Beautiful Creatures

9.12

The Sisters

The kitchen table was still set when I got home, lucky for me, because Amma would have killed me if I’d missed dinner. What I hadn’t considered was the phone tree that had been activated the minute I walked out of English class. No less than half the town must have called Amma by the time I got home.

“Ethan Wate? Is that you? Because if it is, you are in for a world a trouble.”

I heard a familiar banging sound. Things were worse than I thought. I ducked under the doorway and into the kitchen. Amma was standing at the counter in her industrial denim tool apron, which had fourteen pockets for nails and could hold up to four power tools. She was holding her Chinese cleaver, the counter piled high with carrots, cabbage, and other vegetables I couldn’t identify. Spring rolls required more chopping than any other recipe in Amma’s blue plastic box. If she was making spring rolls, it only meant one thing, and it wasn’t just that she liked Chinese food.

I tried to come up with an acceptable explanation, but I had nothing.

“Coach called this afternoon, and Mrs. English, and Principal Harper, and Link’s mamma, and half the ladies from the DAR. And you know how I hate talkin’ to those women. Evil as sin, every one a them.”

Gatlin was full of ladies’ auxiliaries, but the DAR was the mother of them all. True to its name, the Daughters of the American Revolution, you had to prove you were related to an actual patriot from the American Revolution to be eligible for membership. Being a member apparently entitled you to tell your River Street neighbors what colors to paint their houses and generally boss, pester, and judge everyone in town. Unless you were Amma. That I’d like to see.

“They all said the same thing. That you ran out a school, in the middle a class, chasin’ after that Duchannes girl.” Another carrot rolled across the cutting board.

“I know, Amma, but—”

The cabbage split in half. “So I said, ‘No, my boy wouldn’t leave school without permission and skip practice. There must be some mistake. Must be some other boy disrepectin’ his teacher and sullyin’ his family name. Can’t be a boy I raised, livin’ in this house.’” Green onions flew across the counter.

I’d committed the worst of crimes, embarrassing her. Worst of all, in the eyes of Mrs. Lincoln and the women of the DAR, her sworn enemies.

“What do you have to say for yourself? What would make you run out a school like your tail was on fire? And I don’t wanna hear it was some girl.”

I took a deep breath. What could I say? I had been dreaming about some mystery girl for months, who showed up in town and just happened to be Macon Ravenwood’s niece? That, in addition to terrifying dreams about this girl, I had a vision of some other woman, who I definitely didn’t know, who lived during the Civil War?

Yeah, that would get me out of trouble, around the same time the sun exploded and the solar system died.

“It’s not what you think. The kids in our class were giving Lena a hard time, teasing her about her uncle, saying he hauls dead bodies around in his hearse, and she got really upset and ran out of class.”

“I’m waitin’ for the part that explains what any a this has to do with you.”

“Aren’t you the one always telling me to ‘walk in the steps of our Lord?’ Don’t you think He’d want me to stick up for someone who was being picked on?” Now I’d done it. I could see it in her eyes.

“Don’t you dare use the Word a the Lord to justify breakin’ the rules at school, or I swear I will go outside and get a switch and burn some sense into your backside. I don’t care how old you are. You hear me?” Amma had never hit me with anything in my life, although she had chased me with a switch a few times to make a point. But this wasn’t the moment to bring that up.

The situation was quickly going from bad to worse; I needed a distraction. The locket was still burning a hole in my back pocket. Amma loved mysteries. She had taught me to read when I was four using crime novels and the crossword over her shoulder. I was the only kid in kindergarten who could read examination on the blackboard because it looked so much like medical examiner. As for mysteries, the locket was a good one. I’d just leave out the part about touching it and seeing a Civil War vision.

“You’re right, Amma. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left school. I was just trying to make sure Lena was okay. A window broke in the classroom right behind her, and she was bleeding. I just went to her house to see if she was all right.”

“You were up at that house?”

“Yeah, but she was outside. Her uncle is really shy, I guess.”

“You don’t need to tell me about Macon Ravenwood, like you know anything I don’t already know.” The Look.

“H. E. B. E. T. U. D. I. N. O. U. S.”

“What?”

“As in, you don’t have a lick a sense, Ethan Wate.”

I fished the locket out of my pocket and walked over to where she was still standing by the stove. “We were out back, behind the house, and we found something,” I said, opening my hand so she could take a look. “It has an inscription inside.”

