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In the winter, when Father built a fire, he began with wood shavings as transparent as shrimp shells and coaxed it toward its crackling glory, laying the firewood with its veins exposed to the rising flames. I would inhale the aroma, close my eyes, and think that smoking wood was the darkest perfume on earth. In his workshop Father had built us three perfectly proportioned desktops that we could lay across the arms of our leather chairs. I could do my homework on mine, and in front of the fireplace Mother could catch up on her correspondence and Father could read his scientific journals and take copious notes. The fire itself made an amazing noise and Father kept it well tended until it was time for bed.
One late winter night, the phone rang. Father answered it and talked quietly into the receiver. After hanging up, he said to me, “That was Sheba. Go across the street and check on Trevor. He’s really upset about something.”
I took my jacket out of the closet by the front door and went out into the cold Charleston air. The smell of smoke from the chimney of our house was stronger than either the rivers or the marshes and made the airwaves above the neighborhood as dark-scented and fragrant as a night garden. I could hear Trevor sobbing while he sat on the first step of the veranda as I approached. Sheba was holding him tightly. I climbed the stairs and sat on the other side of my sobbing friend. I grabbed his hand and he squeezed it as I asked Sheba, “Lovers’ quarrel?”
“Worse than that,” Sheba said. “Cry it out, darling. Cry as much as you need to.”
When she ran into the house to get her brother a glass of water, I put my arms around him until Sheba returned. The water helped, but it was several minutes before he could speak, and his whole body trembled. Finally he said, “A month ago, Niles and I were nominated for membership into a fraternity. Guys from high schools all around Charleston, public and private, try to get into it. It’s a big honor.”
“You never said a word to me,” Sheba said.
“They swore us to secrecy. The organization began in the 1820s.”
“The Middleton Assembly?” I guessed.
“How did you know that?” Trevor asked.
“Mother has long suspected it’s been a presence at the high schools in town, even Peninsula, but she’s never had any proof.”
“Chad Rutledge nominated us, and tonight the induction ceremony took place. I was excited. Niles couldn’t believe his good luck. He and I were both amazed that this honor had come to us after we’d had such shitty lives.”
“Why do I think things went badly?” Sheba said.
Trevor continued. “They took us to a place on Meeting Street, some Confederate hall or something. There were about a hundred guys our age there. They were dressed in tuxedos and wore black masks. They looked like fucking extras in a Lone Ranger movie. All were silent as the inductees were led in to a pimply-faced guy at the desk. There were eight inductees. The first six were approved with no problems. The assembled members voted aye, with their thumbs raised. Their qualifications were impeccable. The usual Charleston bullshit: the Prioleaus, the Ravenels, the Gaillards, the Warleys. The first six were related to everybody, and it was a fucking cakewalk. Then the gears shifted and the fun began.”
“Where was Chad?” I asked, my voice cold.
“I guess he was in the crowd,” Trevor said. “I never saw him. He may not have been there at all.”
“Oh, he was there,” I said. “Go on, Trevor.”
“Well, they get to me. I’m thinking I’m about to be inducted into an old part of Charleston history and I was caught up in this sense of brotherhood that was completely unfamiliar to me. Then the guy at the desk said, ‘Mr. Trevor Poe is the first openly homosexual to be nominated for membership. His mother is a common drunk, his sister is a common whore, and he has no family that we can find. How does the assembly vote on the known faggot, Trevor Poe?’ A thunderous nay went up from the membership, all thumbs pointing down. Then they went to work on poor Niles.”
“At least they got the part about your sister right.” Sheba trembled with a rage she could barely contain.
“That’s not true, Sheba,” I said. “Don’t say things like that.”
“The pimply-faced guy at the desk—God, he was an ugly fuck!—read from a piece of paper, in this awful, serious drone: ‘Niles Whitehead has spent his life going from orphanage to orphanage looking for his mother, Bright Whitehead, and his grandmother, Ola Whitehead. But in our research we found obituary notices for both of them in the Chimney Rock Times. Mr. Whitehead evidently does not know the name of his actual father. He was born in a shack in the Blue Ridge Mountains. At Peninsula High School, he has earned the nickname of “the mountain nigger.” How does the assembly vote on the mountain nigger, Niles Whitehead?’ Again, the roar of nay and the thumbs pointing down. Niles and I were led out of the hall by four guys who took us out to Meeting Street like we were the morning trash and left us there, too stunned to speak.”
“Where’s Niles now?” I asked.
“I fell apart and started to walk home, but when I looked around for Niles, he was gone. My crying may have upset him as much as the ceremony itself.”
“No,” I said. “They told Niles something he didn’t know. Starla and Niles have always kept going because they believed their grandmother and mother were still alive. Do you know Niles was born when his mother was only thirteen years old? His grandmother was twenty-seven when Niles came into the world. Those bastards killed something in Niles when they announced those women were dead.”
“I’m going to ask Chad Rutledge to fuck me,” Sheba said. “Then I’m going to chop his dick off with garden shears.”
Father walked onto our front porch and yelled from beneath the towering columns of our two magnolia trees, “Everything okay, kids?”
“Things are awful,” I shouted back. “Could you come over here?”
