Distant Blood (24 page)

The voice spoke in my ear, like a miniature devil tittering on my shoulder, urging me to mischief. No. No. I wasn't hateful, I had just been confused. Shocked. Afraid.

I looked up from the floor and saw Uncle Jake watching me from the library, his eyes sharply focused. A book lay open on his lap, and eventually he simply nodded at me and went back to his reading, his finger tracing a path through the prose.

I wavered between retreating to my room, burying my head in a good book in the study with Uncle Jake, or seeking out some private enclave on the island, away from prying eyes, sharpened tongues, and nagging consciences. The last option beckoned alluringly. I went into the kitchen, found it empty, and grabbed a can of Dr Pepper from the refrigerator. I popped the top and took a long swallow, keeping my eyes closed as the sugary coldness gushed down my throat.

You're a mistake.
What a sick woman Sass was, hiding behind alleged concern for Bob Don. And after I'd kept her son from getting pummeled and offered her the olive branch of peace. I heard the kitchen door swing open and shut and I turned.

No one stood there. Odd. I moved to the door, opened it, and peered out into the dining room to see who I'd frightened off by my simple presence in the kitchen. Nobody.

I eased the door back, feeling a disquiet tug in my gut. Probably just Aunt Sass scrounging for lunch and withdrawing when she'd seen me. No problem, as far as I was concerned. For one moment I felt like I wasn't alone in the kitchen; but the only noise was the hiss of my own breathing. I'm letting that woman rattle me, I assured myself, and opened the back door into bright sunshine.

I jumped down the stairs and wended my way past the greenhouse. Rufus puttered inside, whistling tunelessly and
sipping at a root beer. A radio warbled an old Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn duet about a Louisiana woman and a Mississippi man. I didn't want to hear one stanza about star-crossed lovers.

“I put up that shovel for you.” I paused for a moment in front of the greenhouse.

“What? Uh, sure, thanks,” Rufus mumbled.

“You ought to be more careful with your tools, Rufus. I nearly tripped over it out here.”

Rufus blinked at me. “What the hell are you talkin' about, Jordan?”

“That shovel I left propped by your toolroom door. Didn't you see it?”

“No.” He rubbed his scraggly chin with a begrimed hand. “I don't leave my tools lying around. They'll rust out in the rains we get all the time.”

“Oh. Well, someone else must've left it.”

“There weren't no shovel when I came back here.” His gaze left mine and he busied his hands above a table cluttered with junk and plant cuttings.

“Well, whatever. Where's a good place to go for a walk?”

Now Rufus Beaulac looked at me and his eyes narrowed. “What you want to go amblin' around for?”

“Why wouldn't I? It's a beautiful day.” I didn't add I wanted to escape the tension in the house, the unease that had smoked through the rooms even before Lolly's death—and my own sick feelings of remorse. “I need some exercise.”

“You want to help me dig up some flowers for Lolly's service? That'd give you plenty exercise.”

“Listen, Rufus, I'd be glad to help you after lunch. But right now I just want to know is there a good walking trail along the island. Is there or isn't there?”

“Little hot for wanderin' around. And we got enough trouble without you headin' off just to get lost, yeah.”

He doesn't want me exploring this island.
Annoyance tinged his words, more than if I was simply a pest.

“I guess I'll just find my own path. Thanks.” I pivoted to leave.

“This ain't no resort,” he answered rudely. “There's a kind of path that goes above the beach. Don't stray from it. Rattlesnakes and cottonmouths around here.” He smiled a bleak grin. “They got a real taste for college-boy flesh. Ain't nothin' a cottonmouth likes more than sinkin' their fangs into some idiot too overeddicated to know better than to stay away from what ain't his business.”

“Snakes? On an island?”

“Yeah, they'se some here. They're all over Matagorda Island, too. You be careful, serious, Jordan. The cotton-mouths like the sides of pools, ditches, anyplace they'se a little water. You set careful foot there, hear?”

“Yes.” I absolutely hate snakes and tried to keep the tremor from my voice.

