Part 10 (2/2)
The tyger appeared at the top of the steps, dragging Uncle Randall by the back of the neck. Uncle Randall's head hung at a strange angle and his body was limp. The tyger's eyes reflected back the light of the golden lanterns.
It stared at them all a moment before opening its jaws. Uncle Randall dropped like an empty coat.
The tyger's beard was red.
It bared its fangs, and turned and bounded away into the night.
When they asked her why, she explained. After she had told them everything, they made her explain it all over, and then explain once more. No matter how often she explained, however, they did not hear what she said.
Finally they sent her away, to a convent school in France. It was by no means as bad as it might have been.
She made no friends, but her eves being now accustomed to look for detail, she saw keenly the fond possessive looks or angry glances between the other girls, heard the midnight weeping or sighs, saw the notes hastily exchanged; watched the contests for dominance and knew when the cloister gate was locked and when it was left unlocked, and who came and went thereby and when they came too.
The heavy air buzzed like a hive. She no more thought of partic.i.p.ating in the convent's inner life than she would have thrust her hand into a wasp's nest, but she watched in fascination.
Then, one morning at Ma.s.s, above the high altar, the crucified Christ opened green blazing eves and looked at her. He smiled.
Nightmare Mountain.
There was once a poor man, and he had a daughter.
He wouldn't for a second have admitted he was poor. He owned a fifty-acre almond ranch in San Jose, after all. He came of fine stock from the South, and all his people on both sides had owned property before the War. It was true their circ.u.mstances had been somewhat reduced in the days following the capitulation at Appamattox; it was true he and all his kin had been obliged to flee persecution, and head West. But they were people of account, make no mistake about it.
Great-Aunt Merrion would sit on the front porch and look out over the lion-yellow hills, and recollect: ”My daddy once owned three-fifths of Prince County, and the farm proper was seven miles to a side. Nothing like this.” And she would sniff disdainfully at the dry rows of little almond trees.
And Aunt Pugh, who sat on the other side of the porch and who hated Great-Aunt Merrion only slightly less than she hated the Yankees, would wave her arm at the creaking Aeromotor pump and say: ”My daddy once owned a thousand acres of the finest bottom-land on the Mississippi River, as verdant as the gardens of Paradise before the fall. How happy I am he cannot see the extent to which we are reduced, in this desert Purgatory!”
Then they would commence to rock again, in their separate chairs, and little Annimae would sigh and wonder why they didn't like California. She liked it fine. She didn't care much for the ranch house, which was creaking and shabby and sad, and full of interminable talk about the Waw, which she took to be some hideous monster, since it had chased her family clear across the country.
But Annimae could always escape from the house and run through the almond trees, far and far along the rows, in spring when they were all pink and white blossoms. Or she might wander down to the edge by the dry creek, and walk barefoot in the cool soft sand under the cottonwoods. Or 79 she might climb high into the cottonwood branches and cling, swaying with the wind in the green leaves, pretending she was a sailor way high in the rigging of a s.h.i.+p.
But as she grew up, Annimae was told she mustn't do such things anymore. Running and climbing was not proper deportment for a lady. By this time there were two mortgages on the ranch, and Annimae's father went about with a hunted look in his eyes, and drank heavily after dinner, bourbon out of the fine crystal that had been brought from Charleston. As a consequence Annimae very much regretted that she could no longer escape from the house, and sought her escape in the various books that had been her mother's. They were mostly such romances and fairy tales as had been thought proper for genteel young ladies a generation previous.
To make matters worse, the money that had been set aside to send her to a finis.h.i.+ng school had gone somehow, so there was no way out there, either; worse vet, Great-Aunt Merrion and Aunt Pugh took it upon themselves to train her up in the manner of a gentlewoman, her dear Mamma (whose sacred duty it would have been) having pa.s.sed away in the hour of Annimae's birth. They had between them nearly a century's worth of knowledge of what was expected of a fine planter's lady in charge of a great estate, but they so bitterly contradicted each other that Annimae found it next to impossible to please either of them.
When Annimae was fifteen, her father sold off some of the property to the county though Great-Aunt Merrion and Aunt Pugh warned that this was the beginning of the end. He bought Annimae a pianoforte with some of the money, that she might learn to play. The rest of the money would have paid off the mortgages, if he hadn't speculated in stocks.
By the time Annimae was seventeen she played the pianoforte exquisitely, and across the sold-off fields the new Monterey Road cut straight past the ranch house, within a stone's throw of the window before which she sat as she played. Great-Aunt Merrion and Aunt Pugh were mortified, and thenceforth withdrew from the porch to the parlor, rather than be exposed to the public gaze on the common highway.
