The Mirk and Midnight Hour (13 page)

For a moment I could not speak from the swelling in my throat. “Are you afraid?” I asked finally, softly.

“No. I’ll go to a better place and I’m curious to see it. It’s only that I wish I could have seen my home and my family one more time.”

“Tell me about them. And you.” I put my hand over his and clutched tightly.

He was Mr. Isaac Lafarge, of Louisiana, and he was fifteen years old. He was the only son, with five older sisters. He had a coonhound named Badger.

As it so often did when I was distressed, my amulet glowed warm and comforting against my skin. I lifted it from over my head and placed it around Mr. Lafarge’s neck. “Wear this until it’s all done,” I said. “The stone is supposed to bring luck.” I got his address and promised to write to his family.

When the men arrived to take him to the surgeon’s table, I watched after, wondering if I should make myself go along.

However, there was nothing more I could do for Mr. Lafarge, and there were others who needed care.

During the past weeks, cots had been brought in so the patients were off the floor. Most of the filth had been cleaned up, and an army doctor and surgeon were in attendance, replacing Dr. Hale. Many of those patients I had attended were gone, either to their graves or removed by relatives. Although the men left here were mutilated in every imaginable way, several appeared quite cheerful now, certain they were on the mend. Others … Mr. Miller of Georgia, who had a dreadful wound to his shoulder, was wandering in his mind.

Each time I came, my heart was struck anew by the horrors that the Yankees would work upon their fellow men.

However, there was no time to think of such things. I offered water and food, bathed feverish faces and wounds. I listened to talk
of “home, sweet home” and wrote letters. So little, yet the poor sufferers were grateful for it.

A commotion sounded at the door. I looked up to see Dr. Abbot trying to shut out someone who was attempting to enter the gallery. “Oh, no you don’t,” Dr. Abbot’s voice boomed. “Today’s no different from those other times you came. We don’t want medicine such as yours here.”

I caught a glimpse of a pink face with pebble-thick spectacles knocked askew as Dr. VanZeldt was shoved outside.

“But you
should
want it.” The doctor’s raised voice beyond the slammed door sounded deeply distressed. “You simply do not know what I can do to help.”

“Begone, sir, or you will be escorted bodily out of town.”

This threat was met by silence. Dr. VanZeldt must have given up.

By now Mr. Lafarge’s surgery was completed. I was ashamed of my cowardice in leaving him and went to his side as he slept. Gently I bathed his face. He had bitten through his lip; I washed the blood away.

He was so still … so … 
empty
.

Cold.

I reeled, shaky and sick.

Rush. Oh, my Rush
.

No. Not Rush. This was Isaac Lafarge. I steadied myself against the edge of the bed and said a quick prayer for Isaac Lafarge. He was the darling of his mother and five sisters, yet I was the only one in the whole world who knew at this moment that he was dead.

He no longer needed my amulet. After steeling myself to remove it from around his neck, I did so. The amber was cold. It had not been lucky for him.

I informed a nurse about his passing.

“Poor little Mr. Lafarge,” she said. “He was one of my favorites.”

With the back of my hand I swiped at my cheeks. “Mine too,” I choked out.

I stumbled outside and leaned against the brick wall. At one end of the yard was a well. I pulled up a bucket and plunged my face into the cold water. I came up gasping and did it again and again. The drenching and the few minutes allowed me to regain self-control.

Soon after I left the courthouse.

“Miss Violet Dancey!”

The voice sounded from behind. I whirled around.

Dr. VanZeldt was scurrying down Main Street, his pale kid leather shoes scuffing up dust. He held out a walking stick before him as if he would attack me with it, but his expression was eager and benign.

I might have run in the opposite direction if I hadn’t pitied him for his experience at the hospital.

He reached me, puffing a little, and touched the edge of his hat. Up close, his eyes were distorted by the thick glasses, and his shiny pink skin had an odd, stretched look.

“Yes, sir?” I said.

“Miss Violet Dancey, I want to thank you for your kindness to Amenze. You impress us. Impress us, indeed.” He held out his hand as if to shake mine. Instead, he captured my fingers in his damp palm and enclosed them tightly with his other hand. He had a slight accent.

