The Homecoming

by Carsten Stroud

  Nick couldn’t help glancing down the table to where Beth and Hannah and Reed were busy talking about getting the carriage house ready for Beth and the kids to live in it.

  Hannah was a round, plump, angelic little girl who had just turned four, still quite babyish, with large blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white. She had pale skin and a slightly loopy smile and a wonderful sense of humor.

  She had a habit of tilting her head to one side if people were speaking to her, and she always focused on their lips while they were talking. She also had trouble getting some words out right.

  He knew this was because she was deaf in her left ear. It hadn’t occurred to him that she was deaf because her father had slapped her so viciously on that ear that he had damaged her hearing. The realization left him with nothing to say.

  Like all kids who have to live with unpredictable parents, Axel had developed an acute ability to sense what was going on in the minds of adults in his world. Axel read Nick pretty well.

  “It’s okay, Uncle Nick. Don’t you worry about her. Mom took her to a doctor. She’s going to get a hearing aid. She’ll be okay.”

  She will now, he thought.

  And so will you.

  Nick knew then that no matter what happened here in Niceville—and he had a feeling it was going to be very bad before it got better, if it ever did—he was going to do whatever it took to keep these people safe.

  There was a full moon that night. It shone in through the master bedroom window, a streaming blue light that pooled on their bed. It was so intense that it woke Kate up.

  Through the gauzy drapes she could see it hanging there, a huge blue-white sphere surrounded by a misty aura, now gliding majestically into a bank of clouds. The room grew dark.

  Nick was asleep, at rest, the worry lines fading, making him look years younger. The house was silent. Beth was down the hall in the guest room. Axel and Hannah were sleeping downstairs, on a pull-out sofa in the rec room, where they had fallen asleep while watching a DVD of one of Kate’s favorite movies, The Kid, with Bruce Willis.

  She looked at her bedside clock. It was almost three thirty. She lay back on her pillow and tried to make some sense of the disorder that had come into their lives. She tried not to think of where her father might be. She would have to think of it sometime, but not right now. Tomorrow was a Monday, and Mondays were expressly created for dealing with things like that.

  She closed her eyes and was drifting off to sleep when she felt rather than heard a sound, a soft, thudding impact, and then a jingle of metal on metal. It was coming from outside. It sounded like it was in the backyard just below her window. She looked over at Nick.

  Still asleep.

  She slipped out of bed, careful not to disturb him. He was a light sleeper, and tended to snap fully awake if he heard anything out of the ordinary, a habit he had picked up in the wars. She was surprised that the sound hadn’t wakened him.

  Kate went to the window and looked down into the yard. She heard the thump and jingle again. There may have been a shape, a shadow there, in the middle of the backyard. A big dark shape.

  The yard lights shut off automatically at midnight, but she had a remote on the windowsill that would turn them back on. She was reaching for it when the moon came out from behind the clouds again. The yard filled with moonlight.

  A huge horse stood there in the backyard, pale golden in color, although it was difficult to distinguish color in moonlight. It had a long white mane and four white hooves with feathery white hairs all around them. It was enormous, one of those farm horses—what did they call them?

  A Percheron or a Clydesdale or a Belgian.

  It was cropping the lawn, now and then stamping a hoof and shaking its massive head, making its harness jingle faintly. She stood and stared down at it for a long minute, thinking that it was a magnificent animal, wondering how it had gotten into their yard, where it had come from, and what she was going to do about it.

  She looked back at Nick.

  Out cold, on his back, his mouth slack. Kate knew how exhausted he was because she was in the same state. Kate, a girl of the South, wasn’t afraid of horses, even gigantic horses. Deep down they were all the same, prey animals, and if you kept that in mind and moved quietly and slowly when you were around them, you could handle them. Nick could stay sleeping. He needed it more than she did.

  She got into her dressing gown and ghosted down the back stairs and through the sunroom. She could see the animal through the glass, big as a house, the moonlight glistening on his hide like silver on gold. His head was down and he was still working on the lawn. Kate pushed the glass door back, slowly.

