The Homecoming (11 page)

Teague’s face was hot but his chest was icy cold. He looked at the pillow under her head. She was on the threshold. It would only take a moment of pressure to help her cross it. Kate saw his huge hands twitch, his long fingers spreading, and knew his mind. Teague forced himself to be calm.

“If this is true, about the snake, and I do not give it any countenance, why have you not spoken?”

“I was … weary … weary of … you. Weary of your ways. I loved you once. Now I am ready to go.”

“Who … who have you told?”

“No one. I won’t have the children know.”

“Anora … this is simply not—”

Her hand came off the sheet, fingers spread.

“No, Lon. I won’t have your lies be the last words I hear. Send for Constant. I must sleep.”

“Anora …”

“No, Lon. Go. For heaven’s sake … just go.”

Teague stood and stared down at her for a time, but it was as if he was the dead thing in the room. She was still alive, barely, but she was as gone from him now as if she were already in her family’s crypt in the Niceville churchyard. His head was reeling with the urgency of only one thought …

Who else knows?

And the answer came back.

Talitha knows
.

Anora slept, a sleep so peaceful after such pain and struggle that at first Constant and Flora and Jezrael thought she might have passed. Constant laid a fearful hand on her breast, lightly, and they all smiled when she felt the flutter of Anora’s heart. It was shortly before three in the morning and the life of Hy Brasail was at its lowest ebb. A wind was sighing in the branches of the live oaks and a lantern set on the river landing burned in the dark, a single yellow glimmer in a moonless night. Constant rose, leaned over to kiss Anora’s forehead, and then they all slipped silently from the room.

A candle by Anora’s bed burned low.

Kate stood by her bed, looking down at the dying woman. She heard a dry rustle, the sound of wings. A swarm, a cloud of dragonflies came to the windows and ticked against the glass, a vibrating green shimmer in the candle’s light.

The mosquito netting that tented Anora’s bed rippled gently in the night wind. Anora fell into a deeper sleep, and now her life began to flicker and fail. Kate could feel her going.

She drew away into the shadows.

Anora awoke abruptly from a sensation of falling and saw within the candle’s glow a figure sitting on the rickety wooden chair beside her bed.

It was a young girl. Talitha.

She was sitting up straight, her knees tight together and her ankles primly crossed. Her strong brown hands were folded on top of a wicker sewing basket. She was looking into the middle distance with a somber expression and a faraway air, but when Anora stirred, Talitha looked down and smiled at her.

“What are you doing here?” Anora asked, a tremor in her voice.

“I am here to make amends, Missus, if I can.”

Anora looked for the cord that rang the night bell, but it had slipped to the floor. Talitha bent over and lifted it up and laid it down on Anora’s breast. She held her hand there, gently, and then patted Anora’s fingers.

“You don’t need to be afraid now, Missus. I can’t hurt you no more.”

“No. You’ve already killed me, have you not?”

“I have, Missus. And now I have come to …”

“Atone?”

Talitha looked puzzled.

“Missus Teague, I do not know what that word means.”

“It means to make up for the wrong you have done. Is that the creature, in that basket?”

Talitha looked down at the wicker basket on her lap. She lifted the cover and reached inside. Anora’s throat tightened and it was in her mind to pull on the cord, but something held her.

Talitha lifted her hand out. Coiled around it was a snake, not small, perhaps thirty inches or so. It had a small tapered head with a yellow band around it, and its body was banded in bright red and dark green, the bands separated by a smaller ring of vivid yellow. It twisted and writhed in Talitha’s grip, its tongue flicking like the antennae of a moth.

Talitha lifted it up and turned it in the candle glow. Two tiny shards of yellow light glittered in its jewellike eyes.

“The harlequin coral,” said Talitha, seeming to be transfixed by the snake as it lifted its head and stared back at her.

“Be careful,” said Anora, in a whisper.

But Talitha only smiled and draped the snake around her shoulders, where it coiled and tightened and settled, a brightly colored enameled necklace.

“It can’t hurt either of us now,” said Talitha.

“Then why have you brought it here?”

“I will be buried with it, I believe.”

They were each silent for a time. Anora was looking at Talitha, trying to see her clearly, but her image kept fading and then coming back again. Talitha seemed to feel her flickering attention.

“Missus, will you do what I ask you to do?”

“What do you want?”

Talitha turned and lifted a hand, pointing at the ancient gilt mirror hanging on the wall. The black cover was gone and the glass reflected the room, the pale white woman in her bed and the young black woman in the chair. The candle flickering low.

“Will you get up and look in the mirror?”

“I can’t.”

“I believe you can, Missus. You must try.”

Anora tried but was unable to rise. Talitha bent over her and lifted her in her strong young arms, carried her across the floor, and set her down carefully on her bare feet, the two of them framed in the mirror, two silhouettes with a corona of candle glow around them. Anora was trembling. Talitha stepped in and held her in both her arms, kissed her gently on the cheek.

“Don’t be afraid, Missus. There’s family on the other side of the glass. Daddy says this mirror was opened by your own people, when they was living in Paris, France, a long time back. He says a lot of your family got put to death in what they called the Terror. Many of them was put under a machine. When the thing was done, the executioner took their heads from the basket and held them up to this mirror, the very one that been took from their own home where they all once lived, so they could see themselves in it one last time. They meant it to be cruel, because life was still in them, and they could see what been done to them, but it was the last thing they looked at, and they sent their spirits into it, and that is how this mirror got opened. That is the story my daddy told me.”

