Farthest House (30 page)

Prairie flopped back again and nearly slipped onto the stones.

“Dr. Hartford!” Willow gasped.

He reached a hand across the table, catching Prairie’s arm. “Are you okay?” he asked Willow.

“Take Prairie. Don’t let her down. Don’t let her get to the road.”

He stood, reached and plucked the small child into the air. Prairie let out a happy squeal, just as she had in the library, her legs kicking.

There it is again,
Willow thought. Their unfair closeness. Prairie belonged to her. No one else. Not Tory, not Mable, not Clay.

She raised her cup to her lips. She’d drink her tea, try and eat a cookie, and she’d remain sitting where Prairie could at least see her. Pain, sharp and hot stung her bottom lip, making her jerk, splash tea down the front of her white T-shirt and drop her cup. The china rolled from her lap and partially down one leg before hitting the flagstones. In a splash of caramel-colored tea, a bee spun, managed to lift, find an unsteady wing, and fly off, but Willow’s attention was on her precious cup—a symbol for more than she could say. The cup and its broken handle lay six inches apart. “I can fix it. Tory, don’t throw it away. I can fix it.”

“Clay, I’ll take the baby,” Tory was on her feet. “Help Willow.” When he scraped his chair back, passed off Prairie, and caught Willow, Tory’s voice calmed. “It’s not bee stings causing her to be so ill. Dr. Mahoney says she’s not allergic to them. She never has any reaction.”

In Clay’s arms, Willow knew her aunt was right. The stings didn’t leave her with swollen eyes, didn’t close her throat, and didn’t leave her gasping for air. She’d been woozy and seeing things before she was stung. But the assaults, hitting her at her lowest, had the force of fists. “Why,” she cried at Tory, “do you let Jonah keep those things?”

36

Much happened over the next month. While Willow stayed inside with her migraines and nausea, Prairie turned one, began walking, and Clay came most mornings to work. He labored through boxes of Luessy’s papers, journals, and letters, sometimes pacing the library aisle, sometimes sitting in the attic and working in Luessy’s old space. In the afternoons, he tried to show his gratitude by helping Jonah, though he considered hands-on access to the garden, like hands-on access to Luessy’s papers, a privilege.

Depending upon how Willow felt, their time together could be a short or long evening. Even on her worst days, when she saw doubles and triples of everything, he went upstairs, looked in on her, and stayed to read from his notes or tell her something interesting he’d discovered. “Your great aunt, Amelie-Anais, grew up in her uncle’s villa. He was a priest.”

“And she fell in love with a man named Thomas.”

Listening to the two of them discuss my life might have been amusing, if only the truth hadn’t been so horrifying. Thomas had been at the villa only ten days before The Beast caught us talking in private and ordered him to leave. Did my uncle fear I was confiding in Thomas? As The Beast’s bullies rushed forward moments later, to escort Thomas away, he leaned in and whispered. “I’ll come for you, tonight. Be ready.” That was his marriage proposal. I’ve often thought, had The Beast not ordered Thomas out, had we had a few days to plan, I might have lost my courage. I’d likely have convinced myself that my sins, my unholy body, and the curse upon my back made me unworthy of such a man. The rush, and Thomas’s confidence, swept me up, and I had no time for doubt.

Once in America, when the letter arrived telling me of Sabine’s death and of the infant daughter left under
Le Bête’s
roof,
I had to tell Thomas the whole truth. Crossing the Atlantic in a steel steamboat was arduous and dangerous, to say nothing of entering the villa. He had to know why I asked him to risk his life to steal an infant from her bed and take her out of France. I wasn’t far into my confession, when he stopped me and held me, his rough chin against my cheek. “In a thousand ways,” he said, “you’ve already told me.”

Now, I watched Willow and Clay and how their relationship evolved from the afternoon he carried her into the house and up the wide stairs to Mémé’s bed, her head dropped against his chest. Brushing hands moved into holding hands. A first kiss quickly became passionate kissing. At times, Willow felt Clay couldn’t be real, that she’d awaken from her dream of him and find he was as imaginary as weeds growing out of flagstone. She was certain Papa would tell her to ‘Slow down.’ He’d be afraid for her, but she believed Clay was different. Still, there were times when she knew he kept parts of his past a secret.

