The child twists out of her grasp and darts away. A broad-cheeked Gypsy woman with rolling dark eyes approaches them with a plate of dough balls, fried and dusted with sugar. Iris takes one, but Nelle declines. She never eats in a dirty house. She asks, “Are you our hostess?”
The woman nods. She sets the plate aside, claps her hands, and announces in a heavily accented voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, come with me into the parlor.”
Iris murmurs to Nelle, “That’s Zarra.”
The parlor is dim yet colorful, its windows hung with red velvet, the wall sconces enlivened with fringed shades. A round table occupies the center. Nelle scans the ceiling for ropes and pulleys that might cause furniture to move, but sees none. Rugs might conceal a trapdoor. A spectral shape might be created by the use of dry ice, smoke, and light. A child could reach out from a dark corner with a stick and tap someone’s shoulder. Nelle decides she’s enjoying herself. Iris’s rabbity face is all eagerness and expectation. These are modern times, yet there will always be people like Iris and her friends, dupes begging to be hoodwinked.
Yet here is Nelle among them. A dapper young man pulls out a chair for her, and she accepts it. Iris, all aflutter, takes a seat beside her. Dorothy Taylor and others join them. A further dimming of lights commences as a sleek shadow of a boy, about thirteen, snuffs out a candle. Zarra seats herself. The sconces burn steadily, and Nelle is aware of how close the room is. Somebody giggles. Nelle hopes Iris won’t faint. It’s just the kind of thing Iris would do.
Nelle hopes she herself won’t faint. She touches her middle. No bulge yet, to push through her brown silk skirt. She hasn’t told anyone, not even Richard.
They are asked to hold hands. Iris’s fingers feel limp and hot against Nelle’s palm. The dapper young man clutches Nelle’s other hand.
Zarra says, “Think of one you have loved and lost.” Her voice is husky and foreign. Nelle can smell her—a scurfy animal scent. Well, she’ll play along. Loved and lost: her girlhood dog, Griffin, an Airedale hound, fierce and tall.
A bark, and Nelle jumps. The sound comes again, as if a dog is just outside the window. Silence, and then a note sounds on an instrument—a harp or a cello.
“Come,” Zarra cries. “Those gone before us, give us light or darkness, cold or heat or wind. We welcome your presence, your message from beyond.”
Nonsense and charlatanry, Nelle reminds herself, though her ears strain for the barking dog. The young man clears his throat and says, “I would like to make contact with my mother.” Nelle wonders if he’s in league with Zarra. “My mother, Elizabeth Hart Rawlings.”
Zarra repeats the name, and the man moans, “Mother, I’m so sorry.” He rocks in his chair. A scent of honeysuckle—no, mock orange—reaches Nelle’s nose. The man whispers, “Mother, you’re here.” He presses his hands to his chest. “Hold me, Mother, hold me tight.”
Dorothy Taylor bursts into wracking sobs. “My Edward, are you here?” she says. “Oh, darling, I miss you so much.”
Who is the dapper young man, and just how did he disappoint his mother? Who might darling Edward be, or have been, to dull old Dorothy Taylor? Nelle wonders.
She feels the table rising. As guests gasp, it wobbles and lifts beneath their elbows. Nelle and the others push back from it and stand, transfixed. The table whirls and dips until it stops, wavers, and lands with a thud. Zarra seems to be waiting.
“Knock,” Zarra murmurs. “Knock for us, restless soul.”
No answer. From some far corner of the house, a clock strikes. Zarra calls, “Knock! Hear me, spirit, and give your sign.” Her voice sounds agitated.
Nelle knows now. She has figured it out. She says, “Lift it up and let him out. You there,” she addresses the young man. Zarra is already grasping the table, straining to lift it—or to hold it down so the others cannot? No, she is helping. Nelle and Zarra and the young man raise the table from the floor far enough to reveal, yes, a child hiding in its center column, slumped and sliding out from the prison of wood.
“Don’t drop it,” Nelle says. Zarra swoops down to the child. Nelle and the young man maneuver the heavy table out of the way. It’s a relief to set it down.
Zarra shrieks, lights flare up, and figures swoop and fly about the room, picking up the child—a girl, Nelle sees; long hair falls around its shoulders. Not the one that ran into her earlier, but an older child.
