Darkwater

by V. J. Banis

  She shoved those memories determinedly aside. The dead were gone, all of the past vanished. Those memories must be gone too. She could not afford that sort of romantic dream.

  Her dreams now were of nothing more thrilling than survival. And for that, she would need all of her wits about her. She couldn’t waste her time or her energy on ghosts from the past.

  * * * * * * *

  Helen Dere had been oddly impressed with their visitor. It was not only that the young woman was very pretty—you were taken at once with that, of course—or that she was obviously well bred despite the shabbiness of her clothes. Since the war, one had gotten used to seeing people dressed in shabby finery, even here in remote Durieville.

  What Jennifer Hale had was a look of strength—soft and subtle, but enduring strength.

  Of course she would never do. Alicia would never permit it.

  Alicia. That woman! How she had disrupted the peace of an otherwise happy house, with her sickness. We would be better off if she died, Helen thought, and was at once shocked at herself.

  She hurried back down to the first floor and along that hall, to the rear of the house. A young girl of about fourteen slipped from the door of the room at the end of the hall. The slim figure stood poised for a moment, as if for flight. Then she looked down the hall and saw Helen hurrying toward her, Helen’s voile skirt making little swishing sounds as she moved.

  The stiffness seemed to go from the girl’s body. The shoulders slumped, the head drooped. Her young face took on a lethargic expression and her hands toyed listlessly with the pleats of her skirt, which was patently too short for her.

  “What are you doing here?” Helen demanded of her.

  “I came to see Alicia,” the girl said, avoiding Helen’s direct gaze. The defensive note in her voice grated badly on Helen’s nerves.

  “And haven’t you been told time and again not to bother Alicia, especially when she’s having one of her spells. What did you want with her anyway? What did you do to make her...?”

  From behind Helen, Walter’s deep voice asked, “What seems to be the problem here?”

  “Walter,” the girl cried. His appearance effected a marvelous change in the girl. Her dispirited pose was abandoned and she was suddenly filled with the vivacity to be expected of a girl her age. She darted around Helen to fling herself wildly into Walter’s arms.

  “You’re back,” she squealed, sounding altogether like a child. “I missed you so.”

  “Now, Liza,” he said, ruffling her hair playfully, “I was only gone a short while. What seems to be the problem with Alicia? Were you in there?”

  Walter could not see the girl’s face, buried as it was against his midsection, but Helen saw the quick, calculating look that flashed over it.

  “I only wanted to visit with her. I told her I wanted to be friends.”

  “That’s my girl.” Walter patted her shoulder.

  Helen, not in the least taken in, said sharply, “Why was she screaming? Is that what she thought of your offer of friendship?”

  “No, she was screaming because she heard that Walter came back from town with a very pretty lady friend,” Liza said.

  Walter’s grin faded and he frowned at his mother.

  And I’ll bet I know who told Alicia about that, Helen thought angrily. She kept that thought to herself and said aloud, “Liza, I think you had better join the other children and stay out of sight for a while.”

  Liza’s shoulders automatically stiffened in a gesture of resistance. Walter felt it too and again he patted her shoulder. “That’s right, little darling. It won’t do for Alicia to see you if she’s in one of those moods, as we all know from experience. You go along now.”

  “All right, if that is what you want me to do, Walter,” Liza said, emphasizing the “you” and casting a quick glance in Helen’s directions. She left them, walking sedately for a few feet, like a young lady, and then breaking into a run.

  For a moment Helen watched her go with a peevish expression. She loved children and she was well acquainted with their mischief and their ability to dissimulate, but this girl rankled in some way Helen could not quite put into words.

  “What makes you frown like that?” Walter asked.

  That Walter was completely attached to the child, she already knew. And she knew too that to express the opinion she had just thought would do nothing more than provoke a quarrel. She ignored his question, and said instead, “Alicia’s been wanting to see you. She’s been asking for you ever since you left, even before this latest.”

  “It’s all right now,” he said. “I will go to see her.”

  He gave her a smile which did not quite erase the signs of fatigue that played around his eyes and the corners of his mouth.

  Helen waited until he had disappeared into his wife’s bedroom. Then she went along the hall, through the spacious dining room and into the roomy kitchen.

  A huge black woman stood before the stove, stirring something in a large pot. In the heat of the kitchen her skin, black as ebony, gleamed as if it had been polished with wax. She was immensely fat, but when she moved, it was with a surprising grace and with the lightness of movement of a nymph, and when she smiled, opening her vast cavern of a mouth to reveal a full array of teeth and pink flesh, she had a unique beauty of her own.

  Several blacks worked in the kitchen with her. Two young girls were busy just now peeling potatoes, but this woman, Bess, had an air of assurance that told you plainly she was the queen here, subservient to no one but the Deres themselves, and sometimes she seemed to manage them as well.

  She turned from the stove and, catching sight of her mistress’s grim expression, said, “Lord’s sake, you look like you’ve been through the war all over again.”

