Summer in the South

by Cathy Holton

  Ava walked over to the mantel and picked up Clotilde’s vase. She held it above her head as if she might dash it against the floor. She said fiercely, “Why?” She said, “It wasn’t fair.”

  She sprawled facedown on the bed, weeping for her lost childhood, her lost mother. Outside the windows, the clatter of the cicadas soothed her. The summer heat flowed through her drowsy limbs. After a while she fell into a fitful sleep.

  She dreamed she was running through a dark forest. The trees were so thick she couldn’t see the sky, and she was lost. There was something pursuing her—she could hear it crashing through the brush behind her—and as she looked down in terror she saw a red serpent underfoot. She couldn’t help but step on it, and as she did, it swung around and sank its teeth into her flesh. There was a moment of excruciating pain, then she opened her eyes and noticed a light streaming through the trees, which were opening before her like a golden path.

  She awoke with a start. The sky outside the window was a violet gray. She thought of the story Clotilde had told her all those years ago, the story of the Princess Sheelin who goes to the bottom of the sea searching for the One True Pearl. The girl who falls into a deep, mindless sleep until a messenger from her father wakens her and reminds her of her destiny. Reminds her who she truly is.

  Somewhere out in the world there were Govan grandparents. Somewhere out in the world there was a flesh-and-blood father waiting for her to find him.

  Two days later, she got a call from Rachel Rowe. Ava was on the verandah with Maitland and Fanny but Rachel sounded so excited that she excused herself and went into the house, closing her bedroom door behind her.

  “Okay,” Ava said. “Shoot.”

  “Well, you know how I’ve been going through the Woodburn family papers given to Vanderbilt? And let me tell you, that has been some chore. There are literally enough boxes to fill a semitruck, and most of them have been rearranged and pilfered by researchers and grad students.”

  “Rachel? What did you find?”

  “I’m getting to that. There’s a senior researcher there, Alice Atkinson, who I’ve known for years. She’s very knowledgeable about the Woodburn collection, and she’s the one who’s been combing through documents with me looking for a deed from Colonel Woodburn to Charlie Woodburn. We literally went through every document and couldn’t find anything. No deed, no letters mentioning Charlie other than the ones the Colonel wrote to the president of Vanderbilt recommending Charlie for admission. Nothing else.

  “Just when I was ready to give up, Alice mentioned a couple of boxes in storage that contained odds and ends, family memorabilia, receipts, stuff they didn’t know where to catalogue. I started going through the first box yesterday and within a couple of hours I had found it.”

  “A deed,” Ava said, breathing slowly. “You found a deed giving Charlie Longford.”

  “No. Not a deed. A letter. From Colonel Woodburn’s attorney.” She hesitated and Ava could hear the shuffling of paper. “A Mr. Atwood. That was the attorney’s name. Anyway, the letter was from him to Josephine. It was dated a few weeks after the Colonel’s death. And there’s a part that says, hang on, I’ll find it.” She was quiet for a moment and then continued, “ ‘Per our conversation in my office prior to the reading of the will and your later instructions, I have destroyed the document. The document,’ ” Rachel repeated, her voice trembling. “Get it? It must have been the deed they’re talking about. The deed the Colonel had mentioned in his journal. The Colonel had Atwood draw up a deed prior to his death, but it was never properly recorded. Or maybe never even signed. Maybe the Colonel was on his way to his attorney’s office the day he dropped dead in the street. And later, when Atwood discussed the deed with Josephine, she instructed him to destroy it. Which would make sense because, from what you’ve said, she didn’t like Charlie. She wouldn’t have wanted him to inherit anything that belonged to her or her sisters.”

  “What was the date on the letter?”

  “November 14. It was addressed to Josephine via a Mrs. Stillwell’s boardinghouse.”

  “So it was after Fanny eloped with Charlie.”

