in her eyes. Her jaw quivered. “For my entire life I’ve been looking for answers to why I am like I am. A man in a girl’s body. A girl in a man’s body. Only now are some of the pieces coming together.”

  “What pieces?”

  “Me, him, you. The earthquake. That house on the hill coming back to life. Something’s happening. And somebody’s got to do something.”

  “You think Eddington is here for a reason?”

  “I think he’s just a man who felt the pull of forgiveness from those woods. It’s the house that worries me more. I think he’s just an unfortunate pawn.”

  Ellsworth paused. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither do I, but at least I’m trying. And it starts by keeping you sane.”

  “How long has that chapel been in the woods?”

  “That I don’t know.”

  “And what about the earthquake? Old Man Tanner was mumbling about the earthquake. The one in 1886 that leveled Charleston?”

  “A lot of people back then believed the center of it was around the Middleton plantation, not the immediate city of Charleston. And Tanner believes it was here in Bellhaven. He was in these woods when the earth started moving.”

  “Why these woods?”

  “Tanner’s a scientist,” she said. “Or he used to be—studied earthquakes. In ’86, when the foreshocks hit Summerville, he and his wife headed east from Tennessee. Says he felt the instability in the air and followed it first by train and then by wagon, and by the time he reached Bellhaven he was on foot in the woods. The instability was stronger the deeper he went. And then the earth started moving.”

  “Does the earthquake have something to do with that chapel?”

  Gabriel dug back into her rice and beans. “My gut says it does.” She eyed him. “Eighty-six wasn’t the only time the ground here has rumbled.”

  She was right. The last time he remembered was the night Eliza died, that three-second burst of shaking that had put a halt to the violence. But according to the stories passed down, the ground in these parts had been rumbling periodically for generations, long before the ’86 quake ripped Charleston apart, and he remembered several in his lifetime. Did all those little bursts mean the pressure was building up? Was another big one coming?

  The three of them ate in silence for a minute, and then Ellsworth said, “Beverly Adams. You said she was jailed last night as well. What did she do?”

  “She made Reverend Cane a pie,” said Raphael.

  “And?”

  Gabriel put her fork down and sighed. “Instead of apples, she put in dead crickets.”

  By dinner, which was warmed up rice and beans from lunch, Ellsworth was pacing the house from living room to kitchen and back again, biting his fingernails to combat the trembling in his hands. Beverly Adams fixing Reverend Cane a dead-cricket pie? John Stone blowing up Ned Gleeson’s work shed? All those lovely birdhouses destroyed! He stopped pacing to look out the window. Would Anna Belle go up the hill tonight?

  He’d follow her if he could, but he was a moth trapped in a lampshade. His skin was covered with goose bumps. He’d already downed his seventh coffee of the day, and Gabriel wouldn’t let him have any more. Said it made him jittery. He could make a run for the woods, but they’d catch him. His days of running were over, just like his days of pitching.

  “You should paint a picture,” said Raphael. “To take your mind off things.”

  “Last time I painted I got stabbed.”

  “This time you’ll do better.” Raphael grinned. “Mayhap we’ll be able to tell what it is, and the town won’t be as hard on you.”

  “You should be on a stage with that sense of humor.” Ellsworth turned from the window toward Raphael. “What should I paint?”

  He shrugged. “Paint out the bad stuff like last time.” Then he turned to exit the room.

  “Hey.”

  Raphael stopped.

  Ellsworth looked at the piano with a nod. “Maybe you should play, you know, while I paint.”

  CHAPTER 16

  While Ellsworth painted deep into the night, most of Bellhaven slept.

  But not all.

  Ned Gleeson stood on his back porch watching drizzle fall from a purple sky. The moon looked like a cat’s eye, and as a cloud drifted by, he convinced himself the moon had winked at him.

  He took it as a sign.

  He’d always been taught to forgive and forget, to turn the other cheek, but somehow those notions didn’t feel right anymore. Not when the rain still sizzled off the ashy rubble that used to be his work shed. How many birdhouses had he built inside it? Leanne had kept a logbook, and the number she’d last tallied was in the four hundreds, but she was three years dead now, and he’d long stopped keeping track. Every house in town had at least one of them. Some had as many as a dozen, with all the colors of the rainbow.

  There were a lot of birds in Bellhaven. Always had been. Which is why, twelve years ago, Leanne had given him the birdhouse idea in the first place. “If it doesn’t make you wealthy, at least it’ll keep you busy, Ned.” And this afternoon in that chapel, when she’d spoken to him through all that wonderful air and told him to start anew, he’d promised her that he would.

  But first he’d have to build a new work shed.

  Before he left the chapel, Leanne had told him one other thing—about John Stone, the man who’d burned his life work to the ground. At least he’d thought it was her voice. By the time he stepped out of the chapel’s clearing, he’d carried with him an inkling of doubt. But the words had been clear: “John Stone says the rosary every night, Ned. He collects them. Those silly papist rosaries.”

  Ned had thought on what Leanne had said and come to a decision. It was the right thing to do, all things considered.

