The Dark Closet (10 page)

Yes, even in its twilight Wightefield i
nspired imagination and kindled a sense of hope. Often Lamerie went there to capture from it what she could not cultivate in herself until, that is, Jake realized she was paying regular visits there. He grew so disagreeable about it, accusing her of so many outlandish things, that she began to go less and less often. The less she went, the less Jake pestered her and the more Jake himself went. He was good to his word, too, a surprise after so many false cruel words. She discovered on one visit there that the rotting molding in the dining room had all been replaced, though not painted, and that the debris in the upstairs hallway had been largely cleared away. When she offered to help, however, Jake grew surly and she abandoned the idea. He made haste very slowly, she thought, on surreptitious visits she made thereafter, finally discovering why, when on one occasion, she found numerous freshly dug holes in the grounds behind the house. It was then she understood that he was actively searching for the legendary Wighte necklace and silver bearing the marks of the some of the greatest silversmiths of early America. Everyone knew southern planters buried their silver during the war to save it from theft by marauding northern armies, Jake had said. The Wightes were no different. Somewhere on that plantation lay the treasure of Wighte silver. Somewhere, somewhere,
somewhere
, he said. Sometimes he would go in the evening claiming he was patrolling the grounds for trespassers wanting to dig as well.

The wors
t of it was that he carried a gun on these nocturnal trips to Wightefield and had sworn to Lamerie he would shoot anyone, including her, he found up there at night. Nor would he ask any questions until afterward. It was his right he had told her, to protect his property.

“
Mine
,” she had corrected him.

“
Ours
,” he rejoined. “Mine, ours—what difference does it make?” he had asked cavalierly. Then she saw his face: the glassy eyes; the hard, creviced lines, imprints of exhaustion laid upon his face year after year until they had furrowed a permanent network of trails around his eyes, down his cheeks, around his mouth, sending wispy tentacles of surveillance into his chin. His hair was dry and brittle, standing straight here and there where it had lost all tameness over his ears. Then she would feel sorry for him and kiss him and caress him and lead him to their bed where she coaxed some gentleness of feeling from him for about an hour after which he swung his bare feet to the floor, reached for his pack of cigarettes, and exhaled loudly as the orange orb of the sun traced its fluorescent line from his head to his waist in the growing darkness of the room.

“You better not
be lying to me about Wightefield,” he ended the encounter. Yes, there had been warning signs all those years ago when she had fallen for a young handsome, smiling Jake Hawkins of Walsall. And how refreshing he had been after years of growing up on the brow of socially correct Barrow! There she was a fallen angel. She had the proper house, but in such condition. She had the blood, but it was not green enough. She could never hope to entertain the neighbors of Wightefield in the manner to which they had grown accustomed over the centuries. Nor could she get into the socially prestigious Barrow Garden Club because she could not afford to hostess meetings regardless of the fact that she more than met the prerequisite of a family home dating to at least 1810. Wightefield was built in 1677, an original brick structure that burned in 1723 and on whose venerable foundation the house now stood.

She shivered suddenly as she remembered the cold metal on the back of her neck.

“Let’s just give you a haircut,” Jake had said.

She turned around to see him still holding the kitchen knife. She put her ha
nd to her mouth and moved back.

Oh, come on, Lamerie,” he had said, “It was just a joke.”

“A
joke
?”

“You always get so worked up over everything. Besides
, I didn’t touch you with it.”

That was how Jake operated. He rewrote history. He always belittled his abusive actions until he insisted that they had not occurred at all and were fantasies dreamed up by Lamerie who always over-reacted.

The kick as she walked across the living room of the apartment fell into the same category. He had been angry with her because she had hinted at leaving. He followed behind her a breath away the entire day and ended it with a swift kick to her calf that sent her to the floor.

“I hardly touched you. Why are you falling down?”

“You kicked me,” she exclaimed.

“Kicked you? I hardly touched you at all but you have to make it look as if I’d hauled off and thrown you across the room. I hardly touched you.”

By the end of the day, according to Jake he had not touched her at all. She had begun to believe him.

