Chapter 16

C HAPTER 16

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

—Mark Twain

Marigold dressed as carefully as if she were attending a dinner party at Isabella's—after all, one might alter one's standards but never let them down. She chose her dark mulberry velvet dinner gown—with a daytime bodice faced with black ribbon, in deference to her mourning—which was more suited to the Back Bay than Great Misery, but its wonderfully wide gigot sleeves added to her breadth and gave her confidence.

And it gave her the opportunity to see if anyone remarked upon the color—so close to what Minnie had been wearing in the water.

But the gown was such a change from the practical tweed sportswear she had been wearing that Wilbert made an involuntary sound of surprise and admiration when she appeared at the kitchen door. "Golly."

His brother was less subtle, as well as less admiring. "Well, lah-ti-dah," he sneered. "Think you're at Delmonico's?"

While Marigold was surprised to hear the name of a famous, fashionable New York eatery from a cousin who had lived all his life on a rock nearly two miles into the Atlantic, she tucked that piece of information away until she might make better use of it and greeted him politely. "Good evening, Seviah. Perhaps you'd like to make use of the warm water and soap in the basin next to the stove to wash the dirt from your hands before we sit down." She rewarded Wilbert with a smile. "I see you've already done so."

"Used the soap and towel out at the pump," he reported. "Reckoned it was you as put it out there."

"Trying to be helpful," was all the credit she allowed herself as she waited politely for her cousin Sophronia to sit. But Marigold soon found she needn't have stood on ceremony, as dinner appeared to be an informal, uncoordinated affair, with many of the family not even sitting to the table. But the reason for them keeping to themselves was apparent the moment Ellery Hatchet elbowed his way to the table.

"You're still here, then," was his greeting. "Here to take the food from the mouths of hardworking men with your sinful ways."

Marigold would not let his incivility lead her astray. She had standards. "I am indeed here, as you see. Good evening, Cousin Ellery."

"Nothing good in it," he growled before he sat himself at the head of the pine plank table and glowered like a man determined to be displeased with her and unpleasant to all who surrounded him. "You're no kin of mine."

But his unpleasantness seemed to create some fellow feeling in his eldest son, who said, "Why don't you sit here, Cousin Marigold, near me," and held out a chair for her at the other end of the table.

Marigold rewarded him with a grateful smile as Cleon began dishing out the chowder from a cast-iron pot on the stove.

"Why, that's my wedding china," Sophronia exclaimed as she reached for a porcelain bowl that Marigold recognized from the kitchen hutch. "That's not for common use."

"'Tis for Miss Girl." Cleon pulled the dish away from Sophronia's grasp.

But Sophronia met the odd fellow's stubbornness with something that looked, from Marigold's vantage point, to be rather extraordinary determination of her own—Sophronia was so vexed that she swiped at the bowl, knocking it from Cleon's hands, as if she would rather let the precious porcelain dish smash upon the floor, splattering chowder and shattering china, than let Marigold use it.

But whatever spite Marigold might have imagined vanished from Sophronia's face in an instant. "How fearful clumsy of me. Let me get her another. Here, take mine." Sophronia pushed a plainer, earthenware bowl of beans and bacon into Marigold's hands. "Can't have you not fed."

Whatever Marigold might have thought to say was drowned out by Ellery Hatchet's voice. "The wages of sinful covetousness is the same as for all sin," he declared, before clearing his throat in an obvious, over-loud way. "Pay heed, you damn sinners."

Heads flinched downward and away as Hatchet glared at them before he began his prayer. "May any man, or woman, ungrateful for this meal, feel the everlasting fires of hell burning away his soul for all eternity and evermore," he growled. "May the food turn to ashes in your sinful mouths and the fires of damnation burn the tongues from your skulls." He waited a long moment, as if waiting for some further divine inspiration—or retribution—before he seemed satisfied enough to mutter, "Amen."

The men fell to the meal, hunkering over their bowls, guarding them like prisoners fearing starvation, although Seviah stood to one side, against the wall, to eat. Sophronia, Marigold noticed, quickly and silently mopped up the broken dish and retreated into the inglenook around the stove, as did Daisy, leaving Marigold the only woman at the table. Great-Aunt Alva, she recalled, preferred to take her dinners in her room.

That's how it is at Hatchet Farm. Each to fend for themselves.

The food itself was passable—a bite proved it to be beans hot enough to fill and bland enough not to alarm—but the thought of having her taste buds so denigrated for the foreseeable future had Marigold determined to follow Bessie Dove's instructions to eat nothing from this kitchen in the future.

But it seemed others were taking note of the improvements she had already accomplished. "What's gone on in here?" Ellery looked around with suspicion.

"Cleaning," Wilbert said, before he swiftly changed the topic. "I'm pleased that the gilt is well in season. I expect her to farrow come summer."

"You'll sell her off before then," Ellery bade him. "Swine is the spawn of the devil."

