Heaven's Bones (11 page)

The gutted hulk was Riverbend. She could see where the pillars
once stood, the wide porch steps, a heap of charred timber where the central staircase had collapsed. It was nestled in the bend of the river for which it was named, and the water flowed and sparkled and chuckled as before, as if nothing at all had happened.

Fanny whirled around, looking for her father behind her, looking for some kind of explanation. No one was there, not even the mist. The day was clear and transparent: the sun shone down out of a clear sky and glittered on the water, and birds chattered in the woods that were unshrouded by fog. Her father and the strange man were nowhere to be seen.

How had the house burned down so completely and quickly?

And her mother?

Was her mother inside when it happened?

Was she inside now, somewhere underneath the rubble?

Reluctantly, Fanny walked closer. The bottom-most porch step was somehow undamaged; the paint looked weathered, as if by a hundred rainy days, but not burned. The next step looked complete and solid, although the paint was blistered away. The third was ruined.

She stepped tentatively on the first step, which gave slightly beneath her, and listened.

Nothing but birdsong and the splash of the river.

She noticed something else. Although the trees to either side of the ruins were just charred hulks, the grass grew, strong and green, up to the very step where she stood. Vines, some young and pale, others thick and spiny, wound here and there over and between the blackened wood.

This house had not burned down this morning. Not this week, or this month. This had happened years ago.

Fanny sat on the bottom step and wondered whether to cry.

“There are better places to sit on a fine day like today.”

She started at the sound of the voice, with no idea how long she'd been there. Surely the sun had moved in the sky.

The speaker was a man who hovered somewhere between being middle-aged and elderly. His skin was dark and leathery-looking, as if he'd been in the sun for much of his life, and he wore a broad-brimmed straw hat. He wore what looked like work pants, and a maroon shirt, and a cheerful yellow paisley vest, and she was so startled to see another human that she looked at him with her mouth open.

His face was cheerful, but there was sadness about his eyes when he looked down at her, and she had a feeling that he knew far more about her than a stranger should.

“What happened here?” she blurted out before she thought, then blushed fiercely at her forwardness—although whether this man was servant, slave or landowner, it was impossible to tell.

“I mean—what happened to the house? When did it burn?” She indicated the charred remains of the plantation house with a small wave of her hand, although there could be no doubt of what she meant.

“Ah, missy,” said the man, hands on hips and feet apart, regarding the ruin. “ 'Most twenty years ago, it would be.”

“Twenty years?”

Fanny stared ahead, frowning.

“Then this can't be Riverbend Plantation,” she concluded, puzzled but relieved.

“Oh, yes.” He took off his hat, revealing a shiny pate surrounded by a fringe of curly gray hair, and sat on a fragment of unburned step a few feet away from her. “Yes, child, this is Riverbend, or what's left of it.”

Something cold lumped in her belly, her throat constricted, and the world went black at the edges.

“No,” she said but no sound came out. The man sat still, looking at his hat, which he turned over and over in his hands.

Something about him calmed her, and after a while the cold ache eased and her vision cleared. They sat together in silence a long time, listening to the chatter of birds and the breeze in the grass.

Finally she spoke, and sound did come out this time. “What happened?”

“Sherman's March, missy.” The man did not hesitate. It was as if he had been expecting her question and had his answer ready.

“General Sherman took a little walk and lit a few fires. 'Cepting this one was helped along, you might say. The Yankees didn't have to do all the work on this one. Weldon's slaves, and a few others too, were ready to help.”

“Why?” asked Fanny, and it struck her that she didn't think it strange that the servants would delight in burning Riverbend down, although she did not know exactly why. She had a sudden vision, or maybe it was a memory, of a circle of faces, black and white both, standing impassively in an irregular circle as the tall windows of Riverbend shivered and cracked in the heat, and fire flared up the curtains.

“Simple truth was that Doctor Weldon was not a nice man. Oh, he got along fine with all the other families in the area—the white families. Married a local girl and did everything he was supposed to. He wasn't a practicing doctor—too high-class for that, though folks said he had a practice out Alabama way, or wherever it was he come from. But he never talked about it.

“One thing he did was buy slaves that had something or other wrong with them—got hurt chopping cotton or torn up giving birth, and he'd fix 'em. Said he liked to get his hand in for something to do and to develop new ways of treating folk. He corresponded with other doctors about it, and took all the medical journals he could subscribe to.

“That was all well and good, until people started to notice that the slaves Doctor Weldon bought—well, sometimes no one saw them again. And there were stories about sounds coming from that outbuilding he used as a laboratory—like people crying out in pain.”

Fanny thought:
Don't disturb your father at his work
.

Fanny thought:
an animal in pain
.

It occurred to her as well that this man was speaking about her father, and that she ought to be offended. But she listened instead.

“Then there was the matter of that girl—not much more than a child—was a maidservant to Mrs. Weldon. She'd had her since she was a little thing, a present from her father. Played with the Weldon child like she was her big sister.”

Sadie
. Fanny's knees felt weak, and she was glad she was already sitting down. A dizzying cascade of memory poured into her, filling that empty spot that belonged to Sadie.

How could she have forgotten Sadie? What other pieces were missing from her past?

Sadie, playing hide-and-seek with her at the edge of the woods. Sadie, gravely taking tea in Fanny's refuge behind the living room curtains.

Then one day Sadie was gone, and when she asked Mama where she was, Mama ignored her. When she pressed the point, Mama turned red.

