by Rhodi Hawk
“It’s because I turned my back on Jesus, ain’t it? Oh, look what I become!”
He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it. I have no idea why.”
“I only slept on the streets a little while. I tried to get back on my feet an go get a job. Went in for an interview, then afterward I looked in the mirror an there was dirt on my face. No one told me! I went and did the whole interview like that.”
“Oran, Alice. Just tell me about Oran and how you came to be drivin this car!”
She took a gulp of air. “I never done anything like this before. My old man and I used to brawl but that was fair, and we just hittin. That night down by the river, I don’t know why I did that. And now I…”
“Alice!”
She said, “I thought for sure he knew where the doc was. Couldn’t get in his head, had to make him talk the old-fashioned way.”
She gave in to sobbing again, but still managed to squeeze out the truth. “I cut on him! He really didn’t know where she was! But, I kept them, just in case, they’re in there.”
She was pointing at the glove box. Ethan swallowed, and opened it. Three fingers inside. Oran’s fingers.
He slammed the thing shut. “What is it with Zenon and the damn fingers?”
“What?”
“Where is he now, Alice? Where is Oran?”
She gestured a shaky hand back over her shoulder. “He’s in the trunk.”
“Jesus! Give over the keys!”
She handed them to him and he scrambled out of the car and opened the trunk. Oran was in there, shaking and bleeding. He didn’t react to the sight of Ethan or the trunk being opened. Looked like he might be in shock.
Ethan yanked out his cell and dialed 911.
forty-nine
BAYOU BOUILLON, 1927
IN A WAY IT brought relief. No more wondering when the river devils might appear, or the thorns. They were already there. No more groping for the quiet mind, trying to conjure the kind of stillness Ferrar wore so effortlessly. She could follow where the sylphs led her. There was so much to explore: learning to breathe underwater, looking inside yesterday and tomorrow, pinching time to shape the hour.
“Patrice.”
She looked and saw Trigger, and just the sight of him made her laugh. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Look.”
He gestured behind him. Marie-Rose and Gilbert.
“Rosie?”
Patrice felt numb. She’d forgotten. Unbelievable, that she could let her attention lapse to such an extent that she would forget about her siblings, whom she loved most in the world.
She made to encircle them with her arms but Trigger stopped her. “Think first, Treesey, Think on it. You don’t want to do that.”
Patrice listened to him. Yes. It had happened before. She’d touched Rosie and the tar devil had attacked her. It had struck her so hard she’d fallen over. Even though her physical body didn’t exist in this world, the illusions made it seem like she truly had been hit and had even been bleeding. What happened after that, she couldn’t recall.
Rosie was making the swallowed “g-g-g” noises in her throat. The tar devil kept forcing her and Gil forward. They were in a ravine of black briar pines where a sheer cliff reached toward the sky. The shadow river coursed along behind them.
Trigger said, “You touch them, the tar devils come after you, and then you’re lost for a good long while. You and I have both done it. More than one time, I think. It’s hard to tell. This last time, once I got my senses back, I’ve just been watching them and trying to figure this out.”
Patrice ached to touch Gil and Rosie, but she knew what Trigger said was true. Memories flared and winked out.
Trigger said, “It’s because Maman got to both their minds and their bodies. It took me a while to find them again. Every time they start to leave the briar, she scratches them with a bird’s foot dipped in poison. They go through that whole cycle of sleep, then awake, then briar. I don’t know how long each part of it lasts.”
“But why not us? Why hasn’t a tar devil been after us?”
Trigger gave her a sideways look. “One has. You don’t remember? In Bayou Bouillon, it got to you because you damn-fool threw yourself in front of the thing when it shoulda come after me. But I think you need the scratch poison in your system or else it doesn’t last. Not unless you go near one of their tar pools, then they’ll drag you in. After the tar devil goes away, you’re just lost in the briar.”
“But we were scratched! That day we left Terrefleurs.”
“I don’t think Maman perfected it yet then. I think once she got hold of Rosie she practiced on her, with the poisons and the tar devil. Now she’s mastered it.”