Father sprinted across the street. With rare economy, I sketched out the events of the night. I could see his anger as the lines in his forehead deepened. “Come over to the house and sit by the fire. I need to make some phone calls,” he said.
I sat by the fire with the exhausted twins and it moved me that they held hands as they watched the flames. When Father came in to stoke the fire, he brought them each a snifter of Cognac to calm their nerves.
“It’s been a rough night, Trevor,” Father said. “But it’s going to be a rougher morning for Chad Rutledge. Here’s a promise to you: Chad’s going to have no trouble with constipation for the next couple of weeks. I’m going to chew His Highness a new asshole. I think his principal is going to chew him a matching one on his other cheek.”
Sheba took a sip of Cognac, then said to the fire, “I’ve never felt safe in my whole life, but I feel safe in this house.”
Hearing a noise, I went to the front door. Looking through the curtains, I saw the solemn face of Fraser Rutledge through the pane. When I opened the door, she rushed in and ran straight to Trevor, who stood to meet her. Trevor looked like a toy when Fraser lifted him off his feet to hug him. He looked like a fragile, harmless invertebrate.
Fraser cried, “I just slapped the living hell out of my brother. When I heard what those guys did to you and Niles, I went crazy. I said I was sorry that I had a drop of Rutledge blood, then I spit in Chad’s face.”
“So Chad was a part of this?” I asked.
“I heard Chad and my father laughing so hard it brought me downstairs. Chad was telling our father what happened tonight at the Middle-ton Assembly. Something in me died listening to it, Trevor. Sheba and Leo, you’ve got to believe me. Chad said he did it for the family name. No Rutledge was going to marry a mountain nigger.”
“Why’d they do it to Trevor?” I asked.
“Trevor was thrown in as a plum. He was dessert. Also, it set Niles up good. He wouldn’t suspect anything because he and Trevor were being inducted together.”
She threw a mask at me, and I caught it in surprise. “There’s a souvenir from Chad’s big nig
ht. He just humiliated the only boyfriend his ugly sister ever had.”
“You’re not ugly, doll baby,” Sheba said, taking Fraser into her own sweet embrace. “Knock that word out of your vocabulary. Hey, Leo, do you get a hard-on when you think about Fraser?”
“Every night.”
“Fraser brings out the half-tenth of the one percent of me that’s straight,” Trevor said.
As we heard the sound of Fraser’s laughter again, there was another knock at the front door. On my way to the door, I said over my shoulder, “Let me know if you’re ever going to join a club again, Trevor. This is beginning to feel like a house party.”
Under the outside lights, Starla cast a large shadow across the yard. I hugged her, led her to the fire, and she went over to kiss Trevor on the cheek. As Father came back into the room, Starla announced, “Niles called me from a truck stop on this side of Columbia. He told me to tell all of you thanks and good-bye.”
“Did he tell you where he’s going?” Father asked.
“No,” Starla said. “But he didn’t have to. I know where he’s going: he’s headed for North Carolina. The boy’s going home, to the house where we were born.”
“Do you know where that house is?” he asked.
“It’s twenty miles from some big rock,” Starla said. “I was a little bitty kid when they came to take Niles and me away.”
“Chimney Rock?” Father asked.
“That’s the one,” Starla said. “How’d you know?”
“Leo,” Father said, “a field trip to the mountains tomorrow. You’re going to bring Niles back.”
“I’ll walk to Chimney Rock if you don’t take me,” Fraser said.
“I’m a runaway,” Starla said.
“We want to come too,” said Trevor and Sheba.
Father shook his head. “Too many,” he said. “Let’s limit it to Starla and Fraser. Take your mother’s Buick, Leo. I’ll call your substitute, Bernie, to do the paper route. You sure you can find him, Starla?”
“Pretty sure,” she said.
“I’ll call Polycarp,” he told her. “You and Fraser, go to the guest bedroom, and I’ll call your parents, Fraser, tell them you’re okay. Now, let’s break this up. Get some sleep. We’re going to bring that boy back where he belongs.”
“He’s going to where he belongs, Mr. King,” Starla said.
My Charleston-loving father just smiled. “Charleston’s in Niles’s blood now,” he said. “He’s been home a long time. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
At six in the morning, I eased Mother’s car out of the driveway and made my way through the waking city’s dark streets until I mounted the ramp that took me to I-26, where I gassed the pedal and headed west through the heart of South Carolina. Starla sat with me in the front seat, sleeping as we passed Summerville. The sun began to rise out of the sea behind us. In the backseat, Fraser slept on one of the pillows Father had provided, along with a cooler of sandwiches, deviled eggs, a baked ham wrapped in aluminum foil, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies. He handed me two crisp hundred-dollar bills before I left the house, in addition to my shotgun with a new box of shells.
“For emergencies,” Father had said to me. “I packed your fishing rod and gear.”
“We’ll be back by Sunday,” I said. “Whether we find Niles or not. If we don’t find him, I don’t know if Starla will come back or not.”
“She won’t,” Father said.
