House on Diablo Road: Resurrection Day (The McCann Family Saga Book 3) (4 page)

The chair next to Buck was empty .

“
Where’s Katie?” Jesse asked Annie.

“
At the library going through old town history records and newspapers. She’s doing a story for the newspaper on Morgans Bluff Founders' Day celebration next month, looking back to when Davy Crockett brought settlers from Tennessee-the Morgans, the Bonneys, the Clancys, and maybe some of your own relatives.”

“
Well now. I don’t think my ancestors should be celebrated. They may have been among those first families, but if they were like my papa, there’s nothing to brag about.”

“
Some folks just take longer to figure things out, that's all. Speaking of your papa, Katie says Clint’s buried out in the McCann cemetery, and she wants to go there. She’s
already visited every other burial ground in the county, looking for missing names and dates. Some official records mysteriously disappeared from the courthouse, and now everything has to be pieced together. Seems like somebody has something to hide.”

Buck kept his focus on his plate and tried to ignore the conversation:
Let the dead be,
he thought.
Even if the
truth lies with them. Better left buried.

At the mention of the old graveyard, blotches of red crept into Tobi’s fair cheeks causing his freckles to seemingly disappear. He shot a cursory glance at Buck and then turned to his mother. “May I be excused, please?”

“
No Tobias,” Jesse answered for her. ”Finish your supper.”

“
But I’m not hungry.”

“
Do as your father says.” Annie’s order melted into a smile. “Now let’s change the subject. You go first, Tobi. What did you do today? I searched for you when you didn't come home for lunch. You should thank Mr. Hennessy for finding you and bringing you home. Any new adventures you care to share?”

Tobi knew his mother was baiting him into a confession and grabbed his glass of milk and took a leisurely swig. All eyes were suddenly riveted on him, boring holes into his conscience. “No, Mama,” he replied in his most angelic voice. “Not much of nothing.”

Calvin could barely wait to pounce. “The little knucklehead rode out to the Bonney house. That’s what he did today.”

“
Watch what you say, Calvin,” Buck growled. “Don’t get your little brother in trouble. Pass me some more butter-beans, will you, Jesse?”

Jesse seemed to have gone deaf on any subject that did not pertain to his son.“Tobi, is it true? Did you go to that house?”

“
Yes sir. I went on a dare...to see Old One-Eye.”

“
And who or what might 'Old One Eye' be?”

“
Some boys said he’s part devil and part man, and he has only one eye. They say if he fixes that eye on you, you’re cursed. I said I didn’t believe in all that hokum-pokum, and then Cal said If I didn’t believe it, then I shouldn’t be scared to prove it by going out there. He promised to give me back my slingshot if I did it.”

“
So you rode to the Bonney house, broke the law by trespassing, and didn’t tell your mother where you were going. All of that was on a chance of getting back a slingshot that belonged to you to begin with?”

Tobi nodded.

“
Get up to your room then...and Cal, you and I are going to have a heart to heart talk.”

Buck twisted about in his chair. “First you tell Tobi he can’t go to his room, and then you send him there. Now that I've got your attention, if you can’t pass the butter beans, how about you just spoon me a little dab, will ya?”

Jesse took Buck’s plate and held it over the bean bowl absentmindedly, his attention diverted by his son’s troublesome revelation. “Tobi, your mother has warned you about traipsing off by yourself. If it happens again, I’ll have to take a switch to you, as much as I'd hate to.”

“
Am I supposed to go to my room now?” Tobi asked.

“
Aw, forget the butter beans,” Buck muttered. “I think I’ll go to the porch and roll me a cigarette instead.”

Annie’s eyebrows arched over cloudy eyes: “Buck, you know what the doctor said about your heart.”

“Well, if that don't take the cake.
Haven't y’all figured it out? Folks are always tempted by what they ain’t supposed to do, except for saintly souls like the two of you. Wouldn’t nobody catch either of y’all smokin' a Camel or swiggin' shine from a pint jar...or goin’ down a forbidden road to see a freak, like the boy here. Tell me I can’t, and by golly I will. You’d think Tobias was a
Hennessy
.”

Buck hoisted himself up and hobbled toward the door, with his cane thudding against the wooden floor with each step. Seeing the attention focused away from himself, Cal sprinted past Buck and mumbled something about seeing “a girl in town.”

“
Come back here, Calvin. We need to talk!” Jesse shouted, over the slamming of the screen door. Within seconds, there came the sound of Cal’s roadster as he ground out the gears and spun out.

The meal ended with just Jesse and Annie. Jesse pushed his food about on his plate, and Annie ate in silence, looking up at him with those impenetrable gray eyes. Jesse wished he could still read what was behind them, but those eyes had become a stone fortress that allowed no access. Gone was that old open and direct quality he had loved in her—that fire forged steel combined with an innate softness. Something had robbed Annie of her spirit, and that was what Jesse missed the most. It seemed strange that when it was there, he had almost resented it. Now he knew the value of it. It had been the quality that had sustained them both.

They were alone, but there was nothing left to say. Each had become lost in their own
thoughts. Because she would never let him know, he had to wonder:
What does
she see when she looks at me now?
He figured he knew what she remembered: a once virile, decisive man who took on the world and won on his own terms. But what about now? Had she become disillusioned with him?

