The Elementals (4 page)

“Yes I do,” said India, but then added to her grandmother: “He’s said worse. And so have I.”

“I’ll just bet,” sighed Big Barbara.

“Barbara, you know how mean that woman was,” said Luker. “Poor old Dauphin, she treated him like dirt as long as Mary-Scot was around. And then when Mary-Scot joined the convent, she treated him like shit.”

“Shhh!”

“Well you know she did.” Luker shrugged. “And that’s the way it’s been for two hundred years in that family. All the men are very sweet and good-hearted, and the women walk around with armor plating.”

“But they make good wives,” protested Big Barbara. “Marian was a good wife to Bothwell for as long as he lived. She made him happy.”

“And he probably liked getting nailed to the wall and beat with a bicycle chain, too.”

“
You
do,” said India to her father. Big Barbara jerked her head around, dismayed.

“India’s lying through her teeth,” said Luker evenly. “She doesn’t know anything about my sex life. She’s only thirteen,” he said, lifting himself so that he could grin at his daughter. “She doesn’t even know what fucking is yet.”

“
Luker
!
”

“Oh, Barbara, listen, as long as I’ve got my feet in your lap, why don’t you rub ’em for a while? Those shoes pinched today.”

Big Barbara peeled off her son’s socks and began to massage his feet.

“Well,” said Luker, “granted that the Savage women make okay wives, the fact is that as mothers, they’re the pits.”

“No they’re not!”

“Barbara, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you trying to defend a dead woman?”

“Marian Savage—”

“
Savage mothers eat their children up
!
” cried Luker, and the parrot screamed again.

Chapter
2

Big Barbara, Luker, and India remained on the glassed-in porch for another hour, waiting for Leigh to return. Luker slept, still with his feet in his mother’s lap, and turned disturbed only when the parrot Nails screamed. India brought her grandmother a stack of catalogs to be looked through while she herself worked free embroidery in green and purple threads on a blue work shirt. The sun continued bright and green through the live oak foliage at the back of the house. A square of leaded stained glass dangled before one of the windows, and now and then the sun, breaking momentarily through stirred foliage, pierced that square of glass and painted India’s face gold and blue and red.

At last Leigh arrived: they heard the car in the gravel driveway, they heard the doors of the car slam, they heard the opening of the door to the laundry room downstairs.

“Was there that much to do?” asked Big Barbara of her daughter, who came through the kitchen. “You were gone such a long time.”

“Get up, Luker!” said Leigh. “I’ve been on my feet the whole day.” Luker rose wearily and unsteadily from the sofa. Leigh kicked off her shoes and took his place. She unpinned her veil and dropped it on the coffee table. “Mama, I bet you’ve been sitting here the whole afternoon rubbing his feet. Well, rub mine for a little while.”

“You want your stockings on or off?”

“On, leave ’em on. I don’t have the strength to pull ’em off right now.”

“Did you bring Odessa back with you?” asked Luker, who now sat at the table examining his daughter’s work on the graph paper.

“I’m here,” said Odessa from the kitchen door.

“That’s what took us so long,” said Leigh. “We went back to the church, took care of everything there—though when there’s only seven people attending and just one coffin, there’s not a whole lot to do.”

“What’d you do with the extra flowers?”

“We took ’em over to Odessa’s church. Old man died there last night, family didn’t have anything so we carried the flowers over and put ’em in the church. We’re all invited to the funeral, but I told ’em no, I didn’t think we’d come after all, one funeral a week was enough for just about anybody.”

“Can I get y’all anything?” asked Odessa.

“Iced tea,” said Leigh, “please, Odessa.”

“Scotch and lots of ice,” said Big Barbara.

“Better let me get that,” said Luker to Odessa. “I think I’ll start to catch up myself. You want anything, India?”

India, who didn’t approve of family retainers, had shaken her head to Odessa’s offer; but to her father she said, “Maybe some sherry . . .”

“Dauphin has Punt e Mes,” said Luker.

“Oh, great! With an ice cube.”

Big Barbara twisted around. “Luker, does that child
drink
?”

“Only since we got her off speed,” said Luker, and winked at Odessa.

