Simon asked, “Who was screaming?” As James described the off-duty soldiers and the floozies, Charlotte touched her daughter’s skin.
“James, you imbecile,” Hettienne’s father cut in. “You’ve seen the trouble she has been having. These spells. What in the Hell were you thinking? Taking her out on some schoolboy prank to frighten drunkards. Covered in this stuff. Dressed in that, whatever that is, and boxer shorts. In the dead of night. Goddamn it, James.”
Simon held up a hand and said, “Brother James, we’ve much to discuss.”
Eyes pinched with fury, Charlotte shot seething looks at each of the three men, her small fists clenching and opening. Then with a shout she threw up her hands. “Oh, my God. My God! These Sheehys! Get in here, Hettienne, and let’s get this shit off of you.”
In the bathtub, in the hot water, when the miasma of blood rose up from her groin, Hettienne thrashed, but Charlotte grabbed her arms, stilled her.
“Oh.” Charlotte swallowed. “You are becoming a woman now, sweetheart.” She stroked her daughter’s sopping hair and raised her chin. “I have a lot to tell you, and it will all sound strange, and it’s very late. But nothing in the world is wrong with my Hettienne.”
And then for the rest of that summer, it stopped. No more long lapses in speech. No more rhymes. No more spells. No more menacing visions. No more sleepwalking. As if you could explain to the horse in common English that the shadow was not and never would be a serpent, that the shadow always would be just a tree limb. The world seemed bright and wet as if after a hard rain. Her head pounded, and her stomach cramped. In the presence of fans or humming motors sometimes she could hear the strange music once again. But she was each day, each waking hour in the world if not always of it.
From her high bedroom window, late on the morning after the river incident, she spied James walking with a spade over his shoulder. Sure enough, from his right hand drooped one of those incredible nightmare black birds with the scaly gray neck, white legs, and shocking white wingtips. It had been real, then. James spied her watching him and gave her a smile. She wanted to run to him. He chucked the carcass from him, raised the shovel like a sword, and sliced the air above the vulture with several dramatic parries and swipes, swashbuckling like Douglas Fairbanks, only in overalls. At last he bowed to her applause, fetched his dead buzzard, and resumed his trudge.
Walking into Mass at Sacred Heart, the tiny parish church bordering the estate, Cousin Johanna glared at her. “Surely you won’t be taking Holy Communion?”
Overhearing this, Charlotte slapped her Ormond niece so hard that spit flew, and she and Auntie Kate and the children barely made it through Transubstantiation and the Adoration of the Eucharist. At the exit, the Ormonds publicly squabbled with the Sheehys and threatened to walk back to the Ormond house on Route 10. And somehow, over what remained of summer, this clash grew to be connected with certain rumors wafting in the dark and louche dives of the burg of Springfield. The astonished families and friends of two furloughed soldiers began to whisper a tale of albinos, a caretaker and a daughter, of their terrifying, sparkling white skins. The albinos mournfully awaited some evil fate in that huge house that stared upon Hatchet Man’s Bridge and brooded over every spade turned and every crypt sealed in Green Hills Cemetery. Sure, it could be brushed off as a tale to astonish the gullible and to frighten proper ladies just a little closer while flirting. But something was not right out there at the Old Sheehy Place.
The family made it through supper after Mass. Then Hettienne rode Questa Volta along the lake trail and sidled beside Johanna on her mare. Hettienne leaned out to her cousin, who, riding sidesaddle, was not able to lean away. “I had a vision, Johanna,” she whispered. Evening spread its peach, gold, and crimson in the west, and the white star of Venus pierced the frowsy tapestry above them.
“Good for you, freak.”
