The Elementals

  “Why was she drawing this?” said Dauphin, with obvious—if inexplicable—pain.

  “I don’t know,” said Luker, bewildered. “She was drawing it while—”

  “While what?”

  “While Leigh was telling us a story.”

  “What story?”

  “A story that Odessa told her,” said Luker evasively. Dauphin nodded, understanding. “And she said that she didn’t draw it, she said it was the pencil that drew it. And the odd thing is that it’s not India’s style at all. She never does anything this finished. I actually saw her—she was drawing on the pad and the pencil was going ninety to nothing, but she didn’t even look down at it. I thought she was just making scribbles. If I didn’t know India, I’d say she was lying, that somebody else did the drawing and she just made scribbles on another page . . .”

  Dauphin leafed quickly through the other sheets. “All the other pages are blank.”

  “I know. She did the drawing, but I really don’t think she knew what she was doing. I mean, those dolls—”

  “Those aren’t dolls,” said Dauphin with something like harshness.

  “They look like dolls, not even Irish babies are that ugly, I’ve—”

  “Listen,” said Dauphin, “why don’t you go get ready for bed? Take this with you”—he handed the sketch to Luker—“and I’ll be in your room in about five minutes.”

  That much later, Luker was sitting on the edge of the bed with India’s sketch at his side. He studied the drawing of the saturnine fat woman holding the two dolls—that Dauphin said were not dolls—in the massive palms of her outstretched hands.

  Still in the suit that he had worn at the funeral, and with the black tourniquet still around his arm, Dauphin entered the room. From his breast pocket, he drew a small photograph mounted on stiff cardboard and handed it to Luker.

  It was a carte de visite, which Luker, who was knowledgeable of the history of photography, instinctively dated as Civil War or perhaps a year or so later. He studied the back, with the photographer’s logo and claims, before he allowed the meaning of the image to break in on him.

  The picture, faded but still clear, was of a great fat woman with a crimped fringe of hair, wearing a hooped dress widely bordered in black along the skirt and sleeves. She was seated in a chair that was invisible beneath her great bulk. In her outstretched hands she held two little heaps of misshapen flesh that were not, after all, dolls.

  “It’s my great-great-grandmother,” said Dauphin. “The babies were twins, and they were stillborn. She had the picture taken before they were buried. They were both boys, and their names were Darnley and Dauphin.”

  “Why would she want to have a picture taken of stillborn children?” asked Luker.

  “Ever since they started taking pictures, the Savages have had photographs taken of their corpses. I’ve got a whole box of ’em in there. These babies were buried in the cemetery, and I guess if they rated tombstones, they rated a picture.”

  Luker turned the photograph over, studied the back again without knowing what he thought. “India must have seen this . . .” he said at last, lying full length upon the bed and holding up the carte de visite at arm’s length, directly above his face. He turned it so that reflected light obscured the image.

  Dauphin took the photograph back. “No, she couldn’t have. The old family pictures are kept locked in the file cabinet in my study. I had to use my key to get it out.”

  “Somebody must have described it to her,” Luker persisted.

  “Nobody knows about that picture, nobody except Odessa and me. I hadn’t seen it for years. I just remembered it because it used to give me nightmares. When I was little, Darnley and I used to take out all the pictures of the dead Savages and look at ’em, and this was the one that scared me the most. This was my great-great-grandmother, and she was the first one to live in the house at Beldame. And this picture and the picture that India drew are just alike.”

  “No they’re not,” said Luker. “The dresses are different. The dress in the photograph is obviously earlier than the one India drew. The photograph is about 1865, India’s picture is about ten years later.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Luker shrugged. “I know something about American costume, that’s all, and it’s obvious. And if India were just copying the picture, then she’d copy the dress that was in the photograph. She wouldn’t think up another dress that came along about ten years later—India, I’m sorry to say, knows nothing of the history of fashion.”

  “But what does that mean—that the dresses are different?” asked Dauphin, perplexed.

  “I have no idea,” replied Luker, “I don’t understand any of it.”

