Orphans: A Blue House, #1

By DC BENVOLIO

What sorts of homes do we make for ourselves, our families?

What is a family, anyway?

 

From the gold mining towns of old California to a present-day reality imbued with magic, A BLUE HOUSE is a journey along colorful and surprising paths featuring mythical creatures, levitating singers, gender-bending hedonists, reincarnated lovers, wise trees, and a sentient Victorian house. It is a story of friendship, love, possessiveness, greed and loyalty, of connections forged, lost and rediscovered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DC BENVOLIO
• Release date: Apr 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215244340

DC BENVOLIO

DC Benvolio lives in the Pacific Northwest with Lee Widener, Rosie the Cat, and Rossi, the world's cutest dog.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Long ago in the pacific waters of San Alvaro Bay lived many strange and magical creatures. One day a sea fairy helped a mermaid out of a jam involving a fishing net, and the grateful mermaid granted the fairy three wishes. You'd think the sea fairy would be the one handing out wishes, but this is San Alvaro we're talking about.

The fairy, who lived in a conch shell, complained, All this salt water is ruining my complexion. Take me someplace dry.

Is that your first wish? asked the mermaid.

You betcha, said the fairy.

I know just the place, said the mermaid. My ex-boyfriend used to live there. He was a human. By Neptune's trident, he was the most –

I don't need your life story, interrupted the fairy. Just get me out of here.

The mermaid stuck a couple fingers in her mouth and whistled. A seagull flew down, picked up the conch shell, and carried it one hundred miles inland to a dry windswept valley in the California foothills. The seagull glided over cottonwoods, circled down, and dropped the shell on a dustheap.

Now what am I supposed to do? whined the fairy.

You asked for it, kid, said the seagull, flying away.

The sea fairy thrived in this new dry climate, but he grew lonely.

Oh how I'd love somebody to love, yeah, he sang.

Careful what you wish for, warned a passing cockroach. Love your singing, by the way,

Poor people lived near the dustheap. They combed it daily, searching for anything that might be useful or of value. A young man found the conch shell. Instead of selling it, he brought it home to his child as a plaything.

Oh great. Humans, muttered the fairy.

But he and the child hit it off right away. They laughed at each other's jokes. Made up stories together. Sang duets. 

One day, the child got sick. There was no money for a doctor. Fever set in. Things were not looking good.

The sea fairy looked at the fading light in the child's dark eyes.

What would you most like to be? asked the fairy.

Alive, said the child. Papa's got no one except me.

I'm afraid that's not in the cards, said the fairy.

Why not be a song? said a mountain plover who had been eavesdropping from the window. That way, you'll live forever.

The child looked hopeful. Can you make that happen?

The fairy took a deep breath. Sure, kid. All you have to do is make a wish.

No fair giving wishes away, cried the mermaid from the ocean depths.

The child's wish came true. The sea fairy blew the child a final kiss. Then he folded himself into the nacreous lining of the conch shell forever.

The grieving young father buried the shell alongside his child. 

Time passed.

Meanwhile, back in the bay, people gathered other shells, and coral, refuse from the sea, or so they thought. Few imagined the truth of what they took.

Neptune's salty and capricious minions. The souls of young sailors parted too soon from lovers, now married to driftwood. Dark undinal sorrows haunting nautilus chambers. Oysters enchanted by the moon.

It was all sold in heaps and made into lime, and the lime was made into houses.

The houses became a village.

The village became the city of San Alvaro.

CHAPTER ONE:

TWO LITTLE GIRLS IN A GARDEN

Don't you just love thunderstorms? said Violet.

It was a late spring day and the wind was rising. Clabbered storm clouds roiled and rumbled from the eastern skies over the mining camps. A low bellow of thunder warned creatures that lived underground.

If it rains we won't have to weed anymore today, grinned Pearlie. Her real name was Margaret, but nobody but the Sisters called her that.

Two girls, one tiny with long black braids and large black eyes, one tall and lanky, beak-nosed and mouse-haired, were weeding a vegetable garden and taking their time about it. They knew the weeds would all return in a day or two. Practically nothing else grew out of the earth.

The land had been fertile once. Long before the arrival of missionaries, the land had been owned and cultivated by Californios. One day a farmer was startled when his plow blade turned up a small skeleton. Tucked in among the bones was a large, luminous conch shell. A local church consecrated and reburied the remains, but left the shell behind.

