The Elementals (11 page)

Breathing heavily, she jerked away and mopped her eyes with a tissue. When she spoke again to Luker, it was in a quieter, controlled voice. “Luker, this morning before I came over to the house Lawton told me that if I didn’t dry out he was gone file for a divorce directly after the election and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference if he won or lost, he wasn’t gone be saddled with a wife who could drink more than a barnful of Irishmen.”

“Would a divorce be so bad? If you got divorced from Lawton, you could live with Leigh and Dauphin. They’d love to have you. I think you should have filed for one yourself on the day Leigh became a Savage.”

“A divorce would kill me, Luker. I know you don’t get along with Lawton the best in the world, and I know you don’t love him the same way you love me . . .”

Luker laughed harshly.

“. . . but I love Lawton and I always have. I know he’s cheap, and I know he lies, and it was Marian Savage herself—never tell Dauphin this—who told me about this grass widow in Fairhope your father has been going to see since
1962
, and she’s got kinky red hair and a rear end you could lean a baseball team up against—”

“Barbara, you never told me about this!”

“Why should I? There was no reason for you to know.”

“Were you upset when you found out?”

“Of course! But I never said a word. But when it hurt most was when he started talking about a divorce—this morning wasn’t the first time he’s brought it up. Luker, listen, I’m gone give in to you, and I’m gone try this thing—”

She turned away for several moments, contemplating what difficulties lay before her. Then turning to her son, she cried: “Oh, God, get me a glass to hold. I got to curl my fingers around something!”

Luker slipped down from the enormous mahogany bed and stretched. “You’ll be all right,” he said off-handedly.

Chapter
9

On his way down from Mobile, Dauphin had picked up half a dozen lobsters, and these Odessa boiled for their dinner—with potatoes and cole slaw on the side. They all ate in the dining room of the Savage house, and Luker kindly forbore to complain to Big Barbara that her alcoholic infirmity would keep the rest of them from enjoying beer or wine with their dinners. The meal was not a happy one, for no one was entirely easy in his mind; but at least they were all hungry. It was only when they had finished their lobsters, and the cracking of the shells and the noise of the sweet lobster meat being sucked from the shattered carcasses no longer covered their silence, that speechlessness became oppressive.

Dauphin, ever dutiful, took it upon himself to rescue them. Scorning superficialities, he said to India without preface: “Luker told me that I shouldn’t have come out here to Beldame after Mama died, that I’d do better staying in Mobile—”

“Yes,” said India, not understanding why this remark should have been directed to her. “I know that’s what he said. But you don’t think so.”

“No, I don’t. Beldame is the place where I’ve been the happiest in my life. I’m twenty-nine years old and I’ve been coming to Beldame every summer since I was born. I’ve never wanted to go anywhere else. The summers I spent here with Luker, you just cain’t imagine how happy I was then—and how miserable I was when it was time to go back to Mobile! Luker wouldn’t speak to me when we got back home. We were best friends at Beldame, but in Mobile he wouldn’t give me the time of day.”

“You were three years younger than me,” shrugged Luker. “And I had an image to maintain.”

“It made me
very
unhappy,” said Dauphin, smiling. “Anyway, I still came out here even after Luker got married and didn’t come any more. Mama and Odessa and I would come out, and I was pretty happy then too. And all that time Leigh was growing up, and she was so smart—she was valedictorian of her class in high school and she made the dean’s list at Vanderbilt and she was winning beauty contests right and left—”

“I was Fire Queen of Mozart,” said Leigh with self-deprecation. “And one time I won an electric toothbrush in a poetry contest.”

“Anyway,” said Dauphin to India, “I thought that the most wonderful thing in the world was that when we were at Beldame together she’d walk down the beach with me.”

“That’s because I knew you had about eighteen million dollars in your checking account,” said Leigh to her husband.

He paid her no mind. “And one day we were sitting here at this table, just her and me—”

“I was upstairs telling Marian what was gone happen,” said Big Barbara.

“And Odessa was in the kitchen trying to smack a wasp,” laughed Leigh, “and all the time that Dauphin was trying to propose, we’d hear this
thwack thwack thwack
on the walls, and all the pans would rattle.”