“It was n-nothing,” I stammered, trying unsuccessfully to regain my hand. “Just a little confusion about her money. Anybody could have helped.”

He seemed not to hear what I said. His brow furrowed and he held up my palm as if to study it. “You have been … touching someone who departed this world very recently.”

I wrenched my hand from his grasp and wiped it against my skirt. “At the hospital.” My breath came out heavy.

“What a pity,” Dr. VanZeldt said, and his eyes were full of compassion. “He was very young.”

“What … How do you know?”

“Ah, some of his energy yet clings to you, and sensing such things is one of my skills. But you sell yourself short when you say anyone would have helped our Amenze. Around here, very few would. My people are the—ahem—proverbial pariahs.”

“I’m sorry folks haven’t been welcoming. And I’m sorry they won’t let you assist with the wounded.”

“Yes, you saw.” A knowing, bitter look sparked in his magnified eyes. “They do not understand what they are rejecting. They are fools. Nevertheless, that is neither here nor there. What I want you to please know is that we are in your debt. Amenze is most precious. It is our hope that we will all get to know one another better. I have been asked to invite you to dine with us one day at Shadowlawn.”

The thought of seeing the VanZeldts doing anything so ordinary as eating made the invitation almost tempting. However, I did not want to know the doctor better. Although he looked well scrubbed in his white suit with his shiny pink skin, a sense of something unclean oozed out of him.

I managed a vague smile. “Maybe someday. Amenze seemed very sweet. I … um”—I half turned—“ought to be going.”

He tipped his hat again and I hastened down the road, anxious in a way I did not fully understand. I needed to get home.

At Scuppernong, I entered the sitting room to find Seeley sprawled, scrawny and shirtless, on the sofa, very pale, with a bloody bandage wrapped rakishly about his head and a sling around his bony shoulder. Sunny, Miss Elsa, and Laney hovered near.

At the sight I gave a gasp.

“He’s fine, Vi-let,” Sunny said as I darted to Seeley’s side. “No need to look all wild-eyed. This is what happens to boys who climb magnolia trees like monkeys. A branch broke beneath him. Other limbs slowed his fall and he landed on soft grass. That’s all.”

“I did see stars when my head thudded,” Seeley said. “I wondered if people really did.”

Miss Elsa stood wringing her hands nearby. “Dorian’s King snapped his shoulder back in place. What if the fall …”

“You should’ve heard the pop,” Seeley said.

“No. No one should ever have to hear such a thing,” Laney said, making a face. “Not if they know what’s good for them.”

“He was lucky. Devilishly lucky.” Dorian’s voice startled me. I hadn’t noticed him leaning carelessly against the wall behind the door. “And now he’s being a trump about it.” He gave Seeley a grin.

Later, when I went out to find Goblin for Seeley, King loomed against the sunset as he stirred the blazing rubbish fire with a pole. I shuddered at the sight of the huge limb that had broken beneath my cousin, flames dancing along its length. Goblin’s golden eyes glowed nearby, watching.

As I stepped softly past Miss Ruby Jewel’s little house, Jubal’s deep, gravelly voice reached me. “Miss Dancey! My mistress requests a word with you.”

Drat!
And I had walked so softly. I was returning from the long trip into town to make certain the patients were all transported and was ready to get home to Scuppernong. However, I couldn’t ignore the tall, skinny old black man. Jubal stood with his head bowed below a tangled arbor framing the front steps. I made my way up the overgrown path toward the house. Rather than cooling the air with their shade, the thickly interwoven branches of the live oaks held in oppressive heat. I forced my lips into a smile.

No answering smile lightened Jubal’s weary eyes or lifted the melancholy droop of his face. With an almost courtly gesture, he held back the encroaching tendrils of a climbing rosebush. A streak of bright blood beaded up where thorns had torn his forehead, but he showed no sign that he noticed. He indicated the gaping mouth
of his mistress’s parlor. “In here, please, ma’am, Miss Dancey.” His tone was gracious.

“You catch that girl, Jubal?” Miss Ruby Jewel screeched from inside.

