The Moonflowers: A Novel

Prologue

Up from the barren, parched earth, a statue grows. A man, for a woman is too malleable to be immortalized in stone. His rigid body, standing on a two-foot pedestal, rises ten feet into the air. He wears a military officer’s uniform: a thick overcoat with gilt dress buttons and two collar discs pressed on either side of his neck. On his head is a dress cap with a medallion placed in the center, directly above the lip. He stands with one leg slightly bent at the knee and carries a musket. Its thin, tubular mouth points upward, eager to spit a bullet from pursed bronze lips.

The man’s eyes are large, and his cheekbones are much too long and sharp. Benjamin Costello was never an angular man. He was slight and refined. Feminine in features and mannerisms. I see him now as if he is sitting before me, one leg crossed casually over the other with long fingers folded together on the knee. His head bends slightly to the right, and his round cheeks flush from the glass of red wine he sips before setting it back on the table between each taste. He taps his fingers lightly on his knee, and a slow smile creeps across his face as the tip of his tongue teases the curve of his upper lip.

This is how Benjamin Costello looked the night of March 27, 1948. The night he sat at the dining room table inside Whitmore Halls and ate lemon meringue pie before drinking the hot mug of tea steeped with poisonous leaves that stopped his heart and curdled his organs so fast that he was dead on the floor before I had time to clear the table.

It is now 1997, and I have been imprisoned for nearly fifty years for the murder of the man they are commemorating with a large statue erected in the center of the square in Darren, a town that’s not much more than a stray pebble kicked from the hollers of the Appalachians, home to the state asylum where they placed me and the other eighteen geriatric inmates after the women’s penitentiary became overcrowded. It’s also the hometown of the late Benjamin Costello, former mayor of Darren and heir to Costello Railways, a line of rails that brought hope and prosperity to the people in rural Appalachia.

At least, that’s what the travel brochure says.

From the window of my room, I watched it all. The crane was only a gnat in my vision, but I saw the scene before me as if I were standing at the base of the statue myself. It took three days to erect. The cement was poured first. Then on the second day, a pedestal was placed in the center of the square. And on the third morning, before the sun was fully awake and her early-morning glare was still hazy with fatigue, the crane rolled in, Benjamin’s bronze body clenched in its mighty jaws. A crowd had gathered. They applauded as the figure landed heavily on the cement podium and the crane removed its teeth from around his neck.

At night, I close my eyes, and the moon shines down on the memorial. The light makes the monument glow like freshly baked skin after a morning spent in the sun, creating a fine layer of sweat on Benjamin’s upturned face. The room is quiet, and I am alone. Fluorescent lights flicker out in the hall, and the water-stained walls lean closer as I hum a song Benjamin once sang to me while picking crab apples in the woods.

Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush. Here we go round the mulberry bush, on a cold and frosty morning.

I think of the first time I saw Benjamin. He was just a boy then, stumbling out from the trees with an apple in either hand. Sweet Galas, he told me. The ones that grow on the low branches of the fruit trees. Benjamin always did have an affinity for sugar. He juggled the apples in his hands before catching the last in his mouth to make me laugh. When I did, he took a large bite and grinned, a thin line of sweet juice trickling through the gap in his teeth and down his chin.

When the moon is at her highest peak, the ghosts come. They crawl up Benjamin’s hands and feet, wrap their arms around his broad shoulders and thick neck. They claw and pull at the bronze overcoat, the polished boots, the erect musket, and I wonder if they have enough strength to push the statue over, to make it crumble at their feet. All the while, Benjamin stares straight ahead, never looking down at those who writhe beneath him.

One

I leave for Darren by train. It’s a long nine hours from the Amtrak hub in Ann Arbor to the station in Morehead, Kentucky, and my body lurches and sways with the rails. As the train departs, I pick at my nails and watch the brick university towers that mark the urban college town shrink. They never looked small to me before. Even when I left for graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, my car weighed down with paints and blank canvases, the university still loomed large in the rearview mirror.

I am somewhere in the southern corner of Ohio when the land begins to fold into rolling hills pigmented with green trees. If I were to paint them, I would use acrylics, not oils. Their dark-olive complexion is too rich for the denser paints; they would smear. It’s the mountains that need the oils. Their shadowy ridges and hazy peaks. Acrylics could never adequately capture the uneven textures and smoky light.

The train is hot and full of people. The leather seats are covered in deep scars that scratch against my legs. The material pulls at my skin when I cross one knee over the other.

A woman sits next to me. She is slight and petite and holds a small boy, who draws shapes on the window with his wet fingertip. The woman reminds me of Anh Nguyen, the owner of the Vietnamese market in Chicago. I used to stop there almost every day for a cup of pho or ramen. Anh would always send me home with a large bowl, even when I paid for a small.

