In a Heartbeat (16 page)

36

He was missing her—oh, how he was missing her. . . . The scent of her, the cool sexy scent
that he would recognize even through the fog of
Bloomingdale’s perfume department, a seductive mixture of her soft flesh and lilies and jasmine and summer. . . . A peachy smell . . . He
smiled as he thought of it. . . . Where did you
go? Oh, Zelda, where have you gone? . . . I hope
you didn’t go there, not to Hainsville. . . . I
can’t even bear to think of it, to think of you
there . . . that place where my life ground to a
halt, where my guilt and shame will never
leave. . . .

He was back to that terrible night again. His birthday. The night Michael Hains had demanded to buy their pa’s land, and Mitch had cursed him when he had refused. He had thought Mitch was going to punch Pa, he was that angry . . . . but it was worse than that . . . oh, much worse. . . .

Theo had slipped out of the cabin and was running down the road, his backpack bouncing against his shoulders. The fierce wind howled all around him. It snatched his breath, sent him gasping and reeling, clutching at the trees to keep his footing. The entire forest was alive with the sound of it. It shook and trembled as the wind tore full-grown trees from the ground and sent heavy branches crashing.

He was relieved when he was finally out in the open, descending through the meadows onto the potholed blacktop lane that led to Hainsville. He picked up speed now, head bowed, running steadily through the rain with the wind behind him giving him a push, as though it knew of his urgent mission.

He had gone a couple of miles when he saw the gleam of headlights cutting through the darkness. Was Michael Hains bringing Mitch home? Unwilling to be caught, he dodged into the thicket of poplars bordering the road. Their slender trunks seemed to ripple in the wind, and the brittle, golden leaves covered him the way they had the children in the story
Babes in the
Woods
.

He held his breath as the vehicle approached, peering from his hiding place, half blinded by its lights. As it whizzed past, he saw it was a pickup truck with two men in it. He didn’t know the truck, didn’t know the men, but guessed they were itinerant laborers. He pondered on where they could be heading. The road ended at Sorry-gate Farm, one of Hains’s properties, but they weren’t likely to be going there at this time of night. The only other place it led was to his own home.

A warning signal buzzed from his brain to his feet, and in a second he was running back the way he had come. Running fast down the center of the narrow road, oblivious to the rain, fighting the wind.

He was almost home when he saw it. A bright red glow against the lowering sky. “No!” he screamed out. “Please, God, no. . . .” And then he was running again. Staggering, sliding, falling.
Desperate.

He reached the clearing, saw the men throw more gasoline on the flames and the tarpaper-covered cabin explode in a ball of fire.

He was screaming. He saw the men silhouetted against the fireball as they turned and looked at him. Heard their hoarse cries of alarm. Saw one lift a rifle.

Paralyzed with shock, he let out a blood-curdling yell of fear and anguish, before instinct sent him fleeing deep into the forest.

That forest was his backyard, he knew every inch of it, all its secrets and hiding places. He found the tiny cave where he and his sisters had played hide-and-seek. He tucked his large bony frame into it, clutching his arms over his head, hiding like a hunted animal. He was six feet tall, but he was still only a fourteen-year-old kid, terrified and alone. Fear sent shudders through his body. He could scarcely breathe. A terrible feeling of desolation overwhelmed him as he waited for his family’s murderers to find him.

A name zapped like an electric shock through his brain:
Mitch.

His brother was not one of the men who had set fire to the house and murdered his family. But he knew for sure that Mitch had something to do with it.

Now he could hear the men crashing through the forest, hear their muffled curses as they tripped over fallen branches, heard them when they called it quits.

“Aw, fuck this,” one grumbled.

“Whoever it was won’t dare say nothin’ anyways,” the other yelled, so close it made Theo flinch.

“Whole family’s gone. We did our job,” the first agreed. “Let’s call it a night and git outa here.”

The sounds diminished as the men made their way back to their truck. He heard faintly the sound of the pickup disappearing into the night. Numb with shock, he clambered from his hiding place. He ran back to the clearing, stood gazing at the smoldering ruins of his home. Ruins that held the remains of his entire family.
Except for
Mitch.

Tears coursed down his face, as thick as the night’s rain. He choked on his sobs as a deep sense of shame overwhelmed him. He had run away, hidden in the woods, while his family burned to death. Even though he had seen the fiery explosion and knew that they had already been dead and there was nothing he could have done, it brought no respite from the shame. He should have tried to help. He should have strangled the men, broken their necks, run them through with a pitchfork. He should have killed them.
And
now he would kill Mitch.