The expression on Amma’s face stopped me cold. She looked like something had knocked the wind right out of her.

“Amma, are you okay?” I reached for her elbow, to steady her in case she was about to faint. But she pulled her arm away before I could touch her, like she’d burned her hand on the handle of a pot.

“Where did you get that?” Her voice was a whisper.

“We found it in the dirt, at Ravenwood.”

“You didn’t find that at Ravenwood Plantation.”

“What are you talking about? Do you know who it belonged to?”

“Stand right here. Don’t you move,” she instructed, rushing out of the kitchen.

But I ignored her, following her to her room. It had always looked more like an apothecary than a bedroom, with a low white single bed tucked beneath rows of shelves. On the shelves were neatly stacked newspapers—Amma never threw away a finished crossword—and Mason jars full of her stock ingredients for making charms. Some were her old standards: salt, colored stones, herbs. Then there were more unusual collections, like a jar of roots and another of abandoned bird nests. The top shelf was just bottles of dirt. She was acting weird, even for Amma. I was only a couple of steps behind her, but she was already tearing through her drawers by the time I got there.

“Amma, what are you—”

“Didn’t I tell you to stay in the kitchen? Don’t you bring that thing in here!” she shrieked, when I took a step forward.

“What are you so upset about?” She stuffed a few things I couldn’t get a look at into her tool apron, and rushed back out of the room. I caught up with her back in the kitchen. “Amma, what’s the matter?”

“Take this.” She handed me a threadbare handkerchief, careful not to let her hand touch mine. “Now you wrap that thing up in here. Right now, right this second.”

This was beyond going dark. She was totally losing it.

“Amma—”

“Do as I say, Ethan.” She never called me by my first name without my last.

Once the locket was safely wrapped in the handkerchief, she calmed down a little bit. She rifled through the lower pockets of her apron, removing a small leather bag and a vial of powder. I knew enough to recognize the makings of one of her charms when I saw them. Her hand shook slightly as she poured some of the dark powder into the leather pouch. “Did you wrap it up tight?”

“Yeah,” I said, expecting her to correct me for answering her so informally.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Now you put it in here.” The leather pouch was warm and smooth in my hand. “Go on now.”

I dropped the offending locket into the pouch.

“Tie this around it,” she instructed, handing me a piece of what looked like ordinary twine, although I knew nothing Amma used for her charms was ever ordinary, or what it seemed. “Now you take it back there, where you found it, and you bury it. Take it there straightaway.”

“Amma, what’s going on?” She took a few steps forward and grabbed my chin, pushing the hair out of my eyes. For the first time since I pulled the locket out of my pocket, she looked me in the eye. We stayed that way for what seemed like the longest minute of my life. Her expression was an unfamiliar one, uncertain.

“You’re not ready,” she whispered, releasing her hand.

“Not ready for what?”

“Do as I say. Take that bag back to where you found it and bury it. Then you come right home. I don’t want you messin’ with that girl anymore, you hear me?”

She had said all she planned to say, maybe more. But I’d never know because if there was one thing Amma was better at than reading cards or solving a crossword, it was keeping secrets.

“Ethan Wate, you up?”

What time was it? Nine-thirty. Saturday. I should have been up by now, but I was exhausted. Last night I’d spent two hours wandering around, so Amma would believe I had gone back to Greenbrier to bury the locket.

I climbed out of bed and stumbled across the room, tripping on a box of stale Oreos. My room was always a mess, crammed with so much stuff my dad said it was a fire hazard and one day I was going to burn the whole house down, not that he’d been in here in a while. Aside from my map, the walls and ceiling were plastered with posters of places I hoped I’d get to see one day—Athens, Barcelona, Moscow, even Alaska. The room was lined with stacks of shoeboxes, some three or four feet high. Although the stacks looked random, I could tell you the location of every box—from the white Adidas box with my lighter collection from my eighth grade pyro phase, to the green New Balance box with the shell casings and a torn piece of flag I found at Fort Sumter with my mom.

And the one I was looking for, the yellow Nike box, with the locket that had sent Amma off the deep end. I opened the box and pulled out the smooth leather pouch. Hiding it had seemed like a good idea last night, but I put it back in my pocket, just in case.

