Artifacts (32 page)
And his luck had brought Douglass Everett to him. Now the body of the only witness to Abby’s death was bobbing in the storm. Even if it should wash ashore with its inexplicable bullet wound, who could tie Douglass’ death to him and his unregistered gun?
The only other soul who could hurt him was in jail. Once he dispatched Faye and returned to shore, the big Indian’s days were numbered. Such an assassination was best done in jail, anyway. Beatings and killings happened in jail all the time. That’s why those people were there. Joe Wolf Mantooth was as good as dead.
His secrets were all safe at last. He had never killed for pleasure before today, but putting a hole in Douglass Everett had given him great satisfaction. Killing Faye would be the crowning touch. Then he could lay down his gun and enjoy the life of power that he was meant to live. And no one would ever know what he’d done to acquire that power.
It was time. He opened the door to his room and stepped out onto the landing that encircled the staircase like a square doughnut. Rain fell on him so hard that it ceased to be individual drops, melding into sheets and masses of solid water. This was more than a roof leak.
Looking up, he saw that the entire cupola was gone, leaving a great open hole through the house that was broken only by the landing where he stood and the staircase that rose through the center of it all. When the joints in the wooden floor beneath his feet failed, he dropped to his knees and reached for the doorjamb of the bedroom door. Fear propelled him on all fours into the room he had just left. Behind him, the landing crumbled and dropped to the house’s main level.
It was clear why the landing failed. It had been engineered to work in conjunction with the staircase. Should the staircase fail, the landing simply could not support itself. Sheets of wet plaster flaked off the dying spiral. A slow tremor shook the balusters out of their railings until, unsupported, the handcarved banister clattered down with a godawful racket, followed by the treads.
He was trapped in his room, but so was Faye. He could get to her only by taking her path over the roof, but that would put him at a disadvantage when he came through the window to attack her. Neither of them was going anywhere until the storm passed. He would wait until then for his chance.
Faye was encouraged. There were worse places to hide in the old house than in the master’s bedroom. The sneak stair terminated there. As soon as it was wise to leave the house, they would be able to get out unseen. A moment’s fumbling under the bed yielded one of the flashlights she had stashed throughout the house. It had been a prudent emergency measure for a woman who lived in a house without electricity, but she could never have foreseen this particular emergency.
The flashlight’s narrow beam swept over their hideout. Each wall was lined with glass-fronted shelves, proudly displaying her heritage—the family garbage that she’d pulled out of the ground. When the storm hurled a piece of metal through the glass protecting one of the shelves, she shrieked and almost dropped the flashlight. Joe clapped a hand over her mouth, and he left it there for a long time while she sobbed. The wind drove water through the empty window frame as if it would never stop.
Faye knew they could survive this hurricane. It had been done before. Cally did it.
***
Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
It was dark when the wind died down, but the moon was bright and I could see a clump of trees. I set out swimming for it, dragging my dresser drawer behind me. I was glad for the Sunday afternoons when Miss Mariah took me swimming in the salty Gulf. I wasn’t glad a bit for the Missus’s company, because her spunk left her when the storm did.
She whined and she fussed and I had to just about drag her fat self through the water. Then she wouldn’t climb up the tree. She was afraid to let go of the drawer, because it saved her life and she might need it again. I threw up my hands and left her, holding her drawer with one hand and a tree trunk with the other.
I sat in my tree and let the water drop off me. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the moon shone like it had a secret. I wasn’t surprised when the wind came back from the other direction.
I wrapped my arms and legs around the tree trunk and wished for my dresser drawer. The Missus was hollering for me, but I couldn’t go to her. If I got down out of that tree, I would never see the light of another day. I didn’t need a dream to tell me that.
The storm played out and the sun came up along about the same time. I could see a long ways from my tree, but there wasn’t much to see, just a few other treetops. Last Isle was gone.
I figured rescue boats would come, since the hotel was full of rich people. There wasn’t any other way I was getting out of there alive, so I figured I might as well stay in my tree and hope for a boat. I was hoping hard, because my dream said the Master was going to die. It didn’t say anything about me or the Missus.
Maybe hoping works. When the boat came, I was hungry and thirsty and bug-bit, but I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t alone, either. When the sun got high on that first day, I looked deep into my clump of trees, deep where the storm had piled trash and sand and tree limbs. The Missus was laying there, pale and slack-mouthed. I felt like she still needed someone to fetch things for her. Just someone to take care of her. But I couldn’t do her any good, not now, so I stayed put. We waited together, the Missus and me.
