Indescribable: Book Two of the Primordial Page 17

  Blanche’s eyes widened. She kneeled onto the grass in front of Carolina and walked with her knees to be closer to her friend. She spoke in a soft, secretive voice. “Let’s free it.” She touched Carolina’s knee.

  “Blanche!” It was hard for Carolina to believe that just a couple of days earlier Blanche had been pushing her to talk to the man and now she was suggesting something so rebellious.

  “We’ll do it tonight. We’ll sneak out to his camp and let the lion go. Daddy said that he heard that he was staying over at the Bachman’s empty field. C’mon Carolina. Think about Violet.” Blanche turned to look toward the woods. “Would you want her to be caged up like that?”

  “No,” Carolina shook her head. “I know I wouldn’t.”

  “Well, he leaves in a few days and besides, he’s a scoundrel. You even said so yourself.”

  Carolina spent the rest of the day thinking about that evening’s plans. Would she really go through with it? How would she get out of the house without either of her parents knowing? It was all fun and games to Blanche, but to Carolina it was a confusing paradox.

  At around midnight, Carolina walked quietly and barefoot across the hardwood floor. As she passed by her parent’s bedroom she could tell from the steady, rhythmic breathing coming from the darkness that they were both sound asleep. Across the hall, her brother’s door was standing open and she could see that he was snoozing on the bed. After she made her way downstairs, she eased the front door open and closed it softly behind her. She slipped on her pair of boots that she had left by the door. Outside, the nearly full moon lit the ground well enough so that she could see where she was going. At the edge of the woods, in a hollow tree stump, she had hidden a lantern earlier in the evening while her mother had been inside preparing dinner and her father had yet to come in from the fields. She brushed the dry leaves aside and pulled the lantern out of the hollow. She lit the wick. The orange light flooded the darkness of the tree cover. Blanche was standing several feet away, and because of the illumination, she seemed to appear out of nowhere. She looked like a ghost standing there in her white night gown. Without saying a word to one another, the two girls scampered away from the house and went into the trees.

  Carolina held the lantern and led the way as they pushed through the woods. Briars snagged on their delicate nightclothes. All around them they could hear the occasional scamper of small feet that belonged to woodland creatures, the snap of twigs, and the crunch of decaying leaves. They were sounds that young children would spin into stories of specters and haints that would surely cause them to have nightmares about after they had fallen asleep, but to the two teenage girls the sounds were simply those of the night, a time when life was at its most thrilling.

  Eventually they emerged from the trees and into an open field. They could see the man’s camp straight ahead of them. From the distance, it appeared to be nothing more than a tent that had been set up under a small maple tree. The man’s carriage was off to the side, and his horse was tied to the trunk of the tree. On the other side of the tent was where the lion’s cage was located.

  Carolina blew out the lantern. In the open field, without the thick tree cover of the woods, they could see well enough without the additional light from the lantern. They ran across the dewy grass of the field until they reached the campsite. There were the remains of an extinguished fire on the ground. Smoke was still drifting up from the ashy pieces of wood. A black, cast iron skillet was off to the side, sitting on a large rock where it had been left to cool. Blanche motioned for Carolina to go around the tent, toward the cage. Carolina handed the lantern over to Blanche, and when Carolina reached the cage, the lion raised its head from its slumber, looked at her, blinked his eyes, and licked his chops. She looked over her shoulder at Blanche who nodded, silently telling her to go ahead and do it. Carolina’s shaking hand went to the door. From what she could tell, there was no lock to hold the door shut. The locking mechanism was nothing more than a long, metal rod that had been dropped through several holes that were lined on the edge of the door and the adjoining ones that were along the cage’s side. All she had to do was pull the metal rod up and the door would be able to swing open. When she wrapped her hand around the L-shaped top of the rod the lion stood from his feet, anticipating freedom. Just as she was lifting the long piece of metal, there was a deep male voice behind her.