  “Yes, a week or so after.” They were both quiet a moment, then Rachel said, “Do you think Charlie knew about the deed? Do you think the Colonel told him about it before he died?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Then that would mean that Charlie knew he’d been cheated out of something promised to him. And it might explain why he eloped with Fanny.”

  “Yes,” Ava said quietly.

  Rachel sighed. “There’s a lot we don’t know for sure, a lot we’ll probably never know. You don’t think we’re reaching?”

  “It makes a good story,” Ava said. It made perfect sense, the pieces falling easily into place. Josephine’s smoldering hatred of Charlie exploded into open warfare between the two of them. Charlie would have known he’d been cheated at the reading of the Colonel’s will, although he may not have known who it was who cheated him, the Colonel or Josephine. It would not have mattered to him.

  She remembered that Will had told her the Colonel was the last to use the plantation ledgers. He was wrong about that. In the final journal she had found a page at the end with a cryptic message written in a modern hand.

  Goddamn them all to hell. Every last lying, cheating one of them. They’ll rue the day they crossed me.

  She felt Charlie Woodburn’s presence everywhere in the house. She felt a connection to him, and that connection was evidenced by the words that flowed from her fingertips onto the screen.

  And then one evening a curious thing happened.

  She had fallen asleep with her head slumped on the desk, and she awoke suddenly and sat rigidly upright, listening. The room was frigid. Condensation fogged the windows. She had fallen into a deep sleep with no warning or recollection. The computer screen had gone black; the room was lit only by the dull glow of the lamp at the corner of the desk. She had been dreaming of something unpleasant, something that left an odd sensation of a tingling scalp and raised hair at the nape of her neck.

  She rose like a sleepwalker and extended her arm to turn off the lamp, and it was then, at the precise moment when the room was plunged into absolute darkness, that she felt, quite clearly and distinctly, someone take her hand.

  1931

  Woodburn, Tennessee

  “You’re a fortune-teller. Tell me my fortune, old woman.”

  “Beware of dark water,” Martha said.

  He could have had the other one, the other sister. He had known that from the night on the train, when he first played the jazz clarinet for an appreciative audience of planters’ sons and bankers’ sons, and, walking by her seat and leaning to speak to her, he’d seen her face flush. He’d known then that he could have her, if he wanted her.

  And yet when the time came, he’d hesitated, which wasn’t like him. She was too much like the Old Man, the one who’d cheated him of his inheritance, as their branch of the family had been cheating his since the days of the Old Patriarch, Randal Woodburn. He could have her, but could he keep her down, or would she figure out a way to outsmart him in the end, as her father had done?

  Tuition paid at Vanderbilt and a handful of stained letters that would have secured for him nothing more than a clerking job in some dusty little town. The Old Man had promised more. He had promised Longford. He’d taken him home, introduced him to his daughters, taken him around to his club. Charlie had expected a stake, a pot of money he could take down to the gambling dens along Frenchmen Street and turn into something large enough to live on until his luck changed. He had already figured out what to do with Longford, although it was clear the Old Man hadn’t seen much value in it or he wouldn’t have offered it to him. But Charlie had seen its dilapidated state, its secluded location, and realized it would make the perfect juke joint and gambling den. Outside the town limits but not too far to make it a difficult drive.

  But then the Old Man had died and he’d gotten nothing but paid tui
tion and a handful of dusty letters of reference. Then Charlie had had to rearrange his plans. He’d gone back to Vanderbilt feeling cheated, knowing he could have her, Josephine, if he wanted her. But not wanting her either. By then he was tired of it all, the whole charade of pretending to be someone he wasn’t, of playing up to the spoiled rich sons of men who’d risen in life by cheating and stealing from the unwary and innocent, just as he was willing to do. Men who’d married for money, just as he was prepared to do. These men had done it for their children, for their sons, just as he was willing to do for his.

  King. “Don’t call him that,” Myrtle had said. “Don’t give a crippled boy a name like King.” It had nearly broken his heart to hear her talk like that, a man who didn’t think he had a heart left to break. A man who had never known what love and self-sacrifice was until he looked down into the innocent milky eyes of his little son.

