Heaven's Bones (8 page)

“Sure thing,” he answered, breathing heavily and slow. “Sure thing.”

Gets a taste for it
. The surgeon eyed Artemis as he left, the policeman's thoughts clear on his face. Part of what made something lovely was that it could be destroyed. The smooth surface of a porcelain vase, shattered. The ivory column of a woman's neck, bruised and purple. The surgeon understood it better than Artemis could. He knew his own kind. He knew there would be more.

Artemis was usually a polite man but today he trod swiftly though the passages of St. Thomas Hospital, eyes down and hands deep in his pockets, and he raised his hat to nobody.

Alistair Weldon fancied sometimes that he could still smell the burning. He would pause, watching the water pool in the bend of the river, still enough for duckweed to cluster, and sniff the breeze. But it always faded, leaving an ashy aftertaste on his tongue.

Strange how he had accepted the changes in not only his life, but also the very fabric of existence, walking his lands each day as if nothing had happened. But not so strange, perhaps, when the change was so complete, so inevitable. Sometimes it seemed like it had always been like this, as if all that went before was a dream.

The knowledge that Sherman was marching, burning the plantations as he went had struck him and his neighbors with a dull horror that robbed them of the ability to take any sort of action, besides perhaps the helpless packing and repacking of certain possessions, in an endless fugue of sentimentality and practicality.

Beatrice had retreated to her rooms; Fanny was nowhere to be found. And the house servants—you could see it in their faces, the realization dawning, something going out like a snuffed candle. The careful masks they wore, made of that precarious mingling of fear and caution and cunning, were dissolving now they saw that everything was changing.

From the window of his dressing room, over the ridge of the trees he could see the smoke rising—one, two, then three columns—from the neighboring plantations. There, that must be the
Shaws and the Choinards, and that closer one, the Andersons—he thought he could see flames flicker at the base of the column of smoke. The line of burning mansions arrowed toward Riverbend, and there was the faint smell of fields burning.

Weldon had gripped the windowsill until his knuckles turned white.

Then, overcome by the silence in the house, he made his way through the empty halls, the heavy-framed oil paintings of dubious ancestors his only witnesses. Down the double balustrade staircase, his footfalls echoing on the hard marble surfaces.

Still he met no one, but from outside came a faint murmur. He strode to the heavy mahogany doors and thrust them open, feeling the sun on his face like a flame, like the flames destroying the families of the South, house by house.

On the lawn, as if they were waiting for him, the house servants stood: James, who had stood behind his chair at dinner for more than seven years. Suz, the cook, her muscular arms akimbo. Between them were other faces less familiar, faces he rarely saw these days: the field hands, the sugar mashers, the women who cooked for the seasonal workers that swept through at the height of the season. Weldon had given over their governance to Holbart, his overseer, and his team of crackers. There wasn't any trouble under Holbart, none that he need bother his head about, and if folks whispered that Holbart's men were more brutal than they need be then folks should mind their own affairs. And he was a useful man, Holbart, for when an extra hand was needed in the surgery, or when a mess must be disposed of.

He didn't see Holbart anywhere.

It didn't occur to him to be afraid—not at first. The gathered mass of black faces looked at him with what seemed like mute appeal, asking him, master
in loco parentis
, what they should do now the world was come to an end.

Then they parted before him, and Holbart stood amongst them, stiff legged, with an exaggerated grin on his face.

He didn't have time to register his annoyance at the overseer's smug expression before he saw that two field hands were holding the white man up. When they let go, Holbart didn't walk or bend or crumple: he fell straight forward on his face, stiff as a board, on the grass in front of the porch.

A hand axe was embedded deep in the back of his skull.

One of the men who had been holding Holbart up flung something at the porch, and it landed a few steps down from where Weldon stood. It looked like a couple of raccoon pelts tied together, wet as if they had been floating in the river.

Still not completely registering what had happened to Holbart, Weldon peered at the object. It wasn't any kind of fur.

Knowledge came like a sickening thump to the belly. It was hair. Scalps. Three scalps strung together—Holbart's men.

Then his body, not his brain, realized that what had happened to Holbart was no freakish accident and he backed against the solidity of the door. The half-moon of faces watched him, impassively, and then there was a shift and they advanced toward him. Slowly, as if they had all the time in the world. Slowly, as if they intended on savoring this moment.

There, where Holbart had stood. It was Sadie.

But that was impossible, not after what he'd done to her.

She didn't move, and the mass of bodies swallowed her as they advanced.

If he walked by the river when wisps of fog still clung, streamerlike, to the banks, he could hear the voice.

Free of you
.

Just a breath, as if her voice itself were part of the mist—
free of you, forever
.

Fanny Weldon had no intention of telling her father that the Mists were alive.

She first realized they were on a strange day that was half-sunlight, half-gloom, sitting on a smooth, speckled boulder at the place where the river crooked just out of sight of the house. A wash of pebbles buried the base of the boulder, and she'd collected a handful of them to chuck at the water. The sunlight caught the ripples and the water that splashed from the stones she threw; she stopped when her arm began to ache.

Presently she noticed the fog that started to roil from the surface of the river, gathering where the water eddied and clumping together like a solid thing. The air became colder as it coalesced and grew, still over the water, higher and higher until it was a wall of impermeable gray, with only a few swirls here or there to show it was a vapor.

