The Elementals (33 page)

On Wednesday, the twelfth of July, Luker and India flew back to New York. Luker spent three days answering mail and returning phone calls, then he and India went up to Woodstock and stayed in the house of a friend who preferred Fire Island for his summers. It was cool and forested and lonely there, and Luker and India sought to recover themselves. They never talked of Beldame.

Leigh and Big Barbara made an extended tour of the western National Parks, staying four days at each. By the middle of November they had returned together to the Small House, and Luker and India came down for Thanksgiving. Between Christmas and New Year’s Leigh was delivered of twin boys, whom she named Dauphin and Darnley.

Lawton’s will was probated that February, but Dauphin’s not until several months later—the Savage holdings were enormous, and the entire business was complicated by the fact that when Dauphin died, his mother’s estate had been far from resolved. But as soon as she had clear control of the property, Leigh sold Beldame to the oil company that had wanted it, and the oil company was happy to have it—this was a full year after Lawton had first suggested the sale to his family. In the meantime none of them had returned to Beldame, and it was with misgiving that they crossed the Tensaw River into Baldwin County at all. Big Barbara had leased the fertilizer business to some of Lawton’s relatives, who cheated her shamefully in return for the way that Lawton had treated them in decades past—and Big Barbara thought this only fair. She never went down to Belforest, because the ride and the name put her too much in mind of Beldame.

It was late that summer, six weeks after the oil company signed the papers on the property known as Beldame, that Hurricane Frederic slammed into the coast of Alabama. Ninety percent of the pecan trees in Baldwin Country, many of them more than seventy-five years old, were uprooted. What the crashing tides didn’t smash in Gulf Shores, the wind and rains did. The Gulf waters simply broke across the entire peninsula there. It leveled the dunes and buried Dixie Graves Parkway. It shoved Gasque into Mobile Bay. Nothing at all remained to show where Beldame had been, not a stick of wood, not a foundation brick, not a tatter of cloth caught on a blasted sea rose. Sand spat up from the Gulf filled St. Elmo’s Lagoon and it was now no more than a damp depression along the coast. The channel that had kept Dauphin and Odessa at Beldame the night before they were killed wasn’t even a ditch now.

The oil company had to hire surveyors to tell them where the property was they had bought.

Luker and India made but one more trip to Alabama, in the autumn following the destruction of Beldame. India, however, expressed so great an aversion to the twins, Dauphin and Darnley, that she could not be persuaded to remain under the same roof with them. To Leigh, she said only, “I hate children. They make me break out.” But to her father, India confided, “Remember, I can see what Odessa saw. And those babies aren’t McCrays—they’re Savages.”