The Gamble (I) (43 page)

The sight of it brought a leap to Gandy’s heart, a thrill to his blood, even though, like Oakleigh, the house was glimpsed through snarls of vines and thickets of cedar and gum trees that had encroached upon the long lane, rendering it impassable. In its prime, the lane had been meticulously maintained. But today Gandy was forced to rein in after traveling less than a quarter of its length. In the early evening shadows the choking vegetation seemed to lend a menacing note to their reception. The overwhelming catlike smell of the gum trees seemed offensive, as if warning all mortals to keep away.

“Wait here,” Gandy ordered, looping the reins around the whip bracket.

He went alone, picking his way through fifteen years’ unchecked growth until he reached the massive magnolia—the one with the widest limb span in the state of Mississippi—that had dominated Waverley’s front yard for as long as he could remember. But his disappointment redoubled at the sight of it, too, overrun by vines and hemmed in by his mother’s precious boxwoods. She’d brought the boxwoods all the way from Georgia as a young bride and had nurtured them lovingly as long as she’d been alive. Their geometric perfection was long gone, for they’d been pruned by nothing but wild deer for years and years, leaving them grotesque and misshapen. Selena Gandy would have been appalled at their present disgraceful state.

Her son scratched his face on the unkempt bushes as he forced his way through them to the front entrance. The marble steps were intact, as was the iron grillework on the overhanging balcony and the ruby-red sidelights of
Venetian glass surrounding the massive front door.

But the door itself wouldn’t budge.

He cupped a hand over his eyes and tried to peer inside, but the door faced south, and now in the descending twilight little light came through the windows around the matching north door across the entry hall. All he could make out were the carved lyre-shaped inserts on the insides of the windows. Beyond these, images appeared vague, translucent, as if viewed through a glass of burgundy wine.

He pounded on the door and called, “Is anybody there? Leatrice, y’all in there?”

Only silence greeted him and the sudden rat-a-tat of a woodpecker somewhere in the dense growth behind him.

The back door proved no more hospitable than the front. The two entrances were identical, with twin Doric columns fronting recessed porches two stories high. The only differences were the second, shorter pair of columns guarding the front door and the pair of familiar black wooden benches on either side of the back door. The sight of them brought another stab of nostalgia to Scott. They were thick, heavy, made of bois d’arc wood from the cypress swamps down by the river, bent and looped into the modified fanback design by the hands of slaves long before he himself had been born. It was upon the bois d’arc benches he remembered his mother and father sitting while Delia fed the peacocks.

Leaving the house behind, he followed a track showing evidence of recent use, past the old kitchen, the octagonal ice house, the gardens, the tannery, the stables, toward the slave cabins out back. He smelled Leatrice’s woodsmoke long before he reached her door.

Knocking, he called, “Leatrice?”

“Who dat?” she called in a voice like flatulent wind escaping a bloated horse.

“Open up and see for yourself.” He smiled, his face close to the rough door as he waited.

“Sumbuddy full o’ sass, fo’ sure.” The door swung open and there she stood, nearly as big around as the century-old magnolia out front, her skin as coarse and black as its bark, and, like the tree, looking every bit as if she were here to stay forever.

“What kind o’ welcome is that?” he teased, leaning an elbow on the doorsill and letting a grin slide up his cheek.

“Who... Lawd o’ mercy”—her eyes flew wide. “Dat you, Mastuh?” She had never added the
Le
to LeMaster, and had always scoffed at the familiar
Scott.
“Praise mah soul, chile! It’s you!”

“It’s me.” He lunged inside and scooped her up, though his arms reached scarcely two-thirds of the way around her. She smelled of woodsmoke and cracklings and poke greens, and her hug was mighty enough to threaten his bones.

“Mah baby come home!” she rejoiced, shedding tears, praising the heavens. “Lawd, Lawd, he come home at lass.” She backed off and held him by the ears. “Lemme have a look.”

Her voice was like no other in humankind, a deep rumbling bass that could not come out softly, no matter how she tried. She had smoked a corncob pipe all her days, and it was anybody’s guess what concoctions she’d stuffed into it. Something long ago had damaged her larynx and left it able to emit only the grating sound no one ever forgot once they’d heard it.

