The Dark Closet

by Beall, Miranda

  The bearded and mustached lieutenant first eyed Lamerie, then cast his gaze over the whole room with its rococo furniture and heavily gilded portraits of sober men and women with folded arms and unsmiling faces. Lamerie herself looked not unlike them as she stood before the fireplace, as expressionless as the ancestors who brooded over the scene unfolding before them. Their unblinking stares suggested they took note of all that transpired beneath Wightefield’s manor roof, that they kept the records of transgression for atonement in a different time. The distant ethereal laughter of Mersey in an upstairs room filtered through the silent parlor, its ghostly tenor drifting away as the drapes fluttered in the breezes.

  “Madam.” He bowed deeply. “I am Lieutenant Shadrack Hawkins of the Company of New York Zouaves. This is Sergeant Springfield and Private Bethel.

  “The Company of New York Zouaves is welcome at Wightefield. We wish to extend to you and your men every hospitality.”

  Once again Lieutenant Hawkins’s eyes passed over the room.

  “You would not mind if we … look around?”

  “My home is always open to my guests.”

  As he turned from the room, Lieutenant Hawkins looked once again at Lamerie, who had not moved since his entrance. As he left, she felt every sinew in her body let go its hold on her bones as she listened to the scuffing boots moving from room to room. When she heard them ascending the stairs, she stepped quickly into the entrance hall.

  “Azzie! Bring Mersey down so she will not disturb our guests.” Barely breathing, Lamerie stood solitarily in the center of the hall awaiting Azzie’s arrival as Lieutenant Hawkins watched from the curving oaken staircase.

  “You have a beautiful home, Mrs. Wighte,” he said stonily.

  “Thank you, lieutenant.”

  “Get ten more men,” he said loudly to Sergeant Springfield. Lamerie stood still as the sergeant walked past her and ten more men filed in.

  “Look around in all the rooms.”

  As they clumped up the winding staircase, Azzie and Mersey pressed themselves against the wall in their descent. Lieutenant Hawkins stopped them.

  “You’re a pretty girl,” he said to Mersey. “Look just like your Mama.”

  Mersey clung to Azzie’s hand as Lamerie began to climb the stairs. “You should say hello.”

  “Hello,” came the girl’s thin voice.

  “My name is Lieutenant Hawkins.” He drew his hand beneath her chin as Lamerie pulled Mersey to her, a step below Hawkins.

  “She is very shy. You will have to excuse her, lieutenant. She is just a child,” she said evenly.

  “Of course,” he replied. “You don’t seem, Mrs. Wighte, to have much silverware. How is it that the rooms of a family as prominent as the Wightes are so bare of silver?”

  “Mr. Wighte’s ancestors were far more fond of porcelain than silver.”

  “Very fragile, porcelain.”

  “Yes. One must be very careful.” Lamerie was moving backwards down the stairs, guiding Mersey behind her.

  “A soldier’s knapsack is no place for porcelain, now is it?”

  “I would not know, lieutenant.”

  As the soldiers came out of the downstairs rooms, they threw what silver they had found in the middle of the entrance hall. Flatware clanged against bowls and trays, the dents in their softly shining surfaces visible even from the stairs.

  “Search the closets. Sergeant Springfield, take a detail of men around the ground. Look for fresh mounds or diggings, anything that looks like something may have been buried. Mrs. Wighte! I understand it is common practice for prominent southern families to bury the family silver on the grounds!” Lamerie involuntarily gasped as she heard something heavy crash to the floor upstairs and a great ripping sound ensue as draperies were yanked from their wildly spinning metal rings. “A fabulous story runs the countryside here,” he continued descending the stairs in her retreat.

  “Missus.” Jeremiah had come up from the kitchens below. “Them chickens be ready by noon.”

  “Thank you, Jeremiah. Lieutenant, your men will have plenty of food by noon.”

  “Very gracious of you, Mrs. Wighte,” Hawkins said with a deep bow. “But we have already eaten. Your neighbors have been more than generous. I am more interested now in the story that the women of the Wighte family have passed down an emerald necklace given by Henry VII. Sergeant Springfield!” he yelled through a window. “Have you found anything?”

