The Elementals (18 page)

Dauphin dropped Odessa at her house, dined with Lawton McCray and Sonny Joe Black at a seafood restaurant on the municipal pier—where he heard the gratifying progress of the campaign and listened politely to the manifold reasons why he ought to sell Beldame to the oil companies. When he returned home and pressed the key into the lock of the darkened house, he realized that it was the first time he had ever spent the night alone there.

Odessa’s voodoo—was there any other word for it?—with the jumbled broken artifacts of his mother’s life had disturbed him. Of course the black woman had known the Savage family legends of the dead not being dead, but her accumulation of those objects on the marble floor of the tomb had seemed designed for protection against a greater evil than that. The fear had clung to Odessa like cobwebs—that Marian Savage would return from the dead. He drew the curtains in the dining room so that he would not be tempted to gaze out the window at the Great House: he feared to see lights there.

He wandered disconsolately through his home, turning on the television set loud in hope that the voices and laughter would be comforting. On a situation comedy he heard the squawk of a bird, and thought suddenly of Nails. When he went to Beldame, Nails had been deliberately left behind; he had had no wish ever to hear again the single speech the bird had uttered:
Savage mothers eat their children up!

Dauphin went to the cage in the glassed-in porch and lifted the cover, praying that the bird would not repeat its terrible litany. The cage was empty. It had been scrubbed clean; the feeders and water trough were empty and dry.

The television set was left on all night to cover the noises in the house.

Next morning when the two maids arrived, Dauphin learned that on the day that they left for Beldame, Nails had begun to refuse his food. He pined and scraped incessantly at the newspaper at the bottom of the cage, shredding a dozen layers a day. In a week he was dead, and the gardener buried him in the bearded iris bed at the side of the Great House.

“Well, did he talk?” asked Dauphin nervously.

“Talk?” cried the maid who was thin. “That bird couldn’t talk! It never said a word since the day your mama got him!”

“No,” replied Dauphin to Odessa’s question, “I didn’t sleep well at all. I’m not used to sleeping alone, I don’t like sleeping alone. And I tell you something, Odessa,” he said in a tone of voice that came as near as Dauphin ever got to real annoyance, “it was all because of that business in the mausoleum yesterday, those things you put on the floor. It’s not respectful to the dead, it’s against religion, and I don’t know what all else.”

“I did it for you,” said Odessa simply.

“I know you did,” said Dauphin, softening already. “And I ’preciate it. I really do. But the fact is, Mama’s dead. Really and truly. We got two doctors in there to say she was dead, and at the funeral—you saw me—I stuck a knife in her chest. Odessa, I hated doing it, but I checked—she didn’t do any bleeding.”

“Oh, she was dead,” said Odessa nodding her head. The day was so cool and windy that the air conditioner wasn’t wanted in the car. Both front windows were down. “And when I put those things there—when I broke that cup and emptied those pill bottles, I just wanted to make sure that your
mama
remembered that she was dead. That’s all I wanted to do.”

“The dead don’t come back,” said Dauphin flatly. They had just been through Daphne and Fairhope and were almost to Point Clear, taking the route along Mobile Bay instead of the one that went through the interior of the county. All the way down, the bay, whipped frothy, was just to their right, slate blue beneath a sky of gray slate.

“Did you have a dream?” asked Odessa, knowing that he had. “What did you dream about?”

“What else could I dream about?” said Dauphin. “I dreamed about that mausoleum. I dreamed I was dead. I dreamed I was at the funeral, and you and Leigh stood at the coffin, and Leigh touched my chest with the knife. Odessa, I could feel that metal! I could feel it in my sleep! So they took me to the mausoleum and they put me in right on top of Mama—”

“That’s right where they’ll put you when you
do
die,” said Odessa.

“I know,” said Dauphin, “and that’s one reason why the dream seemed so real. They lifted me up and put me in, and suddenly I wasn’t in the coffin any more. I was just lying up there in that space, and they blocked it up. It was dark and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe and I thought I was gone die. Except I was already dead.”

“What’d you do?”

