Magnolia

July 17th, 1998

Long fingers dragged across the soot covered curve of the banister. I caressed the old wood and tapped along it like ivory piano keys. Everything was in ruin, the curtains, once heavy scarlet brocade, now fell in blackened whisps like burnt spiderwebs. The heel of my satin pump was broken off, it’s jagged edge making a rhythmic thumping as I moved across the room. Spinning, I watched the taffeta tear and the smell of burnt hair crescendoed in my senses. Arms outstretched I spun like a swan with singed feathers, letting my body move with the music only I seemed to hear crackling from the old record player in the corner. I watched my wide eyes in the window, or what was left of it, my face fragmented in the shards of glass. The chandelier on the ceiling moaned above me, sending her crystalline tears smattering the floor. I remember my mother’s pearls making the same sound when the strand broke off her neck. I recall watching them roll under her dressing table one by one, their opalescent glow seemed drawn to the shadows. Her fingers reached underneath, inching around like a copper colored spider, but she only found the sharp end of a hat pin. I had waited until she had left before reaching under myself. She had darted from the room, sucking her wounded finger and smearing a little blood on the corner of her mouth. I lifted my skirt and bent to my knees, holding out my hand for a moment until I felt one of those pearls roll right into it. I closed my fist around it like a small pink clam and when I finally opened it again, the pearl was red.

I pirouetted--my foot suddenly finding a plank which could not bear my weight and with a crack

I dropped like a star to a sea of black beneath me.

Now

One morning, it happened. Like the moon eclipsing the sun, my little life just shifted. I inherited my great aunt’s estate. Nestled in the groves of long limbed oaks and bald cypress, it loomed like a once great beast, now half starved, leaning heavily on its weary haunches. Wynona had lived in the family estate in Schriever, Louisiana since she was born in 1920, a sloshing, overfull, year that bubbled like a glass of champagne. Her mind was never truly there, or so my grandmother had told my mother and I. Her youngest sister, my grandmother Cordelia, followed close at her heels. Her little shadow, Wynona had called her. Those dark eyes saw all; the trembling fits, the conversations with those only Wynona could see, the sudden sour moods that would roll in thicker than dense fog. But it had been years since I had even contemplated the dilapidated property left in ruin after a mysterious fire ravaged it beyond reasonable repair. My grandmother had been a quiet woman, serious black eyes and warm lined hands. Her mother had been Chitimacha Indian, her blood reluctantly mingling with a wealthy Spanish tobacco tycoon at the tender age of 16 before bearing him two daughters. Renaldo Montoya, his name stamped on thousands of wooden cases of cigars and whispered by every socialite and debutante. Yet it was her likeness the world would not let go of. My mother, my grandmother, my aunt, and myself, were remarkably similar. Our faces cut from the same worn cloth, crafted by the same weary fingers who only knew how to sew that one particular pattern. Renaldo’s face had faded from memory and been burnt out of most of the yellowed photographs as his empire crumpled to nothing but smoke. He left shortly thereafter, packing his pomade and whatever jewelry of my great grandmother’s he could steal before slipping away into the night. His wife managed well in the wake of his betrayal, weaving baskets from reeds and taking odd jobs, her chin jutting and her pride unsullied. Cordelia married as soon as she blossomed into her womanhood and fled like a homing dove with no home to return to. Wynona however, never left. She paced those halls, her fingers tracing the peeling wallpaper and watching the dust glint in the air as the sunlight filtered through the large windows. She cared for my great grandmother until she passed with a final quiet sigh.

I brushed my dark curtain of hair back into a ponytail as I surveyed the land before me. The skeletal gate was cloaked in Spanish moss and strangled in curling strands of ivy. My mother and grandmother had both now passed and the land could only be left to a woman, as was the custom of the Chitimacha people. Property and decent fall only onto the next female in the family, and as I was the last living woman, it was naturally my burden to bear. It had to be my responsibility to finally appraise and sell this ragged old ghost so I could afford a decent apartment and maybe some more adventurous groceries. So I didn’t have to feel my heart clench up with fear when the bank phoned again about my unpaid student loans. My grandmother, while she was alive, had begged Wynona to sell the property for years, calling her often and offering her the spare room in her own modest home for her to live in. But she hadn’t listened, not to a single word. Wynona had been seized by a terrible rage and slammed the phone down with such force that my grandmother said her teeth had rattled on the other side of the line. Within a few months after she’d turned seventy eight, the house had burned and swallowed Wynona up with it.