  Luker kept India’s drawing and promised Dauphin that he would next day question her more carefully about it—what its meaning could be, neither of them had any idea. Luker expressed the hope that it was only the port that had befuddled them, and that morning would solve the mystery in some simple and satisfactory manner.

  Dauphin took the photograph back to his study and placed it in the box that contained photographs of the corpses of all the Savages who had died in the past hundred and thirty years. His mother’s would be added in a week’s time, for the photographer had visited the Church of St. Jude Thaddeus an hour before the funeral. He turned the key in the lock of this box, hid that key in another drawer of the file cabinet, then locked both the file cabinet and the door of the study. He walked slowly and thoughtfully through the darkened hallways of the house and back onto the glassed-in porch. He turned out the light, but then, in the darkness and his slight inebriation, he knocked his head against the parrot’s cage.

  “Oh,” he whispered, “sorry, Nails, you all right?” He smiled, remembering in what affection his mother had held the shrill bird—despite its disappointing speechlessness. He raised the cover to peer inside.

  The parrot flapped its iridescent, blood-red wings and stuck its beak between the bars. Its flat black eye reflected light that was not in the room. For the first time in its eight-year life, the parrot spoke. In cold imitation of Luker McCray’s voice, the parrot cried: “Savage mothers eat their children up!”

  CHAPTER 4

  While the next morning was frittered away in preparations for the journey to Beldame, the unsettling coincidence of the century-old photograph and India’s unconscious drawing was forgotten. Daylight had not brought a solution, but it had accorded indifference.

  Having arrived in Alabama only the day before, Luker and India had never really unpacked, so it was no difficulty for them to prepare for this secondary journey. And Odessa had little to carry: she brought her wicker suitcase with her to the Small House when Leigh picked her up. But Dauphin had unavoidable early morning calls and these precipitated further errands; and Leigh and Big Barbara had to scuttle among their friends for a time, saying good-byes, returning borrowed items, and begging that certain small but consequential matters be accomplished in their possibly protracted absence. It seemed impossible to Leigh that Marian Savage had been alive not four days before. At times, in this round of visits, she was brought up short, remembering that she must assume a face of grief, and respond that yes, they really did need to get away from it all for a while, and where better to go than Beldame, a place so remote you might as well be at the end of the world?

  India roused Luker at nine, went to the kitchen and prepared him coffee—she didn’t trust the maids for this—then took it to his room and roused him again. “Oh, God,” he whispered, “thanks.” He sipped it, set it aside, rose and stumbled naked around the room for a few minutes.

  “If you want the bathroom,” said India from where she sat in a deep chair with her coffee carefully balanced on the narrow arm, “it’s there.” She pointed.

  When Luker emerged, India had laid out his clothes. “Are we going to see your father today?” she asked. India preferred not to distinguish the man either by his Christian name or the sickening, loaded appellation of grandf
ather.

  “Yes,” said Luker. “Do you mind very much?”

  “Even if I did, we’d still have to go, wouldn’t we?”

  “I suppose I could tell him that you were vomiting blood or something and you could stay out in the car.”

  “It’s all right,” said India, “I’ll go in and speak to him, if you promise that we’re not going to have to stay very long.”

  “Of course not,” said Luker, buttoning his jeans.

  “If he gets elected to Congress, would Big Barbara move to Washington? She’d be a lot nearer us then.”

  “I don’t know,” said Luker, “that depends. Do you want her to be nearer us?” Luker unbuttoned his jeans in order to tuck in his shirt.

  “Yes,” said India, “I’m actually very fond of Big Barbara.”

  “Well,” said Luker, “little girls are supposed to be fond of their grandmothers.”

  India looked away sourly. “Depends on what?” she asked.

  “It depends on how Big Barbara is getting along. It depends on how she and Lawton are getting along together.”

  “Big Barbara is an alkie, isn’t she?”

  “Yes,” replied Luker. “And unfortunately, there’s no methadone for alkies.”