This is the first time I’ve been on a train since leaving Chicago, but, looking at the woman sitting next to me, the scent of pho tangled in her hair, I feel calmer than I thought I would. My fingertips tap against my thigh, but the rhythm is steady, controlled.

I pull out the letter from the mayor of Darren. It’s addressed to my father, a professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Michigan.

“Darren County,” Dad said when he first handed me the letter a month ago. “It was where my father lived.”

I looked up in surprise. Dad rarely mentioned his father. My grandmother, Valerie Costello, had never liked to talk about him. All Dad knew was that his father had grown up in the Kentucky hills, had fought in the Second World War, and had become the town’s mayor. He was the son of a man who had founded a railway company, and when Benjamin had taken over the business, he’d built a line that had added Darren to the midwestern trade routes. Dad hadn’t even known Benjamin had been murdered until I’d read about it in an old newspaper clipping I’d found while researching my family’s history for a sixth-grade genealogy assignment.

“How odd,” Dad said when I showed him the article. The fragile clipping looked small in his hand, and I realized how easy it would be for him to simply wad it up inside his fist and throw it into the wastepaper basket.

Benjamin had been twenty-eight when he was killed, the article read. He had been murdered by a woman named Eloise Price, who was still imprisoned at the women’s penitentiary in Morehead, Kentucky.

When I’d asked Dad why he wasn’t more upset, he’d just shrugged and said, “I never met the man. How can I mourn his absence?”

It was true that Dad had never known Benjamin. My grandmother had been pregnant when she’d left Darren after Benjamin’s death, taking a train north to Chicago, where she’d gotten a job serving eggs and hotcakes at a corner diner on the south side of the city. When I’d first moved to Chicago, I looked for the diner, but it had burned down over twenty years before and a laundromat had been built over its remains.

After Dad left for college, his mother had lived in a small cottage just off the coast of the Atlantic. It had a red roof and a pink door that cried like a hungry kitten when you pried it open. She’d lived there for twenty-six years until she came down with a bad case of double pneumonia six months ago that sent her to the hospital. She’d died three days later. I’d driven with Dad to Maine for the funeral, and on the way home, he’d handed me the box of Valerie’s ashes. All I could think about was how it was so much lighter than my mother’s porcelain urn.

The train jerks, and I smooth the letter over my kneecap and reread the now-familiar words written in bold, sharp ink:

28 August 1997

Dear Dr. David Costello,

I write to you as mayor of Darren Township. I’m sure it’s not lost on you that this March will be the fiftieth anniversary of the death of your father, Corporal Benjamin Costello. Corporal Costello is held in the highest esteem here in Darren for his acts of bravery and selflessness during the Second World War and after. We consider ourselves much indebted to your family.

On the anniversary of the corporal’s death, we would like to commemorate his achievements, courage, and contributions by erecting a statue in his honor in the town square. We also plan to create an exhibit in memoriam for Corporal Costello in the Darren County Historical Museum. We have numerous items of memorabilia that will be displayed, along with photographs, testimonies, and personal letters, graciously contributed by several townsfolk. If there are any of your father’s personal items that you would be willing to donate, we would be most grateful. However, that is not the reason for my writing.

The Darren County Literary Society wants to commission a member to paint a portrait that will be hung in the museum. However, as the society is quite small, frankly, no one feels up to the task. I’ve learned you are an artist and art historian in Ann Arbor and, since he is your father, I write to ask of your interest in taking on this project. We can offer 500 dollars as compensation, a single room for lodging, and a small stipend during your time here in Darren. If this is suitable to your needs, we do ask that the project be completed by the end of January, as we hope to have the full exhibit open to the public with the coming of the new year.

On a more personal note, I had the pleasure of meeting your father once as a small boy. I was riding my bicycle down the street when a large stick got stuck in the rear cog. The wheel creaked and jammed, nearly sending my body flying onto the road. Corporal Costello came by as I was bloodying my fingers trying to remove the spur. He knelt and worked the stick out himself, with fingers like a wood peddler and the patience of a fisherman. He patted me on the shoulder and sent me on my way with a military salute. I am pleased to report that many others had similar encounters with the corporal, for he was as competent and willing as he was amiable.

We do very much hope that you will consider our offer. It would be an honor to have the offspring of Corporal Costello in Darren Township once again.

Yours,

Mayor Anthony Grant

“A memorial?” I was sitting with Dad at the dining table when he first showed me the letter. “I didn’t realize Benjamin was that big of a celebrity.”

