“It’s a dirt road. Goes near straight up. Scary at times. I only been there once. There was a rock slide a couple of years ago during a storm. No one’s seen those houses since.”
“How do we get there?” Starla insisted.
“Take the Asheville Highway. You’re on it,” he said. “Start climbing. The Broad River’s on the left. When a trout stream enters the Broad, look for a dirt road leading up the mountain. The angle’s steep. Be careful. Drive to the rock slide. You’ll have to climb over that, a mile to the houses. It used to be called Whitehead Road.”
“Thanks, cousin,” Starla said.
“Anything for family,” he said, then he touched his hat in a fine salute and drove off.
I’ve always admired people who have the ability to give accurate directions, and their tribe is small. Starla’s third cousin once removed provided directions so accurate it was like he had drawn a map. We began the steep incline up the mountains as soon as we left the city limits of Chimney Rock, and soon were struggling in a land of hairpin turns as we made our way through a rain forest while the sun began its decline. I was driving as fast as I could, trying to make it to the Whitehead compound before dark, the Buick climbing and groaning its way upward, until Starla shrieked when she saw the trout stream cascading into the Broad River. We had entered a land of mountain laurel and waterfalls with veils of milk-fed foam careening off house-sized boulders.
I turned off onto a road that looked unfinished. I slammed the car into second gear as we wove our way to an uncertain finish. As we climbed, we left the trout stream below us, one hundred feet, then a thousand, and the road grew more perilous. Then we started back down toward the stream, with the car so close to the edge that I laughed when I looked into the rearview mirror and saw that Fraser had her eyes tightly closed. “I never liked Niles this much,” I said.
I slammed on the brakes when I reached the rock slide that caught me by surprise, then maneuvered the car as we drew close to the river again. The severe cave-in looked as though the entire mountain had exercised a flanking movement to the left.
I put the gear shift in park. “Let’s get to that stream and walk to those houses. They’ve got to be close by. Fraser, grab the fishing pole. I’ll get the food.”
In the last light, I saw an ancient path or deer run going down to the stream, and I headed down it, shouldering the cooler. When I reached the water’s edge, I followed it toward its source. As it grew darker, I heard Starla say these glorious words: “I smell a wood fire.”
We hurried into the setting sun until we saw the silhouettes of four unpainted shotgun houses on stilts built over the stream. We walked toward the wreckage of those abandoned homes, and followed the smell of that Blue Ridge smoke to the last house. I opened the door and we walked into a house undermined by spores and mildew and lack of attention. A lone man sat by the fire.
“Niles?” Starla said.
“What took you so long?” he asked.
It was the saddest voice I ever heard.
In front of a stone fireplace, we sat by a towering fire, eating sandwiches and listening to the impatient movement of the stream beneath us. Niles ate three sandwiches in a row without uttering a word. It occurred to me that he had not eaten a thing since he was tossed out of his induction ceremony. Fraser took up a position near him but seemed almost afraid to touch him. The fire, the cold, the dampness of this imperiled house, lent a sense of foreboding among us as we waited for Niles to break his eerie silence. He rose from the floor and threw on a couple of logs he had collected in the surrounding forest. The fire rose higher, crackling into sudden light as the wood surrendered to the devouring cunning of flames. Silence itself began to seem like a series of partitions driving us even farther apart from one another.
Finally, it was Fraser who broke all the treaties that made us silent and unforthcoming. “So this is where you and Starla grew up?”
“I was born here, but we grew up in the first house you passed,” Niles said. “It doesn’t have a floor.”
Fraser looked around in a gloom so impenetrable the fire had little effect on it. “It’s nice. I really like it.”
Starla and I cracked up in unguarded laughter. There was even a thin smile that crossed Niles’s clouded face.
This was not the effect Fraser had planned on, and in her nervousness she kept removing a sapphire ring from her right hand, then putting it back on again. “What I meant was,” she said, “that didn’t come out right. I was just thinking—talk about exotic. Talk about waterfront property.”
And again there was convulsive laughter from Starla and me above the trout stream as the fire made grotesque, jerking shadows on the wall, and the evening fell deeper into discomfort and incoherence. My irritation with Niles was growing, though. I had always thought the quiet man was the most overrated form of human life. “When does the welcome wagon arrive?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything else.
“Why’d you come?” Niles finally said.
I said, “Because we heard it was a great time to visit the mountains. Chance of snow. Luxury accommodations. Room service. Feather beds. Hot showers. A sauna. Great talks with old friends.”
“We want you to come back, Niles,” Fraser said. “We’re not complete without you.”
“Your family can always get me again,” Niles said to her, “because I love you.”
Taking her cue, Fraser pulled Niles into her arms and stroked his hair with a delicacy that moved me. A gust of wind blew through some broken panes of glass, moving us all closer to the fire. I threw on some more wood.
“I won’t let them touch you again, Niles, I swear,” Fraser said. “I slapped the shit out of Chad when he came home with his little story. My parents were upset when they saw me fall apart. Charleston society is so cruel, yet none of them can see it. The Middleton Assembly almost folded twenty years ago. The ceremony was so boring, and they were losing membership. One year, only nine members showed up for the induction ceremony. So someone came up with the idea that two boys be nominated as jokes. My parents have never been happy that we’re dating, Niles. You’ve always known that. By leaving Charleston, you played right into their hands.”