  A few minutes later Big Barbara called to tell them that Lawton had gone out to the farm early that morning. If they did not catch him there in the next couple of hours they would have to wait until the middle of the afternoon, when he had returned from his lunchtime speech to the Mothers of the Rainbow Girls. The careful plans of the previous night were then scrapped, and India and Luker—not wishing to postpone the onerous visit—took off toward the farm. Odessa, having packed the trunk with numerous boxes of food for Beldame, rode with them. They went in the Fairlane that Dauphin had bought a year or so back solely for the use of houseguests or acquaintances who, for one reason or another, found themselves temporarily without transportation.

  The Alabama panhandle, which consists only of Mobile and Baldwin counties, is shaped rather like a heavily abscessed tooth. Mobile Bay represents the large element of decay that separates the halves, and at their northern extremities the counties are further divided by a complex system of meandering rivers and marsh.

  The McCrays’ land was situated along the Fish River about twenty miles from Mobile, but on the other side of Mobile Bay in Baldwin County. It was rich loamy flat acreage, excellent for cattle and fruit trees and just about any sort of cash crop one cared to plant. In addition to his agricultural activities, which were entirely supervised by a family of farmers named Dwight whom he had long ago bought out of bankruptcy, Lawton McCray had a fertilizer supply business situated in the nearby and scarcely discernible town of Belforest. Despite recent steep increases in the price of phosphorus, the fertilizer business had continued to make the McCrays a great deal of money.

  The concern was set in a cleared space about a hundred yards square near the tracks of the railroad that no longer stopped at Belforest. There were three large storage sheds, a couple of old barns converted to the same purpose, and a paved area on which rested a number of trucks and trailers and spreading equipment. Set to one side was the office, a small, low concrete-block building with aquamarine walls and grimy windows. A barking dog of ignoble breed was tied to a sagging porch support. Luker would have driven right past the place and gone on to the farm, had he not recognized his father’s pink Continental drawn up before the office. When Luker lowered his window, they heard Lawton McCray’s vituperative voice inside the air-conditioned office, arguing with the impoverished distant relative who ran the operation so profitably for him. As soon as Luker got out of the Fairlane his father spied him through the dirt-streaked window. Lawton McCray came out to greet his son. He was a large man with beautiful white hair, but enough extra flesh—in the form of pendulous cheeks, a large nose, and several chins—to make up another face altogether. His clothes were expensive, fit him ill, and might have done with a cleaning. He and Luker hugged perfunctorily, then Lawton surged around the Fairlane and rapped sharply on the window through which his only grandchild peered up at him mistrustfully. India hesitantly lowered the window, and stiffened when Lawton McCray plunged his head and shoulders through to kiss her.

  “How you, India?” the man bellowed. His mouth widened and his eyes narrowed to a fearful extent. India didn’t know whether she liked him less as a relative or a politician.

  “Very well, thank you,” she replied.

  “Odessa,” twisting his large head on his thick neck, he yelled into the back seat, “how you?”

  “I’m fine, Mr. Lawton.”

  “Odessa,” he demanded, “you ever seen a girl pretty as this one?”

  “I never have,” said Odessa calmly.

  “I never have either! This is a girl to be reckoned with. She is my only grandchild, and I love her like I love my soul! She is the delight of my old age!”

  “You not old, Mr. Lawton,” said Odessa obediently.

  “You gone vote for me?” he laughed.

  “Oh, sure.”

  “You gone get Johnny Red to vote for me, that no-account?”

  “Mr. Lawton, I tried to get Johnny to register, but he talks to me ’bout poll tax. I tell him there ain’t no such thing no more, but he still won’t go down and sign up. You got to go talk to him, you want him to vote for you!”

  “You tell him I’m not never gone get him out of jail any more if he don’t go down and register.”

  “I’ll tell him,” said Odessa.

  Lawton McCray smiled grimly, then turned back to India, who was cowering against the violence and vulgarity of her grandfather’s voice.