Dad shrugged and leaned against the high-back chair that was a gift from the University of Michigan’s Medieval Department to celebrate his tenure. Dad loved anything old and ornate. Anything that had a history. When the Medieval Department presented him with the cherrywood chairs covered in carvings that bled down the chairbacks and arms, he spent the better half of the following week researching their origin. He was always more interested in an object’s history than a person’s. It was safer, I liked to think. Not so messy.

“Are you going?” I asked.

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, tapping the head of one on the inside of his wrist before placing it between his lips and lighting a match. Dad never used a lighter. He said they dampened the experience for him.

He slid the pack across the table toward me as I pulled a lighter from the pocket of my jeans.

“So?” I gestured to the letter.

He took off his glasses. Dad never rushed. He ran a hand over his thinning gray hair and looked past me, toward the reproduction of Boltraffio’s The Adolescent Saviour that hung on the wall above the buffet. It was a portrait of the Virgin Mary that was harrowing and ghostly in appearance. “I was thinking you might want to,” he said.

“Want to what?”

He nodded toward the letter, which had become like a golem sitting between us. “To go to Darren.”

“To go to Darren,” I repeated.

“Yes.”

“But the letter is to you.” I was baffled. I couldn’t go to Darren. I could paint a portrait, sure, but Dad had always been the better artist. Though he studied art more than he practiced, our house was still adorned in his work. I was only a mediocre art student who had dropped out of the program after being awarded the School of the Art Institute of Chicago Fellowship for the following year, an offer I’d declined when I’d decided to move back home to Ann Arbor and never think about the city again.

“Antigone, don’t get ash on the table.”

I looked at my hand. A small pile of ash had fallen from the tip of the cigarette and onto the wooden tabletop. I wiped it to the floor.

Hey diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon.

The old nursery rhyme scratched against the inside of my ear, and I cringed. It was the same aggravating tune that had plagued me ever since I left Chicago.

“I can’t go to Darren,” I confirmed. “You should go. You’re on sabbatical soon.” My palm itched, and I scratched the soft skin just above the flower I’d had inked on the inside of my wrist: Monet’s water lily. I had two tattooed, one on each arm.

Dad frowned and leaned forward to rest both his arms on the tabletop, flicking ash into the dish at his side in a single fluid motion. Even his filth was orderly. “I’m working on a grant. It is out of the question.”

“I’m barely an artist,” I protested. It wasn’t entirely a lie. It had been months since I’d picked up a paintbrush.

“Bullshit,” he countered.

“They asked for you.”

“I think they will settle for any Costello descendant.”

Dad looked at me, and for the first time since I had come home from Chicago, I felt like he was really seeing me, his dark eyes searching my face.

I thought of my sixth-grade genealogy project. It had been somewhat of a joke. Dad had no siblings, and his tree branches were as bare as the dogwoods in the middle of a Michigan winter. My mother’s family was small, names etched onto twigs that would snap when the winter snow became too heavy. Mom had never known her father. She and Dad had that in common when they’d met.

“Aren’t you curious?” My voice softened. “He was your father. Don’t you want to see where he lived? Where he died?”

Dad looked pensive for a moment, as if he wanted to say something but the words were too far apart to form. He put out his cigarette, a quick push down into the ashtray, before turning toward the window. The light shining on his skin made him look twenty-five years younger, and I saw my father as the man he’d been before I was born, the man he’d been when he’d met a young woman and asked her to be his wife: young, proud, and fearless.

“I think it might be good for you to get away for a while,” he said. The words held me in place. “You’ve been home for over a month now, and after Chicago”—his voice caught on the name of the city, like it was a bad taste in the back of his mouth—“it might be good to be somewhere new. A fresh start for a couple months. Get your mind off things.”

I nearly laughed. Get my mind off things. Forget what happened. Forget the way the alley had felt underneath my skin, the way the gravel and cement shards had stayed lodged in the divots underneath my knees, against my shins, wedged in the bloody scratches that had bruised and scarred. I had picked them out for days.

I pushed back from the table. The chair legs screeched against the floor, and the wood trembled. “It would be easier for you if I did, wouldn’t it?” I said, standing. I was angry now. Angry that Dad didn’t care more about his family than his work, angry that he’d suggested I do what was asked of him, angry that he’d brought up Chicago.

“You should go. He was your father. He is your history.” I turned to leave.

“Antigone.” Dad called my name as I was leaving the room.

I paused.

“There are some parts of a man’s history that he cannot learn for himself. They have to be told to him through a funnel. That way, if it all becomes too much, he can put out his hand and simply stop the flow.”

