Farthest House

by Margaret Lukas

  Seeing Victoria soaked in blood, hearing her sobs, each one striking me with double-fisted guilt, I looked to her bloody hands. Between that blood and my panic, my mind saw Sabine’s hand—cleaved. I’d dreamed, so many times, of my little sister in the act of chopping off her fingers: the nighttime kitchen, the household staff off to their beds, Sabine standing in the moonlight, and even Mme. Francoise watching unseen from a dark corner.

  Now, in the kitchen at Farthest House, there was another bloody scene. And again, I was responsible, as soaked in guilt as Victoria was in blood. I’d kept myself imprisoned in denial, that mental coffin, to keep from knowing she was being abused. That rancid, acrid-smelling denial was because I’d been afraid of family upheaval and of what the truth would do to Luessy. Greatest of all, though, was my fear of once again facing what I’d gone through and what I let happen to Sabine. Just as my mother had, I kept my mind angled wide of the truth. I submerged myself in mind-fillers: playing games with them, painting, walks in the wood. All the while promising myself I was fulfilling the role of good grandmother.

  “Jonah!” Victoria screamed that night. The name came over and over, cries for help, her body quaking with the ravages of stark fear. “Jonah! Jonah! Jonah did it. He killed him with the rake. He beat him with the rake, just like that woman he killed.”

  My poor Victoria, clearly too out of her mind with terror to hear the absurdity of her claim. Too crazed to think rationally and see that if Jonah was guilty, a madman on the loose, she’d have run down the hill toward safety, would have called the police, would not be working feverishly to cover up the crime.

  I opened my arms to her. Dropping the mop, she started for me, her legs still child-gangly, her knees bending deep, starting to buckle. I held her, “Where is the body?”

  “Jonah took it.”

  Her trembling body trembled mine. Here again was the insidious atrocity of men abusing children, as if little bodies were tools manufactured to appease fetid lusts. Doors slamming on young unlived lives. This time, the child reached such a nadir of despair and self-loathing that she committed murder. She was innocent of any crime; wanting to live was god-given, not criminal. Anger shot red and hotheaded through my bones. Another man would not destroy another child in my family. Phillip Jatlick deserved what he got, and I was so distraught, I imagined raising the rake over him myself.

  I held Victoria and promised her that we would find a way. We had to. She did not deserve to suffer through a trial, having a fancy-talking lawyer hired by the Jatlick family destroy her character and disgrace her in front of the community, ruining every chance she had of a normal life. God forbid, she’d be convicted and forced to spend her life in jail.

  It hurt realizing that Victoria, in going for the rake, had already planted evidence against Jonah, but I had to let that go. She’d not killed her father with the rake, that was certain. A weak-armed teenage girl against a big man couldn’t have done it. I didn’t see evil in her going for the rake; I saw anguish. I saw a child’s understandable panic. The real fault rested with Mr. Phillip Jatlick, but since Victoria had already dirtied up the body with a rake, and she meant to tell a false story, Jonah’s life was also in danger. The only way to protect them both was to hide the body.

  “Phillip Jatlick deserved to die,” I told her. The terror in her eyes brought my heart up into my mouth. “Jonah has done a good thing,” I said. Why did I pretend to believe Jonah was responsible? Because at that moment Victoria wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of my knowing the truth. “Leave that mop,” I told her, “you’re making things worse.”

  The sun had set, and the garden lay in a silent gray. Jonah crouched against the trunk of a magnolia tree, his arms braced across his thighs, his face empty. The body, pulled from the house by the feet, lay not ten feet away, the arms stretched above the head. I approached it. Phillip’s face, his entire head, looked like a spilled cherry pie. I’d seen Thomas dress a deer with less mess.

