Wild Midnight

by Davis, Maggie;

  He turned his steady bright blue gaze on her. The look said, And you wouldn’t be out of place here, either, in my house.

  “Rachel,” he said. He put his cup down on the table.

  “No,” she said too quickly. She was suddenly oppressed by this homey house that needed a woman so badly. “It’s late. I’ve got to get back.”

  He looked away. “You haven’t touched your coffee.” His patience was more appealing than any move he could have made to hold her hand or take her in his arms. “I’ll walk you out to your car.”

  The night outside was soft as velvet, the hot southern spring full upon them and loud with the shrill voices of tree frogs and crickets. Jim Claxton leaned his hand against the top of her small station wagon, his big body surrounding her, keeping her for a few more minutes. The feeling was strong that he wanted to kiss her. Rachel, with a very female sense of curiosity, wondered what it would be like to have this big, attractive man take her in his arms. The next moment she was irritated with herself for even thinking such a thing. She saw him bend his head to her in the darkness.

  “Rachel, I don’t know how you feel about me at this moment,” he began.

  In another second their lips would meet. She flattened herself against the side of the station wagon and tried to turn her head away casually.

  “If there’s someone else, you’ll have to tell me,” he said in a low voice. “I know it hasn’t been such a long time since you lost your husband, but it wouldn’t, I mean, I wouldn’t want—”

  “It’s too soon,” she heard herself saying. She was appalled at her own dishonesty.

  But he accepted it. “I’m sorry.” She could tell that he was. “It’s just that you’re so lovely, Rachel, so fine and sweet. I don’t want to rush you. I know how much you must miss your husband.”

  She made a little choking sound. She had come so far in deceit, she couldn’t believe it herself. “I have to get back,” she managed. “I have a lot of work to do, first thing in the morning.” She kept on talking, desperate to find a safe subject. “Now that the banks have turned us down I have to think of something to keep us in business. What do you know about Til Coffee?” she said, getting out her car keys. “He’s the high school teacher in Draytonville who—”

  “I know who Til Coffee is,” he interrupted her. “But I can’t tell you a whole lot about him.” He bent to open the door on the driver’s side of the car for her. “He came back here last year to teach, that’s what he said. He’s not giving you people any trouble, is he?”

  “Oh, no,” she said hastily. “Somebody said—someone told me that Til Coffee might get us financing to replant. I just wanted to know if you knew anything about him.

  She saw the big man raise his hand to the back of his neck. He didn’t conceal his disappointment. His face said that up to the last few minutes the evening had been wonderful. “All I know about him is what everybody in Draytonville knows, that he’s Beau Tillson’s half brother. That’s where he gets his name—Tillson Coffee. From the old man.”

  It was only ten o’clock when Rachel reached Draytonville. She drove aimlessly along the state highway, not wanting to go home, where Beau Tillson might be waiting for her.

  She turned her car down the main street, deserted even at that early hour. The heavy perfume of blooming plants—mock orange and cape jessamine—that haunted the damp low-country air was strong; thick shadows from the live oak trees and their trailing gray moss made a dark tunnel of the streets with their few streetlights. The town was familiar, even reassuring now, but Rachel was feeling disillusioned. This beautiful damp, dreamlike part of the world was like no other; she was just beginning to realize the truth of that. Reality didn’t exist beyond an invisible, point; here one could believe anything. And if one didn’t know that, one was a fool.

  She was a fool.