“I kicked out the marker. It fell on the floor and broke all to pieces, and then I climbed down. I cut my foot but it didn’t bleed. All the other markers in the place had been knocked out too. The whole place was covered with broken pieces of marble. There were all these holes in the walls where the coffins had gone, but I was the only person there. I was afraid to look in the holes, but I did, and I was the only person there.”

Dauphin grew feverish telling his nightmare. Odessa must caution him to reduce the speed of the Mercedes. He did so, and when he resumed it was with a calmer voice. “The trouble was, the door was locked. I was in there all by myself, and the door was locked. I started calling for someone to come and get me. I don’t remember if it was day out or night. I couldn’t tell, or maybe I just don’t remember now, but I called and called and nobody came. Then I heard somebody coming, and I yelled out, ‘Hey, y’all, I’m in here!
’
”

“Who was it?”

“They came to the door and opened it.”

“Who was it?” repeated Odessa.

“It was Mama and Darnley. I said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad y’all came. They buried me in here, and I wasn’t dead,’ and then I remembered that they
were
dead. Both of ’em, and I said, ‘Darnley, how’d you get here?—they never found your body.
’
”

“It’s bad when the dead talk in dreams,” said Odessa. “What’d Darnley say?”

“Darnley said, ‘I came to get you, Dauphin.
’
”

“Were you scared in your dream?”

“No,” said Dauphin, “but I started to scream anyway, and soon as I screamed, Mama jumped on me and put her mouth on my throat and she tore it out.”

“Is that when you woke up?”

“No,” said Dauphin. “I didn’t wake up at all . . .”

In silence, they reached Point Clear and continued south toward Mullet, where the road turned inland, away from the bay. Dauphin felt better for having told the dream that had so distressed him, and now he looked forward to the return to Beldame, if for no other reason than that there he would not be sleeping alone.

The road made a sharp left, and as he took this, Mobile Bay appeared now through the rearview mirror, directly behind him. And a couple of hundred yards out in the water, seen through the mirror, was the characteristic red and orange sail of Darnley Savage’s boat that had disappeared without trace thirteen years before.

Dauphin tried to will the vision away, but the sail remained in the rear-view mirror until the road curved and the entire bay was removed from his sight. Dauphin said nothing of this to Odessa: he feared that she would take it seriously, when he knew it could be no more than an hallucination, inspired by the previous night’s sleeplessness, the incident in the mausoleum, the death of his mother so few weeks before. But once they had returned to Beldame, Dauphin stood nervously on the verandah of the McCray house, and nervously scanned the Gulf, watching for the sail he so very much feared to see.

Chapter
18

There were five days left between the return of Dauphin and Odessa and the time when they all must get back to Mobile for the July Fourth celebrations. It had occurred to them suddenly that they need not all be under Lawton’s directive to go back to Mobile—though Big Barbara was certainly wanted and Dauphin too, Leigh had been invited only for her husband’s sake. Odessa was useless to a congressional campaign, being only an insignificant black woman, and Luker and India were hardly the sort of family that a conservative candidate would want paraded before his future constituency. Therefore, all except Big Barbara and Dauphin might remain behind; but Leigh decided she wanted to see her doctor for a little checkup that she had postponed on account of her mother-in-law’s death. Luker would like a few days on the telephone to scare up some fall assignments and India had run out of three colors of thread which wanted replacing before she could complete her embroidered panel. There was no particular reason for Odessa to remain alone, and she would return to help with the shopping. They would leave together, and they hoped, all come back together. They had been at Beldame for a month, and though happy there—seeming to find in the place respite from all the troubles that had beset them in the past year—they wondered if resumption of the vacation would be possible.

They knew how easy it was to forget Beldame, whose chief attraction was its very emptiness. In Mobile one was caught up by excitement, by the demands of friends and business and checking accounts, and one forgot how pleasant the days had been and peaceful the nights. The constant lassitude and indulgent laziness would no longer seem a thing to be desired.

Though no one dared mention it, it was also possible that in future years there would be no Beldame to return to. Dauphin had given his assurance that he would not sell the place, but not one of the family underestimated Lawton McCray’s powers of persuasion or his underhandedness.

It was a sickening thought: Beldame in the hands of the oil companies. The houses demolished, St. Elmo’s Lagoon slicked over in oil, the porpoises in the Gulf shredded by the propellers of motorboats—what horrors did they not imagine?

