12

“Mr. Gillespie, I fail to see how it can take so long for a path to be cleared. The spot I recall was hardly a jungle.” The day after the fire, Priscilla Mabry stood on the porch of the inn where she and Brother Mabry were staying, covered her mouth with a handkerchief with one hand, and shaded her eyes with the other.

Clive Gillespie looked up from the bottom step, directly into the morning sun. He had not made it to the front door before Priscilla came out to admonish him. Even so, there was a smile on his face.

Mrs. Mercile, the manager, a stout woman who wore black shoes with thick straps and drooping stockings, pranced out of the house behind Priscilla. “I put that springwater in her bath like you said to. I put that special water in her bath, but she won’t believe me.” Mrs. Mercile raised her hands in the air just as if she’d been testifying at church.

When the springwater had been depleted from the barrels he had arranged for Priscilla’s baths, Clive Gillespie paid Mrs. Mercile another five dollars a week to go out into the night and fill jugs with water from the pump in the courtyard. And yet somehow Priscilla could tell the difference. “I’m so double-jointed from this impure mixture. It’s a miracle I can stand at all,” Priscilla had complained to Brother Mabry, who in turn voiced his frustrations to Clive.

“We didn’t travel all this way to sit on a front porch and entertain every member of the clergy within three counties who shows up here uninvited,” Brother Mabry said in a voice so loud that it could be heard inside the house next door. “Either get her to the spring or get us transportation back home and be done with the whole concept.”

The concept was the very vision that excited Clive Gillespie to the point of needing powder remedies from the pharmacy to control his insomnia. He lay awake at night, staring at the light from the moon that seeped in from his window and illuminated the molding of his bedroom ceiling that had been handcrafted to resemble lilies. He counted in his mind the number of steamboats that would soon pour into the city and the rows of trunks from tourists that would line the deck. After he had secured Ella Wallace’s property and signed the official papers securing his partnership in the inn and spa for spiritual and medicinal well-being, he would take possession of the oyster plant and then the land closest to the end of the dock, where eventually he would build a state-of-the-art warehouse. Lot by lot, foreclosure would give him the necessary means to eventually surpass the limited aspirations of his father. In a recurring dream, he stood at his father’s grave and tossed twenty-dollar bills to the ground as easy as wilted moss collecting on the marble slab.

Clive motioned with his chin for Mrs. Mercile to step aside on the porch. Pushing his derby hat back to reveal his waxed hairline, Clive smiled with eyes closed. “I believe the path has been cleared now, Mrs. Mabry. Just in time to get you and your double joints straightened out.”

“Praise the Lord,” Mrs. Mercile said.

“But it is Sunday, after all.” Clive lowered his head and looked up at Priscilla the same way he did whenever he tried to convince business owners to refinance. “Surely we can wait just one more day. I expected that on the Lord’s Day you’d want to be in a house of worship, Mrs. Mabry.”

She held the handkerchief with her initials embroidered in pink and waved it like a flag. “What better place to have a Sunday service than at the site of one of God’s miracles? Why, I would have been good as dead by now if it hadn’t been for that spring.”

Since the dirt road leading to Dead Lakes was rutted and muddy from the night’s rains, Clive hired his lawn boy to drive a four-horse wagon, rented from the funeral parlor, to the site of the spring. He gave Mrs. Mercile three dollars for use of her rose-printed love seat, on which Priscilla lounged in the back of the black wagon. Two women of color wearing white uniforms from their days as nannies sat on the edges of the wagon closest to Priscilla, waving heart-shaped wicker fans. “Mercy,” Priscilla called out every time the wagon wheels hit washed-out places in the road.

After the fifth moan, even Brother Mabry stopped paying Priscilla any attention. His big frame sprawled across the seat behind the driver. Sweat stains darkened the back of his crimson velvet jacket. He waited until the wagon had passed the city limits before removing the coat. His baby blue shirt, dripping wet from the August sun, molded against his fat. Licking the end of a pencil, he scratched down words on the tablet he clutched in his palm. “What say you, Mr. Gillespie?” Brother Mabry roared. “Eden Everlasting.”

Clive Gillespie craned his neck from the front seat and nudged the lawn boy to move his leg so he could have more room. “Beg your pardon?”

“The name of the retreat. Eden Everlasting. How does that translate?”

“Ohhh, me,” Priscilla moaned, and the women fanned faster.

The wagon hit another rough patch, and Clive gripped the edge of the wagon. “Eden,” Clive repeated with a reverence better suited for sacred prayer.