"No sense in selling afore there's a good litter of piglets," Wilbert countered reasonably.

"I'll have no swine on Great Misery."

"And why not? You'll have bacon in yer chowder and fatback in your beans. Nothing but false pride not to keep pigs when we can—"

"False pride?" The old man scraped his chair back. "You sniveling sinner. Your pride is a monstrous, hell-bound thing." He pounded his fist on the table. "Hell-bound, I say. You should be caught in the devil's maw and crushed into a bloodless pulp."

"The hell if I will." Wilbert was red in the face.

"Blasphemous!" the elder Hatchet roared. "I should have drowned you in the ocean the day you were born, you miserable—"

Marigold had heard enough. She was on her feet before she knew what she was doing but the assembly gaped at her as if she were the one threatening to murder defenseless babies. Or drown people.

"If you'll excuse me, I'm sure I'm not needed, as I have no idea what on earth a gilt is, and I shall be happy not to know. Thank you, Cousin Sophronia and Cleon, for a lovely dinner. Cousin Wilbert." She smiled, as unconcerned as Joan of Arc at her stake, ignoring the hunger gripping her stomach as she handed Cleon her bowl. "Good evening to you all."

She went only as far as the room at the far end of the hallway, where the fork, knife, and empty plate all indicated Great- Aunt Alva had been given a supper of neither chowder stewed into glue nor bland beans. Marigold's taste buds all but salivated in envy.

"Aunt Alva?" Marigold rapped at the door in another bid to introduce herself.

But the old lady either didn't hear or didn't care—the door remained closed.

Back down the hall, dinner was already coming to a swift close—chairs were scraped back and empty bowls clattered. Marigold returned with Great-Aunt Alva's empty tray to assist Cleon in clearing the remaining dishes from the table.

"No, you leave them be." Sophronia stayed Marigold's hand as she took the tray. "You're not to lift a hand toiling for Hatchets."

"If you insist," Marigold agreed, happy to concede after a long day of just such toil.

"Tho' the cupboard looks right nice," Sophronia said with a quiet nod at the hutch. "Can't remember when it's looked so good."

"I am happy to be of use, though I am very sorry that your dish was broken."

"No matter." Sophronia shook her head, already retreating down a dark corridor from any further conversation.

Marigold was left to join Wilbert in the quiet chimney nook, where he had subsided with a pipe. "I reckon you'll be taking your supper on a tray in your room like Granny from now on," he ventured.

"Perhaps I will." The prospect seemed infinitely preferable to sharing a table with Ellery Hatchet.

Wilbert shrugged in that characteristically careless Hatchet way that seemed to be a ward against hurt. "Suit yerself. Though it sure is pretty to see you togged up so nice in your dress. Don't get to see much prettiness at Hatchet Farm."

"Well, we'll have to see what can be done about that. But I thank you for the compliment. You are a lamb." And speaking of making an effort—"I wasn't sure whom to ask, but I wondered if I might avail myself of some of your chicken manure for making a vegetable garden?"

"Vegetables? What you want with them?"

Marigold decided to bypass the clearly unpopular idea of vegetables in favor of the promise of savoriness. "I plan on growing some herbs—that was those plants in the pots I brought back from town." No need to reveal from whom the plants had come until she better understood the strange, antagonistic, but somehow close relationship between the Doves and the Hatchets. "I can guarantee the herbs will make everything, from bread to stews, taste better."

"Don't know as I'd know the difference."

Marigold was determined to be positive. "Then it won't hurt to try."

"You are a sunshiny thing, ain't you?"

She felt herself smile. "I'm rather used to being called persistent. And hardheaded."

"With the hard heads around here, I reckon that's a good thing."

"Yes," she agreed. "Things do seem to be hard in more ways than one."

Wilbert shrugged. "Just the way it's always been. Never known no different. But I hope you won't let the old man scare you away if you can stomach it."

"The food or the hellfire?"

She was happy to have made him laugh. "Both." His smile went a little wistful.

"Wilbert." She made sure to lower her voice. "Now that you have some money, what's to stop you going off and finding a place at a better farm? Wouldn't you be happier not having to argue over gilts and piglets?"

The idea seemed to rattle him. "Oh, no. I could never. Granny won't stand for family to leave the island. She means to keep us all here to comfort her, same as Pa."

Great-Aunt Alva certainly cast a long shadow—though not in person. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting your grandmother yet."

"Don't know as you will." Wilbert's expression was rueful. "Granny don't ever leave her room. Sees only Pa or Cleon, when it pleases her, or when she needs aught. And the rest of us but once or twice a year, when she wants an account of us blood kin. But I reckon she keeps tabs on us all the same, she does."

"Really?" It seemed a bit farfetched that the malevolent presence that loomed so large over the Hatchets was an octogenarian recluse. "I doubt she cares I'm even here."