  Again, my blood coursed hot and wild. This Beast deserved exactly what he received. I wanted to kill him again for what he’d done and the trouble his death was causing and would cause. He could not be dead enough, didn’t deserve the respite of death. I’d count coup on him, just as Thomas told stories of Indians counting coup on their dead enemies. The act was symbolic, but I needed to beat him, somehow, to be a participant. Only a few yards away, a sapling had recently been planted and still had a supporting stake. I pulled the stake from the ground and struck the body—dull thwacks—until the thin plank in my angry hands broke and was but a few worthless inches of stick. “I’ll cut off his twisted-up root,” I screamed, “he won’t have it for any afterlife.”

  Jonah, shadow, unfolded in the dark. “No. No, Miss Amelie,” he said. “You ain’t doing that. You already beat him good.”

  I paced, my mind frantic for the best burying spot: the garden, the wood Thomas planted, the hillside leading down into Greenburr? I ruled them out. We couldn’t dig a grave deep enough to be certain no wild dogs would unearth it, or that a too-wet spring wouldn’t float the body up. And a patch of disturbed dirt, clay brought to the surface, always flagged a grave. I even considered burying the body with Thomas and replacing the stones. Thomas would forgive me, but he didn’t deserve it. And when the day came and I was buried, the body would still be discovered.

  Victoria came to the kitchen doorway, her body silhouetted by the light behind her. Her arms hugged her chest, and she swayed, soundlessly rocking herself.

  Jonah looked up from the corpse to her, and time began moaning, a low wail that morphed hours, days, years, passing them through him. His face, his eyes especially, began to sag, the skin melting like a thick wax, drooping and aging. His body became more windsock than man, as fifty years of unspent life gusted through the husk and away. A sound, half sigh, half cry, crept from his throat, worked over his tongue, crawled out from between his lips, a resigned, bitter, dying sound.

  My body felt glacial. Guilt traveled through me like time through Jonah. I bore the weight of Victoria’s actions and all the damages those actions wrought. My hands lifted, touched my face, my hair, feeling whether or not I was still fleshed.

  Jonah, his face ancient now and his eyes half-closed, turned to me. I couldn’t bear to hear what he might say, and I cut him off before he could speak. “We have to keep the bastard dead. We’ll stick him under the portico floor.”

  “How?” The word drifting and empty.

  I had no idea, but I’d seen Sabine’s hand superimposed over Victoria’s, and Victoria, fragile as her future, rocked herself and sobbed, and Jonah’s unspent life had washed forever through him. I had to find a way. “We’ll take up part of the stones and bury him in cement. For a hundred years, we can walk on him and pee on him.”

  “How we going to do that.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of disbelief.

  “We will! We don’t have to be finished before Luessy gets back, and we don’t have to tear up that much, just have the body buried.” I was pacing, pointing. “That floor has several cracks, I’ll tell her I tripped on a broken place and fell. I’ll tell her I got so angry, and I was so sore that I put you to relaying the stones. We just have to get him buried. Relaying the stones can take the week if need be.”

  His face was old, the years a silence in him.

  “I’ll do the lying,” I said. “Leave Luessy to me.”

  Jonah nodded, but his eyes said he wasn’t listening.

  I couldn’t bear seeing that old-man look, and my need to save him had me ragged with fear. “Luessy will be surprised,” I said. “She’ll even look hard at me, but I’ll limp around some, moan a bit, tell her that at my age I couldn’t risk another fall. I’ll blame her.” There it was; I knew it. “I’ll accuse her of being so preoccupied she didn’t know the state of her own patio. After this trip, her mind will be even more knotted with new story ideas. Her writing won’t stop, and she won’t pay any attention to what’s happening out here as long as the work
is quiet.”

  Still, Jonah made no sign of hurrying off for a pick or shovel, and I’d winded myself. He stared at the body, the blood over the corpse turning it black. “Why’d she do that?”

  “Because she’s got sense.”

  “And I’m goin’ get lynched for all that sense.”

  At least he was talking. I tried to answer honestly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I give you my word, if this body is found, I’ll tell them I killed him. It shames me to say so, and you know it’s true, but I can’t promise anyone will listen.” We both knew the truth had little chance. He was a young black male with a suspicion of one murder already. Vigilantes would decide the rake was all the evidence they needed.

