Lanier looked up and found Ella peering at them through the kitchen window. He met her smile and forced himself not to break away. When she turned toward the other side of the room where he could no longer see her, Lanier followed the sound of feet crunching the oak leaves that scattered the back of the cabin.
Bonaparte pulled at his pants and walked forward, never taking his eyes off the deputy.
“The man down there by the road let me pass.” Bonaparte handed the deputy the red slip of paper that the other deputy by the driveway had given him.
“I know him,” Lanier said. His reassurance didn’t keep the deputy with the sugarcane from eyeing Bonaparte up and down.
“That’s Bonaparte,” Macon said, brushing the dirt from his pants.
Nodding toward the circle of marbles, the deputy said to Macon, “Why don’t you go back to the store and fetch me a Coca-Cola.”
Macon kept picking up marbles until the circle was filled. Giving up, the deputy tossed the rest of the sugarcane into the garden and made his way into the store. “I figure your boy yonder will protect you,” he yelled and pointed at Bonaparte.
“We got trouble,” Bonaparte said in a stage whisper. He planted his hands on the sides of his pants.
“You’re a little late with that bit of news.” Lanier bent down, picked up a tiger’s-eye marble, and thumped it into the ring. Macon jumped around to the side of the ring and licked his lips.
“I ain’t playing with you,” Bonaparte said. “These folks mean business. I got a family. I got to make a living ’round here.”
Macon shot another marble out of the circle and moved around to the other side. “Lanier, your turn.”
Bonaparte’s oily face glistened in the sun. “The sheriff and Gillespie came out to the house. Talking about bringing us to the church for some meeting. Telling me that my girl better say such and such or I be bucking justice.”
Lanier stared up at the window where Ella had stood.
“Folks is saying that Gillespie knows you the one keeping Miss Ella from selling this place to him. He got them saying you’re a devil. Not me but other people, you understand. Not me.”
“Lanier, do you want me to play your turn?”
Without looking away, Lanier nodded, and Macon shot a cat’s-eye marble across the border of the circle.
“Do you hear me talking to you?” Bonaparte asked. “The sheriff says I best protect my own before I start protecting you. Now I got to do what I got to do. You can up and leave here. I can’t.”
“I’m tired of leaving.”
Bonaparte shifted his weight, dug his hands into his pockets, and stared down at the marbles like they were miniature crystal balls.
At the kitchen window, Ella appeared again and leaned sideways. Her hair gathered at the nape of her neck. This time she did not attempt to wash away reality with a smile.
That evening, after she had dried the supper dishes the same as if it were just another night, Ella once again stood at the kitchen window. She looked out at the light from the lamp that seeped through the cracks in the barn wall, then glanced toward the parlor, where she could hear the boys arguing over a game of gin rummy. She was grateful for their argument. At least it kept the noise of the outside shut away for one night.
Without telling a soul, Ella took one of Samuel’s khaki rain jackets that hung on the hook next to the back door and slipped away. She glanced at the calico cat that jumped from her porch and jetted off toward the woods that was now just a field, sliced and jangled with stumps.
The deputy with the bald head looked down at her from the front porch as she made her way toward the barn. One more to discount her reputation, she thought before she could stop herself.
She didn’t bother to knock before pulling the door open, slowly at first and then with force.
It’s still my property,
she thought.
Lanier stood shirtless with the waist of his pants flapping partway open.
“Oh,” Ella said and covered her face like a schoolgirl before turning her back to him. “I didn’t know you weren’t decent.”
“I’m decent,” he said as he finished dressing.
The barn smelled of barley and dampened dust. The mule that was getting fat in the stall lifted his head and returned to his hay. He never bothered to kick at the stall door.
Lanier sat down at the table he had made out of two sawhorses and a piece of discarded plywood cut for the raft. He had repaired the leg on the stool that had once been used by Harlan when he was a racehorse jockey. “Won’t you have a seat?” He swept his hand across the chair the same way he might if he were in a grand inn. “It’s my parlor.”
Ella couldn’t help but laugh. The laughter cut the tension in the room as much as it did the tension in her mind.
“You make me laugh.”
“That’s a good thing.”
