The slightest stirring under her feet caught her attention. Had something shivered beneath the flagstones? Not possible. She was just getting crazy tired. She shuffled her feet to rid them of the sensation and wished Prairie, who grew heavier by the minute, would sit still.
The conversation between Clay and Tory drifted away from her. She tried to refocus on them and at the same time hold on tighter to Prairie. From the floor beneath her feet, thin wires of energy, like nerves ticking, sent heat creeping up through her soles. She lifted her cup and sipped, noticing the shaking in her hands. Hopefully, neither Clay nor Tory had. The afternoon heat turned thick and damp over her. Somewhere nearby, bees buzzed, spun, and died. She didn’t wonder that she knew, she just knew.
Tory’s voice rose and fell. Clay asked questions, and Willow struggled again to jump onto the moving train of their conversation. But their words were big and cumbersome, leaving without her. Prairie squirmed, and tried to stand in Willow’s lap. Too much energy, more than Willow had in her tired arms. “Mémé gave me a belief in magic,” she blurted. The words were again too loud and likely too far from whatever they were discussing. She couldn’t stop herself. “If Mémé said, ‘Look, a fairy,’ I saw a fairy. I want that for Prairie. To give her a world with a Mother Moses around every corner.”
Tory’s eyes remained on her work, but Clay studied Willow. Gone was the sassiness and confidence she demonstrated only minutes earlier. Distracted, he took another sip of his tea and was forced to swallow. “Mother Moses?”
Settle down, Willow coaxed herself. Stay one more minute. Don’t leave at the stupidest time. “The story’s too long,” she tried to sound casual. “Can I tell you another time?” The unrest beneath her feet had become a bulge. The cement grout crumbled and the corner of a stone lifted. Not possible, but sliding a foot, she felt it pass over the knob. She needed to talk, to use the few words she could still manage like a handrail. “Mother Moses is a bed spread. Mémé bought it from a former slave owner. At least the woman’s ancestors were.” She stopped herself; she was shortening the story.
“Another of Mom’s fantasies,” Tory said.
“Well, whatever her beliefs,” Clay offered, “she’s built a beautiful place.”
Two of Tory’s fingers were buried in her muslin and looked severed. “We all built this place.”
Willow wanted to pull Clay aside and repeat every word of Mother Moses’ story. She’d also tell him that before Mémé’s death, Tory and Mémé had a falling out, and Tory still carried hurt feelings. That conversation, though, would have to wait for another time. At the moment, Prairie kicked with her tiny shoes, sharp and bruising, flagstones moved beneath Willow’s feet, and the pounding in her head was warlike.
She broke off a small piece of cookie and put it in Prairie’s mouth. In a few hours, she wouldn’t be able to hold her head up and wouldn’t be able to take care of Prairie, making certain that Prairie stayed safe. Knowing the rest of the day, and probably the next, would mean crippling headaches and dry heaves, she’d stay as long as she possibly could.
She glanced down at the irritation beneath her feet. Thin black vines rose and reached for her ankles.
Tory let her work sink into her lap. “Willow, your face. Are you all right?”
Vines couldn’t be sprouting, Willow knew, and the realization that she was hallucinating deepened her fear. Was she losing her mind? Dr. Mahoney would shake his head and tell her to get a grip. “I’m fi-ne.” The last word singsong, waltzing.
“This isn’t a good time,” Clay said. He placed his hands on the chair arms and pushed himself up. “Why don’t I come back in the morning?”
The ivy crept, twining tighter and higher around Willow’s legs. She had to fight it and keep her panic under control. She wouldn’t break down in front of Clay, and especially not in front of Prairie. “Please, don’t go,” she said. He was stability, and hopefully, a weight to counterbalance the strange sensation at her feet. “I’m all right. Mable fixed all this.”
He lowered his body back into the chair, but his hands still gripped the arms. Willow concerned him. “I’d love to hear more about your paintings.” And to Tory, “They’re something, aren’t they.”