  “How’d you like the funeral yesterday? Big Barbara said it was your first time. I never saw a dead man ’fore I went in the service, but kids grow up quick these days, I s’pose. D’you find it interesting? You gone tell your friends ’bout a Southern funeral? You gone make a report on it in the schoolroom, India?”

  “It was very interesting,” said India. She cautiously reached toward him with one slender arm. “Do you mind if I raise the window?” she said with an icy smile. “All the cool air is getting out.” And she hardly let him withdraw his head and shoulders before she vigorously spun the handle.

  “Luker!” yelled Lawton McCray at his son, who wasn’t two feet away, “that child has sprung up! That child has grown a head since I last saw her! She is a doll! Glad she didn’t inherit your looks. She’s already ’most as big as you are now, isn’t she! Looks more and more like her mother every day, I s’pose.”

  “Yes,” said Luker expressionlessly, “I suppose she does.”

  “Come on over here, I want to talk to you for a minute.”

  Lawton McCray pulled his son into the shadow of a yellow Caterpillar—though in this place that stank of chemicals, diesel fuel, and phosphorus dust, there could be no real relief from the Alabama sun. Standing with one foot on the serrated maw of the tractor, as if daring it to start up and shovel him high into the air, Lawton McCray held Luker in reluctant conversation for nearly ten minutes.

  Each time that India looked out at her father and grandfather she was more surprised that Luker remained so long. On the viable pretense that all the cold air in the car had dissipated, India lowered her window. But even with that, she could hear nothing of what the two men said. Lawton’s voice was uncharacteristically moderated. “What are they talking about?” she asked Odessa. Her curiosity overcame her indisposition to speak to the black woman.

  “What else those two got to talk about?” replied Odessa rhetorically. “They talking about Miz Barbara.”

  India nodded: that made sense. In another few moments, the two men—one beefy, red-faced, corpulent, and slow-moving, and the other small, quick, dark-skinned, but unburnt, as much like father and son as India and Odessa appeared mother and daughter—moved back toward the car. Lawton McCray thrust his thick arm through the window and grabbed India by the chin. He pulled her halfway out.

  “I just
cain’t get over how much you look like your mother. Your mother was the prettiest woman I ever saw in my life.”

  “I don’t look a bit like her!”

  Lawton McCray laughed loudly in her face. “And you talk like her too! I was sorry when your daddy got a divorce. But law, India, he don’t need her when he’s got you!”

  India was too ashamed to speak.

  “How’s she doing, your mama?”

  “I don’t know,” replied India, lying. “I haven’t seen her in seven years. I don’t even remember what she looks like any more.”

  “Look in the mirror, India, look in the damn mirror!”

  “Lawton,” said Luker, “we got to get going if we’re going to reach Beldame before the tide comes in.”

  “You get going then!” yelled his father. “And listen, Luker, you let me know how things are going, you understand me? I’m depending on you!”

  Luker nodded significantly. How things were going appeared to possess a specific and weighty meaning for both men.

  As Luker drove away from the compound of the McCray Fertilizer Company, Lawton McCray raised his arm and held it high in the dust-filled air.

  “Listen,” said India to her father, “I don’t have to tell any of my friends, do I, if he’s elected . . . ?”

  CHAPTER 5

  Their way lay south through the interior of Baldwin County, down a narrow unshaded secondary road that was bordered by shallow ditches filled with grass and some ugly yellow flower. Beyond the low ramshackle fences of post or wire lay vast fields of leguminous crops that hugged the ground and seemed very cheap and dusty and to have been planted for some reason other than an ultimate ingestion by either man or cattle. The sky was washed out almost to whiteness, and wispy clouds hovered timorously at the horizon on every side, but hadn’t the courage to hang directly above. Now and then they passed some sort of house, and whether that house was five or a hundred years old, its front porch sagged, its sides had been blistered by the sun, its chimney leaned precariously. Dilapidation was consistent, as was the apparent absence of all life. Even India, who had little enough expectation of the excitement of the rural existence, found it remarkable that she had seen not a living thing for fifteen miles: not man, woman, child, dog, or carrion crow.