“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I cried, and I meant Louisville, the house on Willow Street, my own tattered reputation, with the dead and without Daisy.
“Why, then you must come stay with me,” she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and I sobbed harder. She made it sound easy, and for a miracle, just that once, it was.
The judge’s funeral, respectable but sparsely attended, was held five days later, and two days after that, I was on my way home to New York with Mrs. Sigourney Howard, who graciously permitted me to call her my own Aunt Justine.
We departed from St. Louis, her in the black she had kept on after her husband died, and me in the fashionable black frock that was part of my new mourning set.
“Six months at the outside,” she told me sternly. “It isn’t appropriate for a young thing like you to be stuck in mourning too long.”
On the train, in our private compartment, she gave me my first drop of real demoniac, making my eyes water and my throat ache. All I had had before were fakes made from cherry liqueur mixed with a queasy amount of goat blood, only good for making young debs sick off of hayrides and at church socials. Demoniac was still legal then, and something of an old man’s tipple still, a remnant from an age more alchemical than mustard gas.
When I had gotten over the discomfort of those first few moments, a sense of peace spilled over me, warm like I had never been warm before and more easy in the world and in my skin than I had ever been. I glanced out the train window to see a shimmer of bright gold traveling over the flat blue Middle Western sky.
Out my window, for just a moment, I saw a pair of Black farmers on either end of a broad fallow field. One lifted his hand and a burn line spread out to the right and left of him, glowing red, moving fast and leaving black rich earth behind it. The line of fire raced towards the other man, the one closer to the tracks, and I glimpsed a smile on his face as he held up his hands and the fire went suddenly cold and white in front of him. It was land magic, earth magic of a kind you never saw in the city, and with the demoniac whispering in my belly and my blood, I lost all of my city reserve and educated pretension to stare in awe and pleasure and wonder at the sight of it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As it turned out, Nick and I were possessed of a basic incompatibility that we both gamely ignored in order to spend time with one another. He did well in New York, where charming ex-soldiers were de rigueur, and where his Middle Western good looks contrasted nicely with mine. He liked being shocked by the extravagances of the city, but he was not ready for the people that came with the wonder, who lived shoulder to shoulder with wonder and thus grew immune to it.
Also, Daisy’s cousin or not, he was of another class entirely, unable to comprehend how very little money meant once you had a certain amount of it. I brought him one weekend up to Warwick, where the Dancy siblings, Margaret and Highland, were throwing their annual midsummer crush. I borrowed Max Peabody’s car for the weekend because Nick’s wasn’t fit to be seen, and I drove us up on Friday so we’d have the full two nights.
It was a good weekend, with Nick and me stealing off quick moments on the hidden beach, before breakfast in one of the dining alcoves, and yes, just once, in a little closet that smelled of fresh detergent and pallid violets. I saw a bit less of him than I might have preferred, because he took up with some men he recognized from his time in the city. He turned out to be popular with them, sitting up late on the veranda and talking business, politics, and women late into the night. I was slightly put out, but I could hardly blame him for making the most of things.
It rained on Friday night, and as it happened I had forgotten to put the top up on Max’s car. He arrived with Carol Linney on his arm, crossing the crowded breakfast room to playfully scold me for my mistake. Max was a big bluff thing, avuncular even at the age of twenty-one, and he told me that he would have to put me to work drying off the seats and polishing the chrome to say sorry.
“Well, someone’s going to have to do that, but it certainly won’t be me,” I told him. “I had someone else do the parking for me, and they must have left the top down. I am dreadfully sorry for it, Max, and of course I’ll pay to have it taken care of, if you like…”