“Bring water,” someone cries.
“She is dead,” Zarra screams. Nelle wonders for an instant if this is all part of the charade, but the lights and pandemonium tell her it’s real. Zarra’s other children mob their mother and sibling, calling out a name that must belong to the fallen child. To Nelle, the name sounds like Airs-a-bet, airs-a-bet.
Iris clutches Nelle’s arm, asking, “What happened?”
“Go get Richard,” Nelle says, but Richard is already striding toward them, moving past overturned chairs and gaping guests. Zarra and her other children give voice to keening ululations.
Richard takes command. “Out, everybody, except the family. Nelle, prop that front door.”
Nelle sweeps the others out of the parlor and opens the front door wide, so fresh air pours into the stuffy house. Richard raises windows in the room where Zarra clutches the fallen child. The other children move away, pressing against each other.
Guests mill about in the dark yard, stunned, speaking short, confused phrases. Nelle hears Iris’s voice, frightened. From Nelle’s vantage point, Richard appears to be feeling the child’s neck. He places his head against the small chest. Finally he stands up, and Zarra stands too, then sags to the floor in a faint.
One of the children is holding a glass of water. Nelle seizes it, goes to Zarra, and dashes it into her face. Sputtering, Zarra revives.
“You fool,” Nelle tells her.
Richard takes Nelle’s arm and leads her from the room. Behind them, Zarra resumes her keening. Nelle and Richard step outside, and the people in the yard clamor for an explanation. The group has grown in size, perhaps including neighbors.
Richard stands on the sagging porch and says, “The child is dead. It’s a girl, about twelve.” The people listen quietly. Richard says, “She probably broke her neck from the weight of the table. The mother said it’s usually one of her boys who does that trick.”
The dapper young man says, “That was dangerous. My God, it was fatal.”
“It was,” agrees Richard. “We need to get the coroner out here. Is anybody going by Dr. Thorpe’s house?”
“I am, Richard,” Dorothy Taylor volunteers. “I’ll tell him.”
Richard has that ability, Nelle thinks, to get people to do things. He can organize them, calm them, or urge them to action. It’s a quality he inherited from his father; people listen to old Henry. If Richard wanted to run for office or be appointed a judge, he would stand a good chance.
That makes up, quite a lot, for his being short.
A few of the women go inside, presumably to comfort the family. The crowd disperses. Richard escorts Iris and Nelle to their carriage. Nelle checks to make sure her purse is still on her arm. Yes, it is. Gypsies: low, awful people. In India and Europe, Gypsies begged on the streets and picked pockets at train stations. One of them stole her father’s watch right out of his vest. The entire family shared his outrage.
On the way home, Nelle says, “I wish I’d slapped her face.”
Iris sobs. Richard drives silently. The horses pick up on the air of disturbance and break into a trot. Richard reins them in to a walk. Though it’s dark, the sky retains a glow that makes Nelle think of the red velvet curtains in Zarra’s parlor. She becomes aware of a deep trembling in her limbs, the result of the effort it took to lift that table.
When she and Richard are alone, at bedtime, she asks, “Why did she let her daughter do that?”
“The boy kept laughing,” he says. “People heard him laughing inside the table. The girl wanted to try. She was the right size. She did it last night, the mother sai
d.”
“I bet she’ll let the others do it,” Nelle says. “She won’t care.”
“You saw how upset she was. She didn’t expect it to happen.”
Or maybe it has happened before, Nelle thinks. There might be thousands of children dead from broken necks or suffocation during centuries of Gypsy cunning.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she says.
“Oh!” Richard’s voice is thick with joy. He hugs her.
In the morning, her arms and back are sore from the lifting, but there is nothing wrong that she can detect.
In September, one of the whores who lives in the town of Orange, six miles south of Rapidan, goes mad. People hear her screams from blocks away. The house where she lives sits in an alley between Railroad Avenue and Church Street. She came into town on the train, the story goes. Her screams become as habitual as the sound of the whistle.
Nelle already suspected the house was a brothel. She couldn’t imagine any other reason for women to live together, close in age and in such numbers. Five or six shadowy figures out on the porch, heads bent over some task. Mending. Cracking nuts. Idleness: loud laughter, bare feet coy beneath draggly hems. On a clothesline, dresses droop in the heat. Where do they dry their drawers and their stained rags? Those are never on display.