  Although it had been some fifteen years since the war to free the slaves, it remained in Bess’s mind as the yardstick by which all other unpleasant experiences were measured. Here at Darkwater it had not made much difference in the lives of the blacks. There had not been so many slaves here as on other plantations and those who were here had lived pretty much the same before the war as after and with nearly as much freedom. The Deres had always been humane people and very progressive in that respect.

  Indeed, Bess sometimes pointed out that in some ways things had been better before the war for the blacks here. Prosperity had benefited them as well, and blacks had not always fared well at the hands of Union soldiers either.

  She knew, however, that elsewhere blacks had not had it so nice as here at Darkwater. The Deres were the exception, not the rule, and other blacks had plenty of reasons to celebrate their freedom.

  These days only a few blacks remained, and they did not do so much farming as in the past. All over the South great plantations had been laid waste, and even many of those that had not been ravaged lay fallow, because the Northerners who had taken them over, breaking them up into little farms, were not farmers, or did not understand cotton or the Southern climate or the intricacies of growing cane.

  The Deres had been fortunate in that, even before the war, much of their money was invested in the industrial North, so that their fortune had not suffered so much as their neighbors’. Moreover, Durieville was only a backwater town, not on the road to anywhere, and so had experienced little actual damage from the war.

  “It’s Walter,” Helen said absentmindedly. “He looks so strained. All this business of an invalid wife....”

  Bess gave a disdainful snort. “Invalid? I’d say puttin’ on, if you was to ask me.”

  “Now, Bess, I can’t believe anyone would voluntarily go through all Alicia’s gone through,” Helen argued, but without the strength of conviction to her voice. “You’ve seen her when she is having her spells, she really does suffer.”

  “The doctor said,” Bess began, but Helen had heard this tirade countless times before.

  “Lest I forget,” she interrupted, “we have a guest. I’ve put her in the green room and we will need an extra place for din
ner.”

  “Yes’m,” Bess said. “This’d be the new nurse for Miss Alicia?”

  That there was a guest in the house was hardly news to her. In fact, she had been informed of it when the cart first turned up the drive, as she was promptly informed of nearly everything that went on about the plantation. She had seen the newcomer even before Helen had. Peeking through a crack in the door as they alighted from the cart, her eyes had become wide circles of white in her black face and she had murmured to herself, “Land’s sake, wait until Miss Alicia has a look at her. Umm hummm.”

  She looked now entirely innocent, however, as she turned her attention once more to the pot on the stove. The boy had brought her a huge bowl of peeled potatoes, which she snatched from his hand wordlessly, making him look disappointed that he had not been thanked as he was used to.

  “Go on,” she said out of the side of her mouth, shooing him away.

  “No, our guest will only be staying the night,” Helen said. She did not offer any further explanation. She knew full well that Bess had already seen the newcomer and would figure out for herself why she would not be staying. She left the kitchen.

  Bess grinned to herself and added the potatoes to the pot, making brown gravy splash down the sides.

  She had been with the Deres since she was born, and was attached to them, especially to Miss Helen, who was her contemporary, with a passionate devotion. During the war, when other slaves, including some who had, as she put, “been treated like family by the Deres,” were running away or burning and looting their former masters’ houses, and the Dere men had been away, Bess had guarded her mistress with an ancient flintlock, defying anyone, white or black, blue or gray coated, to enter the house uninvited. No one had.

  Miss Alicia was something else. She was not a Dere except in that she had married Mr. Walter. “More’s the pity,” Bess would say often. It was plain to Bess that there was a war going on right here in this house, between the Deres, especially Walter and his wife, Alicia. That woman was trying to break that man, and she was winning, wearing down his spirit, trying his temper and his patience.

  Lord knows, he had been patient enough with her moanings and cryings and screamings. Bess didn’t see how he had kept his head for so long, but he was changing. He, who had once been so happy and smiling all the time, and never worried about a thing, not even in the worst of the war, and he hardly smiled at all now, or if he did, it was so tinged with sorrow and tiredness that he looked like a different man.

  And where will it all end, she asked herself silently, tasting the stew in her pot? A house divided against itself cannot stand. That was what Mr. Lincoln had said and it was true. She had seen the omens herself, even if Miss Helen ordered her not to practice the arts anymore. Something was going to happen here, something bad, and it was coming soon, she was as sure of it as sure could be.

  “It’ll be her that brings trouble on the house, too,” Bess told herself grimly. “With all her mysterious aches and pains and the doctor can’t find anything wrong with her except she’s spoiled and a Longstreet, and they always thought they was too good for anybody. And she can’t stand to think anybody else is happy or having any pleasantness.”

  For a fleeting moment Bess’s thoughts left that subject and went to the visitor. Well, of course, there was going to be trouble there. Miss Alicia was never going to put up with having someone young and pretty like that around the house.

  “Lord knows, and she knows it too, Mr. Walter isn’t getting any loving from the woman he’s married to,” she said, muttering to herself. “And a pretty face like that could turn a man’s head easy enough.”

  The door opened noiselessly and Liza slipped into the room, moving quietly, the way she always did. Like a rat, Bess thought.

