The Elementals (3 page)

Big Barbara’s astonishment was so great that she must stand; Leigh clutched her mother’s arm and rose as well. Luker and India followed suit, as did Odessa across the aisle. Standing, the mourners were able to see into the coffin. They half expected Marian Savage to sit up in protest at this extraordinary proceeding.

Sister Mary-Scot let go the handle of the knife. Her hands trembled in the space above the coffin, her lips moved in prayer. Her eyes opened wide as she reached down into the coffin and pulled apart the linen grave-clothes. Marian Savage’s unpainted flesh was distinctly yellow; Sister Mary-Scot pushed aside a prosthesis and uncovered the mastectomy scars. Drawing in his breath sharply, Dauphin raised the knife high.

“Lord, Dauphin!” cried Sister Mary-Scot, “get on with it!”

Dauphin pressed the blade an inch deep into the corpse’s sunken breast. He held it there the length of his shuddering.

He withdrew the knife slowly, as if fearful of causing Marian Savage pain. The blade emerged coated with the mixed coagulated liquids of the unembalmed body. Shuddering anew at the sensation of actually touching the corpse, he placed the knife in his mother’s cold stiff hands.

Sister Mary-Scot flung away the empty black box and it clattered on the polished wooden floor. Quickly she pulled together the graveclothes and without ceremony dropped the top of the coffin over the mutilated body of their mother. She rapped loudly three times on the lid. The sound was distressingly hollow.

The priest and the organist reappeared through the small side door. Dauphin and Mary-Scot dashed to the back of the church together and dragged open the great wooden doors to admit the pallbearers. The six men hurried down the aisle, lifted the coffin on their shoulders and, to the accompaniment of a thunderous postlude, carried it out into the fiery sunlight and blasting heat of that Wednesday afternoon in May.

Part I

Savage Mothers

Chapter
1

The house in which Dauphin and Leigh Savage lived had been built in
1906
; it was a large, comfortable place with generous rooms and careful and pleasing detail in such things as hearths, moldings, frames, and glazing. From the windows on the second floor you could see the back of the great Savage mansion on Government Boulevard. Dauphin’s house was the secondary Savage residence, reserved for younger sons and their wives. Patriarchs, older sons, and dowagers got the Great House, as it was called. Marian Savage had wanted newly-wed Dauphin and Leigh to stay with her in the Great House as long as they remained childless—she possessing no affection for infants or small children—but Leigh refused this invitation politely. Marian Savage’s daughter-in-law said that she would just as soon settle into a place of her own, and pointed out how much more efficient the air conditioning was in the Small House.

And, despite the heat of that Wednesday afternoon, when the temperature at the cemetery had been over
100
degrees, the glassed-in porch at the back of Dauphin and Leigh’s house was almost uncomfortably chilly. The harsh sunlight that prevailed at the front was here filtered through the two great live oaks that separated the backyard of the Small House from the extensive grounds of the mansion. In this generous chamber, filled with heavily upholstered furniture covered in large-patterned chintzes, Big Barbara had removed her shoes and stockings. The quarry tile was cold beneath her feet, and she had plenty of ice in her scotch.

Right now it was only Luker, Big Barbara, and India in the house. Leigh’s two maids had been given the day off in deference to the dead. Big Barbara sat at one end of the great soft sofa, going through a Hammacher-Schlemmer catalog, turning down pages for Leigh to examine particularly. Luker, who had removed his shoes, lay stretched out upon the couch with his feet in his mother’s lap. India sat at the long trestle table behind the couch, reworking on to graph paper the patterns she had memorized in the church.

“House seems empty,” remarked Luker.

“That’s ’cause nobody’s here,” said his mother. “Houses always seem empty after a funeral.”

“Where’s Dauphin?”

“Dauphin went to take Mary-Scot back to Pensacola. We’re hoping he’s gone be back by suppertime. Leigh and Odessa are taking care of things at the church. Luker, listen . . .”

“What?”

“I don’t want
any
of you to go dying on me, because I just can’t
begin
to tell you how much trouble it is to arrange a funeral!”

Luker didn’t reply.

“Big Barbara?” said India, when her grandmother was knocking the last ice cube into her mouth.

“What, child?”

“Do they always do that at funerals around here?”

