Miserere Page 9

  ***

  It was nearing dinner time when Elizabeth heard Abraham’s truck rumble up to the house. The screen door slammed and Conn ran through the kitchen and up to her room.

  “What happened?” Elizabeth asked in alarm as Will and Abraham came in.

  “I’m afraid it’s my fault,” said Abraham gravely. “Connemara wanted to keep a fish she caught. I assumed she knew that meant we would be cleaning and eating it.”

  “Oh,” said Elizabeth, comprehending. “I’ll talk to her. She’ll be okay.”

  Abraham nodded with an apology and took his leave as Will thanked him.

  Elizabeth went upstairs and found Conn curled up on her side, facing the wall. “Hey,” she said, sitting on the bed and rubbing Conn’s back. “Mr. Greene told me about your fish.”

  Conn sniffed and said nothing, trying to forget the sight of the once-beautiful fish lying in her hands, limp, lifeless, its cloudy eye staring up at her.

  “Around here, most people go fishing or hunting so they can eat what they catch,” Elizabeth said. “Sometimes we have to kill to stay alive.”

  “Like Daddy?”

  “What?” Elizabeth asked, startled.

  Conn rolled over, wiping her eyes. “Isn’t that what Daddy was doing in Vietnam?”

  Elizabeth steadied herself with a deep breath. “For some people, that is their mission. To kill the enemy. Your father was flying rescue missions. But… he would kill if he had to.”

  Conn’s blue eyes bored into her mother’s soft brown ones. “Would you?”

  “How did we go from a fish to this?” Elizabeth joked uncomfortably.

  “Would you?” Conn repeated.

  Elizabeth returned Conn’s gaze for a long moment. “If I had to, yes. To protect you or Will, then I think I could kill.”

  Conn blinked and looked away. “I don’t know if I could,” she said softly. “I don’t want to kill anything, ever again.”

  “Why have you been thinking about this?”

  Conn shrugged, but said nothing.

  Elizabeth gave her a shake. “Come on. Your brother is being way too quiet downstairs. He’s probably eating everything he can get his hands on.”

  CHAPTER 12

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Will whispered, his face illuminated only by the yellow glow of the fireflies in his jar.

  He hadn’t always thought so. A few nights after Conn’s birthday, they were outside as dusk fell and they noticed the first tiny flickers of light out in the yard.

  “They’re ghosts,” Will said fearfully when they first appeared. “Jed said our house is haunted and has strange lights.”

  “They’re not ghosts,” Elizabeth laughed. She caught one and showed them. “See? They don’t bite. They just want to fly around and light up the night.”

  She got two old jars and showed the children how to punch air holes in the lids. She sat and watched as they ran around collecting fireflies.

  “Maybe they’re really faeries,” Conn whispered dramatically as they held their jars up, entranced by the glowing insects within. “And they can do magic and transform after we’re asleep.”

  “Faerieflies,” Will breathed, and ran off to collect some more.

  After a while, Conn came and sat beside her mother in the grass.

  “Got enough lightning bugs?”

  Conn nodded, leaning against her mother. “I wish Daddy was here with us.”

  Elizabeth kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “Me, too.”

  She held up her jar. “They won’t live very long in here, will they?”

  “No,” Elizabeth said, ruffling Conn’s hair. “We’ll let them go after Will’s asleep, okay?”

  ***

  The day after Abraham took them fishing, Will came to his mother. “I don’t feel good.”

  When Elizabeth took his temperature, it was a hundred two. She made him go back up to bed and brought him some hot soup for lunch. He didn’t feel like eating and by late afternoon, his fever had climbed two more degrees.

  Alarmed, she called the general store. “Mrs. Walsh? This is Elizabeth Mitchell. Who is the local doctor? Jenkins…” she repeated as she jotted the name down. “Do you have his number? It’s my son.”

  Conn watched anxiously as her mother wrote the number down. As she hung up, Elizabeth berated herself for not having made contact with the doctor sooner, but none of them had been sick since they came here. At Sandia, the base had its own clinic and doctors any time they got sick.