On errands in town, Nelle listens for the screams that everyone is talking about, but she doesn’t hear them. One morning she leaves her order at the store, and the grocer promises to deliver everything that afternoon. Her cook, Nehemiah, is driving her. To the bank they go, and then the stationery shop. Her last stop will be a visit to a man said to be an expert bookbinder. She has brought several of her childhood treasures, worn and falling apart, that she desires to have repaired.
She looks at the address, which she wrote on a piece of paper, and with a thrill she realizes it is near the brothel. When she directs Nehemiah to the street, she detects surprise in his voice as he answers. He takes the alley, an inspiration, for he could have arrived at the bookbinder’s by use of the street. Nelle understands that he wants to see the house as much as she does.
In the alley, the backs of brick buildings are dark from the soot of passing trains. Nelle hears a low purling cry that soars into a full-throated yell. Her heart jumps. The horses startle, and Nehemiah allows them to proceed as far as the brothel, where he halts them. He is making it possible for Nelle to observe what might happen.
The house sits dumpily on its lot, though it has a lawn. Nelle and Nehemiah wait. The door bursts open, and two women tumble out, one young and the other much older—the madam? They fall on the grass, punching, kicking, cursing. The young one, who seems to be the crazy girl, tears hair from the other’s scalp. Windows fly open, and women lean out and jeer. A man clad in underwear speeds out and grabs the girl’s shoulder, but she throws him off.
To Nelle’s horror, the madwoman’s dress is soiled, as if with excrement. She seizes the older woman and picks her up bodily, then lurches toward the well. The older woman breaks free and charges toward Nelle’s carriage, waving bloody arms, close enough that Nelle notices a gap between her teeth.
“Help me!” the woman screams.
“Giddyap,” Nehemiah commands the horses, and the animals leap forward.
Shock has taken Nelle’s powers of speech away. She is relieved that Nehemiah simply drives to the post office, as if that were their destination all along. When she is calm enough, she goes inside and buys stamps.
She can tell the story or keep it to herself. If she confides in Richard, he would be upset that she witnessed such a thing. It seems safer to hold her tongue. She knows that Nehemiah will tell only other Negroes, or nobody at all.
Two days later, Nelle hears that the madwoman is dead. These events led to her death: She was arrested, jailed, and was to be taken to an asylum for the insane, in Crozet. She attacked those transporting her—a deputy and a matron from the county jail.
“She fought like a tiger,” Richard reports, for he had the story from friends at the courthouse. “They managed to handcuff her, but she got loose, jumped out of the wagon, and got caught in the wheels.”
The house has been shut down by the law, Richard says. The women were given a few days to pack and depart. Nelle suspects they won’t go far. They’ll mix among others in the street, at stores, at horse fairs.
“Were the deputy and the matron hurt?” she asks.
Richard nods grimly. “She bit off the matron’s thumb.”
The next time Nelle goes into Orange, Nehemiah drives by the house as if by mutual consent. It is boarded up, the grass already high. A train whistles and makes its familiar crossing through town, a block from the alley. Nelle feels the vibration through the floorboards of the carriage. She and Nehemiah regard the property while the sound of the train fills their ears. Nelle drinks in the scene with her eyes. Why does she want to examine it so much? When the train has gone, Nelle says, “To the pharmacy.” Nehemiah flaps the reins, and they go on.
She needs tooth powder. She sends Nehemiah in, and while she waits in the carriage, a stranger comes barreling down the road, a man with wild black hair, beating his chest and talking to himself. He passes close enough that Nelle sees dirty scars on his cheeks and tears running from his eyes.
“My heart’s broke,” he yelps. “My heart’s broke.”
A tattered coat, flapping soles on his boots. He seems not to see Nelle.
Nehemiah emerges from the store. His eyes flick toward the man. He hands Nelle a wrapped parcel and says, “Mr. Grymes put some candy in there for you, Miss Nelle.”
“Thank you, Nehemiah.”
Over the next several weeks, Nelle and Nehemiah continue their observations of the former brothel. Windows are stoned out, and birds swoop freely through broken panes. A pile of refuse appears on the lawn—cheap, ruined furniture, boxes overflowing with the linty remains of mice nests. The wreckage is rained upon and scavenged by dogs until it exudes a cold, sour scent that makes Nelle think of a crypt.