And so she lived in his world, impossible to escape, cornered at times with his face barely six inches from hers, angrily bellowing or saying nothing at all, just cornering her. She would try to slip through but it never worked. His body moved with hers as if somehow they were tied together by a gossamer thread.

“Stop!”

“Stop what?”

Leave me alone! Move!”

“Move? Why?”

“Because I want to get by. Why do you always do this?”

“Do what? I’m not that close. You always get so worked up over things.”

And sometimes he would move and sometimes he wouldn’t, shattering Lamerie’s world over and over again, like a tea cup of the finest china shipped from England, the emblem of the oldest families of Barrow—china shipped from England centuries ago.

She couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t just leave. Yes, there were threats and veiled threats. He told her once that if she tried to leave, he would shoot her. She knew where both the rifle and the
bullets were and figured that if there were no ammunition, the subject of the rifle would be moot. So she opened the small top drawer of Jake’s bureau, filled a plastic bag with the bullets, walked into the surrounding woods, and hurled the bag as far as she could. She didn’t think of covering or burying them; she just wanted to get them out of the apartment because she believed he would shoot her given the chance. For three days she held her breath waiting for him to realize the boxes of bullets were gone.

But he never did.

There was no two and two for this. It was then that she realized that Jake was not what she had thought he was. He was a fraud. Bellicose and aggressive though he was, he would miss things—like the absence of the bullets. He terrorized her with words to keep her from leaving. And it was this revelation, this epiphany, that finally gave her the courage to leave. And there was only one way to do it. There would be no marching out the door. Jake had somehow through words alone insulated the entire apartment with an invisible fence that would spew and spatter its electricity should she touch it.

No, there was only one way to do it: leave on a mundane errand and never come back. Pristine in its simplicity. She wondered how long it would take for him to realize she was gone.

But for all Jake’s bullying, he finally appeared to have a few secrets of his own. It was not until several years ago that she learned quite accidentally while flipping through a friend’s coffee-table book
Civil War Soldiers
that the history behind Jake’s Company of New York Zouaves of which he so often and so proudly claimed his great grandfather to be a member. Apparently, men of this regiment had come from the cream of New York’s society, and membership in it was as much a social coup in New York as membership in the Barrow Garden Club was a social coup there. Its men all supplied their own equipment and uniforms and drilled on a monthly basis until the regiment was called to Washington in 1861 when General George B. McClellan was called to command the Army of the Potomac against an invasion of Maryland by General Lee. At first she laughed. So where was Jake’s ancestral money?

“What
happened?” she had boldly asked him. “Don’t tell me the family fortune was squandered?”

He
had laughed a guttural, throaty, truculent laugh, throwing back his head and exposing his knobby Adam’s apple. The sound had made her feel as though she was standing naked, and she felt the muscles of her pelvis begin to draw up.

“No, Lie
utenant Shadrack Hawkins preferred poverty to not finding the Wighte emerald necklace.”

It was such a bizarre thing
to say that she never questioned it. Instinct told her in sudden swift revelation that the answer marked her place in a continuum of time along which she slipped according to the orchestrated movements of a confederacy of souls bound for the same destiny, fated to live it regardless of the number of human lives it took to do so, regardless of the eons of time it might consume. The intensity of the moment convinced her for its split second of the truth of the vision, but it passed in the exhalation of a breath leaving her with only the memory of it to ponder.

Crossett was studying the article again. If ever the
necklace were found, he thought, its finder would be wealthy indeed. Seven four-carat emeralds set in a 24-carat gold rope, a gift from King Henry VII to May Lamerie Wighte in the hopes that she would return the largesse. The stuff of legends. Such fabulous pieces of jewelry simply did not exist except in tall tales (The Rambler had that right) of local history. And the silver? Probably that did exist and as many pieces as The Rambler reported: 18 caudle cups; 14 sterling silver candelabras; ten keyhole-design porringers; a Sheffield plate monteith bowl; two snuffboxes, a fruit basket, six tureens, and nine wine coolers; twelve sets of silverware dating from 1653 to 1860; the list was almost endless. Their marks included those of John Hull; Paul Lamerie; Hester Bateme; Philip Syng, Jr.; Abraham Dubois; Benjamin Wynkoop; Gerrit Onckelbag; and Bartholomew LeRoux. It was likely, Crossett mused, the silver had been buried when the family realized Union troops were headed their way, and it was even more likely it had all been unearthed long ago, when slaves who had run off the night the mistress of Wightefield was killed returned to sift through what the troops had left behind. Or maybe the Union soldiers found it and carried it all off. Or carpetbaggers, looters, runaways, maroons—

Who knew?