  “Let it go,” the man said in a stern tone. He didn’t sound angry, only instructive.

  Carolina gasped and her hand instinctively let go of the cool and hard metal rod. The pieces of the cage door slammed back together, and the sound was a gunshot-like crack in the otherwise still and quiet night. Carolina spun around. The man was standing several feet from her. He was not wearing a shirt. His brown hair was tousled from sleep.

  “I – uh,” Carolina couldn’t come up with any words to explain what she had been about to do.

  The man began walking toward her. “What are you doing here?” He said. By then he was just inches from her.

  “I – I -” Carolina was at a loss for words.

  From behind the man, Blanche spoke up. “We don’t like what you’re doing with that lion,” she said. “We came to free it.”

  The man turned to look at her. It was obvious that he was just now realizing that Blanche was even there. “Leave,” he told her.

  Blanche stood still.

  “Leave,” he said again. This time he said it more firmly and pointed across the field, back toward the direction from where the two girls had come from.

  Blanche began to back up. She shook her head and her thick hair jostled back and forth. “I’m not leaving without her,” she said and nodded toward Carolina.

  The man turned his attention from Blanche and looked back at Carolina. He stepped even closer to her.

  “Can I -,” Carolina’s voice was a tremble. “Can I go too?” She felt her eyes scan over the man’s bare torso. She had never seen a man that was so cut with muscle before that night.

  The man smiled. He had seen the quick movement of her eyes as they had traveled downward over his abundant, exposed flesh. “I think you had more in mind that freeing that lion,” he said. By then he was just a quick breath away from her. “What else did you have in mind Caroline?” he asked.

  Carolina shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. To hear him mention her name caused her heart to skip a beat. She glanced toward Blanche and saw the confused expression on the other girl’s face.

  Out of the blue, the man leaned in and kissed Carolina on the mouth. She didn’t pull away. Instead, she welcomed the kiss. It was, after all, what she had been dreaming about. As his lips lead hers, she opened her mouth and could feel the tip of his tongue meet her own. Her right hand instinctively went to his cheek. Her fingertips brushed down the side of his face that was rough with stubble. She gently touched the bare skin of his firm, rounded bicep. He pulled away from her. “Now you can go,” he said.

  Carolina was panting for breath as she backed away from him. She touched her lips with her trembling fingertips. Her heart was racing and her legs felt weak. After a moment, she was finally able to tear her gaze away from James. Blanche was standing to the side, dumbstruck about what she had just witnessed. “Let’s go,” Blanche said. Carolina glanced at the man one more time. He smiled, and very discreetly, nodded his head in her direction. Carolina knew that it was an invitation and that he was silently telling her that she was welcome at his campsite any time. The two girls turned their backs and ran back toward the woods.

  “I can’t believe it,” Blanche was saying as they were making their way through the thickest part of the woods. She was leading the way this time, holding the lantern out in front of her. In their hurried determination, the lantern was swinging on its handle and causing their surroundings of thick trees and bramble to abruptly shift from light to shadow. “I can’t believe that he would do something so, so audacious. He doesn’t even know you. He is just a scoundrel! How does he know your name?”
Carolina didn’t answer and Blanche continued. “And as if what he is doing to that lion isn’t bad enough, now he thinks that you would be so foolish to fall for that bad of an attempt at romance. Why would he think that he had the right?” Blanche was pushing a long, thorny briar out of her way. It was snagged in her hair. “You didn’t like it did you?” She turned to look at her friend.

  “Ugh! Blanche, no,” Carolina said with a scrunch of her nose. But the truth was that she was already yearning to be with James again, wanting his lips pressed against her own once more. She knew that she couldn’t tell her friend of her desire, not after what Blanche had told her about the man’s supposed, criminal past. How would anybody understand her wanting to be with someone that was rumored to have been involved in such activity? That was all it probably was, Carolina reasoned, a rumor. And besides, Blanche had never been known to be one that would shy away from spreading gossip, giving even more reason to believe that the allegations were not true.

