The Healing (6 page)

“I know that, Mistress Amanda.”

“If Becky knew that anybody else—”

“Yes, ma’am!” Sylvie broke in again. “I’ll take good care like I always do,” she said bluntly. “I best get busy, then.”

The mistress didn’t make a move to leave. She was searching Aunt Sylvie’s face. After long moments of leaden silence, she released the expression of vague helplessness, and her cold, lifeless eyes lit up with a fiery flash.

Granada tensed.

Lizzie hunched her shoulders and squinched her face, as if she were expecting the mistress to flare up and slap her other eye blind. But today Mistress Amanda hit no one. She abruptly swung about
and tromped from the kitchen, uttering not a word. Chester released Daniel Webster, who went scurrying after her. Lizzie’s good eye circled the room once. She breathed deeply and then sped off, hurrying to catch up.

Everyone held their tongues until the hollow sounds of heels clopping down the covered walkway connecting the kitchen to the great house died away.

“She worse ever day,” Aunt Sylvie said, making no effort to hide her disapproval. “Just ain’t right. Acting like she don’t remember she got a little boy still alive and breathing. No, the only one she thinks about is the dead one. I reckon Little Lord looks too much like his daddy to suit her.”

Little Lord was Granada’s best friend, and it pained her to hear Sylvie say he was never noticed, either.

Sylvie gently stroked the satiny softness of the gown draped over her arm. “I remember the first time Miss Becky wore this frock. It was for a children’s tea party up in the bluffs at Delphi. Bless her baby-doll soul. One day Master Ben is going to put a stop to this mess.”

Granada pulled at one of the velvet ribbons dangling from the cook’s fingers. She touched the soft fabric to her lips, kissing it gently. “Put it on me, Aunt Sylvie,” Granada pleaded.

“You keep wearing a dead girl’s clothes,” Aunt Sylvie warned, “and you’ll get her haint after you.”

Granada shrugged. She didn’t believe in ghosts. “The mistress likes me to wear them. And Little Lord said I looked pretty all dressed up.”

Aunt Sylvie planted her fists on her broad hips. “Just because Mistress Amanda is mad enough to parade you around in her dead baby’s frocks don’t make it right. And they don’t make you white and they don’t make anybody love you any more. Little Lord likes you just fine in your kitchen dress.” Aunt Sylvie slapped her hands together. “Look at me, girl, while I’m talking!”

Granada crossed her arms over her chest and gave Sylvie a look of pure exasperation.

“Mark my words. Just as sure as Judgment Day, they going to come
a time when the mistress reaches inside that wardrobe for another pretty costume and come up empty-handed. Only one left to wear be the one I put on Miss Becky before I laid her in her grave box. Then what you going to do? Go dig it up?”

Before Granada could think to protest, Sylvie had already drawn her hand back. “And if I see you raising up that stomping foot, I swear to merciful God I’ll—”

Chester laughed at the cook’s outburst. “Sylvie, you think that white girl was the Jesus child.” He turned to Granada with kind eyes. “Them dresses look just as fine on you as they did Miss Becky. And she didn’t have those pretty licorice-drop eyes and skin as fine as the mistress’s best velvet. You just listen to old Chester here. Go on and have yourself a big time. Don’t pay Sylvie no mind.”

“Ain’t no danger in this girl paying me no nevermind,” Sylvie groused, stooping over to pick up the bowl of tallow that had been warming by the fire. “One day, girl, you going to learn that every fine road comes to a stopping place. Better be careful, one day your momma is going to show up and drag you off to them swamps. Then what you going to do? I’ll tell you. You’ll be sad you didn’t pay Aunt Sylvie no heed.”

Aunt Sylvie drew a chair from the table and sat down. “If you can tear yourself away from Chester and his foolishness, come on over to me, baby,” Sylvie said warmly. “I’ll grease your hair.”

This was the Sylvie that the girl loved—the nice one who wasn’t shouting orders and fussing about her kitchen. The one who called Granada “baby.” She hurried to Aunt Sylvie and plopped herself on the floor, wedging between the cook’s knees.

