Touched (30 page)

He called to me with his gaze. He did not speak. His lips did not move.

Please, Mattie.

I heard his voice, but his lips did not move. I touched his lips again and felt them curve only slightly in a smile.

“JoHanna asked me to tell you a story, Mattie.” He spoke against my hand, his life puffing lightly against my fingers. “I’ve picked out one I think you’ll like. If it isn’t right, Floyd will be here soon to take over as the master storyteller. For the moment, my story is about a young girl who decided to have an adventure on a river.”

I closed my eyes and felt his words against my fingers, and I began to listen.

I awoke to unnatural blackness and the sound of panic. In the darkness people were scurrying around and there was the sound of breaking glass as a woman cursed with great ability. I had no idea how long I’d been asleep or where I was. But I had slept. After nights and nights of sitting at my windows watching, I’d finally slept. Inside my head the memories were quiet.

“Where’s Pecos?” The young girl who had trouble walking demanded. I recognized her voice easily.

“Duncan, that bird has sense enough to get someplace safe. That’s why he’s been missing for the last hour. He’s smart enough to realize we’re in for a bad storm and he’s found himself a safe place to be. Now we’re going to do the same.”

“I’m going to hunt for him.”

“Over my dead body. I’ve got enough to worry about without you going out into a bad storm.”

“I’m not afraid of storms.” There was defiance in the words.

“I’m not either, but you’re not going out there. This isn’t just a thunderstorm, Duncan. Can’t you feel it? This is a grandfather of a storm.”

A man’s soft voice spoke. “Imagine it, Duncan. Zeus up there in the clouds getting ready to pour some serious tragedy down on us mortals. A little entertainment for the gods.”

“Right.” She spoke with sarcasm. “It’s just an old storm. Ever since I got struck by lightning, Mama acts like a little rain is going to kill me.”

“Duncan, you’re staying inside this house. If Pecos wants to come home, he will.”

“I’ll go look for Pecos, Duncan.”

This was a different voice. Younger than the other man. Golden and light. I liked the sound of it. I knew this man and he made me feel safe.

A door closed and footsteps went down the wooden steps.

Someone had come into my room and closed my window, so I got up and went and opened it. The peach curtains, slinky as silk, fluttered in the wind and draped around my body, teasing my skin with cool caresses. It was as dark in my room as it was outside, so I had no concerns about being seen. Beyond the window I heard the golden man calling for the rooster named Pecos. The storm had blocked out all signs of moon or stars, and the clouds seemed thick and dense, moving close to the ground like the march of a midnight army.

I saw the man in the light from the kitchen window. His hair was longish and golden. Floyd. I knew him. I knew that I liked him. He was tender, gentle. He had been kind to me sometime in the past, though I couldn’t remember when or why. The wind pressed his shirt into his brawny chest, and he lifted his chin and called for the rooster. “Pe-cos! Pe-cos!” He called strong and hard, but the wind whipped the words from his mouth and tore them apart. “Pe-cos!” He moved toward the outside shed. He tried to force the door open, but the wind blew against him. I could see he was strong, but the wind was strong, too, and it came in gusts that made it hard to fight. The door gave suddenly, swinging out toward him. A squawking, flapping blast of feathers shot from the shed. The bird half ran, half flew across the yard directly to the window where I stood.

Before I could move, he flew up, talons extended, and came at me. I felt his claws dig into my arm, and I heard my scream, though it sounded as if it came from a great distance away.

Behind me there was the sound of running feet, and then the man and woman and the young girl were all around me. The woman held my arm while the man put pressure on it to stop the flow of blood. In the light of a lantern I watched the dark red blood drip off my fingers and dance against the waxed wood of the floor.

It didn’t hurt, not yet, but I knew it would. Reaching up to push the hair out of my face with my other hand, I saw the other scar, the curved hook in the center of my palm. That, too, had been made by the rooster. I remembered. Pecos. The red-brown flurry of feathers and claws as I stood in the hot yard pulling a wagon and a gramophone. Pecos! I remembered!

Around me JoHanna and Duncan and John Doggett were chattering and getting bandages and turpentine. In a corner of the room the rooster waited, his beady little eyes following each and every movement that I made. We looked at each other, and he lifted his wings out from his body and shook them at me, a warning.

“Damn you, Pecos,” I said. “That’s the second time you’ve spurred me. I ought to cook your scrawny ass. I think Aunt Sadie was on the right track when she wanted to make dumplings with you.”

Everyone around me went completely silent, and I looked at them.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Nearly ten o’clock. You slept for twelve hours straight.” JoHanna’s voice was rigidly controlled, a calm, steady voice.

I nodded. JoHanna was giving me the strangest look, and Duncan had finally stopped crying. Floyd stood in the doorway, and John Doggett sat beside me on the bed, his large hand holding the cloth against the six-inch slash that Pecos had opened up between wrist and elbow. I had the clearest memory of John’s eyebrows and the way his lips moved when he talked about some girl who went to live with the Indians on the Pascagoula River.

“Welcome home, Mattie,” JoHanna said. She brushed her hand over my face and lifted my chin up to the kerosene lantern she held in her other hand. She studied my face intently. “Do you know me?”

“I know you aren’t Mary Pickford.”

My response brought laughter that started rather feebly but continued to grow as they each looked at one another. Finally, they were all laughing until tears came from their eyes.

“Who would have thought Pecos would bring her out of it?” Floyd asked. He went and got the rooster and put him on his shoulder. “As soon as John finishes with Mattie, I think we should put the boards across the windows. The wind is getting mighty high. This is going to be one bad, bad storm.”