The tar devil stood bent and swaying on lizard-like limbs. It shoved Rosie forward and she took a step, then stopped. It made a screeching sound and shoved at a pine tree, then struck Rosie on the back of the head. She staggered forward again,
A pine needle drifted down and landed in Rosie’s hair, near her ear. She wiped it away and it fell to the ground, now shining black. Patrice stepped a little closer. Rosie had tar smeared over her eyes, mouth, and ears. Gil did, too.
The tar devil kept pushing them from behind, and they kept staggering forward until they came to the rock face. Another shove from behind, and Gil started climbing up, hand over hand.
Patrice racked her mind, thinking, trying to figure out how they might free their siblings from this.
“Do you know where their bodies are?” she asked Trig.
He nodded, saying nothing, and walked over to where Gil and Rosie had just been. Patrice followed. He picked up the pine needle that had lodged in Rosie’s hair. It had tar on it.
“Come here.” He took Patrice by the wrist, leading her to a pool that formed at the edge of the shadow river.
He placed the pine needle on the surface and then brought Patrice’s hand into the water. “Now look.”
They both leaned forward. There, reflecting on the surface, they saw Rosie peering back at them. Not the way she was over there with the tar devil. This had to be her physical self. She was wrapped in what looked like white thread, so tangled she could barely move. She was looking down from somewhere high above. Crossed wooden beams. Roofing joists.
From over by the rocky rise, she heard Rosie say, “Patrice?” and the Rosie staring across from within the pool said it, too.
“I’m here, baby!” She didn’t know which side of the pool to address.
But Trigger put his finger over his lips and shook his head. Over by the ledge, the tar devil gave a cry and boxed Rosie’s ears.
Patrice looked back to the pool and saw Rosie’s physical self reel to the side as though she’d been struck in the physical world, not in the briar. It looked for a moment like she might fall from those rafters. But she steadied herself and went back to moving again, climbing across a wooden beam with the same tired, jaunty motion she used while walking in the briar.
Trigger said, “Maman’s holding them up in the attic of some old building. Their bodies concentrate on keeping balance. I think it keeps them occupied somehow. Their minds are here, in the briar, but the tar devil keeps them lost.”
Patrice stared at her sister’s reflection. Hard to imagine that the girl from the pool was the real, physical Marie-Rose, and that this sleepwalker at the base of the cliff was the illusion. The physical girl had sunken eyes and her hands and feet gripped the beams in such a way that barely seemed human.
But beneath the spider threads that bound her, her hair was brushed and neatly tied. She wore clean bloomers.
“Who is looking after them?” Patrice asked.
Trigger replied, “Tatie Bernadette.”
Patrice caught her breath. “How could she?”
“How couldn’t she? Maman forced it on her. Told her she could look after the children if she wanted but she’s not allowed to leave the building or speak to anyone. Tatie makes sure they eat and go to the toilet.
And she helps them bathe and dress. When she’s not doin that, she sits and cries and prays.”
Rosie crawled along a beam at the ceiling and angled her body so that she could get a better look back through the pool toward Patrice and Trigger, and in doing so she crept into a ray of sunlight. Her face looked so different. Her lips fuller. And as she turned, a tiny lump showed the beginning formation of a breast—the first stages of puberty. At seven years old?
“What?” Patrice said, but then she saw Gil.
He crawled into view, moving along the ceiling joists to join Rosie. His eyes were vacant like Papa’s used to look when he was so, so lost, wandering Terrefleurs as a madman. As he moved, he worked his way through sticky, crisscrossing threads, just like Rosie. One of the threads was knotted around his neck like a leash, like a noose. Rosie had one, too.
Patrice stared. Gil’s body was long. Not the boy Patrice lost yesterday. He was tall. Stubble at his chin.
“How long have we been in here?” Patrice cried.
Trigger shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s hard to tell.”
“Then guess!”
Trigger was silent, his face grim. Patrice knew that if she gave over to panic the thornflies would come to sting her, to amplify her distress, and she would be no use to Gil or Rosie.