“I don’t know how to explain it where you ain’t going to get hurt,” Sylvie said, dipping two fingers into the bowl. “You too young to understand, I guess. Like I told your momma when she was about your age, half the things you see in any white man’s house ain’t real. But in this particular house, real done took a holiday.”

Before applying the dab of tallow, Sylvie leaned over and kissed
Granada on the top of her head. “My pretty baby don’t even know her own momma. Worse, you don’t care. Don’t think I can never forgive the mistress for doing that to you. One day you going to see how all your life, you been tangled up in somebody else’s grief.”

Sylvie sighed. “I reckon it takes age to understand the kind of devilry that even the littlest death can give birth to.”

G
ranada knew that the first of the guests were in sight when she heard the distant sound of carriage wheels slicing into the carefully graded drive of crushed shells.

While the master was giving last-minute instructions to the servants, Granada ran out onto the gallery off the upstairs parlor to watch the guests arrive. The driver of the fancy brougham coach was elegant and fine-boned, outfitted in a black greatcoat and opera hat. He was expertly managing two high-stepping bays up the drive of gleaming white shells that had been hauled all the way from New Orleans and were replenished each year after the winter floods washed them away.

Granada tried to imagine the mansion as the passengers were seeing it—majestically columned and galleried on three sides, upstairs and down, and surmounted with a copper-domed observatory from which they would soon be invited to survey the master’s swamp kingdom.

When Granada saw Chester, his buttons gleaming, march onto the drive to meet the carriage, she raced back inside the parlor and proudly claimed her place by the chair where the mistress sat. For it was here, by the mistress’s side, more than any other place in all the master’s glimmering universe, that Granada desired to be.

The mistress, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be aware of where
she was at the moment. The woman had doubled up on her laudanum in preparation for her guests, nearly sixty drops according to Granada’s count. It took both Granada and Lizzie to lead the mistress down the hall to her chair in the parlor, each gripping an elbow.

Except for the embarrassed looks from the master, nobody ever seemed to mind. That was because Master Ben carefully managed his visitors’ impressions so that little attention ever fell upon his unpredictable wife. The guests, even longtime callers, were so awed by the workings of the place that the mistress’s condition could be easily overlooked.

Even now Granada could hear them chattering, throwing out words like “stunning” and “breathtaking” as they took in the floors laid with marble, the crystal chandeliers, the floating double staircase with the polished mahogany banisters.

Granada stiffened and mentally rehearsed her first curtsy. Above the gleam and glitter of the mansion, the thing she wanted them all to remember from the day was
her
.

In strode Pomp, the butler, grandly dressed in one of his master’s splendid old claw-hammer coats with its narrow tails down past his knees. To complement the polished banisters, the master made sure that Pomp’s yellow skin glistened and gleamed by insisting he rub his face amply with tallow. As Pomp solemnly led the party into the room, Granada immediately recognized the two planters and their elegantly dressed wives. They had come all the way from the town of Delphi up in the bluffs.

• • •

Benjamin Satterfield, looking tall and lean and very much in charge, heartily greeted his visitors as they crossed the threshold. His fair skin seemed to pink up with enthusiasm.

The mistress remained seated in her massive chair with brocade the color of dried blood. Daniel Webster crouched a few inches to the left of her bonneted head, perched on the back of the chair.

But as Granada had hoped, it was her all eyes found first. She stood beaming at the mistress’s side, bedecked in the elegant blue satin gown and creamy patent-leather shoes, her hair greased, combed, and ribboned. The intoxicating scents of Miss Becky’s powders and perfumes rose off her skin.

Mistress Amanda acknowledged her guests with a single nod and a vacant smile, while Granada competed by showing off her curtsy. To make sure no one doubted her abilities, she bowed with exaggerated flourish, thrusting her right foot forward and drawing back the left, at the same time dramatically plucking her skirt upward on either side like turkey wings. Her spare fingers stuck out stiff and straight.

