I returned to the sofa cushions and beat out the dust that had made its home in them so long.
Miss Emily was apparently satisfied with how much work we did accomplish, however, for after dinner she decided I could read or go to sleep as early as I wished. I did go into the library to peruse some family pictures I had discovered when I had done the thorough cleaning of the shelves. I turned the pages and gazed at the sepia photographs capturing Grandmother Cutler, Miss Emily, and Charlotte as children.
Grandmother Cutler was by far the prettiest of the three. Even as a child, Miss Emily had that pinched face and those cold, hard eyes. Charlotte was always on the plump side, but she always had that happy, innocent look of a child. There were even some pictures here and there in which Luther could be seen in the background. He was once a tall, strapping and even handsome man. In all of the pictures of Father
and Mother Booth, Mother Booth was standing and Father Booth was sitting with Mother Booth behind him, her hand on his shoulder. Neither of them smiled—perhaps they thought that smiling would bring the devil. The pictures of the grounds were nice, however, and I understood that the plantation was once a bright and rich place. I couldn't help but wonder about the forces and events that had changed everything so dramatically and made this family so horrid.
Thinking about all these mysteries reminded me of my intention to explore the west wing. I went up to my room to get some rest and wait until it was much, much later when I would be certain Miss Emily would be asleep. I didn't anticipate how deep my own fatigue from the day's hard work went, however, and I practically passed out the moment my head hit the pillow. It was nearly morning when I woke up again, but it was still dark enough for me to begin my explorations.
I rose out of bed and lit the kerosene lamp, then I stepped out into the dark corridor and made my way toward the west wing, determined to discover if there was even the slightest shred of truth to Charlotte Booth's fantasies.
When I reached the stairway, I hesitated. It was almost as if there really was an invisible wall, a border that I would have to cross and the moment I did, I would risk bringing the full wrath of Miss Emily down upon me. The west wing corridor was pitch dark, and I had no idea where anything was, but I continued forward, hovering near the wall on the right as I did so.
Just like in my corridor, there were some decorative furnishings and many old paintings. There were two rather large portraits of Father and Mother Booth side by side, and as in all the other pictures, neither smiled, both looked angry and unhappy. These pictures hung on the wall directly across from the first door. I stopped and listened. Was this Miss Emily's or Charlotte's room? I turned the knob slowly and pressed against the door. At first, it didn't budge and then it got unstuck and I practically fell into the room.
I held up the lamp, afraid that I had blundered into Miss Emily's quarters, but it was immediately obvious to me that no one had lived in this room for years, so I turned up the lamp and gazed around. It was an enormous room with a great oak bed. It had pillars that went up as high as the ceiling and an enormous half moon headboard. The bed still had all its pillows and blankets, but the cobwebs on it were so thick it was clear no one had come in to clean it for ages.
There was a stone fireplace at least twenty feet long on the wall with large windows on either side. Long curtains were drawn tightly closed and looked weighed down with dust and grime. Above the fireplace was a portrait of a young Father Booth, I thought, or perhaps his father. He stood holding a rifle in one hand and a string of ducks in the other. It was one of the few pictures in the house where someone had something of a smile on his face.
There was a lot of dark, beautiful antique furniture in the room, and on the night table there was a copy of the Bible with a pair of reading glasses beside it.
The room smelled musty and stale and looked as if its inhabitants had simply been swallowed up one day, for the vanity table was still covered with brushes and combs and jars of skin creams. Some jars had been left opened, the contents dried and evaporated. Clothing still hung in the closets and there were pairs of shoes beside the bed, a man's pair on one side, a woman's on the other. I had the chilling feeling I had invaded the sanctuary of a pair of ghosts.
I backed out of the room I felt sure had once been Father and Mother Booth's room and continued down the corridor. When I realized that the door to the next room on the right was open, I turned the kerosene lamp down again and approached as quietly as I could. There was some very dim light coming from this room. I hesitated and then peered around the door jamb and gazed within.
There, asleep on a long, narrow bed with a plain square head and foot board was Miss Emily. She looked laid out like a corpse, for she wore a shroudlike nightgown and the light of her small kerosene lamp made her face appear bone white. So she slept with a light on, I thought. How interesting that she permitted herself to be wasteful. Despite her iron face and steel cold eyes, she lived with fears that made her afraid of the darkness.
I moved across her open doorway quickly and hurried down the long corridor, for the next doorway was some distance away. That door, too, was open, and when I looked in, I found Charlotte asleep in her bed, her body folded into the fetal position, her fingers near her mouth. Her long pigtails had been unraveled and her hair lie about her head in a clump of gray that made her childlike face look strangely out of place.
Except for their parents' room kept like some museum chamber, what was here that would make Miss Emily want to forbid me from entering the west wing? I wondered. I lifted the lamp and directed the light ahead of me and saw that there was another room on Charlotte's side, the doorway much smaller than the others. I listened to be sure Miss Emily hadn't heard my footsteps and then I walked on. The door to this room was closed. I tried the knob, but the door didn't budge. Was it just like the first door, simply stuck? I pushed harder and it opened as if someone had been standing behind it and had suddenly decided not to resist. I practically flew into the room, carried in by my own efforts.
This time when I lifted the lamp to gaze about, I shuddered. It was a nursery. Charlotte hadn't been fantasizing about that. The walls were covered with her needlework in frames, all of it beautiful work, pictures of animals and the plantation, as well as simple scenes in nature—meadows, trees, flowers. There were dressers and closets in the room, but the centerpiece was a crib and it looked like there was a baby in it.
My heart began to pound as I drew closer and closer. There was a baby. All this time . . . but I never heard it cry and why keep it a secret? Whose baby could it be?
I stepped up to the crib and lifted the light slowly over it. Then I reached in and carefully drew the soft, pink blanket back from the baby's face and realized . . . it was a doll!
"How dare you come in here?" I heard Miss Emily scream and I nearly dropped my lamp. I spun around quickly to see her standing in the nursery doorway. She was only in her nightgown, her hair loose around her shoulders, making her even more witchlike. She held her own lamp up so the light fell on me. "How dare you come into this wing when I forbid it!"
"I wanted to see why Charlotte kept telling me about her baby. I wanted . . ."
"You had no right," she roared, coming forward. "This is not your business," she hissed, only a few feet from me now. Her eyes were filled with hot anger, her neck strained, making her collarbone look like it would rip out 'of her skin. Death itself couldn't have appeared more horrid looking than she did with the light over her venomous face, her skin the same shade as her teeth and her eyes red. I could barely breathe, barely move. My throat closed up; my heart felt as if it had stopped and a cold chill rushed up from my feet and traveled with electric speed over my spine to the back of my head.
"I . . . didn't want to bother you by asking, but . . ."
"But you were curious," she said, nodding, "as curious as Eve about the Tree of Knowledge, even though she, like you, were forbidden to taste of it. Nothing's changed you all the time you have been here, not the work, not the Sundays in the chapel, not my lectures, nothing; you are what you are and what you will always be—sinful."
"I'm not," I protested calmly. "I only wanted . . ."
"To know where the devil has been before. I understand your interest," she said, nodding again. "Very well, feast your eyes upon it," she said, gesturing around her.
"I don't understand," I said.
"This room was where we kept the child until it died and went to hell."
"Died? What child? Whose child?"
"The devil's own," she said. "Charlotte gave birth to it, but it was the devil's own."