  She’d come here a naive and inexperienced young woman, an outsider with an idealistic project for tenant farmers, thinking she could change things. But the only thing that had changed was herself. Without her even being aware of it, Draytonville had claimed her, dragged her into its tangled, thwarted past and present-day mysteries and made her a part of them. Now, in this theater of the absurd, Rachel told herself bitterly, she was onstage with the rest of the permanent cast of players, in that select company that had known each other for most of their lives, acting out a strange melodrama that had no beginning, as far as she could see, and no ending, sustained only by the willingness of the performers to go on. Right now she was a character known as “Beau Tillson’s Woman,” replacing the renowned Darla Jean. Taking her place alongside unhappy D’Arcy Butler, who longed, one supposed, to have her leading role. And beside unhappy Jim Claxton—if ever a good, kind, solid man deserved better, it was he. Center stage was, of course, Beaumont Tillson playing his famous characterization—Beau Devil, the recklessly satanic product of war, a bizarre childhood, and everything else that made him what he was. Then there was Til Coffee, as unlucky as Rachel to be caught up in all this, and at his side the beautiful Loretha Bulloch and their child. And in the wings—the ghosts of Clarissa and Lee Tillson, one apparently as bad as the other.

  Before she’d left him, Jim Claxton had told her as much as he knew about their stories. Jim, the sharecropper’s son, reminding her that after all, he knew only a part of it, and that the Beaumonts were just one family and the county had many.

  Begin with Jessie Coffee, a beautiful woman and a Bulloch; all the Bulloch women were fine looking, proud, and smart.

  “They always claimed they were descended from some tribe on the gold coast,” Jim had told her. “The Bullochs held themselves a cut above the Gullah people hereabouts. And since nobody knew for sure, their story about where they came from originally was as good as anybody’s. Jessie was a county nurse-midwife, went up to Atlanta University and got her diploma and then came back here. They say Tillson wooed her with his money, bought her a new car, gave her anything she wanted. I guess the two of them made up for things they weren’t getting out of life.”

  The main street of Draytonville ended at the river and the partly collapsed old dock there. Rachel stopped the car and let the motor idle, watching the moonlight on the Ashepoo and its estuaries and the open glittering expanse of St. Helena Sound.

  In time Jessie Bulloch had gone to Chicago. Til Coffee, her son, had gone to high school and college there, and Lee Tillson had paid for all of it.

  “He did darned little for Beau, his other son,” Jim had added. “As far as anybody knows, they hated each other.”

  Rachel put the car into gear and moved down the sandy alley that ran behind the backs of the Main Street stores and along the moonlighted river. There was not a soul anywhere. Even when she got to the intersection of Main Street and the state highway, the service station and the Polar Bear Drive-In had put out their lights.

  It was only a matter of minutes to her house. As she crossed the yard she saw that the sandy earth was full of tire tracks, as though someone had driven in and then turned around. She turned the key in the lock and pushed the front door open with her hand, and as she did so something crunched underfoot. Rachel felt for the light switch, and when it came on she bent to see what it was.

  The light over the front steps wasn’t adequate, she could only feel that whatever it was, it was small and prickly with straw. She carried it inside.

  Rachel put the thing she still carried in her hand on the kitchen counter and turned on the light. Under the sudden fluorescent glare she could see that it was a small figure. It had feet and legs, it sat with its legs tucked under it to hold its body upright, and all of it was made with gray and white clay of the kind that could be found along the banks of the Ashepoo River. A wad of straw was tied around its middle with string, and rough arms, like flippers, were bent over its stomach. Attached to its head were a few strands of maroon yarn that might have been unraveled from someone’s old discarded sweater. Its two eyes were made of small white shells that gave it a disconc
ertingly blind look.

  And it smiled.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Oh, my God,” D’Arcy shrieked, “that’s a mamua, a little conjure doll! I haven’t seen one of them in years!”

  “There are more of them,” Rachel said. She pulled D’Arcy into the kitchen and showed her the shelf over the sink. There were six, all alike in their red wool hair, their staring white shell eyes, their little dresses of straw, and their crescent smiles shaped into the surface of the clay while it was still wet. “Nearly every morning there’s a new one outside.”

  D’Arcy groaned. “Well, of course, there is—if you’re going to keep moving them, they’re going to keep coming! You must be working some poor old root doctor half to death!”

  “Am I going to die?” Rachel asked calmly.

  “Oh, hush, be serious! You aren’t being serious, are you?” D’Arcy flung a handful of her pale hair back from her face and stared at her anxiously. “Honey, don’t make fun of me. I know you don’t believe any of this, but you have to be careful. You just don’t know about these things.”