“Do what?” asked Big Barbara uneasily, not turning around.

“Stick knives in dead people.”

“I was
hoping
you hadn’t been paying attention at that time,” said Big Barbara. “But I assure you, child, it is
not
a common occurrence. In fact, I have
never
seen it done before. And I am as sorry as I can be that you had to see it.”

“Didn’t bother me,” shrugged India. “She was dead, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” said Big Barbara, glancing at her son, hoping that he would interrupt this unhappy exchange. Luker’s eyes were closed, and Big Barbara knew that he meant to give the impression that he was asleep. “But you are still too young to have to know about that sort of thing at all. I went to my first wedding when I was nine, but they wouldn’t let me into a funeral until I was fifteen—and that was after Hurricane Delia, when half the people I knew in the world got blown twenty-five miles up in the air and toothpicks got driven all the way straight through telephone poles. Lots of funerals that month, I can tell you!”

“I’ve seen dead people before,” said India. “One day I was walking to school, and there was a dead man in a doorway. My friend and I touched him with a stick. We wiggled his foot, and then we ran away. And then one afternoon, Luker and I were having dim sum in Chinatown—”

“You were having
what
? Is that innards?”

“We were in Chinatown having lunch,” India said more simply, “and when we came out of the restaurant we saw two little Chinese girls get run down in the road by a water truck. It was disgusting—we saw their brains and everything. After that I told Luker I would never eat a brain again—and I haven’t, either.”

“That’s terrible!” cried Big Barbara. “Those poor little girls—were they
twins
, India?”

India didn’t know.

“What a terrible story!” cried Big Barbara, pushing Luker’s feet out of her lap. “That’s just the sort of thing that happens in New York. Now that you’re divorced I don’t see why you still live there.”

“I love New York,” said Luker without opening his eyes.

“So do I,” said India.

“When you got your divorce from . . .
that woman
,
you should have come back home to live.”

“I hate Alabama,” said Luker.

India didn’t say anything.

“Luker,” said Big Barbara, on to her favorite subject, “the happiest day of my life was the day you called up and said you were getting a divorce. I said to Lawton, ‘Lawton,’ I said, ‘I—
’
”

“Don’t get started,” warned Luker, “we all know what you think about . . .
that woman
.”

“Then get up and get me some more scotch. Grief has
always
—ever since I was a little girl—grief has always made my throat dry.”

Luker got up slowly. “Barbara, it’s not four o’clock yet. You guzzled that first drink—”

“I was just trying to get at the ice, I was so thirsty. That cemetery ought to have a water fountain. I don’t know why it doesn’t. People get thirsty at funerals just like they get thirsty everywhere else.”

From the kitchen Luker called, “You’re a drunk, Barbara, and it’s time you did something about it!”

“You’ve been talking to your father!” cried Big Barbara. She turned to India. “Do you treat him as badly as he treats me?”

India lifted her red pencil from the graph paper. “Yes.”

“Then you’re a rotten child!” exclaimed Big Barbara. “I don’t know why I waste my love on either one of you!”

Luker brought his mother her drink. “I made it weak. It’s all ice cubes and water. You don’t have any call to be drunk before the sun goes down.”

“My best friend in the world is dead,” replied Big Barbara. “I am toasting her memory.”

“She’ll be toasted all right,” said Luker in a low voice. He threw himself back on to the couch, and again dropped his feet into his mother’s lap.

“Lay ’em flat!” commanded Big Barbara, “so I can put the catalog down.”

There was quiet for some minutes. India continued her painstaking work with a handful of colored pencils; Luker apparently slept; Big Barbara sipped at her drink and turned the pages of the catalog that was propped against Luker’s feet.

“Good God!” said Big Barbara to Luker, and pummeled his knees with her fist. “Did you see this, Luker?”

“See what?” he murmured without curiosity.

“There is an ice cream machine in here that costs seven hundred dollars. It doesn’t even use rock salt. It probably doesn’t even use milk and cream. For that kind of money you just plug it in, and four minutes later you got a half gallon of cherry-peach-vanilla.”

“I’m surprised that Leigh hasn’t got one then.”

“She does!” said Big Barbara, “but I just had no
idea
that it cost seven hundred dollars! For seven hundred dollars you could make a down payment on a recreational vehicle!”

