The Elementals

  Into the trunk of the black Mercedes the two maids put a rake, a broom, a bag of soft cloths, and a cardboard box of cleaning liquids. They did not volunteer to assist Odessa in the cleaning of the Savage family mausoleum. But when he was pulling out of the driveway, Dauphin said to Odessa, “First we’re going to the drugstore and leave off India’s film, then you and me are going to the lawyer’s.”

  Odessa said, “You leave me off at the cemetery. By the time you get through I’ll be done too, it’s not gone—”

  Dauphin interrupted her. “Odessa, I didn’t tell you this ’cause I knew you wouldn’t like it, but Mama mentioned you in her will. In fact you and me are the only people mentioned at all—personally I mean, so it’s you and me that’s got to go to the lawyer’s. When we’re finished there—and it won’t take long—then we’ll go back to the cemetery and clean up. I want to help . . .”

  “Mr. Dauphin, you should have told me!” said Odessa reproachfully. “Your mama didn’t have any business going and putting me in her will. I wish she hadn’t done it.”

  “Well, I tell you, Odessa, if it makes you feel any better, she didn’t want to do it, but I made her. It was all my doing. I told the lawyer what all to say, and he wrote it out and then I sat up in that room for three months until she finally signed it.”

  “All right then,” said Odessa, “long as she didn’t mean it, I guess it’s all right.”

  At the lawyer’s offices, Dauphin was greeted not only by that man, but by the president and all the fellows of the firm, making unaccustomed Saturday appearances—Dauphin was, after all, the third richest man in Mobile, and of those three he was the only one to have been born in Alabama. The reading of Marian Savage’s will was perfunctory. She had left a quarter of a million dollars to the convent in which Sister Mary-Scot was resident, she had set up a nursing scholarship at Spring Hill College, she had donated a new Sunday school wing to the Church of St. Jude Thaddeus, and she provided Odessa with an annuity of fifteen thousand dollars for life, the principal to return to the family coffers after the black woman’s death. Everything else went to Dauphin. Marian Savage had not loved her son who survived, but she was Savage to the heart and had never entertained any thought of channeling the family fortune away from Dauphin, Leigh, and whatever children they might have. As she signed the will, she had given Dauphin to understand that if Darnley had lived, or if Mary-Scot had not joined the convent, things would have been quite different. Dauphin would have got only a pittance. But as things were, he must have everything.

  “I thank you for what you did,” said Odessa as they were driving away again, forty-five minutes later.

  “Odessa, don’t—”

  “You let me talk,” she said sternly and Dauphin was silent. Odessa went on: “That money’ll mean I won’t ever have to worry again. I was ’ginning to worry about Social Security. I know a woman on Social Security and after she’s paid her rent, it don’t buy her a mess of black-eyed peas. When I’m not working any more, I won’t have to worry—”

  “Odessa, you’re gone work for Leigh and me forever, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am! I will work for you and Miz Leigh till I cain’t put one foot in front of the other!”

  “You’ll always have a home with us, Odessa. You know we couldn’t do without you.”

  “When I get old and I’m as mean as your mama was, Mr. Dauphin, then you’ll be glad enough I’m living on my own somewhere—” Dauphin looked about to make a contradictory speech here, but Odessa rode over it: “—but now I don’t need to worry. You just got to promise me one thing, Mr. Dauphin, you got to promise me—”

  “I promise. What is it?”

  “When I’m dead, you make sure that Johnny Red don’t get a folded dollar of that money!”

  “I promise,” said Dauphin, but he was already scheming charity—trying to think of how he could take care of no-good Johnny Red in the unlikely case that that alcoholic loafer survived his common-law wife.

  The Savage mausoleum was a squat square edifice of darkly veined Italian marble set in a cypress-shaded corner of Mobile’s oldest cemetery. Mobile’s dead had been planted here since the early part of the eighteenth century, but hurricanes and vandals and widening of the streets had obliterated all trace of the first fruits, and the Savage mausoleum was now celebrated as the oldest remaining monument. Along the three walls inside were carved the names of six generations of Savages—and this did not include infants and adolescents who, not considered worthy of the place, were relegated to a little sinking plot of earth over the way.