Amma shouted up the stairs again. “Get on down here or you’re gonna be late.”

“I’ll be down in a minute.”

Every Saturday, I spent half the day with the three oldest women in Gatlin, my great-aunts Mercy, Prudence, and Grace. Everyone in town called them the Sisters, like they were a single entity, which in a way they were. Each of them was about a hundred years old, and even they couldn’t remember who was the oldest. All three of them had been married multiple times, but they’d outlived all their husbands and moved into Aunt Grace’s house together. And they were even crazier than they were old.

When I was about twelve, my mom started dropping me off there on Saturdays to help out, and I had been going there ever since. The worst part was, I had to take them to church on Saturdays. The Sisters were Southern Baptist, and they went to church on Saturdays and Sundays, and most other days, too.

But today was different. I was out of bed and into the shower before Amma could call me a third time. I couldn’t wait to get over there. The Sisters knew just about everyone who had ever lived in Gatlin; they should, since between the three of them, they had been related to half the town by marriage, at one time or another. After the vision, it was obvious the G in GKD stood for Genevieve. But if there was anyone who would know what the rest of the initials stood for, it would be the three oldest women in town.

When I opened the top drawer of my dresser to grab some socks, I noticed a little doll that looked like a sock monkey holding a tiny bag of salt and a blue stone, one of Amma’s charms. She made them to ward off evil spirits or bad luck, even a cold. She put one over the door of my dad’s study when he started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Even though my dad never paid much attention when he was there, Amma said the Good Lord still gave you credit for showing up. A couple of months later, my dad bought her a kitchen witch on the Internet and hung it over the stove. Amma was so angry she served him cold grits and burnt coffee for a week.

Usually, I didn’t give it much thought when I found one of Amma’s little gifts. But there was something about the locket. Something she didn’t want me to find out.

There was only one word to describe the scene when I arrived at the Sisters’ house. Chaos. Aunt Mercy answered the door, hair still in rollers.

“Thank goodness you’re here, Ethan. We have an E-mergency on our hands,” she said, pronouncing the “E” as if it was a word all by itself. Half the time I couldn’t understand them at all, their accents were so thick and their grammar so bad. But that’s the way it was in Gatlin; you could tell how old someone was by the way they spoke.

“Ma’am?”

“Harlon James’s been injured, and I’m not convinced he ain’t about ta pass over.” She whispered the last two words like God Himself might be listening, and she was afraid to give Him any ideas. Harlon James was Aunt Prudence’s Yorkshire terrier, named after her most recent late husband.

“What happened?”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Aunt Prudence said, appearing out of nowhere with a first aid kit in her hand. “Grace tried ta kill poor Harlon James, and he is barely hangin’ on.”

“I did not try ta kill him,” Aunt Grace shrieked from the kitchen. “Don’t you tell tales, Prudence Jane. It was an accident!”

“Ethan, you call Dean Wilks, and tell him we have an E-mergency,” Aunt Prudence instructed, pulling a capsule of smelling salts and two extra-large Band-Aids out of the first aid kit.

“We’re losin’ him!” Harlon James was lying on the kitchen floor, looking traumatized but nowhere close to death. His back leg was tucked up underneath him, and it dragged behind him when he tried to get up. “Grace, the Lord as my witness, if Harlon James dies…”

“He’s not going to die, Aunt Prue. I think his leg is broken. What happened?”

“Grace tried ta beat him ta death with a broom.”

“That’s not true. I told you, I wasn’t wearing my spectacles and he looked just like a wharf rat runnin’ through the kitchen.”

“How would you know what a wharf rat looks like? You’ve never been ta a wharf in all your life.”

So I drove the Sisters, who were completely hysterical, and Harlon James, who probably wished he was dead, to Dean Wilks’ place in their 1964 Cadillac. Dean Wilks ran the feed store, but he was the closest thing to a vet in town. Luckily, Harlon James had only suffered a broken leg, so Dean Wilks was up to the task.

By the time we got back to the house, I was wondering if I wasn’t the crazy one for thinking I’d be able to get any information out of the Sisters. Thelma’s car was in the driveway. My dad had hired Thelma to keep an eye on the Sisters after Aunt Grace almost burned their house down ten years ago, when she put a lemon meringue pie in the oven and left it in there all afternoon when they were at church.

