The Elementals (17 page)

Up flew Odessa’s other hand, and stopped India’s mouth.

Chapter
16

A couple of days after Lawton McCray’s visit to Beldame, Dauphin Savage returned to Mobile for the reading of his mother’s will. Leigh had offered to accompany him but he assured her that she need not bother. Since he knew the entire contents of the document, the reading would be only a formality. The will had been drawn up according to his own consultation with the family lawyer, and he had spent three months in persuading his dying mother to sign it. Dauphin told Leigh that she was welcome to go along for the ride; she could shop in town, check on the house, do whatever wanted doing in Mobile after a month’s absence from the city. But Leigh and the others, to whom the invitation was also extended, declined: whatever must be done in Mobile could wait until the following week when, under Lawton’s directive, they
must
return.

When, on that morning, India strolled past the jeep parked on the edge of the yard, she was surprised to find Odessa sitting inside, wearing her dark glasses and her straw sun hat.

“Why are you going?” asked India of the black woman. “Do you have shopping to do?”

Odessa shook her head.

“Why, then?” persisted India, when it appeared that Odessa had no intention of answering her question.

“Ask Mr. Dauphin,” hissed Odessa, and nodded in the direction of the Savage house. Dauphin was coming out the back door.

“You ready?” he called to Odessa, and she raised a hand in acknowledgment.

When he came nearer, he said to India, “You sure you don’t want to go? Aren’t you getting tired of this place? Beldame’s not as exciting as New York City, and I know it for a fact!”

“Why are you taking Odessa?” asked India.

Dauphin—who seemed dark and unfamiliar because of the suit that he wore—paused before climbing into the jeep. “She’s gone sweep out the mausoleum. Mama was buried a month ago today.”

Embarrassed that she had forced Dauphin to admit to this piece of filial piety, India asked: “You’re coming back tonight, aren’t you?”

“I ought to be through at the lawyer’s by four,” said Dauphin, “but don’t ya’ll count on us for supper. We’re probably gone stop on the way.”

Big Barbara and Luker appeared on the verandah and waved good-bye as Dauphin started the jeep. “Wait!” cried India, “can you do me a favor in Mobile?”

Dauphin smiled. “What you want me to get you, India? You want me to bring you a postcard of a traffic jam?”

“No,” she said, “if you can wait a second, I’ll be right back.”

Dauphin nodded, and India ran into the house. A few minutes later she reappeared and handed Dauphin two small gray plastic canisters. “It’s film,” she said, “and I’ve got my name on it and everything. Could you take it somewhere and have it developed?”

“
’Course,” replied Dauphin, “but it probably won’t be ready by the time we head back.”

“That’s all right, I’ll pick it up next week.”

He nodded, pocketed the canisters and drove off, blowing the horn in farewell.

Luker said to his daughter at lunch: “You ought not send good film out to some commercial place. They
always
scratch it. It could have waited until we got back to New York, and I would have done it right.”

“Those were the pictures I took of the third house,” said India. “
You
’re the one I wouldn’t trust with that film.”

Luker laughed.

Mobile was nearly a two hours’ drive from Beldame; Dauphin and Odessa pulled up into the driveway of the Small House just before noon. Odessa, who had no liking for the two maids employed by Leigh, had looked forward to disturbing them in their well-paid indolence there, but Dauphin had insisted that he call from outside the city and prepare them for his arrival. He would not even allow them to fix him lunch, but stopped at a fried chicken franchise and bought something for himself and Odessa.

The two maids declared themselves happy to see him again, though in lackluster voices and with drooping shoulders that only a man so willingly deceived as Dauphin would have thought sincere. They turned over to him three shoe boxes filled with mail and a peach crate they had filled with catalogs that had arrived for Leigh. Dauphin and Odessa sat at opposite ends of the long table and ate their chicken. Then an inspection tour of the Great House reassured them that all was in order there.

Into the trunk of the black Mercedes the two maids put a rake, a broom, a bag of soft cloths, and a cardboard box of cleaning liquids. They did not volunteer to assist Odessa in the cleaning of the Savage family mausoleum. But when he was pulling out of the driveway, Dauphin said to Odessa, “First we’re going to the drugstore and leave off India’s film, then you and me are going to the lawyer’s.”

