The Elementals (27 page)

“If anything happens,” Odessa repeated slowly, nodding her head with terrible significance, “
eat my eyes
. . .”

Chapter
27

It was sprinkling as they loaded the car. When Dauphin drove by Lula Pearl’s house in Bay Minette to satisfy Big Barbara that Lawton was indeed there, the pink Continental in the red clay driveway was spattered with mud thrown up by the increasing shower. The drive through Baldwin County took half an hour longer than usual because of the severity of the rain. It churned the fields, beating down plants that were more than two feet high; it created vast pools across the road that threatened to drown the motor when Dauphin splashed through; in Loxley and Robertsdale and Foley the rain brought people to the screen doors of their houses and the front doors of their shops to watch the water pour off the roofs and awnings in thunderous destructive cascades. When they got near the coast the rain was even heavier, though five miles back that had seemed an impossibility; but its effects on the landscape were less severe. Any amount of water will fall on sandy ground and be immediately absorbed, and scrub pine may be blasted on the Day of Judgment, but nothing will harm it until then.

Along the peninsula they could scarcely discern where the rain left off and the Gulf began, so heavy was the water that spilled from the black sky above. Big Barbara turned around in the front seat and changed her mind every five minutes whether it was better or worse for a pregnant woman to wear a safety belt, and they had reached Gasque without mishap before she ever fell into any permanent decision. India and Odessa stood talking behind one of the closed doors of the garage of the abandoned gas station, staring out through the grimy windows; Luker sat inside the Fairlane, looking intently at a magazine that lay open on the seat beside him.

“Last week it was all heat,” said Big Barbara, “so I guess this week it’s gone be all rain.”

“Don’t say that,” said India. “I’ve never seen rain like this. Will it turn into a hurricane?”

“Not the season yet,” said Leigh. “It’ll let up any minute now.”

And so it did, in a quarter of an hour, to the extent that they were able to move the luggage from the Fairlane and the Mercedes into the Scout and the jeep. They waited ten minutes more, in which time the storm—which oddly had been without either thunder or lightning—abated further.

As they drove off in the two sand vehicles, India had the uneasy feeling that the curtain of water had drawn aside only momentarily, just long enough for them to get to Beldame. As soon as they crossed the channel she felt certain that the rain would begin again and they would be cut off entirely.

Though it was low tide, the channel was filled with rainwater to some depth; the jeep and the Scout splashed through and wet everyone’s feet. This made little difference, however, since they were soaked anyway; when there was so much water in the atmosphere, metal roofs and raised windows could not insure dryness. As they neared the houses, India watched Odessa intently, hoping to discover by the black woman’s expression whether things in Beldame were
all right
.

India proudly considered that she had developed a little intuition of her own. Before this summer she had never before admitted the possibility of anything existing that was paranormal, supernatural. Oh, of course there was ESP and psychokinesis, what they studied in Russia and North Carolina. These things she had known about since
Weekly Reader
days, but such things had nothing to do with Luker and India McCray and West Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan. But Beldame was definitely out of kilter with the rest of the world. Something was at Beldame that ought not be there and India was sure that thing had never made an appearance at the laboratories in North Carolina and Russia. She had sensed it, she had heard it, seen it, even
felt
it—but still she did not entirely believe in it.

Certainly she did not think that Odessa’s ideas were entirely accurate. Odessa didn’t think straight, that was a fact. Odessa’s ideas were confused and contradictory, and she said this and that about the third house, and this and that taken together didn’t make an ounce of sense. There was something to it, of course, but not what Odessa suggested. India suspected that it was indeed the ghost of Martha-Ann inside the house, and that was all. Lots of houses had ghosts, she supposed—people had done research. Even the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
had an article on ghosts—so that was probably what it was. A decent exorcism would dissolve Martha-Ann, and all this business about Elementals and “
eat my eyes
”—whatever
that
meant—was a lot of confused hocus-pocus. Odessa couldn’t help it. What with segregation and an illiberal state legislature, she had never had the educational benefits that India herself had enjoyed; it was even possible, she considered with a shudder, that Odessa had not finished high school. She meant to ask her.

