Ciji Ware (60 page)

By this time, Daphne was smiling to herself about the woman’s amazing facility for breathing in the middle of her run-on sentences, when she was brought up short by Libby’s unexpected job offer.

“Well, really, that’s very sweet of you to think of me—”

“Wanted to do you a good turn, after all the rotten things Jack did to you—
and
me, by the way,” she declared hotly. “Can you
believe
that he refused to pay me my bonus, even though I whipped that ol’ Livingston place they bought here last year into good shape in less than six months? But would Jack Ebert give me the credit back in New Orleans?” she demanded rhetorically. “Noooo! He pounded that new Ebert-Petrella Funeral Home sign into the ground, took all the credit for the changeover himself, and poisoned the well for me with Uncle René to boot, that old drunk! So I quit before they could fire me, and now I’m stuck in Natchez.”

Daphne was about to make a comment when Libby barreled on.

“Do y’think you could play for Abigail Langhorn’s funeral on Monday? That’s tomorrow, would you believe? You’d be doin’ me a real favor, and I guess I’d be doin’ the same for you—with those roof bills, and all. By the way, I thought you and those other gals in the sexy getups last night at the ‘For the Birds’ benefit were jus’ great! Seein’ ya’ll reminded me to call you anyway, and then Miz Abigail up and died early this mornin’. Now I’m stuck with gettin’ her buried real quick ’cause her son can only stay one day in Natchez, isn’t that a pity? He doesn’t even want to bother with a church ceremony—which I find in very poor taste, but then nobody asked
me
for an opinion, did they? So, anyway…”

Libby Girard continued with her stream-of-consciousness chatter while Daphne did her best to suppress a laugh. Finally, Daphne cut in.

“I’d be happy to play for the service tomorrow, Libby,” she declared. And besides, she
could
use the extra money. “I charge a hundred dollars an hour.”

“Woo-eee! That’s twice as expensive as one of Miz Whitaker’s students, but don’t get me wrong, you’re good. You’re
great
, in fact, and Miz Langhorn’s family’s still rich enough—though they always act as if their cotton’s got a boll weevil blight eatin’ away at it. Just like those tightwads, the Eberts,” she exclaimed with renewed energy. “The Petrella family’s a lot nicer, but René Ebert’s a real creep, don’tcha think? He never did stop those awful cousins who used to drag poor Jack into the embalmin’ room when he couldna been more than
five
years
old
. No wonder Jack’s so weird.”

Daphne sat bolt upright in her desk chair, her attention suddenly riveted on the bizarre turn in Libby’s prattle. A hazy, long-buried memory from childhood sprang to mind. Maybe she
hadn’t
imagined it—that time so long ago—when Jack tried to drag an eleven-year-old Daphne into the back room at the Ebert-Petrella Funeral Home off St. Charles Avenue. “As they’ve done unto you…”

Her mind spinning, she barely registered Libby’s next words.

“Just promise me, you won’t play anything remotely like rock ’n’ roll tomorrow, will you? Play some nice, soothin’ songs, y’know what I’m sayin’? Miz Langhorn’s daughter couldn’t stop cryin’ this mornin’, poor thing.”

“Absolutely,” Daphne assured her. “What time tomorrow?”

“Eleven o’clock,” she answered promptly. “The service starts at eleven thirty. And don’t forget, wear
black
, now, y’hear? And make sure it covers… everything!”

***

Monday, as previously planned, Daphne and Madeline Whitaker met Bailey Gibbs at the B&K Bank at ten a.m. and deposited close to twenty-five thousand dollars in a special account, with all three as cosigners.

“Well, this should hire us a fancy lawyer or two.” Bailey kissed Daphne’s cousin on the cheek for good measure and gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Couldna done it without you, too, Maddy girl.”

“Land, go on, now,” Maddy replied, blushing. “Everybody pitched in, ’specially Daphne, here.”

“Thanks,” Daphne replied. “Now if we could just say the same for Sim.”