Outside of Columbia, I pulled the car into a gas station and announced a pit stop. My fellow travelers stumbled out and stretched their limbs in the cold sunlight. I studied a map of the Carolinas and compared it with the one Father had traced with a yellow marker that guided me through a maze of backwoods that would begin our climb into the North Carolina mountains. He had circled a blue smudge of a place called Lake Lure, which seemed to be the entryway to Chimney Rock. Once I hit Chimney Rock, Father had warned me, then I’d enter the land of pure detective work. We’d have to spread out to ask questions of the mountain people, who were noted for their ambiguity and their complete distrust of strangers. Seeing a look of distress cross my face, Father reminded me that Starla was returning to her native land and would be back among her own people.
After leaving Spartanburg, we entered into that haunted country that always represented the real South to me, the God-fearing truck stops and the small whitewashed churches that worshipped a fiercer Christ than I did. We had entered the kingdom of snake handlers and clay eaters and moonshiners, where the farmland itself was stringy, stone-pocked, and unforgiving. We passed through Lake Lure just before noontime, and the tension in the car mounted as we went over the game plan we had devised in ignorance of the terrain and the mumbling people of few words whom we were certain to encounter.
“What’re the mountain folk like?” I asked Starla.
“Like everyone else,” Starla said. “A lot nicer than Charleston people.”
“I resent that,” Fraser said. “Charleston’s famous for its civility.”
“How do you think Trevor and Niles liked Charleston’s famous civility last night?”
“It’s a tradition,” Fraser said, looking straight ahead. “There are always two guys who are picked because they won’t make it. It’s even written into the by-laws of the Middleton Assembly. Chad said it would be the most boring ceremony in the world if not for the eviction of the unfit.”
“It was so thoughtful of Chad to let Trevor and Niles share that experience,” Starla said. “Chad’s cute to be such an asshole. I like for God to mark assholes. You know, make them ugly as sin, their meanness written all over their face. I thought Wormy was like that, but hell, I like him better than Chad.”
“White trash charm,” Fraser said.
Starla fired back, “Niles and I are a lot lower than white trash, Fraser. For us, white trash is a step up.”
“You might be,” Fraser said, “but not Niles. He has some pride, at least.”
I heard a small noise like a cricket turning over on its wings in a bait bucket. I looked over and saw a glitter of metal in Starla’s hand. She held the knife up for Fraser to see.
“Jesus, Starla,” I breathed.
She told Fraser levelly, “I’ve thought about cutting your throat all morning because of what your brother did to Niles. So drop the lectures about pride, you Charleston bitch. You better think twice before you fuck with a mountain girl.”
I steered the car to a screeching halt on a pullover designed to let faster traffic pass and yelled at the girls, “The purpose of this trip is to bring Niles back. I don’t want to hear another word about the debutante-versus-the-mountain-girl shit, or you can both get out. Now, give me that goddamn switchblade, Starla.”
She folded the knife and handed it over to me. I jammed it in my pocket, then eased the car back out onto the road. When we passed over a bridge, I threw the knife into a creek.
“There’s Chimney Rock.” I pointed to a towering outcropping that looked capricious and out of place, as though an imbecilic creator had fashioned it when he tired of making stars. The town of Chimney Rock was a place to buy a Cherokee tomahawk, an Indian headdress, a leather bullwhip, or jars of honey taken from beehives in mountain laurel country. Without tourism, Chimney Rock would be a lonesome stretch of mountain road beside the boulder-strewn Broad River. Several of the stores were closed for the winter, but many were open, trying to lure wayward travelers like us as they climbed the mountains on the way to Asheville. There were storefronts on both sides of the street, and all looked as though they were selling duplicates of the same merchandise. I dropped Starla and Fraser off in front of one, and they scrambled out like beagles as they went door to door asking for any information about the Whitehead family.
On the other side of town, I parked the car and went into a barbershop. As the barber trimmed my hair, I asked about the Whitehead family. Though the name was familiar to him, he wasn’t sure if he had ever actually met a Whitehead, but he had certainly heard the legend
s; they were mountain people who had a reputation for being disputatious and stubborn, and they had a particular antipathy toward officers of the law. He thought they were part Cherokee, and there was nothing in the physiognomies of Niles or Starla to disprove that theory. But he was fairly certain they had disappeared from the area, probably trickling down to Charlotte to look for work. Though he said there were a lot of hard-up mountaineers, it was hard to find a low-down one, and that’s where you had to look to flush out the Whiteheads.
I went to look for my search party when I spotted Starla and Fraser racing across the street in my direction. “The lady in that souvenir shop made a phone call, and I got me a third cousin once removed who’s coming down to see us,” Starla told me, breathless.
Later, as a pickup truck drew near us, we saw it as our best chance to make any connection with Niles. The man wore a strange fedora and overalls, and he studied us before he spoke. Then he spoke only to Starla. “You’re the Whitehead,” he said, then gave me and Fraser a look of disapproval. “Who’re they?” he asked her.
“I brought them with me,” Starla said. “We’re in this together. Do you know where my family lived?”
“Back there.” He pointed behind him with his thumb. “Way up in the hills. You can’t get there now.”
“Why not?” Starla asked. “I want to see the place where I grew up with my brother.”