Pearlie had just dug it up. She had shoved her spade in the dirt and it hit something too hard to be a potato. Eagerly, she and Violet unearthed the shell. Violet brushed off the dirt with her handkerchief. It had spikes and spirals and curves, an infolding of smooth pink. Neither girl had ever seen a seashell apart from schoolbook illustrations. There was something miraculous about it.

Shouldn't we give it to a Sister? Violet asked.

Why should the Sisters have to know? said Pearlie. It's fun having a secret. I do wonder how it turned up here, though. So far from the sea.

They took turns holding it up to their ears and listening to the distant hollow wail within. Violet shuddered.

Pearlie, it sounds just like a Drifter!

Naw, Vi, it's a purty sound, like a song without words. The tall girl put the shell in her pocket. Seems like everyone sees more Drifters during a thunderstorm. How many you see today, Vi?

Let me think. Emmy Lou this morning, and I heard the Whistler in the woodshed. What about you, Pearl?

I believe I saw the Twin, but I was half asleep so it might've been a dream.

That's two for me and one for you. I win today.

Day's not half over, mush head.

The girls were speaking of the resident ghosts of the Little Sisters of Mercy Pioneer Orphanage, the only home they had known. The orphanage had plenty of ghosts, with more added every year. Every child who died on the premises was given a proper burial and a funeral Mass said for them. Their names, date of birth, date and cause of death were duly recorded, and that was usually the end of it. But for a few restless souls, these measures provided no balm. They lingered uneasily, lost and uncomprehending of their situation, longing for a birthright cruelly denied them. Sightings, although commonplace, were often startling. One day a Sister, lowering a bucket to the well, might glimpse a small plaintive face flickering on the water's surface. Or the act of shaking out a winter blanket might uncover a thin fluttering shadow, there and gone. Some had voices. Orphans in their beds heard little sighs in the walls, echoes of faraway sobbing. Words were indistinct, but most everyone when alone had heard a tiny voice intone Mama or Help me or, most commonly, Home. The Sisters of Mercy accepted this situation with the same resignation they used to face all circumstances of life in the diggings. It was all part of God's Great Design, although none of them could say exactly what that design was, or how ghosts figured into it. The shade of Emmy Lou inhabited a cottonwood tree; her body lay beneath its roots. The Whistler was a cheerful boy of six who called to horses. They seemed to hear him; they would swivel their ears and nicker at the sound. The Twin was a baby ghost, always seen toddling with tiny arms outstretched, silently whimpering, forever wandering in search of its spirit brother.

Violet stared at the darkening sky. I wish something could be done for them.

The Sisters say we must pray for their souls, said Pearlie dutifully, pushing down her stocking to scratch a scab on her knee. 

We do pray, so why are they still here?

The conversation was growing too somber for Pearlie. To change the mood, she said, Vi, what sort of house are you going to live in when you're a lady?

The House Game was the girls' favorite. There was an unwritten rule that you could never choose the same house twice. This was no difficulty; their young imaginations held an endless supply of dwellings to choose from.

Violet stopped tugging on a clump of cheatgrass to ponder. I'm going to have a cottage by the sea with a tower to watch the ships come in. No, a lighthouse. And if the light ever goes out, I will sing to call the ships in.

You'd have to sing awful loud, said Pearlie. I'm going to live in a castle, with the tallest staircase ever, and I'll slide down the banister every single day and nobody will stop me.

There ain't any castles in this country, Pearlie! Wait, I know... I want to live in a house that's like a dollhouse, only bigger. With... with plenty of rooms for the drifters. If they can't go to Heaven, they should at least have a nice home to haunt.

And no Gobbler to frighten them off, added Pearlie, rolling her eyes. Gobbler was Sister Obligata. Every few days she charged around the property waving a censer and bellowing prayers, believing she was shooing away the ghosts. She only succeeded in frightening the younger children and annoying everybody else.

Violet shivered.

Pearlie? I don't want to become one of them.

Pearlie seized her friend's hand, half the size of her own.

Oh Vi, you couldn't ever be. Don't you worry!

Hand in hand they knelt in the dirt. Suddenly the air flashed white as pain, and furious thunder clamored. The girls screamed, then giggled. Together they leaped up, grabbed hold of each other and spun inside the rain, shrieking. Wind whipped hair across faces. For a blissful moment they were part of the storm and the wild world, and each other.

Then a bell rang and the two girls dropped their hands and hurried to the chapel.

CHAPTER TWO:

HIS NAME IS OCTAVIAN

This one is special, said the pale woman.