The gate's old chain was too much for my dull bolt cutters so I squeezed through a gap between the two gnarled hands of the gate, my leg catching on the rusty metal and clipping my skin through my jeans. I padded slowly across the sandy driveway up toward the house, my boots careful to avoid the pools of muddy water peppering the path. “It’s only for a few days. I just have to get the real estate agent out here to appraise the property and then...I’m free of it,” I whispered to myself as my hand wrapped around the metal doorknob embossed with a magnolia blossom. The door opened with a rasp and I took it in. The once elegant entry room left nothing but a bitter aftertaste of acrid smoke. Wet and reclaimed by nature, plant life had begun to climb the walls and conquer the space. I closed my eyes, letting my mind drop like a silken cloth over the room, transforming it again to its former splendor. I could almost feel the plushness of the carpets beneath my boots, I swore I half heard the tinkling of a thin flute of champagne. I opened my eyes again and the room leached of its color, returning to the gray husk it truly was. I picked up my phone and dialed the real estate agent, wandering as I listened to her manicured nails tap the desk as she planned her visit.

“And June, I’ll be over there tomorrow morning, bright and early. I cannot be kept waiting, I have six other appointments. June, are you listening?” Her voice sounded farther and farther away with each room I explored. Something seemed to slip over my skin like a lace shawl, a presence over my skin that I couldn’t shake. I felt like I should stand up straighter. I adjusted my hair in a long mirror in the corner of the room, pinching the skin of my cheeks and tilting my head to the side. Behind me, a shadow stretched thin fingers along the wall, I could just hear the rasp of their ridges against what remained of the wall paper. My reflection in the mirror seemed….different. I reached out to touch the glass and as my finger brushed it, the surface of the glass rippled slightly. “What the…” Before I could finish speaking, the mirror on the wall gave way with no warning. The clouded glass shattered in a million silver shards at my feet as I jumped backward in alarm. The wall where the mirror once hung was peculiar, I leaned closer again to inspect the uneven texture, stepping around the glistening pieces. I pressed against it firmly with my hand, banging along the wall and listening to changes in sound. I grabbed the bolt cutters from the satchel at my waist and plunged them into the wall over and over again. Under the weight of my assault, the wall began to give, slowly revealing a small compartment hidden beneath. I cleared away the rotten wood until my hand met something else. I drew my hand out and held within was a small black notebook, leather bound and in remarkable condition considering the fire. Eyes wide, I opened it and thumbed through pages and pages of journal entries from my great aunt Wynona.

Every page was a spiral of delusion and fear. Something had plagued her during her life in this house. Something that drained her and filled her with near constant paranoia. I read rapidly, scanning the text, my heart thundering in my chest. All at once something behind me let out a slow exhale, almost sounding relieved. I whipped around and for a moment, I saw her. Wynona, maybe twenty years old, swathed in grey lace. Her eyes wide and her mouth a thin, sad line. She held my gaze and then turned, walking slowly down the hallway, her fingers trailing along the wallpaper. I stood motionless in the room, the little black book in my right hand. I glanced down and read a page with only one single entry, all at once, everything making sense.

January 4th, 1934

Mother killed him. He beat her every day for years but the day he raised a hand to me, her face turned a color I’d never seen. She shot him with his own pistol, the little colt revolver that he used to sit by the fire and spin. The rattle of the cylinder used to sound like a snake coiled in the grass to me, but the bullet was louder than the thunderstorms that shake our window panes each summer. Mother had Jameson bury him, down in the stables under the floor of one of the horse stalls. “That’s where he belongs,” Mother said as she smoked her third or fourth cigarette. We told little Delia he’d run off with whoever his latest woman was, she wept a little that night, I could hear it through the wall when I went to bed. She always had a fondness for him, one I never understood, though he did dote on her more than he ever did me. Mother told me that I had to guard this secret, I could never tell anyone or leave this house. As I write this, I finger the bloodied pearl I found under her dressing table. I promised I never would tell. “They mustn't find him, or I’ll be blamed. They’ll hang me as quick as they can,” Mother had said. I won’t let that happen to her. I’ll guard this house myself for as long as it takes. I--Oh no, I hear him again. I always hear him at night. The sound of that revolver spinning, the rustle of his snuff box as he readies his pipe….Mother says she doesn’t hear him. But I know she’s lying. I see her hands shake and her mouth go pale at the sound of the thumping footsteps when only she and I are home. Father’s family still sends us money from time to time, they pity us I suppose. They think their son abandoned us, but truly he never left. And Mother and I are trapped too, sealed into this great house like a mausoleum.

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