  Within an hour, Dr. Jenkins had arrived at the house. He was short and round, with wire-rimmed glasses that he kept pushing up to rest on his forehead above his bushy eyebrows. Conn waited in the sitting room while he and her mother went upstairs. It seemed they were up there a very long time before she could hear them coming down the stairs, talking in low voices.

  “You’re sure he got all the boosters?” Dr. Jenkins was asking.

  Conn came to the staircase and crouched there, listening.

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said firmly. “He got the last one when he was five. After my mother… both children got the vaccine.”

  “Well, I can’t be sure of course, and it would be rare, but…”

  “I thought polio was eradicated,” Elizabeth said in a dazed voice.

  “The vaccine did nearly eradicate the disease, but we haven’t eradicated the virus. It’s been years since I treated an active case around here,” Dr. Jenkins said. “Just to be safe, I would keep your daughter away from him for a couple of weeks.”

  “What can we do?” Elizabeth asked as she and the doctor went through the swinging door into the kitchen.

  Conn crept around the staircase to the swinging door and listened as the doctor sighed, “I wish there was something we could do. Just give him plenty to drink, children’s aspirin to get his fever down. We’ll have to wait it out. You have my number. Call me if his fever climbs, otherwise I’ll be out tomorrow to check on him.”

  Conn came into the kitchen as the doctor drove away. Elizabeth sat heavily, her head in her hands. Conn came to the table and sat also.

  “He’s not… he’s going to be all right, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Of course he is,” Elizabeth said sharply, tossing her hair back and wiping her cheeks. She pushed up from the table and went to the refrigerator. Pouring a large glass of orange juice and another of water, she said, “You’ll get yourself something to eat?”

  Conn nodded.

  “I don’t want you going near his room,” Elizabeth said firmly. “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Conn said solemnly.

  Elizabeth gave her a small smile before going upstairs.

  Conn made herself some peanut butter crackers and went out to the front porch where she sat on Nana’s swing and munched, feeling horrible, but not in a sick way. She kept thinking about all the times she’d been mean to Will, and made up her mind to be nicer to him. She was trying not to think of the curse, but found herself angrily wondering what Caitríona had done to call such wrath down upon the rest of the family.

  Her mother was still upstairs with Will as dusk fell. The first fireflies of the evening glowed out in the yard, and a sudden thought came to Conn. She retrieved her jar and collected a couple dozen lightning bugs. She took them up to her room and climbed out her window onto the porch roof. Walking carefully to avoid the seams in the tin roof, she squatted low and placed the jar of fireflies on the sill of Will’s window. Stealthily, she crept to her window and crawled back inside. Out in the hallway, she heard his excited gasp.

  “Mom! Look! A jar of faerieflies!”

  Conn heard the screen slide open and then shut again.

  “You know,” said Elizabeth, “I’ve heard it said that faerieflies can make wishes come true. Let’s make a wish together for you to get better fast, shall we?”

  Out in the hall, Conn closed her eyes and wished with them – wished with all her heart.

  §§§

  “And we t
hought there was a lot of work before these useless lumps got here,” Caitríona grumbled in the dark as she and Orla dressed.

  “Shhh,” Orla hissed. “Someone will hear you.”

  “I don’t care if they do,” Caitríona replied, though she dropped her voice to a whisper. “We were up past midnight, waiting till they didn’t need us anymore, and now we’re up again at four while they won’t get up until noon.”

  Hugh Playfair and his party had arrived at Fair View the week prior. He had come with his friend, John Willingham, and their wives, as well as a personal servant for each of them. Apparently, they had thought a trip to America would be a bit of a lark, but had obviously expected more of the comforts to which they were accustomed.

  Playfair, mopping his handsome face with a scented handkerchief as he stepped from the carriage, had looked upon the house for the first time and declared, “At least Father had the sense to bring some civilization to this God-forsaken wilderness.”

  “I thought we would never get here,” said Amelia, his wife, as the footman helped her from the carriage.

  “But this is charming,” said Willingham, looking with delight at the trees and grounds.