Brother Mabry coughed and looked back at Priscilla before addressing Clive. “I’ve only shared my findings with Priscilla. Hear me when I say it’s confidential.” Brother Mabry raised his eyebrows toward the lawn boy with the ripped straw hat that flapped with each bump in the road.

Clive reached over and squeezed the driver’s shoulder. “This boy is trustworthy. You have my word. Aren’t you, boy?”

The young man, who cut and raked Clive’s yard and cared for his family plot at the cemetery, never looked away from the road. He only popped the reins harder.

Sweat dewed the sides of Brother Mabry’s reddened face. “Hear what I say, now. If you study the book of Genesis, you will see several descriptions of the Garden of Eden that are specific. Very specific and very strange.” Brother Mabry said the words as if he might be singing them. “All these highbrowed divinity professors have for years and years speculated where that Garden might have been located. Some say the Near East, but I say hogwash. Hogwash! Believe what I’m telling you. God wanted a sign to tie the Scriptures back to America. America!” he shouted, and the horses shook their heads. Their bridles and bits made a jingling sound.

“America?” Clive asked.

“America. Hear me now. Look at all the ways God has blessed this great country of ours. Why, take this war, for instance. If America hadn’t stepped into this war when we did, there is no telling what sort of unbearable future those people overseas would face. President Wilson has his head on straight. America is the vehicle that the Lord is using to point the way. And hear me when I say that such was the case at the beginning of time too.” Brother Mabry held up his pad and shook it. “I tell you, God is calling His people back. All you have to do is look at the newspaper. Wars and plagues . . . it’s all accounted for in Scripture.” Brother Mabry shifted and the wagon seat creaked. “God has put a calling on me to give people hope. I’m sent to let people know that the Garden of Eden is not some fairy tale or some outlandish place that evaporated in a desert. No, sir. It’s right here before them.”

“Mercy,” Priscilla moaned. “I’m sure to burn to death from this sun. My parasol.” The colored woman with freckled cheeks quickly popped open a pink parasol with matching fringe and held it over Priscilla.

“I see,” Clive said. He lifted the derby and set the hat on his lap. Beads of perspiration dotted the nape of his neck like dew.

“Mr. Gillespie, you said you’re a churchgoing man. . . .”

“Oh yes,” Clive quickly said. “Baptized in the same church as my father.”

The lawn boy popped the reins again. The lead horse blew dust from his nostrils.

“Well then, you’ll recall from Sunday school that the Garden of Eden sat on a river that forked in four places.” Brother Mabry lowered his chin. Rolls of fat glistened.

“Four places, you say?”

“Hear what I’m telling you. It’s all in the book of Genesis. And do you happen to know the only place in the entire world where the river forks in four places?”

Clive looked down at the horses and then back at Brother Mabry. “Do you mean to say . . . ?”

“Search the Scriptures, and walk the globe. There’s not a Harvard Divinity School professor who can argue otherwise.”

Clive sat on the edge of the seat and turned completely around. When he had been contacted by Brother Mabry’s New York attorney, he had only been presented a business proposition that would rival any the area had ever seen. He had been promised currency, not religion. Clive’s arm was propped on the lawn boy’s shoulder. “The Apalachicola River?”

Brother Mabry closed the cover on his pad. “Tell me another river in the world that forks in four places.”

Licking at the sweat that tickled his lips, Clive practically cheered. “What a story! They’ll come from all over . . . all over the world, even.”

“Exactly,” Brother Mabry said.

The freckle-faced woman standing over Priscilla gripping the parasol held the gaze of the woman who waved the fan.

“I hope you don’t take offense,” Brother Mabry said in a softer tone. “I took the liberty of hiring a botanist to survey the area. A fellow by the name of Listerman who teaches at the university. He came out to the spot and took samples.”

“It’s a blessing,” Priscilla called out. “A blessing that my father found that Indian who led him to the spring.”

“A blessing!” Brother Mabry roared, causing the horses to prance to the side. “I’ll have all the newspapermen from across the country come see for themselves. I’ll have that Listerman professor trained to speak. He’ll tell it to those newspapermen in a way they can’t negate. Before it’s through, William Randolph Hearst himself will be coming to see.”

“A blessing, yes, sir,” Clive said before turning around. He laughed and brushed his hands together as if it were a winter’s day. Then he leaned over and whispered instructions for the lawn boy to turn at the fork in the road.

“The long way?” the young man whispered back.

“Absolutely,” Clive said in a disguised cough. He clutched the side of the wagon as the boy turned at the fork in the road. The horses high-stepped in the direction of the fishing camp where Bonaparte lived—completely skirting Ella’s place.