As Willow watched Tory pinch off more batting and work it into the doll’s head, she knew she couldn’t really discuss her paintings. She could talk about the paintings’ esthetics, color and line, but she couldn’t discuss what they meant to her spiritually. That, like a hundred other secrets she needed to keep, including the green/black growing up her calves, was private. She wiped cookie spittle from a corner of Prairie’s mouth. Struck by a sudden realization, the shaking in her hands increased. The paintings were not just a way of saving her life; they could save Prairie’s as well. She took another sip of tea, praying the liquid would work as a tonic. When she couldn’t keep Prairie from standing, she kept hold of her daughter’s hands, letting the punch of little shoes strike again and again.
Beyond the portico, the air had become a hot brilliance. Willow turned from the light and felt a sort of slippage in time that might have meant five seconds or five minutes passed. The conversation had moved ahead, and she felt addled and embarrassed. At the same time, evil continued to climb from beneath the flagstones, wanted to pull her down, and wanted her to know.
Now, she did want Clay to leave. He couldn’t stop what was happening, and she didn’t want him seeing her like this. Another time, they’d get together and toss a football. She’d throw the ball so straight and hard the pigskin would pop and sting his palms, and he’d know she was there.
“No, he’s not from here,” Tory was saying, as she looked out at Jonah. “He’d been accused of a murder in Omaha, and Mom brought him here to save his life.”
Other than his bug story, Willow had never heard anything of Jonah’s past and never wondered about a life before Farthest House. The realization was painful.
Clay wrapped his fingers around his nearly full cup, a thumb tapping on the handle. “What happened?”
“He was accused of killing a white woman. How, or why, Mom got involved, I couldn’t say. Many people believed him guilty, but she used her name, and well, there he is.”
The vines clung, turned Willow’s ankles blue, and made her calves ache. She fought to keep her mind off them and on the conversation. “A white woman?” Was killing a white woman more heinous than killing a black woman? “Was she pretty, too?”
“She was blonde, and I hear quite beautiful,” Tory said. “There was talk of a lynching. The Willie Brown incident was still fresh in everyone’s minds, and many young men believed they had missed a good time. They wanted their faces on the front page of the newspaper, too.” She paused, kneading the doll head in her hands and smoothing out the stuffing. “Jonah is still the only suspect.”
“He couldn’t have murdered anyone,” Willow said. Her voice cracked. She turned to Clay, “Don’t put that in your book.”
Tory plopped her muslin down. “Willow, really.” She glanced sideways around the edge of the table at Willow’s legs. “What are you doing?” When Willow didn’t answer, she spent another moment watching her before turning away. “She’s likely right. Jonah doesn’t seem the type to have killed a woman, though it was believed his father was in jail at the time for murder. He had no other family. And he was working that day, raking leaves for the woman. His rake was the murder weapon.”
Clay pushed his cup back. “When was this?”
“1932.”
“The lawless thirties,” he nodded. “The era of mobs, cover-ups, and Saturday night lynchings. He’s been here ever since?”
Between Tory’s pushing and stuffing, she managed to finish her tea. “Nowhere else to go. I imagine that for years he was afraid of showing his face back in Omaha, tempting fate as it were. Getting a traffic ticket, even walking on the wrong street, might have ended in arrest. He owed us, too, for Mom saving his life.” She smiled to herself. “When my brother, Willow’s father, started police
work, he was determined to prove Jonah’s innocence. He couldn’t do it. He stewed over records for years, questioned people, but he couldn’t find any evidence to clear Jonah. That should tell you something.”
This was news to Willow, and squinting against the brightness, she looked out to where Jonah worked. The outline of his figure looked hazy in the heat and his straw hat made of gold. He couldn’t have murdered anyone, even if he didn’t want her and Prairie around. However, if Tory believed he had, maybe that was one of the reasons she and Mémé fought.
Prairie squirmed, this time nearly falling from Willow’s aching arms. Thin drops of sweat ran down the sides of Willow’s face, and the vines were more insistent. They weren’t real, couldn’t be, and struggling against imaginary wolves only spread them through your house and filled your closets with growls. She needed to put Prairie down, but she’d waited too long and couldn’t trust herself even to set her on the floor without dropping her. And what then? Tory and Clay were deep in their conversation and not paying enough attention to notice if Prairie crawled across the yard and out of sight forever.