  Victoria’s wailing increased, and I worried about her mind. If we were caught, would she testify against Jonah? “I swear, if that body is found,” I said again, “I’ll try and take the blame. I’m a damn good storyteller myself, but Victoria’s mind can’t be trusted.”

  “However it comes down, I’m gonna swing.”

  “No. I’ll take his car to the river. I’ll leave the lights off, everything looking fine, like he just stepped out and into the water. I’ll leave his whiskey bottle on the seat, open, empty.”

  “You don’t drive a car.” He was stirring, agitated, but moving.

  “Watch me! I need you here starting the heavy work, and if you were to get caught in that car….” I shuddered to think. “If there’s a fingerprint left behind, it needs to be mine.”

  He looked in the direction of the trees. “I still got dark.”

  “Where would you go? They’d find you. One week, two weeks. I can’t do this without you.” I nodded at the log of flesh on the ground. “If that thing is found, and you’ve run off—even if I claim responsibility—there will be ‘Wanted’ posters with your picture sprouting up on every tree and in every storefront across the fifty states. How you going to escape, if you can’t even board a train?” I gave him a minute to consider what he’d have to face. “I can’t keep you here. You’re a free man, but I don’t think running is your best chance.”

  I was walking up and down alongside the body, wringing my hands, something I’d been doing since dropping the stick. I hated begging, but considering what a mob would do if they caught him rammed a stake through my heart. Even if he was brought in alive to face a jury, highly unlikely they’d bother with the formality, Luessy was already considered half-crazy for saving his life the first time. She wouldn’t be believed again; she’d spent all the good faith folks had in her, and trying to save him over her daughter? Oh, God in heaven, she’d try and fight for the truth, but no mother deserved having to condemn a child.

  I didn’t know what was right and couldn’t reason through all the probabilities with a dead body already stinking of old blood, and time a crucible lowering over us, but I knew I wanted Jonah to stay close. We were his only family. I didn’t want anything to happen to him that didn’t happen right here, where I could run into the fray and knock off a couple of heads.

  “I need you,” I said, “and you need me. That beast got his just desserts, and we don’t deserve the trouble his body could bring. He won’t be missed. Folks down the hill know all about his chasing one new pot of gold after another or some young thing with bobbed hair and a cigarette. They don’t care if he walked into the river or left his car to crawl into some floozy’s.”

  “Except if a black man can be blamed. Then they care.”

  How could I answer? He knew better than I. “A few bored locals might pull on fishing waders and tramp around in the water for a bit, but they won’t waste more than a morning. By the time their noon burgers and fries are set on the table, they’ll be done with it.”

  “Sheriff comes to tell Miss Luessy about the car, sees the stones all tore up?”

  Jonah would stay. I stood shaking, realizing it wasn’t because I’d made a lick of sense, but because he simply wasn’t running again. He wouldn’t have his name tacked to this murder, which leaving would do, and he wouldn’t be forced from his garden and his bees. On top of that horrible list, he’d become an old man. Running was for the young, those who could jump trains, climb trees, and scavenge.

  “People aren’t murdered in Greenburr,” I was pleading my case. “Bodies aren’t buried under patios here. That only happens in books. The sheriff gets reelected because he hasn’t got the imagination of a garden toad and beds down with the sun. That way no one’s teenage son is arrested for drinking or speeding. He wouldn’t think murder, if one happened in his kitchen.”

  We’d already wasted precious time, and Jonah would need help. The cracks winding through the flagstones would give him a place to stick a crowbar or the tip of a shovel, but the work would be hard. Still, I needed to settle Victoria first. Again, I feared for her mind, and I had to clean up the massive amount of blood in the kitchen.

  I’d read all of Luessy’s books, and I knew many of the ways murderers fouled up, leaving clues, and getting caught. I had to find out how Victoria really killed Phillip, especially if I intended to take the blame. If there was some obvious evidence I was missing, I needed to get rid of it. I steered her back through the kitchen door, her body trembling against mine, her feet stumbling with fear. Her terror made me stop and call over my shoulder. “Jonah, you remember this: Victoria is innocent, too.”

