Gone South (50 page)

Maybe. It would be the biggest gamble of his life.

He found himself stroking his brother’s arm through the T-shirt. Clint was as famished as he was. As tired, too. He was going to sleep for a week.

Get out of this damn swamp and get rich, I won’t never look back.

He had never been able to get out before, he realized, because he’d never had anything to go to. What if …? he wondered.

What if?

Maybe those two words were the first steps out of any swamp.

“Comin’ close!” Train called. “Jump over and tie us up, fellas!”

As Flint and Cecil secured the lines to cleats, Train stepped onto the pier and walked to an old bronze bell supported on a post ten feet high. He grasped the bell’s rope and began to ring it, the notes rolling up over the green lawn and through the trees toward the white house on the hill.

In just a few seconds three figures came out of the house and began to hurry down the path.

They were nuns, wearing white habits.

“Sister Caroline, I sure’nuff got some hurt people here!” Train said to the one in the lead as they reached the pier.

“Got a fella with a hurt leg, one with an arm needs lookin’ at. And I
do
mean lookin’ at. Believe I could use a Band-Aid or two myself, ay?”

“Oh, Train!” She was a sturdy woman with light brown eyes. “What’s happened to you?”

“Gonna tell you all ’bout it later. Can you put us up?”

“We always have room. Sister Brenda, will you help Train to the house?”

“No, no, my legs ain’t broke!” Train said. “Tend to that man lyin’ there!”

Two of the nuns helped Arden get Dan up on his feet. Sister Caroline rang the bell a few more times, and two more nuns emerged to answer the call.

“What is this place?” Arden asked Sister Caroline as Dan was taken off the boat.

The other woman paused, staring at the birthmark. Arden moved so their eyes met. “This island is the convent of the Order of the Shining Light,” Sister Caroline answered. “And that” — and she nodded at the white mansion —” is the Avrietta Colbert Hospital. May I ask your name?”

“It’s Arden Halliday.”

“From?”

“Fort Worth, Texas.” Arden turned to Train. “I thought you told me the Bright Girl lived here!”

“The Bright … oh, I see.” Sister Caroline nodded, glancing from Arden to Train and back again. “Well, I prefer to think we are all bright … uh … women.” She gave Train a hard stare. “Does she know?”

“Non.”

“Know what?” Arden asked. “What’s goin’ on?”

“We shall see,” Sister Caroline said flatly, and she turned away to direct the others.

Dan was being walked up the path supported between two nuns, one a young girl maybe twenty-three, the other a woman in her fifties. The shadows of the oak and willow trees were deliciously cool, and a quartet of goats stood watching the group of pilgrims pass.

“Just a minute,” someone said, beside Dan.

The nuns stopped. Dan turned his head and found himself face-to-face with Flint Murtaugh.

Flint cleared his throat. He had his arms crossed over his chest, in case Clint made a spectacle of himself. These fine ladies would get a shock soon enough. “I want to thank you,” Flint said. “You saved our lives.”

“You did the same for me.”

“I did what I had to.”

“So did I,” Dan said.

They stared at each other, and Flint narrowed his eyes and looked away, then returned his cool blue gaze to Dan. “You know what I ought to do.”

“Yeah.” Dan nodded. Everything was still blurry around the edges; all of this — the morning’s events, Gault’s stronghold, the gun battle, the Swift severing of the house in two, this green and beautiful island — seemed like bits and pieces of a strange dream. “Tell me what you’re
gonna
do.”

“I think —” Flint paused. He had careful considerations to make. He held a man’s future in the balance: his own. “I think … I’m gonna get out of this damn swamp,” he said. “Pardon me, Sisters.” He looked up the path at the man walking alone. “Cecil, can I talk to you, please?” He left Dan’s side, and Dan saw Murtaugh put his hand on Eisley’s shoulder as they began to walk together.

The closer they got to the house, the more in need of repair Dan saw it was. He counted a half-dozen places where rainwater must be leaking through loose boards. A section of porch railing on the first floor was rotten and sagging, and several of the columns were cracked. The place needed repainting, too, otherwise the salt breeze and the damp heat would combine to break down the wood in a very short time. He bet the old house had termites, too, chewing at the foundation.

They needed a carpenter around here, is what they needed.

