Southern Gods (14 page)

Her hands were clutched into fists, Sarah saw, and dripping water onto the floor.

“Something wrong, Alice? Mommy?” Franny stood, jammied and frizzy, in the door to Alice’s rooms.

Sarah made her body unclench, loosened her shoulders. This was
Alice
. If there was anyone she should listen to, to trust, it was her.

“No, baby. We were just talking.”

“Girl, you go brush them teeth. Now,” Alice said, and Sarah marveled at how brusque she could be yet still put love in her voice.

Franny stuck out her tongue at Alice, turned, and disappeared.

And suddenly, Sarah couldn’t find any reason to be angry with Alice anymore. It was as if anger in her had been snuffed out, like a candle.

Alice eased, opened her dripping hands, and then turned back to the sink.

“Your momma asked for you this afternoon, wants you to bring her sip. She’s a little cranky, to be honest.” Alice paused here, slumped her shoulders and leaned into the counter. “Or she was earlier. Might be better now, but I doubt it. I’ll make sure the kids get to sleep real soon. You go on and talk to your momma. Don’t let nothing she’s got to say bother you.” Alice winked at her. A peace offering. “Oh, there’s another bottle of Wellings in the Library. Saw you been working in there. You getting ready to go back to school?”

Sarah shook her head, laughed a little at the idea. “No, of course not. That night I couldn’t sleep, I just started remembering the two years I spent at Hollins before the war, and Latin class.” Sarah almost said translating the little book kept her mind off things, but stopped when she realized she didn’t want to say what.

“Always knew you were happy when you were at college, though I missed you something fierce. After you see your momma, I’ll have a toddy waiting for you down in the library, if you want. You can do a little more reading, or whatever, and drink it there. After talking to you momma, you might need it.”

“That sounds wonderful, Alice. What would I do without you?”

“Don’t have to flatter me, none, Sarah. I’m here. You know that. I’ll always be here.”

Alice stopped her dishwashing, looked down into the water.

***

Sarah went to the library, glanced at the open book on the green ink blotter of the oak desk, then retrieved the port from the dry bar nestled amongst the volumes.

The gallery was dark as Sarah walked up to the second floor where her room, the bathroom she’d just bathed Franny in, and her mother’s room were located. Around the other side of the gallery were two more rooms, one a ladies’ den and the other an unused guest room. At her mother’s door, she knocked.

There was no answer. Sarah rapped again, louder. Again no answer.

Sarah pushed her way in to the room, totally black except for the blue light coming from a big open bay window, ruffling the sheer drapes in the breeze. Sarah’s mind went briefly back to the night that Franny went missing. Sometimes, the sensation of her fright and pure terror of that night came back to her unwillingly and unwanted, catching in her chest and making her breath come in hard gasps.

She moved to her mother’s bed, realized it was empty, and looked around. In the shadow by the window, her mother sat on a padded bench, pulled from her vanity. She stared out the window, looking at something in the yard, or the field beyond it. Sarah came closer, walking up behind her mother. The old woman’s hair shone whitish blue from the moonlight streaming in through the window. Her shoulders slumped a little, but otherwise she looked at ease. As Sarah drew near, she could make out black shapes moving in the yard.

“Momma?” Sarah whispered.

Sarah’s mother muttered something she couldn’t make out, words in a low tone that hovered just beyond understanding. Sarah turned away, placed the tray of Wellings down on the bedside table, and returned to her mother.

“Momma? Are you okay?”

Sarah walked as softly as she could, rolling on each foot ball to toe, ball to toe. She paused, squatting, trying to hear the mutterings her mother made. But they were nonsense, breathy and unintelligible, like the Pentecostals speaking in tongues that she’d seen at a tent revival as a child. She tried to read her mother’s lips, but the older woman’s wild white hair covered her mouth. Sarah reached out and softly touched her mother’s hand, white with age, thin as parchment.

The moment Sarah’s hand came into contact with her mother’s, the old woman whipped her head around, snarling. Sarah, startled, fell backward, onto her haunches, sitting down heavily.

For an instant—a fleeting moment like the after image of a photographer’s flash—her mother’s face had been vicious, enraged. Her eyes appeared totally black, her cheeks mottled, her lips pulled back like those of a feral, savage dog, showing yellow teeth in black gums.

But then the image passed and Sarah wasn’t sure what had happened, what she had seen. She rose up from her seat on the floor.

“Sarah, don’t sneak up on your mother like that, goddammit. At least Alice has got the sense to just leave when I’m in my reverie.” The old woman smoothed the empty bust of her dress. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m not feeling too well, so I’m gonna be a little short. And sneaking up on me like that! I was lost in my own thoughts, staring out at the moon in the yard.”

“Momma, I knocked twice. Then I called your name a couple of times too. You didn’t answer. What were you saying?”

Sarah’s mother looked at her with narrowed eyes. “That’s none of your business, missy. You ought to let an old lady have her secrets. Anywho, I was just sitting here—”

“In the dark.”

“That’s right, in the dark, watching the peafowl out in the yard. If I turn on the light, they can see my silhouette and they know I’m watching them, which won’t do at all. Not at all.”

She turned toward Sarah, white hair a tangled spray in the blue light. Her dark eyes brightened. “Did you bring my sip?”

Sarah nodded and retrieved the tray by the bed.

“No, come help me get back in bed and then pour one.”