A family of whitetail deer grazed up ahead on the side of the road. Brother Mabry leaned forward, shouting for Priscilla to muster the strength to rise and witness the sight. But the only image Clive could think about was the confirmation he had received. The note left underneath his door that morning danced across his mind. DONE, the note read in block letters resembling the efforts of a grade-school child. Clive lit his morning cigar, blew a ring of smoke toward the portrait of his father, and then held the amber tip to the paper. Other than the ashes of a note and charred virgin timber, there would be no official record of the man who wore brass-buckled suspenders.

At the site of the spring, Clive looked with cautious intrigue at the cleared timber off in the distance. Since the spring sat on the opposite corner of the property, past the swamp and cypress, Ella’s home appeared no larger than a matchbox off in the distance.

“You mustn’t jar me too much,” Priscilla warned as the women and the young man tried to lift her from the wagon. “Gingerly.”

“Gingerly,” Brother Mabry echoed, motioning with his straw hat for Clive to help.

Rushing to offer aid, Clive was careful not to let his hands brush too closely to Priscilla’s pale skin with raised blue veins or to the hands of the black workers he employed. “Yes, easy does it,” he said.

Locusts roared, weeds flapped, and tree limbs snapped under the feet of the young man carrying Priscilla like she might have been his gigantic child. “You got her, boy?” Clive kept asking as the group made their way down to the embankment covered in ferns and poison ivy. A black snake slithered beneath a blanket of dead palmetto bushes. One of the women of color made a gasp that sounded like a scream. Clive glared at her, and she placed her hand over her mouth. “Easy does it,” he said without looking away from the woman.

“Ohhh,” Priscilla moaned and then threw her head back until she appeared to be either dead or drunk in the arms of the young black man.

“Just a few more steps, dearest. You can do it. I know you can,” Brother Mabry yelled while sliding sideways and then rebounding by grabbing a scrub oak tree.

At the spring, the women laid out blankets that had been taken from the beds at the inn back in town. Then they tied string to trees surrounding the pool and placed white sheets over them. “See there,” Brother Mabry said. “You’ll have complete privacy.”

The young man adjusted his weight and in the process jostled Priscilla. “Ohhh,” she cried out again before demanding to be set down. He placed her on one of the blankets, and she stuck her foot up in the air. Without any direction, the freckle-faced woman went about taking the shoes and stockings from Priscilla’s feet.

As Priscilla soaked, Clive lit a cigar and listened to Brother Mabry once more make the case for this being God’s first place of creation. Brother Mabry swung his log-sized arms in the air and closed his eyes. Suddenly his nose crinkled and he opened one eye. “Cigar smoke doesn’t sit well with Priscilla’s constitution. She’s allergic.”

When Brother Mabry went to check on Priscilla’s progress, Clive backed away and stomped across a patch of blush-colored red root growing around saplings of pines. He looked out toward Ella’s house. Behind a massive oak, a palmetto bush fluttered, and a figure cast a shadow down the side of the tree.

Clive hadn’t made it fifteen feet away from the tree when Narsissa stepped out from behind it. He froze, and the side of his jaw flinched as he looked back at the spring. “What are you doing?”

“I was fixing to ask you the same thing,” Narsissa said.

“Well, it is Sunday. I have guests and thought that an outing to the . . . to the country would help their respiratory systems.” He bit the end of the cigar and then spat it to the ground. The tobacco came to rest against a log speckled with fuchsia-colored fungus.

“Ella don’t care for guests on her place unless she invites them.”

“Is that so?” Clive smiled and then took a drag on the cigar.

Narsissa put the pail of red root stems down on the ground next to the palmetto bush. Before rising up, she casually lifted the silver knife out from her boot and hid it behind her back.

Clive stepped forward but Narsissa didn’t move.

“We had a fire. A fire that wiped out our timber last night.”

“Our?” Clive coughed out the word. “You’re one step away from being down there with the others helping a pitiful white woman.” Clive nodded his head back toward the colored women who were assisting Priscilla.

“I’m not scared of you,” Narsissa said. “No, sir.” She exposed the knife to him. The sun flickered off of the tip.

Clive flicked an ash from the cigar and laughed. He moved so close that when he exhaled, his breath caused the ends of Narsissa’s hair to flutter. “Now let me give it to you straight, gal. I’ll take my pistol and whip you bloody with it. Who will help you then? Ella?”

“Who says I need helping?”

Clive looked sideways at Narsissa. A nose hair twisted and turned as he breathed. “What am I thinking? Having a conversation with a gal who probably can’t even sign her own name. Get on back to your shack before I knock you back there.”