The man peered doubtfully at the beet-red newborn in his wife's arms. He had long ago lost his enthusiasm for progeny.

I don't see anythin diffrent bout that one. Looks t'same as t'others to me.

The pale woman had given him eight children, all boys. Only two had survived.

He is different. I know it. He will make his mark in the world. His name is Octavian.

Octavian? Whut kind o' Christian name is that? Whut's th'matter with Ezekiel, like we fixed on?

It means the eighth, explained the pale woman. And it was the name of a great emperor of ancient Rome.

Ah, wife, her husband grumbled, you sure learned a heap o' foolishness from that high bred family of yours.

The woman's family had been titled landowners long ago in the highlands of Caledonia. It was a long and downhill road from the land of castles and argyle to this hardscrabble cabin on a desolate Midwest prairie. She looked wearily up at the man.

We've given all the others the names you chose for them. This is my last child. Let me have a say in his destiny.

The man sighed noisily. It made no difference to him, really; the child would probably die before the year was over.

Oh, fine. Call him by that handle 'n see how he likes it.

The woman gave the baby her finger. He gripped it so hard that she gasped.

Hello, Octavian, she cooed.

She didn't exactly die. The desolate endless prairie winds filled her with an immutable torpor, cooling the blood in her veins until finally she was nothing but a dense marble-white body in a rocking chair, still as a broken clock, smiling gently at the wall. She was too heavy to bury, so they left her there.

Octavian grew to be a wiry, snub-nosed, thin-lipped boy with a shock of yellow hair, hands as calloused as a grown man's, and a habitually empty belly. He had been raised mainly on root vegetables, corn mush, and the occasional squirrel. For a score of years the Lucas clan had tried their hardest to make the land yield, but nature defeated them. Season after season, extreme weather and all kinds of sickness contrived to whittle down the family until only Octavian and his brother Jebediah were left alive. Their late father and brothers remained in the cabin as ethereal beings, and their ghostly hacks, moans, and sobbing filled the room's cobwebbed corners and clogged the chimney and made the boys' hardscrabble lives even more miserable.

At the age of twelve, Octavian was already certain that he wanted a future which included: No more nights spent huddled under a threadbare blanket as the north wind's malicious breath seeped through the chinks in the wall. No more dinners of cold turnips smeared with squirrel grease and washed down with thin chicory coffee. No more dead brothers waking and shivering him in the middle of the night.

I'm sorry you all had to die, he told the ghost-infested darkness half a dozen times each day. But I'm alive and I aim to go on living.

One early spring morning, Octavian and Jeb were awakened by the sound of millions of pebbles pummeling the cabin walls. Breath misting the air, they peered out through a crack in the timber. Hailstones were scattered thick and grayish white on the hard ground, cascading off the cabin roof, spitting down on the Lucas land and its weak stalks of young corn.

Disgusted, Octavian heaved a rusty kettle at the wall.

I'll be damned if I'm gonna stay in this Godforsaken spot one more minute!

Where you gonna go, Tavy?

West, Octavian replied shortly. He rummaged around, piling odds and ends onto a blanket, tying it into a pack.

Whereabouts? El Dorado, you mean?

Octavian tightened his bootlaces. That's where all the gold is, ain't it?

You're leaving now? said Jeb plaintively. The hailstones rattled the shutters.

Why wait?

Jeb sighed. I'd better go with you, then.

The hail turned to a freezing rain. Octavian, wearing a tattered coat three sizes too big for him, stood in the doorway. His family ghosts groaned from corners and crevices, made hollow echoes in the chimney. Beside him Jeb, eyes closed, muttered a prayer. Octavian grabbed a bushel basket, ran around to the back of the cabin, and filled it with rocks. Then to Jeb's astonishment, he clambered onto the cabin roof and dumped the contents down the chimney.

Brother, what in the name of creation are you doing?

Making sure none of em can get out and follow, that's what.

Octavian clambered down and stood, hands on hips, listening. There was no sound except the wind and the slicing rain. He turned and walked briskly up the road as the cold drops hammered down. Jeb followed.

The two Lucas boys spent the next fifteen months tramping across the country, taking whatever work they could find, hitching wagon rides, scrounging hickory nuts and sour apples, sleeping in abandoned barns.

Along the way Octavian made an important discovery: Jeb was a crashing bore. Nights when it was just the two of them huddled in a haystack or camped out on a riverbed, Jeb would keep his younger sibling awake with his interminable chatter.

Gee, Tavy (he hated to be called that), the stars sure do go on and on, don't