  He went inside to get a hammer and a towel—the latter so that he could muffle the sound of breaking glass. He breathed deep, expanded his chest with fresh Bellhaven air, and then stepped out into the drizzle toward John Stone’s backdoor.

  Tanner Whitworth leaned over his bathroom sink and stared into the mirror.

  He’d never liked that the town called him Old Man Tanner. But truthfully, now that he’d finally taken a long gander at how white his hair was—like dove wings—and how wrinkled his face was—like a doggone prune—he reckoned he did look like an old man.

  Oh, well. Some boozehounds drink to get drunk. Some drink because they can’t not drink. He supposed his situation was a combination of both. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was doing; he’d noticed the repercussions years ago, and now the crow’s feet around his eyes had grown feet of their own.

  He wondered what his brain must look like after so many years of entering the woods. Mushy applesauce came to mind. He liked applesauce, just as he had come to like walking backward—it made him feel relaxed, made him feel like he could rewind time and start working against those crow’s feet. And also, he’d seen a black woman in the woods doing it. Years ago, on a night when the moon was completely round and looked full of blood.

  An escaped slave was what she’d looked like, with that coarse white dress in need of washing and the brightly colored textile she’d wrapped around her head. Just her by her lonesome, walking barefoot and backward through wisps of fog. He’d tried blinking her away, but every time he opened his eyes she’d been
there. She’d put a finger to her lips as if to shush him. Whispered something that sounded like “Good crows don’t tell . . .”

  America Ma.

  Somehow Tanner had known her name. Like she’d magically passed it from her mind to his because they’d both been inside that chapel.

  He’d never told a soul about that place and didn’t plan to. Good crows don’t tell. But he wasn’t even a crow. He was as white-skinned as they come. He freckled in the sun. And now everyone knows about it.

  He missed America Ma and often wondered where she’d gone to. Wondered why she’d been walking backward through the woods all those years ago when the moon was bloody.

  Oh well. She might not have even been real. His mind had already half turned to applesauce by then.

  For now he was just glad Sheriff Lecroy had let him out of jail. The pudgy sheriff had looked flustered unlocking his cell, made him promise he wouldn’t stab Ellsworth Newberry again. But apparently Ellsworth was in the process of dropping the charges, and with what had happened with John Stone and Beverly Adams, the sheriff had hinted that he might need more future jail space.

  Just don’t go fleeing town.

  Oh, Sheriff Lecroy didn’t need to worry himself with that. Tanner wasn’t going anywhere but his bed. That jail cot had wrecked his back. He entered his bedroom and smiled. He’d told Ellsworth he was sorry for what he’d done and promised to never go into that chapel again. And he’d meant it—for now, at least. They needed to know what he knew about the earthquake and the chapel, and for that he’d need to stay somewhat clearheaded.

  Somewhat.

  At the foot of his bed was a wooden chest. He unlocked it, and his heartbeat accelerated. He counted twenty jars inside, all tightly sealed. He grabbed one, started to open the lid, and then decided that tonight called for two. After securing both jars in the crook of his elbow, he locked the chest and shuffled to his bed.

  The covers had already been turned down, and the pillow looked primed to swallow the side of his face. He sat on the side of the bed and watched out the window. Wondered why Ned Gleeson was walking across his backyard in the drizzle. Is that a hammer he’s carrying? Oh well. Tanner had more important things to tend to.

  He placed one jar in between his legs and opened the other—slowly, so as to not let anything slip out unused. Both jars looked empty, but they were far from it. He put his nose up close to the lid and inhaled so deeply his lungs ached. You never know how badly you miss something until it’s gone. And then he completely removed the lid and stuck his entire nose in the jar, breathing in the air he’d trapped inside. Months ago? Years? What did it matter? He felt alive again. Youthful for the first time in days.

  He dropped the jar to the floor and relaxed against his headboard, both feet now strewn across the bed as he untwisted the lid on the second jar. He closed his eyes and inhaled—once, twice, three times until he felt he’d gotten every last bit of it.

  By then the bliss had taken over and his eyes grew heavy. He remembered America Ma whispering to him one night—that’s right, he’d seen her more than once—that there was slave blood on those walls.

  He’d never understood how one man could own another. His father had been an ardent abolitionist. Sounded like nasty business.

  Dirty old nasty business.

  I picks all the cotton, massa.

  Tanner grinned, on the edge of slumber. “Mayhap now we have some dat corn bread.”

  Reverend Ephraim Cane didn’t like crickets.

  His wife was scared of them, just like she was of mice and spiders and flying beetles and June bugs. She’d climb up on a chair and scream like the dickens until Cane squashed the culprit under his shoe.

  So ever since she’d cut into Beverly Adams’s new pie and heard the crunch of dead crickets instead of the soft cinnamon apples she expected, she’d closed herself off in the bedroom. Hadn’t even come out for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. Every time Reverend Cane knocked on the door she told him to go away, as if it was somehow his fault.

  He’d couldn’t think of a reason why their neighbor of twenty years, who had baked them many an apple pie, had suddenly baked them a dead-cricket one. He supposed it was better than a live-cricket pie. That would have been a sight.