He sat for a long time on the stump of the big mountain ash his daddy had cut down the previous year when it became too tall, thinking black thoughts of despair. Anguish lay heavy as a stone in his chest as he planned how he would go into town and find Mitch, imagining the dozen different ways he might kill him.

As dawn broke, he rose wearily from his seat and walked toward the still-smoking ruin. “God bless you, Ma, Daddy,” he whispered. “God bless you, Jared and Jesse, Honor and Grace. You are in heaven now and safe from all this. The Lord will take care of you.
And I will take care of
Mitch.
”

At that moment, he could have sworn he heard his mother’s voice: calm, rational, speaking directly to him, telling him that he must not kill Mitch. That if he did, he would be a murderer too, and she wanted no blood on his hands.

He lifted his head, looked around, wondering. But of course she was not there. The voice in his head was his own conscience, telling him that he was no killer.

There was only one thing to do. Hefting the small pack containing his birthday jeans and new flannel shirt, he set out through the forest for the top of the mountain. He couldn’t see the peak because it was wreathed in mist, but the rain had stopped and a weak beam of sunlight struggled through the clouds.

South Carolina lay on the other side of that mountain, and he intended to put as much territory between himself and Tennessee, and his murdering brother and Michael Hains, as possible. He guessed the killers were right. They would assume the entire family had perished in the blaze. He would never see his brother again.

37

“I didn’t shed any tears when he told me what happened that night they murdered his family,” Mamzelle Dorothea said. “Nor did I cry when he told me the story of what happened afterward. I was a selfish woman. My parents had indulged me, spoiled me rotten, y’might say. I never cared what other people thought, and I lived my life exactly the way I wanted. But that young stranger touched my heart. Or what was left of it.”

She contemplated her glass, staring into the bourbon’s amber depths as though looking for an answer to why she had found Theo Rogan’s story so heartfelt.

“He was so young,” she said finally. “So pitifully young. And so thin and starved. Oh, not like me, which was, y’might say, by choice. That is, I chose to drink rather than eat. And he was so damned gallant with it. A young gentleman.” She was silent for a moment, then she added softly, “I thought to myself, This could have been the son you never had. The boy who would have made your life worth living. And then I took another long look at him. And I thought, Y’know what, Dorothea, he still can.

“And that, my dears,” she added softly, “was the beginning of our lives together.”

Ed’s body felt like a dead weight. . . .
Dead,
he thought.
How ironic. My body is dead but my
brain is working overtime, crowding me with
memories.

I lived the life of an itinerant,
he remembered.
Hopping freight trains, dodging the law, bumming food from other hoboes, hunching around
their campfires. A thin, starved lad, looking older
than my fourteen years. I lied about it, of course,
always said I was sixteen, and no one questioned
that. I took jobs where I could get them: picking
tobacco or cotton, working in the fields. My life
was worse than my father’s. He had at least succeeded in owning his own piece of land, but I
was lower than a sharecropper. I was an itinerant
laborer of little value to anybody, except as an
extra bent back in the fields. I hated it, but I saw
no way out. Until Dorothea Jefferson Duval
came along and saved me.

Almost a year after he had climbed over the mountain into South Carolina, he found himself in Charleston on a night of freezing rain when the temperatures dipped into the low thirties. He had only his denims, which, true to his mother’s words, were now rising around his ankles, the worn blue-checked flannel birthday shirt, his old home-cobbled shoes, and the oilskin slicker that had belonged to his father.

It was January and the black fields lay hibernating and desolate under a coating of frost. There was no work to be had and Theo drifted, hungry and cold, with only a fifty-cent piece in his pocket, into the beautiful city of Charleston.

He had never seen such a place. Light from the tall windows of splendid houses spilled across the sidewalks into tree-filled squares. Shop windows glittered with an array of goods, the likes of which he had seen only on his rare visits to the movies in Hainsville. Well-dressed people thronged the sidewalks, streaming into restaurants whose aromas nearly drove him crazy with longing, and shiny automobiles cruised the nighttime streets, heading, he guessed wistfully, for home.

The city was everything he had ever day-dreamed about and more. Beautiful, rich, opulent, and sensual. It was, he felt sure, unmatched by Paris or London, though maybe not by Rome, with all its wonderful antiquities. Of course he had no true way of comparing because Charleston was the first
real
city he had ever seen, but if he were a rich man, he knew he could want for nothing more than to live here, in one of those splendid houses.

