Paradise (34 page)

Finally out of the ditch, Lone naturally sought out a DuPres. She had been reared in that family, rescued, then taught by one of the daughters. More than that, she knew what they were made of. Pious DuPres, son of Booker DuPres and nephew to the famous Juvenal DuPres, was her first choice. Like the Morgans and Blackhorses, they were pleased to be descendants of men who had governed in statehouses, but unlike them, they were prouder of earlier generations: artisans, gunsmiths, seamstresses, lacemakers, cobblers, ironmongers, masons whose serious work was stolen from them by white immigrants. Their deeper reverence was for the generations that had seen their shops burned and their supplies thrown overboard. Because white immigrants could not trust or survive fair competition, their people had been arrested, threatened, purged and eliminated from skilled labor and craft. But the families held on to what they could and what they had gained from 1755, when the first DuPres carried a white napkin over his arm and a prayer book in his pocket. The belief that steadied them was not grim. Virtue, unexpected goodness, made them smile. Deliberate righteousness lifted their hearts as little else could. They did not always know what it was, but they spent a lot of time trying to find out. Long before Juvenal was elected to the statehouse, supper conversation at a DuPres table focused on the problems each member was having, how each and all could handle or help. And always the turn was on the ethics of a deed, the clarity of motives, whether a behavior advanced His glory and kept His trust. None of the current DuPreses liked or approved of the Convent women, but that was way beside the point. The actions of Brood and Apollo had insulted them; Wisdom Poole was brother to their daughter-in-law, and in his participation in a group intent on hurting women—for whatever reason—they would quickly see the monster’s handiwork. And so they did. When Lone told them all she had heard and what she knew, Pious wasted no time. He instructed his wife, Melinda, to get over to the Beauchamps’ place; tell Ren and Luther to meet him. He and Lone would get to Deed Sands and Aaron Poole. Melinda said they ought to notify Dovey, but they could not agree on how to do that if Steward was there. Lone didn’t know if they had already started for the Convent or were waiting for sunrise but said someone should risk it and inform Dovey, who could, if she wanted to, let Soane know what was going on.

Tired from their night dance but happy, the women return to the house. Drying themselves, they ask Consolata to tell them again about Piedade, while they oil their heads with wintergreen.

“We sat on the shorewalk. She bathed me in emerald water. Her voice made proud women weep in the streets. Coins fell from the fingers of artists and policemen, and the country’s greatest chefs begged us to eat their food. Piedade had songs that could still a wave, make it pause in its curl listening to language it had not heard since the sea opened. Shepherds with colored birds on their shoulders came down from mountains to remember their lives in her songs. Travelers refused to board homebound ships while she sang. At night she took the stars out of her hair and wrapped me in its wool. Her breath smelled of pineapple and cashews….”

The women sleep, wake and sleep again with images of parrots, crystal seashells and a singing woman who never spoke. At four in the morning they wake to prepare for the day. One mixes dough while another lights the stove. Others gather vegetables for the noon meal, then set out the breakfast things. The bread, kneaded into mounds, is placed in baking tins to rise.

Sunlight is yearning for brilliance when the men arrive. The stone-washed blue of the sky is hard to break, but by the time the men park behind shin oak and start for the Convent, the sun has cracked through. Glorious blue. The water of the night rises as mist from puddles and flooded crevices in the road’s shoulder. When they reach the Convent, they avoid loud gravel crunch by weaving through tall grass and occasional rainbows to the front door. The claws, perhaps, snatch Steward out of the world. Mottled and glistening from rain, they flank the steps. As he mounts between them, he raises his chin and then his rifle and shoots open a door that has never been locked. It slants inward on its hinges. Sun follows him in, splashing the walls of the foyer, where sexualized infants play with one another through flaking paint. Suddenly a woman with the same white skin appears, and all Steward needs to see are her sensual appraising eyes to pull the trigger again. The other men are startled but not deterred from stepping over her. Fondling their weapons, feeling suddenly so young and good they are reminded that guns are more than decoration, intimidation or comfort. They are meant.

Deek gives the orders.

The men separate.

