"Yes, I swear I will. You are my son, born from my love for your father . . ."
"You loved my real daddy?" he asked unbelievably, "you really did love him, even if you seduced and killed him7"
I groaned, then ran to seize hold of Bart. "Come on, let's get out of here while we have the chance."
"Bart, you go with Jory," called my
grandmother, "and take care of my daughter."
There was the side door Bart used to sneak inside the house, and I dragged him toward that, looking back to see Mom was being pulled along by her mother. Mom seemed on the verge of fainting, so my grandmother almost had to carry her.
As I ran from the house, forcing Bart to join Dad under the tree where I'd left him, I saw Mom had sagged in her mother's arms. When she did, both women tumbled over backward, and for a moment the smoke obscured them.
"Oh, my God, is Cathy still in that house?" asked Dad, still wiping at the blood which wouldn't stop flowing from the deep gash on the side of his head.
"Momma's gonna die, I know it!" cried Bart, racing toward the house and forcing me to run after him. I hurled myself forward and brought him down with a tackle. He fought me like a madman. "Momma, gotta save Momma! Jory, let me, please let me!"
"You don't have to. Her mother is going to save her," I said, looking over my shoulder as I held him down and prevented him from entering that house of fire again.
Suddenly Emma and Madame Marisha were in the yard, holding to me, to Bart, hurrying us both toward Dad, who had managed to stand. Blindly, with his hands groping before him he was headed toward the house, crying out, "Cathy, where are you? Come out of that house! Cathy, I'm coming!"
That's when Momma was shoved violently through one of the French doors that opened onto the patio.
I ran forward to lift her up and carry her to Dad. "Neither one of you has to die," I said with a sob in my throat. "Your mother has saved at least one of her children."
But cries and screams were in the air. My grandmother's black clothes were on fire! I saw her as one sees a nightmare, trying to beat out the flames.
"Fall down and roll on the ground!" roared Dad, releasing my mom so quickly she fell. He ran toward his mother, seized her up and rolled her on the ground. She was gasping and choking as he slapped out the fire. One long wild look of terror she gave him before some kind of peace came over her face--and stayed there. Why did that expression just stay there? Dad cried out, then leaned to put his ear to her chest. "Momma," he sobbed, "please don't be dead before I've had the chance to say what I must . . . Momma, don't be dead . . ."
But she was dead. Even I could tell that from the glazed way her eyes kept staring up at a starry winter night sky.
"Her heart," said Dad with a dazed look. "Just like her father had . . . it seemed her heart was about to jump from her chest as I rolled her about. And now she's dead. But she died saving her daughter."
Jory
. All the shadows that clouded my youthful days, all the questions and the doubts I'd been afraid to speak about, all have been cleared away now, like cobwebs from the corners.
I thought when we came back from the funeral of our grandmother that life would go on as usual and nothing much would be changed.
Some things have changed. Some weight lifted from Bart's shoulders and he became again the quiet, meek, little boy who couldn't really like himself very much. His psychiatrist said he would grow out of that gradually, with enough love given him, and enough friends his own age to play with.
Even as I write this I can look through the open window and see Bail playing with the Shetland pony our parents gave him for Christmas. At last he had his "heart's desire."
I watch him often, the way he looks at the pony, the way he stares at the St. Bernard puppy my daddy gave him too. Then he turns his head and stares over at the ruins of the mansion. He never speaks of her, the grandmother of our lost summer. We never speak the name of John Amos Jackson, nor mention Apple or Clover. We can't risk the health and happiness of one unstable little boy trying to find his way in a world that isn't always like a fairy tale.
We passed a true Arab woman on the street the other day. Bart turned around to stare after her, wistful longing in his dark-dark eyes. I know now that whatever else she was, Bart loved her--so she couldn't have been as awful as I think when I read Mom's book. She made Bart love her, even as John Amos took a vulnerable child and warped him
And so John Amos got what he deserved, and, like my grandmother, he too lies dead in his grave, way back in Virginia, the home of his ancestors who settled in what history books call "The Lost Colony." All his plotting and scheming was for nothing. If, wherever he is, he can think, I wonder what he thinks and feels knowing what was in the will my
grandmother left. Did he turn over in his grave when the lawyer told us that our grandmother had left the entire Foxworth estate to Jory Janus Marquet, Bartholomew Scott Winslow Sheffield, and
surprisingly enough, Cynthia Jane Nickols too would get her share. And none of us were legally her blood kin--legally. All that money held in trust for us, until we reach the age of twenty-five. All held in trust, my father and mother the administrators.
We could live in splendor if we chose, or if my parents chose, but we live on in the same redwood house with the marble statues out back, and every year the garden grows more lush.
Bart keeps himself exceptionally clean now. He will not lie down to sleep at night until his room is in complete order, everything precisely placed. My parents look at each other when he insists on doing this, and I see fear in their eyes, making me wonder if Malcolm Neal Foxworth was exceptionally clean and neat.
Bart laid down the law to my mother and father one morning soon after Christmas had come and gone, and he had his pony: "If you are to keep Cindy then you can no longer live together as man and wife and contaminate my life with your sinning. You have to sleep in my room, Daddy, and Momma has to sleep alone for the rest of her life."