  I sat her down with her first-ever glass of sherry. I used buckets of water from the kitchen sink, scrubbing, dipping, and wringing out my rag until the water turned so soiled I couldn’t bear putting my hands in it again. I poured the soup into the toilet and refilled my bucket with fresh water, over and over again.

  With the kitchen clean and scalding water poured over the threshold, I coaxed Victoria out of her clothes and into a warm bath. Two hours, maybe more, had passed since I first walked into the kitchen, and still she sobbed and trembled. If her mind skipped away and she couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet, if she climbed to the roof-peak like the village idiot and sang, what then?

  I poured her a second glass of the sherry, the only liquor Luessy kept in the house for when Bess Streeter Aldrich visited. “Keep drinking,” I said. “Sleep, forget what happened. Sip. Sip. Sip.”

  The glass trembled against her teeth, the fortified wine running red over her chin and onto her chest and into the bath. “Why’d Jonah do that?” she asked.

  Was it possible? Was the mind so malleable that enough trauma could twist it into a new shape? Was she really convinced Jonah had done the killing? Even though her body was covered in blood? Again, I thought of Sabine. Hadn’t her mind just finally given out?

  I helped Victoria hold the glass, tipped it to her lips, slowly, the way I helped her learn to drink milk as a toddler, coaxing her to finish the sherry, and finally helping her into bed. All I wanted was for her to sleep. I knew she’d have to be watched, possibly for months, even years, but I couldn’t think of that then, only that I’d stay close, keep her under my wing, and give her whatever sherry she needed to sleep through the night.

  In the darkness of her room, waiting for her to sleep, I strode back and forth at the foot of her bed. My heart pounded with all I still needed to do and wondering how Jonah was faring. Then, I began to see: the dresser mirror lay shrouded with a ghostly sheet, as if she never wanted to see herself; her hope chest was thrown open, and the tea towels and aprons and handkerchiefs we’d embroidered were strewn about the room and soiled—looking stomped on with dirty shoes. Even the movie posters of Loretta Young and pictures of Anita Page taken from movie magazines were pulled from the walls, crushed, and torn on the floor. Dried and emptied Datura pods, the poisonous, almond-shaped harvested seeds, lay on the dresser.

  Luessy worked on a new novel: Mad Apple, and I’d given her the idea of doing away with several characters by using locally grown toxic substances. She and Tory had followed me down to the river and through Thomas’s wood to pick Datura seedpods, and Luessy even visited a chemist at the university in Lincoln. They ca
me up with a possible combination of mushrooms and plants so poisonous even dumb cows knew to avoid them. It was a mixture that could conceivably, when combined with alcohol, prove fatal. Mad Apple was still a work of fiction, and she had the recipe so vaguely written that she never supposed someone would try and copy it.

  I stood in that dark room, Victoria tossing in her bed, while I wrestled with my dread. Had she figured out an exact formula, or was she just lucky? My stomach rolled, and I promised myself she had happened on to a lethal dose. Because if she hadn’t, if Phillip had only passed out, she’d taken a rake to a live man. A rake she knew would cost Jonah his life, as well.

  49

  Tory’s funeral ended and finally, the post-funeral luncheon hosted by Greenburr’s Altar Society. Willow walked toward the parking lot and Clay’s car, with one arm slung through his for support. Prairie, with her little-tyke gait, scuttled ahead of them.

  Standing at Tory’s gravesite, Willow had refused to mumble along with the prayers, and she looked across Tory’s casket to the headstones of Jeannie, Papa, and Mémé, all possible victims of Tory.

  Prairie continued her toddler running, getting as many as twenty steps ahead.

  “Stop, don’t go so far,” Willow cried.

  Clay slipped his arm from hers, hurried up on Prairie’s heels, and swooped her into the air. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Don’t let her down. Keep hold of her.”

  He turned to Willow, raising an eyebrow at the panic in her voice.

  “I know,” she said. “I may never be relaxed again. Deal with it.”

  “Give yourself time.”