Farthest House (40 page)

48

I was already old the night it happened, leaving all our lives changed forever. That evening, I strolled up Old Squaw Road toward Farthest House among talking birds and chirping insects. I’d had dinner with another widow lady, and afterwards, we sat on her porch and remembered our husbands. I cried a few, shaky tears thinking of Thomas, and we laughed at a couple of young women walking arm in arm toward the town’s small theatre. They had no male escorts and wore neither hats nor gloves.
The Great Ziegfeld
was playing and had young people spending their money to see it not just once but a second and, sometimes, even a third time. My friend and I laughed until we each peed a few drops in our knickers, and then, we laughed again, this time about the number of knickers an old woman can soil in a day.

I continued my stroll up the hill. The setting sun threw all the colors of a French villa across the sky, and the cooling evening air on my arms made me long again for Thomas’s touch.

Julian, who liked to comb the newspapers with his mother, keeping up on recent crimes, had turned fifteen. He was in Omaha with Luessy doing research, a trip she made three or four times a year. She divided her days there between the main library on Eighteenth and Harney and the police station, where she combed public records, talked with detectives about the latest police procedures, and listened to the stories of the uniformed men who walked a beat.

I rounded the hilltop corner, stepping from Old Squaw Road onto the long drive of Farthest House. The sight stopped me. A black Plymouth touring sedan lurked at the top. Phillip Jatlick. He was the villain who fathered Luessy’s children, and now he’d returned after weeks away.

My legs trembled from the climb, but I had a new reason to hurry. With my breath prickling my lungs, I struggled up the drive, until I finally puffed through the front door of Farthest House—my home too, since the fire that destroyed Little Nest.

Sobbing. The sound caught me, raced my heart and pinned me to the doorway. Victoria—still the name she went by at the time—and Julian were in high school, and I hadn’t heard that sort of sobbing and wailing since they’d outgrown falling off bicycles and bloodying knees. I rushed across the foyer and into the kitchen.

Victoria, standing in the satin ivory slippers I’d given her, worked with a mop. The slippers were soaked to deep red and sagged on her feet. She shot the rag head back and forth, smearing a burgundy stain the size of a washtub into the size of a table top. Blood. The back door lay open and the wide swath of a bloody smear, surely a dragged body, trailed across the threshold and into the night.

I found my voice. “What happened?”

She screamed and jerked, and her shoulders heaved in great wracking sobs. The front of her dress was a slick red apron that clung to her body.

I prayed the horror in front of me was a hallucination, that the trek up the hill had blown blood vessels in my aged brain, or sent clots to stopper them, and I was suffering an aneurysm or stroke. Dying, my brain might have been reliving scenes snatched from deep in the pages of one of Luessy’s murder mysteries. I’d have accepted anything for myself, if only Victoria could be saved. But I’d seen the car lurking in the drive, and on the table next to a soup bowl was a whiskey bottle with only an inch of alcohol still shimmering in the bottom: Mr. Phillip Jatlick. In the weeks of his absence, I’d been promising myself he was dead, safely rotting underground, his liver having finally drowned, or some woman wearing a red petticoat had mercifully pressed her derringer to his fancy shirt front and pulled the trigger.

Seeing Victoria soaked in blood, hearing her sobs, each one striking me with double-fisted guilt, I looked to her bloody hands. Between that blood and my panic, my mind saw Sabine’s hand—cleaved. I’d dreamed, so many times, of my little sister in the act of chopping off her fingers: the nighttime kitchen, the household staff off to their beds, Sabine standing in the moonlight, and even Mme. Francoise watching unseen from a dark corner.

Now, in the kitchen at Farthest House, there was another bloody scene. And again, I was responsible, as soaked in guilt as Victoria was in blood. I’d kept myself imprisoned in denial, that mental coffin, to keep from knowing she was being abused. That rancid, acrid-smelling denial was because I’d been afraid of family upheaval and of what the truth would do to Luessy. Greatest of all, though, was my fear of once again facing what I’d gone through and what I let happen to Sabine. Just as my mother had, I kept my mind angled wide of the truth. I submerged myself in mind-fillers: playing games with them, painting, walks in the wood. All the while promising myself I was fulfilling the role of good grandmother.

“Jonah!” Victoria screamed that night. The name came over and over, cries for help, her body quaking with the ravages of stark fear. “Jonah! Jonah! Jonah did it. He killed him with the rake. He beat him with the rake, just like that woman he killed.”

My poor Victoria, clearly too out of her mind with terror to hear the absurdity of her claim. Too crazed to think rationally and see that if Jonah was guilty, a madman on the loose, she’d have run down the hill toward safety, would have called the police, would not be working feverishly to cover up the crime.

I opened my arms to her. Dropping the mop, she started for me, her legs still child-gangly, her knees bending deep, starting to buckle. I held her, “Where is the body?”

“Jonah took it.”

Her trembling body trembled mine. Here again was the insidious atrocity of men abusing children, as if little bodies were tools manufactured to appease fetid lusts. Doors slamming on young unlived lives. This time, the child reached such a nadir of despair and self-loathing that she committed murder. She was innocent of any crime; wanting to live was god-given, not criminal. Anger shot red and hotheaded through my bones. Another man would not destroy another child in my family. Phillip Jatlick deserved what he got, and I was so distraught, I imagined raising the rake over him myself.

I held Victoria and promised her that we would find a way. We had to. She did not deserve to suffer through a trial, having a fancy-talking lawyer hired by the Jatlick family destroy her character and disgrace her in front of the community, ruining every chance she had of a normal life. God forbid, she’d be convicted and forced to spend her life in jail.