  “No, sir!”

  “You are frustrating me, Mrs. Wighte. I would like to see the necklace.”

  “I do not have such a necklace.”

  “I hear you wear it very seldom, but you do wear it.”

  “I do not have such a necklace.”

  “Perhaps your daughter—“

  “She knows nothing of such stories!”

  “The necklace goes from mother to daughter. Of course she knows! And soon she will be old enough to wear it herself! Bethel, tell the men they may take what they want!”

  Bethel heeled past Lamerie as she backed into the parlor. A cry went up at Bethel’s muffled command, and the regiment fanned over the front lawn. Lamerie watched the grinning faces pass before the windows, the goblin procession punctuated by intermittent wailing black figures.

  “We have been assured by President Lincoln we will not be harmed, lieutenant.” Lamerie’s voice was shaking.

  “I give the orders on the battlefield, Mrs. Wighte. President Lincoln just makes the policies from the White House. I want to see the necklace.” Her back was pressed now against the mantel as Mersey tried to hide behind her. “Or I will rape this entire plantation and everyone on it!”

  Several men ran into the entrance hall, raising their sabers and slashing the portraits that hung there. Strips of oiled canvas hung limply from the ornate frames, an oiled and startled eye here, an oiled and muted mouth there. Generations of Wightes hung like men from the gallows, scrambling to cling within their gold, carved frames wildly askew. The soldiers spilled into the parlor, grunting and pushing one another, searching for objects to dash in splintering pieces against the wooden floors. As Hawkins turned to order them out, Lamerie stooped and fished something out of the soot of the fireplace. When he turned back around, her blackened hand held a pistol.

  “Get out of my house, Lieutenant Hawkins! I have no silver and no necklace! Take what you want and get out!”

  A shot went off as Hawkins advanced on Lamerie with outstretched arms. The grazing bullet left a streak of red through his torn jacket as he fell on Lamerie. Mersey clutched Hawkins’ bony fingers encircling her mother’s white throat, Lamerie’s face a startled mask of wonder and horror mixed as she clawed at the lieutenant’s merciless hands. She struggled intermittently to push Mersey behind her as if her own body, dead or alive, could shield the girl from what would come.

  Mersey huddled beside her mother’s still body, weeping. She heard Azzie screaming as some soldiers flung the books from their shelves in the library. Others who had gotten into the wine cellar were pouring the dark red vintage on the ornate Oriental rugs and velvet settees. Their cries rang through the hollows of the house as they smashed china and lead crystal, as they hurled the rope bed and highboy and secretary down the curving stair, as they gouged the walls with tongs and pokers.

  But it was all dwarfed by the piercing cries of Mersey as Hawkings thin, knobby hands reached for her.

  1963

  Chapter 2

  1963

  The snow rose and fell over the empty fields as gracefully as a dancer, creating hills and dales, swells and drops that did not exist beyond their own fantasy. The century would see only three great snows in Southern Maryland, and this was the second, heralding the winter of 1963 with that insidious calm of fine falling snow that makes even the most acute of hearing feel deaf with its silence. It had stopped now—finally—after four days of blowing icy, pin-prick flakes so thick it was impossible to see from inside or outside the house, frosty needles piercing into squin
ted eyes bundled scarves could not protect. Crossett sank to the hilt of his shiny black hipboots, the powdery snow gently rolling a drift pressed up against the glass of the storm door that protected the brass lion’s-head door knocker, roaring with the indignity of such weather. As the bitter air hit his face, he pulled up the collar of his wool overcoat and drew his scarf around his mouth and ears, wondering how soon the warm moisture of his breath would dot with icy lumps the woolly plaid of the scarf.

  His children, however seemed unencumbered as they tumbled out the front door after him, bundled in their blue and gray snowsuits, their furry hoods and gloves, their rubber boots into which the elasticized snowsuit ankles had been securely pushed. Their laughter tinkled in the air like bells on a frosty morning as they fell into the great piles of snow.