“And the rattlers—you hear that buzz, you step light, yeah? They like thick clumps of weeds and grass where they little mouse friends live. You get bit, we got maybe just enough time to get you to Port O'Connor. Maybe.” He grinned, his gums looking discolored in the faint light of the greenhouse.

“Thanks for the warning,” I retorted, hurrying off before further horrors could be suggested. Rufus might be full of it, I decided. I had never heard of cottonmouths on offshore islands, but what did I know? Maybe he just wanted to put me off walking around the island, where no one could keep an eye on me.

Pure and simple, Rufus didn't want me snooping around Sangre Island. I resolved to find out why.

The path—and I use the term rather loosely—Rufus described was the one we'd taken up from the dock on the beach, little more than grass worn away, sand mixed with crushed shells. Littler dunes, engulfed in the fleeting beauty of colorful wildflowers and matted with hardier, twining plants, lay behind the main dune ridge. The flatlands behind the ridge were grassy and thick with shrubs. The wind was a constant companion, bowing all in its path.

I walked down the trail, well past the empty dock. When was Uncle Mutt due back? I felt with him gone, the family
was hardly more than an unsupervised classroom, ready to erupt into anarchy.

The wind surged, cooling my skin and easing the smothering humidity. Long strands of cloud stretched across the formerly empty sky. My clothes had started adhering to my skin uncomfortably during my latest exchange with Aunt Sass and I pulled my T-shirt's fabric away from my back. I didn't let my eyes stray far from the path, just in case Rufus was correct about snakes. I hate snakes. Really and truly.

I pulled a pair of sunglasses from my shorts pocket and donned them. The path became entirely a figment as I reached a small bend out of sight from the house. The shore here was sandy, dotted with beached shells. I watched a small crab, pale, skitter from my approach and vanish into a burrow. With the house out of sight, and the only sound my own breathing and the hard whisper of the wind caressing Sangre, I could imagine myself miles away from any people. It might make a good place for sunning with Can-dace. But the idea of lounging in the bright summer air didn't seem appropriate with poor Aunt Lolly dead and with so much unresolved between Bob Don and me.

I peered and puttered for a while, then climbed up a slide of sand and high grass into the scrubby flatland. Sand kissed everything. I wandered for a while, listening to the distant caws and cries of the seagulls—and keeping my ears open for any rattling noises. Profusions of groundsel shrubs, small plants, saltgrass, and a rainbow of wildflowers covered the land. A colony of stubby, dark-barked huisache trees, not quite as tall as my head, swayed in the quickening breeze. Black mounds of sprawling Macartney rose—I'd been told it once served as living barbed wire on area islands—dotted the land. Its bloom seemed already past, and Bob Don had warned me about the briar's pesky thorns.

I breathed in the air of isolation. The island was rough in its beauty, but I could see why Mutt put up with all the difficulties of living here: having to import most of his potable water, horrendously expensive electrical service, the inconvenience of always being a boat ride away from civilization. The quiet, the beauty, were worth it all.

I walked through a thick motte of live oaks. The air felt moist and stifling. Mosquitoes swarmed and I slapped at my neck and legs repeatedly, cursing myself for not having the foresight to douse thoroughly with repellent. No help for it now; I pinched my lips together and forged ahead.

I found a small clearing near what I would have guessed was the island's center. It opened up from a precut path, lined with thickets of saltcedar trees, that would have been far easier to take than the way Rufus pointed me. Silly old toot. I saw an old, wrought-iron fence squaring off a section of land. Tombs stood cluttered within the fence's borders, most of them aboveground in the boxy marble style of interments I'd seen in Galveston and New Orleans. Wild spurts of grasses and small, pointed bursts of Spanish dagger separated the stone monuments. I unlatched the gate and opened it. The creak of its hinges sounded eerie in the hushed wind, almost like a human cry.