Three women preparing food in the kitchen hear a shot. A pause. Another shot. Cautiously they look through the swinging door. Backed by light from the slanted door, shadows of armed men loom into the hallway. The women race to the game room and close the door, seconds before the men position themselves in the hall. They hear footsteps pass and enter the kitchen they have just left. No windows in the game room—the women are trapped and know it. Minutes pass. Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood leave the kitchen and notice a trace of wintergreen in the air. They open the game room door. An alabaster ashtray slams into Arnold’s temple, exhilarating the woman wielding it. She continues to smash until he is down on all fours, while Jeff, taken off guard, aims his gun a tick too late. It flies from his hand when a cue stick cracks his wrist and then, on upswing, rams into his jaw. He raises his arm, first for protection, then to snatch the point of the cue when the frame of Catherine of Siena breaks over his head.

The women run into the hall, but freeze when they see two figures exit the chapel. As they run back to the kitchen, Harper and Menus are close behind. Harper grabs the waist and arm of one. She is a handful, so he doesn’t see the skillet swinging into his skull. He falls, dropping his gun. Menus, struggling to handcuff the wrists of another, turns when his father goes down. The stock that drenches his face is so hot he can’t yell. He drops to one knee and a woman’s hand reaches for the gun spinning on the floor. Hurt, half blinded, he yanks her left ankle. She crashes kicking at his head with her right foot. Behind him a woman aims a butcher knife and plunges it so deep in the shoulder bone she can’t remove it for a second strike. She leaves it there and escapes into the yard with the other two, scattering fowl as they go.

Coming from the second floor, Wisdom Poole and Sargeant Person see no one. They enter the schoolroom where light pours through the windows. They search behind desks pushed to the wall even though it is clear nobody, even a child, is small enough to hide there.

Down below under long slow beams of a Black & Decker, Steward, Deek and K.D. observe defilement and violence and perversions beyond imagination. Lovingly drawn filth carpets the stone floor. K.D. fingers his palm cross. Deek taps his shirt pocket where sunglasses are tucked. He had thought he might use them for other purposes, but he wonders if he needs them now to shield from his sight this sea of depravity beckoning below. None dares step on it. More than justified in their expectations, they turn around and climb the stairs. The schoolroom door is wide open; Sargeant and Wisdom motion them in. Bunched at the windows, all five understand: the women are not hiding. They are loose.

Shortly after the men have left Sargeant’s place, the citizens of Ruby arrive at the Oven. The rain is slowing. The trash barrel swirls with debris. The stream has crested but doesn’t overflow its banks. It seeps underground instead. Rain cascading off the Oven’s head meets mud speckled with grout flakes washed away from bricks. The Oven shifts, just slightly, on one side. The impacted ground on which it rests is undermined. In trucks and cars the citizens go to meet the men.

Neither of the sisters needs persuading, for both have known something awful was happening. Dovey asks Soane to drive. Each is silent with loud, rocketing thoughts. Dovey has watched her husband destroy something in himself for thirty years. The more he gained, the less he became. Now he may be ruining everything. Had twenty-five years of rampant success confused him? Did he think that because they lived away from white law they were beyond it? Of course, no one could ask for a more doting husband and as long as she ignored the unknowable parts, their marriage seemed perfect. Still, she misses the little foreclosed house where her Friend visited. Only once since K.D. took it over has he come to her and that was in a dream where he was moving away from her. She called; he turned. Next thing she knew, she was washing his hair. She woke, puzzled, but pleased to see that her hands were wet from the suds.

Soane is chastising herself for not having talked, just talked, to Deek. Told him she knew about Connie; that the loss of their third child was a judgment against her—not him. After Connie saved Scout’s life, Soane’s resentment against her evaporated and, because the two of them had become fast friends, she believed she had forgiven Deek also. Now she wondered whether her fear of suffocating in air too thin for breathing, her unrelieved mourning for her sons, keeping the ache alive by refusing to read their last letters were ways of punishing him without seeming to. In any case, she was certain that routing the Convent women had something to do with their marriage. Harper, Sargeant and certainly Arnold wouldn’t lift a hand to those women if Deek and Steward had not authorized and manipulated them. If only she had talked twenty-two years ago. Just talked.