“—and I said, ‘Hey, Leigh, I know you’re smart, and I know you’re beautiful and there’re about eighteen million men who would jump off the back of a moving truck just to get the chance to say something nice to you, but I’ve got a lot of money and if we get married you sure will have a good time spending it . . .”

“And I said, ‘Dauphin, I sure will!
’
” said Leigh. “And I sure do!”

“Well, Barbara,” said Luker, “now that Leigh has been taken care of, I hope that you and Lawton have changed your will to leave me sole beneficiary of the McCray Fertilizer Company.”

“That will depend on how you treat me in future,” said Big Barbara.

Odessa came out of the kitchen to pour more coffee and remove the dishes. India’s question was almost lost under the clatter of the plates. “Dauphin, are you frightened of the third house too?”

“Yes,” he answered, without hesitation.

“What makes you ask such a question, child?” demanded Big Barbara.

“Because Luker’s afraid of it.”

“Luker,” said his mother, “have you been telling that child tales?”

Luker didn’t answer.

“India,” said Leigh, “there’s nothing in the third house. People just think there is because it’s been abandoned so long, and it’s getting covered up with sand and so forth. I mean, the place looks . . .” She didn’t want to finish that sentence.

“It looks as if something were wrong with it,” said Luker. “That’s all. India asked me why we never invited anybody down here but family, and I told her about Dauphin’s graduation party.”

“Oh, that was nothing!” said Big Barbara. “India, that was nothing! That was ten little girls sitting up late and telling each other ghost stories and all of ’em getting scared together, because Beldame
is
a lonely place at night if you’re not used to it. They made it all up. I was in the house that night and I didn’t see anything. There were about ten boys staying here in the Savage house, and they didn’t see anything. There wasn’t anything to see.”

“But you still don’t invite anybody down,” said India.

“People like excitement and bright lights these days,” said Big Barbara, “they don’t want to come to poky old Beldame, where there’s nothing to do but memorize the tide tables.”

“Anyway,” said Leigh, “there’s no point in
you
being afraid of the third house, India. The only reason Dauphin and Luker and I are afraid is that we grew up with it. We were always making up stories about it, saying there was somebody who lived inside—somebody who was always hiding in the rooms where we couldn’t see him. We’d dare each other to look through the windows, and when we looked through the windows whoever was inside would be hiding under the bed or behind the couch or something.”

“Today,” said India, “this afternoon, I—”

“India was very foolish today,” interrupted her father, “and she climbed to the top of the dune at the front of the third house. She looked in one of the windows.”

Dauphin appeared horrified by this, and Big Barbara spluttered her alarm. Leigh said, “India, you ought not to have done that. Luker, you ought not to have let her. That sand isn’t firm, she could have slipped right under! The sand at that end of Beldame is treacherous, just treacherous!”

“I looked in the window, and—”

“No!” said Big Barbara. “We are going to stop talking about all this—because it’s just nonsense. Isn’t it, Odessa?” Odessa had come in with more coffee.

“Sure is,” said Odessa. “Nothing in the third house ’cept sand and dust.”

“India,” said her grandmother, “we wouldn’t let you play on an abandoned roller coaster, and we’re not gone let you play around the third house either. It’s rotted and it’s dangerous.”

India placed her hand over her coffee cup and wouldn’t take any more.

Dauphin had admitted to India his fear, but refused to elaborate upon it. However, it was certain that he had taken the bedroom at the northeastern corner of the house for Leigh and himself. From its two windows, you could see nothing but St. Elmo’s Lagoon, which shone with a sickly green phosphorescence. It was the loneliest and saddest vista that Beldame afforded, and this especially at night. Nowhere were nights blacker than at Beldame; there wasn’t a streetlight within thirty miles of the place. Just offshore the Gulf was deep and had no need of buoys. When everyone had gone to bed and the lights in the houses were extinguished, there were only the stars overhead and the wide rippling ribbon of St. Elmo’s Lagoon. The new moon was a black patch stitched onto a blacker quilt.

After supper, when Luker, India, and Big Barbara had crossed the yard together and gone into their own house, Dauphin stood at the window of his and Leigh’s room and looked out at the lagoon. Above, he heard the footsteps of Odessa and Leigh on the third floor. When Leigh came down he begged her to read in bed until he had fallen asleep.