Anora stared into the mirror, seeing only herself and Talitha, embracing each other, and the sickroom a dim image behind them. And something else. In the farthest corner of the room she thought she could see a shape, standing in the shadows, a pretty young woman in a pale night shift.

The woman looked familiar to her. Perhaps she was the ghost of a woman she had known, or would someday know. Or perhaps she was simply having visions. Her head filled with green light. If Talitha had not been holding her she would have fallen. Talitha’s body was as cold as hers was warm.

Talitha kissed her on the temple.

“Good-bye, Missus. I am sorry for what I done.”

Anora tried to touch her, but there was a window of rippled glass between her and Talitha. She held up her hand against the mirror and Talitha lifted hers on the other side until their palms touched. Talitha spread her fingers out, covering Anora’s hand with her own. Anora could feel the chill in Talitha’s hand even through the mirror.

“Are you coming with me?” Anora asked.

Talitha shook her head.

“No, Missus. I wish I might. I can’t.”

“Yes you can. I forgive you. It’s not too late for you. You can go to the pastor at Plaquemine and confess. To a judge. You can … atone.”

“Missus, I believe I done that already. For what I done to you, Mister London has killed me.”

“Killed you?”

“Yessum. Mister London has killed me with a rope down in the box maze and now I am hung in the jupiter willow with a note I never wrote
pinned to my dress. Mister London, he don’t collect I never got my letters, but Second Samuel knows.”

She paused for a moment, as if listening.

“They calling for me now, Missus. My run is done. I am bound for unconsecrated ground, because I am a whore and a murderess. I only come to take you to the mirror. Remember me to Second Samuel, if you can. He was a fine daddy to me, and I am sorry I was such a bad daughter. If you see him one day, on your side, I beg you tell him so, for me.”

Talitha took her hand away and stepped back from the mirror. She felt something lying at her feet. Anora’s body lay on the ground, a small dead thing. In the mirror there was only one reflection. Her own. Talitha lifted Anora’s body and carried it back to the daybed, laying it down softly. She lifted up the sheet and placed it over her, leaving her face uncovered. She arranged the body into a peaceful pose, twined the peridot rosary around Anora’s fingers.

Then she picked up the candle, looked around the room one last time, saw Kate standing there, watching her. She touched her finger to her lips, and then blew the candle out.

Down in the jupiter willow Talitha’s corpse turned slowly in the river wind, a crushed snake twisted around her neck, a note pinned to her dress.

In the mirror hanging on the wall of the Jasmine Room, Anora Mercer stood looking at her own body lying on the daybed. Then she looked up at the young woman in the white slip and smiled at her.

Anora turned away and walked down a winding lane between oaks and willows until she came to a sunlit clearing full of emerald green dragonflies. They fluttered and hummed around her, a vibrating cloud of shimmering green. She could feel the thrumming power of their wings.

Through the cloud of dragonflies, as if through a mist of green light, she saw a tall house on a sun-dappled street lined with live oaks draped in
Spanish moss. The house was pale cream stone and it had high sash windows and the interior was filled with a golden afternoon light that put a warm glow on the rooms and the furniture.

A blond-haired boy in a navy coat and gray trousers was standing at the foot of the curved staircase that led up to the entrance. He had a rucksack in his hands, and he was standing with his head down, his long blond hair covering his face, as if he had not yet seen the woman waiting on the landing. Another boy, smaller, with curly brown hair, was standing beside him, their heads together, as if conspiring at something. The woman on the landing had shining black hair held back by a silver pin. She was smiling down at the boys. The woman looked like her, so much alike they could almost be sisters. The woman on the landing glanced up, saw Anora there, and raised her hand.

Anora recognized her. She was the young woman in the white slip, standing in the shadows of the Jasmine Room. Anora tried to wave back, but the vision turned into a dazzle of green light and the dragonflies took her away.

In his empty bed London Teague lay awake and stared at the ceiling, thinking of the girl in the jupiter willow, sick with dread of the morning. The lantern on the river landing glimmered in the dark. Beyond it the Mississippi rolled down to the Gulf of Mexico, down to the Civil War, down to the future, leaving Hy Brasail Plantation and all her people far behind in the moonless southern night.

Sunlight streaming in through the gauze curtain of her bedroom woke Kate up. She glanced at the bedside clock. It was almost seven. Nick was already out of bed. She could hear him in the shower. The smell of bacon and eggs came up the stairwell, and children’s voices came with it, Axel and Hannah. It sounded as if they were talking to Eufaula, the ethereal young girl who came each weekday to cook and care for the house.

Kate pulled the covers back and slipped out of bed. She went to the window and looked down into the yard, seeing the sunlight on the flowers and the green shadows at the bottom of the yard, where the pines and oaks crowded up against the hill. She could see the water bubbling and frothing along in the creek that ran through the little forest there.

She realized that she was looking for hoofprints on the lawn, and it
came to her that she had dreamed a strange dream the night before, about Hy Brasail Plantation and the people who had lived and died there. She could feel the details slipping away and she fought to keep them in her mind. She felt it was very important to remember.