Narsissa didn’t turn away. “You’re trespassing. The law’s on our side.”

“Our . . . our?” Sunlight cracked through the canopy of vines and made Clive’s waxed hair seem even slicker. “You poor old thing. Ella has manipulated you but good. You really do think that you have a stake in all of this.”

“I know what I know,” Narsissa said, gathering the pail before walking away.

“So sue me. Courthouse opens at eight in the morning,” Clive said. His laughter could be heard long after he had tromped over the blooms of the red root and returned to the uninvited guests. The jagged sound of his amusement followed Narsissa like a haint, tormenting her all the way through the sand littered with pine stumps and to the dust that had accumulated underneath the bed where Ella mourned her loss.

The report of Clive’s appearance jolted back Ella’s determination as much as the raspberry-colored liquid that Narsissa drained from the skillet after frying the red roots. “It is time,” Narsissa said as she forced Ella to drink the bitter concoction.

The next morning, while Narsissa hitched up the wagon, Ella gathered the breakfast plates in the sink and told her oldest son a lie. “Narsissa and I are going to town to try one more time to plead mercy with Clive.” Today of all days, she didn’t need a boy who thought he was a man getting into her business. After the fire, Samuel had stomped about the house, rearing and carrying on about how Clive Gillespie was to blame for all their troubles since the beginning of time. He had declared vengeance, and that night, after he had gone to bed, Ella locked the gun cabinet and hid the key in the teapot that she seldom used.

“You can’t handle him by yourself,” Samuel said, walking toward his bedroom to change. “I better go with you.”

“No,” Ella said, blocking the passageway next to the oven. “I mean it, Samuel. You are not going. Don’t make me tell you again.”

At the city limits of Apalachicola, Narsissa popped the reins and turned left through the outskirts of town. The shrill sound of wood meeting electric saw blades caused the mule to pin his ears back. When they came to a stop at the long wooden warehouse that served as the headquarters for Herndon Lumber, both women paused to look at the stacks of wood that covered the side yard next to the sawmill. The ground looked as if it were covered in dark-brown carpet. Colored women dressed in garments the color of pine needles stacked the lumber two at a time. Hats that reminded Ella of the ones she had seen for safaris tilted on their oily foreheads. Gloves, thick and stained with tar, protected their hands. Only a few gave a curious glance toward Ella and Narsissa.

A passel of men came out of the office doors crafted to resemble pinecones. They scattered in front of the wagon and went back to their proper places of operation.

Avery Herndon, the mill owner and a man whose waist size matched his age of forty-two, followed behind the men. He stood on the wooden step that was gnarled and peeling. Ella never noticed him. She kept her gaze toward the women and thought if only she could hire them for a week, then maybe she would have a chance.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Avery shouted above the roar of the saw.

Ella and Narsissa jumped in their seats.

Avery, with his hands propped on his back and his stomach protruding forward, said, “Don’t hate me for hiring them.” He pointed to the colored women with his knobby chin. “It’s only for the time being. Until this war is over. I got twenty-seven men over in what-ya-ma-call-it fighting for Uncle Sam. Not enough men to go around if you ask me. Don’t blame me for working women like they were men. Blame that sorry President Wilson.”

“Mr. Herndon,” Ella said, climbing down from the wagon, “may I have a word with you?”

He scratched the side of his chin. Red streaks marked the spot where his fingernails had raked. “I don’t have long. I got a man from Pensacola coming by to try and sell me one of those new tractors.”

“I don’t have long either,” Ella said.

On Avery’s office desk were littered a disorganized pile of yellowing trade journals, stacks of invoices, and packages of cigarettes. He propped his hands on top of the current edition of Southern Lumberman. Avery nodded to each detail that Ella shared about bank notes, unexpected setbacks, and arson. He only widened his eyes and raised an eyebrow when Ella said she knew who had set the blaze.

“You know who did it just as well as I do,” she said. “So I have to sell cypress. I have to cut it and sell it fast.”

Avery ran his hand over the cover of the trade magazine and then looked down while flipping through the pages. A breeze from the rotating fan propped above Ella’s head on the corner of a ceiling beam caused what hair Avery had left to rise. “I hate it. I really, really do.” Avery shook his head, and a roll of fat that gathered above his shirt collar jiggled. “You had some good timber.”

“I still do. . . . I mean, I still have good cypress. Cypress is in demand, I hear.”

He shook his head again, this time faster. “Not like you might hear.” He sighed and bent sideways. “Excuse me. I’m just keeping watch for that man who’s bringing the tractor.”