They two finished their supper and joined Buck out on the front porch. By the time the moon came out, a shiny red 1921 Buick roadster pulled up to the front gate. A man was at the wheel, and next to him sat Katie. They both were lost in some private moment of their own. Their heads were turned toward each other, and they seemed unaware that they were in anyone’s line of vision. The man’s arm slid around Katie, pulling her closer against him, causing Jesse to clear his throat loudly. Katie laughed, pulled away, and hopped out.

As she approached, Jesse was taken aback by his daughter’s appearance. She had resorted to bright red lip rouge, shorter length fringed dress, silk stockings, and her curly sandy colored hair was cut into a bob and bangs—all so different from her mother’s graceful ankle length skirts and up-swept hairdo. What could anyone say? It was, after all, 1921. Katie was twenty-eight and earning her own living as bookkeeper at the saw mill. She was a modern woman—carefree and liberated. Her parents worried that, with the new age of Prohibition, she had begun to hang out in speakeasies across the river. It was not unusual for young women in that new era.

Annie was the first to ask the question that was on all three minds: “I see you're no longer keeping company with Tom Yancy. Who’s your beau, Katie?

“
Nathan Bonney. ‘Nate’ I call him. You know him, Mama. You haven’t seen him since he was a kid.”

Katie turned and waved goodbye to him, and he waved back. The chrome on the fancy new automobile gleamed under the yard lamp as he raced away. Katie watched him leave and then continued. “He’s editor of the Gazette now, and I’m working on the Founders Day article and a speech for him.” She gave her father a sly sidelong glance and spoke with hesitation. “And...he’s also the man I just might marry, Daddy.”

Buck took a massive drag on his Camel, choked and cursed beneath his breath.

Well now. Wouldn’t that be a
fine how-do-you-do? A McCann and a Bonney...after all the bad blood. What do you think of that Minna, old girl, sitting up there in your room. I know you see him. Isn’t that just a kick in the head?

Granny had not missed a thing. Even disabled, she could see and hear very well. Upstairs in her bed by the open window, she heard the sound of voices, and with great effort, managed to part the curtain just enough to peek out. The yard was bathed in enough light for her to make out the striking features and cleft chin that was the mark of the Bonneys. Her mind was not so far gone that she could not figure out who the man was. He would have to be, in an assessment of his age, the great grandson of Jonathan and Mary, the first wife.

It seemed to her she had been midwife at Nathan's birth almost thirty years ago, just as she had for the generations of Bonney children before and after. She had tended to the childhood illnesses of that same boy who was now roaring off in a fine automobile, after bringing her great granddaughter home.
Ayah, Great One, a Bonney enters our scared circle.

She rolled to her good side, reached for the bell on the nightstand, and in her awkward attempt to make her crippled fingers work, sent her supper tray crashing to the floor. Then, unable to stop her momentum, she tumbled from her bed. As the old Caddoan lay helpless, her thoughts took flight with a will of their own:

Father Caddyio, protect your child Kathryn Hannah. Give me back my power to speak, so I can warn her...before it’s too late. And Great One, I ask one more favor. Send the spirit of our faithful animal guide to protect this family. You know the one.

Katie became a passenger in a virtual time machine of old newspapers and historical journals. Piles of thick binders filled with yellowing copies of the Gazette lay on the library table in front of her. She browsed through each like a child on Christmas morning, unwrapping presents from the past. What a significant Founder’s Day Morgans Bluff would have with its rich heritage. Before her lay the last volume in her pile. It was marked “
1860-1865”

Lt. Cyrus McCann, age 34, a Morgans Bluff prominent citizen and alleged Confederate deserter, has been reported to have been lynched last night. He was found hanging from a dogwood tree in front of his house on Diablo Road. Pickers who were questioned claimed a Haitian-Creole named Louis Monet was seen taking his body from the tree and hauling it by wagon to an unknown location. In view of recent county-wide uprising of field workers against plantation owners, it is believed Monet was likely the culprit. The picker disappeared before county lawmen could question him . McCann’s body has not been found.

McCann’s friend, Sgt. Colin “Buck” Hennessy, Texas Confederate Militia, claimed McCann had not deserted, but while at home, the former lieutenant's chronic condition of “white-leg” had worsened, causing him to be absent from camp. Hennessy maintains his belief that the soldier was executed by the Night Riders.

She fumbled frantically through the book shelves, until she found the genealogical records of the McCann family. She traced the branches of the family tree out and down until her finger came to rest on one branch: Cyrus McCann had been a brother to Grandpa Clinton. Some might say if Cyrus was lynched, it was his just due as a deserter. In the brighter light of the twentieth century, the act of violence would be classified as murder. Obviously, no one wanted to say what they knew, if indeed they knew anything. What, then, had happened to his wife Lucinda?

Her fingers flew through the heavy Gazette volumes and at last rested at the answer to her question in a June, 1865 issue:

Lucinda Foster McCann, widow of Cyrus McCann, was united in holy matrimony to Jonathan Bonney, widower of Mary McCullough Bonney, at seven o’clock last evening. The bride and groom will make their home at the McCann Plantation on Diablo Road.

A wedding picture of the bride and groom was set above the caption. Lucinda wore an ivory satin wedding dress with high neck and puffed sleeves, and in her hands she held a bouquet of roses. Katie found herself staring into the face of a woman who would have been pretty had a smile softened the tension around her prim mouth. It seemed to Katie that Lucinda’s eyes spoke of a profound remorse—but then Annie had always told her that, like Granny Minna, she relied too heavily on her Native intuition.