  Carolina was a bundle of nerves the first time that she emerged from the woods and into the Bachman’s field all alone. That night, James acted like he wasn’t at all surprised to see her walking toward him across the wide, open field. Just as she had the night that she had been there with Blanche, Carolina held the lantern as a guiding light. That night, in addition to the lantern, she also had a basket of warm, blueberry biscuits that she had made herself. She held the basket out to James. “I wanted to bring you this,” she said. “And I wanted to apologize for what we, what I did last night. I hope I can properly get to know you now that all of that is out of the way.”

  Just a minute later, James bit into one of the buttermilk biscuits. He closed his eyes, savoring the homemade goodness. It made Carolina happy to see him enjoying the food. That night, they sat by the campfire and talked. The evening ended with another kiss that Carolina thought about all the way home and caused her not to be able to fall asleep.

  From then on, every night she met the man at his camp. Together they watched fireflies hover over the open field. They lay on their backs and gazed at the stars that were scattered across the black sky. Things began to get more heated between the two of them until one night, when Carolina got there, she saw that the ground surrounding the tent was scattered with freshly cut zinnias. The flowers were an assortment of colors: yellow, blue, white, red, pink, and orange. It was that same night that Carolina finally allowed herself to give in to the cravings that she had been having and found herself inside Mr. Percy’s tent and underneath his anxious and needful body. Like outside, the inside of the tent was covered with an array of soft petals. Their romance remained a secret to everyone, including Blanche.

  The day after the flowers, Carolina was in town with her brother, Jonathan. They were walking side by side. She didn’t think that the man would be exhibiting the lion that day because he had told her just the night before, while his arm had been wrapped tight around her, that he would be taking the day off, but to her utmost surprise, there he was, in the center of the town. When Carolina saw the gathered crowd, she grabbed her brother’s arm and led him around the outer edge of the square. Not knowing what James would say to her, she didn’t want him to see her that day, not with Jonathan. She was afraid that if her brother witnessed the two of them side by side that he would be able to pick up on what had been going on between them. And she didn’t want her brother to find out about what she had been doing. What if he would tell their father? The romance needed to remain a secret until she saw the appropriate time to come clean. She glanced out of the corner of her eye and could see James standing next to the lion’s cage. Just glimpsing at him, her heart thudded as she recalled what he had looked like out of his clothes. He was looking at her through the crowd. His face was expressionless. Their eyes locked for a moment. As usual, the look in his eyes was hard for Carolina to comprehend. It was the same that he would give her when he leaned in for a kiss. It was one of seriousness and a deep, seemingly insatiable desire. Carolina broke her attention away from James and nudged Jonathan away from Mr. Percy’s Great Menagerie.

  “Murderer, that’s what Daddy heard last night,” Blanche was saying. The two girls were sitting in high back rocking chairs on the front porch of the Rimbault’s house. It wasn’t long after Carolina and Jonathan had returned home. A light drizzle of rain was coming down and spattering on the tin roof. Even though it was raining, the sun was visible and shining through the light gray clouds. Blanche’s voice was a near whisper. “They said that he killed some man outside of a tavern. And Mrs. Drexler said that yesterday when she went out to her garden she discovered that all of her zinnia blooms had been cut, every one of them.”

  Carolina laughed and rolled her eyes. “Why would he cut and steal somebody’s flowers, Blanche? That doesn’t make any sense.” Carolina still hadn’t told Blanche about her and James. She could feel her face turning red and hoped that Blanche couldn’t tell that she was hiding something, that she knew exactly where the flowers had ended up.