Dan tried to put weight on his injured ankle, but the pain made him sick to his stomach. He was getting dizzy again, and his head was pounding. The blurred edges of things got still more blurry. He was about to give out, and though he fought it, he knew the sickness eventually had to win.

“Sisters?” he said. “I’m sorry … but I’m real near passin’ out.”

“Train!” the older one shouted. “Help us!”

As Dan’s knees buckled and the darkness rushed up at him once more, he heard Train say, “Got him, ladies.” Dan felt himself being lifted over Train’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry before he passed out completely, and Train — weak himself but unwilling to let Dan hit the ground — took him the last thirty yards to the house.

Late afternoon had come.

Arden was freshly showered and had slept for five solid hours in a four-poster bed in the room Sister Caroline had brought her to, on the antebellum mansion’s first floor. Before her shower another nun about Arden’s age had brought her a lunch of celery soup, a ham salad sandwich, and iced tea. When Arden had asked the young woman if the Bright Girl lived here, the nun had given her a tentative smile and left without a word.

On the way to this room they’d passed through a long ward of beds. Most of the beds were in use. Under ceiling fans and crisp white sheets lay some of the patients of the Avrietta Colbert Hospital: a mixture of men, women, and children, white, black, and Latino. Arden had heard the rattling coughs of tuberculosis, the gasping of cancerous lungs, the slow, labored breathing of people who were dying. The nuns moved around, giving what comfort they could. Some patients were getting better, sitting up and talking; for others, though, it seemed the days were numbered. Arden heard a few Cajun accents, though certainly not all the patients were of that lineage. She was left with the impression that this might be a charity hospital for the poor, probably from the Gulf Delta area, and that the patients were there because no mainland hospital would accept them or — in the case of the elderly ones who lay dying — waste time on them.

The same young nun brought Arden a change of clothes: a green hospital gown and cotton slippers. Not long after she’d awakened there’d been a knock at the door, and when she’d opened it there stood a tall, slim man who was maybe in his mid-sixties, wearing a pair of seersucker trousers, a rumpled white short-sleeve shirt, and a dark blue tie. He’d introduced himself in a gentle Cajun accent as Dr. Felicien, and he’d sat down in an armchair and asked her how she was feeling, was she comfortable, did she have any aches or pains, things like that. Arden had said she was still tired but otherwise fine; she’d said she had come here to find the Bright Girl, and did he know who she meant?

“I most think I do,” Dr. Felicien had said. “But I gonna have to beg off and leave that for later. You try to get yourself some more sleep now, heah?” He’d gone without answering any further questions.

A fan turned above her bed. Her window looked out toward the Gulf, and she could see waves rolling in. Shadows lay across the lawn. She had figured this room belonged to a doctor or someone else on the staff. When she went in the small but spotless bathroom to draw water from the faucet into a Dixie cup, she looked at her face in the mirror, studying her birthmark as she had a thousand times before.

She was very, very scared.

What if it had been a lie? All along, a lie? Maybe Jupiter hadn’t been lying, but he’d just been plain wrong. Maybe he’d seen a young and pretty blond woman in LaPierre when he was a little boy, and maybe later on he’d heard the myths about a Bright Girl — a faith healer who could cheat time itself — and he’d mixed up one with the other? But if there
was
a Bright Girl, then who was she,
really?
Why had Train brought her here, and what was going on?

She lifted her hand and ran her fingers along the edges of her birthmark. What would she do, she asked herself, if this mark — this bad-luck stain that had ruined her life — had to remain on her face for the rest of her days? What if there was no magic healing touch? No ageless Bright Girl who carried a lamp from God inside her?

Closing her eyes, Arden leaned her face against the mirror. She’d felt she was so close. So very close. It was a cruel trick, this was. Nothing but a cruel, cruel trick.

Someone knocked at the door. Arden went to open it, thinking that it was probably Dr. Felicien with more questions or the young nun.

She opened the door and the face that looked at her both startled and horrified her.

It belonged to a man. He had neatly combed sandy-brown hair on the right side of his head, but on the left side there were just tufts of it. A terrible burn and the subsequent healing process had drawn the skin up into shiny parchment on that left side, his mouth twisted, the left eye sunken in folds of scar tissue. The left ear was a melted nub and the man’s throat was mottled with burn scar. His nose, though scarred, had escaped the worst of the damage, and the right side of his face was almost untouched. Arden stepped back, her own face mirroring the shock she felt, but at once that feeling changed to shame. If anybody understood what it meant to look at someone shrink away from you in a display of ill manners and idiocy, it was she.