“Slaves come and go,” she had hissed at her. “They get sold and given away like any other animal. Don't ask me again.”

It was strange, seeing such emotion in her mother's face. In an instant, Beatrice Weldon had smoothed away all signs of it.

“Don't bother your head, or me, about the girl,” she said, turning back to her correspondence. And that was that.

The man was still talking.

“There came a day when the house servants said that Mrs. Weldon's maid wasn't to be seen anymore—no one saw hide or hair of her again. It got to the white folks and for some reason that rubbed them all the wrong way. A field hand was one thing—but a house servant, especially a maid—those you had some affection for. Like a pet. White folk didn't look too favorable on Doctor Weldon—nor his missus—after that.

“After that was when some of the Weldon servants began to run away—even a couple house servants. If they tracked a house servant down, they got sold downriver as a field hand—or worse. But it didn't seem to make much difference to them.

“Then Sherman came, burning his way down Georgia, and people had other things to worry about. And when the Yankees got here, they burned Riverbend with the rest. But it may be that they didn't. It may be that the slaves got to it first.

“One thing for sure is no one ever saw the Weldons again. They say they burned up in the fire—whether by accident or intent. Even when the fire died out no one could say because of the smoke that stayed on longer than smoke had any right to. Maybe because the house was right by the river, and prone to queer mists and tule fog. Maybe it mixed with the smoke and you got a fog like I hear London does sometimes, with no one seeing a foot beyond their face. People didn't like to come near, because there was tales of strange things roaming in the smoke—queer hunchback dogs with red eyes, and things like wraiths ten feet high. Pure superstition, like enough.

“When time passed and the smoke did clear, we searched the ruins.” He looked at his hands as if could still feel the ash on them. “Didn't find a thing in the big house—and never found hide nor hair nor bone of the Weldons, not the doctor or his missus, nor yet the little girl. But under the outbuilding, where Doctor Weldon did what medical work he cared to …”

He stopped and breathed deeply, and Fanny tensed.

“The floor had fallen in, and there was a room underneath—must've been a trapdoor before the whole thing burned. A boy stepped wrong and fell through—he weren't hurt bad, because it weren't so deep. But he was screaming, because it was dark and because he could feel the bones beneath him.

“We hauled him out and shone torches down there. They were laid out neat enough, except where the boy had fallen and scrambled about. Near as we could tell, about fifteen bodies. Some were clean bone, and some still had their flesh dried on them. One had most of her face left and I heard someone say it was Mrs. Weldon's maid—Sadie that was. I didn't see her face—didn't like to look long. The whole middle of her was carved away.”

Fanny shut her eyes tight and hot tears crept down her cheeks.

“We gathered up the bodies best we could and gave 'em Christian burial in the churchyard—didn't seem right they should be anywhere near the family plot. After that, folks gave the place a wide berth. Property belongs to some relative of Alistair Weldon's that lives up North, but they've never been inclined to do anything with it, so it stays. Folks don't like to come here, for all that fishing's good on the river hereabouts. They say the place is haunted. Strange sounds and all that, and some have spotted a little girl walking about the grounds, a little white girl. They say it's the ghost of little Frances Weldon, who don't know she's dead yet.”

Had she come here before? Had she wandered through the Mists to this place and forgotten she had?

Fanny felt a catch in her throat and looked up at the man, into his eyes. She hadn't noticed, before, that they were huge and a strange color, amber, almost yellow, with dark rims like an owl's.

She couldn't shake the feeling that she'd met him before, that she'd had this conversation before, not once, but many times.

He looked down at her with a look of sympathy.

“Maybe if we could've found her bones she'd be at rest. But we never found any of the Weldons. The girl, at the least, deserved burial.”

Fanny looked down and watched the now-cold tears drop into the ashy soil. Something touched the top of her head, as if in benediction.

“Where are you, Fanny? Where your bones at, child?”

Fanny shook her head. When she looked up again, the man was gone.

She sat there alone a long time on the step, on the threshold of the burned-out hulk of a house, listening to the river and the scraps of birdsong, and the insects in the trees. The sun was low in the sky and the world touched by amber when the Mists came back for her, drawing her into their cool gray embrace.

Fanny closed her eyes and let them take her.

Daniel, who doesn't have a last name yet, stands on the lawn outside the Big House, blades of grass cold between his bare toes. The others, field hands and house slaves alike, stand together like a glade of charred saplings. The acrid tang of smoke stings the back of Daniel's throat. The air is gritty with it; the great plantation houses have been burning all day.

There's another smell, sharp and bright under the smoke. When they peeled the scalps of the overseer's men from their skulls there was less blood than he thought there would be, just veiny patches of red and pink on white, glistening muscle. But the smell is there, like a pig butchered for the Big House's Sunday dinner.

Beside him, Suz shifts her bulk and sighs. The others, including Daniel, are silent.

He thinks he will never forget the meaty
thunk
the hand axe made when it bit into the back of Holbart's head. He thinks he'll never forget Weldon's expression as he stared, horrified, not at the scraps of skin and hair on his porch or the body of his overseer, but at something invisible at the bottom of the steps.

Bright orange flames lick out the windows of Riverbend, tipped black like a fox's tail. Smoke streams up the sides, staining the white paneling. Once in a while the crack of breaking glass rings out like a gunshot. Daniel flinches when this happens.