Nelle hears the rumors as she goes about her errands. Them whores buried babies in the basement. Men that didn’t pay, they killed ’em and threw ’em down there too. Hark Burriss went in there and wasn’t seen no more.
Richard says, “A bad place, and it met a bad end.”
“Who owns it?” Nelle asks.
Richard says he’ll find out, but days pass, and he seems to have forgotten about the matter.
III
The Confederate veterans march down Orange’s Main Street in dusty parades, the uniforms they wore as starving soldiers somehow still fitting, as if the worn fibers have stretched to accommodate paunches and sags. They travel to Richmond and Culpeper and Charlottesville for reunions, and to Lynchburg and Winchester and Fredericksburg to see statues of heroes unveiled. They fill entire train cars. On horseback, and by wagon and runabout, singing as they go, they head to Cedar Mountain, seven miles north of Rapidan, to picnic and reminisce about the great battle in August 1862.
Frequently they gather on Nelle’s front porch, where her father-inlaw entertains them.
Henry Fenton is the authority on the burning of Rapidan in September ’64. When pressed, Henry tells the story of the day the Yankees set his mill and the railroad depot afire. He was on furlough, and thus at home when it happened. When they came on their horses, with torches in their hands, he was ready. From the top of his mill, he killed two.
“You never told me that, Papa,” Richard says.
Henry Fenton sits on a rocking chair, his friends gathered in a circle around him. Nelle quietly occupies a wicker settee. She knows the old Rebels regard her as an enemy. They’re chivalrous, but she isn’t fooled. She, a Yankee spider, has captured Henry Fenton’s son, a gentle fly.
“I never told anybody, except Fannie and the preacher,” Henry says. “Word got around there were two new graves at the church. Nobody asked me, though.” He rubs the white beard on his chin.
The veterans remind Nelle of old animals: the whisker
-rubbing, the cautious stretching of palsied limbs, the measuring gazes of eyes still sharp enough to sight down the barrel of a gun.
Henry says, “The other soldiers looked for those two before they headed out, but the brush was so deep, they couldn’t find them.” He pauses. “I found out who one was and where he was from, and I wrote a letter to the family. The other one, I never knew.”
The men are silent. That is how they show respect. Then they resume their smoking and tobacco chewing. Nelle imagines Henry Fenton on top of the mill, lying on his belly amid pigeon droppings. There’s heavy brush where the river meets the forest. It would be easy for a man to sink down, die there, and not be found by comrades.
The old warriors: Their wounds and scars and missing parts, their eye patches and crutches and pinned-up sleeves, stir deep feelings in Nelle’s heart, feelings she is hard put to describe. Not sorrow, exactly, though the hostess in her is quick to offer the best seat to a cripple, a hot toddy to a man complaining of rheumatism. Forty-five years ago, the war ended, and the veterans mark its anniversaries by telling the old stories over and over.
Nelle is learning the individual histories. One veteran, Dallas Minetry, lost a leg. He became a cobbler, since he could sit all day on a bench to work. Bodie Glenn, minus a foot, resumed his trade as a farrier, moving around the animals by means of a three-wheeled stool. Dallas Minetry and Bodie Glenn can walk with crutches, swinging along with a rhythm that looks oddly carefree and youthful, as if they’re riding a breeze.
After the war, Nelle knows, Henry came back home and took up his life. His first wife, Mary Jane, had died the year the war began. Fannie is his second wife. Nelle hears Fannie’s laughter from inside the house, girlish, countrified, easy.
Fannie pushes the screen door open and steps onto the porch, holding baby John in her arms. A man named Sam Strong offers Fannie his seat. She smiles and takes it. Nelle has to admit there is graciousness there, some femininity that makes men want to flirt even now, as if Fannie is the buxom redhead she used to be, not a gray-haired grandmother. Sam Strong was a cavalry officer under Jubal Early; now he has a farm in Rapidan and owns a building in Orange that houses a colored funeral parlor. He likes to say that the funeral parlor is the best place to get a suit on short notice: “The Negroes borrow ’em on Saturday night and bring ’em back on Tuesday, cleaned and pressed.”
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