  That night, after Blanche had left for her own home, the Rimbault family had a fabulous dinner of roast pork and vegetables. Just as she did so often, Carolina took the plate of scraps to the edge of the woods and placed it on the ground. She stepped back and watched as Violet emerged from the trees and ate the food in her usual, eager determination to wolf it all down as quickly as possible. The rain had completely stopped by then. The sky was orange with the dropping sun and the area surrounding Violet was already dark with shadow. As Carolina watched Violet, she was also in deep contemplation about that evening’s planned rendezvous with James when she heard a slamming from behind her. The noise caused the fox to turn from its dinner and dart back into the safety of the woods. Carolina spun around in the opposite direction to look for the source of the sound and could see that one of the slaves was at the house. The older man was standing on the front porch. The sight of the man caused Carolina’s heart to jump. She knew that something was going on and it had to have been something bad. The workers hardly ever came to the house like that, especially at the end of the day. She began walking quickly toward the house and saw her parents emerge from the inside. The slave said something to the two of them and it was obvious to Carolina that the words had sent both her mother and father into a panic. Stanwood hastily ran off the porch and climbed into his carriage that was waiting on the other side of the house. Carolina picked up the pace of her steps and was running by the time she reached her mother.

  “Jonathan,” Ella said. “Somebody hurt Jonathan.” She wrapped Carolina in her arms.

  What Carolina learned from her mother was that just minutes earlier, the slave had discovered Jonathan’s body in the marshy creek that stretched along the land behind the house. Her brother’s body had been dumped in the shallow water where the Mayhaw berries grew that both Ella and Carolina had often used to make deliciously tart jam. He said that Jonathan’s body had been beaten to near death.

  By the time that Stanwood’s carriage arrived back at the house carrying the young man, Jonathan’s face and torso had become so badly bruised that he was an array of purple, black, and yellow. Ella burst into tears when she saw him. Both of Jonathan’s lips were cracked and blood covered his jaw. His left eye was nearly swollen shut from the beating that he had received. After Ella and Stanwood assisted in washing him with a rag of warm water, his body was not as distressing to look at. At least the blood had been removed and most of the deep gashes had been bandaged over. As Carolina looked in on him from the hallway as he lay in bed, her heart ached for own her flesh and blood. Even though his outer appearance was cleaner than it had been earlier in the evening, it was obvious that he must’ve been in horrible pain. His face was so swollen that he couldn’t even talk.

  That night, Carolina was hesitant about going to see James, but she needed to be with him. She needed for him to hold her in his strong arms, and so she went once again to his campsite. After removing his shirt, she saw fresh, red scratches that were spread across his ches
t. It looked like somebody had fought at him and marred his skin with their fingernails, or as if somebody had fought back, Carolina thought uncontrollably. As his hand caressed her throat, then moved lower to her chest and lower still, she could see where his knuckles had been scraped and left bloody. Had he been hitting something, she wondered. At the sight of the damaged flesh, all she could think about and picture in her mind was her brother’s hurt body as he lay in bed back at the house.

  Afterwards, Carolina and James lay on the ground underneath the cover of the tent with their limbs intertwined together. James’s hand was resting on her bare stomach. Carolina traced her fingertips along his long arm, over the newly scratched skin, and tried to imagine him in a fight with someone. Blanche’s words spun tornado-like through her head. Scoundrel and murderer were two of the words that her friend had used to describe him.

  “Who was that you were with today?” James asked, dropping the veil of contemplative silence that had been hanging between them. It was like the curtain had been lowered to reveal the beginning of the final act of a stage play.

  The question sunk into Carolina with the weight of a heavy brick. For the first time, she thought that maybe it was true, that he, James, had been the one to attack Jonathan. She remembered the look on James’s face upon seeing her and Jonathan walking together in the town center. Had he thought that Jonathan was another man that she was seeing behind his back? She wasn’t sure and was afraid to broach the subject, but something in her gut told her that the assumption was legit. She grasped his hand in hers and placed it off of her.

  “It was my brother,” she said with a cracking voice and got to her feet. She stepped outside of the tent and began putting on her clothes.

  Behind her, James propped himself up on his elbow. The blanket was draped over him. “Where are you going?” He asked her through the pulled back flap of the tent’s front.