  Not that he felt that way about the mother, of course. He’d met Myrtle at a juke joint down by the stockyards, the kind of place drifters and drummers and hotel gadflies frequent to find girls who like to have a good time. It was during that long summer he’d spent living in Woodburn and trying to convince the Old Man that he was worthy of saving, that the Woodburn blood ran true and blue in his veins. The summer when he’d nearly died of boredom and had to break loose every once in a while down at the stockyards with a girl like Myrtle.

  King was an unwelcome surprise, at first, a possible wreckage of his plans. But when he’d looked at his son, so small, so twisted in body and yet so fine in spirit, so much like the boy he, himself, must have once been before poverty and hardship took their toll, he’d known that he would do anything to make his life better. Anything. Even pretend to accept a life he didn’t want to live. Even marry for money.

  He’d gone back to Vanderbilt determined to have his revenge. But when he’d thought about marrying Josephine, he’d wavered. And several days later, when he’d gone up to Mrs. Stillwell’s to check on Fanny and she, without ever considering the impropriety of her actions, had taken him up to her room and he’d seen the doll lying on her bed, he’d known with a cool certainty what he must do. He was surprised he’d not thought of it before. She had always seemed such a child to him. But now, watching her flitter about the room, he saw how pretty she was, how soft and yielding, so unlike the other sister, Josephine.

  He could punish the older sister by choosing the younger one. Because he knew by now that Josephine loved him; he’d seen it in her foolish face. And it had been so easy, too, once he decided what he’d do, to include Fanny in his plans. All it had taken was a promise to take her home, back to Woodburn to the house where she had grown up.

  And in nearly two years since then he’d had no reason to regret his choice. She cared nothing for the money; he could spend it as he pleased. And when the money ran out, he’d start selling off the furniture and fixtures, all the precious Woodburn possessions that made them who they were and him who he was not. Josephine might question his actions, but what could she do? She was helpless. Fanny was his wife. He could do with her as he pleased.

  And therein lay another benefit to this arrangement, a benefit he had not foreseen. He could punish Josephine by lifting his hand to Fanny. She never said a word, just took it quietly, patiently, but Josephine went around the house with her eyes red and weary from crying at her helplessness. She would kill him if she thought she could get away with it. This brought him a certain grim satisfaction.

  But he had to be careful, too. Fanny would let him beat her to death, and if he wasn’t careful he might give in to this sweet urge one night and, in a drunken rage, do something he might live to regret.

  She spent all her waking hours trying to decide how to kill him. It was amazing to Josephine now that she had ever loved him. Those days seemed so long ago; she was such a naive girl then, so unaware of the brutality of life. After the elopement she had stayed at Vanderbilt to take her degree in art history, traveling around that first summer to visit relatives because she couldn’t bear to return home, where Fanny and Charlie had taken up residence. Charlie had never returned to school. He had tried to obtain money in exchange for the tuition Papa had agreed to pay, and when that didn’t work, he’d simply spent Fanny’s money. The cousins spoke of it incessantly the summer that Josephine traveled among them, gossiping about the money Charlie Woodburn was going through, the wild parties he threw, the gamblers and bootleggers said to frequent the house. In those days Josephine retained enough of her feelings for Charlie to defend him, to insist that Fanny would never have married, or stayed married to, a man of such low character.

  But now she had graduated from Vanderbilt and come home and seen for herself that they were rig ht. That it was even worse than they had imagined. Fanny, swollen and listless with pregnancy, spent most of her days sleeping in her room, her cat purring on her pillow. Charlie was drunk most of the time, sleeping the day away and waking just before evening. You would know he was up by the clink of bottles in his room. And he wasn’t always alone either. Josephine had, on more than one occasion, glanced into the room behind him and seen the pale outline of a woman’s arm nestled in the bedclothes. That had shocked her, as had the state of the house. So much had shocked her in those days before she’d become accustomed to all the ways human beings can find to degrade themselves. Now nothing shocked her.