But if India chose to discount Odessa’s theories about the unreal occupants of the third house, she yet trusted the black woman’s sensibilities. Odessa would feel these things before and more surely than India herself. India suspected that the third house was not always operative in the matter of ghosts and spirits—that at times it was relatively benign. Perhaps it was a matter of the tides or the phases of the moon or large-scale weather patterns. In any case, she hoped that this second part of their vacation would coincide with a period of low activity in the third house, and though the unnaturally heavy rain didn’t augur well, it was with this hope that she searched Odessa’s face.

In it she could read nothing, and Odessa refused to understand India’s prods and winks. At last, when India was helping take groceries into the Savage kitchen, she stopped and asked Odessa directly, “Listen, is everything all right?”

Odessa shrugged.

“You know what I mean,” persisted India. “You should be able to feel something. I want to know what you feel. Is everything all right or are we all going to be in trouble again?”

“I don’t feel nothing,” said Odessa at last. “When there’s rain like this, when it’s being like it’s been today, I cain’t feel nothing.”

But next day, even India could sense the change that had come over Beldame. The rain had let off just at suppertime the night before. The moon had reached full on July second and was now on the wane; it shone through India’s bedroom window and lighted the foot of her bed. Dauphin’s thirtieth birthday had dawned splendidly clear; the lagoon was higher than usual and a dirty chain of detritus marked high tide on the beach, but there were no other indications of the previous day’s storm. All the sand that had been blown against the house in months previous and lodged in crevices and dried against the windows had been washed away by the rain.

The third house appeared to be no more than it was: a house which hadn’t been lived in or repaired in three decades or more, and which moreover was being slowly consumed by a dune of sand. It looked somber and picturesque, but not menacing. India even smiled when Luker dared her to peer through a window; but even the bright day and her intuition that nothing was wrong any more (perhaps Martha-Ann slept in the lagoon now) would not permit her to go so far as that. “Oh, no,” she said to her father with a smile, “I’ve had just about enough of that place.”

“But you’re not afraid any more?”

“I’m not afraid
today
.”

“What about last night?”

India shook her head. “I thought I was going to be scared, but I didn’t even have any bad dreams. I got up once to go to the bathroom, and when I came back in I went to the window and looked out at it. And it was just a house. You know what I think the problem was?”

“What?” asked Luker.

“I think I got cabin fever. But it had never happened to me before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I just went a little crazy, that’s all. I
remember
what happened inside the third house, but it’s as if it
didn
’
t
happen because it was so crazy. Luker, I’m glad you raised me in New York. Alabama’s weird.”

“Yes,” he laughed. “I guess it is. But what about the pictures? How do you explain those?” India’s cavalier attitude toward the third house encouraged Luker to bring her fears into discussion, in hope they would all be dismissed.

“I don’t know.” India shrugged. “It was just one of those things, I guess. I guess that part of it won’t ever be explained. I left ’em at the Small House, I didn’t see any point in bringing ’em back here just to scare myself. But when we go back to the city, what you’ll do is blow them up real big, and we’ll see what’s really there. You can’t really tell anything from a print that’s only three by five. You’ll make some eleven-by-fourteens and then we’ll see what we can make of it. Till then, I just won’t think about it.”

“Very sensible,” said Luker. He stooped and pushed aside the thick narrow leaves in a bed of greenery in the yard. “That’s odd,” he said.

“What is?” asked India.

“This day lily. It’s already withering.”

“I thought lilies died and then came back the next year.”

“They do. But not till much later in the season, and certainly not till after they’ve bloomed. But this day lily is definitely withering.”

“Maybe something got in the roots. It’s a wonder they live at all in all this sand.”

Luker pulled the plant up and examined the roots for insects or scale. “The roots look fine,” he said. He knocked the heavy pendulous bulbs against his jeans to dislodge the loose soil. He tore off the dried and yellow foliage and tossed it aside.

“You think it’s the bulb?” asked India.

Luker peeled away several of the cloves that surrounded the central bulb of the plant then, pressing his thumbnails into the top of the bulb, gently pried it apart.

It split suddenly open in his hand, and dry white sand spilled out over his bare feet.