  The horse jerked its head up, snuffled at her, thumped a hoof the size of an anvil into the ground with enough force to send a tremor through Kate’s body, and then went back to ruining her lawn.

  Kate walked slowly up to him, feeling the cool moisture of the grass under her bare feet, seeing her shadow on the lawn in the moonlight.

  She reached the horse’s head, bent down, and touched his forehead. He lifted his head, snorted, and huffed at her. His breath was as hot as an oven and he smelled of horse and hide and grass. He moved his head slightly to the left, staring down at her with one huge brown eye.

  She saw herself reflected in it, oddly distorted, a silvery figure bathed in light. The animal snorted again, and stepped back and away. He turned—massively, ponderously, like a great wall of hide and muscle—and he walked away from her, his hooves thumping into the grass, his long tail twitching, his heavy flanks moving.

  In spite of her fear, as if hypnotized, Kate followed him into the forest at the bottom of her garden, to a shadowed place lit with shafts of moonlight. He disappeared into the dark. She stood there, hearing him moving away over the stones, hearing his hooves clip-clop through the little river there. She stood still, holding her breath, feeling a kind of humming presence all around her, an electrical charge filling the night.

  Everything changed.

  Kate was standing on the banks of a broad mud-brown river. It surged and hissed behind her, slow and powerful and immense. The air smelled of river mud and wood smoke and growing things. She was at the end of a long avenue that ran under an arch of live oaks so large and ancient that their branches met in the air above the lane. At the far end of this green-shaded avenue was a great mansion with a gallery that ran all across the front. Grecian pillars supported the gallery.

  It was a fine old house, a plantation house, and Kate recognized it from a large oil painting that hung in the dining room at the golf club.

  It had once belonged to relatives of hers. Lenore, her mother, had an old closet door in their house, made with painted panels taken from this plantation house after the Civil War. The panels were faded and dried, but you could still see the pattern on them, jasmine flowers on a pale background, hand-painted, according to Lenore, by an artist brought in from Baton Rouge.

  “This is Hy Brasail Plantation,” Kate said to herself. “Why am I here?”

  She realized she was asking a ghost horse a question. A horse that was nowhere to be seen. The lunacy of this struck her, but the strangeness remained. So did the plantation.

  Hy Brasail Plantation Southern Louisiana, 1840

  It was the afternoon of the ninth of July in the year 1840. Today was London Teague’s sixty-third birthday and his third wife was dying. Her name was Anora Mercer. Anora Mercer had been a famous beauty, one of the celebrated Mercers of Niceville and Savannah. There was a time when London Teague had persuaded himself that he adored her. But that was when Cathleen, his second wife, was still alive. While Cathleen lived, Anora was forbidden fruit. Cathleen died by her own hand the following year and was refused consecrated ground. Her grave now lay beneath the jupiter willow at the center of the box maze. It had been London Teague’s experience that the fruit untasted was usually the sweetest. So it had been with Anora.

  Now Anora was leaving too.

  Her illness had come on
her three days before, during the night. In the morning she would not wake, and when she finally opened her eyes and tried to speak, her voice was lazy, as if she were disguised in drink, and her eyelids drooped. She complained of languor and pain throughout her body. The fever grew upon her and her lips became cracked and dry. She felt the weakness spread from her body into her hands, and in a while could not raise a cup to her lips. Her breathing became harsh and rapid. Soon she fought for every breath.

  The medical men had arrived and contemplated her through their pince-nez, stroking their sideburns. The ague, they intoned with heavy sighs. And perhaps a touch of the miasmic fever. They told the women to exhibit tincture of laudanum at need, to have her bled, and to put her in the salt baths. They then presented an outrageous fee, took themselves down to the river landing, and flagged a packet back to Vacherie.

  Anora’s state grew dire.