But if the man was bothered by her reaction, he didn’t show it. He smiled. He was wearing dark blue pants, a blue-striped shirt, and a bow tie. “Miss Halliday?”

Arden remembered she’d told Dr. Felicien she was unmarried.

“She wants to see you,” the burn-scarred man said.

“She?
Who?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I forget that everybody ’round here doesn’t know her name. Miz Kathleen McKay. I believe she’s who you’ve come to find.”

“She’s —” Arden’s heart slammed. “She’s the Bright Girl?”

“Some would call her that, I ’magine. If you’d like to come with me?”

“Yes! I would! Just a minute!” She crossed the room and got the little pink bag from atop a dresser.

On the way out they went through another ward toward the rear of the hospital, and in passing the man spoke to the patients, calling their names, giving some encouragement, throwing a joking remark here and there. Arden couldn’t help but see how the patients — even the very, very sick ones — perked up at this man’s presence. She saw their faces, and she saw that not one of them flinched or showed any degree of distaste. It dawned on her that they didn’t see his scars.

Arden followed him away from the house and along another fieldstone path that led toward a grove of pecan trees. “I hear you had a time findin’ us,” the man said as they walked.

“Yes, I did.” She figured Dr. Felicien or somebody had gotten the whole story from either Dan or Train.

“That’s a good sign, I think.”

“It is?”

“Surely,” he said, and he smiled again. “It’s not far, right through here.” He led her under a canopy of interlocking tree branches, and just on the other side was a small but immaculately kept white clapboard house with a screened-in front porch. Off to one side was a flower garden, and a plot of vegetables as well. Arden felt faint as the man walked up the front steps and opened the door to the screened porch.

He must have noticed her condition, because he said, “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Just a little light-headed.”

“Breathe deep a few times, that oughta help.”

She did, standing at the threshold. And suddenly she realized who this fire-scarred man must be. “What’s … what’s your name?” she asked.

“Pearly Reese.”

She had known it, but still it almost knocked her knees out from under her. She remembered the prostitute at the cafe in St. Nasty saying that the Bright Girl was an old woman who
came to Port Fourchon to see my mama’s cousin. His name was Pearly, he was seven years old when he got burned up in a fire. Near thirty years ago,
she’d said.
The Bright Girl took him with her in a boat.

“Do you know me?” Pearly asked.

“Yes I do,” she said. “Your second cousin helped me get here.”

“Oh.” He nodded, even if he didn’t quite understand. “I think that must be a good sign, too. You ready to meet her?”

“I am,” Arden said.

He took her inside.

O
NCE INSIDE THE DOOR
, Pearly called, “Miz McKay? I brought her!”

“Come on back, then! I know I look a fright, but come on back anyway!”

It had been the raspy voice of an old woman, yes. Dan had been right, Arden realized as the first hard punch of reality hit her. There was no such thing as a woman who could stay young forever. But even if Jupiter had been mistaken about that part of it, the Bright Girl could still have the healing touch in her hands. She was terrified as she followed Pearly through a sitting room, a short hallway, and then into a bedroom.

And there was the Bright Girl, propped up on peach-colored pillows in bed. Sunlight spilled through lace-curtained windows across the golden pine-plank floor, and above the bed a ceiling fan politely murmured.

“Oh,”
Arden whispered, and as tears came to her eyes her hand flew up to cover her mouth so she wouldn’t say something stupid.

The Bright Girl was, indeed, an elderly woman. Maybe she was eighty-five, possibly older. If her hair had ever been blond, it was all snow now. Her face was heavily lined and age-spotted, but even so, Arden could tell that in her long-ago youth this woman had been lovely. She was wearing a white gown, and now she reached to a bedside table for a pair of wire-rimmed eyeglasses. The movement was slow, and her mouth tightened with pain. The fingers of her hand were all twisted and malformed, and she had difficulty picking the glasses up. At once Pearly was at her side, but he didn’t put the glasses on her face for her. He steadied her hand so her gnarled fingers could do the work. Then she got the glasses on, and Arden saw that behind the lenses there was still fire in the Bright Girl’s pale amber eyes. Like lamps, Arden thought. Like shining lamps.