she worked globs of Roy Boy into her hair, bumping James with her elbows. He watched her in the corona coming off the fire. Reeds and weeds threw diagonal shadows across his sweating face.
“Jesus, Hettienne. Don’t get it in your eyes,” James whispered.
She looked at him and whispered, “Get yourself ready.” She faced him and extended her palms. After a moment’s hesitation, he stroked his thick, rough fingers along her open hands, then smoothed the excess salve onto his cheeks, nose, and knuckles. He stifled a choke, the stuff was so potent. When he finished, he looked at her as if waiting for a signal.
They both rose up, James following her lead. They mounted and then came floating down the berm, a white Sídhe of a girl with long opal limbs, blonde hair shot through with streaks of white and silver, and the streaked hillbilly djinn, James, shambling behind her in overalls, the Remington shotgun ready in his arms. In the first splashes of water, full in the headlights, they halted, tall, straight, and still as two pillars.
Hettienne dramatically raised a sparkling arm, then extended her index finger and pointed to the bridge, the gesture amplified by the bell sleeve of the medieval-looking weskit. Intruders!” The voice that had droned poetry at dinner now filled the valley. “Evil awaits!” Her arm seemed to stretch even longer to the icicle tip of her finger. “Begone!”
Screams from the women. The tall soldier leapt for the driver’s seat of the Willys, and the stout girls tumbled toward the jeep. The round soldier stood with his beer drooping, pouring out, fizzing into the Sac. The thin soldier mashed the horn of the Willys. “Get in, dumbass!” one of the floozies screamed from the backseat.
James did not move a muscle. And Hettienne held that same pose, pointing away toward the bridge. Headlights bobbled down the tunnel of trees that loomed over Sac River. The Willys careened, the floozies screamed, and the men shouted, Oh, Lord! Oh, my God! What the Hell? Scrabbling, bumping like a toy up the embankment, then squalling tires on Buffalo Road, the Willys lunged toward Springfield.
At last there was silence. Stars returned above them, the big ones that could burn down through the milky vapors roiling above the water. Hettienne’s eyes seemed blank again, her face long and emotionless. That low and awful voice had come out of her once more.
“Who is it I am with?” James asked.
She whirled to him. “Your niece,” she said, her voice small, pleading. “Your niece, Hettienne.” And then she did something they only allowed each other in greeting and parting, and threw her arms around his neck and buried her face against his chest.
Turning to the house, they could see lights blazing in the upstairs windows. “Oh, Hell,” he said. “No need to wash in the river. You can wash in a tub. Come on, kiddo.”
“Come on, kiddo, what?” she asked, bouncing on her toes. “What do we tell them?”
“Leave that to me.”
- 8 -
On the back stoop, Simon, her father, and her mother waited. Simon held up a kerosene lamp. Hettienne and James, glowing in moonlight now without the cover of the foggy Sac, halted before them. Hettienne hooked her arm in James’s elbow.
“Been hearing trespassers,” James said. “Several nights running.”
Simon, John, and Charlotte stared at Hettienne, streaked in the sparkling white.
“Planned a little surprise. Give them a little scare. It’s Roy Boy. Horse liniment.” He pointed at his front and nodded at her.
“We heard screams,” said Simon, not amused. “And a car horn.”
“We succeeded. Spectacularly.”
Simon and John exchanged a look.
Charlotte descended the stairs to James. “You were supposed to watch her. To keep her out of trouble!”
“She woke,” James said. “We saw lights at the river. We planned a scare for them.”
“Young lady?” asked Simon.
Hettienne glanced at James but then she realized she could not hesitate. “It’s just a costume.” She held out her white-streaked arms, made more shocking by the drooping bell sleeves of the weskit, silvered, heavy, and slick. “Ghosties. We’re ghosties. See? To scare them off.” She faced Simon, John, and her mother. “I stopped them. Tonight we made sure they’ll never, ever come back on Sheehy land.”
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