Twenty-eight

O
NCE the wound given to me by Pecos had been cleaned and dressed, I ate a bowl of potato soup and went back to sleep. I awoke, infrequently, to the sound of Pecos’s claws clacking on the hardwood floor beside the bed. Either he was serving as sentinel to my sleep, or he was angry because I’d taken Duncan’s bed. I didn’t waste more than a few seconds on the question but immediately returned to the soft darkness of a dreamless sleep. When I finally surfaced, it was to an eerie gray light and the howl of wind. The rain, driven by the wind, hammered the windows that were crisscrossed with boards in long gusts that sounded like rocks being shaken in a jar. My first impulse was to pull the sheets and pillows over my head. The house groaned as if it were coming apart at the seams, while outside the trees fought their own battle against the gales. They moaned and strained, a subtext of noise to the challenge of the wind.

I knew instantly where I was, and my arm, and Pecos’s presence in the room, perched on the back of the rocking chair JoHanna had sat in to watch me, was testimony that I had not dreamed the events before I went to sleep. I laid in Duncan’s bed and decided I was glad to be back in the present. My retreat had been into the past, but a past that had never existed. I knew that. It had been a choice—to avoid a present I could not tolerate. JoHanna’s rescue of me, the strange power of John Doggett’s voice, and Pecos’s unintentional attack. Somehow the combination had given me the link to the present, a path back.

Stretching against the clean cotton of the sheets, I felt the most peculiar sensation seep into me. During brief lulls in the wind I could hear voices in the kitchen. The storm was blasting the house, and because of where I was, I felt safe. I was also a little afraid, but mostly safe. I got up and slipped into the robe JoHanna had placed at the foot of the bed and went to find her.

I found them all in the kitchen, huddled around the table. Duncan sat in JoHanna’s lap, and Floyd and John sat on either side of her. Pecos followed me into the kitchen, and I took the fourth seat at the table.

“It’s a hurricane,” JoHanna said. “A lot of people are going to suffer.” A single lamp on the kitchen table cast a golden globe of light on our hands and faces. It was strange illumination. The outside light was pearlized, a glowing gray, as if the sun had forsaken us and sent a weaker cousin in her place.

“Is it going to blow the house down?” Living in Meridian, I’d heard about hurricanes, but they only affected the coastal area, or so I thought. Jexville was a good forty miles from Mobile Bay, and then another goodly piece from the open water of the Gulf of Mexico. But the big storms obviously had a long reach.

“This house is well made.” JoHanna looked around the kitchen just as a big limb slammed into the side of the house. “If one of the trees falls on it …” She didn’t have to finish. The big oaks out front had deep root systems, but they also presented a big target for the wind to catch. I wanted to look outside, but I was unwilling. The noise of the wind was enough to convince me that the storm’s raw power was more than I wanted to witness. I would linger in the safety of the lamplight with my friends.

“What about Will?” I asked.

“He’s still in New York. I’ll get word to him that we’re safe as soon as I can.” She wrapped her arms tighter around Duncan.

Duncan shifted, loosening JoHanna’s hold. She cocked her head, a gesture that Pecos, standing beside her, immediately imitated. “I like the storm,” she said softly. “Listen to the wind. It’s terrible, so angry.” She took her mother’s hand. “But none of us were in the dream. It was only strangers.”

There was an undercurrent of emotion around the table. Fear? Apprehension? I couldn’t be certain.

“You like it because you think it won’t affect us.” JoHanna was frowning. “A lot of people are going to be hurt by this. The last storm that came through in 1906 leveled the pine timber from the coast up to Fitler. The destruction was complete. Some folks haven’t recovered yet, and here it comes again.”

Duncan twisted so that she could look behind her, reading her mother’s expression more than her words. “You always say that nature is supreme, that people forget her power. You say that nature is the only force to bend humans to her will, and that it’s good for us to know we aren’t all-powerful.”

When no one spoke, Duncan continued, her voice more determined. “You said that when man is able to control the weather that he’ll destroy the earth.” She turned in JoHanna’s arms to look at John Doggett. “You said it, too. I’ve heard you talking with Mama.”

Doggett’s smile was sad. “It’s true, Duncan. But some lessons are painful, and hard to watch. Nature tends to punish the good and the bad without discrimination.”

His words struck me at the base of the spine, a tingle of apprehension. I had so fully accepted his presence in the house. I had climbed out of myself using his words as footholds. But why was he here? I lowered my chin and watched him through my eyelashes. He was at ease, but sad.

“Some people need to hurt.” Duncan’s gaze turned inward, her mouth taking on a hard line that looked older. “This is what I saw in my dream, and it’s going to happen to everyone in Jexville. They’re all going to be touched.” She put her cards, face down, on the table. “I keep remembering the dream, and I know some of it’s here, in Chickasaw County. People drowned. Water running in creeks and ditches.” Her forehead furrowed and she rubbed it with one tired fist. “But it doesn’t make sense. It’s land like a farm where the bodies are. Not all on the coast.”

JoHanna gathered her daughter to her chest, hugging her tightly. “Hush, Duncan.” JoHanna looked over the top of Duncan’s head and into Floyd’s worried eyes.

“What is it?” I felt the tension, but I didn’t fully understand. The storm was going to do awful things, but we couldn’t stop it, and we were safe. Will was safe in New York. What was going on that I didn’t understand?