In Morehead, a man is waiting outside the station. I see him even before I disembark. He stands to the side of the small brick building and looks miserably hot. He has a mop of thick, unruly hair that is pressed down with a backward baseball cap and wears dirty jeans and a flannel shirt that covers wide shoulders. He can’t be more than thirty years old. Dad told me that someone would be waiting for me at the station.

The man looks past me, watching the other passengers. I can tell from the way he rocks back and forth on the heels of his feet that he is waiting for someone he has never met. I know that someone is me.

I roll my heavy suitcase behind me and walk over to him. My pulse beats in my eardrums. He is tall but not tall enough that I couldn’t reach his eyes if he grabbed the inside of my wrist. His legs are shorter than his torso, and I’m certain I could outrun him if I had to. I glance down at my black-soled loafers. I should have worn sneakers.

I grip the handle of my suitcase a little tighter. “Are you waiting for someone?”

The man turns. In the light, he looks older, his skin weathered from too much time in the sun.

“I’m supposed to be meeting someone here,” I tell him.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m waiting on a man from up north.” His voice is low, a deep burgundy, much lower than my father’s.

“You’re looking for David Costello?” I know I’m right when a confused expression crosses the man’s face. “I’m his daughter, Tig,” I explain. “My father sent me on his behalf. I’m here for Benjamin’s memorial.”

The man startles but recovers well.

“I’m an artist,” I tell him, as if this makes me less of an impostor. “Dad thought I might be able to hold the paintbrush better than he can.”

The joke falls at the man’s feet.

He takes off his hat, and his hair looks like a wet head of lettuce. The flattened curls and cowlicks are thick with sweat. He wipes a hand over the dark mess before setting the cap right back where it was. “We weren’t expecting a lady,” he says. At least he’s honest. “Mae will be pleased. She wasn’t too keen on having a man living up above her.”

He holds out his hand and introduces himself as Jason, personal assistant to Mayor Grant.

“We don’t have many visitors passing through.” Jason bows his head to the gravel walkway, and a shy smile traces his lips. “And not many come this way carrying a suitcase on wheels.”

I look down at the hard plastic shell, cringing when I notice the dirt roads and cracked asphalt. “Leave it to plastic to give me away then,” I joke awkwardly. My hand loosens around the handle.

Jason laughs graciously before offering to carry the case.

“I got it,” I insist when he reaches for the handle the second time. My voice has a bite to it that still tastes unfamiliar.

Jason takes a step back, wiping the sweat from his upper lip. He brushes a hand on the front of his jeans and looks up. “It’s been hotter than normal this fall.”

I rearrange the suitcase in my hand and lift it off the ground, determined to carry it the rest of the way. Jason is right: it is hot here. I am used to midwestern summers, the streets heavy with sweaty bodies and recycled air, but the humidity in Darren is as thick as the smoke I pull into my lungs every time I draw from a cigarette.

The station sits at the bottom of a foothill and is surrounded by trees. In the distance, the mountains roll their shoulders at the birds that fly overhead. In Chicago, and in Ann Arbor, there were pockets of color. The vibrant bouquets and flower arrangements from Patty’s Petal Shop. The heavy dark blue of the Chicago River after it rained. The stream of yellow taxis strung like Christmas lights flickering across the streets. But nothing like here. Here the trees are on fire, the red and orange and yellow leaves stained with colors so rich that the paint couldn’t be diluted.

“The hills look like they’re burning,” I murmur.

Jason squints. “Yep, I suppose they do.” When I look back at him, I catch him eyeing me warily.

“Something wrong?” I am instantly uncomfortable.

He blushes. “No, ma’am.”

I am suddenly very aware of myself. Not only of the suitcase I am holding but of my hemmed pants, fitted top, long dark hair pulled back in a plastic clip that digs into my scalp. I press my hand against the side of my pants, searching for a pocket, for something to hold on to.

Jason leads me to a green pickup truck. It is freckled with rust and has a large dent on the right front side as if it has recently encountered a metal pole. As he lifts my luggage over the tailgate, I see a wooden structure in the truck bed. It looks like a cedar box missing a wall. Placed inside is a black bucket full of wood shavings. Two paint cans are pushed against the back, and a red toolbox holds them in place. The plastic bed liner is a wig of dirt and pine needles. When I slide onto the front seat, I’m careful not to sit on the large coffee stain that blossoms on the edge of the fabric.

I roll down the side window. “You mind?”

The train ride has made my stomach churn, and the air here feels light. It draws the city noise and smog from my body.

Jason pulls the shifter into gear. “I think you’ll like it up here just fine,” he says as I stretch my arm out the open window to grasp a fistful of air. “Once you get those wheels off that damn suitcase.”

I bite the side of my cheek to hide my chuckle. Damn suitcase, indeed.