The five days were permeated with nostalgia; nostalgia for what Beldame had always been, for their scant month together, for the times there that they might now never know. And that last week of June was the hottest that anyone could remember; even Odessa was brought to say that she could not recall any time at Beldame that was more uncomfortable. These were the longest days of the year: each morning the sun rose early and bright in a cloudless sky. A thermometer was nailed outside the Savage kitchen window, and by eight o’clock each morning it read above ninety degrees. Ten o’clock was appreciably warmer, and no one could step outside between eleven and four.

In the morning they put on bathing suits and did not take them off again. Odessa’s cotton print dress was stained with perspiration from breakfast on, and she must wash it out each night. No one wanted to eat for all food tasted spoiled. No one wanted to read or work puzzles or even talk. They crept into shaded corners in the interior rooms, and strung hammocks inside for maximal circulation of air around their bodies. And as much as they could, they slept through the daylight hours. Sleep at night was impossible, and they turned, sweating, on top of the sheets. There were no breezes then. Sometimes India and Luker snuck naked out of the house past midnight and swam for a hour in the Gulf, hoping for relief from the heat, but even this late the water temperature was above
80
degrees. Big Barbara stuck an oscillating fan on a straight-backed chair, and it blew over her all night long. She would try to kick off stifling covers that weren’t there. Leigh and Dauphin slept at opposite edges of their double bed, fearful of touching one another, their bodies were so hot.

And through all this—the straining heat and the worrisome uneasiness over the fate of Beldame—they forgot about the third house. When nothing distracted them—and God knew there were few enough distractions at Beldame in general—the third house was a lowering, sullen, potent presence; but the sun and the sun’s heat that persisted from nightfall to dawn burned away their thoughts and if there was any fear it was the fear of losing Beldame altogether.

India, invariably the last to be served breakfast, was alone with Odessa in the kitchen on the second of the five mornings left to them. She asked the black woman if she had ever known the like weather before, and Odessa replied, “No, never did. And it means something too, child.”

“Means what?” asked India curiously.

“Means something’s gone happen.”

“Like what? A tornado you mean? Or a hurricane?”

Odessa shook her head slowly, and turned away.

“You mean,” said India carefully, for she had learned that in Alabama a direct question is not always the best way of obtaining an answer, “we have to be careful.”

Odessa nodded. “That’s right, child. We have to be careful . . .”

“About
things
. . .” said India, prodding.

“That’s right, child. About
things
.”

Odessa had taken a baking pan from a cabinet next to the sink.

“Odessa, you’re not going to bake anything, are you? Can you imagine what this room would be like if you turned on the oven!”

“I’m not gone bake, child.” Odessa sat beside her at the kitchen table. “Ever’body’s in the other house, ain’t they?”

India nodded. “Just you and me here,” she said. Odessa said nothing then, and India went on cautiously, “Are you going to tell me
how
to be careful?”

Odessa pushed the baking pan, old and dented and rusted, a few inches toward India.

India placed a finger in the corner of it and pulled it nearer. “What do I do with it?”

“Go outside,” whispered Odessa, “and go round to the other side of the third house—don’t let ’em see you, ’cause they’ll stop you. Go round there and fill this up with sand and bring it back in here to me.”

India’s brows contracted, and something welled in her of old systems of rationality. What Odessa asked her to do made no sense.

“You sure this is—”

Odessa slapped the pan away. It slid to the edge of the table then dropped onto the floor with a clatter. “Get on out of here, child, if you’re not gone believe what I say to you!”

With hands sweaty not only with the heat but her chagrin at having offended the black woman, India leaned down and picked up the pan. “Odessa,” she said, “please let me go. If you say we have to be careful, then I know we do. You know what I saw in the third house, don’t you? You know who’s in there, don’t you? And that’s why
you
won’t go, isn’t it?” India expected Odessa to try to stop her mouth again, but Odessa only stared steadfastly into her face.

“Martha-Ann’s in the third house,” whispered India. “I saw her crawl out of the sand.”

There was no surprise on Odessa’s face. “Wasn’t Martha-Ann,” she said after a few moments. “Just something pretending to be Martha-Ann. Something that wanted to fool you.”