  The bells of a nearby church were chiming four o’clock as the Mercedes pulled up before the Savage mausoleum. While Dauphin unloaded the trunk, Odessa opened the iron door of the tomb with the key that she kept with all the others of the household. She stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind her; she stood at the grating and told Dauphin to put everything down just outside.

  “You let me take care of this, Mr. Dauphin,” she said. “You sit in the car. You go get a ice cream cone. You come back for me in an hour, that’s what I want you to do.”

  “Odessa, I ought to go inside and pay my respects to Mama. Mama was big on respect-paying.” He smiled sadly through the grating.

  “I know, but you ought not come inside, and that’s the truth.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause graves is no place for the living.”

  Dauphin shrugged and smiled, and pushed open the door. “I’m gone come on inside, Odessa, and speak to Mama for a few minutes.”

  The mausoleum was dim inside. The refracted light of a heavily overcast afternoon penetrated as only a filmy gray. But Dauphin immediately saw that all inside was not as he had left it on the day of the funeral. On the floor below his mother’s niche was spread a small linen cloth with a jumble of objects on it.

  “Odessa,” he said, “somebody’s been in here. What is all this stuff?”

  Nervously—for no Savage could deal straightforwardly with irregularities in the matter of tombs and burials—Dauphin knelt to see what was on the cloth: an alarm clock loosely wrapped in a page torn from a calendar; a teacup whose broken handle lay inside it; two conch shells that had been smashed together; and a plastic shoe box holding the litter of a medicine chest.

  Dauphin looked curiously up at Odessa, who said nothing and seemed not surprised to see those things there.

  “Somebody’s been playing here,” said Dauphin hopefully. “Some child has got inside here, and was playing a game, and—”

  Odessa shook her head.

  Dauphin picked up the alarm clock. It was set for four o’clock, the time of his mother’s death; the calendar page was for the month of May, and the day of her death red-circled. The teacup was of the set of dishes off which she had always had her breakfast. The conch shells were those that in summer had flanked either side of the cold hearth in her bedroom. The labels on the discarded prescription bottles at the bottom of the plastic shoe box all read, For the Use of Marian Savage.

  “I put everything there,” said Odessa. “Nobody broke in here. I came back early the morning after the funeral, Miz Leigh brought me over here before she carried me to the house.”

  Dauphin raised himself and strove to make out Odessa’s eyes in the dimness of the mausoleum. “All right, but why, Odessa? Why’d you bring all this stuff here?”

  “Brought it for Miz Marian.”

  “As an offering? That what you mean?”

  Odessa shook her head. “Keep her from getting out of this place,” she said, and pointed to the square of inscribed marble against which rested the foot of Marian Savage’s coffin.

  “Clock and calendar’s gone remind her she’s dead. I broke that cup—I hated to do it, but it was a extra—broken cup’s gone tell her she’s dead. Those shells gone speak to her of water. The dead got to cross water.”

  “And the pills? What about the ’scription bottles?”

  “They gone remind her who she was. Dead com
e back, they don’t always remember who they was. Your mama reads her name there, Mr. Dauphin, and she’s gone say, ‘Why, I’m dead, I’m gone go right back inside and not bother nobody!’”

  “Odessa, you’re talking crazy. You’re making me real scared. I want you to take all this junk out of here.”

  “You got to leave it for at least six months,” said Odessa, “that’s when the dead come back. They die and they start forgetting right off, but it takes six months ’fore they stop caring.” She jerked her head toward Marian Savage’s marble plaque. “She’s back there now, and she cain’t remember everything, they’s things she’s already forgotten, but she knows how to get out and she knows who to come after, she—”

  “Odessa!” cried Dauphin, shaking all over. “Don’t you say another word about this!” And he fled that dim gray place, leaving Odessa to sweep the floor and run her cloths over the marble walls. He was waiting in the car for her half an hour later, silent, nervous and morose, and they did not speak on the drive back to the Small House. But even if they had spoken, Odessa would not have told him of what she had found in the mausoleum, what had not been apparent until her eyes had grown fully accustomed to the dimness there: that the mortar around the marble plaque of his mother’s monument had been chipped away in a number of places, leaving little lines of blackness all around. You could have stuck a straw through those holes and touched Marian Savage’s coffin on the other side.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dauphin had not planned on it, but he remained that night in Mobile. His accountant found out from his lawyer that he was in town and telephoned him late in the afternoon, asking if it would be possible to talk with him that evening. Odessa assured him that it would make no difference if they did not return to Beldame until the next day, and she had just as soon spend the night in her own house. There was no way of letting those in Beldame know that they would not be coming back, but probably they would not worry unduly.