“You are too
young
to drink!” cried Big Barbara to her granddaughter.

“No I’m not,” replied India calmly.

“Well you are certainly too young to drink in front of me!”

“Then turn around.”

“I will!” said Big Barbara, and did. She looked at Leigh. “Do you know that that child sees dead people all the time in New York—
on the street
. Dead people on the street, did you ever hear of such a thing? People dying where you can see ’em and poke ’em with a stick!”

“India’s much more grown up than I was at her age, Mama,” said Leigh. “I don’t think you have to be particularly worried about her.”

“Luker would be a terrible man to have for a father, if you ask me. He’s the meanest man in the world, you ask anybody.”

“Is that why you love him more than you love me?” asked Leigh.

Big Barbara didn’t answer, but India laughed. “Luker’s not bad,” she said.

Luker appeared with a tray of drinks. He went to India first. “Barbara, watch,” he said, “see how well I’ve got her trained. What do you say, India?”

India stood from the table, dropped a curtsy, and said in a simpering voice, “Thank you very much, Father, for bringing me the glass of Punt e Mes with ice.”

India sat down again, but Big Barbara was unconvinced. “She’s got manners, but what has she got in the way of morals?”

“Oh,” said Luker blithely, “she and I don’t have any morals. We have to get along with a scruple or two.”

“I thought so,” said Big Barbara. “Nothing’s ever going to come of either one of you.”

India turned to her grandmother. “We’re different from you,” she said simply.

Big Barbara shook her head. “Were truer words ever spoken within your hearing, Leigh?”

“No,” said Leigh as she accidentally cascaded half her iced tea down the front of her black dress. Shaking her head at her own clumsiness, she rose and went in to change. When she returned a few minutes later, Luker had grabbed his place again on the couch; he made an insincere offer to give it up to her.

“Well, y’all,” said Leigh, sitting in a chair that faced them, “are y’all dying to hear about the knife or not?”

“You know!” cried Big Barbara.

“Odessa told me on the way back to the church.”

“How come Odessa knew and you didn’t?” asked Luker.

“Because it’s a Savage family secret, that’s why, and there’s nothing about the Savages that Odessa doesn’t know.”

“Marian Savage told me
everything
,” said Big Barbara, “but she never mentioned a word about sticking knives in dead people. I would have remembered something like that.”

“Go on and tell us,” Luker demanded, impatient despite his languorous posture. The light in the room was now entirely green.

“Get me a drink, Luker, and I’ll tell y’all what Odessa told me. And after y’all know all about it, y’all are not gone mention it to Dauphin, understand? He didn’t like doing it, he didn’t want to stick that knife in Marian’s chest.”

“He should have asked me to do it!” said Luker.

Nails screamed in his cage.

“I despise that bird,” said Leigh wearily.

Luker got up to get the drink, and when he returned, Odessa came along behind him. “You’re going to make sure she tells it right?” asked Luker over his shoulder, and she nodded. With her bony black fingers running up and down the sides of a glass of iced tea, she sat at the far corner of the long table where India bent low over the pad of graph paper.

Leigh faced them all, and her expression was serious. “Odessa, you’re gone interrupt me if I get anything wrong, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I sure will,” said Odessa, and bargain-sealed with a swallow of tea.

“Well,” began Leigh, “we all know ’bout how long the Savages have been in Mobile—”

“Since before there
was
a Mobile,” said Big Barbara. “They were French. The French were the first ones to come here—after the Spanish, I mean. They were originally the
Sauvages
.” The little speech was directed to India, who nodded over her sketchbook.

“Well, about that time—about two hundred and fifty years ago—Mobile was owned by the French, and the Savages were real important even then. The governor of the whole French territory around here was a Savage, and he had a daughter—I don’t know her name, do you Odessa?”

Odessa shook her head.

“Well, this daughter died in giving birth. The baby died too, and they were buried together in the family mausoleum. It’s not the one where we buried Marian today, it was one that came before that one—it’s gone now. Anyway, the next year, this woman’s husband died too—of cholera or something—and they opened the mausoleum again.” She paused.

“And you know what they found?” Odessa prompted from behind.

