Christopher Rice - The Vines

“Allegedly. There are those who claim something else happened—something that had nothing to do with Delachaise and booze.”

“So, wait. The family survived?”

“No. I’m saying they might have been killed by something more than a fire.”

“OK… And who exactly believes this?”

“The slaves who fled that night.”

“I see. So you found them all on Facebook?”

She rolled her eyes. “Close. Dr. Taylor found them on the Internet, in a manner of speaking, that is. She’s one of my professors at LSU. She’s working with a couple other universities to create something called the Lost Voices Project. It’s the most extensive database on African American slaves ever built.”

“What is it? A list of names?”

“Oh, it’s a lot more than that. There’s a professor down in New Orleans, Gwendolyn Hall, she went into old slave auction records and put together an exhaustive list of slave names and identities. Dr. Taylor, she’s building on top of that kind of research. Only all sorts of information goes into the system. Slave narratives taken before and after the Civil War. Diary entries from plantation owners. Travel logs, newspaper reports from the period. All of it gets filtered through algorithms and computer software that work to assemble a complete reconstruction of every slave. I mean, even down to their physical appearances, their mannerisms, their speech patterns. The eventual goal is to have a database where you can actually sit there and have a conversation with a slave. But that’s years away.”

“Virtual slaves…”

“Virtual ghosts . Back from the dead. Folks whose lives were ignored and tossed aside in the history books. Now they’re coming back to life ’cause of the kind of computer software that tracks what you buy on the Internet.” Nova’s excitement over her professor’s vision has her excited, straight-backed, and talking with her hands. She catches herself with a quick but deep breath and forces her hands to her lap. “I mean… it’s in the early stages. But she let me use it anyway.”

“Use it… how?”

“I searched for Spring House.”

“And that’s how you found these slave narratives?”

“Yeah. They weren’t all in one place until a few months ago. This project has assembled old documents that were scattered in archives all over the world.”

“OK. And these slaves… what did they say?”

“They said the earth took Spring House,” Nova answers. “The justice of the earth.”

“Those were their words? The justice of the earth?”

She nods. “And they all mentioned one name. Virginie Lacroix.” The French pronunciation— ver-jun-ee —rolls effortlessly off her tongue.

“Was she related to Felix?”

“Nope. She was a slave. A slave who could talk to the soil.”

“What, like… voodoo?”

“No,” Nova says, with evident distaste for the cliché. “There’s no mention of Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices. No altars. No chickens getting their heads cut off. This is much more specific. She could make things grow . That’s what they said. And apparently… she could also make them die.”

“What?” Blake asks, incredulous.

“Seriously,” Nova says. “There was a story passed among the slaves, and it was in all the accounts that came back when I did the search. They knew about Virginie’s power, but the belief was that she didn’t have control over it. She could use it in short bursts here and there but nothing that could have freed her or caused an uprising. Anyway, Delachaise was a terrible manager. A lot of the plantation owners were. Spoiled little French brats who weren’t prepared for how labor-intensive cane harvesting was going to be. There wasn’t much turnaround time each year before the winter frosts came, and there was also the refinement process and all that. Anyway, to make up for how overwhelmed he was, Felix worked his slaves half to death. So Virginie showed him what she was capable of.”

“And… what? Killed him?”

“No, once he found her out, they made a deal. He asked her to make the cane grow faster. In exchange he’d add enough new slaves to lessen everyone’s workload. In other words, he promised to stop working everyone half to death if she’d use her magic on his fields.”

“Did she agree?”

“Sort of. Enough, at least, for her to grow the cane. But it sounds like he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Because the whole thing didn’t end well.”

“Justice of the earth…”

“Three different narratives in the database said something came up and out of the earth and literally tore Spring House apart. The fire happened second. But whatever happened first —it was so goddamn bad, nobody cared when all the slaves took off for the swamp.”

“Something Virginie made come up out of the earth?”

“Or something she unleashed by mistake.”

Blake sits, thinking it over. Finally, still shaking his head, he says, “And we’re the first people to read this?”

“No. We’re just the first people not to dismiss it as the voodoo mumbo jumbo of a traumatized people.”

But she’s got more than words to present. The sketch she places in front of him is a pixelated scan of a crude ink drawing. The grand facade of Spring House is plainly visible in the background, but it’s not quite to scale with the clump of stick-figure slaves standing in the foreground next to a giant oak tree. One of their own is lassoed to its giant trunk in a manner that wouldn’t be possible in real life, given the tree’s size. The overseer’s whip has been caught in midair by a giant snake that’s unfurled from one of the branches overhead. But it has no eyes, no flickering, cartoonish tongue. But if it’s not a snake, then it has to be…

Blake knows this is the part where he should continue shaking his head in disbelief, dismissing the story as the childish folklore of a primitive and uneducated people. But he can no longer muster such a reaction, and so he sees Nova softening before him as she realizes she won’t have to mount a stronger defense of this incredible tale.

“So…,” Nova finally says. “What did Jane Percival say?”

Blake knows his next words will amount to a kind of surrender, that much of what other people have regarded as his defining courage sprang from his belief that he had survived one of the worst blows life could deliver. But now, suddenly, the rules about what life can hurl at you have been suspended, and he hesitates, scared of what this could unleash. He knows, though, something has already been unleashed—both in 1850, and now it’s happening again for some reason—and if he stays silent, it will amount to a betrayal, of Nova and her father, whose lifework is Spring House and everything that rises from its soil.

“She said the vines are coming for us all.”

The eighteen-wheelers lumbering past outside seem hollow and insubstantial, their great tires skating across a line between air and earth that seems perilously in doubt. The waitress comes to refill their water glasses, but something about the tense energy coursing between the two of them causes her to recoil wordlessly, retreating behind the counter and shooting a hasty glance in their direction, as if she has mistaken the stunned silence between them for the calculation of armed robbers preparing to strike.

Then Nova’s cell phone rings, and she is digging in her backpack for it, and she’s uh - huh ing her way through what sound like pleasantries on the other end, and Blake is wondering if, just as the revelation that Santa Claus was a myth killed the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, and a host of other childhood fantasies for him, this current revelation and its spreading, unavoidable implications are opening a doorway that will admit more than one impossible guest.