Prairie flopped back again and nearly slipped onto the stones.
“Dr. Hartford!” Willow gasped.
He reached a hand across the table, catching Prairie’s arm. “Are you okay?” he asked Willow.
“Take Prairie. Don’t let her down. Don’t let her get to the road.”
He stood, reached and plucked the small child into the air. Prairie let out a happy squeal, just as she had in the library, her legs kicking.
There it is again, Willow thought. Their unfair closeness. Prairie belonged to her. No one else. Not Tory, not Mable, not Clay.
She raised her cup to her lips. She’d drink her tea, try and eat a cookie, and she’d remain sitting where Prairie could at least see her. Pain, sharp and hot stung her bottom lip, making her jerk, splash tea down the front of her white T-shirt and drop her cup. The china rolled from her lap and partially down one leg before hitting the flagstones. In a splash of caramel-colored tea, a bee spun, managed to lift, find an unsteady wing, and fly off, but Willow’s attention was on her precious cup—a symbol for more than she could say. The cup and its broken handle lay six inches apart. “I can fix it. Tory, don’t throw it away. I can fix it.”
“Clay, I’ll take the baby,” Tory was on her feet. “Help Willow.” When he scraped his chair back, passed off Prairie, and caught Willow, Tory’s voice calmed. “It’s not bee stings causing her to be so ill. Dr. Mahoney says she’s not allergic to them. She never has any reaction.”
In Clay’s arms, Willow knew her aunt was right. The stings didn’t leave her with swollen eyes, didn’t close her throat, and didn’t leave her gasping for air. She’d been woozy and seeing things before she was stung. But the assaults, hitting her at her lowest, had the force of fists. “Why,” she cried at Tory, “do you let Jonah keep those things?”
36
Much happened over the next month. While Willow stayed inside with her migraines and nausea, Prairie turned one, began walking, and Clay came most mornings to work. He labored through boxes of Luessy’s papers, journals, and letters, sometimes pacing the library aisle, sometimes sitting in the attic and working in Luessy’s old space. In the afternoons, he tried to show his gratitude by helping Jonah, though he considered hands-on access to the garden, like hands-on access to Luessy’s papers, a privilege.
Depending upon how Willow felt, their time together could be a short or long evening. Even on her worst days, when she saw doubles and triples of everything, he went upstairs, looked in on her, and stayed to read from his notes or tell her something interesting he’d discovered. “Your great aunt, Amelie-Anais, grew up in her uncle’s villa. He was a priest.”
“And she fell in love with a man named Thomas.”
Listening to the two of them discuss my life might have been amusing, if only the truth hadn’t been so horrifying. Thomas had been at the villa only ten days before The Beast caught us talking in private and ordered him to leave. Did my uncle fear I was confiding in Thomas? As The Beast’s bullies rushed forward moments later, to escort Thomas away, he leaned in and whispered. “I’ll come for you, tonight. Be ready.” That was his marriage proposal. I’ve often thought, had The Beast not ordered Thomas out, had we had a few days to plan, I might have lost my courage. I’d likely have convinced myself that my sins, my unholy body, and the curse upon my back made me unworthy of such a man. The rush, and Thomas’s confidence, swept me up, and I had no time for doubt.
Once in America, when the letter arrived telling me of Sabine’s death and of the infant daughter left under Le Bête’s roof, I had to tell Thomas the whole truth. Crossing the Atlantic in a steel steamboat was arduous and dangerous, to say nothing of entering the villa. He had to know why I asked him to risk his life to steal an infant from her bed and take her out of France. I wasn’t far into my confession, when he stopped me and held me, his rough chin against my cheek. “In a thousand ways,” he said, “you’ve already told me.”