When the rescuers came, the captain asked me who I belonged to. I opened my mouth to say they were dead and shut it again. I’d lived through a hurricane, but I was scared to death of the auction. I opened my mouth again and said, “I belong to Mister Courtney. Mister Courtney Stanton. He’s the master at Innisfree.”
Sometime before dawn, the storm broke. At first light, Faye and Joe executed their plan to slog through the floodwaters, dragging Douglass to his boat. Surely it had survived the storm. Or, if not, surely its radio had survived the storm. Plan B involved using the
Gopher
and its radio. There was no Plan C.
The sneak stairs were so cramped that there was no way for Faye to help Joe with Douglass, so she led, as if her slight weight would keep them from falling if Joe failed to support the wounded man’s bulk. For just a few seconds during the escape, they would be visible from Cyril’s window. If they could dodge him for that long and if one of the boats did its part, they would soon be headed for the safety of Wally’s Marina. Or any portion of Wally’s Marina that the hurricane had allowed to remain standing.
The Senator heard bumping and scraping behind his wall. He had spent the night comparing the eccentric shape of his room’s interior with the shape and size of the house’s exterior. The only rational explanation for the discrepancy between indoor and outdoor dimensions was a hidden staircase, and he knew Faye was using it. He had been waiting for this moment for hours, ripping Faye’s sheets and clothes into long strips, knotting them together, knowing that a controlled slide down this fabric rope would take him to the ground faster than any cramped staircase.
He backed out the window and down the steep roof, then slid down the rope. The knots passed through his fingers, slowing his descent, and the water cushioned his landing. The look on Faye’s face as she emerged onto the porch where he waited was priceless. He aimed and fired.
Faye dropped into the murky, hip-deep water. The shot had missed her, but there were no more. He was still conserving ammunition, waiting to shoot until he got a good look at her. Pressing her belly to the floorboards, she swam and slithered through the flooded dogtrot, hoping to get to the back of the house and some kind of cover before she had to breathe.
The dogtrot formed a bottleneck and he followed her into it, grabbing at her with his free hand. It shocked them both when she rose out the water and slashed at him with Joe’s makeshift stone scalpel. She connected with his right arm. The damage was minimal—a torn sleeve and a deep cut about the length of his thumb, but the gun and the stone tool fell into the water.
It was a small victory, because he was far larger than she was. His fingers closed around her throat. She was bending backward, heading for the water, when she saw Joe behind him, silhouetted at the entrance to the dogtrot.
Faye hated to believe that her last thought was going to be a whiny, “Where have you been? I’m dying here.” Then she saw where Joe had been.
In the left arm that was drawing back to deliver a killing blow, Joe held the
atlatl
, the spearthrower that he had reworked as a gift to her, still fitted to the spearhead and haft he made with his own hands. She pushed hard against the Senator’s grip, trying to keep him standing as a more-or-less upright, unmoving target, and she was rewarded.
Joe let the weapon fly. The force of his muscles, amplified by the
atlatl’
s whiplash action, drove the spear into the back of the Senator’s neck until Faye could see the stone point protruding through his throat.
Faye rested on the floor of her bedroom, having insisted that Joe deposit Douglass on the bed and having refused to be left alone anywhere else. Joe had left them to look after each other while he went to check the condition of the boats and their radios. He also claimed to know some herbs that would bring down her fever, and Douglass’, too.
Faye imagined that any herb on Joyeuse Island that had survived the storm was now underwater, but she didn’t doubt Joe’s word. If he could find the weeds he sought, she trusted that she would feel better quite soon. And she did feel terrible. Fever, chills, nausea. Her thigh was so engorged that she’d had to slit her khakis to give it room to swell. She pulled at the hole in her pants, trying to see whether the famed red streak of blood poisoning was crawling up her leg. If she found such a streak what would it mean? Amputation? Lockjaw? Death? God only knew the consequences of dragging an open puncture wound through mud and muck and floodwater.
“Douglass?” she asked, in a voice that sounded faraway even to her. “How do you think his necklace got in Abby’s grave? Cyril’s, I mean…Cedrick’s…whoever.”
“I decked him. Didn’t I tell you?” The memory added strength to the wounded man’s voice. “After we dug the hole. Abby lay right there on the dirt while I did it.” He drew another labored breath. “Clipped him on the jaw. Knocked him down.” It hurt Faye to watch him cough and wheeze again before he went on. “Straddled him. Did my damndest to throttle him.”
“You broke the chain while you were choking him.”
“Prob’ly. Shoulda finished the job. Would have, ’cept for what he said.”
Faye wanted Douglass to go on, but she was afraid. He was breathing in such tiny gasps.