She folded her arms and then swung them free. “I tend to drown in blue spells. You rise up and laugh.”
“I’ve had practice.” He ran his hand across the top of the plywood. “I’ve had my sinking spells, believe me.”
“Lanier . . .” Ella’s words came out in a sigh.
“I know.” He looked up from the table, and for the first time she saw tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The deputy out on the porch coughed, and some of the small group of people who had not yet given up on seeing the healer laughed. Ella turned toward the noise, and then stepped closer to Lanier. This time she made sure that the table separated them.
“You know Neva Clarkson, the teacher, the one I told you about who was in school with me? Well, she came by today.” Ella tapped the table with the fingernail that was growing back after being cut for common labor. “I assured her that all would be fine. I told her not to worry about this so-called meeting at the church. I told her that you are a good man.”
Lanier looked up as if the crowd had just burst through the door.
“I told her the truth,” Ella said and tapped the table. “I told her the truth, didn’t I?”
He sat down on the stool and stared at a hoofprint that the mule had made on the ground. “That means a lot. I expect people are wondering why you don’t make me leave or why I don’t run on.”
Ella’s neck tensed at the thought of the conversation drifting in the direction of the moment they had shared on the steamboat. Her heart didn’t want to discuss his leaving, but her mind told her it was the right thing to do. “But now you know, at the meeting they will be publicly stating what has been whispered. They will ask about the healing. They will ask, and I have to go answer.”
“Have to?”
“Have to,” Ella repeated. Her hand was laid flat on the table. “I want to stand up there and tell them what I told Neva. I want to tell them that you are a good man. A trustworthy, decent man. I want that, Lanier.”
“I am,” he said, walking around the wagon wheel that was in need of repair. “I’m all that.”
“But I need answers. I respect your abilities . . . your gift . . . whatever it might be. And up until now, I haven’t pointedly questioned you on it. I have always felt that faith is a private matter. You told me you weren’t into darkness, and I took your word for it.”
“I think you ought to know that by now.”
His words settled over Ella, and for the first time since she had walked through the door, she breathed deep enough for her belly to expand.
“When my granny told me that I had the gift . . . being a fatherless son and all . . . she said never to tell what I was praying when I touched people. It’s how I was raised in the mountains up in Georgia.”
“And the North Georgia mountains are far away from here,” Ella said.
“It rips me up inside,” he said. “I’m tempted to just let the next person pull out the fire, cure the thrush, heal the whatever. And they tried to tell me it was a gift. Then how come it feels like a curse?”
Ella folded her arms. “Curse?”
Lanier ran his hands through his hair, and strands fell down over his face. “Don’t worry. The witches aren’t flying in on brooms just yet.”
“All jokes aside, I trusted too much already.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Now they are congregating at that church, and I’m going to be publicly skewered. This thing you have . . . this whatever it is that you have to make people better . . . Lanier, you need to tell me how to explain it to people. You owe me that much.”
“Faith.”
It was the quiet way he said the word that caused Ella to take her hand from the stall door. He moved closer, and she could smell the musky scent that only he gave. The smell that caused her to feel unbalanced, frozen. She wanted him to put his arms around her again, but when he lifted his arm, she stepped to the side.
“You know, Neva mentioned that letters can be doctored up all sort of ways to look official.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know you, Lanier. I mean, I really don’t know you. It’s not just the healings. I’m very open-minded . . . more open-minded than most. But all this talk that we’re so similar. Well, I’m learning that emotions are one thing. Reality is another.” Ella folded her hands behind her back. “A letter is only a piece of paper.”
“That letter I have from the sheriff is certified.”
Ella tapped the wood with her fingernail. “The story behind the letter is what I’m getting at.”
Lanier sat back down on the stool. His legs were wide, and his arms rested on his knees. “You’ve trusted me more than anybody would have. It’s how come I have these thoughts, these feelings. . . .” His words trailed off, and he looked down like he might be praying. “My wife, Octavia . . . she had . . . problems. Mental problems.”
“You told me that much already,” Ella said.
“I had a son, Nathaniel. He was three when she drowned him.”