While she held the pose for the speechless guests, the monkey chittered frantically, scampering across the back of the chair, as if he were jealous of the attention. Granada remained outstretched in mid-curtsy, while the manic monkey leaped off the chair onto the girl’s back, causing her to totter. She struggled desperately, staggering about, flapping her arms to regain her balance.

With mayhem erupting about her, Mistress Amanda sat rigidly erect, her eyes staring blankly before her, like a queen bored with her court jesters. Her only movement was a quick jerk of her head when she caught herself listing too far in one direction.

Granada valiantly attempted to hold her curtsy, even with Daniel Webster bounding up and down on her shoulder, tugging on one of her plaits, and causing her to tilt considerably to one side. The girl peeked to note the reactions of the guests.

The women had dropped their eyes to the floor, looking red-faced, as if they had been slapped in church, and the bald-headed man with a high stomach and eyebrows like furry caterpillars hid his mouth behind his hand and coughed loudly. Granada thought he might be strangling, but then she noticed his eyes. They danced with a wicked merriment. When she looked at the master, she saw that his cheeks were ablaze, and he was now talking rapidly to his guests, shunting them as best he could toward the pastries on the sideboard.

Granada didn’t mind. They could be as mean and as jealous as they cared to, just like Aunt Sylvie. The girl was used to it. All Granada knew was that the immense gold-framed mirror on the wall before her proved a kindlier presence. It did not avert its gaze nor did it scorn her. It did not exclude Granada because her skin was darker than all the rest. In spite of the creature on her shoulder, the reflection showed Granada to be as beautiful as anybody in the room, and the mistress loved her best for it.

Pomp broke the tension by lifting a tray of goblets from the sideboard and moving among the guests. “Drink, Master? Drink, Mistress?” he asked all around, proffering the silver tray.

As the guests chitchatted, and Daniel Webster quit Granada’s shoulder for a higher perch on the marble mantel below Miss Becky’s smiling portrait, the girl knew that she had become invisible again. She took the opportunity to shift her weight from one foot to the other. The dead girl’s feet were too small and the shoes pinched Granada’s toes. When she first saw them earlier that morning, they had gleamed so, her heart nearly stopped. But now she would much prefer to have on the soft silvery slippers studded with tiny glass beads that she wore when Senator Davis came calling.

Granada knew she was supposed to avert her eyes, but she couldn’t help stealing glances as more white folks entered the room and then stood about with their company manners, all stiff and formal, performing half bows, with their stifled laughs that sounded like coughs.

More interesting than their words were the spaces they left between, the gaps of silence separating the speakers. They talked the way they danced at their fancy balls, holding each other at considerable distance. Nobody ever crowded in on top of another. They reminded Granada of cold pots in the fireplace. Not like Chester or Aunt Sylvie and Pomp when they got to carrying on in the kitchen. They came to full boil, sloshed over the sides, and didn’t care who noticed.

“It’s a grand day for preaching to the nigras, isn’t it, Bishop?” the bald-headed man called out, removing a toddy from Pomp’s tray.

“Now leave the good bishop alone, Charles,” his wife teased.

The fat bishop smiled, as if pleased to be noticed. “The day was made for it, Mr. Stogner,” he said, “as is every Sabbath, rain or shine.”

Their words were ponderous but dead, and Granada imagined them falling at her feet like wet leaves after a winter rain. Aunt Sylvie fussed that white folks only talked about four things: “Slaves and cotton and cotton and slaves.” Then she would add: “And they don’t know a damn thing about none of them.”

It was then Granada heard someone whisper her name.

The girl cut her eyes to the doorway where stood a child several years younger than she with corn-silk hair.

“Hey, Granada!” he called again.

It was Little Lord, the master’s son, peering at her from around the doorframe. The boy smiled at her in pure delight and then waved. He was about to say something else before milky-eyed Lizzie came up behind him and grabbed his arm, hauling him back to his room.