Douglass continued anyway. “Said if anybody come up right then—they’d see just two men and a dead body. Said, ‘Who they gonna to send to the chair? Me? Or you, nigger?’”
Faye closed her eyes and watched two men lowering Abby’s limp form into her grave. Covering her with dirt. Riding together back to shore in Douglass’ tiny fishing boat, facing each other eyeball to eyeball, because each was afraid to turn his back on the other. Afraid for forty years to turn their backs on each other.
Partly to get his mind off forty years of slow torture and partly to get her own mind off her leg, Faye peeled the damp plastic wrapping off William Whitehall’s journal.
“Want to hear a story?” she asked him.
Douglass shifted on the bed. “Want to hear a story, Faye,” he mumbled.
Carefully unwrapping the journal, she arranged the clear plastic wrapping to protect its pages from her damp hands, her wet clothes, the sodden air. Her fever had risen to the near-delusional stage of garbled thinking and uncertain vision, but she needed to read for Douglass and for herself, so she pulled herself together and did it.
***
Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
Living in the Big House at Joyeuse after the hurricane and I killed the Master felt like I’d died and gone to heaven, but it didn’t make Mister Courtney happy. Sometimes, he sat at his desk and unlocked the drawer where he kept his papers. Then he laid bills of sale for all his people across the desk, calling them by name as he sorted through their papers.
“Rufus. Sallie. Beau. Scipio. Ora.” Then he would set one paper to the side, away from the others, and say, “Cally.” After a minute, he’d go back to counting his people. There were plenty of them, because he inherited Joyeuse since the Master didn’t leave any children. Well, he left me, but I didn’t count.
Mister Courtney’s Mama must have told him that his stepfather, the Master, was my daddy. Knowing that, a decent man like Mister Courtney couldn’t treat me like a slave. He gave me a room in the Big House and, even though he never asked me to run his household I did, because it needed doing and I knew how. Once he told me he wanted to set all his slaves free. When I caught my breath, I asked why he didn’t go ahead and do it. I can still hear what he said.
“Because I’m afraid.” He fingered through the bills of sale laid across his desk and said, “I’m afraid of what will happen to them, and I’m afraid of what will happen to me.”
It took a long time for the War to touch us at Joyeuse. Mister Courtney didn’t go away to fight, on account of his lame leg. Truth be told, I never noticed his limp until I came to live with him, because he carried himself like a prince. When he spoke, he fastened his blue eyes on you so direct that you hardly noticed whether the sun was shining. You certainly didn’t notice anything so paltry as a weak leg.
I know you can tell that I was in love with him. In the seventy years since, I never met anyone who could hold a candle to him, so I’ve been alone, but we had a few good years together, my Courtney and I. It took some time for us to forget that he was my Master. He surely forgot it quicker than I did. But we lived together in his house and I took care of things for him and I was the only person in the world he could talk to. I was his wife in every way but one, and in the end it was up to me to show him that I could be his wife in that way, as well.
I think it wasn’t just Mister Courtney’s leg that was weak. I think it was his heart, too. When he left us, it was sudden. He came riding in from the fields, holding his chest. I tried to help him off his horse, but he fell. I was a skinny thing in those days, but I’m proud to say I caught him.
I fixed him a bed out on the porch where it was cool and he was comfortable there, but right away he sent me inside to look for a box hidden in his desk.
“It’s your Christmas present,” he said, “but I think I need to give it to you now.”
It was a chatelaine, all made out of gold. It hung at my waist and held my keys and my scissors and my thimble—everything the lady of a great plantation needed to get through the day. I said I couldn’t think of any gift I’d like better, then he pulled a gold ring out of his pocket. He’d had it made with a funny little loop on the side.
“You can wear it on your finger when it’s safe, but you know that little ring could put you in jail. The law won’t let you be my wife. When strangers come around, you wear that ring on your chatelaine. You understand, don’t you?”
His voice got stronger when he talked about that little ring, and I began to hope he would pull through. But when I said, “Yes. I understand,” he settled down and got weaker again.
He put the ring on my finger and said “I do,” and made sure I said it, too. Then he said, fainter still, “A wedding present. What shall I give you?”
The word “Freedom,” came out of my mouth before I thought and he said, “Oh, Cally, I tore up your paper long ago.”
“Not just for me,” I said. “For everybody.”
So I fetched the papers out of his desk and helped him write “Freed in consideration of years of faithful labor,” across the face of every one of them.
The next day, my precious Courtney left me alone, five months pregnant and responsible for a hundred new-made freedmen.