Carol O’Connell - Stone Angel

“You’re absolutely right,” said Augusta. “I would quit this minute if I had any sense.” Smoke swirled around her as she spoke. “I should practice discipline and self-denial.”

Lilith nodded.

Augusta continued. “Then, when I’m ninety years old and blind with cataracts, when I’m crippled with arthritis and my breasts have been hacked off for tumors – I’ll be able to say, well thank God I don’t have emphysema.” Augusta threw back her head and laughed. Her bubbling voice had a wicked young character.

All the wrinkles, the deep lines, every detail of Augusta’s age was lost in the dark. Here was the lean, unbowed body and long, flowing hair of the famed beauty who, shot for shot, had drunk many a young man under the table – the better to take advantage of them in the love affair and the equally bloody war of a business transaction.

Augusta had also been a legendary horsewoman. As a small child, Lilith had been enthralled by the sight of her elder cousin riding bare-back along the top of the levee. And best of all was that moment when Augusta had turned her horse down the steep slope of the dike, riding home to earth. The horse’s massive body had obscured the action of its legs and the animal appeared to fly down from the road in the sky. Whenever Lilith thought back on that day, she remembered the horse with wings.

Now Augusta’s laughter subsided.

“I saw the angel when I passed through the cemetery,” said the younger woman, casually, as though this might be idle conversation. It was not.

“There are sixteen angels in that cemetery.” Augusta tipped back the last of her coffee and reached for the pot on the small wicker table by her chair.

Lilith repressed an urge to caution her cousin on the dangers of caffeine. “I mean the angel. I forgot how beautiful Cass Shelley was. So the prisoner is really Kathy?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t need Mr. Butler’s help, would I?” Augusta was betraying a trace of temper, and Lilith knew she was onto something. “But you’ve heard talk in town. You think it – ”

“Don’t insult me,” said Augusta, and the subtext of her sarcasm was clear – Idle conversation my ass.

“I’m just curious is all,” Lilith lied.

“Fine. We’ll just pretend I am the addled old woman you take me for.” Augusta settled back in her chair, but the tension between them was strung tight. “Let’s say the prisoner is Kathy. Remember, she was born in Louisiana, and I do believe the strategy of a woman comes with the mother’s milk. But I’m told she talks like a northerner. Must have been up there all this time. So now the southern woman and the northern woman meet in one brain and one body.” She turned to Lilith and smiled with no intention of kindness. “Now there’s a hellish piece of work. Does that scare you, Lilith? It should.”

The younger woman pressed her lips together in a hard line to stifle the remark that would put her on Augusta’s bad side.

The old woman went on. “Oh, I know what you’re up to. But if I had to bet on the outcome, I wouldn’t give even money for your chances.”

Lilith began to hum a tune as she pushed off with her feet to rock on the back legs of her chair, working off the angry energy. She watched her cousin out of the corner of one eye, and then she smiled to see Augusta looking back in the same way. She sought out safer ground for conversation. “You still ride your horse along the top of the levee?”

“No, I never ride anymore.” Augusta said this with the rare tone of defeat. “I had a bad fall one year. Broke my leg, and it took forever to mend. I don’t have time to be laid up with another injury. Time is precious.”

The sudden howl of an animal made Lilith tuck in a breath and sit up a little straighter. “That was the wolf.”

“Oh, stop, Lilith.” The red coal of the cheroot made an impatient streak in the dark as Augusta waved her hand. “You’re too old for that game.”

“I know that howl.” Indeed, this was the strongest memory of her early childhood in Dayborn. “That was Daddy’s wolf.”

“It was nothing of the kind – only an old dog.” There was a tired smile in Augusta’s voice. “Your father was pulling your leg when he told you that story. You know that.”

Yes, she did. In one pragmatic room of Lilith’s mind, she knew her father had created the wolf for her. But there was another room where she kept her father’s gifts: his poetic blind faith in things unseen, and the power of that faith.

“There has never been a wolf in these parts – not ever,” said Augusta.

And Lilith knew this was fact. But in that room, her father’s gentle voice was saying, “Lil, if you can only catch that wolf, he will infinitely increase your life.”

As though Augusta were arguing against this inner voice, she said, “He only told you that tall tale when he had it in mind to raise him a little track star.”

“When you catch him, when that moment comes, your life will be changed.”

“Oh Lord, how you did run to see that wolf.”

“Hear him howl, Lil? Isn’t he magnificent?”

“But all the time, it was only Kathy’s dog,” said Augusta. “And that’s him wailing now.”

And it did sound more like a wail for the dead, tapering off to mournful crooning, ending with a whimper. The animal was crying.

“But he can’t be alive. No way. He’d be more than twenty years old.”

Lilith had kept faith with a winged horse and a wolf she had yet to see, but she could not believe that a common dog had lived well past the century mark in the canine’s translation to human years.

“It is an indecent age for a dog.” Augusta exhaled a perfect smoke ring. “Every time I leased out Cass’s house, I always told the old story of the murder and how the dog missed little Kathy. All the renters were good sports. They even fed him. And I might’ve kept that house occupied. But after a while, the renters began to realize that the dog was insane.”

Lilith turned away, preferring her father’s wolf to the half-dead dog haunting the yard of the old Shelley house.

Augusta’s voice droned on in the background of her thoughts.

“In any case, you never want to chase down a wolf, Lilith. Ever think of what you’d do when you caught up with it?”

The old black dog’s hind leg was working as he ran through his dream, pacing himself to the towheaded child with green eyes. It was toward the violent end of the dream that he moaned and rolled over in the dirt to expose all his old scars to the moon, every wound that was not concealed by his pelt. The pain of old injuries woke him again, and he felt the real and solid world all around him.

He was alone.

His head dropped low as he did the dog’s version of bitter tears. Then came a fresh spate of howling. It was one of those rare phases of weather when the wind carried his night music everywhere, even into Owltown.

At the edge of Dayborn was its unacknowledged spawn, a crescent cluster of shacks and mobile homes on blocks, a main street of neon lights that glowed all night, and drunks who did not fall down until the first light of dawn. Though it was a legal partition of Dayborn, the older residents pretended it was not. When they had occasion to refer to the sprawling blight on the lower bayou, they called it Owltown.

Alma Furgueson, who lived in this place, rose in her bed and listened to the dog’s voice. She wished someone would put that demented creature out of his misery and hers. She would do it herself, but she could not bear to go back to the Shelley house again.

She gripped the edge of her blanket and drew it up over her face. Though she was past fifty, she reacted to her fears with the solutions of a child. She left her bed and went to the closet, hiding herself away at the back and pulling the door shut.