  “No, I don’t,” she admitted. “But it doesn’t make me very happy to think somebody hates me this much.”

  D’Arcy couldn’t repress a small shudder. “Hate you? Oh, sugar—this is something different!” With long, hesitant fingers she reached up and took one of the little figures from the shelf. “Ugh, prickly little devils, aren’t they? I had an old nurse in Charleston once, she came from Edisto Island before they even had a ferry out there, much less a bridge, and she used to fill me to the ears with gris-gris.” Her fingers wriggled around the doll as though she could not bear to hold it. “Of course, Mama never knew, or she’d have thrown both of us clean out of the house!” D’Arcy put the doll down on the table quickly. “There,” she sighed. “That’s mamua obeah, isn’t she cute? She doesn’t have any color on her eyes because yours are brown, Rachel, but if they were blue—oh, my! Blue eyes are bad luck, and if mamua obeah’s going to look after you right, she has to have your eyes right.”

  “This thing is going to look after me?” Rachel asked, amazed.

  “Oh, now Rachel, honey, listen. Somebody’s setting mamua obeahs in front of your house to watch over the road and keep bad things away. If they were going to come from the river, they’d have put her in the back yard. Do you understand?” D’Arcy bit her gleaming underlip. “It’s kind of old fashioned, you don’t see the obeahs much anymore. But somebody’s looking after you. Why don’t you just put her out in front where you found her, and leave her there?”

  “I can’t put a thing like that on my front doorstep,” Rachel protested, “it’s downright silly. For goodness sake, why don’t I put the whole collection out there, line them up so they can have a dolls’ tea party? Do you think that would take care of it?”

  D’Arcy threw a hand up to stop her. “Lordy, don’t make fun of it! Somebody’s really worried about you, Rachel. They don’t want anything bad to get you. You must mean a lot to the Gullah people around here, ordinarily they don’t bother with white folks. It’s some old root doctor looking after you. The young ones don’t care anymore.”

  Rachel smiled. “D’Arcy, be sensible. You can’t believe in all this. Besides, the only people who come down this road are the mailman and I. And somebody in a pickup truck,” she added, “that races down to the end and back at night. Some of the local high school kids, I guess.”

  D’Arcy looked startled. “What high school kids—tell me! Have you seen them, do you know that’s who they are? When did all this start?”

  Rachel turned away from her, unconcerned, to put the kettle on to make tea. “I’m not going to add to this nonsense, D’Arcy, it isn’t fair. Just a pickup truck, I told you. It’s high school kids, or somebody looking for a lover’s lane.”

  But D’Arcy only rolled her eyes heavenward. “Oh damn, sometimes I just don’t believe you, Rachel. Listen, please be careful—if you do anything against these little mamuas, like throw them in the trash, the very least you do is hurt somebody’s feelings an awful lot. Somebody who’s trying to help you. Did you ever think of it that way?”

  Rachel shook her head. But this made more sense than the other things D’Arcy had said to her. She was the object of someone’s concern. If this was the Gullah way of showing it, she couldn’t help wishing they’d join the co-op instead.

  D’Arcy looked disapproving. “I wish you’d be serious—somebody’s going to a lot of trouble for you. These are real mamuas, not just somebody trying to play a practical joke.” She added quickly. “Not that anybody around here would do such a dumb thing.”

  “D’Arcy, I’m sorry—it’s not that I want to make anybody unhappy, but I just can’t have these things around.”

  “Rachel, honey, you’re just being foolish. The Gullah people just know when something’s going to happen. I swear, it’s true!”

  “That’s just rank superstition, and you know it.”