  The sickness spread. Her face began to swell and bruises bloomed along her thighs and across her belly. Her throat closed in upon her so that no food could be taken, only lemon water and chamomile and sheep marrow mixed with brandy. Nothing seemed to stay the advance of this sickness and now, two days later, it had stolen away all of her beauty.

  Yet she fought on, and the women tended to her. At three o’clock this day a parson from South Vacherie had drawn up in a hired dog cart, a Mr. Horace Aukinlek, S.J., a jaundiced cadaver with a gotch eye and a stammer. He now loitered in the music room, his moldy black frock hanging on a chair and his hobnails defiling the second-best ottoman as he thumbed through Psalms with a cold collation and a flagon of cider at his elbow.

  By late afternoon it was clear to all that Anora could not hope to recover. Already the mask of death, the skull face, was rising up from beneath her skin, stretching it as tight as a painter’s canvas, and her color was a waxen yellow.

  Riders had been dispatched to Niceville to inform Anora’s people there, her godfather, John Gwinnett Mercer, and his family, but this was a distance of six hundred miles and had been done more as a sign of respect than with any hope of a return before her struggle had ended.

  John Gwinnett Mercer was a volatile man and he had not looked with favor on Anora’s betrothal to a man forty years her senior, a man already twice widowed and rumored to be a rake.

  London Teague would not risk a serious rift with Mercer, a wealthy man with great influence in New Orleans and Memphis, so the riders had been sent, at punishing expense.

  And still Anora lingered.

  Go, Teague thought, but did not say, when he came in to stare down at her, the women bustling about the sickbed. But it was in his mind.

  This unwillingness to die in a timely manner was simply selfish malingering. It was womanish and weak. Anora was like an actor whose part in the play had ended, yet she would not leave the stage.

  Her selfishness had put the pressing business of Hy Brasail in irons. A sad cold supper had been laid out in the summer kitchen, stale corn bread and hard-boiled eggs, a slab of mutton and a balthazar of Sillery in a silver ice boat. Their girls, Cora and Eleanor, were whining and moping in the deer park and the two boys, Cathleen’s sons, Jubal and Tyree, unwilling to watch Anora die, for they loved her dearly, had taken themselves off to Plaquemine to offer a novena.

  The house slaves were all caught up with caring for Anora and, because she was beloved by the people, the work of the plantation had effectively come to a halt. And his money was slipping away.

  In heaven’s name, woman.

  Just go.

  At sunset the women put Anora’s wasted body into a ladder-back chair and carried her up the servant stairs to the Jasmine Room, softly singing “Annie Laurie,” Anora’s favorite song. The Jasmine Room had a view of Hy Brasail’s great avenue of live oaks, considered one of the jewels of southern Louisiana. Riverboats passing by along the Mississippi often lingered in the bend, backing water so the passengers lining the rails could admire it.

  The avenue was made of twenty-eight massive spreading oaks, fourteen to a side, planted long ago by a Creole merchant who had gone back to Spain to fight Napoleon and gotten himself bisected by chain shot on the ramparts of Valladolid.

  The oaks of Hy Brasail marched in a stately progression down to the riverbank, their branches interlaced above the deer park to make a kind of leafy green cathedral. At the far end of the avenue the river glimmered in the dying light.

  This was Anora’s favorite view, and she had often expressed the wish that she might, on a far distant day, die with this view before her.

  As they carried her up the stairs Anora had called weakly for Teague to sit by her, but he could not abide sickness of any kind.

  It repelled him.

  He gave word and Second Samuel brought Tecumseh around to the front of the house. Teague mounted up on his big hammer-headed roan and cantered down the shaded avenue without looking back at the French doors of the Jasmine Room, where he knew she would be watching. At the gates he wheeled left and went for a long gallop upriver, all the way past Telesphore Roman’s place, fifteen furlongs or more, all the time thinking she’d surely be gone by twilight.

