The Vines (5 page)

“Then don’t rub her nose in it . . . unless you think you won’t be able to help yourself.”

“Well, that’s not fair. For Christ’s sake, Nova, I’m a nurse, not a detective.”

“And my father is not a slave!” she cries, whirling on him. “There is something dangerous here, and I don’t care if she kicks him out of that house; he’s not working another day here until I find out what it is. Now, he came close enough to death last night ’cause of some stupid white lady, and I’m not going to let it happen again, you hear me?”

“Nova, I know you’ve been mad at her for years, and I get it. Caitlin’s behavior around your dad . . . it’s not always healthy
and . . .
I get it, is what I’m trying to—”

“You don’t know
anything
about my anger.”

“Oh yeah. ’Cause I’ve never dealt with prejudice in my life.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You’re right. You didn’t lose the man
you
loved.”

“Not yet,” she whispers.

And then she is gone. And Blake is left alone with the realization that in another minute or two it will be so dark outside he will either have to pull the chain on the lightbulb overhead, or leave the shed altogether. He chooses the latter.

12

A year before he died, Caitlin’s father transformed one of the side porches of their home on St. Charles Avenue into a solarium, replacing its three walls of sagging screens with clean sweeps of plate glass. It is on the second floor and looks out mostly onto the neighbor’s yard. Her father compensated for its oak-branch-filtered view of the Bickmores’ swimming pool by lining it with potted plants Caitlin has done her best to tend since she inherited the house a few years before.

She can think of no better place to bring the flower she plucked from the spot where her dead husband should have been.

She has placed it inauspiciously in a tulip sundae glass, half-filled with water, and set it atop the white wicker coffee table beside a pile of unread copies of
Architectural Digest
,
which she adds to once a month because the subscription is her mother’s and she can’t bring herself to cancel it.

For what feels to her like hours, she has been staring at the blossom, awaiting the return of the strange luminescence with which it first greeted her.

But the only otherworldly aspect to it now is its shape; the petals are too large, hand-sized, proportional to each other but not to its slender stalk. Their vibrant shade of white isn’t bruised in the slightest, even after hours of being pressed against her flesh, hours in which she was questioned ceaselessly by the police, all the while wondering if the secret under her dress, the one laced under the waistband of her panties, was about to explode in another slick and thirsty eruption. Rather than frightening her, rather than quickening her words and making her appear sweaty and suspicious to the stoic detectives, this uncertainty filled her with a kind of delicious, drugged calm, and she wondered how many others found themselves drowsy and contented upon suddenly learning they were drifting through an upended world.

Even now, even in the absence of its strange pulses of light, she half expects the flower’s supernatural promise to spread through the house, a reality-bending gas that alters the very fabric of each room. She wouldn’t be surprised to see the regal portrait of her father in the adjacent sitting room suddenly peel free of its canvas and take a humanoid form, slowly dropping to the hardwood floor like a jewel thief suspended from a cable. If the patterns in the Oriental rug began to rearrange themselves into the alphabet of a strange new language, she would drop to the floor next to it and begin to take notes. In every dusty corner of the house, she can feel the possibility of upset and release, the low tremor of unborn energy.

Ever since she was a little girl, she has tried to nurse a belief in heavenly guardians; her bedroom was filled with framed pictures of cheerful cherubs and proud archangels, and for years little angel statuettes were everyone’s go-to present when the time came to buy a Christmas or birthday gift for the girl who could afford to buy herself anything. But belief is a feeling and faith is a practice based in experience. Now she has faith; in her lowest moment, an angel did appear to her—only it had blossoms instead of wings.

Caitlin brings the flower to her nose and inhales. Its scent is something akin to charred sugar, sweet and smoky and a little cloying. Then comes a loamy undertone, an intoxicating compromise between turned dirt and the taste she’d often discover just below her husband’s armpit during sex.

This smell of earth and flesh induces a state of feverish, sudden arousal; she finds herself going moist with the impossible speed depicted in the letters on
Penthouse
Forum
she would sometimes read aloud to Troy when things had gone particularly soft in the bedroom. Is this response simply a result of being reminded of her husband? Her husband, who cheated on her at her own birthday party, just a few feet from where she stood. Her husband, who is now gone, gone, gone.

No. It isn’t possible. This is a force greater than memory, and it is using her nostrils and mouth and sex as entry points.

The petals of the flower have rounded slightly around the edges, forming a half funnel that is now aimed directly at her. The stamens and filaments within have gone rigid, abandoning the slightly interlaced posture they’ve held since she first discovered the impossible blossom, and the slender stalk is curling gently back and forth through the water like a tethered tadpole.

The smell is gathering strength now—bread and semen and dirt lashed by rain and turning to mud—and with its growing power, a darkness is crowding in at the edges of her vision.

She feels her hand tense around the wicker love seat’s arm. But when she looks down to make sure this isn’t a trick played by the nerves in her arm, the hand she sees is black and callused. Her stomach lurches. The angle suddenly seems all wrong.

A name slices through her, as if it’s been whispered in terror by a dozen guardian angels perched in the next room.

Virginie . . .

. . . When they take the blindfold off her, she sees they have brought her to a clearing where the trees are freshly splintered and some sort of foul-smelling chemical has been poured into hollows dug into their trunks. The horse beneath her shudders and takes several halting steps. On instinct, she jerks her bound wrists against her lower back, but it’s no use. She is forced to steady herself by clamping her thighs down on the horse’s flanks.

