The Witches Of Denmark (8 page)

Chapter Seven

While my family continued the debate about slipping out of Denmark and heading west, Alisia and I were relieved of our weed-pulling duties. In addition to our emancipation from toiling in the oppressive heat, I felt like I now had a helluva lot more free time to enjoy. Very strange, as only a month earlier I often felt pressed for time, despite school being over and my days occupied with the latest version of
Dark Souls
. Amazing what having to work and relying on better time management can do for one’s perspective.

With all this sudden free time, and the inevitable vagabond status we were facing, I took my father up on his offer to let me tag along to Julien and Meredith’s place. The ladies in our family were out with Sadee and Meredith for the afternoon, and the urgency to monitor Grandpa’s extracurricular activities had waned since the news other warlocks would soon be citizens of the great city of Denmark. So, the prospect of hanging out a few hours with my new favorite author sounded very cool.

Besides, I had been dying to see the inside of this amazing Queen Anne across the street. The place gave me chills as Dad and I stepped closer to the intricate spindle work atop the front porch and eves. Yeah, a little weird maybe, but a house like this has the same effect on me that meeting Justin Timberlake would have on my sis. Maybe I should take up drafting with a focus on Victorian-styled architecture, if I decide to go on to college. Even if I didn’t use a skill set like that in this generation, it might come in handy during the next hundred years or so.

As we stepped up to the gate that was slightly shorter and more ornate than ours, a little girl accosted us. Twyla Tidwell. I should’ve mentioned her earlier, since the five-year-old is a verifiable ‘hoot’, as they say down here. Blonde, blue-eyed, and cute as a button, she roams the neighborhood, introducing herself to strangers with the tag line of ‘it’s okay for me to be here as long as I can see my house’, which sits behind the Mays’ home. I could barely see the fence surrounding her yard the first time she pulled that intro on me, right after we moved in. But before I could stop her, she had already met Grandpa and Grandma after running to our front door, and then invited herself inside our house. Despite the unusual assertiveness, my grandparents liked her immediately. Once I got over the little girl’s obstinate pushiness, I fell in love with her, too.

“Hello, Mister man and his son!” she said, parking her bike outside the Mays’ gate and leaning it against an azalea bush, breaking a small branch and sending several flower petals spiraling toward the sidewalk. She didn’t wait for either my father or me to acknowledge her greeting, pushing past us to reach the front door. Before she rang the doorbell, Julien opened the front door. “Huh? You’re supposed to let me ring the doorbell! That’s what Miss Meredith said!”

“Oh, I suppose you will have to wait until Meredith gets back to take that up with her,” said Julien, chuckling. He looked beyond the little girl to my father and me, motioning for us to come inside. Twyla moved to come inside, too, but he gently blocked her way. “Darlin’, I promise you can come in for a while when Meredith gets back in a few hours. If you play your cards right, she might even share an ice cream sandwich with you. How does that sound?”

“It sounds
great!”
said Twyla, excitedly. But for a moment, she still persisted in trying to get around him, finally sighing in frustration when he successfully blocked her every attempt. “But I’m still tellin’ on you for not lettin’ me in!”

She turned around and ran down the brick pathway, deftly moving past us. We watched her move through the gate, carefully shut it behind her, and grab her bike.

“Bye Mister man and his son—and Meredith’s husband, too!”

The three of us waved, and watched her pedal her bike up Old Dominion, heading for a small park at the end of the street. When she reached Sadee’s house, halfway along our block, she stopped and threw down her bike near the curb.

“Hello Miss Sadee’s husband!” she said, before running up to the covered front porch where Dan Dean sat, looking like he was reading a newspaper. We heard his surprised greeting and returned our attention to Julien.

“She’s a little jitterbug, that’s for sure. But I worry someone is going to snatch her from us, since her parents let her go wherever she wants, and unattended,” he remarked. “Come on inside, Gabriel and Sebastian. I do believe I’ve got a tour to deliver.”