  “Honestly, John,” said his wife Ernestine, petulantly. She had already removed her bonnet and was fanning herself vigorously with a vividly-colored silken Chinese fan. “How you can find this delightful is beyond me.”

  Nearly as bad as the ladies and gentlemen were the servants who accompanied them, arriving in a second carriage loaded with trunks and cases. Addressed only by their surnames, the two men and two women clearly saw themselves as much higher-ranking than Burley and Ellie, whereas Orla and Caitríona were little more to them than the Negroes. Almost as soon as they arrived, they established that they were to be the intermediaries between their masters and mistresses and the plantation staff.

  “If you need to speak at all,” said Johnson, Hugh Playfair’s valet, “you will speak to me. Under no circumstances are you to address the master or his lady or their guests.” As he gazed disdainfully at the assembled household staff, he said, “I realize you may not be trained in the running of a proper English house, but we will maintain the standards to which his Lordship and Master Hugh are accustomed.”

  “How long d’you think it’ll take ‘em to realize they’re in America, not England?” Burley asked under his breath when they were dismissed.

  One of the first changes implemented upon their arrival was Mrs. Playfair’s insistence that none of the Negroes was to come further into the house than the kitchen. “They’re heathen,” she had pronounced, not bothering to lower her voice the first time she had encountered one of the slaves coming into the bedchamber to collect the chamber pots. “For all we know, they could be cannibals waiting to attack us in our sleep. I won’t have them near me. Let the others do their work,” she said, pointing dismissively in Orla’s direction.

  And so, Orla and Caitríona were tasked with bringing the bed linens, clothing, chamber pots and other items downstairs so that the slaves could clean them. This, in addition to their normal cleaning of the house, and now having to ferry trays between the kitchen and the dining room added hours to their day as dinner often lasted late into the night.

  The personal servants took rooms in other halls up on the third floor, segregating themselves from the girls and Fiona.

  “Have you heard them talking about ‘the Irish’ the way they would talk about ‘the hounds’?” Caitríona complained. “As if we can’t hear or understand them.”

  “Aye,” agreed Orla conspiratorially, “but it also means we can overhear things they don’t think they need bother to keep quiet.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the fact that the master doesn’t want to be here,” Orla said. “He barely looks at the ledgers Batterston shows him. He’ll never realize Batterston is stealing from him. His wife was trying to convince him over breakfast to go back to England, but he said his only chance of inheriting property, as the second son, is to stay here and do as his father wishes.”

  “Well, seeing as it is likely to be his inheritance, you’d think he would want to be taking better care of it.”

  The days passed, bringing, if possible, even more heat and humidity. Tempers flared, especially Caitríona’s, as successive nights of three to four hours’ sleep took their toll.

  “Here,” said Fiona in a harassed voice one morning as the bell rang yet again. “Would you be taking this breakfast tray up to Mrs. Playfair before they yank that bloody bellcord out of the wall?” She thrust the loaded tray into Caitríona’s hands and shooed her from the kitchen.

  Balancing the tray on one arm, Caitríona raised her other hand to knock on Mrs. Playfair’s door. She listened to the voices within while she waited impatiently to be summoned inside. Finally, she heard, “Come.”

  Mrs. Playfair’s maid, Feathers, was fluffing her mistress’ pillows behind her as she sat up in bed. Feathers took the tray from Caitríona and positioned it over Mrs. Playfair’s lap.

  “Wait,” Feathers commanded as Caitríona turned to leave. “Take this while you’re here,” she said, picking up the chamber pot and shoving it roughly into Caitríona’s arms so that the contents slopped down her front. Feathers’ mistake was to smirk, igniting Caitríona’s already short fuse. Without thinking, Caitríona threw the remainder of the contents back at her, lid and all.

  “You’re no better than I am, you little squint,” Caitríona said furiously.

  Feathers let out an irate close-mouthed scream as she stood, holding her arms out, her face scrunched up against the disgusting mess dripping from her face and hair, covering her front. Mrs. Playfair leapt out of her bed. Her eyes narrowed maliciously as she approached. Caitríona lowered her eyes, though her face burned scarlet with her temper.