The overseer has his hand on its bridle, and he’s staring up at her with as much fear as hate in his bloodshot eyes.

Beneath the light of a half-moon lies ample evidence Felix Delachaise’s men have tried their hardest to turn the area around them into a desert. But in southern Louisiana, where land and water are often one and the same, it is not possible to make a desert even with the labor of a million men. But these men have tried. The mud looks plowed, roots torn up, perhaps by hand, only the shredded detritus left behind in a scrum that looks like sawdust.

She is, in ways she wishes she was not, startled by their bravery. They have seen only a glimpse of her power, when she brought the vine out of the oak to halt the overseer’s whip because it looked as if Big John was near death from the flogging. For all they know, she could cause great roots to rise up from the soil and tear them apart.

And she could, perhaps. But it would kill her for sure, or cause a pain so bad death would be a mercy.

She speaks to the ghosts in the soil, and sometimes they need to be convinced. Coaxed. Charmed. And what is easiest for her is coaxing the fruits of the earth into quick and confident growth. Eruptions like the one she triggered the other day, the one that sent the overseer into a sputtering, red-faced rage, makes a pain like knives in her gut. But she can’t let these men know that.

It takes her a few minutes of blinking into their lanterns and torches for her to count how many are there. The overseer and three men she doesn’t recognize, probably white folks from a little ways downriver. And then he steps forward into the light, Felix Delachaise, the master of Spring House. He has a forehead like one half of the temple roofs she’s seen drawings of in stolen books, and his lips always appear to be peeling away from his face.

“No need for more fear at Spring House, witchy woman. Plantation life is hard on all of us. We are all a slave to the land here.”

“Then, every now and then, we should all get the whip.”

An angry shudder at her impertinence moves through the other men, but Felix just stares. It’s a terrible risk, speaking to them this way, but she cannot let them know how severely they have limited her power by plowing this field. She cannot let them know how much it would require for her to unleash a true massacre.

“Don’t remember you being punished so,” Felix says.

“Don’t much imagine I will be now.”

“If you had the power of the Devil in you, you’d be gone by now, Virginie Lacroix. What makes you stay, working your trickery on my overseer?”

The very question she must avoid; to answer in any way would reveal the limitations of her gift, and oh, how those limits have caused her to lie awake nights cursing the God who gave it to her. Why? Why such a tiny drop of power and not the might needed to frighten the white man into seeing the Negro as brother and sister?

“Can’t have no hanging tree when there’s no trees,” she says.

“No hanging is planned,” Felix answers.

“Set me aflame then? Burn me like a witch?”

“Are you a witch?”

“They’s ghosts in the soil. I can talk to them. That is my story.”

“And you can make them dance. We’ve all seen that. Scared my poor wife half to death, that’s for sure.”

And there it is. His wife. She had seen some evidence of Virginie’s gift over the years, seen the roses she’d brought back to life with a whisper and a touch. Kept the secret to herself as long as it gave her nice flowers. But the other day, she’d been on the second-floor porch, watching Big John get whipped as if it were a nuisance on par with a mosquito in the bedroom, watching the great vine come free from the oak branches like a snake. And now Virginie is in the dark with men who rape her kind without a second thought. Men who have, at present, made no move to immolate or dismember her.

“What else can you do?” Felix asks, closing the distance between him and the horse that holds her a strange kind of prisoner.

“Kill me and be done with it,” she says.

And then I’ll let all hell break loose, ’cause I’ll know I’m dying. I’ll know for sure the pain won’t last forever,
she thinks,
so I’ll push it as far as I can, and I’ll bring justice from the earth like the other slaves are always begging me to.

“I have no interest in your death, Virginie. I have brought you here for other reasons.”

“Name them or be done with me.”

“A trade, witchy woman,” Felix says. “That’s all. A trade.”

Blake can see her from where he’s standing on the front porch.

She’s on her feet inside the solarium, her back to him and the broad, bustling avenue just beyond the house’s fence. There is a strange, diseased-looking slouch to her posture, like she is staring down at something that threatens to draw her so far forward she will lose her balance.

He has texted her several times—for some reason this feels less intrusive than ringing her doorbell. He hates the thought that his brief, exploratory messages—
U OK? Do u need anything? U home?
—are what she’s studying with such paralyzed intensity. The longer he watches her and the more she doesn’t move, the harder it is for him not to ring the doorbell a second time. He gives in.

The doorbell is actually part of the intercom system, and after he hits the button on the brown box next to the front door, he’s forced to stand there and listen to the gentle two-tone electronic chime that’s now emanating from every telephone inside the house.

He steps back and looks up again. The house has always looked to Blake like a fat, sweating wedding cake. As a child he had recurrent dreams in which its dormers sloughed off like moist icing. Tonight it is lit up with its typical showplace precision behind the short decorative wrought iron fence that marks the quarter of a city block on which it sits, a proud landmark of the avenue, now sheltering a young woman who appears to be in the throes of some sort of nervous collapse . . . and then she collapses for real.

Years in the ER have familiarized Blake with the speed and intensity of her fall. The back of her hand does not flutter theatrically to her forehead; there is no last-second grab for any hard surface; up one moment, down the next. Total, stone-cold blackout that could be caused by anything from anemia to an aneurysm.

It is that same experience that springs Blake into action, the past six months of silence rendered irrelevant by a split second.

He is slaloming down the side yard of the house, past the concrete-framed swimming pool lined with enormous planters and crowned with a sleek chrome-and-concrete waterfall.