Strange, he thought the article appearing now. Why, it was just a few weeks ago Twynne and he were talking about Barrow ghosts—in fact, Twynne had mentioned the Wighte ghost but said he did not know much about it. What had he said? Perhaps he should look into it? He certainly was absorbed in the history of the region. Maybe he found something out and spoke to the mysterious Rambler himself; perhaps he encouraged him to write such a piece as was spread before him now. He would have to ask Twynne sometime.

He looked back down at the article.

“ ‘The figure of a woman has been seen in the front parlor of Wightefield,’ “ he read aloud. “ ‘She performs no determinate actions but reportedly has appeared on several occasions in close proximity to the hearth. Descendants say—‘That can’t be you.’ “ He twisted to look at Lamerie, but she did not answer, “ ‘—reports of a woman’s appearances date back to shortly after the Civil War, the earliest of which was an eyewitness by Ester, a house slave who returned to Wightefield a few months after its attack under the leadership of Lieutenant Shadrack Hawkins of the Company of New York Zouaves. The slave claimed—‘ “

“Who?”

”What?”

“Who led the attack?” Lamerie was on her e
lbow now, pulling herself over top of Crossett.

“Somebody named Hawkins.”

“The full name,” she said grabbing for the paper. “What is the full name?”

“Wait!”
Crossett exclaimed, holding the paper out of her reach. “Let me look. Here. ‘Lieutenant Shadrack Hawkins.’.”

“Are you sure?” she asked softly, dropping b
ack.

“Yes, that’s what it s
ays. ‘Shadrack Hawkins.’ An awful name, huh? You should be glad you’re married to a Jake Hawkins.”

Lamerie felt the rush
once again, the sensation of being levitated for a hollow second in time, as if she had been transported to a different dimension just long enough to know she had been there and that it existed. Then the weight returned to her body, as if she had landed again in herself.

“
Where was I?” Crossett trailed his index finger down the page. “Oh, yes. Here—‘to have seen the deceased Mrs. Wighte in the parlor and being relieved to find her mistress unharmed and still living in the house, fell at the woman’s feet weeping, but found when she looked up that the lady had vanished. She and another prodigal slave searched the house but found no other living soul. The did, however, find a fresh shallow grave in the family cemetery many yards from the house which they claimed was the grave of Lamerie Tailler Wighte and produced her engraved wedding ring as proof.’ Well that’s quite a story,” he interpolated. “ ‘Trespassers,’ , “ he continued reading, “ ‘have narrated like experiences but as their presence at the house raised certain legal questions they were often unwilling to elaborate on their stories or commit them to paper.’ “

“ ‘It is pure conjecture to suppose that these sightings are in any way
connected with the fabled Wighte emerald necklace passed down from mother to daughter since 1552. Not seen since Lamerie Tailler Wighte wore it on the day of the sixth anniversary of her marriage to Robert J. Wighte on June 21, 1858, the necklace has inspired much conjecture as to its whereabouts over the last century and more. One theory holds that the necklace is in the possession of its rightful owner.’ “ Crossett paused in his reading and looked at Lamerie with intense interest. “ ‘Lamerie Wighte also received on her wedding day 800 acres, including the house, of her father’s 2,000-acre holding, called Wightefield. It was another custom of the Wightes to pass on to the eldest daughter, along with the  necklace, the house at Wightefield, referred to locally as both the Wightehouse and Wightefield. Much of the enormous land holding that constituted the original land grant to Jacob Wighte in 1657 was lost during the Civil War. The remainder of the property, excluding the house, now belongs to Mr. Harford Saxon.’ “ Crossett lay the paper down.” Nothing much new in that,” he said softly.