in 1923, the Sheehys came along, bought the whole thing, and shut it tight as a bank vault. Hettienne and David kept the diary secret, meeting on the sly at the Headley springhouse. In its foggy cool, under its alpine timbers, in its castle-like keep of limestone blocks that sweated shadows, they read the journal of Frank Headley Jr.’s last days at Emerald Park to each other. Cool kept potatoes, eggs in buckets of chilly lime water, onions, beets, carrots, and cantaloupes stacked like ancient cannonballs at a battery surrounded them.
The diary was tragic, even maudlin. Headley, who had farmed so well and built so much—with Percherons, Jersey cows, a cattery of Persians, a dynasty of running collie dogs—was forced to leave, and his heart was breaking because he was enough of a scientist to connect the seizing of his lungs with all the flying hair, pollen, feathers, dust, and ruckus of Emerald Park. He recorded his sadness in the plain, near perfect block type of a draftsman. In the end, nurses packed him away. He left everything behind for the relief of a sterile desert. Arizona. To the baron and princess of this green, hilly kingdom, it was an unimaginable, unbearable fate. To live, he must give up all he had ever lived for.
Shaking from more than the springhouse chill, Hettienne read to David: “The land I have husbanded assaults me. The air, it kills me from the inside out, the outside in. My own country sickens me. It is as if I made manna of my own lands, with my own hands, manna in plenty. Yet when I broke it and gave it to the people of the Ozarks, it returned not a blessing, but a white and teeming curse.”
Speaking those words out loud seemed to send a rumbling shudder through the old stone springhouse. Astonished, they waited frozen in its shadowy clasp until finally Hettienne raised her pinkie. In absolute silence, they swore an oath too weighty for spoken words. Together they hid the crumbling leather binder and its ocher diary behind a loose stone with an odd Northern Irish name, morkan, chiseled into its facing, still legible but vanishing, chipped, and spotted green and yellow with age.
Now, in the sparkling sunlight off the lake, Hettienne unwound her hair from the bun, her long white arms making two big L shapes. Watching his gaze, which did not seem much enraptured, she experimented and arched her back like the girls painted on bombers. But David’s look remained as cool as a clinician’s.
“All right. At lunch, I sat down. And there was the empty plate, and the salad fork with a cloud, a spot on it. And then I was elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere? In your head elsewhere? Like where? Chicago?” David had long ago given up needling her as the only Sheehy who used the city term “lunch.”
Hettienne shook her head. “Outside the house. But it was night. And there were people. All in black. Wandering around.”
“People? Who? Sheehys? Ormonds? Hoboes? Thieves?”
“Savages. Barbarians. Some other people. Not us. Not family. One of them stuffed a closet with hay and set it on fire. Our house, Simon’s house, Sheehy Mansion. On fire.”
He was quiet for a bit. “I don’t get it. People from South Town? People from before Springfield? Like Osage Indians?”
She slumped her shoulders and squinted. “Long-haired. Bearded. Almost like . . . like a bunch of old-timey German soldiers went to sleep in their spiky leather clothes and helmets and woke up years and years later, dirty, with long beards. And the women, all their skin painted like sailors from Cuba.”
“Stuffing hay in all the closets?”
“No, that came later. And just one heathen. In one closet. But eventually everything was on fire, in ruins.”
Over the whole surface of the lake, diamonds of sunlight burned on the water, sending radiant warmth over them.
“And then inside the house. Lettering everywhere. On every wall and door. Not like warnings, but mad lettering. Nonsense, like idiots or cripples would write.” evil awaits, she recalled, written in bold red paint at the base of the Headleys’ stone silo.
Some of this she knew had come to her during whatever had happened before she awoke in the kitchen in her chemise. Before her fit, all she remembered was the pain in her arms and legs. The moon, full and milky, filled her bedroom window. Then outside, the shadow of a huge bird, no, four of them in the trees. Four greasy black birds hunkered, sulking, ragged like sopping hoboes. When they flew, their arched wings became curved sickles, the wing and the tail all one crescent swoop without distinctions, suspended in the air, making a rent silk of the moonlight. Then she was elsewhere. Then just as suddenly, James petted her shoulder, and she sat before a roaring stove in her nightclothes.
David smiled, but the effort showed at the corners of his eyes. She thought for a moment, Stop, stop, stop. This all should cease. He was an Ormond, from the Ozarks, where nothing abnormal happened, everything proceeded in 4/4 time. This was not Chicago. There were no tramps wandering and mumbling, no tattered beggars outside Union Station, no veterans with wide, shattered eyes queued at the Salvation Army Hostel, no unionists agitating on Wacker, no sad ghosts gandering out the Cyclops eye of the Blackstone. In the Ozarks, there weren’t even any Coloreds.
“You think I’m crazy?”
He raised his chin. “You can’t be. You’re a Sheehy.” He bobbed his eyebrows.
“That’s not very funny at all.”
He did something he had not done since she was eight or nine and placed his hand over hers and drummed upon the lunate bone of her wrist the Morse code H, E, S, Hettienne Ellery Sheehy, her initials. She began to cry but without sobbing, without breathy weeping. He squeezed her hand and would not let go.
“And then . . . then there were these sad kids with opal skin,” she started again, recovering. “All moping about in black clothes and zany black hair, like creepy old Austrians from some haunted castle. And their music . . .” She laughed and then pulled her hand from his to grind the tears into her cheeks with her palms. “Oh! What the Devil is this all about, David? I don’t understand any of it. And why me?”
He did not turn away, but he did look her over anew from head to toe with a tenderness that one brings to a wounded pet. “What was the music like?”
She tried to smile at him. “Awful. Like it was written and performed by people with the stomach flu. Like listening to a huge grandfather clock flying apart while some maniac wallops it with a cello. And fires. God! They lit fires all the time. Everything was trampled. Everything ruined. Everything broken. Everything burned.”
He looked down at the water. “All this came to you at the dinner table? You were quiet for just a minute or two.”
She didn’t want to lie to him. “I don’t know what more to say, David. I feel fantastic most of the time. But how are we supposed to know how we ought to feel when I don’t get to feel like anybody else but me ever?”
“Deep.” He smirked at her. “Jezz Ooo Wet School.”
“Hick,” she spit. She leapt on him with both fists clenched. But after two solid licks to the side of his hard head, she stopped herself while laughing, then breathed deeply twice. His smile also faded. He was flat on his back. She straddled his waist, arm poised for the next blow. But he raised an open palm to her. With a terrific thrill, she thought that he was going to reach for her breasts, which ached, though they were no bigger than walnuts. She shook as she would at a bluff over the lake, ready to rush free, teeth bared for the plunge into frigid water. How wonderful—this was not acting a part.
“We may be,” he said, “may be too old, Hettienne, to wrassle like we did when we were kiddos.” He did not touch her.
She planted both of her palms alongside his head on the grit of the jetty and let her long hair trail down until it covered his stilled face in a yellow canopy. His eyes changed like coals catching wind in a slumbering fire. Though she did not know what it meant, the look firing those common, toffee-brown Ormond eyes and focused upon her face made a single chord of G ring from the top of her scalp down her spine to her tailbone. “I never,” she had to gather herself, the sky whirling, “I never, ever wanted to hear you say we were too old for anything.”
“Get