  “This way!” Crossett called peremptorily as he motioned with his arm for them to follow the deep trails in the snow left in his wake. The four scuttled along the two narrow little paths their father’s thick rubber boots cut in the white powder. Sometimes he was up to his waist in it, other times only to his knees. The procession turned a slight curve across the one-acre front lawn to the winding mile-and-a-half driveway stretching to the narrow paved road that led to the civilization of Barrow, the small town that serviced this tobacco- and corn-growing region.

  He was processing to ascertain the full extent of the snow and to meet his neighbor, Twynne, at the northern fence that divided their two farms. The expedition would help determine just how long he and his family would have to remain living in the basement with the oil stove, the only source of heat in a frigid house with no current and no telephone service. Such luxuries as electricity and outside communication had been lost on day one of the storm. The blizzard conditions, the falling temperature in the house, the lack of any way to cook food had driven the family into the basement to strike up the oil stove, which could provide both heat and hot food, and the pot-bellied stove in which Crossett usually burned the family’s trash but into which he now dropped the narrow logs he had squirreled away in case of such an emergency as this. There was also a copious supply of large glass mason jars filled with water, a necessity usually dictated by summer, not winter, when the surface well invariably went dry in August.

  The driveway was navigable by foot, largely, except for the curves where the walls of cedars on either side broke with the bend, and the snow had piled itself into drifts that fell over the post-and-rail fence into the buried field beyond. Crossett struggled through these snowy mounds, dragging his legs with effort to bare a trail for his children.

  “Daddy!” came a muffled cry from behind him.

  “Maude’s in the snow!” shouted Braden, the eldest and most adventurous.

  Crossett reached a long, strong arm from where he stood and hauled Maude, face encrusted with snow, from the drift. She sputtered and cried and sought her father’s arms as he drew her to him.

  “I couldn’t breathe,” she gasped, trying to wipe the snow from her face with icy gloves. Crossett removed his own gloves and brushed the snow from her face with warm, soft hands.

  “Stay in line,” he dictated as he set her on her feet in the path he had forged. “We’ve got a way to go yet.”

  Most snows managed to cover the lawns stretching before the house, to discourage the few forsythia blooms in a temperate winter, to dust the driveway with a film of white, but never to bury the stubble of last year’s corn crop in the fields. It would pile up in the slight ditches among the rows and lay itself gently about the base of brown, brittle adventitious roots. The stubbled stalks left from combine harvesting would poke brown and hollow above the inch or two of snow. Now Crossett looked out over the corn field to his left, and not a stalk reared its bamboo head, just a vast expansive sea of foamy white rising and falling in waves to meet the homogenous white of the sky above. The mighty trunks of the 150-year-old cedar trees bordering the driveway on one side and inspecting the fields on the other were at least knee-high in snow themselves.

  The road was a miserable disappointment, for Crossett anyway. A monstrous drift rose before him at the very entrance to the mile and a half driveway, with one stone pillar completely buried. The children, on the other hand, frolicked and reveled in the novelty of being allowed to play in the road. If Anne were there, she would have had a fit, even though no cars would be coming down Green Spring Road today or tomorrow or the day after or the day after that. As far as he could see, one drift after another, each as tall as a man, rose and fell like a roller coaster along the road.

  “Two weeks,” Crossett muttered to himself as he put his hands on his hips. Then he reached out and pulled Warenne back. “Your sister almost suffocated in the snow. Don’t fall into it like that.” His dictatorial tone always frightened his children, and he rarely gave reasons for his edicts.

  “Come on,” he called abruptly as he headed back up the driveway along the trail already blazed. Halfway back to the house, he knocked the snow off the fence in a spot it had not drifted and stooped to bend beneath the top and second rails to climb into the field. Braden squirmed over the top rail until he fell in a lump on the other side; Warenne got stuck trying to crawl through the second and third rails; Maude followed her father’s example; and Sofie whimpered until Crossett came to haul her over the top himself. Across the field they trooped, cutting a zigzag through the snow as they avoided the drifts. Beneath the arthritic, snowy clutch of an oak that grew on his side but reached its cyclopean, gnarled hands over to Crossett’s side was Twynne with his three children, May, Editha, and Thomas.

