“That’s propaganda anyway,” she continued. “What the Aunties say. Of course Sheehys get sick, but then they don’t die every time. And of course most Sheehys are sick when they do die. We don’t get hit by trains or smashed under tractors or fall from castle walls, at least not that often.”
Now he was watching her carefully. His eyes were his father’s, who was not welcomed at the farm, whom Hettienne had only met at Mass at Sacred Heart, caramel, toffee brown, like a hickory leaf at the last of its turn in fall.
“So what was that at dinner yesterday?” David asked. “You had Baby Lilliana so worked up, she wouldn’t nap.”
At the water’s edge in a meadow down the shore from them, a scissor-tailed flycatcher—yellow, gray, black of beak and tail, white of breast—hovered flitting as if standing on that impossibly long X-shaped tail, a miracle. She had never seen the birds, her talismans of July, anywhere but here in the Ozarks. “Do you promise to say nothing at all if I tell you? Not to your mother? Most of all not to Johanna?”
David shrugged. “Sure. Yeah.”
“Swear it,” she said, sticking her pinkie at him. He hesitated; then he latched his pinkie into hers.
Three summers ago, they had discovered Frank Headley Jr.’s diary in the barn loft. Frank Headley Jr. was the last of the Headleys who had built Emerald Park, now the Old Sheehy Place, into a showcase of a farm. The stone stables, the dirt oval horse track, the forty-acre lake, all things the Headleys had built. For holiday summer weekends and private soirees, the Headleys provided johnboats and canoes for rent to flocks of townspeople. They had the waterfall improved with stone pathways. They renovated the property’s original log home into a clubhouse for picnicking. Across meadows of dairy farm strolled prize Jersey cows churning out butter and Edam cheese and ice cream. They opened a winding cave, which thrill seekers could travel seated in a string of refitted mine cars salvaged from one of the old Morkan quarries, the whole train of adventurers tied to four Missouri mules. New mothers pressed postcards of Emerald Park into keepsake albums. Then, in 1923, the Sheehys came along, bought the whole thing, and shut it tight as a bank vault. Hettienne and David kept the diary secret, meeting on the sly at the Headley springhouse. In its foggy cool, under its alpine timbers, in its castle-like keep of limestone blocks that sweated shadows, they read the journal of Frank Headley Jr.’s last days at Emerald Park to each other. Cool kept potatoes, eggs in buckets of chilly lime water, onions, beets, carrots, and cantaloupes stacked like ancient cannonballs at a battery surrounded them.
The diary was tragic, even maudlin. Headley, who had farmed so well and built so much—with Percherons, Jersey cows, a cattery of Persians, a dynasty of running collie dogs—was forced to leave, and his heart was breaking because he was enough of a scientist to connect the seizing of his lungs with all the flying hair, pollen, feathers, dust, and ruckus of Emerald Park. He recorded his sadness in the plain, near perfect block type of a draftsman. In the end, nurses packed him away. He left everything behind for the relief of a sterile desert. Arizona. To the baron and princess of this green, hilly kingdom, it was an unimaginable, unbearable fate. To live, he must give up all he had ever lived for.
Shaking from more than the springhouse chill, Hettienne read to David: “The land I have husbanded assaults me. The air, it kills me from the inside out, the outside in. My own country sickens me. It is as if I made manna of my own lands, with my own hands, manna in plenty. Yet when I broke it and gave it to the people of the Ozarks, it returned not a blessing, but a white and teeming curse.”
Speaking those words out loud seemed to send a rumbling shudder through the old stone springhouse. Astonished, they waited frozen in its shadowy clasp until finally Hettienne raised her pinkie. In absolute silence, they swore an oath too weighty for spoken words. Together they hid the crumbling leather binder and its ocher diary behind a loose stone with an odd Northern Irish name, morkan, chiseled into its facing, still legible but vanishing, chipped, and spotted green and yellow with age.
Now, in the sparkling sunlight off the lake, Hettienne unwound her hair from the bun, her long white arms making two big L shapes. Watching his gaze, which did not seem much enraptured, she experimented and arched her back like the girls painted on bombers. But David’s look remained as cool as a clinician’s.
“All right. At lunch, I sat down. And there was the empty plate, and the salad fork with a cloud, a spot on it. And then I was elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere? In your head elsewhere? Like where? Chicago?” David had long ago given up needling her as the only Sheehy who used the city term “lunch.”
Hettienne shook her head. “Outside the house. But it was night. And there were people. All in black. Wandering around.”
“People? Who? Sheehys? Ormonds? Hoboes? Thieves?”
“Savages. Barbarians. Some other people. Not us. Not family. One of them stuffed a closet with hay and set it on fire. Our house, Simon’s house, Sheehy Mansion. On fire.”
He was quiet for a bit. “I don’t get it. People from South Town? People from before Springfield? Like Osage Indians?”
She slumped her shoulders and squinted. “Long-haired. Bearded. Almost like . . . like a bunch of old-timey German soldiers went to sleep in their spiky leather clothes and helmets and woke up years and years later, dirty, with long beards. And the women, all their skin painted like sailors from Cuba.”
“Stuffing hay in all the closets?”
“No, that came later. And just one heathen. In one closet. But eventually everything was on fire, in ruins.”
Over the whole surface of the lake, diamonds of sunlight burned on the water, sending radiant warmth over them.
“And then inside the house. Lettering everywhere. On every wall and door. Not like warnings, but mad lettering. Nonsense, like idiots or cripples would write.” evil awaits, she recalled, written in bold red paint at the base of the Headleys’ stone silo.
Some of this she knew had come to her during whatever had happened before she awoke in the kitchen in her chemise. Before her fit, all she remembered was the pain in her arms and legs. The moon, full and milky, filled her bedroom window. Then outside, the shadow of a huge bird, no, four of them in the trees. Four greasy black birds hunkered, sulking, ragged like sopping hoboes. When they flew, their arched wings became curved sickles, the wing and the tail all one crescent swoop without distinctions, suspended in the air, making a rent silk of the moonlight. Then she was elsewhere. Then just as suddenly, James petted her shoulder, and she sat before a roaring stove in her nightclothes.
David smiled, but the effort showed at the corners of his eyes. She thought for a moment, Stop, stop, stop. This all should cease. He was an Ormond, from the Ozarks, where nothing abnormal happened, everything proceeded in 4/4 time. This was not Chicago. There were no tramps wandering and mumbling, no tattered beggars outside Union Station, no veterans with wide, shattered eyes queued at the Salvation Army Hostel, no unionists agitating on Wacker, no sad ghosts gandering out the Cyclops eye of the Blackstone. In the Ozarks, there weren’t even any Coloreds.
“You think I’m crazy?”
He raised his chin. “You can’t be. You’re a Sheehy.” He bobbed his eyebrows.
“That’s not very funny at all.”
He did something he had not done since she was eight or nine and placed his hand over hers and drummed upon the lunate bone of her wrist the Morse code H, E, S, Hettienne Ellery Sheehy, her initials. She began to cry but without sobbing, without breathy weeping. He squeezed