Clay wasn’t at Farthest House the bright afternoon Willow held Prairie’s small hand as they moved at the child’s toddler pace along a garden path and off between flower beds where roses bloomed in great bushels of perfumed red and farther still under shade trees. They walked to the edge of the yard where Willow loved to stand. There, under the great bowl of blue sky, she had the farthest view and the widest perspective. She breathed deeply, inviting the wind over her face and through her hair and almost believed her fear of Mary stalking was imaginary.

I’d stood there, too, watching the road with the same dull ache in my stomach, checking for signs of Thomas returning after days on another photography expedition. Afraid that he wouldn’t come back, that he’d been caught in a massacre, or imprisoned in a damp dungeon an ocean away from me.

Willow marveled at the blooms on the slope leading down to the river and how they changed with the seasons, going from pink and white wild flowers in the spring to yellow and gold in the fall. Currently, it was wild mustard, sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, and Mad Apple with its white trumpet-shaped flowers. Some few minutes passed before Willow realized there was also a haze of bees working over the acres, thousands, maybe tens of thousands, low over the plants. She tugged on Prairie’s hand, “Let’s hurry and visit Jonah.”

He stood in the shade of his tool shed with an overturned shovel, the scoop against his hip, as he cleaned it with a wooden scraper. Black dirt crumbled down one pant leg. His overalls looked empty and held up only by the hanger of his shoulders. A knot tightened in Willow’s stomach. The two of them had yet to have a meaningful conversation, and their relationship felt like torn fabric. She missed what they’d lost, and she had no idea how much longer she’d be at Farthest House, though she wanted never to leave. And there was his age. The few long and slow good-byes that Death allowed were only a ruse: Death loved to surprise.

As she approached him, she realized that in the years she’d been away, Jonah had become the “outside man.” When Mémé lived, he’d often been in the kitchen handing over his tomatoes, fixing something, or just sitting with Mémé over seed catalogues while Mable peeled potatoes or stirred cookie dough. Willow wondered, too, who neatly stitched squares of almost-matching fabric on the worn knees and elbows of his clothes, who purchased his coffee, his eggs, his underwear? Who cut his hair?

He lifted his head, the skin on his neck stretching as he sighted them from below his sagging lids.

Willow smiled. “How are you?”

Seconds passed, then a barely audible, “Yup.”

So much for small talk. “I’m feeling better today,” she said. There it was again, a childish confession, an obvious attempt to receive love.

He continued scraping his shovel, his age also evident in the tremor of his hands. She longed to put an arm around his stooped shoulders, to tell him she cursed time for its cruelty to him, but mentioning anything of the sort would only call attention to his palsy. She wanted him to believe she didn’t notice.

“You’re seeing that college fellow now,” he said.

“Clay?” Had Mable told him? Or did he see more through his cloudy and closing eyes than she supposed? Had he seen Clay and her earlier through the library window? Clay leaning against the desk, his arms around her waist, while she leaned dangerously close into the vee of his open legs and they played at verbal badminton? Had Jonah seen the long kiss?

“Thought you’d go home by now,” he said.

A webby rash of goose flesh fanned across Willow’s back. Before she could answer, Prairie, with her dimpled knees and unsteady waddle of a run, started after a butterfly, heading across the grass. “Prairie stop. Come back here.”

Prairie did stop, and Willow frowned at herself. Did she really suppose the one-year-old would bypass the manor and head down the driveway for Old Squaw Road where Mary waited with her passenger door open:
Come in, little girl.
Yes, exactly that.

Jonah tucked his wooden scraper into his back pocket and drew out a snakestone. His file hit the shovel in short, hard strokes, sunlight ricocheting off the burnished steel. His jowls, soft and round floated beneath his skin. “This ain’t a place for young people.”

“We’re still not welcome?” Willow asked. “What part of Farthest House isn’t good for us?”

Jonah didn’t answer.

Two bees entered her space, and she took a quick step back, her stomach sinking. Were they attracted to worry and irritation? She had plenty of both. Jonah wasn’t going to talk, the bees refused to move on despite her batting at them, and Prairie threatened to run off. Coming outside had been a bad idea.

She felt the tiny touch of a bee landing on her hand, she jerked, shook the insect off and swatted at the air as the bee lifted but threatened to land again. “Jonah! Why are they doing this?”

“Quit dancing.”

A third and then a fourth orbited her.

“Are you siccing them on me?”