The first mounds were marked with a standard stone tombstone:
HERE LIE TWO CONFEDERATE SOLDIERS, KNOWN ONLY TO GOD. NOVEMBER
1863. The marker appeared much more recent than the graves themselves, added at a later date. I wondered if these men died in the actions in Matagorda Bay when Union general Nathaniel Banks launched his major offensive against the Texas coast. Matagorda Bay had been in the thick of the fighting. Another memorial, this one a spire of Hill Country granite topped with a decorative anchor, was
IN MEMORY OF THE CREW OF THE TEXAS SHIP RELIANT. LOST IN BATTLE, 1835. NO
doubt the memorial owed its existence to Mutt's fascination with the past.

I found myself wondering how this island had stayed out of government hands, remaining in private fortunes. I'd heard of the federal government seizing islands in the Matagorda area, condemning the homes and kicking off families that had been there for generations. Too little to bother with? Not of strategic importance? I thought of the dead men in the sunken hull of the
Reliant
, off the coast. Had they thought this island mattered? Had they watched it as their boat cracked and sank, a refuge out of their reach as
the Mexicans closed in, cannons roaring? I had studied Texas history as a boy and knew that neither side offered the other much clemency when captives fell into enemy hands. The massacres of Goliad and the Alamo did not encourage kindness toward the foe. The butchered boys on the beach of Sangre Island served merely as another reminder of the casual cruelty of war.

I strolled past other graves and tombs. Apparently someone had lived on Sangre since Texas became a republic, for there were additional memorials. One family, the Merciers, seemed to have held the island the longest. I squatted before their tombstones, running my fingers over their weathered inscriptions.

The back corner held Goertzes. A simple, elegant tomb, topped by an angel reaching toward heaven, was marked
NORA JEAN GOERTZ.
1940-1972. Fresh wildflowers, newly picked, rested below the inscription. Next to it was another marble tomb, this one with a small statue of a boy, apparently caught wandering along a beach, barefoot, with a basket of shells in his hand,
BRIAN RILEY GOERTZ. TOO BRIEF A TIME.
1970-1982. I ran my fingers along the inscription
TOO BRIEF A TIME.
Here also, fresh flowers lay against the engraved stone. I thought of the brightly smiling, bucktoothed boy in the photographs in Lolly's room.

In the corner, an even rectangle was neatly staked out, awaiting the shovel and the marble. Lolly's memorial. Rufus or Uncle Mutt must have come out and already marked out the plot. And perhaps left fresh flowers on Brian's and Nora's graves.

Voices drifted toward me, coming closer from down the path. I circled the tombs, feeling like a trespasser, keeping the stone blocks between me and the new visitors. The thick growth of saltcedars hid them from my view. I didn't decide to hide among the dead until I heard one of the voices was Philip's, ranting in hot anger.

I HUNKERED DOWN IN THE DENSE GRASSES
that divided two of the older tombs. I prayed there wasn't a fire-ant mound nearby, but none of the pests had invaded the territory of the dead. I did manage to scrape my elbow good on a corner of Nora Goertz's tomb and winced at the sudden, sharp pain. I didn't have much time to inspect the wound. Philip's baritone carried toward me on the never-ending wind, another softer voice answering his. I lay flat in the tall grass, not daring to peer around the monument. My choices were few.

And what are you going to do if they spot you? Claim you're sunbathing? In a graveyard?
I didn't have a clue. I decided not to fret until the problem presented itself.

I inched my face around the corner of the tomb and saw them stroll past the saltcedars: Philip huffing along, followed—surprisingly—by Wendy Tran. He appeared angry; she seemed fidgety. Even at this distance I could see her glance around nervously, as though expecting unwanted visitors.

They stopped at the gate to the cemetery. Philip mopped his glistening forehead with a raggedy handkerchief. Wendy stopped and crossed her arms. She said something I couldn't hear and looked back over her shoulder. I ducked my head behind the tomb. I couldn't see them, and they, I hoped, hadn't seen me.

“I'm not gonna keep you long,” Philip said. “Lunch'll wait. You got the money?”

“Of course not. I need more time, Philip.” Her voice
sounded tight and controlled. I wondered if she was quite as placid as she acted in the comfort of her kitchen.