  “Two weeks, minimum, Twynne,” Crossett said breathlessly as he approached the fence.

  “I think you’re right,” he replied as he shook Crossett’s hand. “How are you?”

  “Oh, fine. Living in the basement,” he said with whitened breath in the fifteen-degree air. “Cramped.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Forster?” Crossett’s four children rang out as the stepped forward one by one to shake hands.

  “How do you do, Mr. Mainwaring?” Twynne’s three children chimed as they leaned over the fence to shake Crossett’s hand.

  He and Twynne always met like this after snow or rain storms that knocked out the electricity and telephone or rendered the roads impassable. It was their emergency communication system: meet at eleven o’clock a.m. the first day after precipitation ceased, exchange information, make sure everyone was safe and well, make swift decisions if everyone was not. They had a series of alternative plans if there were any injuries or sickness: herd both families under one roof; send one father and son by horse (Twynne had three) for help at the nearest neighboring farm; send one father by horse to Barrow for the doctor if need be; if possible, send the patient as well. Crossett was not much of a rider, although he belonged to the Barrow Hunt Club, mainly because anyone who was anyone in Barrow was in the Barrow Hunt Club. It was not with approval that the powers of the Barrow Hunt Club met with Crossett’s lukewarm attitude toward riding, but Mainwaring was a prominent name in the Barrow countryside and at the Barrrow tobacco warehouses. Crossett did in fact own a stable, albeit it had not seen a horse in two generations. Its existence, however, mollified the Membership Committee of Barrow Hunt Club. Crossett’s willingness to host the opening hunt breakfast did nothing to hurt his case as well.

  “How are you?” Crossett continued his conversation with Twynne.

  “Can we play with May, Editha, and Thomas?” Braden interrupted. His father threw him a chilly glance.

  “Surviving the storm of the century?” Crossett went on, ignoring Braden’s request.

  Twynne laughed and shook his head. “We’ve got no heat either, but there’s an old stove in the kitchen we’re using for the occasion. Not much to eat but oatmeal and grits. What I’d give for a smoking roast!” Both men laughed, and Crossett seemed to relax a little. They had grown up together on these two farms, played in the pre-Civil War tobacco barns and corn cribs to escape the summer heat, hunted minnows and tadpol
es in the swamp on Twynne’s farm in the spring, worked in the tobacco fields at their fathers’ commands, gone off to Williams College and returned to inherit the family fortunes within four months of each other. The Forster and Mainwaring alliance was an historic fact. Generations of Forster and Mainwaring eldest sons had been steadfast friends practically from birth to death, even bailing one another out in the particularly lean tobacco years of 1733 to 1801. In those days they even hired to one another their best field slaves; now they sought to protect one another from unscrupulous sharecroppers whose reputations preceded them and from neighboring farmers who sought to lure their most trustworthy sharecroppers to their own estates, a common practice in Barrow.

  Unbuttoning his coat part way, Crossett reached in a shirt pocket and pulled out a silver cigarette case. He tapped it distractedly against the heel of his hand.

  “It’s as quiet as a tomb in that house at night. I don’t know why it seems that way. All the lights would be off at night even if we had current because everyone would be in bed.” He opened the case and drew out a cigarette.

  “Must be the weight of the snow on the roof… all that creaking.” He proffered the case to his friend. “Or snow falling from the trees. I lost a few branches in all that wind.”

  He leaned forward to inhale as he lit his cigarette, then lifted the silver engraved lighter to Twynne’s pipe, which he had pulled out at Crossett’s offering of a cigarette.

  “So have I. In fact, I lost a maple I thought a great deal of.”

  “Where?” His children were shuffling restlessly in the snow. “Go on and play,” he said curtly, blowing a great puff of white smoke into the frigid air. His own breath was just as pale, but not as plentiful.

  “In the yard.”

  “The one by the box walk?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll lose a lot of shade in the summer.”

  “You’re telling me. The house will be hot as blazes in the east rooms. I won’t have any choice but to buy a couple of air conditioners.”