Bailey and Maddy exchanged looks that did little to allay Daphne’s mounting sense that her relationship with Sim might surely have ended, all but for the official burial ceremony.

Bailey put a comforting hand on Daphne’s shoulder. “I know Sim’s not being down here this week upset you, darlin’, but let’s not haul him up the yardarm just yet. I’ve got a feeling that everything might still turn out just fine.”

It won’t be so fine for me if Sim Hopkins has gone back to his ex-wife
…

Daphne glanced at her watch. The last thing she felt like doing was playing her harp at a funeral. Nevertheless, she waved the couple off to a celebratory lunch at Pearl Street Pasta and drove directly to the Farrell Funeral Home on the edge of town.

“Oh… I so appreciate your bein’ punctual,” Libby chirped, leading the way down a hushed, carpeted corridor.

Ten rows of white wooden folding chairs were set up in front of the open casket in readiness for the roomful of mourners yet to arrive.

“Is over here all right?” Daphne asked, averting her eyes as she gingerly wheeled the harp case to the corner farthest from the guest of honor. “It’s not a performance, really,” she hastened to add, “so I think it’s good if I’m just part of the furniture, okay?”

“That’s fine.” Libby made her way toward a tall, white wicker basket containing sprays of yellow gladioli to straighten one stem that had tilted precariously. She turned toward Daphne, and said brightly, “All set?”

Daphne nodded and commenced unpacking her instrument. “Where should I store the case?”

“Just wheel it into the casket room, last door on the left. Nobody’ll bother it in there,” Libby instructed on her way out of the viewing room.

“I suspect not,” Daphne commented dryly to herself.

By eleven thirty, the friends and family of Abigail Langhorn occupied two-thirds of the folding chairs. At the conclusion of the simple ceremony, the deceased’s son, grandsons, and nephews shouldered her coffin and bore it to a waiting limousine for the journey to the Natchez City Cemetery, north of town.

One woman remained seated and motionless until the last mourner had followed the coffin down the corridor. Then her shoulders began to shake, and she began to cry in deep, wrenching sobs. Uncertain what to do, Daphne played the last bars of “How Great Thou Art” while the woman continued to weep. Her fingers ended in a sedate glissando, its jeweled notes shimmering in the air even after she allowed her hands to rest in her lap.

And still the woman sobbed, bereft and inconsolable. Daphne waited quietly in the corner for the woman to regain her composure. The mourner’s long, rending cries tore at the heart and spoke of utter desolation and a world without hope… a world in which a pitiless God decided who lived and who died and which babies would be called back to heaven before they’d inhaled even a single breath of earth’s sweet air, or heard a note of music, or saw a bird on the wing…

And Daphne knew suddenly that those heart-wrenching wails were mere echoes of generations of women who cried their sorrows into the night.

Chapter 26

September 13, 1818

Daphne Whitaker Clayton’s eight-year-old daughter, the image of her mother, peered inside the upstairs bedchamber at Bluff House. The little girl with the golden curls had been told that her mama had planned to give birth in the big plantation bed at Devon Oaks. But something mysterious and alarming had happened earlier that morning and there was no time even to summon the doctor. Nobody had explained to the child exactly what had transpired in her mother’s darkened boudoir, and now young Madeline was determined to find out for herself.

Maddy watched Mammy, bent over with rheumatism these days, lay a little bundle inside a wooden box that her husband Willis had hastily brought through the rear of the house and up the back stairs from the pantry.

“What you doin’ here, Maddy?” Mammy demanded, catching sight of the wide-eyed youngster sucking her forefinger and gazing dolefully at the scene. Mammy’s blue skirt and bodice were streaked with dark stains, as was a bundle of linens piled on the floor. “You ’sposed be downstairs, not up here botherin’ your poor Mama. Your daddy and Mistah Hopkins get back from ridin’?”

“Just before sunset,” Maddy informed her. “Daddy’s been checking on his horse because Ovid’s leg came up lame.” She pointed at the box. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A girl,” Mammy replied sorrowfully.

Maddy gazed solemnly into the servant’s dark eyes, and murmured, “Baby Phaedra, Mama said… if it was a girl.”