“Where’s Maman?”
“She’s down the stairs from where they are.”
Trigger leaned back and rose to his feet, stepping forward into the water. “You can go on in if you want. They just—you know, no one’ll see you.”
Patrice watched him. He at least still looked like an eleven-year-old boy. But so did the briar version of Gil, climbing that ledge with those awful smears of tar across his eyes and mouth. And Rosie was still so small. Their physical counterparts had changed so much and yet their briar selves were the same.
Patrice stepped into the pool after Trigger and watched the reflections of her sister and brother ripple away. She pulled herself deep under the surface, down until she felt a strange euphoric upset of balance. And then she was standing inside a great chamber where her brother and sister were moving about twelve feet above her. Their gazes followed her as she moved. But it seemed automatic, the way insects respond to light.
The ropes around their necks provided enough slack that they could move freely about the rafters. But not so much that they could come down from them. The ropes each looped through a pulley and down along the wall to a steel arm, and then wound around that arm in several crisscrossing loops.
Trigger said, “Maman lets Tatie Bernadette unwind the cord to feed them or put them to the toilet or bathe them. Then after that she has to send them up and tie the cord again. It’s the only time they come down to the floor: eat, bathe, dress, toilet. Rest of the time, they’re up there. Even when they sleep.”
A ladder lay across the raw wooden floor. She tried to move it, knowing that for her it was only an illusion.
“That’s a waste of time,” Trigger said.
“Alright. I’ll see what I can do with Maman.”
Trigger nodded. “I’ll do my best to get them down. But even if I do, I still don’t know how we’ll physically get to them.”
Patrice turned and followed through a doorway to a narrow, steep stairwell. She descended to the bottom landing, then passed through a locked door as though it were open.
Sitting near a window, reading a folded newspaper, was Maman.
* * *
THE ROOM WAS ORNATELY decorated with a vast ceiling and wood molding that sculpted every inch of the walls from crown to base. A white-painted radiator stood beneath the window like a set of teeth. Patrice looked back to the door she’d just passed through. No doorknob or visible hinges; it was a hidden passage to the attic. It looked like one of the painted wood panels lining the wall.
A mirror hung over the fireplace. Patrice cast no reflection in it.
Aside from Maman sitting in the chair, there was a man in the room. He lay stretched on the bed, one foot on the floor and a hat covering his face, his hand tucked behind his neck.
Patrice stared at her mother. Skinny, with that zipper scar that ran down the back of her shoulder. She had the newspaper folded down to a rectangle just large enough for the article she was reading, and nothing more. Patrice could probably walk up and peer over her shoulder and still not be able to tell whether it was The Times-Picayune or The States. Even such a simple thing as reading the paper had to be a clandestine act.
And yet the absurdity seemed to be in the plain fact that she would be sitting there reading like that. Such an everyday thing.
“Shouldn’t you be getting to the warehouse?” Maman said to the man on the bed, her French accent lengthening her words.
He stirred but otherwise ignored her. That’s when Patrice realized that he had no hand. Jacob Chapman.
She remembered the old Terrefleurs legend of the amputation performed with no better anesthesia than liquor and song. Jacob had come around the plantation often over the years, helping Maman with sugar business and looking in on Papa.
“Ah,” she heard her mother say.
Patrice saw that Maman had looked up from the paper and was staring directly at her.
Maman said, “Is this my boy, Guy? Have you finally come looking for your brother and sister?”
Maman set the paper on the side table and rose to her feet. Patrice stepped toward her. She could try pigeoning her. It likely wouldn’t work.
“Or, is it … Patrice?”
A knock at the door, and then it opened. Patrice recognized the woman who entered the room but couldn’t quite place her. It wasn’t until she was passing Maman that Patrice realized this was her own Tatie Bernadette. She’d lost considerable weight. She held a basket topped with a white linen cloth.
“Bernadette. Where are you going?” Maman said.
Tatie paused and looked over her shoulder at Maman. “It’s time for their supper.”