  Dauphin dropped Odessa at her house, dined with Lawton McCray and Sonny Joe Black at a seafood restaurant on the municipal pier—where he heard the gratifying progress of the campaign and listened politely to the manifold reasons why he ought to sell Beldame to the oil companies. When he returned home and pressed the key into the lock of the darkened house, he realized that it was the first time he had ever spent the night alone there.

  Odessa’s voodoo—was there any other word for it?—with the jumbled broken artifacts of his mother’s life had disturbed him. Of course the black woman had known the Savage family legends of the dead not being dead, but her accumulation of those objects on the marble floor of the tomb had seemed designed for protection against a greater evil than that. The fear had clung to Odessa like cobwebs—that Marian Savage would return from the dead. He drew the curtains in the dining room so that he would not be tempted to gaze out the window at the Great House: he feared to see lights there.

  He wandered disconsolately through his home, turning on the television set loud in hope that the voices and laughter would be comforting. On a situation comedy he heard the squawk of a bird, and thought suddenly of Nails. When he went to Beldame, Nails had been deliberately left behind; he had had no wish ever to hear again the single speech the bird had uttered: Savage mothers eat their children up!

  Dauphin went to the cage in the glassed-in porch and lifted the cover, praying that the bird would not repeat its terrible litany. The cage was empty. It had been scrubbed clean; the feeders and water trough were empty and dry.

  The television set was left on all night to cover the noises in the house.

  Next morning when the two maids arrived, Dauphin learned that on the day that they left for Beldame, Nails had begun to refuse his food. He pined and scraped incessantly at the newspaper at the bottom of the cage, shredding a dozen layers a day. In a week he was dead, and the gardener buried him in the bearded iris bed at the side of the Great House.

  “Well, did he talk?” asked Dauphin nervously.

  “Talk?” cried the maid who was thin. “That bird couldn’t talk! It never said a word since the day your mama got him!”

  “No,” replied Dauphin to Odessa’s question, “I didn’t sleep well at all. I’m not used to sleeping alone, I don’t like sleeping alone. And I tell you something, Odessa,” he said in a tone of voice that came as near as Dauphin ever got to real annoyance, “it was all because of that business in the mausoleum yesterday, those things you put on the floor. It’s not respectful to the dead, it’s against religion, and I don’t know what all else.”

  “I did it for you,” said Odessa simply.

  “I know you did,” said Dauphin, softening already. “And I ’preciate it. I really do. But the fact is, Mama’s dead. Really and truly. We got two doctors in there to say she was dead, and at the funeral—you saw me—I stuck a knife in her chest. Odessa, I hated doing it, but I checked—she didn’t do any bleeding.”

  “Oh, she was dead,” said Odessa nodding her head. The day was so cool and windy that the air conditioner wasn’t wanted in the car. Both front windows were down. “And when I put those things there—when I broke that cup and emptied those pill bottles, I just wanted to make sure that your mama remembered that she was dead. That’s all I wanted to do.”

  “The dead don’t come back,” said Dauphin flatly. They had just been through Daphne and Fairhope and were almost to Point Clear, taking the route along Mobile Bay instead of the one that went through the interior of the county. All the way down, the bay, whipped frothy, was just to their right, slate blue beneath a sky of gray slate.

  “Did you have a dream?” asked Odessa, knowing that he had. “What did you dream about?”

  “What else could I dream about?” said Dauphin. “I dreamed about that mausoleum. I dreamed I was dead. I dreamed I was at the funeral, and you and Leigh stood at the coffin, and Leigh touched my chest with the knife. Odessa, I could feel that metal! I could feel it in my sleep! So they took me to the mausoleum and they put me in right on top of Mama—”

  “That’s right where they’ll put you when you do die,” said Odessa.