Chapter
28

While India and her father were examining the strangely decayed lily in the yard, Dauphin and Odessa sat on the front porch of the McCray house, in the swing out of which Marian Savage had tumbled dead. “I’m glad we came back,” said Dauphin.

“You got no work to keep you in Mobile?”

“Oh, ’course I got work. Always got work, Odessa, you know that. But cain’t work all your life. If I was to go back to Mobile and work, I wouldn’t ’complish a thing in this world ’cept make more money. And what’s the point of having money ’cept to enjoy yourself and take care of the people you like taking care of?”

“I don’t know,” said Odessa, “I don’t know nothing ’bout having money. Never had any, never gone have any.”

“You got what Mama left you.”

“That’s right, but long as I work for you and Miz Leigh, I’m not gone touch that money. I’m counting on you taking care of it for me.”

“You bet I will. Odessa, you know me and you know I’m not good for much. But there’s one thing I can do, and that’s make money. I turn round and there’s money hitting me on the head. I don’t hardly know where it comes from. I tell you, it’s a good thing there’s
something
I can do. I’ll take care of your money and ’fore you know it, you gone have it rolling out your ears.”

Odessa shrugged, lowered her head and rubbed the back of her neck. “Anyway,” she said, “it’s good you come back out here. You was always happiest at Beldame.”

“I know it. Ever since I was little. Times I think I’m happy at Beldame and unhappy everywhere else. I’m sitting in that office in Mobile or I’m driving down the road or I’m listening to somebody talk to me about how much money I ought to lend him, and I think, ‘Lord how I wish I was at Beldame right this very minute sitting on the porch talking to Odessa or Leigh or Big Barbara or somebody!’ I’m just surprised I wasn’t born here! ’Cause if I had my way I’d live here and I’d die here and I’d be buried here! When I get to heaven I hope there’s a corner of it off somewhere that’s so much like Beldame I cain’t even tell the difference! I could sit on this front porch in heaven till the stars come falling down! You ever read in your Bible there’s some place like Beldame?”

“Well,” said Odessa, “there’s ‘many mansions’—so maybe they got a few of ’em on a beach somewhere for you and me.”

“Oh, that’s bound to be right, Odessa, that’s just bound to be what it’s like! Mama and Darnley are probably sitting there waiting for me right now. Darnley’s out in the water—he’s probably got a boat just like the one he had here—and Mama’s lying down upstairs. And at supper they sit down and they say to each other, ‘Where’s Dauphin? Where’s Odessa?’ Listen, Odessa, you think they’re thinking about us? You think they remember who they left behind?”

“No way to know what the dead are thinking ’bout,” said Odessa. “Probably a good thing they not letting us know either.”

And as they talked, a little breeze blew up from the west; and the wind sifted a glaze of white sand over the porch of the McCray house.

Leigh and Big Barbara had been in the living room of the Savage house all that morning, happily talking over their plans for the coming months.

“Mama,” said Leigh, “I am so glad you are taking this thing the way you are!”

“You mean your baby! Well of course I’m happy about it, we’re all—”

“No, Mama, I’m talking about your divorce. Luker and I were sure you were gone be upset, and have setbacks and get hooked on pills and I don’t know what all, but here you are talking like you cain’t wait to get out of your house and into mine!”

“Well I cain’t!”

“Well good!” laughed Leigh. “I tell you it’s gone be such a help to me to have you around. I’ve never had a baby and you’ve had two, you know what they look like and all that. I don’t know a thing about ’em, and I don’t think I want to know, either. Mama, when I go into labor I want you and Dauphin right there in the operating room. Dauphin’s gone hold my hand and soon as that baby comes out, you’re gone grab it up and run off with it. I don’t even want to see it till it starts first grade!”

“Leigh!” cried Big Barbara, “you’re talking about your child! You’re gone love that baby! You’re not gone want to let it out of your sight!”

“You take a Polaroid and send it to me and I’ll stick it in my billfold. I think I’m gone go live with Luker and India till that child is six years old.”

“Luker doesn’t want you living with him,” said Big Barbara with a laugh.

“I know,” said Leigh. “There’s a lot about Luker’s life that he doesn’t tell us about.”