“Jiss like I thought,” she pronounced, “skinny as a sparrow’s kneecap. What they been feedin’ ya, pot likker?” She turned Scott around by the shoulders, inspected him minutely, then swung him again to face her. “Well, ol’ Leatrice fatten ya up in no time. Mose!” she called without looking back over her shoulder. “Come see who’s heah.”

“Mose is here?” Gandy’s face registered happy surprise as he glanced beyond her shoulder.

“Sho’ is,” said the aged black man who emerged out of the shadows and crossed the wooden floor with an arthritic shuffle. “Nevuh goed. Stayed right heah where I belonged.”

“Mose,” Scott said affectionately, clasping one of the old man’s bony hands in both of his own. Mose was as thin as Leatrice was fat. His silver hair topped his head like Spanish moss, and, standing, he listed slightly to the left and forward, as if his spine refused to straighten completely anymore.

“Fifteen years,” the old man mused aloud in a thin, wispy voice. “’Bout time ya was gittin’ back heah.”

“I may not be stayin’,” Scott clarified immediately. “Just came t’ see the place again.”

Mose released Scott’s hand to brace his back. “Y’all be stayin’,” he said, as if there were no question.

Scott let his eyes slide assessingly from Mose to Leatrice. “So you two finally took up together.”

Leatrice cuffed him none too gently on the side of the head. “Watch yo’ tongue, boy. Ain’ I taught ya t’ respec’ yo’ elduhs? Me an’ Mose kep’ de place while y’all went gallyhooin’ ‘roun’.” She turned away with an air of superiority. “’Sides, I wou’n’t have ‘im. He too lazy, dat one. But he company.”

Scott rubbed the side of his head and smiled. “That any way t’ treat the boy who used t’ pick you wild blackberries and snitch roses for you from his mother’s garden?”

When Leatrice laughed the rafters overhead threatened to split. “Set down, boy. I got warm cornbread an’ black-eyed peas. Bes’ get t’ work hangin’ some fat on dem bones.”

Gandy stayed where he was. “I brought company. Think y’all could handle ham and biscuits for eight if I bring the ham and the fixin’s?”

“Eight?” Leatrice humphed and turned away as if slighted by the question. “Like feedin’ eight mosquitoes aftuh what I done feed in de good days. Y’all brung dat Ruby home, too?”

“I did. And Ivory, too.”

“Ivory, too.” Leatrice raised one eyebrow and added, sarcastically, “My, my, dat make four o’ us. Soon we be raisin’ cotton.”

Gandy smiled. Being tongue-lashed by Leatrice was exactly what he needed to make him feel as if he were home at last.

“I left them stranded in the lane. Couldn’t get into the big house.”

“Key’s right heah.” Leatrice pulled it from between her ample breasts. “Been keepin’ it in a safe spot. Mose, he open up.” She drew the leather thong over her head and handed it to the old man.

But Mose gaped at it as if it had eight legs. “Me?”

“Yas, you. Now, git!”

Mose backed off, shaking his head, eyes bugging as they fixed on the key. “Ain’t goin’ in dere, nossir, not ol’ Mose.”

“What you talkin’ ‘bout. ‘Cose you goin’ in dere. Got t’ open it up fo’ young Mastuh an’ his frien’s.”

Gandy watched the interchange with a puzzled frown.

“Git, now!” the black woman ordered imperiously.

Mose only shook his head fearfully and backed farther away.

“What is all this?” Scott demanded, frowning.

“Place got a hant.”

“A hant!”

“Thass right. I heard her. Mose heard her. She in dere, whimperin’. Y’all go in, ya heah her soon ‘nuff. What ya s’pose kep’ folks out all dese years? Not jiss two old black folk goin’ ‘round checkin’ de doors.”

Gandy’s neck stiffened even as he declared, “But that’s ridiculous. A ghost?”

Leatrice picked up his palm and into it slapped the keys, still warm from her breasts. “Y’all open it up yo’self. Leatrice, she cook. Leatrice, she make biscuits, she make ham. Leatrice, she bring dem ham and biscuits far as de back door.” She crossed her arms over her watermelon-sized breasts and gave one stubborn wag of the head. “But Leatrice don’t go near no hants. Noooo, suh!”

As he picked his way back toward the house, armed with several tallow candles, Scott clearly recalled the child’s voice he’d heard in the house after the war. Was it true, then? Was it Justine? Was she searching for her mother and father somewhere in the lofty, unoccupied rooms of Waverley? Or was it only the product of several overactive imaginations? He knew how superstitious black people were. Yet, he, too, had heard it, and he’d never had a superstitious bone in his body.