  “Listen,” D’Arcy cried, “it may be superstition to you but these people came from Africa, honey—they’ve been believing in these things for a long time. It wasn’t so long ago we used to have a lot of things, night burials, around here. The Gullah people used to bury their dead at midnight, just like when they were slaves, and whole crowds of them, hundreds of them, carried pine torches through the woods down to the river to bury the corpse in the riverbank. I think that was to keep the dead from walking, to put them in a grave above the high water mark. Gullah people are awfully nervous about the walking dead. And they could still chant all those African songs—I know some people who used to go to night burials, and Rachel, believe me, they said it was enough to scare the pure hell out of you!”

  “D’Arcy, you’re not going to convince me. Good heavens, don’t you realize you spent your summers here at an impressionable age?”

  “Don’t be so stubborn, Rachel,” she cried. “I know these things are true, and you don’t!”

  “Okay, D’Arcy,” Rachel sighed, not wanting to argue. The only thing she accepted was that someone thought they were trying to protect her.

  Yes, but against what?

  If it was against Beau Tillson, she thought with a slight shudder, they might be right. But she hadn’t seen him in over a week—not, in fact, since he’d come to her house demanding that she fix lunch for him. Since then there’d been no explanation for his absence, no messages left with the lawyer, no telephone calls, nothing. It was as though his need for her, his need to taunt her and be cruel to her, to make love to her—everything, had disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

  At first Rachel suspected that Beau Tillson had heard of her date with Jim Claxton in Hazel Gardens, since she’d made no effort to hide it. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter. But she’d lain awake each and every night waiting for some sound that told her he’d returned, expecting him to reach out for her in the darkness and demand her surrender, her body, her love—while giving little or nothing of himself. And in the darkness waiting, examining her own hurt, her own folly, and finally the return of humiliation, Rachel debated whether to try to telephone him, if only to find out what had happened. But she couldn’t imagine herself calling Belle Haven. She didn’t know if she believed him when he said Darla Jean was no longer there.

  When the pickup truck began racing up and down the road she wondered if it was he, patrolling the road to see if she really were in her house alone at night. But Beau Tillson drove a jeep, not a pickup. What roared down the road most nights, churning up the bitter dust, was a dark blue or green truck, from what she could glimpse from the front windows.

  Someone or something else delivered the conjure dolls, she was sure. They were never there when she went to bed, no matter how late. But they were always there at dawn.

  Rachel didn’t really want to talk to D’Arcy about any of this. D’Arcy was full of her own problems. The blond woman’s restless journeys from Charleston to Draytonville and back, sometimes three times a week, indicated that poor D�
��Arcy was obsessed with her particular troubles. Rachel found what was happening to this beautiful, frivolous Charleston society girl just as inexplicable as all the other things taking place. But her sudden sympathy made her ask, “Are things getting any better, D’Arcy?”

  The corners of D’Arcy’s lovely mouth turned down. “You mean me? Oh, hell, I just come and go, come and go, sugar, but nobody pays any damned attention. I put so many miles on that Lincoln, I’m just going to wear it out, I’ll never get a trade-in to amount to anything next year. I’m just plain throwing my life away on that man.”

  It had to be her cousin, Rachel thought with a pang. Suddenly impatient, she said, “For goodness sake, D’Arcy, if you love him, why don’t you come right out and tell him. Maybe he doesn’t know.”

  D’Arcy shook her golden head. ‘I did, honey, I did, and it didn’t make one bit of difference. He just thinks I’m an empty-headed rich girl, he practically told me so. Oh, he was sweet when he said it,” she said, her voice cracking with despair. “He’s always so wonderful, so damned kind, but that doesn’t get me anywhere at all! I can’t prove anything to him—that I’m not the way he thinks I am, because he treats me like I don’t even exist!”

  Rachel stared. D’Arcy’s words didn’t match what Beau Tillson had told her at all. Had he lied when he said that D’Arcy had never told him she loved him? Certainly D’Arcy seemed to know a different Beau Tillson, to describe him as “sweet” and “kind.”

  She couldn’t resist asking, “Did your cousin know about his half brother? I mean, before Til Coffee came here to live?”

  D’Arcy looked startled. “He, who? Oh—that. You mean Beau. Oh lordy, somebody’s gotten around to telling you that old story.”