“Recreational vehicles are in bad taste, Barbara. At least you can hide an ice cream machine in the closet. Besides, Dauphin’s got all the money in the world. And now that Marian Savage has finally had the good taste to kick off, he’s going to have even more. Are they going to move into the Great House?”

“I don’t know, they haven’t decided yet. They’re not gone decide till we get back from Beldame.”

“Barbara,” said Luker, “whose idea was it for us all to go down to Beldame? I mean, Marian Savage died at Beldame. You think it’s going to do Dauphin a whole lot of good to be down there where his mother died about three days ago?”

Big Barbara shrugged. “You don’t think
I’d
suggest something like that, do you? It wasn’t Leigh either. It was Dauphin’s idea—Dauphin’s and Odessa’s. Odessa had been down there with Marian, of course—these days when she was so sick, Marian wouldn’t walk across the hall unless Odessa went with her. And anyway, Dauphin and Odessa seemed to think it’d do us all good to go on down there and get it out of our system. You ’member when Bothwell died down there, nobody went back for six months—and that year had a
beautiful
summer!”

“Bothwell was Dauphin’s father?” asked India.

Big Barbara nodded. “How old was Dauphin when Bothwell died, Luker?”

“Five. Six. Seven,” replied Luker. “I don’t remember. I had forgot that he died at Beldame too.”

“I know,” said Big Barbara. “Who thinks of poor old Bothwell any more? Anyway, it wasn’t as if Marian had been down there all that long either, it’s not as if all her suffering took place down at Beldame. She and Odessa hadn’t been down there more than a day and a half when Marian died. It was real strange. She stayed in the Great House for almost two years, hardly stirring from that room, sleeping all day and awake all night complaining. Then all of a sudden she up and decides that she wants to go to Beldame. Dauphin tried to talk her out of it.
I
tried to talk her out of it, but Marian gets something in her head, it doesn’t get out again. So she just ups and goes down to Beldame. Dauphin wanted to go with her, but Marian wouldn’t let him. Wouldn’t even let him drive her. Johnny Red drove her and Odessa down. And they weren’t gone hardly twenty-four hours before there was a state trooper beating on the door to tell Dauphin that Marian was dead. It was just horrible.”

“What’d she died of?” asked India.

“Cancer,” said Big Barbara. “She was eaten up. It was just strange that she should have lasted two years up here, and then die all of a sudden-like soon as she got to Beldame.”

“Was Odessa with her when she died?” asked Luker.

Big Barbara shook her head. “Odessa was cleaning upstairs or something, and Marian had a stroke out on the verandah. When Odessa came downstairs the swing was still rocking, but Marian was dead on the floorboards. Odessa dragged her inside and put her in the hammock and then walked to Gasque and called the highway patrol. She tried to call Dauphin but wasn’t anybody at home. Listen, Luker,” said Big Barbara in a lower voice, “India has got me to thinking—have you figured out yet what that knife business was all about?”

Luker had turned so that his face was buried between the cushion and the back of the couch. Big Barbara rolled him over.

“Yes I have,” he replied.

“Well?”

“Dauphin and Mary-Scot were just sorry they hadn’t stuck a knife in her when she was still alive, and it was their last chance.”

In the corner of the room, in a cage suspended six feet from the floor, was a large red parrot. It screamed.

Big Barbara pointed. “See. Nails understands every word you say. Marian loved that bird, don’t you dare say anything mean about Marian in front of Nails! He doesn’t like it.”

“What is that thing doing here anyway?”

“Well, they couldn’t just leave it at the Great House, it would have pined away in three hours without Marian around.”

“They should have buried it with her.”

“I thought parrots could talk,” said India.

Nails poked his beak through the wires of the cage and screamed again.

“This one’s doing a perfect imitation of Marian Savage, right now,” said Luker.

“Luker,” exclaimed Big Barbara, grabbing a handful of his toes and twisting them, “I do not understand why you talk so mean about the woman who was my best friend in the world.”

“Because she was the meanest bitch that ever trod the streets of Mobile.”

“I
wish
you wouldn’t use language like that in front of a thirteen-year-old girl.”

“She can’t see me,” said Luker, who was invisible from where India sat, “and she doesn’t know who said it.”