The Elementals Read Online Free PDF Page B

wearily.
    Luker got up to get the drink, and when he returned, Odessa came along behind him. “You’re going to make sure she tells it right?” asked Luker over his shoulder, and she nodded. With her bony black fingers running up and down the sides of a glass of iced tea, she sat at the far corner of the long table where India bent low over the pad of graph paper.
    Leigh faced them all, and her expression was serious. “Odessa, you’re gone interrupt me if I get anything wrong, aren’t you?”
    “Yes, ma’am, I sure will,” said Odessa, and bargain-sealed with a swallow of tea.
    “Well,” began Leigh, “we all know ’bout how long the Savages have been in Mobile—”
    “Since before there was a Mobile,” said Big Barbara. “They were French. The French were the first ones to come here—after the Spanish, I mean. They were originally the Sauvages .” The little speech was directed to India, who nodded over her sketchbook.
    “Well, about that time—about two hundred and fifty years ago—Mobile was owned by the French, and the Savages were real important even then. The governor of the whole French territory around here was a Savage, and he had a daughter—I don’t know her name, do you Odessa?”
    Odessa shook her head.
    “Well, this daughter died in giving birth. The baby died too, and they were buried together in the family mausoleum. It’s not the one where we buried Marian today, it was one that came before that one—it’s gone now. Anyway, the next year, this woman’s husband died too—of cholera or something—and they opened the mausoleum again.” She paused.
    “And you know what they found?” Odessa prompted from behind.
    No one had any idea.
    “They found out they had buried that girl alive,” Leigh said. “She waked up in her coffin, and she pushed off the lid and she screamed and screamed and nobody heard her and she tore her hands all up trying to get the door open and she couldn’t and she didn’t have anything to eat— so she ate the dead baby . And when she was through eating the baby, she piled up the bones in the corner and put the baby’s clothes on top of them. Then she starved to death, and that’s what they found when they opened the mausoleum.”
    “It wouldn’t have happened if they had embalmed her,” said Big Barbara. “A lot of times people turn black for a minute on the embalming table, and that means there was a little bit of life left in ’em, but after the embalming fluid goes in, nobody wakes up again. Whoever’s around when I die, I want ’em to make sure I get embalmed.”
    “I don’t think that was the end of the story, Barbara,” said Luker, reproving her for the interruption.
    “Well,” said Big Barbara defensively, “it’s just a terrible story already, I don’t see how there could be a whole lot more to it.”
    “Well, when they found the dead woman on the floor of the mausoleum and the little pile of bones, everybody was so upset that they figured they had to do something to prevent it from ever happening again. So at every funeral after that, the head of the family stuck a knife through the heart of the dead person just to make sure he was really dead. They always did it at the funeral so everybody could see that it had been done and wouldn’t worry about the corpse waking up in the mausoleum. It wasn’t a bad idea, considering that they probably didn’t know about embalming fluid.”
    India had looked up from the graph paper and was listening attentively to Leigh. However, her pencil moved unceasingly and purposefully across the page, and now and then she glanced down as if surprised by the picture that was forming there.
    “So after that, every person that was born into the Savage family got a knife presented to him at his christening, and that knife went with him for the rest of his life. And then when he died, that knife was stuck in his chest, and then got buried in the coffin with him.”
    “And then it became ritual,”