  “I know,” said Dauphin, “and that’s one reason why the dream seemed so real. They lifted me up and put me in, and suddenly I wasn’t in the coffin any more. I was just lying up there in that space, and they blocked it up. It was dark and I couldn’t see and I couldn’t breathe and I thought I was gone die. Except I was already dead.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I kicked out the marker. It fell on the floor and broke all to pieces, and then I climbed down. I cut my foot but it didn’t bleed. All the other markers in the place had been knocked out too. The whole place was covered with broken pieces of marble. There were all these holes in the walls where the coffins had gone, but I was the only person there. I was afraid to look in the holes, but I did, and I was the only person there.”

  Dauphin grew feverish telling his nightmare. Odessa must caution him to reduce the speed of the Mercedes. He did so, and when he resumed it was with a calmer voice. “The trouble was, the door was locked. I was in there all by myself, and the door was locked. I started calling for someone to come and get me. I don’t remember if it was day out or night. I couldn’t tell, or maybe I just don’t remember now, but I called and called and nobody came. Then I heard somebody coming, and I yelled out, ‘Hey, y’all, I’m in here!’”

  “Who was it?”

  “They came to the door and opened it.”

  “Who was it?” repeated Odessa.

  “It was Mama and Darnley. I said, ‘Oh, I’m so glad y’all came. They buried me in here, and I wasn’t dead,’ and then I remembered that they were dead. Both of ’em, and I said, ‘Darnley, how’d you get here?—they never found your body.’”

  “It’s bad when the dead talk in dreams,” said Odessa. “What’d Darnley say?”

  “Darnley said, ‘I came to get you, Dauphin.’”

  “Were you scared in your dream?”

  “No,” said Dauphin, “but I sta
rted to scream anyway, and soon as I screamed, Mama jumped on me and put her mouth on my throat and she tore it out.”

  “Is that when you woke up?”

  “No,” said Dauphin. “I didn’t wake up at all . . .”

  In silence, they reached Point Clear and continued south toward Mullet, where the road turned inland, away from the bay. Dauphin felt better for having told the dream that had so distressed him, and now he looked forward to the return to Beldame, if for no other reason than that there he would not be sleeping alone.

  The road made a sharp left, and as he took this, Mobile Bay appeared now through the rearview mirror, directly behind him. And a couple of hundred yards out in the water, seen through the mirror, was the characteristic red and orange sail of Darnley Savage’s boat that had disappeared without trace thirteen years before.

  Dauphin tried to will the vision away, but the sail remained in the rear-view mirror until the road curved and the entire bay was removed from his sight. Dauphin said nothing of this to Odessa: he feared that she would take it seriously, when he knew it could be no more than an hallucination, inspired by the previous night’s sleeplessness, the incident in the mausoleum, the death of his mother so few weeks before. But once they had returned to Beldame, Dauphin stood nervously on the verandah of the McCray house, and nervously scanned the Gulf, watching for the sail he so very much feared to see.

  CHAPTER 18

  There were five days left between the return of Dauphin and Odessa and the time when they all must get back to Mobile for the July Fourth celebrations. It had occurred to them suddenly that they need not all be under Lawton’s directive to go back to Mobile—though Big Barbara was certainly wanted and Dauphin too, Leigh had been invited only for her husband’s sake. Odessa was useless to a congressional campaign, being only an insignificant black woman, and Luker and India were hardly the sort of family that a conservative candidate would want paraded before his future constituency. Therefore, all except Big Barbara and Dauphin might remain behind; but Leigh decided she wanted to see her doctor for a little checkup that she had postponed on account of her mother-in-law’s death. Luker would like a few days on the telephone to scare up some fall assignments and India had run out of three colors of thread which wanted replacing before she could complete her embroidered panel. There was no particular reason for Odessa to remain alone, and she would return to help with the shopping. They would leave together, and they hoped, all come back together. They had been at Beldame for a month, and though happy there—seeming to find in the place respite from all the troubles that had beset them in the past year—they wondered if resumption of the vacation would be possible.