Four and Twenty Blackbirds

"So, who was he?"



"Arthur?"



"Yes, Arthur. Who was my father?"



Her cheek twitched, poorly smothering a smile. "You won't like the answer."



I rolled my eyes. "You know, people keep telling me that—no matter what questions I ask. I'd rather know something unpleasant for certain than wonder after the truth for the rest of my life. Please, Tatie."



She rose and set her glass on the bar, empty except for the half-melted ice cubes stacked on the bottom. Then she moved to a bookcase laden with old volumes and accented with family photographs. She pulled one of the pictures down, and handed it towards me. I obliged her offer by standing and crossing the room to meet her, taking the photo by the frame and staring at the man and woman within.



"That's Arthur. And the woman beside him is—"



"His wife," I guessed.



"Yes. You knew already?"



"That much Lulu told me."



"And what else?"



"Nothing," I confessed. "All she said was that he was married."



"Did Louise tell you that Rachel was a lunatic?" She didn't wait for me to respond, so I didn't have to fib. "Oh yes, that woman was a basket case. One of those holy rollers who can't keep her nose out of anybody's business. I never liked her—not from the moment I met her. Always had to know way too much about every little thing. Asked a lot of questions—rude ones. Then when Art went and married her, well, that did not make me happy. Not at all. Rachel cared way too much about things that weren't her concern. Small wonder he turned out the way he did."



Her apparent swing in topic confused me. "Arthur, you mean?"



"Huh? No. I mean Malachi."



She said it casually, though she watched me closely from under shuttered lids. She wanted to see my reaction as the realization blossomed that I was wistfully holding a snapshot of Malachi's parents. I tried not to swallow too hard, and I made my face a mask, refusing to give the evil old crow her satisfaction as I stared down at the man who must have fathered me and my homicidal nemesis both.



He was average enough in appearance, light brown hair and eyes more green than my hazel ones. I searched for any likeness we might have shared and found only a similarity in our slouched posture. Just about anyone could see that I favored my mother's family; Lu had passively passed me off as her child for years. But Malachi favored our father strongly. I now knew where he'd gotten his sharp cheekbones and rectangular chin, as well as his bird-thin bones—a gene that had passed me by entirely. I glanced at Eliza and realized she had the high cheeks too, though age had hung her skin from them like curtains from a rod.



"How do you feel about that?" she asked, prodding for the carnage she felt she deserved.



"I'm not sure," I said. I shook my head, pretending to toss my hair over my shoulder and out of the way. Mostly I wanted to do something that didn't involve looking over at the smug old battle-ax again. "It doesn't matter, really. Where could I find him?"



"Up the hill under a stone. He killed himself in 1979. She's still alive, I think, his crazy wife, but she's long gone. I haven't seen her in twenty years. She left Malachi here one day for his summer vacation and she never came back for him. Last I heard she joined some crazy cult church out west, but I couldn't tell you if that was right or not. It wouldn't surprise me, anyway."



I tapped my knuckle against the picture frame, working up the fortitude to face Eliza without wanting to punch her. "So he's dead."



"Thoroughly."



"And Malachi is my half brother."



"Yep."



"As well as, somehow, my cousin. I mean, since you're my aunt, with a couple of 'greats' tacked on. And Avery was my grandfather. And he was your half brother. That definitely makes him a cousin too. This is . . . damn. This is messed up." For one nasty second I remembered and cringed from a moment of grade school shame.



"Well, it's complicated, yes—but when you say it that way it sounds strange."



"It is strange," I insisted, and I felt dumb for feeling like I needed to do so.



"Not so much." She retrieved the photo from my hand and put it back on the bookcase. "Modern families are complicated things. Siblings, half siblings, stepparents, stepcousins, what have you. You can't pick who you're born to, that's for sure. I'm fortunate that way; I'm a legitimate Dufresne, the name is mine by right. I didn't have to steal it from anyone."



I was suddenly defensive. "No one in my family calls herself a Dufresne anymore—or hell, no one ever did, that I know of."



She looked like she wanted to argue with me, but after thinking about it for a second, she didn't. "And thank the Lord for it," she said, still gazing at the picture. "What name did you end up taking? I can't recall."