No one had any idea.

“They found out they had buried that girl alive,” Leigh said. “She waked up in her coffin, and she pushed off the lid and she screamed and screamed and nobody heard her and she tore her hands all up trying to get the door open and she couldn’t and she didn’t have anything to eat—
so she ate the dead baby
.
And when she was through eating the baby, she piled up the bones in the corner and put the baby’s clothes on top of them. Then she starved to death, and that’s what they found when they opened the mausoleum.”

“It wouldn’t have happened if they had embalmed her,” said Big Barbara. “A lot of times people turn black for a minute on the embalming table, and that means there was a little bit of life left in ’em, but after the embalming fluid goes in, nobody wakes up again. Whoever’s around when I die, I want ’em to make sure I get embalmed.”

“I don’t think that was the end of the story, Barbara,” said Luker, reproving her for the interruption.

“Well,” said Big Barbara defensively, “it’s just a terrible story already, I don’t see how there could be a whole lot more to it.”

“Well, when they found the dead woman on the floor of the mausoleum and the little pile of bones, everybody was so upset that they figured they had to do something to prevent it from ever happening again. So at every funeral after that, the head of the family stuck a knife through the heart of the dead person just to make sure he was really dead. They always did it at the funeral so everybody could see that it had been done and wouldn’t worry about the corpse waking up in the mausoleum. It wasn’t a bad idea, considering that they probably didn’t know about embalming fluid.”

India had looked up from the graph paper and was listening attentively to Leigh. However, her pencil moved unceasingly and purposefully across the page, and now and then she glanced down as if surprised by the picture that was forming there.

“So after that, every person that was born into the Savage family got a knife presented to him at his christening, and that knife went with him for the rest of his life. And then when he died, that knife was stuck in his chest, and then got buried in the coffin with him.”

“And then it became ritual,” said Luker. “I mean, Dauphin didn’t push the knife all the way in, did he? He just sort of nicked her.”

“That’s right,” said Odessa, “but it’s still not ever’thing.”

“I cain’t believe there’s more!” cried Big Barbara.

“Sometime before the Civil War,” said Leigh, “there was a girl who married a Savage boy and she had two children, both of ’em girls, and the third baby would have been a boy, but he died at birth. And she died right after. They had the funeral with the mother and the baby in the coffin, just like the first time.”

“Did they stick the knife in the dead baby too?” asked India. Her pencil did minute cross-hatching on the pad without her looking at it.

“Yes,” said Odessa.

“Yes,” said Leigh, “they certainly did. The boy’s father stuck the knife in the baby first, and then pulled it out—it must have been a terrible thing to have to do. So the church was full, and the father pulled the knife out of his little baby. He was crying, but he was brave and he raised it up high and brought it down and stuck it in his wife’s chest . . .”

“And?” prompted Luker when she paused.

“And she woke up screaming,” said Leigh softly. “She woke up from the shock of the knife going in her. Blood went everywhere, all over the burial dress, all over the coffin, all over the baby, and all over her husband. She grabbed him around the neck, and pulled him down in the coffin with her, and then the coffin tipped over and all three of ’em rolled out in the middle aisle. She kept her arms around his neck, and she died that way. Then they had the
real
funeral . . .”

“What happened to the husband?” asked India, curious.

“He married again,” said Leigh. “That was Dauphin’s great-great-grandfather, and he was the one who built Beldame.”

Big Barbara began to weep, affected not only by the story but by the declining afternoon, the scotch she had consumed, and her growing sense of loss. Luker, who saw this, kneaded his mother’s thigh with the soles of his feet in comfort.

“So that’s why they don’t push the knife all the way in any more?” said Luker softly.

“That’s right,” said Odessa.

“They just touch the chest with the point of the knife—that’s the symbolic part,” said Leigh. “But then they bury the knife in the dead person’s hands, and that part’s
not
symbolic. They figure that if they wake up in the coffin, then they can kill themselves with the knife.”

“But wasn’t Marian Savage embalmed?” asked Luker.

“No,” said Big Barbara, “she wasn’t. Bothwell wasn’t embalmed, and so she said she wasn’t going to get it either.”