Odessa said, “You leave me off at the cemetery. By the time you get through I’ll be done too, it’s not gone—”

Dauphin interrupted her. “Odessa, I didn’t tell you this ’cause I knew you wouldn’t like it, but Mama mentioned you in her will. In fact you and me are the only people mentioned at all—personally I mean, so it’s you and me that’s got to go to the lawyer’s. When we’re finished there—and it won’t take long—then we’ll go back to the cemetery and clean up. I want to help . . .”

“Mr. Dauphin, you should have told me!” said Odessa reproachfully. “Your mama didn’t have any business going and putting me in her will. I wish she hadn’t done it.”

“Well, I tell you, Odessa, if it makes you feel any better, she didn’t want to do it, but I made her. It was all my doing. I told the lawyer what all to say, and he wrote it out and then I sat up in that room for three months until she finally signed it.”

“All right then,” said Odessa, “long as she didn’t mean it, I guess it’s all right.”

At the lawyer’s offices, Dauphin was greeted not only by that man, but by the president and all the fellows of the firm, making unaccustomed Saturday appearances—Dauphin was, after all, the third richest man in Mobile, and of those three he was the only one to have been born in Alabama. The reading of Marian Savage’s will was perfunctory. She had left a quarter of a million dollars to the convent in which Sister Mary-Scot was resident, she had set up a nursing scholarship at Spring Hill College, she had donated a new Sunday school wing to the Church of St. Jude Thaddeus, and she provided Odessa with an annuity of fifteen thousand dollars for life, the principal to return to the family coffers after the black woman’s death. Everything else went to Dauphin. Marian Savage had not loved her son who survived, but she was Savage to the heart and had never entertained any thought of channeling the family fortune away from Dauphin, Leigh, and whatever children they might have. As she signed the will, she had given Dauphin to understand that if Darnley had lived, or if Mary-Scot had not joined the convent, things would have been quite different. Dauphin would have got only a pittance. But as things were, he must have everything.

“I thank you for what you did,” said Odessa as they were driving away again, forty-five minutes later.

“Odessa, don’t—”

“You let me talk,” she said sternly and Dauphin was silent. Odessa went on: “That money’ll mean I won’t ever have to worry again. I was ’ginning to worry about Social Security. I know a woman on Social Security and after she’s paid her rent, it don’t buy her a mess of black-eyed peas. When I’m not working any more, I won’t have to worry—”

“Odessa, you’re gone work for Leigh and me forever, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am! I will work for you and Miz Leigh till I cain’t put one foot in front of the other!”

“You’ll always have a home with us, Odessa. You know we couldn’t do without you.”

“When I get old and I’m as mean as your mama was, Mr. Dauphin, then you’ll be glad enough I’m living on my own somewhere—” Dauphin looked about to make a contradictory speech here, but Odessa rode over it: “—but now I don’t need to worry. You just got to promise me one thing, Mr. Dauphin, you
got
to promise me—”

“I promise. What is it?”

“When I’m dead, you make sure that Johnny Red don’t get a folded dollar of that money!”

“I promise,” said Dauphin, but he was already scheming charity—trying to think of how he could take care of no-good Johnny Red in the unlikely case that that alcoholic loafer survived his common-law wife.

The Savage mausoleum was a squat square edifice of darkly veined Italian marble set in a cypress-shaded corner of Mobile’s oldest cemetery. Mobile’s dead had been planted here since the early part of the eighteenth century, but hurricanes and vandals and widening of the streets had obliterated all trace of the first fruits, and the Savage mausoleum was now celebrated as the oldest remaining monument. Along the three walls inside were carved the names of six generations of Savages—and this did not include infants and adolescents who, not considered worthy of the place, were relegated to a little sinking plot of earth over the way.

The bells of a nearby church were chiming four o’clock as the Mercedes pulled up before the Savage mausoleum. While Dauphin unloaded the trunk, Odessa opened the iron door of the tomb with the key that she kept with all the others of the household. She stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind her; she stood at the grating and told Dauphin to put everything down just outside.

“You let me take care of this, Mr. Dauphin,” she said. “You sit in the car. You go get a ice cream cone. You come back for me in an hour, that’s what I want you to do.”