Maddy wondered why Mama always named the babies after people who’d died young. She’d seen the headstone under the pecan tree at Devon Oaks where Mama’s sister, Madeline Whitaker, had been buried before she’d even gotten herself a husband! Maddy didn’t like seeing her own name on a headstone like that.

There were other headstones for Grandfather Charles Whitaker and his son Charles, too, and for the other Phaedra and Eustice, Mama’s brother and sister, who each passed away from something horrible long before Maddy was born. And there were tiny headstones for all of Grandmother Susannah’s and Mama’s babies who’d died so young, nobody’d even bothered to name them.

Maddy wished she’d been given a different name like Alice or Charlotte, or even Arabella. At least Uncle Keating didn’t have a stone marking
his
grave. He was nice.

There was silence in the bedchamber, except for the sound of her mother’s quiet weeping. Maddy wondered when her uncle would be coming back from Scotland.

“Baby Phaedra’s dead, isn’t she?” she declared suddenly, pointing to the miniature wooden box under the window that looked out on the river.

At this, her mother’s weeping grew louder, confirming the little girl’s blunt assertion. But before Mammy could answer or scold her again, heavy footsteps could be heard mounting the stairs. Mammy cast a worried glance at her patient, curled into a ball under the quilted coverlet that Great-grandmother Drake had made, once upon a time. The tall, imposing figure of Aaron Clayton loomed in the doorway beside his only living child.

“What was it?” he asked Mammy harshly. Maddy’s mother suddenly ceased crying, almost as if she’d been strangled where she lay.

“A girl chile, Mistah Aaron.”

Mammy sounded scared. Mammy
never
sounded scared, Madeline thought with alarm. But then, this long-time family retainer was getting old and frail like Grandmother Susannah, who lived locked up in a room under the eaves at the top of Devon House.

“So we have a Phaedra Whitaker Clayton to add to our rotting family tree, do we?” Her father pronounced the names in a clipped accent, bitterly emphasizing each word.

Maddy darted a glance at her father’s stern face at the same instant Mammy said softly, “The baby lived only a few minutes, Mistah Aaron. The cord was wrapped ’round her po’ lil’ neck and she was real blue-colored. She give only one tiny lil’ cry ’fore she died. My Willis made this coffin, real quick.” Mammy glanced at Maddy as if she wished she weren’t in the room.

Aaron Clayton’s expression hardened and he slammed his curled fist against the doorjamb, startling Maddy so that she jumped and made the mistake of clinging to her father’s waist. He shoved her aside without a glance.

“Damnation!
Damnation!
That’s the end of it… the absolute
end
of it!” He turned on his heel and stormed downstairs in a lather of temper. “Simon,” Maddy heard him call out. “Don’t leave! Stay right where you are, my man!” he shouted, apparently halting the outbound progress of the neighbor who had come to inquire after her mother’s health. “Daphne’s had another girl! Another
dead
girl.”

Aaron Clayton spat the words as if girls were the nastiest things in the world. Despite Maddy’s fear of her father’s angry moods, she tiptoed down the hallway, wondering what would happen next.

“Oh, my dear Aaron,” Simon Hopkins said, his voice filled with sympathy. “I am so sorry.”

Ignoring their family friend’s heartfelt sorrow, her father shouted, “I’m finished with doing all the work for this feckless family when it’s her brother who’ll inherit it all—that is, if those cursed bankers don’t get Devon Oaks first!”

“Aaron… calm yourself. You’re upset, as surely I would be, but—”

“I shall go to Edinburgh, myself, and bring Keating back to Natchez,” her father fumed, ignoring Simon. “Let
him
deal with the accounts and the boll weevils and the blasted money changers who demand their pound of flesh. Let
him
try to cope with a mad mother-in-law living in splendor at the top of Devon Oaks. And I’ve certainly no use for a wife who’s nearly as unhinged as her mother—and won’t give me a
son
!”

“Surely, Aaron, you can’t blame poor Daphne for—”