Ella leaned slightly away in the chair, giving Avery a better view of the window. Then she shifted the other way to block him. “Now, I know that cypress can be sold in Millville. Mr. Busby told me they are hiring men hand over fist to work at that new shipbuilding plant.”

“Now I don’t know what Mr. What-Ya-Ma-Call-Him is saying, but you take it from me. The government needs pine. Loblolly if they can get it.” Avery stood up, adjusted his pants, and glanced out toward the main doors beyond his office.

Standing and looking at Avery Herndon’s gray, sunken eyes, Ella never blinked. “I am not asking for favors. I’m just asking for a chance. You and I both know that I can give you some of the best cypress around here, so—”

“It’s dwarf cypress, Ella. Now, I don’t expect you to know the difference, but dwarf cypress just ain’t in demand,” Avery snorted.

“With all due respect, Avery Herndon,” Ella said, “I hear otherwise.”

Avery exhaled hard enough to ruffle two of the invoices stacked upon his desk. “I don’t want to get into all that. . . . It’s just more trouble than it’s worth, all right?”

“What does that mean? I won’t be any trouble to work with.”

“Not you, Ella. I’m talking about the situation with Clive and the loan you got with his bank,” Avery said, smiling at her sideways the way he might to a child who had tried unsuccessfully to win a game of hopscotch. “Look, Ella, like it or not Clive Gillespie carries a big stick around here. All I’m saying is I got a business to run and I’d rather not rattle that cage, if you know what I mean.”

A roar and a backfire caused both of them to turn toward the entrance doors. Avery jumped up, landing his nubby fingers on the desk. “Yonder he is,” he said. Avery moved faster than he had all day, bounded around the side of the desk, bumped against Ella, and trotted outside.

A stack of invoices and the edition of Southern Lumberman that he’d been flipping through fell to the floor at Ella’s feet. Her first instinct was to stomp on them until the grime of her shoe left a permanent tattoo of her visit. When she picked the papers up like a properly trained lady, she noticed a crinkled page in the magazine. “Uncle Sam Calls on Lumbermen to Fulfill Timber and Cypress Needs.”

Scanning the article, Ella could hear the cry of the tractor engine outside and the clipped pieces of male conversation. “You say it has the ground pressure of an eighty-pound boy?” Avery asked the salesman.

After reading just three paragraphs that described the new battleship War Mystery and the tons of cypress needed to build it, Ella used the tip of what remained of her chipped pinky nail and sliced the inside seam of the magazine. She folded the article in half and stuffed it down the front of her blouse.

Outside, Narsissa sat on the wagon and worked the reins to keep the nervous mule from running away. “The steel mule,” the salesman with gray britches that were too short called the machine that sputtered and spun around the office building as Avery’s foreman, a man shaped liked a square, gave it a trial run. “Take it for a run over the logs, fella,” the salesman shouted. “She might look like a car, but she’s got the guts of a locomotive.”

The front wheels that were the size of a car’s struggled over the pine log nearest the group of colored women who paused from their work only long enough to glance at the smoke that was brewing from the box-sized engine. Then the steel wheels of the back end buoyed over the log with little effort.

Before Narsissa and Ella pulled away, they heard the salesman make one last pitch to Avery. “She’s the newest and greatest thing on the market. She’s good for the lowlands. I guarantee you. Cypress and tupelo trees are no match for this one.”

By the time the afternoon sun had cast a shadow over the store, which now had the Closed sign dangling from the window, word had made its way through the currents of Dead Lakes that Ella and her children were in the swamp, slicing at cypress trees.

“She’ll wind up hospitalized and homeless, mark my word,” Myer Simpson said.

“Poor thing. Never could face reality,” Mrs. Pomeroy added.

“That’s what you get when you let a woman run a business,” Elroy Purvis, the beekeeper, said before pulling the veil down over his face.

But Neva Clarkson watched from a distance and ignored their predictions. “A survivor,” she said only to herself.

At the southern end of the county, past a fork in the road, Bonaparte and the daughter who had been spared from pain said nothing. They just stood by the boat with peeling green paint that rocked on the river and listened. Their neighbor Royal cuddled a jug he had just picked up at the juke joint and leaned against the dogwood tree with the colored bottles hanging from its branches. The clinking noise caused Royal to speak louder, and the effort caused his words to slur even more. He told about a fire at the place where the healer stayed.

The troubles of the woman he knew only as a delicate figure that glided behind a store window shadowed Bonaparte’s heart long after the evening lamp was turned low.