Ella stepped backward, pressed against the stall. She tried not to move, not to even breathe as he spoke his words. A dirt-dabber bug fought against a mound of dirt and then wiggled into the hole he created, disappearing for good.
“We wrote Nathaniel’s passing off as accidental. Accidental drowning. Octavia said she was distracted by a bell ringing and left him in the tub just a minute too long. I knew different. The girl, Rosie, who kept house for us knew different. The problems . . . the mind problems didn’t come on until after Nathaniel was born. Octavia claimed having Nathaniel caused her to be the way she was. Her family claimed it was me. No matter how hard I tried to wash up or learn the way they wanted me to think, I never could suit them.”
Even as the mule stuck his head out from the stall door and nudged her shoulder with his nose, Ella never moved.
“My brother-in-law is heartless. You might as well say evil. People said one time him and his brothers strung up a colored man for looking twice at J.D.’s wife.” Lanier shook his head and stared down. “Like Camilla would be interested in a man to start with. Poor Camilla. J.D. had no business marrying that girl. She wasn’t supposed to marry. Anybody could see that. He married her for her money. Her daddy owned most the land in the county and a sawmill in the city. Umm . . . I guess Camilla was really the one who had no business marrying. Pressured, I reckon. By her family. By the community. Who knows. But she gave in just the same. She married him when she was thirty-one. They’d been married for a few years when I came into the picture.
“For a year or two, I just thought they were close . . . Octavia and Camilla . . . like sisters or something. Then, after Nathaniel . . . well, I’d have to be blind not to see it. A touch of the hand. A sideways glance that turned into a stare. Hugs that went on too long, even in public. Even after the funeral, weeks after we buried Nathaniel, the only person Octavia would let into the room was Camilla. I was numb to it all . . . my baby boy dying . . . then here comes Camilla. The only reason I agreed for her to move in with us is because she managed to make things quiet in the house again.
“I always wondered what J.D. thought about his wife packing up and moving in. He had her inheritance in the bank. I reckon he didn’t need her in his own house. And I always wondered about Rosie. Did Rosie ever know what was going on?” Lanier stared across at an orange and black spider that hung from a broken web on the stall gate.
“Rosie had worked for the Troxlers for years. She was polite to me, but like the rest of them she was distant. When I was able to save Nathaniel from the croup, she seemed to get scared of me. So see there, I’ve had some experience with all this . . . all this judging.”
Ella tried to smile, but Lanier was too far away in his mind to notice. He hugged himself and rocked forward. Muscles in his forearm twitched.
“The morning . . . the morning it all happened, I heard them talking in the kitchen. Camilla’s voice was low, but Octavia yelled, ‘Take me away from here or I’ll take myself.’ I figured she wanted to go to Atlanta for a day or two. They’d do that now and again.
“It must have just happened right before I got there for lunch. Rosie hadn’t made it back from the market yet. I liked to eat late and then shut my eyes for a little bit. Like always, Rosie left my lunch in the heating cabinet up over the stove. I came in the house. Funny, all I remember hearing was the screen door creak and the birds chirping outside. Not even a clock ticking . . . nothing but birds . . . happy-sounding.
“‘Octavia,’ I called out. Easing down the hall, walking past the table that I’d made for her on our first anniversary. The first thing I remember seeing was a black shoe sticking out from the door. It was turned toward me. The buckle strap was bright silver . . . brand-new. Not a scratch on it. I never had paid any attention to Camilla’s shoes. It all still comes to me now and then like flashes . . . like lightning you can shelter from but can’t stop from happening. Camilla had on a black skirt. And cherries. Cherries on her blouse—all these little cherries sewn on it. The top part was covered in blood from where a pistol had ripped her chest wide open. The gun right there by the foot of the bed . . . my pearl-handled gun . . . the one Octavia bought for me when we got married. The barrel was even still warm.
“Octavia was on the other side of the bed. Blood was all over the wall. All over the oval picture frame that held Nathaniel’s photograph. Everywhere was blood on my side of the bed.” Lanier folded his arms and tucked his hands inside the folds of his biceps. “All over my hands. The blood got on me when I lifted Octavia’s head, thinking I’d be able to stop it from happening or something. Just like I could fix it.”