  “And you are another one, always bringing trouble,” Bess said aloud, eyeing her darkly and with no welcome. “What you been up to in Miss Alicia’s room, making her holler? You take her a snake or what?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Liza said, running her fingers along the edge of the table and casting hungry glances around the kitchen for something to eat. “I went to visit her, and I just happened to tell her about the pretty lady that came in with Walter, and she started hitting the pillow with her fists and screaming.”

  Bess chuckled at the picture, for although she considered Liza odd and a nuisance, that feeling paled to nothingness beside her dislike for Alicia.

  She quickly recovered herself and assumed a stern expression. “You go on now, get out of here,” she said, “and don’t be piecing before dinner.”

  “I’m hungry. I want something to eat,” Liza said, undaunted by what she called the black woman’s “airs.” “You can’t stop me from getting something to eat.”

  Bess’s eyes flashed angrily and she shook a long wooden spoon in the girl’s direction. “Go on, git, or I’ll tell Mr. Walter.”

  The girl’s own eyes grew menacing, but she said defiantly, “He doesn’t care about my coming into the kitchen. You can’t scare me away.”

  Bess leaned toward her until their faces were only inches apart and they stared eye-to-eye at one another. Bess said, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, “I’ll tell him about the time last week when you put that spider in Miss Alicia’s tea and you didn’t think I was watching you do it.”

  Lisa’s face paled and her jaw dropped open a little. For a moment she held her ground but Bess’s wide grin undid her and with an angry toss of her head, she whirled about and ran toward the door.

  Bess chuckled to herself. In fact, she had not seen Liza do that, but when the spider had showed up in Miss Alicia’s tea, she’d had a good idea right away how it had gotten there.

  At the door to the outside, Liza turned back long enough to say, in a menacing voice, “You damn nigger.” But she ran out, letting the door slam, before Bess had time to retaliate.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time she came down to dinner, Jennifer had restored both her usual neat appearance and her self-confidence. She would somehow convince the Deres to let her stay on here as the nurse-companion that the young Mrs. Dere was said to need. She would because she must. And she had learned over the past few years that desperation often made it possible to do the impossible. What a person made up her mind she must do, accepting no possibility of failure, then it was done.

  Helen Dere awaited her in the parlor. Although it was summer, a small fire had been lit to fight the damp chill of the storm. The look Helen gave her guest seemed balanced somewhere between instinctive approval and reasoned misgiving.

  “My, you look pretty,” she said with sincerity but with a touch of regret, too. It was certainly true. Before, wet with rain and tired from her travel, this young woman had still looked pretty, but now, her hair neatly tied back, her face glowing without benefit of rouge, she looked lovelier still. She wore a gown of pearl gray silk and although it was plainly not new and was well worn, it was a Worth, and still stunning. The absence of jewelry or adornment of any kind only enhanced the effect of old elegance.

  “Thank you,” Jennifer replied, glad that she had decided to wear this, the last “good” dress she had left. Tonight of all nights she must be at her best. “I’m afraid I must have looked dreadful when you saw me earlier. I’m sure you must have been disappointed at first sight.”

  “On the contrary, your appearance was rather more than I expected. Shall we go in to dinner? I should perhaps have explained, we dine rather informally at Darkwater. Since the war, there have been fewer servants and everyone works much more than before.”

  “I understand,” Jennifer said. “We too went through the war. We lost...everything.”

  With a flash of insight Helen realized that the young woman walking beside her had lost far more than what they here at Darkwater had lost, and it made her more sympathetic to Jennifer’s plight. Still, there was always the problem of Alicia....

  “Of course we were so much more fortunate than most,” Helen said lamel
y. She knew so many had lost, as Jennifer had said, everything. Families, once proud, aristocratic, wealthy, had been reduced to living in abject poverty, on the tenuous charity of friends. Even a decade and a half after the war the South lay ravaged, and most of the wealth was in the hands of the Northerners who had descended upon the fallen Confederacy like swarms of locusts. Every night when she said her prayers, she thanked God that the Deres, had come through it so well, in large part thanks to her husband’s business foresight.

  “You have your home,” Jennifer said simply. “That is fortunate. What a pleasant room.”

  The dining room was large and homey, dominated by a long table set informally. The dishes were mismatched and some of them chipped. Another couple was already seated at the table, with them three children: a boy about five, a girl who was obviously his sister and appeared to be about eight, and another girl who was older, probably fourteen, Jennifer guessed, but who looked not at all like the other two.

  The adults stood as the two women came into the room, and Helen introduced them. “This is our guest, Miss Jennifer Hale, This is Susan Donally, my daughter, and her husband, Martin. They live in the cottage just behind Darkwater but they usually take their meals with us. We are somewhat isolated here, so we take comfort in one another’s company.”

  “You’re fortunate it’s so quiet tonight,” Susan said. She had a big, open smile and she made no effort to conceal her curiosity regarding their visitor. She was perhaps twenty, and Jennifer recognized her as typical of the generation that had grown up since the war, without the old forms of courtesy and rigid formality. “Anyone who happens to be passing by about this time stops in for dinner—people from town, neighbors, relatives, even traveling salesmen.”

  “Hospitality is a tradition here,” Helen said.