  But when he came cantering back up between the live oaks early that evening, Second Samuel was there, a standing rebuke on the porch steps, and in his thick West Indies accent, with a touch of his old defiance, he told London Teague that the lady of the house was still struggling brave against it, yes she was.

  As Second Samuel took the reins from Teague and stroked Tecumseh’s heaving barrel, Teague could plainly see in the old man’s yellow-rimmed eyes and the set of his leathery jawline that there were loose talk and murmuring in the slave quarters.

  Teague watched Second Samuel lead Tecumseh away to the stables, thinking that his head boy, though not yet fifty, was now a bent old wreck. Second Samuel had been with London Teague ever since Teague’s people got run out of Hispaniola.

  Teague, who consulted the cat whenever dumb insolence or persistent sloth made it necessary, had never taken it out of its bag to flay Second Samuel’s back. But the sheer impudence of the man—

  Teague felt a ribbon of hot bile in his throat and his vision went dim. He put his right hand on the grip of the pistol in his belt.

  After a while he took it away.

  No man who mistreated his livestock could have good standing down in New Orleans, good standing with the men who counted, and London Teague was in great need of good standing with the men who counted.

  Second Samuel was a hundred feet away, leaning in to talk softly to Tecumseh, who had known him since he was a colt, when Teague called out to him.

  “Samuel, has Talitha been found?”

  Second Samuel turned to look back, tugging on Tecumseh’s halter. The horse could smell the mares and did not want to stop. He whinnied and capered, but Second Samuel held him tightly, thinking about the question and what it might mean for Talitha, who was his oldest daughter, and a sore trial to him.

  Talitha had gone missing from the big house on the night that the lady had been taken poorly and she had not been seen since. She had been absent before—she was a willful girl and liked to go on walkabouts. One time she had wandered overland and through the marshes as far as the outskirts of South Vacherie—but she had never been gone this long. It was now the afternoon of the third day and this was a breach that could no longer be overlooked. Teague saw the hesitation in the man’s face but let it pass.

  “Not rightly yet, Mister London.”

  “Who’s looking?”

  “Mister Coglin’s men, I believe.”

  “With the dogs?”

  “Not yet, Mister London. Those dogs is unruly in the chase and tend to do damage. Don’t want no damage done to the stock, you always says.”

  Teague nodded, dismissed him with a wave, and went slowly up the steps and across the creaking boards to the open doors. The front hall was empty, but the house stank of sickness and death. In keeping with the ancient custom, the great gilded mirror in the front hall had been draped wit
h black cloth, as had all the other mirrors in the house.

  The Irish believed that the spirit of the newly dead would enter an uncovered mirror, and live there, in between the two worlds, trapped forever.

  So the mirrors were all draped.

  Teague drew in a breath and held it.

  Death.

  The house reeked of death and dying. It flowed like a miasma down the main staircase and pooled around his boots. He glanced into the music room and saw that it was still infested by Mr. Aukinlek. He exhaled, smacked the dust off his jodhpurs, scraped his boots on the brush bars by the doors, and went looking for his tobacco pouch.

  A few minutes after midnight Teague was sitting in a cane rocker on the gallery outside the Jasmine Room, still in his riding clothes, his blue jacket hanging off the chair rail behind him. He was smoking a bent briar full of latakia, his boots propped up against the railing.

  Through the open glass doors behind him he could hear the soft voices of the women tending to Anora, and the singsong monotony of Aukinlek’s voice as he administered the Last Rites, and under that Anora’s fretful murmuring as they wiped her body down with vinegar sponges and dabbed at her swollen lips with ice.

  He pulled in a wheezing breath, shook his big shaggy head. Even the smoke from his pipe couldn’t quite cover the smell of a sickroom.

  He pushed himself up out of the cane rocker and walked a short way down the gallery, his spurs clanking, the old boards groaning under his weight, passing by very close to Kate, who was standing in the shadows by the French doors. Kate smelled the tobacco on him as he passed, and the rank sweat in his clothes.