“He caught me,” I said, entering the room, which was close with tobacco smoke, humidity, the stench of the old woman and her many cats, and a crowded jumble of musty, dusty furniture, knickknacks, and odds and ends. Jubal tried to tidy up, but it was more than one tired old man could possibly triumph over. I had forgotten to take a lungful of clean air while I still could. From the smell there might even be a dead kitten among the drifts.

A mottled tom sidled up. Some skin disease left his fur patchy, with splotched bits of flesh between. I twitched my gown away. The beast somehow managed to get under my skirt, and I shuddered as he purred loudly and rubbed against my legs. I shooed him out and gave him a subtle little nudge to send him on his way. Another feline leaped down from the mantel, and in the corner of my eye slinky shadows crept constantly, making the room seethe. All cats in the world were beloved by me except Miss Ruby Jewel’s. These made my skin crawl.

Miss Ruby Jewel took a puff of her pipe and said in a voice like twigs scraping against a glass pane, “Make room for yourself on that there settee.” Huddled and sunken into a low chair wreathed by bluish smoke, she resembled a bag of bones in her rusty black dress. The old lady’s back was humped, her hands twisted with arthritis, and her legs too short to reach the floor. With her miniature stature Miss Ruby Jewel looked like a very ugly doll. The sort of doll to give a little girl nightmares.

Hesitantly I shoved aside clothing and papers to carve out a place to sit.

“Been losing weight, ain’t you?” Miss Ruby Jewel commented while my back was turned. “Your hiney don’t spread out wide like it used to. You still favor your daddy’s cousin Winnie, though. The one who come out here to settle her own place and ended up marrying a Choctaw Indian and living in a tepee behind his saloon.”

Why was it that whenever people said I resembled anyone, it was always someone I didn’t want to resemble?

I perched gingerly at the edge of the sofa. “How are you, Miss Ruby Jewel?” A stream of perspiration trickled down my back.

“Tolerable,” she said. “Just tolerable. Jubal! You, Jubal! Fetch this young lady a cold drink right quick and grab me up some gingersnaps.”

The old man sighed and shook his head. “Now, Miss Ruby Jewel, ma’am, you know Dr. Hale doesn’t want you eating sweeties. They make you sick. He says one of these days they’ll be the death of you.”

“But what a way to go, eh? Hale’s an old fusspot. Now, no more impudence, you, Jubal. Take your raggedy black tail out of here and bring back what I done told you. Lots of them. Lots of gingersnaps.”

“Yes’m.” Jubal shuffled from the room.

“Now,” the old woman said, “I ain’t talked to you in a month of Sundays, but I did want to tell you I was right sorry to hear about your brother. He wasn’t a bad young’un.”

I thanked her and looked down at my hands, wriggled, and removed from beneath me a brass swan. It had been lodged between
the sofa cushions, with its beak digging into my less-spread-out posterior. Then, because I didn’t want her to say anything more about Rush, I asked, “Ma’am, how long has Mr. Jubal been with you? Years and years, isn’t it?”

“ ‘Mister,’ is it?” Her beady black eyes sparkled. “Don’t let him hear you call him that. Don’t need to give that one no more uppity ideas. Yep, he sure ’nough has been with me nigh sixty years.”

“And how did he come to you?”

She gave a screech of laughter so sudden and shrill that I jumped. “You been conjecturing on that forever, ain’t you? You been pondering how someone like Ruby Jewel Clewett come to own a fancy-pants Negro like Jubal. Well, I guess ’twon’t hurt none to satisfy your curiosity, even though curiosity done killed the cat. Didn’t it, my precious?” She nuzzled the neck of the mangy marmalade feline that had leaped momentarily on the arm of her chair. With her head nodding she looked more than ever like a grotesque doll—this time the kind that wags its head on a spring. “It happened like this: back when I was a beautiful young gal—ho-ho, I see your eyes pop. You don’t believe I could ever have been pretty, do you?” She cackled again. “Well, you’re right. I done told you a story. I always been so homely I’d run a dog off a meat wagon and that’s a fact, but Billy Dean liked me well enough when I married him at the ripe old age of thirteen. At the time he was already older than the mountains and had twice as many skunks.