Nightfall

  Chapter Twelve

  Just before the sun rose, Damon landed the plane on a private airstrip near Natchitoches, West Louisiana, and they wearily stumbled to a waiting car for the drive into town.

  “You really don’t live far from the border, do you?” Mike said uneasily, noting on the map that the Red River flowed just east of town. It was uncomfortably close to Union territory on the far bank, and Luther’s warning about cross-border raids came vividly to mind.

  “Yes, but don’t worry. No one lives in the bottoms on the far shore, and there’s not even a bridge or a border crossing here. It’s not as close as it seems, in some ways,” Damon said.

  “This is Matthieu’s place,” Mike said when they pulled up to the curb in front of a fine old house made of red brick. He’d only been there twice, but he still recognized the place.

  “Ouai, that was my great-grandfather. But we’ll talk more about that tomorrow. Right now we all need rest,” Damon said.

  They sleepwalked through the door and practically collapsed into the bed he showed them, having to put off curiosity till later.

  They slept most of the day, and Mike woke up near evening with a headache, feeling grungy and uncomfortable. Annabelle and Tyke were still asleep, so he carefully got up and went to the bathroom to clean up a little and take a hot shower. After that he felt much better, and even ventured downstairs in search of something to eat.

  The old house didn’t seem to have changed much in a hundred years; a little dustier and less tidy, perhaps, but still quiet and full of books, even though Damon didn’t strike him as the type who liked to read very much. But when he walked past the door to the dining room, he caught sight of a pretty girl with long braids sitting at a mahogany table with a paperback.

  “Um. . . I hate to bother you, but is there anything to eat?” he asked, and the girl looked up with a smile. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

  “Sure. Papa had to go out for a while, but he told me y’all might be waking up soon and to give you whatever you asked for. My name’s Katrina, by the way,” she said, getting up to offer her hand.

  “You mean like the-“ he began, and she laughed.

  “Yeah, like the storm. But anyway, are you very hungry or just a little bit? I can cook something if you’ll tell me what you like,” she offered.

  “You don’t have to go to that much trouble, really, whatever you’ve got is fine,” he said.

  “Well. . . let’s go see what we can find, then,” she said, and moved past him down the hall till she reached the kitchen. She went immediately to the refrigerator, surveying the contents critically and chewing on her lip.

  “Would fried chicken be all right?” she asked uncertainly.

  “That would be wonderful,” he agreed, and she proceeded to take a package of chicken drumsticks out of the refrigerator along with a container of milk and a box of breading. Then he sat at the table while she breaded the chicken and started it cooking. After a while she covered the frying pan with a lid and came to sit across from him at the table.

  “The secret to good chicken is to cook it slow,” she confided, and he smiled a little.

  “So are you still in high school?” he asked, for the sake of something to say.

  “Yeah, for two more years anyway. Then I’m out of this dinky little town,” she said.

  “Going off to college?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Not sure where, yet, but we’ll see. Someplace that has a good biology or chemistry program; I love all the sciences,” she said.

  “Really? I’m an astronomer myself, and my wife is a math professor,” he said, and the girl wrinkled her nose.

  “Well, except for those kinds of science. No offense,” she said apologetically, and Mike laughed.

  “Oh, well. Can’t win them all,” he said. He wasn’t offended, just amused.

  Katrina got up to check on the drumsticks and turn them over, and then came back to sit down again.

  “It’ll be done before long. Anyway, Papa says you’re from Florida, right?” she asked.

  “Well, sort of. That’s where we live, but we’re both from Texas, actually,” he said.

  “Really? Where?” she asked.

  “She’s from Mount Pleasant and I’m from Ore City,” he said, thinking to himself that Katrina Doucet had more curiosity than a cat on steroids.

  He was spared any more quizzing when Annabelle appeared in the doorway with Tyke, who was still yawning.

  “Aw, he’s so cute! Does he like chicken?” Katrina asked, reaching out to poke Tyke’s belly with her finger. He stared at her solemnly at first, and then a faint smile appeared on his lips, and finally a laugh.

  “To answer your question, yeah, he likes chicken. He’ll eat pretty much anything that doesn’t run too fast or bite back too hard,” Annabelle said wryly. He could tell that she’d had a shower, too, but there were still circles under her eyes from the long night.

  “How are you feeling, sugar baby?” he asked, giving her a kiss and then kissing Tyke too. She sighed.

  “Well, I’d be a liar if I said I’d never had a better day, but I’ll get over it. I’m just glad we’re finally safe now,” she said, and he nodded.

  “Amen to that,” he said with feeling.

  Katrina was busily serving the chicken while they talked, and for a little while they ate with a mixture of silence and desultory conversation

  “Did your father say when he’d be home?” Mike asked after a while, and Katrina shook her head.

  “He didn’t know for sure, just sometime this evening. I think he expected y’all to stay here for at least a few days, though,” she said.