We followed him inside, and Julien cast a warm glance to my father that turned amused when he brought his attention to me and my reaction to his house.

“Wow… this is really cool,” I said, allowing my gaze to follow a staircase nearly as grand as ours to an antique crystal chandelier hanging over the foyer from a twelve foot ceiling. The extensive woodwork dressed in Victorian style was truly something to behold. Lots of ornate detailing, to the point anyone unfamiliar with the Queen Anne aspect might consider garish or gaudy. My eyes settled on an old pipe organ built into one of the main parlor’s walls.

“You can play it if you like,” offered Julien, holding the remnants of a drink in one hand, as he went over to turn on the organ. His genteel drawl was more pronounced, no doubt influenced by the liquor, and he was dressed in khaki shorts and a polo shirt—the very thing almost everyone wore the other night at our house. “The older folks of Denmark tell me how George C. Brown, a noted organist in this region, used to blast out his neighbors every now and then, especially whenever they had pissed him off. That was back in the early 1900s, just before the outbreak of World War I.”

I almost took him up on his offer, but a slight brush across the back of my hand by Dad kept me from doing it.

“That’s okay… can I see the rest of your house?”

I couldn’t hide my excited smile.

“Of course… but are you sure you don’t want to see, or rather, hear what this bad boy is capable of?”

Lead me not into temptation….

Dad shot me a look, and unlike the subtle message from a moment ago, Julien caught this one.

“Or, perhaps you can come over in the fall, when I play it while the courthouse bell rings at kickoff for the high school football games. Last year when I did it, we had all the neighborhood dogs, cats, and raccoons howling together.”

Dad and I laughed.

“Gabriel, will you join me for a drink?”

“Sure,” said Dad, earning a surprised glance from me. “I’ll take scotch on the rocks, if you have it.”

“Good man,” said Julien. “Sounds delicious, but I’ll stick with my preferred standby, vodka and cranberry juice…. Anything for you, Sebastian?”

He looked over at me from behind an elaborate bar that appeared to have once served patrons in a New York pub. Well stocked, I might add, with every shelf in the mirrored case behind him loaded with booze.

“I’m not old enough to drink down here,” I lied. “I’ll take a Dr. Pepper if you have one handy.”

“Well…. You’re in luck,” he said, after opening a refrigerator hidden from view and pulling out a glass bottle version of my preferred carbonated beverage. A rarity at home, I imagined it would be near impossible to procure glass bottles in this wee town of inhospitable restaurants and scarce grocery stores. “Now, how about that tour, gentlemen?”

And, so began my initial exploration of the ‘Mays Mini-Castle’, as I have come to fondly refer to the place. The house was bigger than I pictured from the outside. From what Dad said, it rivaled the square footage of our famed antebellum sitting across the street. In addition to the turrets in front, there was a larger turret in the back of the house. Beautiful mahogany mantles and stained glass windows that were designed and installed by an apprentice of Louis Comfort Tiffany graced both floors. Julien joked that the seven windows themselves had recently been appraised for an amount three times the value of the rest of the house.

After our tour, which ended with a brief visit to Julien’s office and personal library on the second floor, we returned downstairs to share another round of refreshments on the covered front porch and shoot the shit—what seemed to be a favorite pastime of Denmark. Surprisingly, the ceiling fans kept the sweltering heat and pesky mosquitoes at bay. 

The heavy worry hanging over my father had been admirably hidden, until the news that the Mateis were seeking to invade our new stomping grounds. From the moment Mom had revealed what Julie Paris had told her at the beauty shop until now, his apprehension seemed to be worsening. In fact, I believe if Mom and her new lady friends had been any later in returning from their outing, he would’ve gotten smashed—and not unintentionally. I could tell that a remarkable bond was beginning to form between him and the guy I had found to be my favorite resident of Denmark. Julien’s lack of societal inhibitions made him almost irresistible.

