Читать книгу The Legend of the Albino Farm - Steve Yates - Страница 6

In the dead of night, Aunt Agnes found Hettienne in a chemise and boxers standing before the open icebox, arms dripping wet, mouth agape, and eyes like saucers. Puddles of water trembled around the child’s bare feet. Agnes called the girl’s full name, Hettienne Ellery Sheehy. No reaction. A still, white streak in the musty dark of the kitchen ell. Agnes spat upon the floorboards at her niece’s bare feet, then made the sign of the cross. The instant she finished with the Holy Spirit, she clutched her dressing gown up at her hips and rushed to fetch James, her heart as frantic as a sparrow in a fist. James had studied sleepwalking and had, in fact, brought Simon to safety many times.

“Oh, Hell,” said James in a whisper on seeing his niece. Agnes released his hand, then smacked his knuckles. “Remember,” James whispered, “the pain of growing that fast?”

Agnes’s lips puckered. “I remember the switch. My back’ll soon remember the mop and bucket!”

“Tell no one,” James said, then held his finger to his lips for a long while to be clear. “Last thing we want’s for her mother to fly into a rage and take her forever from us.”

“Bitch!” spit Agnes.

“Yes, but the girl’s mother as well.”

Hettienne did not come down to family breakfast—a breach unless gravely ill. Young Ormond cousins whispered and wondered. Johanna smarted most from this unprecedented privilege and became so wound up that David at last asked, “How do you know she isn’t ill, heifer?” The Ormond children landed at the table in a foul mood. Agnes was in a muddle, dropping plates, leaving milk to scald at the back of the stove. Simon kept an eye on them all, tense and silent. “A memorable breakfast,” Helen Sheehy remarked once the spinsters were shut in the kitchen. “For unknown reasons.”

With the meal cleared, the three spinster sisters were nibbling and gossiping in the kitchen amid the leftovers and dirty dishes when Hettienne entered from the back ell, dressed for riding, her hat in her hand and her hair woven in a bun, of which all three spinsters instantly approved.

“I’ll be direct,” snapped Margaret Sheehy. Helen and Agnes moved in echelon behind her. In their long brown dresses, they appeared to Hettienne as human approximations of the round-bodied, drab female wigeons bustling on Lake Michigan. “Just what is the meaning of all this, young lady?”

Hettienne bowed her head but could not stop the emotion flooding her. “I love you all so very much,” she whispered, her voice quaking. For all her summers, all the blazing months away from Chicago in the paradise of the Sheehy farm among family, she had been their infallible favorite, the one Sheehy child. She knew her episodes made for a confusing, alarming disappointment.

“I’m so sorry to have caused all this trouble.” She covered her face with her hands.

The kitchen smelled of live yeast, flour, bacon, peppery sausage gravy, and cantaloupe. Hettienne cupped all those soothing smells to her.

Like a flock, the three sisters nestled forward, and their long arms swooped around her shoulders and waist.

She let them lower her hands, and Margaret then lifted Hettienne’s chin. “Oh, dear child. We sisters agree. This staring, this rhyming, the gaps. It is just manifestations of the change.” Her voice dropped to a low whisper. “From girl to woman. Sheehys change hard.”

The spinsters all nodded.

“Agnes, I swear, sent the moon awry,” said Aunt Helen.

Not at all ready for the circle into which she had just been admitted, Hettienne shuddered. “I’m hungry,” she managed. Lightning fast, fried potatoes, sausage, milky coffee, and the remains of a pyramid of melon balls—orange, green, and red—flashed before her. The sisters hovered while she ate.

“Why’s your Uncle James look so dreadful, Hettienne?” Margaret asked.

Because, Hettienne realized, he had been up half the night with her. She recalled awakening in the pit of the night seated on a chair in this kitchen, roasting by the ancient stove which smelled of charred metal. A grill of flickering orange, and there was James kneeling, staring up at her.

James had touched Hettienne’s shoulder. “Everything is fine. You’re waking up. You’ve had an adventure.”

Much worse than an adventure. Fire, and children running. Terrible chaos outside. Was it a dream? Wide awake, she had been striding deep into the wood. Silence outside now, then the mockingbird gargling. Dawn silvered the top of the windows back in the ell. She did not recall a door, no opening, no exiting. Her head felt like a tunnel was blown clean through it. A slick cold clasped her arms. James’s hand steadied her.

“Hardly knows what’s happening, James. My God!” whispered Agnes.

“I know perfectly . . .” she began, but her tongue stopped as if her mind filled with paste.

James watched her, clearly a little disturbed. “Darling. We think it best that we keep this among us for now.” He touched her nose, then circled the kitchen with his index finger. Agnes, James, Hettienne. A finger to his lips. “Sss,” he sealed the circle shut.

“Your mother hates it here enough already,” Agnes whispered.

Now, in the daylight, in this warm kitchen with breakfast cleared, Hettienne shivered. Helen and Margaret closed in on their sister.

“Agnes, you’ve been awfully quiet about all this,” Margaret observed.

“Never quiet; always at it!” Helen quipped glaring at her eldest sister. “Mop in the morning; woodsman take warning.”

“James was sleepless. I was sleepless.” Agnes pinched the air as if she meant to nip Helen and Margaret at their ears. “Why not get to work if all the lights are on in the head?”

“Then, Hettienne, what’s the meaning of this?” asked Margaret. She stamped her foot, and pot lids shook. “Agnes and James are bumbling, and you’re late to breakfast. Out with it!”

Hettienne kept her mouth very full of melon balls. For the first time, it struck her why her father might have fled this place. Just as she was about to swallow, and those three long faces raised expectantly for her answers, a timid rapping startled the flock. Cousin David Ormond sidled into the kitchen from the ell, a straw hat in his hands.

“Aunties!” he called, and the flock abandoned Hettienne.

“More tea, David? Sausage? Biscuits?” offered Margaret. She arced like a bow on the tips of her toes, the biscuits on a green platter held high, waxed paper trembling.

David took a yellow biscuit in each fist and crammed them down in his overall pockets, waving off the fresh waxed paper thrust at him. “Thank you. Thank you. I want to show Hettienne the raft I’ve built. For the fireworks tower. May I steal her? Is she excused?”

The spinsters lifted her food right from her and retreated. Yet with crafty, sidelong glances they watched her as she followed Cousin David. When the two children were gone, Helen shared a long, dark look with Margaret.

“Secrets, secrets,” warned Helen.

“Sss,” Agnes hissed.