  “Oh. Well, I guess we’ll talk to him when he gets here, then, if not tonight then tomorrow,” Mike said. He had a lot of questions to ask Damon and a lot of plans to make, but he felt tolerably safe at the moment and all those things didn’t seem quite so urgent as they would have back in Tampa.

  And that was a good feeling, indeed.

  Damon still hadn’t shown up by the time he and Annabelle got ready for bed, so they didn’t wait on him.

  “Do you think they’ll come looking for us?” Annabelle asked quietly.

  “I hope not,” he murmured, although in his heart of hearts he suspected it was highly likely. His work was too valuable for them to let him escape that easily.

  “I hope they never make any connection between us and Damon, and they think we drowned at sea when the boat sank,” she said.

  “Maybe they will,” he agreed.

  “Where do you think we should go from here? We can’t stay with Damon and Katrina forever, you know,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said.

  “And?” she asked.

  “Well, I know one place we maybe could go,” he said.

  “Where’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s possible I could get my family’s ranch back, if the state hasn’t already sold it to somebody else a hundred years ago,” he said.

  “Do you think that’s such a good idea? That’s a place where you’ve got known connections; they might be able to track us down over there,” Annabelle said.

  “I don’t think so. Everybody keeps talking about how all the records from before the Union War got wiped out, and that’s really the only way I know of that they could connect me to the place,” Mike said.

  “Well. . . true. It’s still pretty close to the border, though. You know what Luther said about that,” Annabelle said.

  “It’s nowhere near as close to the border as Natchitoches,” he pointed out.

  “Yeah, that’s true too. I guess it might be worth going to see,” Annabelle finally agreed.

  “I’ll call the tax assessor tomorrow and see how it’s listed; that’ll tell us a little bit, anyway,” he said, and with that plan in mind he went to sleep.

  The next morning, Damon met them at breakfast.

  “Now, y’all ca
n stay here as long as you need to. I know you’d rather be a little farther away from the border if possible, but I know it might take a little while to find somewhere to go,” he began, waving his fork in the air as he ate his bacon and eggs.

  “I’m sure we’ll find somewhere soon. We don’t want to impose,” Mike said.

  “No, it’s no trouble at all. Just me and Kat here in this big old house. Plenty of room for visitors,” Damon said.

  “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to your wife?” Annabelle asked.

  “Don’t rightly know, to tell you the truth. She was a lot younger than me, ended up finding her a trophy buck and running off to Dallas with him. Haven’t seen her since Kat was a baby,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Annabelle said, and Damon shrugged.

  “Some things were never meant to be, that’s all. Old coot like me should have known better than to get married in the first place, much less to a little slip of a thing like her. I was forty-nine and she was twenty-one, if that tells you anything. We were doomed from the get-go,” Damon said.

  “How did you meet her?” Annabelle asked innocently, and Damon hesitated.

  “She was an exotic dancer at a club in New Orleans,” he finally admitted, and Annabelle’s face turned a shade of crimson rarely seen outside a box of crayons.

  “Oh!” she said, and Mike would have laughed if it had been anyone else. But as it was, the kindest thing he could do was to pretend not to notice her embarrassment.

  “Well, at least you have a beautiful daughter out of the deal,” he said, and Damon seemed glad to change the subject, too.

  “Ouai, at least there’s that much. She is beautiful, isn’t she?” he agreed, taking another bite of eggs.

  “She certainly is,” Mike said.

  “Tough, too, and she can fly almost as well as I can. It’ll soon be time for her to start going on these midnight dogfights over the Gulf and such; I’m getting too old for that kind of thing. But enough talk about that. The first thing we need to do is get you some transportation. Philip said you’d be bringing some cash; do you have enough to buy a car?” Damon asked.

  “Yeah, no problem,” Mike agreed.

  And so it was that Damon took them to a car dealership on the west side of town, and Mike paid cash for a used but still sturdy Dodge Esperanza, the most nondescript-looking vehicle they could find on the entire lot. The last thing they wanted was to attract attention with something flashy.

  As soon as that was done, they bought some new clothes and a few other necessities they hadn’t had time or space to bring with them from Florida, and then things were much more comfortable.

  But as Annabelle had pointed out, they couldn’t move in with Damon and Katrina permanently, no matter how well they got along. Nor would they have wanted to even if they could have. In spite of what Damon had said about no bridges, Natchitoches was much too close to the border for comfort.

  Mike found his thoughts turning to Goliad again, but when he called the county assessor he received a surprise.

  “Now that’s weird,” he said, as soon as he got off the phone.

  “What’s weird?” Annabelle asked.

  “The place is still listed in my father’s name, and somebody’s been paying the taxes every year so I guess they haven’t had any reason to think twice about it,” Mike said.

  “I wonder who it could have been,” Annabelle said.

  “I have no idea. But I sure would like to find out,” he said.