It hurt realizing that Victoria, in going for the rake, had already planted evidence against Jonah, but I had to let that go. She’d not killed her father with the rake, that was certain. A weak-armed teenage girl against a big man couldn’t have done it. I didn’t see evil in her going for the rake; I saw anguish. I saw a child’s understandable panic. The real fault rested with Mr. Phillip Jatlick, but since Victoria had already dirtied up the body with a rake, and she meant to tell a false story, Jonah’s life was also in danger. The only way to protect them both was to hide the body.

“Phillip Jatlick deserved to die,” I told her. The terror in her eyes brought my heart up into my mouth. “Jonah has done a good thing,” I said. Why did I pretend to believe Jonah was responsible? Because at that moment Victoria wasn’t strong enough to bear the weight of my knowing the truth. “Leave that mop,” I told her, “you’re making things worse.”

The sun had set, and the garden lay in a silent gray. Jonah crouched against the trunk of a magnolia tree, his arms braced across his thighs, his face empty. The body, pulled from the house by the feet, lay not ten feet away, the arms stretched above the head. I approached it. Phillip’s face, his entire head, looked like a spilled cherry pie. I’d seen Thomas dress a deer with less mess.

Again, my blood coursed hot and wild. This Beast deserved exactly what he received. I wanted to kill him again for what he’d done and the trouble his death was causing and would cause. He could not be dead enough, didn’t deserve the respite of death. I’d count coup on him, just as Thomas told stories of Indians counting coup on their dead enemies. The act was symbolic, but I needed to beat him, somehow, to be a participant. Only a few yards away, a sapling had recently been planted and still had a supporting stake. I pulled the stake from the ground and struck the body—dull thwacks—until the thin plank in my angry hands broke and was but a few worthless inches of stick. “I’ll cut off his twisted-up root,” I screamed, “he won’t have it for any afterlife.”

Jonah, shadow, unfolded in the dark. “No. No, Miss Amelie,” he said. “You ain’t doing that. You already beat him good.”

I paced, my mind frantic for the best burying spot: the garden, the wood Thomas planted, the hillside leading down into Greenburr? I ruled them out. We couldn’t dig a grave deep enough to be certain no wild dogs would unearth it, or that a too-wet spring wouldn’t float the body up. And a patch of disturbed dirt, clay brought to the surface, always flagged a grave. I even considered burying the body with Thomas and replacing the stones. Thomas would forgive me, but he didn’t deserve it. And when the day came and I was buried, the body would still be discovered.

Victoria came to the kitchen doorway, her body silhouetted by the light behind her. Her arms hugged her chest, and she swayed, soundlessly rocking herself.

Jonah looked up from the corpse to her, and time began moaning, a low wail that morphed hours, days, years, passing them through him. His face, his eyes especially, began to sag, the skin melting like a thick wax, drooping and aging. His body became more windsock than man, as fifty years of unspent life gusted through the husk and away. A sound, half sigh, half cry, crept from his throat, worked over his tongue, crawled out from between his lips, a resigned, bitter, dying sound.

My body felt glacial. Guilt traveled through me like time through Jonah. I bore the weight of Victoria’s actions and all the damages those actions wrought. My hands lifted, touched my face, my hair, feeling whether or not I was still fleshed.

Jonah, his face ancient now and his eyes half-closed, turned to me. I couldn’t bear to hear what he might say, and I cut him off before he could speak. “We have to keep the bastard dead. We’ll stick him under the portico floor.”

“How?” The word drifting and empty.

I had no idea, but I’d seen Sabine’s hand superimposed over Victoria’s, and Victoria, fragile as her future, rocked herself and sobbed, and Jonah’s unspent life had washed forever through him. I had to find a way. “We’ll take up part of the stones and bury him in cement. For a hundred years, we can walk on him and pee on him.”

“How we going to do that.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement of disbelief.

“We will! We don’t have to be finished before Luessy gets back, and we don’t have to tear up that much, just have the body buried.” I was pacing, pointing. “That floor has several cracks, I’ll tell her I tripped on a broken place and fell. I’ll tell her I got so angry, and I was so sore that I put you to relaying the stones. We just have to get him buried. Relaying the stones can take the week if need be.”

His face was old, the years a silence in him.

“I’ll do the lying,” I said. “Leave Luessy to me.”

Jonah nodded, but his eyes said he wasn’t listening.

I couldn’t bear seeing that old-man look, and my need to save him had me ragged with fear. “Luessy will be surprised,” I said. “She’ll even look hard at me, but I’ll limp around some, moan a bit, tell her that at my age I couldn’t risk another fall. I’ll blame her.” There it was; I knew it. “I’ll accuse her of being so preoccupied she didn’t know the state of her own patio. After this trip, her mind will be even more knotted with new story ideas. Her writing won’t stop, and she won’t pay any attention to what’s happening out here as long as the work is quiet.”

Still, Jonah made no sign of hurrying off for a pick or shovel, and I’d winded myself. He stared at the body, the blood over the corpse turning it black. “Why’d she do that?”

“Because she’s got sense.”

“And I’m goin’ get lynched for all that sense.”

At least he was talking. I tried to answer honestly. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I give you my word, if this body is found, I’ll tell them I killed him. It shames me to say so, and you know it’s true, but I can’t promise anyone will listen.” We both knew the truth had little chance. He was a young black male with a suspicion of one murder already. Vigilantes would decide the rake was all the evidence they needed.

Victoria’s wailing increased, and I worried about her mind. If we were caught, would she testify against Jonah? “I swear, if that body is found,” I said again, “I’ll try and take the blame. I’m a damn good storyteller myself, but Victoria’s mind can’t be trusted.”