"Oh, she cares," Wilbert assured her. "Likes to keep her hand in everything that goes on on the island. She sees the books—the stock book, though it's just the two mules and the two swine and the hens, and the egg book and the larder list—every day. Cleon takes them in to her every morning with her breakfast. Wants to know where every penny has gone, she does."

"Except the eggs and pennies you withheld to buy the hogs?"

Wilbert evinced a sheepish blush. "You're danged smart to remember that, Cousin."

"I am also smart enough to know when something is said to me in confidence, so I will tell you in plain language, I will keep your secret, Wilbert. I give you my word. You may rely upon me not to tell a soul—about the egg money or about the money from the scrap metal."

"Ain't never scared up more'n a dollar at a time," he admitted. "Don't know what to do with it all."

"You may rest assured that I will help you, Cousin, any way that I can. You have only to ask."

"Can't ask you to clear out the place, though, can I?" he joked halfheartedly.

"And why not?" Marigold joked back. "I am rather persistent, and once I set my mind to a thing, I always get my way. See if I don't."

But as determined and sunshiny as she was, Marigold couldn't get one particular dark cloud, or one particular person, from her mind—Minnie Mallory.

She tracked her cousin Seviah down to the dark end of the breezeway where he slouched against the open windowsill, quietly smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. "Come to cozy me up the way you have with Daisy and Wilbert?"

"Not in the least." She returned his sarcasm measure for measure. "I've come to antagonize you, as that seems like a relaxing after-dinner exercise. Might I ask how well you were acquainted with Minnie Mallory?"

His answer was a short laugh as he blew out a stream of smoke. "What's it to you? Jealous?"

"I only ask"—Marigold tempered her vulgar curiosity—"because hers was the name your mother mentioned yesterday morning while you were up in the hayloft with"—she checked to make sure no one else was listening but lowered her voice anyway—"somebody I doubt very much was Minnie."

His expression grew guarded. "Well, ain't you the nosy parker."

"Curious," she corrected, "especially about how well you knew Minnie."

His frown devolved into a smirk. "Bragging about me in town, was she?"

"Did she have something to brag about?"

He tossed up his shoulder in that Hatchet Shrug—all-too-casual, suspect dismissal. Clearly hiding something. "I may have walked out with her a time or two."

"Walked out?" Marigold decided that with Seviah, the direct approach worked best. "Is that your rural euphemism for having sexual relations?"

"Sexual relations." He pursed up his mouth to mimic her. "Aren't you the hot tottie."

While he was clearly no Galahad. "I make no moral judgment about your involvement with Minnie, but a sexually promiscuous young man is a danger to more than himself. Did you use any precautions?"

"Look, I don't know who you think you are to ask, Miss City Manners"—he lowered his voice to a perturbed growl—"but what a man does with his inamoratas is no damn business of yours."

Well, someone picked up new vocabulary quickly. "It will be your business if someone in town knows she was your inamorata. Or if you got her pregnant. Because she's dead."

He jumped off the railing as if scalded. "What?"

The moment she saw the very real horror and disbelief on his face, Marigold regretted being so blunt. "I'm sorry, but I found out in Pride's Crossing today. I understand they pulled her body out of the water day before yesterday." The day she was alleged to have been in the hayloft.

Seviah sat back heavily on the sill as if the strength in his legs had given out. "Holy hell."

Marigold watched him carefully. "I read the notice of her death in the newspaper after hearing it from Mrs. Dove, and I put one and one together with your mother's mention of the name …"

"No matter what you put together from Minnie and me," he swore, "you won't come up with three." He scrubbed his hand through his hair and lowered his voice even further. "I ain't so stupid or no-account as some folks like to think, Miss Nosy Manners. I got plans for getting myself off this cursed rock, same as Minnie wanted to get out of that damned one-horse town. She didn't want to get herself tied down, no mor'n me or anyone."

"Then why did you not correct your mother the other morning?" Marigold probed. "And since Minnie wasn't with you, who was?"

"Minnie weren't no mor'n a diversion to keep folks from—" He shook his head as if reconsidering what to say. "I mean, she were no more than a passing fancy, just like I were no more'n a passing fancy to her." He looked down at himself and gestured to his appearance. "More like a not-so-fancy, I suppose. But I keep myself to myself," Seviah vowed, "or I'll never be able to escape this curst place."

His vehemence seemed genuine. "Now, don't tell me a modern man like you believes in curses? Don't you want to stay and help your brother make something of the place?"

"Take a hell of a lot more than a flock of sheep to make a go of this place," Seviah sneered.

So Seviah had been listening. What else had he been doing that he oughtn't? "What would you do if it were yours?" she challenged.

"Sell it," he said without another thought. "Sell it or burn it to the ground. Because who would buy it?" He inhaled and blew out a thin stream of smoke that hung in the air like a ghost. "This broken-down old place, where nothing gets better and nothing ever changes except the girls who turn up dead? If that isn't cursed, I don't know what the hell is."