Each pastel-colored mansion was hidden behind high walls and elaborate iron gates that offered a glimpse of gardens shaded by magnolias and ancient oaks, and secret courtyards where winter-silent fountains promised to lift next summer’s humid air with their music.

Theo waited until the restaurants closed, then he scavenged in the garbage cans, fighting off the feral cats in search of the same meal, gulping down the scrapings from other people’s dinner plates, gnawing on steak bones for the final tasty bits of meat, scooping rice and beans from the debris in the cans. He was still hungry when he left, drifting through the now-quiet streets, a thin gray shadow unnoticed by the few pedestrians.

It must have been around midnight when he found himself in the area known as the Battery, with spacious lawns fronting the sea, dotted with huge oaks and old monuments and ancient cannons. The wind was edged with ice and he shivered under the black oilskin. A memory of his siblings flashed across his mind, huddled around the woodstove, toasting their toes along with a few chestnuts, arguing and punching, rowdy as a pack of puppies confined in the tiny cabin with its newspaper-covered walls.

In that moment, Theo longed so badly for his home and his family that his knees went weak. He sank onto the frosty grass, head bowed, lost in grief and despair. He had nothing to live for.

Frozen, he finally stirred himself, drifting away from the water, seeking shelter from the wind. He wandered north of the Battery into an area of grand homes. The big houses were silent and dark, their lucky families asleep in warmth and comfort. Envy left a bitter taste in his mouth, though he would have traded any one of those grand homes just to put back the clock and have his own little cabin and his family alive, all together again, safe in the lee of the Great Smokies.

He paused outside a pink-washed Federal house, just visible through the leafless trees. No lights showed at the windows, but he noticed that a small side gate stood ajar. He saw it led into a courtyard and quickly stepped inside. The high walls cut off the wind and he stood for a minute, catching his breath, letting his eyes adjust. He was a country boy, he was used to walking hilly terrain at night and could navigate his way around in the dark easier than most folks did in daylight.

He walked cautiously past the frozen fountain, through a low wooden door set in the brick wall, and into a neglected garden. Even though it was winter, he could see that no human hand had touched the place in a decade. Vines choked the camellias, leafless rosebushes spread thorny branches across the path, and box hedges that once bordered flower beds had now taken them over completely. Ivy swarmed over the walls of the house and across the garden, half hiding the many statues of angels and nymphs. And, at the far end of the garden, he saw another building. Dirt was so ingrained on its exterior that it was impossible to know, until he went inside, that it was completely made of glass.

When his eyes got used to the even deeper level of darkness, he made out the shelves of long-dead plants: withered orange and lemon trees, dead fig, and espaliered peach. He knew it was some kind of hothouse he was in, except there was no heat. But there was a long table fashioned from wooden planks that he recognized as a place where seedlings were potted and brought on in the winter. His daddy’s precious tomato plants had flourished in a makeshift version of this potting shed.

And on the table were a few old flour sacks. He did not hesitate. He climbed onto the table, covered himself completely with the sacks so that not even his nose peeked out, and curled up into a fetal position for warmth. He had found a home for the night.

As the temperature fell and ice crusted the glass panes of his shelter, he had the feeling that it might be his second encounter with death. Winter would kill him, even if Mitch and Michael Hains had not. Death would be his companion that night and he welcomed it.

He did not wake until the faltering rays of a wintry sun thawed his numb legs. Still beneath the sacking covers, he stretched out his full length, arms above his head, surprised to be alive. His first thought was that he was hungry again.

“Hot damn, you’re a big fellow, whoever you are.” A female voice cut through the silence like a pistol shot.

Theo flung off the sacking and stared at the old woman sitting opposite him in a green canvas lawn chair. Faded eyes sunk in dark shadows gazed calmly back at him. Her silver hair was tugged fiercely back from a bony, lined face. She was scrawny, with sparrow-claw hands and tiny feet thrust into old boots, and she was as shabby as he in an ancient fur coat that looked as though it had once belonged to a much larger person, and which enveloped her stringy body like a mangy shroud. An empty bourbon bottle was on the floor next to her feet.

He breathed a sigh of relief. She was a vagrant like himself, seeking temporary shelter and warmth. He felt a pang of pity as he looked at her. He couldn’t guess how old she was, but he knew she was too old to be living rough like this. He wished he could help her, but he could not even help himself.

“Ah’m sorry, ma’am, if Ah startled you,” he said, remembering to be polite to his elders and betters.

A cackling sound came from her throat. It made his hair stand on end until he realized she was laughing. “I think it’s the other way about, young man. And do I detect a mountain accent?”

