“Now then,” she said, stepping back and shoving her hands into her apron. “You eat some of this food and you’ll be back on your feet in no time.”
Ma Kersey took up her station again and I turned my attention to the food. It was scrambled eggs and a sausage with gravy. Mrs. Kent apparently felt that invalids were better served with hearty fare than with thin gruel. I could find no fault with this program.
I made it through about half the meal before exhaustion caught up with me. You wouldn’t think that eating would make you so tired. I drank more tea, then lay back on the pillows, half dozing, while Ma Kersey told me all the latest gossip. It was mostly names I didn’t know, in situations I was unfamiliar with, but I enjoyed it all the same.
“… and Eloise, now, she thinks she’ll marry him, but everyone knows his mama’s got him well and truly under her thumb. Even if she gets him to the altar, she won’t get much joy of it.But you can’t tell Eloise anything, never could, not since she was a little girl…”
My mind started to drift. The only places for it to go were unpleasant though. The body in the shed—had it really been there? Had I actually seen it at all?
“… called him everything but a child of God. Well, now, Hiram wasn’t going to take that from a gal young enough to be his daughter…”
Was it actually a body?I wondered vaguely.What I saw… what IthoughtI saw… was practically mummified. Nothing mummifies here. It’s too wet. I was standing in water. If you put a body down there, it wouldn’t look like that, would it?
Maybe Ihadn’tseen it. One of the first things you learn as a naturalist is how flawed and fallible human observation is. I’ve lost track of the number of flowers that I would swear looked one way, only to sit down in front of a specimen with a sketchbook and realize that it was totally different. And which was more likely, after all—that I had seen a dead body behaving in a way that bodies shouldn’t behave, then began to hallucinate five minutes later, or that I wasalreadyhallucinating? That strange pinprick brightness around my vision, the shivering… no, I’d obviously been feverish by the time I went in.
“… so he lost it all gambling and was too afraid to tell his wife, so he made up a story about being attacked in Greensboro and whacked his own head on a post trying to make it look good. But he misjudged it and knocked hisself silly and babbled out everything to the doctor trying to patch him up…”
Halder was a strange man, and clearly he’d been violent at least once in his life, but just because somebody shoots someone else in anger doesn’t mean they’re likely to keep corpses in a shed. There is not what you’d call a straight line between the two behaviors. And why would he bring chickens to a room that held a dead body and nothing else? And why would Phelps be covering for him? No, none of it made any sense.
“… Martha’s youngest is getting married, and good for her. Fine young man, from over Bynum way…”
On the other hand, if I’d been half out of my mind with fever and I saw something like a pile of dermestid beetles—well, I didn’t know what that would look like, but a box of mealworms makes a kind of humped-up, dry brown mess as they eat and crap and shed. Suppose there had been a table with something like that on it? If the beetles had been stripping a body—a chicken, say—I could have seen bones. And in candlelight, already delirious, I saw that and my brain filled inmummified dead body.
(is that really what happened though?)
A knock on the door startled me out of my thoughts and Ma Kersey out of her monologue. Sally poked her head around the door, skipped in, said, “I’m glad you’re feeling better, miss, I picked you these,” and presented me with a handful of bedraggled flowers. I thanked her and Ma Kersey fetched the jam jar off the painting table and filled it with water and the remains of a June bug.
Sally was followed by Jackson, who gripped my hand and said, “Gave us quite a scare, Miss Wilson.”
“And I hear I have you to thank for summoning my nursemaid here,” I said.
“Thought he was gonna bang the house down, I did,” Ma Kersey said, with a flash of gold dentistry. “Usually it’s only the expectant fathers that pound on the door like that.” Jackson grinned, unrepentant.
My last visitor was not nearly so welcome. Phelps appeared in the doorway like a bird of ill omen and I suppressed a guilty start. Did he know I’d been in the shed?
He can’t know. He was the one who left it unlocked. Even if he suspects someone’s been in there, there’s no proof that it was you. In fact, you’ve been collapsed with malaria, so you’re the last person he should suspect.
Besides, why should he care? It was just beetles, right?
(was it though?)
“Mister Phelps,” I said coolly.
He didn’t advance into the room. In fact, he didn’t even look at me, but at the opposite wall. He was holding his hat in both hands, and I got the strange feeling that he was embarrassed.Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is it because I’m in bed? Does visiting a woman’s bedroom offend his sense of Christian morals?
“I have prayed for your recovery,” he said stiffly. “I am pleased that you are improved.”
Oddly enough, I believed him. He probablyhadprayed.
“Ma Kersey here is an excellent nurse,” I said, unwilling to give Phelps’s God all the credit.
“She is indeed,” he said, lifting a hand to touch the back of his head. I saw the edge of a bandage and raised my eyebrows.
“Pfff, that wasn’t nothin’,” Ma Kersey said. “Fell down and raised a goose egg, that’s all. Jackson could have patched you up just as well. Just hard to work on the back of your own head, that’s all.”
“You hit your head, Mr. Phelps?”
He nodded gingerly and touched the bandage again. “Pride is a sin,” he remarked to no one in particular, “and it hurts only my pride to tell you. A wasp flew at my face and I lost my footing. My head hit a log. Providentially, it was rotten.”
