Adele Starret did not tell Mama but I knew what happened next. Never mind that I had dreamed it; any half-wit seven-year-old could have predicted it.
Leonard and Tansy refused ever to set foot in Ramparts again. No other sensible colored person would consider it, never mind the foolish ones. Of the whites, both sensible and idiot, only five could be found willing to enter the house. Dr. Evarts had and would, and no one thought the less of him for it, for his fundamental Yankeeness protected him in some indefinable way from the evil in Ramparts, and he was, after all, a Man of Science. My brother, Ford, would, but of course he thought there might be something in it for him, and, after all, it was his family estate. And Winston Weems would, for the same reason of self-interest, and also to protect his reputation as a hardheaded Man of Bidness. Men like Dr. Evarts and Mr. Weems could not believe in haunts or curses or hoodoos, for such things must necessarily be beyond their purchase or control. Mr. Weems hired two white men who would do anything for a jug, but who were not yet too debilitated by their vices to do the heavy lifting.
Ramparts was emptied in one weekend of almost everything perishable, usable or saleable (out of town, where its provenance was unknown), under the direction of Mr. Weems, Dr. Evarts, and my brother, Ford.
A single piece of furniture was abandoned: Mamadee’s bed, its bloody sheets already rotting, still stood in her bedroom.
And the umbrellas. Eccentric currents of air native to the house itself rolled the open umbrellas this way and that in the empty rooms. The tips of the ribs of the umbrellas tapped the floors and walls tick-tick-tick, as regularly and syncopated as clocks all set to different times. The rustling, the snicking and clicking, the faint thuds, all echoed through the house, along with its own creaks and groans.
That Ramparts was haunted, there was no doubt. Outside it, the live oaks shuddered, the rags of their Spanish moss twisting and flapping like grave clothes on a revenant mummy. Children dared one another to creep up on to the verandah and stare through the dusty windows. The glass under their palms was so cold that they snatched their hands away. One or more of the opened umbrellas, upside down and right side up, and sideways in every room would move, and the children would run away shrieking. Few returned for a second peek.
Thirty-eight
TO Mama, knowing whether Mamadee was alive or not was minor compared to the reassurance that Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin could not be blamed for whatever it was that had happened in Tallassee. The death certificate signed by Dr. Evarts gave the cause of Mamadee’s death as exsanguination caused by a tumor of the throat. The usually discreet doctor’s hints that Mamadee’s sudden dementia had been caused by a brain-storm brought on by hypoxia, from the tumor cutting off her oxygen, were eagerly retailed around Tallassee. Deirdre Carroll had never been beloved of the town, and her gaudy death, entertaining as it was, had shifted the town’s sympathies back to Mama. In hindsight, Roberta Ann must have witnessed the first sign of her mother’s dementia and sensibly fled, even though it would have been only the second sensible thing that Mama had ever done, the first being marriage to Joe Cane Dakin, and look how that turned out. Even the fact that Roberta Ann and her pathetic child had not returned to attend the brief funeral was not condemned, as no one else had either, aside from Ford and Dr. Evarts and Mr. Weems. Mrs. Weems and Mrs. Evarts had both vehemently refused, on the grounds of declining to be hypocrites. It must have been the only shining moment of nonhypocrisy in either of those two matrons’ existence, but was consistent with their parsimonious practice of charity.
“Oh, it’s terrible, it’s all so terrible I can’t even bear to think of it,” Mama said.
Of course not.
Adele Starret asked Mama slyly if she was getting up her strength for the drive up to Tallassee.
Mama came right back at her. “I will go, but in the morning, when I have had sufficient time to recover myself a little. Since I have already been deprived of the comfort of being at my mama’s deathbed and holding her hand at the moment she passed over—since I was not allowed to weep at her funeral—since I was prevented from seeing her casket lowered into the earth of a snake-handler’s cemetery, there is nobody who is going to keep me from at least being there when poor Mama’s will is read! Nobody, do you hear me?”
“Well, you won’t have to make a trip to Tallassee at all,” said Adele Starret, “because the will has already been read, probated and executed.”
Mama caught her breath in shock.
Adele Starret presented a long narrow envelope to Mama. Quick-fingered, Mama plucked out a single folded page. She went stiff and then thrust it at Adele Starret.
“Please read it for me, Miz Starret,” she asked, with a tremor in her voice.
Adele Starret did so.
Everything that Deirdre Carroll, late of Ramparts, City of Tallassee, Elmore County, Alabama, owned, possessed, had control over or interest in, all her possessions, goods and chattels, were bequeathed to her grandson, Ford Carroll Dakin. Until his twenty-first birthday, that inheritance would remain under the control of his guardians, one Winston Weems, attorney, and one Lewis Evarts, physician, of Tallassee, Alabama. The custody of Ford Carroll Dakin had been assigned in separate documents to Dr. Evarts, until such time as Ford Carroll Dakin was twenty-one.
To her daughter, Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, Deirdre Carroll bequeathed a particular pen, which was contained in the envelope.
Mama still held the envelope, forgotten, on her lap. Slowly she turned it upside down and a cylindrical object rolled out onto her open palm, presumably the aforementioned pen. She dropped the envelope to the floor of the verandah.
Mama sat there stunned.
Adele Starret read on: “To Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin’s daughter, Calliope Carroll Dakin, Deirdre Carroll bequeathed twice what Calliope Carroll Dakin had inherited from her father, the late Joe Cane Dakin.”
Mama seemed not to hear that clause as Adele Starret declaimed it. Her fingers had closed around the pen. In the silence that followed Adele Starret’s reading of the will, Mama clicked the pen. Its nib emerged and Mama winced and let the pen fall onto the floor. It rolled gently to the nearest gap between the floorboards and fell through onto the sand beneath.
“I caint believe Lew Evarts would do this to me,” Mama muttered. Then she said, “Mama must have been as crazy as a mockingbird on a live wire when she wrote that thing. But that’s it, Miz Starret!”
“What’s it?”
“My mama didn’t write the will. Winston Weems wrote it—that snake dipped his forked tongue in ink and signed my dead mother’s name to a lie!”
“I photostatted the will at the courthouse,” Adele Starret said, “and had a handwriting expert examine it, along with some samples of your mother’s handwriting. Your mother very definitely wrote out that will.”
I wondered at how quickly Adele Starret must have worked, to have obtained the will (and have it examined by a handwriting expert), samples of Mamadee’s writing, the death certificate, and the whole long story of Mamadee’s death, since Mrs. Mank had phoned her.
“Then he held a gun to her head while she dictated it!”
“He wasn’t there. I interviewed the two witnesses, and your mother was alone but for them.”
“Who were the witnesses?” Mama demanded.