The gray and crimson of the clouds, the peach and gold shimmer of the atmosphere, the purple hemline of distant hills, and the blue-green of the woods—the Old Sheehy Place was the only stretch of earth Hettienne knew where nature manifested such garish color clashes and threatened without quite showing a fang. Riding, envying her buxom cousin’s smug peace, Hettienne was struck that she had witnessed the real, devouring center of the Old Sheehy Place, of Emerald Park. There was something to poor Frank Headley’s diary. That white and teeming curse he wrote about now seemed to Hettienne broken open. Somewhere in the blue-green forest, she could even now sense the one moving onyx bauble in the wild, the vulture’s eye tracking her from its scaly emplacement. How she resented Johanna, who rode so unperturbed, so comfortable through these woods that were to be Hettienne’s one day. “Once you are married,” Hettienne whispered to her cousin, “you will grow a big, black, hairy mustache.”
Riding sidesaddle prevented Johanna from tackling Hettienne then and there.
Furious with James for putting Hettienne at risk and at his wit’s end with Charlotte, who insisted he forgive and forget, John traveled immediately back to Chicago and to his brokerage. It was for the best, Simon declared, that he go on ahead. Heartbreaking but unspoken, at least to Hettienne, it was clear that James chose to be with her only at mealtimes. James excused himself whenever it appeared they were about to be alone. And if she and James were together, her mother or Simon hovered as a buffer.
On the eve of the day her summer visit was to end and Charlotte and Hettienne were to meet their train for Chicago, it poured and poured. All the children retired from supper to the library to read.
If Hettienne stared to the southwestern horizon, where lightning flashed in blue rivers, she thought she could see again fire and the strange, sad opal children running. Their crazy black hair. Bruised eyes. She pulled her long legs up on the sofa and let her flats drop to the carpet. Maybe it was only the revenant of a bad memory. She mashed the pages of her book between her thumb and index finger to keep from shaking with joy. There would be no Dunning. There would be no shock treatment, no binding straitjackets, no icy blasts of hydrotherapy. She was a woman, a sane young woman, and these strange things happened to Sheehy women. Poor Uncle James. Even poor David Ormond, who watched her from the doorjamb, and wouldn’t touch her, even he didn’t understand.
All the nine cousins were together for a last few hours till next summer, and all were sweaty, full, and quiet while Auntie Kate tried to get Lilliana settled for the night, stroking the babe’s back with just the tips of her fingernails. Hettienne looked around now at her cousins bent to their stories—Cowboys and Moon Men and Chivalrous Knights and Pious Yeoman Hillbilly Shepherds. Though she did not care one bit to pose for photographs, she wanted to nab the Six 20 Flash Brownie in the hall closet. She wanted this true story framed in the blue pop of the Brownie and sealed forever in the silver magic of a photograph. Why couldn’t this scene be what she witnessed in the thrall of a spell?
Johanna lowered her book, Hark! The Runaway Marquise. She drew herself close to Hettienne and sneered. “I have read up on your name in the Irish Book of Names, Hettienne Sheehy. Do you know what it means? It means mysterious. Eerie. Weird.”
Wide eyes all around the library. Auntie Kate’s shoulders slumped, and David held to the door as if it were the last exit in the world.
Hettienne did not stir from her book on rocks and minerals. In fact, for one who had caused so much angst and tumult that summer, she seemed infuriatingly calm.
“My name is Hettienne. And Hettienne is not an Irish name, Cousin Johanna.” She closed her book and stared blankly at her heavy Ormond cousin’s heart-shaped face. Johanna was squared against her now like a bulldog on the sofa, and the dripping gray light did nothing for her freckled complexion and long, straight hair. “But I’ve looked up Ormond in that same book in the library at Our Lady of the Angels. Want to know what the surname Ormond means, Johanna Ormond?” The stillness of her long face, the emotionless, low tone of her voice was mesmerizing and frightening. They had all seen the zombie’s stare she had turned on Baby Lilliana in that grand mal fit at the dinner table. Now it was as if she had learned to use that black-hole gaze and desolate voice to indicate an absolute disdain. Very slowly she said, “Ormond