“Odessa, I ought to go inside and pay my respects to Mama. Mama was big on respect-paying.” He smiled sadly through the grating.

“I know, but you ought not come inside, and that’s the truth.”

“Why not?”

“
’Cause graves is no place for the living.”

Dauphin shrugged and smiled, and pushed open the door. “I’m gone come on inside, Odessa, and speak to Mama for a few minutes.”

The mausoleum was dim inside. The refracted light of a heavily overcast afternoon penetrated as only a filmy gray. But Dauphin immediately saw that all inside was not as he had left it on the day of the funeral. On the floor below his mother’s niche was spread a small linen cloth with a jumble of objects on it.

“Odessa,” he said, “somebody’s been in here. What is all this stuff?”

Nervously—for no Savage could deal straightforwardly with irregularities in the matter of tombs and burials—Dauphin knelt to see what was on the cloth: an alarm clock loosely wrapped in a page torn from a calendar; a teacup whose broken handle lay inside it; two conch shells that had been smashed together; and a plastic shoe box holding the litter of a medicine chest.

Dauphin looked curiously up at Odessa, who said nothing and seemed not surprised to see those things there.

“Somebody’s been playing here,” said Dauphin hopefully. “Some child has got inside here, and was playing a game, and—”

Odessa shook her head.

Dauphin picked up the alarm clock. It was set for four o’clock, the time of his mother’s death; the calendar page was for the month of May, and the day of her death red-circled. The teacup was of the set of dishes off which she had always had her breakfast. The conch shells were those that in summer had flanked either side of the cold hearth in her bedroom. The labels on the discarded prescription bottles at the bottom of the plastic shoe box all read, For the Use of Marian Savage.

“I put everything there,” said Odessa. “Nobody broke in here. I came back early the morning after the funeral, Miz Leigh brought me over here before she carried me to the house.”

Dauphin raised himself and strove to make out Odessa’s eyes in the dimness of the mausoleum. “All right, but why, Odessa? Why’d you bring all this stuff here?”

“Brought it for Miz Marian.”

“As an offering? That what you mean?”

Odessa shook her head. “Keep her from getting out of this place,” she said, and pointed to the square of inscribed marble against which rested the foot of Marian Savage’s coffin.

“Clock and calendar’s gone remind her she’s dead. I broke that cup—I hated to do it, but it was a extra—broken cup’s gone tell her she’s dead. Those shells gone speak to her of water. The dead got to cross water.”

“And the pills? What about the ’scription bottles?”

“They gone remind her who she was. Dead come back, they don’t always remember who they was. Your mama reads her name there, Mr. Dauphin, and she’s gone say, ‘Why, I’m dead, I’m gone go right back inside and not bother nobody!
’
”

“Odessa, you’re talking crazy. You’re making me real scared. I want you to take all this junk out of here.”

“You got to leave it for at least six months,” said Odessa, “that’s when the dead come back. They die and they start forgetting right off, but it takes six months ’fore they stop caring.” She jerked her head toward Marian Savage’s marble plaque. “She’s back there now, and she cain’t remember everything, they’s things she’s already forgotten, but she knows how to get out and she knows who to come after, she—”

“Odessa!” cried Dauphin, shaking all over. “Don’t you say another word about this!” And he fled that dim gray place, leaving Odessa to sweep the floor and run her cloths over the marble walls. He was waiting in the car for her half an hour later, silent, nervous and morose, and they did not speak on the drive back to the Small House. But even if they had spoken, Odessa would not have told him of what she had found in the mausoleum, what had not been apparent until her eyes had grown fully accustomed to the dimness there: that the mortar around the marble plaque of his mother’s monument had been chipped away in a number of places, leaving little lines of blackness all around. You could have stuck a straw through those holes and touched Marian Savage’s coffin on the other side.

Chapter
17

Dauphin had not planned on it, but he remained that night in Mobile. His accountant found out from his lawyer that he was in town and telephoned him late in the afternoon, asking if it would be possible to talk with him that evening. Odessa assured him that it would make no difference if they did not return to Beldame until the next day, and she had just as soon spend the night in her own house. There was no way of letting those in Beldame know that they would not be coming back, but probably they would not worry unduly.