She wasn't afraid, although she knew the dangers of getting lost in a thick fog. Before the Fire all the children were warned of it—
don't go wandering in the tule fog, or you might fall into the river and no one would ever know
.

But sitting on the rock she wouldn't get lost, and despite the increasing chill, she had no intention of stirring. She tucked her hands beneath her pinafore and waited.

The river had vanished beneath the thickening mist, and although she could still hear it chuckling the sound was muffled and distorted. She understood now how one, wrapped in fog, could think the river someplace else entirely and slip right in.

The sunlight behind her shone oddly on the wall of mist, and the gray took on some tints of gold and amber. Although foggy tendrils wafted around her, most of the vapor was concentrated about a foot from her face, and seemed inclined to stay there.

Curious, she reached out a small hand, wondering if the mist would swallow it so it was invisible to her.

But instead the vapor before her moved, shifted back so that her hand touched nothing.

That was strange. She moved her hand right, then left. Each time the mist made haste to avoid her touch, the vapor visibly moving, making a hole in itself that shifted to accommodate her.

She folded her hands back into her lap and considered.

Strange.

Very
strange.

Was it trying to lure her into itself, trying to drown her in the current she still could hear within that gray mass?

Perhaps.

Cautiously she tried again. Moving slowly, as she would around a shy animal, Fanny stretched out a damp palm to the thick murk.

It didn't move until she almost touched it, and then it flowed back from her hand, and only in the area of her hand, forming a dimple in its own substance.

She brought her other hand up, just as slowly, creating a second dimple in the wall.

On impulse, Fanny moved her hands one over the other, trying to carve a sphere out of the mist. It worked. It was as if she had scooped out two semicircles, one atop the other, in the mud: a perfect round formed and floated freely, substantial as a smoke ring.

The circle, detached from the main body of the mist, floated toward her, stopping just in front of her face. She studied it. She imagined it studied her.

For the first time in a very long while, Fanny smiled.

Black Warrior River

Outside Birmingham, Alabama, 1832

Alistair Weldon had barely turned eleven when the Perfect Day happened.

There was a frantic bustle and packing in his parents' house, a hasty dismissal of servants and wrapping of china in underclothes,
and whispers about the rent and imprecations about the landlord. His mother shooed him away, telling him to return by bedtime because in the morning they must be away by first light, with him or without him.

Years later he understood was happening, and his cheeks burned to remember it: moving from place to place, one step ahead of the rent collectors, desperately pretending to be respectable. Then he swore to always have money, to control what happened to other people, down to their very breath and bone, to never let anyone tell him where and when to go.

But that day he knew it was best to stay away from the semi-shabby house that was soon to be vacated and he found himself walking beside the river.

Did he buy Riverbend, so many years later, so he could seek the peace of that day by the banks of another river?

If so, he never found it.

It was near the end of summer, a warm day with the promise of autumn in it, so instead of searing white the sunlight was golden and gilded the surface of the water that chuckled by his side. Something was blooming that touched the air with a fine gold dust, and birds chattered in the willows that clustered where the water bent around huge chunks of granite thrust up from the rocky soil.

A familiar ache smoldered in his breast: the sense that his home, his true home, a place he had never seen, was near. Sometimes in his short life he'd caught of glimpse of it, a flicker in the corner of his eye. The window of a strange house placed just so, or the arrangement of bricks in an archway leading to a garden, or the black swoop of swallows in the evening sky. Or a smell, of cakes baking or of jasmine, or the sharp astringent pucker of new paint.

Nowhere he had ever lived was home: habitation only, cottage and shack and sidewalk-level city flat. Dirty or clean, bright or dimly lighted, sweet-smelling or imbued with the odor of old boiled cabbages.
Home
was elsewhere, and he longed for it with a physical pain that, later, made him think how appropriate was the simple term
heartbreak
.

It was close now; so close.

He didn't know how far he walked, buoyed by the gilded air and the sound of the river. He could smell the grasses that had dried in the heat of summer and the musky green of them down in the dirt. Late-blooming flowers, blue and deep rose, peeked from between the stems.

When a pleasant ache in his legs told him he was tired, he sat on a smooth boulder that overhung the water and watched the sun strike crystal from the surface, and the occasional swirl and plash of a trout.

Alistair closed his eyes and let the sun warm his face. The rock was warm too, and smelt like baking bread.

Insects hummed as they darted over the water, and somewhere was the low droning buzz of a beehive. Once he felt something touch his cheek, then his arm, and opened his eyes to see a plump bee, its legs fat with orange sacs of pollen, crawling down his bare forearm beneath the rolled-up sleeve of his second-best shirt.

It tickled, but he stayed still as the bee investigated his knuckles before flying away, clumsy under its burden, without stinging him.

Lazily he turned his head and watched it fly toward the fringe of oaks that ringed the riverside meadows. His forearm itched faintly where it had crawled.

He stretched his legs and jumped down from the boulder, vaguely following the bee's path. More bees, similarly burdened, bumbled back and forth between the trees and the water. He supposed their hive was somewhere in a hollow in one of the oaks, and as he reached their shade he fancied he could smell the tang of dried, powdery honey.

Alistair looked up through the thick latticework of leaves of the oaks nearest him, and the sight filled his senses and seemed more real, more present in his world than his parents or their shrill worry
or the pokey, cabbage-smelling house that was merely one of a series of cabbage-smelling houses to which they'd flee, one after another, a few steps ahead of the sheriff's men.