Theo felt himself blush. His almost-impenetrable accent had caused him no end of problems since he’d left home. He couldn’t figure out why folks had so much trouble understanding him, until he realized they spoke differently, and then he’d begun to try to copy them.

He slid hurriedly off the table, tucking his shirt-tails into his pants, running his hands through his thick dark hair until it stood on end like a cockscomb. “Ah didn’t see you when Ah came in last night. Ah’m sorry, Ah would’ve left you alone. Ah wouldn’t want to interrupt your sleep.”

She chuckled again. “At my age you don’t care much about sleep anymore. It’s all I’ve got to look forward to.
That long, last sleep.
”

They stared at each other in silence, neither understanding what they saw. He thought she was obviously as poor as he was, yet she spoke with an educated accent. She thought he was like a rough young animal, thin and wild.

“We are alike, you and I,” she said at last, reading the pain and fear in his eyes. “But for different reasons.” She clambered slowly out of the lawn chair and Theo hurried to assist her. He flinched as he touched her. Her hand was icy, purple, bloodless, and her breath smelled of bourbon.

“Where y’ headin’, ma’am? Cain’t Ah do anythin’ to help you?”

“Can you think of anything?” She stared up at him, tiny as his sister Grace had been.

He blushed again, bewildered. “No, Ah cain’t, ma’am. Ah ain’t got nothin’ to offer you. ’Cept’n my arm, to aid ya down the street.”

She nodded, thoughtfully. “That’s very civil of you. Thank you, but I can manage.” She shuffled slowly to the door of the conservatory, leaning heavily on a silver-banded cane. “You must be hungry,” she said, turning as she reached the door.

“Ah guess so, ma’am. Yes, Ah am.” Theo’s stomach rumbled loudly as she reminded him. “Ah’ll find something, though, sooner or later.”

“Sooner is better, I think,” she said, nodding to herself. “Wait here, will you?”

She closed the glass door with its broken panes as carefully as if it were crystal from Venice. Theo stood where she had left him, shaking his head in wonder. A call of nature brought him back to this world and he found a discreet corner of the garden in which to empty his bladder.

Buttoning his filthy old denims, he found a metal bucket of water, cracked the ice on it, and dashed the water over his face. He didn’t flinch. All his life he had washed in cold water, even ice-water like this, in winter. He smoothed his hair as best he could and adjusted his clothing until he was as neat as a lad who had slept in his clothes for several months could be.

The old woman returned a few minutes later, pushing an ancient baby carriage that had once been very grand. Its glossy navy coachwork and soft creamy leather interior had once been suitable for the baby of a very rich family. Now it contained a fresh baguette, a dish of butter, and a pot of very hot coffee, the smell of which almost brought Theo to his knees.

“Where d’y’ git all this?” He was afraid she had stolen it.

“Oh, the people here know me.” She smiled at him. “They take pity on me, sometimes. Think I need feeding up. When all the time it’s young fellows like you who need nourishment.” She thrust the loaded carriage toward him. “Help yourself.”

She took her place on the lawn chair again, watching as he poured coffee into two china beakers. “Sugar and cream, ma’am?” He looked inquiringly at her.

“You have nice manners.” She settled the ratty fur elegantly around her shoulders as though it were a luxurious sable. “I’ve taken coffee black all my life, thank you, and I’m not about to change now. Though of course the doctors say I should. Bah, what do they know, silly old fools. I always tell them if they know so much, how come they die too?”

She took a sip, seeming not to notice that it was scalding. Theo had just burned his mouth on it. “Pass me a bit of that baguette, young man, with some butter.”

He had never seen a sterling silver knife before, and this one was elaborately carved on the haft. “It’s too beautiful to use,” he said, amazed, turning it over and over in his hands.

“Remember this, young man.” She stared into his eyes. Hers were a clear transparent blue, paler than a winter sky. For a second he almost believed that if he looked hard enough, he would see into her soul. He shivered, wondering if she was a witch. “Remember,” she said again, “that a thing of beauty is even more beautiful if it has a use.”

Theo thought about that for a minute. Maybe she was right.

“Isn’t it about time you introduced yourself?” She was sitting up, drinking the coffee, perky as a sparrow now, with a touch of pink in her cheeks as the drink warmed her.

Theo put down the hunk of baguette smothered in butter. It was the best thing he had tasted in almost a year and he was reluctant to leave it even for a second. But he remembered his manners, and that this lady was responsible for his breakfast and his current good fortune. “Ah’m Theodore Rogan, ma’am. Youngest son of Farrar Rogan, deceased, of Hainsville Township, East Tennessee.”