Sarah started back across the room, and her mother hissed, “Turn on the damned light, you ninny, so I can see.” Sarah turned once more, switched on the beside lamp, and then returned to her mother. She helped the old woman rise, and led her back to bed. Once her mother was comfortable, tucked under a goose down comforter, she poured a glass of the port. Her mother downed it immediately and held out the glass for another. She downed that one as well, and then sipped the third.

“Tell me, daughter. Why hasn’t that miscreant child of yours come to see me more often since she’s been here? I can hear her and Alice’s brood tromping up and down the halls—”

“Have they been bothering you, Momma? If they’ve been bothering you, we’ll stop them from coming up on this floor.”

“It’s not that, girl. Why hasn’t my granddaughter come to see me more?” Her mother stuck out a gnarled finger and jabbed it at Sarah. “More to the point, why haven’t you brought her to me? Hmm?”

Sarah remembered the years growing up in this house, her mother’s fierce interrogations, her rants, her rages. Elizabeth Rheinhart Werner had neither respect nor tolerance for timidity or shyness.

“She’s scared of you, mother. Franny thinks you’re turning into a wolf, to gobble her up. A stupid play on words that Jim made planted that idea in her head.”

Sarah’s mother gave a thick, wheezing laugh that quickly turned into a cough. When the coughs died, the old woman smiled, tears streaming down the sides of her withered, discolored face.

She laughed again, and said, “Whoo-ee, I’m starting to like that girl. I watch her from my window, you know. She’s a wild thing, not like you or your father. She’s like me.” Sarah’s mother tapped her ribcage with a gnarled finger. “Tell that little dumpling that I was born a wolf, and after many years, I’m finally becoming human.”

At that, Elizabeth settled into her cushions and asked Sarah to read to her from the volume of Dickens at her bedside table.

“I’ve been trying to finish
Bleak House
for months, my eyes are becoming so bad. And it’s not really a good book for right now, now that the big house isn’t so bleak anymore, eh? How bout young master Copperfield, or
Great Expectations
?”

Sarah poured her mother another port, leaned back in the chair beside the bed, and picked up
Great Expectations
.

After the first page, her mother asked for more port, which Sarah gave her, then started to snore, making a light chuffing sound. Sarah remained still, looking at her mother, hands in her lap, lightly holding the big book. Finally, she rubbed away the tears at the corners of her eyes and stood. Sarah carefully maneuvered the bookmark to the right page and quietly crept from her mother’s room.

On the gallery, it was darker than earlier, and a hush had fallen over the old house. The quiet made Sarah uneasy. In some ways coming home had been the most natural thing she’d done in years, but in other ways she felt dislocated, separated from her life and world and daughter.

I can’t compete for her affections against other children. They fill her world now, I only constrain it. If I try and supplant those kids, she’ll never forgive me… and she’d be right not to. But what do I do with—for—myself? Drinking gallons of coffee with Alice every morning and sneaking cigarettes on the sleeping porch… well, it just ain’t cutting it, as Jim would say.

She thought about Jim then, playing with the idea of going home to visit, just her, just to see how he was. He hadn’t called or written in the weeks they’d been here, and every one of her phone calls went unanswered. None of her letters had been returned, though. So he was still receiving the mail.

She lightly touched her breast, shivering in the dark of the gallery, goose bumps rippling over her skin.

Then she noticed the black figure standing in a spill of shadow at the foot of the stairs. A silhouette, jet black, looked up at her, head cocked and staring intently, silent, eyes like flecks of obsidian.

Sarah’s breath caught in her chest, and the goose bumps of pleasure quickly turned to those of fear. She dropped her arms to her sides, not knowing what to do. A clock ticked somewhere and the old timbers of the house settled around her. The black thing below stared, its eyes fierce and black.

Then Alice passed in the doorway of the kitchen, beneath Sarah, blocking the spray of light slanting into the atrium below, changing the configuration of shadows.

And the thing was gone, if it had ever really been there at all.

Sarah exhaled suddenly. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.

She went downstairs and into the kitchen.

Alice turned to look at her, then said, “
Humph
. She must’ve been real bad. I’ve got the water hot. You go on into the library, I’ll bring your toddy in to you.” Alice pointed to a bowl in a far corner of the counter. “I’m gonna be up for a bit, got some dough rising. I’ll come check on you in a bit. Go on, girl. I know you been waiting.”

In the library,
Opusculus Noctis
was open on the desk, and as she sat down in front of it, Sarah took a deep breath, placed a hand on the yellowed sheet, and turned over her page of translation from the night before. It read:

the little book of shadows

or the little night book

a
glance
look into the shadows

demands
requires many things

if one
wishes
would like to
converse
bargain

with the
animals
creatures kept locked

beyond
the stars or
the vorago?

admonitio admonition? warning

a warning

do not call up that which you haven’t
pulli

sent away

don’t call up

what you cannot put down

all
sermons
converse with the prodigious

must begin start with a payment
tithe
of

inculpatis innocent? blood

in addition to
also

the
will
intention to bargain, the caller

is
helped
assisted by the

intention to do
necessity
the necessary things?

Sarah had managed the translation with great effort, flipping backward and forward in the Latin English dictionary. The fact it made no sense depressed her, but she felt, for the first time in years, a desire to
know
, to understand. What was the meaning behind the words? They blended together on each line of the pamphlet, having no spaces between letters to indicate the beginning or end of a thought or phrase. There were certain words, like
vorago
and
prodigium
, that were not provided for in the library’s poor dictionary. She couldn’t tell if it was some religious manual or an ancient recipe book. She knew she’d committed mistakes in the translation, but hoped the gist of it was right. She couldn’t be sure without consulting someone who knew better.