  He smiled when he shouldn’t have been, thinking of all those crickets exploding through the cut and him giving chase with one of his shoes. He liked Miss Adams, and he’d already forgiven her. But that didn’t mean he’d turn the other cheek. He’d prayed on it, and for the first time in his life he’d come to the conclusion that retaliation could be fun—and just. But what could he do?

  Moments ago when he’d asked his wife if she needed anything, she’d shouted that she needed to be fully immersed into the baptismal waters again. To pronounce her faith in Jesus in front of one and all, as if the first time hadn’t fully taken root.

  “At least neither of us took a bite,” he’d said. To that comment she’d thrown something at the bedroom door—probably her hairbrush—and he’d scurried away to sit at the kitchen table with his Bible and his thoughts.

  He’d been having those more often of late—random thoughts that didn’t make much collective sense. Did I ever kill a cricket in front of Beverly Adams? Was she a lover of crickets and took offense to it? But if she was a lover of crickets, it wouldn’t make much sense to fill a pie with dead ones—unless, over the years, she’d collected all the ones he’d scraped off the bottom of his shoe. Maybe the wind blew them from my yard into hers.

  He opened his Bible and flipped through the Old Testament, but couldn’t find anything calling to him. He scanned a few psalms and part of John’s gospel, but his mind was too muddled to concentrate. Maybe he’d take a trip into the woods. No, it was a bad idea to go into the woods at night. His mother had always told him so. The tree limbs turned to arms, and they’d snatch you. Kids disappeared in those woods at night.

  He’d wait until morning. First thing. Maybe he could get Mrs. Cane to go with him. Entice her out of the bedroom with a bit of that fresh chapel air.

  He closed the Bible much too hard and wondered if that was a sin. And then it dawned on him, clear as day. Beverly Adams was a strict Catholic, and a few days ago he’d let one slip in front of her, one of the condescending comments he and Mrs. Cane liked to make in secret about the pope. “Pope Benedict, the one who sits on his throne in Rome like some king.”

  He remembered how Beverly had folded her arms and smiled. But it had been the kind of smile that wasn’t really a smile, the kind that hid the opposite of a smile. The kind that said watch your back because you’ve got something coming to you—like a dead-cricket pie on a Sunday afternoon. Come to think of it, she’d slammed the door on her way out. Mrs. Crane’s framed painting of Jesus being baptized in the water had tilted askew on the wall.

  Reverend Cane stood abruptly from the kitchen table. He knew what he was going to do.

  Beverly Adams volunteered to clean Saint John’s Church once a week. That’s where he could gut-punch her. He’d give her something to clean up all right. And Father Timothy? Well, he and the good priest had always been cordial with one another. They’d swapped stories and shared enough meals at the town-hall gatherings over the years to be considered friends. Good ones, even. But the way those Catholics baptized infants before they could even walk or talk just made no sense. It had always gotten under Reverend Cane’s skin. And all those crazy rituals—and the doctrine of transubstantiation! Truly believing they were eating the body of Christ like a bunch of cannibals?

  Yeah, they’ve had this coming for years. Longer than that, even. Since way back when the Catholic Church was selling indulgences for remission of sin and Luther decided enough was enough and hammered his ninety-five theses to some door. It was about time to do something about all that. But first he’d need to coax Mrs. Cane out of the bedroom. He needed her to sew something for him right quick—she could sew a small doll faster than he could wash a sink full of dishes.

  And o
h, he almost forgot.

  He’d need his sledgehammer from the barn.

  Father Timothy couldn’t sleep.

  Despite the drizzle, the moon glowed, and the thin window covering did little to keep out the light. But that wasn’t the only reason he was awake in bed, getting sore. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the thoughts he’d been having.

  A priest shouldn’t have those kind of thoughts. But with how Anna Belle Roper had bounced down the street the other day in her pretty dress stretched full from her figure and wiggled her fingers his way, in what he took as a flirtatious wave, he couldn’t much help himself, now could he? Every time he closed his eyes now he imagined what she looked like without that dress on.

  As a boy, he hadn’t been completely immune to the seductive nuances cast by the opposite sex, but whatever urges he may have had were strongly overshadowed by those he felt from the church. The Lord had called him, and he’d obliged, willingly and without a second thought. He’d taken the vow of chastity, and for years now he’d had no issue keeping to it. It was like he’d successfully flipped a switch when the time came, casting that room into perpetual darkness.

  Well dad-blame if Anna Belle Roper hadn’t somehow flipped that switch to a bright light again. Even the thought of her sent his heart fluttering.

  He got out of bed and prayed on his knees for strength. Anna Belle was a widow now, and he’d heard of priests leaving the church before. Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe that was just wishful thinking. Jingle-brained thinking. He wasn’t all that handsome of a man. Anna Belle was probably just being nice with that wave she’d done.

  He removed his belt from the hook on the bedroom door and flung the metal part over his bare back to chastise himself for having impure thoughts. He flinched and cried out. It hurt like hell, so he didn’t do it again. He needed to restore himself to a religiously pure state with something maybe not so painful. Maybe he’d fast tomorrow. No, he liked food too much. And Anna Belle was a great cook. Too bad she spends all of her energy fixing food for that crippled Ellsworth Newberry down the street.