Now, I watched Willow and Clay and how their relationship evolved from the afternoon he carried her into the house and up the wide stairs to Mémé’s bed, her head dropped against his chest. Brushing hands moved into holding hands. A first kiss quickly became passionate kissing. At times, Willow felt Clay couldn’t be real, that she’d awaken from her dream of him and find he was as imaginary as weeds growing out of flagstone. She was certain Papa would tell her to ‘Slow down.’ He’d be afraid for her, but she believed Clay was different. Still, there were times when she knew he kept parts of his past a secret.
Clay wasn’t at Farthest House the bright afternoon Willow held Prairie’s small hand as they moved at the child’s toddler pace along a garden path and off between flower beds where roses bloomed in great bushels of perfumed red and farther still under shade trees. They walked to the edge of the yard where Willow loved to stand. There, under the great bowl of blue sky, she had the farthest view and the widest perspective. She breathed deeply, inviting the wind over her face and through her hair and almost believed her fear of Mary stalking was imaginary.
I’d stood there, too, watching the road with the same dull ache in my stomach, checking for signs of Thomas returning after days on another photography expedition. Afraid that he wouldn’t come back, that he’d been caught in a massacre, or imprisoned in a damp dungeon an ocean away from me.
Willow marveled at the blooms on the slope leading down to the river and how they changed with the seasons, going from pink and white wild flowers in the spring to yellow and gold in the fall. Currently, it was wild mustard, sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, and Mad Apple with its white trumpet-shaped flowers. Some few minutes passed before Willow realized there was also a haze of bees working over the acres, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, low over the plants. She tugged on Prairie’s hand, “Let’s hurry and visit Jonah.”
He stood in the shade of his tool shed with an overturned shovel, the scoop against his hip, as he cleaned it with a wooden scraper. Black dirt crumbled down one pant leg. His overalls looked empty and held up only by the hanger of his shoulders. A knot tightened in Willow’s stomach. The two of them had yet to have a meaningful conversation, and their relationship felt like torn fabric. She missed what they’d lost, and she had no idea how much longer she’d be at Farthest House, though she wanted never to leave. And there was his age. The few long and slow good-byes that Death allowed were only a ruse: Death loved to surprise.
As she approached him, she realized that in the years she’d been away, Jonah had become the “outside man.” When Mémé lived, he’d often been in the kitchen handing over his tomatoes, fixing something, or just sitting with Mémé over seed catalogues while Mable peeled potatoes or stirred cookie dough. Willow wondered, too, who neatly stitched squares of almost-matching fabric on the worn knees and elbows of his clothes, who purchased his coffee, his eggs, his underwear? Who cut his hair?
He lifted his head, the skin on his neck stret
ching as he sighted them from below his sagging lids.
Willow smiled. “How are you?”
Seconds passed, then a barely audible, “Yup.”
So much for small talk. “I’m feeling better today,” she said. There it was again, a childish confession, an obvious attempt to receive love.
He continued scraping his shovel, his age also evident in the tremor of his hands. She longed to put an arm around his stooped shoulders, to tell him she cursed time for its cruelty to him, but mentioning anything of the sort would only call attention to his palsy. She wanted him to believe she didn’t notice.
“You’re seeing that college fellow now,” he said.
“Clay?” Had Mable told him? Or did he see more through his cloudy and closing eyes than she supposed? Had he seen Clay and her earlier through the library window? Clay leaning against the desk, his arms around her waist, while she leaned dangerously close into the vee of his open legs and they played at verbal badminton? Had Jonah seen the long kiss?
“Thought you’d go home by now,” he said.
A webby rash of goose flesh fanned across Willow’s back. Before she could answer, Prairie, with her dimpled knees and unsteady waddle of a run, started after a butterfly, heading across the grass. “Prairie stop. Come back here.”
Prairie did stop, and Willow frowned at herself. Did she really suppose the one-year-old would bypass the manor and head down the driveway for Old Squaw Road where Mary waited with her passenger door open: Come in, little girl. Yes, exactly that.
Jonah tucked his wooden scraper into his back pocket and drew out a snakestone. His file hit the shovel in short, hard strokes, sunlight ricocheting off the burnished steel. His jowls, soft and round floated beneath his skin. “This ain’t a place for young people.”
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