  “You will be punished for that,” said Mrs. Playfair, taking care to step around the mess on the floor. “But first, you will clean this up. And you will apologize to Feathers.”

  Caitríona’s eyes blazed as she raised them defiantly to stare at her mistress. “I’ll clean, as I’ve always done. But I’ll not apologize to her, or to you or to anyone!”

  By the time Caitríona had the bedroom floor cleaned up, it seemed the entire house knew of what had happened. Batterston himself volunteered to cane her. He took her out to the flagstoned area between the kitchen and the pumphouse while the household staff was assembled to witness her punishment. There, he ordered Orla to unbutton the back of Caitríona’s dress and peel it away. Caitríona stood in her shift, proudly refusing to cover herself as she focused defiantly on some far point. Ten times, Batterston raised the cane, making it whistle through the air as he whipped the supple branch across her back so that it bit into the flesh, cutting as it hit. She refused to cry out. Only her trembling gave away the pain she was feeling. Not until she and Orla were alone did she cry.

  “Will you never learn to control your temper?” Orla asked a short while later up in their room as she gently bathed the welts and cuts on her sister’s back with cool water.

  There was a timid knock on the door. Orla opened it and quickly pulled Hannah inside. “What are you doing up here?” Orla asked. “You know the mistress forbade any of you to come into the house.”

  “I know,” said Hannah, “but…” her gaze lit on Caitríona’s back, and Caitríona knew that Hannah understood first-hand the pain she was feeling, “we have a salve. Ruth makes it. It’ll help the cuts heal.”

  Caitríona, wiping hastily at her tear-stained cheeks, murmured, “Thank you.”

  Hannah turned to leave, but stopped and said, “If you had cried down there, he would have stopped sooner. You made him mad.”

  Despite her pain, Caitríona’s eyes flashed angrily. “I’ll never cry in front of him.”

  Hannah looked at her with those curiously light-colored eyes. “I know.” She cracked the bedroom door and checked that the hall was clear before slipping out.

  Orla dipped her fingers into
the pungent dark ointment and applied it gingerly to one of the deeper cuts on Caitríona’s back. Bracing herself for it to sting or burn, Caitríona felt instead a gentle deadening of the pain. As Orla applied the salve to more of the lash marks, she felt Caitríona’s body begin to shudder. “What is it? Am I hurting you?”

  “I want to go home,” Caitríona sobbed.

  §§§

  “Hey,” Elizabeth said, shaking Conn gently.

  Conn opened her eyes and realized she was still sitting in the hall.

  “Come on,” Elizabeth said, pulling Conn to her feet. “You need to get to bed.” She walked Conn down the hall, helped her change into pajamas, and then tucked her into bed. “Good night, my love,” she said, kissing Conn on the forehead.

  “Night, Mom,” Conn said sleepily.

  But as soon as the door shut, Conn was wide awake, listening. Once she was sure the house was quiet, she sat up in bed. Concentrating with all her might, she whispered, “Caitríona Ní Faolain.”

  To her gratification and dread, Caitríona’s shape appeared. Her reddish curls blew gently as if ruffled by a light breeze.

  Conn stared at her for several seconds. “My brother is sick,” she said at last.

  Caitríona’s eyes lowered. “I know.”

  “He may die.”

  “I know.”

  “This is your fault!” Conn said angrily.

  Caitríona’s misty outlined grew a little fainter as she said, “Yes.”

  “I need your help if I’m to put an end to this,” Conn said beseechingly.

  “‘None may help her in her quest’,” Caitríona quoted.

  “But how am I to find the answer to this?” Conn asked in frustration. “I have no idea what to do.”

  “You will,” said Caitríona. “You’ve already begun.”

  Conn thought hard. “The hidden stairs and the tunnel?”

  Caitríona nodded.

  “So you do know about them!”

  “Yes.”

  “And who was Hannah?” Conn asked.

  Caitríona faded almost completely at this.