“All right,” she said, “why?”

“Because,” he replied simply, “I’m afraid to be the last one asleep at Beldame.”

“Even when I’m in bed right next to you?”

He nodded.

“What did you used to do when you had to sleep all by yourself?” Leigh asked.

“I made Odessa sit up with me. I’ve never been the last one to go to sleep at Beldame.”

“Dauphin, why haven’t you ever told me this before?”

“I was afraid you would think I was being stupid.”

Leigh laughed. “Why are you telling me now?”

“Oh, because of what India was talking about tonight.”

“The third house?”

“Yes. I don’t like talking about it. It’s not that I’m still afraid—”

“But you are,” said his wife. “You are still afraid of it.”

He nodded. “I guess I am. It’s funny to be back now. And it’s odd, I thought I’d be thinking the whole time about Mama, but I got here, and I was out sitting in the swing, and it wasn’t till just now that I remembered that Mama died in that swing. I wasn’t thinking about her, I was just thinking about the third house . . .”

“Dauphin, I don’t think you’re foolish. Mama and Marian, they were the foolish ones, raising us to be superstitious, raising us to be scared of things. If we have any children, I’m gone raise ’em different. They’re not gone hear a word about the third house.”

“That’d probably be best,” said Dauphin. “It’s not good, I can tell you, to grow up all the time scared of things.”

Leigh turned on the bedside light and read a
Cosmopolitan
that was dated fifteen months back. Dauphin fell asleep with his head buried in her side, and his arm reaching across her breast. Even his feet were tangled in her legs—for protection against the third house.

When he felt the warmth of the rising sun on the sheet that lay across his body, he tried to avoid waking. Leigh lay within his arms but did not rouse when he squeezed her. Still he did not open his eyes, hoping that despite the increased warmth—which already was making him sweat—and despite the light that burned carmine against the inside of his lids, he would be overtaken by sleep again.

Experimentally, he pushed away from Leigh, and turned his back to her. But sleep would not come again, and Leigh did not wake. The effort of keeping his eyes closed became at last too great, and he allowed them to open. A large rectangle of red light—carefully outlined and divided like the window—was focused on the door into the hallway; as he stared it shifted a little, dropping toward the knob. It was probably not later than five.

He waited for Odessa’s step on the floor above. He knew in which of the half-dozen beds she slept, and that it lay directly above the dresser. As soon as she put her foot upon the floor, he would know it. And when she had dressed herself and he heard her footsteps on the stairs, he would allow himself to rise. He had not minded admitting to his wife that he was fearful of being the last to go to sleep at Beldame; but he would have been ashamed to have it known that he was also frightened of being the first to rise. Anyone could understand night terror, but what could one say of a man whose fears persisted through the dawn?

Dauphin jerked: the footfall had come, but in an unexpected place, just above the chifforobe in the opposite corner. Dauphin wondered what could have induced Odessa to change a habit of thirty-five years, and this season sleep in a different bed. He stared at the spot where her foot had sounded. Why had Odessa . . .

Why had he heard no more footsteps? he wondered suddenly, lifting his head from the pillow for the first time.

Then more footsteps sounded: Odessa moving carefully about the room, knowing she could be heard in the rooms below. For the duration of thirty summers at Beldame (he had first come to the place in Marian Savage’s pregnant belly), Dauphin had risen within minutes of Odessa. He had always been the first for whom Odessa prepared breakfast, at the same time that she fixed her own; and it was only this meal, in this place, and only with Dauphin that Odessa broke her own rule against eating with her employers. At Beldame, at six-fifteen every morning, Odessa and Dauphin Savage shared breakfast at the kitchen table.

Dauphin also knew that the staircase to the third floor emerged directly into the middle of the room above him, just at the foot of the fourth bed. There was no door to open, and presently Dauphin heard Odessa descending the stairs.

He had risen from the bed and slipped on his pajamas, intending to follow her downstairs. Unwilling to risk waking Leigh, Odessa would not speak to him until they were together in the kitchen. The square of red morning sunlight burnished the brass knob of the door; Dauphin turned the key in the lock, and pulled the door open.

Marian Savage stood there. In her hands she held a large red vase that he had never seen before. “Dauphin,” she said.