“Come back later.”
Tatie stood motionless, her gaze returning to that panel that led to Rosie and Gil.
“Aw, let her feed’m.” Mr. Chapman said from the bed.
He was now sitting up with his hat resting on his head instead of over his face, and he lit a cigarette.
Maman ran her gaze across the room until it landed again on Patrice. She looked like a blind person who could not look eye-to-eye, only stare in the direction of a voice.
She said, “My child. Would you like that, eh? See how we feed your brother and sister like dogs. All because you won’t come out from hiding.”
Mr. Chapman’s hand froze where he held his cigarette to his lips. He looked from Maman to the vague direction of where Patrice stood, his eyes darting from mother to daughter. Patrice doubted he could see her. He rose carefully to his feet, placing the cigarette in the ashtray as though it were fragile as an egg.
Tatie Bernadette turned, too, following Maman’s gaze.
Maman said, “Go ahead then, Bernadette, feed them. Feed the mongrels.”
Tatie Bernadette burst into tears and started pleading to Maman. “Which one is here? Is it little Trigger or Patrice? You can’t keep treating those babies like this. You’ve got to stop—”
Maman backhanded Tatie. “Go in there and feed them, or leave them behind forever.”
Maman hadn’t even raised her voice. Just a strike and an order.
Tears streaming, Tatie cupped her hand to her face and pushed through to the panel, muttering, “I’m sorry children. I’m sorry.”
Maman said to her, “And reset their tethers when you’re done. You remember what happened to them the last time?”
Tatie was shaking where she stood in the doorway.
“Bernadette, did you hear me ask you a question?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Then tell us. I want everyone present to hear.”
Tatie shuddered. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Patrice had never seen her tatie this way before.
“S
peak, Bernadette!”
“You took off their pinky toes. Took off little Rosie’s first. Then Gilbert’s. They were unsteady in the rafters after that.”
“More liable to fall,” Maman said.
Tatie hesitated, then, “Yes, ma’am.”
Maman nodded. “So I advise you to put the tether back in its place when you’re through feeding them.”
“Yes, ma’am.” A whisper this time.
“Alright then. Go on.”
The panel closed behind Tatie, and they could hear her footfalls going up the steps. Patrice found it hard to believe that that terrified, cowering woman had really been her darling tatie.
Mr. Chapman strode for the opposite door. Patrice felt rage well up inside her at the sight of him, his mother’s accomplice. She threw her focus into him.
He stopped just as he was reaching for the handle. The cigarette was still burning unchecked in the ashtray. Chapman stood still as an oak, beads of sweat already forming at his brow.
Mother looked satisfied. “There. Good idea. Use him.”
Patrice turned Mr. Chapman around to face Maman. His movements were wooden.
But on Patrice’s command he said, “What do you want from us?”
“Who is this? Patrice or Guy?” Maman asked.
“Patrice.”
“Ah. Ma p’tite Patrice. You should send Guy to talk to me. You have nothing I want.”
“Let them go.”
“No, child. They will stay with me forever. Or until that silly Bernadette dies and they rot away to dust up there. I let her look after them only to get your attention. Now that I’ve got it, I should let them die.”
Patrice listened, shock pulsing through her. Until now, Patrice’s worst fear was that Maman would gain control of them. Make them into slaves. But these things Maman was saying—Patrice didn’t know whether to believe it. That she was truly capable of letting Rosie and Gil die up there in that attic space. Maman had never been warm with them, but … this? Had she changed so much when they banished her from Terrefleurs? Or was this always her true nature?
Patrice spoke again through Mr. Chapman. “How could you hurt them like that? Why would you?”
Maman shook her head, never looking at Mr. Chapman though he was the one delivering the words. She kept her gaze on Patrice. “For the years I wasted on all of you. On your father. He would go into that spirit world and bring back so little. I saved his plantation for him. I bore his children. He had no responsibility. If Marie-Rose and Gilbert could learn to bring back real talents, then it would be worthwhile to keep them alive. But they don’t. They were always terrible students. They never learned.”