One night Annimae came to the end of an air by Donizetti, and fell silent, gazing out into the summer darkness.
”Do play on, child.,” said Aunt Pugh irritably ”The young have no excuse to sit wool-gathering. A graceful melody will ease your father's cares.”
Annimae's father had already eased his cares considerably with bourbon, upstairs at his desk, but ladies did not acknowledge such things.
”I was just wondering, Aunt Pugh,” said Annimae, ”Who is it that drives by so late?”
”Why, child, what do you mean?” said Great-Aunt Merrion.
”There's a carriage goes by every night, just about half-past nine,” said Annimae. ”It's very big, quite a fine carriage, and the driver wears a high silk hat. The strangest thing is, the carriage-lamps are all set with purple gla.s.s, purple as plums! So they throw very little light to see by. I wonder that they are lit at all.
”The horses' hooves make almost no sound, just gliding by. And lately, it goes by so slow! Quite slow past the house, as though they're looking up at us. Who could they be?”
Great-Aunt Merrion and Aunt Pugh exchanged a significant glance.
”Purple gla.s.s, you say,” said Great-Aunt Merrion. ”And a driver in a top hat. Is he an old buck-”
and I am afraid Great-Aunt Merrion used a word no true lady ever uses when referring to a member of the Negro race, and Aunt Pugh smiled spitefully at her lapse behind a fan.
”I think so, yes,” said Annimae.
”I expect that must be poor crazy Mrs. Nightengale,” said Aunt Pugh.
”Poor!” exclaimed Great-Aunt Merrion, with what in anyone less august would have been a snort.
”Poor as Croesus, I'd say. Nouveau Riche, child; no good breeding at all. Do you know how Talleyrand Nightengale made his money? Selling powder and ball to the Yankees! For which he most deservedly died young, of the consumption (they said), and left that bloodstained and ill- gotten fortune to his wife.'
”I heard he shot himself in a fit of drunken despondency and shame,” a.s.serted Aunt Pugh. ”And she's n.o.body. Some storekeeper's daughter from New Orleans. And there was a child, they say; but it was a puny little thing, and I believe she had to put it into a sanatorium-”
”I heard it died,” stated Great-Aunt Merrion, and Aunt Pugh glared at her.
”I believe you are misinformed, Miss Merrion. So what should this foolish woman do but take herself off to the Spiritualists' meetings, and venture into the dens of fortune-tellers, like the low-bred and credulous creature she was.”
”And what should that foolish woman come to believe,” said Great- Aunt Merrion, cutting in with a scowl at Aunt Pugh, ”But that all her misfortunes were caused by the unquiet spirits of those who perished due to Northern aggression supplied by Nightengale Munitions! And one evening when she was table-rapping, or some such diabolical nonsense, her departed husband supposedly informed her that she had to run clean across the country to California to be safe.”
”Nor is that all!” cried Aunt Pugh, leaning forward to outshout Great- Aunt Merrion. ”She believed that if she built herself a house, and never let the work stop on it, she would not only escape the predations of the outraged shades of the Confederacy, but would herself be granted life everlasting, apparently in some manner other than that promised by our dear Lord and Savior.”
”I do wish,” said Great-Aunt Merrion, ”Miss Pugh, that you would not raise your voice in that manner. People will think you lack gentility. In any case, child-the Widow Nightengale has built herself a mansion west of town. It is a vile and vulgar thing. She calls it Nightengale Manor; but the common children of the street refer to it as Nightmare Mountain. I do hear it has more than a hundred rooms now; and night and day the hammers never cease faking. One wonders that a lady could endure such appalling clamor-”
”But they do say she shuts herself up in there all day, and only ventures forth by night, in that purple carriage of hers,” said Aunt Pugh. ”Or goes occasionally to make purchases from shopkeepers; yet she never sets a foot to the ground, but they come out to her as though she were the Queen of Sheba, and she picks and chooses from their wares.”
”It never ceases to amaze me how common folk will abase themselves before the almighty dollar,”
said Great-Aunt Merrion with contempt, and Aunt Pugh nodded her head in rare agreement.
But on the very next evening, as Annimae's father was lighting the fire in the parlor himself-for the Chinese servants had all been discharged, and were owed back wages at that-Annimae looked out the window and saw the strange carriage coming up the drive.
”Why Daddy, we have callers,” she exclaimed.
Annimae's father rose up swiftly, white as a sheet, for he was expecting the Marshall. When the gentle knock came, his mouth was too dry to bid Annimae stay, so she got up to open the door; though Great-Aunt Merrion hissed, ”Child, mention that our house boy just died, and you do not yourself customarily-”
But Annimae had opened the door, and it was too late.
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