The Healing by Jonathan Odell Read Free Book Online Page A

where you ain’t going to get hurt,” Sylvie said, dipping two fingers into the bowl. “You too young to understand, I guess. Like I told your momma when she was about your age, half the things you see in any white man’s house ain’t real. But in this particular house, real done took a holiday.”
    Before applying the dab of tallow, Sylvie leaned over and kissedGranada on the top of her head. “My pretty baby don’t even know her own momma. Worse, you don’t care. Don’t think I can never forgive the mistress for doing that to you. One day you going to see how all your life, you been tangled up in somebody else’s grief.”
    Sylvie sighed. “I reckon it takes age to understand the kind of devilry that even the littlest death can give birth to.”

CHAPTER 5

    G ranada knew that the first of the guests were in sight when she heard the distant sound of carriage wheels slicing into the carefully graded drive of crushed shells.
    While the master was giving last-minute instructions to the servants, Granada ran out onto the gallery off the upstairs parlor to watch the guests arrive. The driver of the fancy brougham coach was elegant and fine-boned, outfitted in a black greatcoat and opera hat. He was expertly managing two high-stepping bays up the drive of gleaming white shells that had been hauled all the way from New Orleans and were replenished each year after the winter floods washed them away.
    Granada tried to imagine the mansion as the passengers were seeing it—majestically columned and galleried on three sides, upstairs and down, and surmounted with a copper-domed observatory from which they would soon be invited to survey the master’s swamp kingdom.
    When Granada saw Chester, his buttons gleaming, march onto the drive to meet the carriage, she raced back inside the parlor and proudly claimed her place by the chair where the mistress sat. For it was here, by the mistress’s side, more than any other place in all the master’s glimmering universe, that Granada desired to be.
    The mistress, on the other hand, didn’t seem to be aware of whereshe was at the moment. The woman had doubled up on her laudanum in preparation for her guests, nearly sixty drops according to Granada’s count. It took both Granada and Lizzie to lead the mistress down the hall to her chair in the parlor, each gripping an elbow.
    Except for the embarrassed looks from the master, nobody ever seemed to mind. That was because Master Ben carefully managed his visitors’ impressions so that little attention ever fell upon his unpredictable wife. The guests, even longtime callers, were so awed by the workings of the place that the mistress’s condition could be easily overlooked.
    Even now Granada could hear them chattering, throwing out words like “stunning” and “breathtaking” as they took in the floors laid with marble, the crystal chandeliers, the floating double staircase with the polished mahogany banisters.
    Granada stiffened and mentally rehearsed her first curtsy. Above the gleam and glitter of the mansion, the thing she wanted them all to remember from the day was
her
.
    In strode Pomp, the butler, grandly dressed in one of his master’s splendid old claw-hammer coats with its narrow tails down past his knees. To complement the polished banisters, the master made sure that Pomp’s yellow skin glistened and gleamed by insisting he rub his face amply with tallow. As Pomp solemnly led the party into the room, Granada immediately recognized the two planters and their elegantly dressed wives. They had come all the way from the town of Delphi up in the bluffs.
    • • •
    Benjamin Satterfield, looking tall and lean and very much in charge, heartily greeted his visitors as they crossed the threshold. His fair skin seemed to pink up with enthusiasm.
    The mistress remained seated in her massive chair with brocade the color of dried blood. Daniel Webster crouched a few inches to the left of her bonneted head, perched on the back