She paused, closed her eyes, and then with her hands over each other and pressed to her chest, breathed in the way she would over a bed of wildflowers. When she saw how I was staring at her, she stiffened like someone caught doing or thinking something illicit.
"It looks like it might rain this afternoon. Noble, so get to your work as soon as possible," she ordered, and went into the kitchen,
I rose. lifted Baby Celeste out of her chair. and watched her hurry to join Mama, Then I went out to the garden.
I was troubled all morning, convinced that somehow what Mama was now doing would eventually lead to a disaster that would hurt Baby Celeste more than anyone else. Every once in a while. I stopped working and searched the dark corridors of the forest hoping to see a vision, to get a message from Daddy or hear his voice offering me a solution or an understanding that would calm my taut nerves.
Everything I did, every move I made, caused me to vibrate inside as if some invisible hand had reached into me and strummed those nerves. From time to time. I realized I was holding my breath so long, my lungs ached.
"Oh. Daddy, where are you?" I whispered, and looked for him in the pockets of
darkness here and there in our forest. but I saw nothing, felt no one's presence near me.
Finally, just before lunch. I heard the front door open and the screen door slap shut. Mama hurried down the steps toward her car. She was carrying her pie. When she opened the car door to put it Gingerly on the front seat, she turned to call to me.
"I have to be gone awhile, Noble. I want to bring this pie over before Mr. Fletcher starts his shift at the drugstore. Go inside and look after Baby Celeste. She's in the living room. Make her lunch. Everything you need is set out on the kitchen counter, and don't make a big mess for me to clean up when I return," she warned.
She got into her car and drove off
The sky had become fully covered with clouds promising rain, just as Mama had predicted. An unexpected cold breeze rubbed across the back of my neck like a hand that had been dipped in ice water first. I spun around.
Without the sunlight now, the gloomy, dark places in the forest that surrounded our property deepened. Even the songbirds were blanketed and hooded like hawks. An eerie stillness fell about me. It was so quiet I could hear the pulsating throb of my own heavier heart. My vision blurred and then I thought I saw Fletcher's face take form under the branches of a sapling. It was a face I had seen many times in dreams these past two years. It formed, faded, and reformed like a face rising and sinking in the water, just the way I imagined it had that dreadful afternoon.
I could barely hear him at first, but his whispering imitated the rhythm of the thumping that rose up my body and settled in my head. His voice grew louder. stronger. He was calling out to me. I wanted to turn and run into the house. but I was mesmerized by the sound of his voice, by that undulating cry that rose and fell with the wind.
"You never told her the truth," he said. "You never told anyone the truth about what you saw and what you knew had happened to me."
I stepped back, shaking my head.
Was he s
peaking to me or was my own conscience rising like a thick-skinned bubble out of the inky depths of my troubled soul.
"You'll drown in the lies just like I drowned in the creek. The deceptions are too heavy. They'll bring you down. They'll bring you both down. I'll see to it. I will... I will .."
"No!" I shouted, or at least I thought I had. The sound reverberated through my bones like some trapped explosion.
Mama's too powerful. I thought with
confidence. Our family is too powerful. His spirit can't come here and harm us. He could never touch us. We won't give him the opportunity. We won't weaken our castle of faith.
"You're forgetting the lies,," he whispered like an eavesdropper on my thoughts. "The lies are like cracks in your great wall of protection. If she doesn't let my father be. I'll come. I'll come. I will," he threatened. From the very first time Mama had mentioned Mr. Fletcher, I had been afraid of such a thing.
I turned and ran to the house, charging up the porch steps and then stopping at the door to look back. The first drops of rain had begun, an almost invisible drizzle, intensifying with every passing moment. Fletcher's image was gone from beneath the branch of the sapling. Surely, it had all been in my active imagination. I caught my breath and was now ashamed of my fear and cowardice.
Mama was too smart to permit anything serious to occur between her and Dave Fletcher anyway. I thought. She was just doing what she said, being compassionate, commiserating with someone who had suffered a similar loss in his life and who needed a sympathetic ear. It was nothing more. It could be nothing more. Our spiritual protectors would surely warn her, dissuade her against going too much further. My fears were silly and selfish.
I hurried into the house and discovered Baby Celeste had crawled up and onto Grandpa Jordan's chair. She sat there with her Celeste doll in her arms and looked at me with a face that seemed to age before my eyes into the face of an old woman, one of the elderly aunts captured in a sepia photograph in one of the family albums.
As quickly as the vision appeared, it
disappeared. I chastised myself for permitting my imagination to play such foolish games again.
"Come on. Celeste." I said. "Let's make lunch."
She slipped off the chair quickly and scurried like a puppy to my side, reaching up with one hand while she clung to her doll with the other. Thinking of a puppy brought back pages of memories of Cleo, the golden retriever I had had. He was a beautiful, loyal animal that had never left my side. Mama eventually gave him away because she had come to believe something evil entered our world through him like a Trojan horse. It broke my heart but there wasn't anything I could do.
When Mama made a pronouncement that was stamped with spiritual authority, there was no way to oppose it or contradict it.