"Moore. My mother's."



"You mean your grandmother's married name."



"Whichever." It then occurred to me that it wasn't my immediate family she had in mind. Since she'd done her best to provoke me, I decided to return the favor, or at least to try. "Your half brother was the son of a slave, and he took the Dufresne name, didn't he? Otherwise you wouldn't be worried about anyone in my line having it."



She wheeled around, face brimming with hatred, but her words were mostly level. "My family never kept any slaves, girl. If you knew more about your own birthplace you'd know that. Nobody around there kept slaves. An' Avery, he had no right—the name wasn't his. My father tried to be kind, and you see what it got him? You see what it got me?A line of illiterate, money-grubbing, mixed-breed cousins who feel entitled to everything that's mine. And here you come, into my own house. Into my own house through the front door, goddammit. I thought you might be different. I thought I saw in you . . ." She stopped, teetering at the edge of saying more but resisting, regaining her balance.



"What?" I pushed. "What did you think you saw?"



"Someone else."



I was about to lose her if I wasn't careful. "Tatie . . ."



"Don't you call me that. Don't you call me that, ever."



Perhaps a hasty subject change would distract her enough to calm her down. I needed to nudge her attention in some other direction; I needed to remind her of someone else she hated so she could forget how much she despised me. Given Eliza's nature, I figured just about anyone could serve that purpose.



"Why did you pay to send Leslie to Pine Breeze?" I asked, throwing my mother in front of her, giving her someone else to be angry at. "If you wanted her out of your hair there were cheaper places she could have gone to have a baby in secret."



It worked, at least a little. She shrugged one bony shoulder and scanned the room for something. "That's where she wanted to go." Her eyes settled on what was left of her drink.



"What damn did you give?"



She ignored me for a second, returning to the bar and to her glass. Eliza reached under the counter and pulled out the bottle of gin. She dumped it straight over the remaining ice and took a hearty gulp. "I didn't give any damn, and that's the truth. I went along with it because of Arthur—and because I couldn't stand the sight of his wife, who hated your mother so much. It was worth paying to keep Leslie out of Rachel's reach just to keep her angry."



"You're not really so vindictive."



"Oh, the hell I'm not." Tatie lifted the glass to her lips again, killing nearly half the drink. Her crinkled eyes slipped sideways, peeking at the door. "I wonder when he'll get here," she murmured.



"Who?" I asked, then I recognized what a silly question that was, so I answered it myself. "Malachi?"



"Well, yes, Malachi. The police are right. He's got nowhere else to go. He'll come here in his own time. And when he does, I'll be sure and tell him he just missed you."



"You know they're waiting for him right outside? They're parked out in the trees. They'll catch him if he comes here."



Eliza's confidence was disconcerting. It made me wary, and it made me think she knew something the rest of the world didn't. "I doubt it," she said. "I know they're there. They can sit and wait till Jesus comes again and they won't get my boy. Of course, even if they do, they won't keep him long."



"Yes, he rather has a gift for escape, it seems."



"A gift. That's a good way to put it." She was pensive now, or the alcohol was finally seeping its narcotic way into her bloodstream. "It was a gift, though I can't make him understand it. I believe Indians think madness is a gift, too. His mother . . . his mother, she . . ." Eliza took the drink and wandered back to her chair.



"Did she write letters to Pine Breeze? I found one I think she might have sent."



"Probably. I don't rightly know. God knows she wouldn't have told me about it, but she probably did. It sounds like something she'd do."



"The letter kept calling Leslie's baby 'he.' She thought I was going to be a boy?"



"I guess." She shut her eyes for a few seconds, then opened them again. I didn't trust her fatigue, but then she was over a hundred years old and apparently drank like a camel.



I didn't have to ask it. I already knew. "She thought I was Avery. She's the one who convinced Malachi of it."



Eliza was instantly awake again. It was that name, Avery. It stirred her every time I said it. "She was crazy. Crazy to think that."



"Why did she think that?"



"I don't know," she said, but I felt like she was being stubbornly untruthful. "I don't know how she got it in her head. I told you, she liked to dig in things that weren't her business. Arthur told her his family history, and she took it and went crazy with it. I suppose Louise told you the story, or you would've asked by now."