His yellowed eyes fixed in her direction, but they looked into the past. “They ain’t acted this way since your mama.”

A bee touched her neck, and she tried to swat it off, but she felt it roll once under her fingers and then the quick fire of a sting. The bee dropped, and she palmed the pain. “Dammit!” For Prairie’s sake, she managed to keep back a far bloodier scream.

Jonah leaned the shovel against the shed and turned toward his cabin. “I’ll fix that.”

The other bees were still bothering. Jonah’s cabin was nearer than Farthest House, and he’d actually extended something of an invitation. Hadn’t he? She hurried after Prairie, grabbed her up, and returned so quickly on Jonah’s slow heels, she almost ran into him. His stiff and laborious walk, full of age-shortened steps, added to her sense of a world grown hopeless. When he stepped through the narrow door of his cabin, a shadow into a shadow, she followed, Prairie on her hip, and pulled the door shut so hard and quick the thin cabin walls shook.

Absolute darkness. Odors close and strong: boiled onions, cabbage, turnips, raw honey, old work clothes, rotting wood. She feared Prairie would slap pudgy hands over her nose and say, “Ack.”

Squares of diffused light, like blocks of faint auras, she counted four, made her squint into the darkness to try and understand.

A harsh bulb above the kitchen sink flashed on, and the long, frayed string Jonah had pulled swung in the air. She looked around, unable to stop herself. Jonah’s place, like his body, looked pared down to a line drawing. If the whole of his wealth was there, she could count his possessions on her fingers: a small table with two unmatched chairs, one wood, one aluminum, a refrigerator, a slouching brown sofa with lighter areas where the fabric pile had been worn away. Through a doorway, a small, unmade bed, a nest really, with its mattress sunken in the middle and looking so lumpy it might have been filled with stones, and an old Bible on an end table. She could imagine the Bible splayed across his bony knees, his shaky hands slowly turning the stained and yellowed pages, his eyes reverent over the words and evoked images. Though the Bible held no fascination for her, she imagined Jonah entering the verses the way she entered her paintings, as if through wickets in hedges.

He opened the refrigerator with its door as round as a coffin top. With trembling hands, he brought out an egg, cracked it on the side of a cup, let the yolk and white fall in, and scratched at the lining of the empty shell, lifting out a piece of thin membrane the size of his thumbnail.

The small wooden table butted the wall, and Willow took one chair, keeping Prairie in her lap while Jonah shuffled to her, his chin raised so he could focus on her wound. With fingers she felt wobbling against her skin, he fumbled his egg-membrane remedy over the pain. Instant coolness. For a few seconds, he remained standing at her side, examining his work so closely Willow could have leaned and rested her cheek against his chest. “Thank you,” she said.

He reached for a porcelain teakettle I’d given him as a Christmas present. Over the decades, the porcelain had chipped so much the original color was nearly lost. He’d kept the pot, though, and I told myself his doing so proved he carried no animosity towards me for what happened later.

Only a pencil-thin stream of water leaked from the faucet, but he stood at the sink watching the kettle fill. Willow searched for the mysterious lights she’d seen: wisps of eerie moon-colored glow, vague as smoke rings, large, square smoke rings. Her stomach fell. His windows. Each had been covered in a thick tarp-like material and was held tight with a row of nails hammered up and across and down. The shrouding couldn’t be seen through, although in the dark, traces of light seeped in around the edges. She remembered the black, construction-paper rings Sister Dominic Agnes draped around the classroom window, and she had to swallow back a moan of sadness. Who did Jonah fear might look in? Had he been as afraid when Mémé was alive? Did his hiding away have something to do with the long-ago murder Tory told Clay about? Or the graves across the yard?

The teapot scraped on the stove burner. “The bees don’t mind me,” Jonah said.

She watched the blue flame licking around the bottom of the kettle.

“They don’t mind color,” he continued.

Growing more accustomed to the dim light, Prairie pushed and squirmed to be put down. Willow let her stand on her own feet and then toddle out of reach, cold rushing the tips of Willow’s now-empty fingers. “They mind me,” she said. “What color am I?”

He stood so close to the stove she wondered that he didn’t feel the heat and step back, but he only turned his body slowly in her direction, looking so stiff he might have been one calcified piece. “Yell-ow,” he said.

Willow needed a moment. “Yellow?”