As it was, the conversation between the two men, that I got to occasionally participate in, had some amusing moments. Amusing and enlightening moments that specifically dealt with our neighborhood’s colorful past—including its recent history, which featured our surly neighbor on the Chaffin’s Bend side of our property.

Most entertaining was the “Tale of the Four Harrys”. Harrison Crawford was considered the most cultured of the bunch, with his luthier skills, musicianship, and board membership for the locally prominent art school. The neighborhood fondly referred to him as ‘Music Harry’.

‘Music Harry’ and his wife, Jennifer, lived in a nice craftsman next to Julien and Meredith, on the right. A quarter mile away lived another ‘Harry’, whom we hadn’t met yet. Harold Gustafson. He and his wife, Betsy, and their daughter Sandra and her three kids moved from Wisconsin two years earlier and lived on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Forrest Street—directly across from the art school that also faced the rear of our property. Their small bungalow’s backyard bordered the Dean’s backyard. Harry was viewed as one of the few dependable handymen in town.

“The third Harry is the youngest, a black teenager,” said Julien, pausing to light a slim panatela. “He is the hardest working of the bunch, and might just be the brightest—of all of us. Harris Martin is the kid I mentioned to you over dinner the other night, and is the only dependable kid living around here—no offense, Sebastian. He lives with his mom across from the other end of the school, and would be in direct line of my front porch, if not for a damned magnolia blocking my view.”

He grinned at his little joke about one of the majestic trees in our front yard, and it took my father a moment to catch the drift, and another to understand that what was said was strictly in jest.

“So, he lives across from us, too? From the back edge of our property, I mean,” said Dad, pointing as if that would help Julien better see what he described.

“Yes, I guess that’s true,” said Julien, nodding as if this was the first time he had considered the simpler way to describe where the kid, Harris Martin, lived.

“You said there were four Harrys,” I said, drawing a raised eyebrow from Dad. “Who’s the fourth Harry?”

“Why, I do believe you’ve already met him.” Julien subtly nodded toward the home of the crazy man with the kid who scowled just like his daddy.

“So, that guy is a Harry, too?” I considered the irony of how the four Harrys were nearly aligned as a square surrounding our house.

“Yes, sir,” he drawled, tapping out an ash into a nearby shrub. “That would be Harry Turner.”

“Not Harold, Harrison, or Harris, I take it?” Dad snickered.

“No, sir… He was born just ‘Harry’, with no middle name either.” A gleeful light danced in Julien’s eyes. “I guess the sort of laziness that has become part of Harry’s repertoire here in Denmark was passed on by his dear pappy from the day this particular Harry came squallin’ out of his momma.”

Not knowing how to respond to that assessment, Dad and I smiled and looked back at the house littered with junk on the porch and throughout the yard. Meanwhile, Julien drew in a mouth full of smoke that he proceeded to exhale in a row of diminishing rings. Sometimes magic happens unconventionally in the world around us, without the aid of a wand or spell.

“Your realtor, Julie Paris? What a sight for sore eyes she can be…. Especially on a day like the one where she went up to the Turners’ front door, intending to kindly ask them to clean up their shit, since the Clarke family wanted to make the highest impression on y’all.”

“Seriously? Silvia and I scarcely noticed the crap out there on our initial visit. We only remarked about it on the day we came back to sign the final paperwork.”

“And it didn’t scare you off?”

“No. Silvia and my mother loved the house, and that was enough for me.”

“I noticed,” I said, eyeing Dad with a pretend pout. “Why wasn’t I consulted about it?”

“You think this is bad, son?” asked Julien. “You should’ve been here three years ago when Harry and his wife, Jolsteen, moved in. The place was bought at auction, so everyone around here was patient, knowing it would take some time to get settled and bring things up to the standard we are all trying to achieve and maintain…. But then old Harry Turner decided to pour two dump truck loads of horse manure in a big pile in his driveway, and shoveled all of that shit into the yard. Covered the grass completely, and from what I understand, he believed he was properly fertilizing his entire yard.”