  Martha was too sick to cook and care for the house. She would not allow Clara to set foot inside, so Josephine took over the daily running of the house, refusing to hire outside help, afraid that the rumors already trickling through town would run rampant. That was how she discovered that some of the silver was missing, a sterling silver urn given to one of her ancestors by Lighthorse Harry Lee to commemorate the Battle of Paulus Hook, and a silver christening cup said to have been given to Randal Woodburn by his godfather, Thomas Jefferson. When she asked Fanny, she seemed confused and said vaguely, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure they’re here somewhere.” There was a dark bruise on one of her shoulders. “Bumped it on the edge of the tub,” she said blithely. “I’m as big as a horse now, and it’s hard to get in and out.”

  Josephine believed her because she was naive in those days, and the terrible truth would not have occurred to her. But she was learning. In June she threatened to call the constable over a party that had dragged on into the small hours of the evening and Charlie, in a fit of rage, drove his fist into the wall beside her head. She had not flinched but it had taken every ounce of courage she had; the threat of violence hung so heavy in the air that she felt sick and light-headed.

  The truth dawned on her gradually.

  She went upstairs to Fanny’s room and drew back the covers. Her sister’s frail, swollen body made her weep.

  “Hush,” Fanny said. “He’ll hear you.”

  Josephine went back down the stairs, raging, but he was gone, following the party out. She waited all night and when he did not return she went across the garden to the little cottage where John, Martha, and Clara lived. They confirmed what Josephine already knew, surprised it had taken her so long to realize the truth. When she began to rage, John reminded her quietly, “She’s his wife. He can do with her what he pleases.”

  Going out again, Clara followed her and pushed a horrid-looking doll into her hand. It was made of burlap and covered in several strands of dark, silky hair. A hatpin had been driven through its chest, through the middle of a crudely drawn heart. “Show him this and he’ll leave you alone,” Clara said.

  Josephine kissed her and gently returned the doll. “You keep it,” she said.

  She was glad now that she’d sent Celia to live with Minnie’s family in Bell Buckle.

  When Charlie got home two days later, he was not alone. He had the crippled child, King, with him, and the boy’s mother. They sat in the breakfast room, a bottle of whiskey on the table between them. They’d given the boy a glass of buttermilk and corn bread, and he was drinking out of Randal Woodburn’s silver christening cup.

&n
bsp; “That belongs to me,” Josephine said, standing in the doorway.

  Charlie glanced at her, his eyes narrowing as he looked away from the boy. “It’s mine as much as yours,” he said.

  “No,” she said, lifting her chin. “It’s not.” And when he didn’t answer she said, “Get them out of here.”

  He stood so quickly she only had time to step back against the pantry door. He crossed the room in long strides, putting his hands on either side of her head and leaning in so close she could smell the whiskey and tobacco on his breath.

  “You can’t hit me,” she said. “I’m not your wife.”

  “Thank God,” he said.

  “Thank God.”

  Later, as he climbed the stairs to Fanny’s room, he looked at her and grinned, and Josephine felt her stomach clench with hatred and despair. She went to Papa’s room then and rummaged around in the armoire for his shotgun, but Charlie had obviously taken it. He had probably sold it.

  Now she spent all her time thinking about how to kill him. She could tell Maitland, who loved Fanny so much he’d never come home from Sewanee after she married, staying to gather one degree after another. Maitland would do it. Or she could tell the cousins, who had long hated Charlie for taking advantage of Fanny and squandering the family fortune and good name. They would do it themselves or hire it out to some gangster from New Orleans or Memphis.

  But on her good days, Josephine knew she had too much of Papa in her to ever let someone else do her dirty work for her. She would do it. Still, she would need help. An accomplice. She sat down and wrote a long letter to Maitland, telling him what was happening.