He shrugged aside the thought, rounded a corner of the house and bumped into something soft.

He gasped and let out a yelp.

But it was only Jack, prowling about the foundation of the old place, trailed by the others, who’d grown restless waiting in the carriages.

“She’s a beauty,” Jack declared, “and sound, too, from what I can see in this light.”

“Let’s go inside.”

As he inserted the key into Waverley’s front door, Scott found himself relieved to have the company of seven others, especially Willy, whose small hand he clasped tightly.

But once inside, all thoughts of ghosts fled. Even in the light of two candles, the massive rotunda welcomed him back. It smelled of disuse and dust, but nothing had changed. The Southern pine floors, the double staircase curving downward like two open arms, the giant pier mirrors reflecting the flickering candles, the hand-carved spindles lining the stairs, disappearing into the shadows overhead, the elegant brass chandelier dropping sixty feet from above—all waited to be polished and put to use again.

“Welcome to Waverley,” he said softly, his voice echoing to the lookout four stories above his head, then dropping back down as if the mansion itself had spoken to him.

They lit a fire in the massive downstairs dining room and ate the supper Leatrice prepared, though only Ivory and Ruby caught a glimpse of her as she delivered the hot food to the back door. Afterward, discussing sleeping arrangements, both Ivory and Ruby said they’d be more comfortable away from the big house, which they’d scarcely seen before as slave children. Though Gandy tried to convince them they were welcome to sleep there, they prevailed upon Leatrice and Moses to put them up out back.

Gandy settled Marcus and Jack into one of the four massive second-story bedrooms, Pearl and Jube in another, leaving himself and Willy. Of the two remaining rooms, there was the one he and Delia had shared and the northwest bedroom, which had forever been known as the children’s room. After inspecting them both he left the choice to Willy.

“That one.” Willy pointed. “It’s got a rockin’ horse.”

Scott, relieved that he need not face sleeping in his familiar rosewood bed without Delia, led Willy into the children’s room. Together they turned back the dust covers, shucked down to their underwear, and settled down beneath the dusty coverlets.

“Hey, Scotty?” Willy’s voice sounded smaller than ever in the big room when the candle was blown out.

“Hm?”

“I’m cold.”

Gandy chuckled and rolled onto his side. “Then get over here.”

Willy presented his back and burrowed his posterior into Scott’s belly. Coiling an arm around him, Scott couldn’t help thinking of Leatrice barking out the word “mosquito.” It felt as if Willy had twice as many ribs as other people and half as much fat.

“This is nicer than the storeroom. Mmm...”

That was the last sound Scott heard from Willy. In minutes the boy was asleep.

But Scott lay in his childhood bed for hours, feeling Willy’s heartbeat beneath his palm, listening to the regularity of his breathing, drawn back to Kansas by Willy’s last remark.

He thought about Gussie, the empty town, the emptier saloon. He closed his eyes and pictured her at her sewing machine with Willy’s empty stool beside her, limping down the street to eat alone at Paulie’s, sitting on the top step in the winter wind, wrapped in her pelisse while snow fell on its hood. But the picture that burned brightest of all was none that he imagined, but one he recalled—Gussie with blood staining her nightgown as she lay in his bed and he kissed her.

He forced his eyes wide, as if attempting to transmute the memory into reality.

But around him pressed only unrelieved blackness. He tried to acclimate himself to its density, but it was difficult to do so. In Kansas there had been streetlamps. On the train the moon had lit the landscape. But here, at Waverley, beneath the giant magnolias and pines and creeping wisteria vines, the blackness was absolute. If there were a ghost, it could surely choose no better place. And if it wanted to make itself known, it could certainly choose no better time. After all, he already felt haunted by Agatha. What was one more ghost?

But none appeared. None spoke. And in the end, Gandy slept fitfully, warmed by Willy’s small body.

* * *

He awakened early and lay for minutes recalling the past; remembering how his father had begun each day by surveying his domain from the very spot designed for it. That spot drew him irresistibly to follow in his father’s footsteps. Quietly, he slipped from bed into his clothing and climbed up the stairs, up past the third floor, whose four closed doors led into the immense windowless attic beneath the main roof. The trunk room, they’d always called it, where Scott had often played with his brothers on rainy days and where members of the family had been isolated whenever they were ill.