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 means redheaded Scottish thief.”
Howls, and it was all David could do to separate them.
- 9 -
The following summer, John Sheehy did something that shook open the fault lines of the family in permanent ways. He and Charlotte enrolled Hettienne in dressage courses for a summer term at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Without Hettienne there at Emerald Park for June and July, and with grain prices roaming high and free, the Sheehys did not invite the Ormond children for the usual extended stay. That August, when wheat and oats were ready for the shock, Simon offered to hire Cousins David, Hal, and Brent as farmhands. He sent Aunt Margaret around with a handwritten note of inquiry and fair market terms.
When Old Mike Sheehy had died in April of 1934, he had divided land to every son and daughter, but to Kate he had willed and devised the mere sum of $200. Now in answer to Simon’s offer to hire, Auntie Kate Sheehy Ormond sent her brother an old postcard—where had she come by it?—featuring the Headleys’ version of Emerald Park, on which in bright greens, blues, reds, yellows, and whites the visitor could see all the way from the limestone gate on Buffalo Road to the model barns and the stone silo and the mansion. Beckoning was the white gravel drive, all open, all welcoming, and of old, of the Headleys’ day. Back before any Sheehys owned the land, such postcards were sent by tourists and townspeople alike in pride, or preserved and cherished. Now those walls grew over with maypop, trumpet, and Virginia creeper. Bois d’arc, black locusts, and shaggy cedars rose and entangled to make a second, more forbidding barrier. On the reverse of the postcard Auntie Kate answered her brother Simon with one word: no.
Denied his niece, James mailed her a letter.
My Dearest and Onliest Hettienne,
I hope you will forgive your Uncle James the occasional letter to one greatly missed. And you are greatly missed—without you here, this place is a 300-acre tomb. Did you know that Old Michael Sheehy, that surveyor/purveyor and progenitor of all of us and purchaser of this sepulchral spread, when he signed the warranty deed for $30,000 (a fortune in 1923), did not “sign” but made his mark x and the same of sound mind and body on his last will and testament. A witnessed mark x. For the genius spark of House Sheehy could not read or write an English sentence, and yet had a command of numbers and measures and formulae so sure that he would beat Simon and me about the ears and neck if we chose to cipher a sum on paper. Simon will often tell that story at table to inspire us. To what, I do not know. If you will, please ask your mother’s permission that we correspond on the condition that no one here at Emerald Park is to know. John will not understand. But I am willing to wager