“What do you think?” Dovey broke the silence.

“I can’t.”

“They wouldn’t hurt them, would they?”

Soane cut off the wipers. There was no need for them now. “No,” she answered. “Just scare them. Into leaving, I mean.”

“People talk about them all the time, though. Like they were…slime.”

“They’re different is all.”

“I know, but that’s been enough before.”

“These are women, Dovey. Just women.”

“Whores, though, and strange too.”

“Dovey!”

“That’s what Steward says, and if he believes it—”

“I don’t care if they’re—” Soane couldn’t imagine worse. Both became quiet.

“Lone said K.D. is out there.”

“He would be.”

“You think Mable knows? Or Priscilla?” asks Dovey.

“Doubt it. Hadn’t been for Lone, would we?”

“It’ll be all right, I guess. Aaron and Pious will stop them. And the Beauchamps. Even Steward won’t mess with Luther.”

The sisters laughed then, small hopeful laughs, soothing themselves as they sped through glorious dawn air.

Consolata wakes. Seconds earlier she thought she heard footsteps descending. She assumed it was Pallas coming to nurse the baby lying beside her. She touches the diaper to see if a change is needed. Something. Something. Consolata goes chill. Opening the door she hears retreating steps too heavy, too many for a woman. She considers whether or not to disturb the baby’s sleep. Then, quickly slipping on a dress, blue with a white collar, she decides to leave the child on the cot. She climbs the stairs and sees immediately a shape lying in the foyer. She runs to it and cradles the woman in her arms, smearing her cheek and the left side of her dress with blood. The pulse at the neck is there but not strong; the breathing is shallow. Consolata rubs the fuzz on the woman’s head and begins to step in, deep, deeper to find the pinpoint of light. Shots ring from the next room.

Men are firing through the window at three women running through clover and Scotch broom. Consolata enters, bellowing, “No!”

The men turn.

Consolata narrows her gaze against the sun, then lifts it as though distracted by something high above the heads of the men. “You’re back,” she says, and smiles.

Deacon Morgan needs the sunglasses, but they are nestled in his shirt pocket. He looks at Consolata and sees in her eyes what has been drained from them and from himself as well. There is blood near her lips. It takes his breath away. He lifts his hand to halt his brother’s and discovers who, between them, is the stronger man. The bullet enters her forehead.

Dovey is screaming. Soane is staring.

“This dying may take a while.” Lone is desperate for Doublemint as she stanches the white woman’s wound. She and Ren have carried her to the sofa in the game room. Lone can’t hear a heartbeat, and although the neck pulse seems still to be there, too much blood has left this woman with wrists small as a child’s.

“Has anybody gone for Roger?” she shouts.

“Yes,” somebody shouts back.

The noise outside the room is giving her a headache along with a fierce desire to chew. Lone leaves the woman to see what is being done to salvage a life or two from the mess.

Dovey is weeping on the stairs.

“Dovey, you have to shut up now. I need a thinking woman. Come in here and get some water; try to get that girl in there to drink it.” She drags her toward the kitchen where Soane is.

Earlier, Deacon Morgan had carried Consolata into the kitchen, holding her in his arms for the time it took the women to clear the table. He laid her down carefully, as though any rough gesture might hurt her. It was after Consolata was comfortable—Soane’s raincoat folded under her head—that his hands trembled. Then he left to help with the wounded men. Menus, unable to get the knife from his shoulder, was whinnying in pain. Harper’s head was swelling, but it was Arnold Fleetwood who seemed to be suffering a concussion. And Jeff’s broken jaw and cracked wrist needed attention. Other Ruby people, stirred by the first caravan, had arrived, increasing twofold the disorder and the din. Reverend Pulliam removed the knife from Menus’ shoulder and had great difficulty trying to get both Jury men and the Fleetwoods to agree to go to the Demby hospital. A message came from Deed Sands’ son that Roger’s return from Middleton was expected this morning, and soon as he got back his daughter would send him along. Pulliam was finally persuasive and drove the hurt men away.