  So they made the two hour drive, and when they arrived at the old place it was in sad shape. The fields and pastures Mike remembered were gone, grown up in dense woods. The white rail fence had disappeared, and even the driveway was impassable, though he could tell where it had once been.

  “I barely recognize the place,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Well, let’s get out and see. We drove all this way, we might as well look,” Annabelle said. So they parked at the edge of the road and headed up the old driveway on foot, pushing branches out of the way. There were wild yellow roses growing profusely everywhere, and the thorns were wickedly sharp.

  Before long they came to a huge pecan tree, and Mike stopped.

  “This tree should have been in the center of the circle drive. The house ought to be right in front of us,” he said, although they still couldn’t see it.

  They struggled through thickets for a little while farther, till they finally stumbled against a set of flagstone steps leading up to the porch. The porch was like a green cave heavily overgrown with vines and dead leaves and creepers, and it was easy to see that the house itself had also begun to suffer the ravages of time. The screen was hanging loosely off its hinges, and the wood of the front door had warped over the years from sun and rain until it no longer quite fit the jamb. Mike had to kick it hard to get it open.

  It was dim inside, and they had to wait a few minutes for their eyes to adjust before moving on. A few really determined vines had managed to make their way into the living room, but for the most part the place was clear of vegetation, thankfully. There was nothing worse to contend with indoors than a thick layer of dust on everything, and the musty smell of a place that hasn’t been opened up in a long time. But there was still furniture in place, and all the other things that should have been there, almost as if the people had walked away one afternoon and then never come back.

  “I wonder who lived here last,” Annabelle said.

  “My parents, I guess. Maybe Uncle Brandon one of my sisters,” Mike said absently. There was a portrait in a frame above the fireplace, and he quietly walked over to blow the dust away. It was of a young couple standing in a field of bluebonnets in front of a lake, next to a white wood rail fence. He was wearing a white straw hat with a black t-shirt, and her long auburn hair lay prettily against her dark blue sleeveless blouse.

  “That’s my mom and dad, a long time ago,” he said, staring at the portrait. He could dimly remember when the two of them had still looked like that, when he was very small. Annabelle came up behind him and put her arms around his middle, almost as if she could feel his mood.

  “Don’t be sad, sugar daddy. Nothing is meant to last forever,” she said, laying her head on the back of his neck.

  “No, I don’t guess it is,” he said softly.

  They wandered all around Goliad for several hours that day, what little there was left to see of it. The lake was still there, and some of the trees in the peach orchard, and the road up to the cemetery on top of Mount Nebo. The cemetery itself was weedy and unkempt, but it was probably the least overgrown part of the whole place when they reached it. The black wrought-iron fence was still in place, and if Mike closed his eyes just a bit he could almost imagine that no time at all had passed.

  For a little while, he indulged his melancholy and visited the graves of the people he remembered or at least knew something about. Reuben and Hannah, who first settled the place. Blake and Josie, his grandparents. Uncle Marcus and aunt Jenny. He found his parents almost at the end, and hard as that was, he was comforted to see that both of them had lived well into their nineties. The inscription on their stone read

  May the words of my mouth and the imaginings of my heart

  be acceptable in Thy sight, O God, my strength and my Redeemer.

  Cody McGrath had been a songwriter and Lisa a lyric poet, so perhaps those words were appropriate for the two of them. Mike got a little teary-eyed, seeing all that, and Annabelle could only squeeze his hand and murmur a few soft words of comfort.

  “Come on, let’s go,” he finally said, wiping his eyes dry with the sleeve of his shirt, and they left the cemetery.

  “I think we could make this place livable again, if you really wanted to. It’d take some work, sure, but mostly just cutting down all this overgrowth. It didn’t look like the roof leaks yet, or anything major like that,” Annabelle said. She was trying to be optimistic and constructive, bless
her heart, but he wasn’t in a mood to hear it.

  “Maybe,” he shrugged.

  “Don’t you want to? I think it could be a really pretty place, with a little work,” she said.

  “It always used to be,” he admitted.

  “Well, there you go,” she said.

  “Would you really want to live here, though? Way out in the sticks like this? No shopping malls, no good restaurants, no movie theaters or anything to do?” he asked skeptically, and she laughed.

  “Remember who you’re talking to, boy. I grew up farther out in the boonies than you ever did. I don’t mind at all. The real question is whether you’re ready to give up being a high powered intellectual and settle down to raise cows,” she said, and as usual, she was devastatingly accurate. He could almost see his father smiling.

  “You’re absolutely right. I’m not ready for that and I never will be. Daddy might have been a redneck farmer but I’m most definitely not,” he said.

  “Then don’t do it. We’ll find something else,” she said, and he sighed.

  “Have I really got any other choice, Annabelle?” he asked.

  “Human beings always have a choice. Do this if you want to, and don’t if you don’t. I’ve already told you I’m okay with it, but I don’t want you to feel like you have to,” she said.

  “Give me a while to think about it,” he said, resigned.