“Where you girls been?” Thelma called from the kitchen.

They bumped into each other trying to push their way into the kitchen to tell Thelma about their misadventure. I slumped into one of the mismatched kitchen chairs next to Aunt Grace, who looked depressed about being the villain of the story again. I pulled the locket out of my pocket, holding the chain in the handkerchief, and spun it around a few times.

“Whatcha got there, handsome?” Thelma asked, pinching some snuff out of the can on the windowsill and tucking into her bottom lip, which looked even weirder than it sounded, since Thelma was kind of dainty and resembled Dolly Parton.

“It’s just a locket I found out by Ravenwood Plantation.”

“Ravenwood? What the devil were you doin’ out there?”

“My friend’s staying there.”

“You mean Lena Duchannes?” Aunt Mercy asked. Of course she knew, the whole town knew. This was Gatlin.

“Yes, ma’am. We’re in the same class at school.” I had their attention. “We found this locket in the garden behind the great house. We don’t know who it belonged to, but it looks really old.”

“That’s not Macon Ravenwood’s property. That’s part a Greenbrier,” Aunt Prue said, sounding sure of herself.

“Let me get a look at that,” Aunt Mercy said, taking her glasses out of the pocket of her housecoat.

I handed her the locket, still wrapped in the handkerchief. “It has an inscription.”

“I can’t read that. Grace, can you make that out?” she asked, handing the locket to Aunt Grace.

“I don’t see nothin’ at all,” Aunt Grace said, squinting hard.

“There are two sets of initials, right here,” I said, pointing to the grooves in the metal, “ECW and GKD. And if you flip that disc over, there’s a date. February 11, 1865.”

“That date seems real familiar,” Aunt Prudence said. “Mercy, what happened on that date?”

“Weren’t you married on that date, Grace?”

“1865, not 1965,” Aunt Grace corrected. Their hearing wasn’t much better than their vision. “February 11, 1865…”

“That was the year the Fed’rals almost burned Gatlin ta the ground,” Aunt Grace said. “Our great-granddaddy lost everything in that fire. Don’t you remember that story, girls? Gen’ral Sherman and the Union army marched clean through the South, burnin’ everything in their path, includin’ Gatlin. They called it the Great Burnin’. At least part a every plantation in Gatlin was destroyed, except Ravenwood. My granddaddy used ta say Abraham Ravenwood musta made a deal with the Devil that night.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was the only way that place coulda been left standin’. The Fed’rals burned every plantation along the river, one at a time, till they got ta Ravenwood. They just marched on past, like it wasn’t there at all.”

“The way Granddaddy told it, that wasn’t the only thing strange ’bout that night,” Aunt Prue said, feeding Harlon James a piece of bacon. “Abraham had a brother, lived there with him, and he just up and disappeared that night. Nobody ever saw him again.”

“That doesn’t seem that strange. Maybe he was killed by the Union soldiers, or trapped in one of those burning houses,” I said.

Aunt Grace raised an eyebrow. “Or maybe it was somethin’ else. They never did find a body.” I realized people had been talking about the Ravenwoods for generations; it didn’t start with Macon Ravenwood. I wondered what else the Sisters knew.

“What about Macon Ravenwood? What do you know about him?”

“That boy never did have a chance on account a bein’ E-legitimate.” In Gatlin, being illegitimate was like being a communist or an atheist. “His daddy, Silas, met Macon’s mamma after his first wife left him. She was a pretty girl, from New Orleans, I think. Anyhow, not long after, Macon and his brother were born. But Silas never did marry her, and then she up and left, too.”

Aunt Prue interrupted, “Grace Ann, you don’t know how ta tell a story. Silas Ravenwood was an E-centric, and as mean as the day is long. And there were strange things goin’ on at that house. The lights were on all night long, and every now and again a man in a tall black hat was seen wanderin’ ’round up there.”

“And the wolf. Tell him about the wolf.” I didn’t need them to tell me about that dog, or whatever it was. I’d seen it myself. But it couldn’t be the same animal. Dogs, even wolves, didn’t live that long.

“There was a wolf up at the house. Silas kept it like it was a pet!” Aunt Mercy shook her head.

“But those boys, they moved back and forth between Silas and their mamma, and when they were with him, Silas treated them somethin’ awful. Beat on ’em all the time and barely let ’em outta his sight. He wouldn’t even let ’em go ta school.”

“Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood never leaves his house,” I said.

Aunt Mercy waved her hand in the air, as if that was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “He leaves his house. I’ve seen him a mess a times over at the DAR buildin’, right after supper time.” Sure she had.

That was the thing about the Sisters; half the time they had a firm grasp on reality, but that was only half the time. I had never heard of anyone seeing Macon Ravenwood, so I doubted he was hanging around the DAR looking at paint chips and chatting up Mrs. Lincoln.

Aunt Grace scrutinized the locket more carefully, holding it up to the light. “I can tell you one thing. This here handkerchief belonged ta Sulla Treadeau, Sulla the Prophet they called her, on account a folks said she could see the future in the cards.”

“Tarot cards?” I asked.

“What other kind a cards are there?”

“Well, there are playin’ cards, and greetin’ cards, and place cards for parties…” Aunt Mercy rambled.

“How do you know the handkerchief belonged to her?”

“Her initials are embroidered right here on the edge, and you see that there?” she asked, pointing to a tiny bird embroidered under the initials. “That there was her mark.”

“Her mark?”

“Most readers had a mark back then. They’d mark their decks ta make sure nobody switched their cards. A reader is only as good as her deck. I know that much,” Thelma said, spitting into a small urn in the corner of the room with the precision of a marksman.

Treadeau. That was Amma’s last name.

“Was she related to Amma?”

“Of course she was. She was Amma’s great-great-grandmamma.”

“What about the initials on the locket? ECW and GKD? Do you know anything about them?” It was a long shot. I couldn’t remember the last time the Sisters had ever had a moment of clarity that lasted this long.

“Are you teasin’ an old woman, Ethan Wate?”

“No ma’am.”

“ECW. Ethan Carter Wate. He was your great-great-great-uncle, or was it your great-great-great-great-uncle?”

“You’ve never been any good with arithmetic,” Aunt Prudence interrupted.

“Anyhow, he was your great-great-great-great-granddaddy Ellis’ brother.”

“Ellis Wate’s brother was named Lawson, not Ethan. That’s how I got my middle name.”

“Ellis Wate had two brothers, Ethan and Lawson. You were named for both of ’em. Ethan Lawson Wate.” I tried to picture my family tree. I had seen it enough times. And if there’s one thing a Southerner knows, it’s their family tree. There was no Ethan Carter Wate on the framed copy hanging in our dining room. I had obviously overestimated Aunt Grace’s lucidity.

I must have looked unconvinced because a second later, Aunt Prue was up and out of her chair. “I have the Wate Family Tree in my genealogy book. I keep track a the whole lineage for the Sisters a the Confed’racy.”

The Sisters of the Confederacy, the lesser cousin of the DAR, but equally horrifying, was some kind of sewing circle holdover from the War. These days, members spent most of their time tracking their Civil War roots for documentaries and miniseries like The Blue and the Gray.

“Here it is.” Aunt Prue shuffled back into the kitchen carrying a huge leather-bound scrapbook, with yellowed pieces of paper and old photographs sticking out from the edges. She flipped through the pages, dropping scraps of paper and old newspaper clippings all over the floor.

“Will you look at that… Burton Free, my third husband. Wasn’t he just the handsomest a all my husbands?” she asked, holding up the cracked photograph for the rest of us.

“Prudence Jane, keep lookin’. This boy is testin’ our memory.” Aunt Grace was noticeably agitated.

“It’s right here, after the Statham Tree.”

I stared at the names I knew so well from the family tree in my dining room at home.

There was the name, the name missing from the family tree at Wate’s Landing—Ethan Carter Wate. Why would the Sisters have a different version of my family tree? It was obvious which tree was the real one. I was holding the proof in my hand, wrapped in the handkerchief of a hundred-and-fifty-year-old prophet.

“Why isn’t he on my family tree?”

“Most family trees in the South are fulla lies, but I’m surprised he made it onta any copy a the Wate Family Tree,” Aunt Grace said, shutting the book and sending a cloud of dust into the air.

“It’s only on account a my excellent record keepin’ that he’s even on this one.” Aunt Prue smiled proudly, showing off both sets of her dentures.

I had to get them to focus. “Why wouldn’t he make it on the family tree, Aunt Prue?”

“On account a him bein’ a deserter.”