“That’s all very beautiful and touching,” Starla said, “but I’ve got to pee.”
“Use the outhouse across the road from the second house,” Niles said. “There’s some newspaper in there.”
“I want to pee, not read,” she said.
“You’ve been gone from the mountains too long,” Niles said. “C’mon. I’ll show you the way.”
When Niles returned with Starla, Fraser and I told him everything that had happened since his and Trevor’s humiliation. He laughed at our story about the cousin in the pickup truck. One memory sparked another until Niles was taken up by a flood of them. Soon, it was only Niles’s voice that was heard in that dilapidated house. I think our arrival had shaken something loose in him, had touched him in a long-buried place, so he decided to open up in all the protection that fire and cold and darkness could provide when a soul has a butterfly-like moment and decides to soar toward the high, urgent places. That night, his soul was a living thing born by firelight. He told us his history, one he had never told even Starla.
He was born in the house we were now in; his thirteen-year-old mother, whose name was Bright, had walked over to her mother’s house at noon when her water broke. Bright’s husband, a solid, big-chested guy, worked as a janitor in an insane asylum in Asheville, and didn’t get home very often. He was Bright’s third cousin from the Asheville Whiteheads. They named Niles after the river in the Bible after hearing the preacher mention it in church, although he did not know why they made it plural. When Starla came a year later, they named her after the star that shown over the stable in Bethlehem.
His grandmother was twenty-seven when Niles was born, and she was a midwife. Niles’s two uncles lived in the middle houses, both sullen, hardworking men. The sons of Niles’s grandfather, Pickerill, mad
e the best moonshine in that part of North Carolina, and had a prison record to back it up. Niles’s mother was a sweet woman who had cried when Starla was born because now she had a perfect set of dolls to play with, a boy and a girl, never having had a doll to play with in her childhood. Niles and Starla agreed that their mother had adored them and spoiled them, as did their grandmother. No one in the family could read or write, but they spent the evenings entertaining one another with tall tales of hunting and mayhem and family feuds. Uncle Fordham played the banjo, and they would sing the old church songs as well as the mountain songs passed down for generations, songs that brought news of life’s hardships.
Niles had little memory of his father, none of it good. He often arrived drunk on his rare visits to the creek. By the way, Niles said, its official name was Whitehead Creek, and he guaranteed he would catch us all a trout for breakfast.
“If we’re still alive,” Fraser said, as we huddled in a tight circle. I fed the fire with more wood.
Their father would cuff their mother around, bringing the menfolk into the mix to defend her. Niles recalled the arguments along the creek as red-hot and vile. Usually, his father would stay the weekend, then hitch a ride back to Asheville. His visits became less frequent, which was fine by him and Starla. His mother, Bright, raised enough honeybees to support herself, and jars of her honey sold in stores as far away as Raleigh. There were two cows that provided butter, milk, and cheese, and they raised pigs that they slaughtered for their meat. Their grandmother was a marvelous cook. On Sunday, they would take a mule, hitch it to a wagon, and ride two miles down to Chimney Rock to the Church of God. After the service, there was a luncheon in the churchyard, which provided their social life.
“As kids, you don’t know if you’re happy or not,” Niles told us. “Starla and I were just in the business of being kids, but strong in the knowledge that we were cherished and loved and well fed. Mama was sure that we’d be the first kids in the family to get an education. It was a bitter blow to lose her, but we’ve had to wake up to that bitterness for more years than anyone should count. It’s when you fall in love with your life that some demon force decides to take it all away.”
His father returned from the city again. Niles did not know his first name because he and Starla called him Daddy and his mama called him sweetheart and those kinds of names. He brought papers written up by his lawyer to divorce his wife. He wanted Bright to put an X on the paper, so he could go ahead and marry another woman. She went crazy and ran to her own mama’s house and got her daddy’s shotgun out of his closet, and was heading back to her house when she spotted her husband running as fast as he could, being chased and bitten by the pack of dogs that served as an alarm system for strangers coming up the road. Because she was afraid of hitting the dogs, she unloaded the shotgun into the creek just to scare the sorry son of a bitch and make him think twice about bothering her again. But Bright took it harder than she let on, which Niles knew in his heart, though she never uttered a word against his daddy. That was not part of the Whitehead code.
Several months later, their father died in Asheville. The family preacher had received a call from Asheville, so he drove his car up to the White-head compound to bring the grim news. His mama let out a howl, and the Reverend Grubb offered to drive the family to the funeral, which was gratefully accepted.
“We were in our Sunday finest when we waited for the preacher on the Asheville Highway to pick us up,” Niles told us. His grandmother was the only adult to accompany her daughter to the funeral, since the menfolk had reached the conclusion that the husband was worth less than their egg-sucking dog with mange. On the ride to Asheville, Starla and Niles both got sick on the curves.
The church was too fancy for their mama’s country taste. Bright had never met a Presbyterian. Though hesitating, she and her mother both drew shaky Xs in the guest book, then went up to view the body.
It was hard for Niles to tell the rest of this story. He tended to the fire before he continued.
His mama began wailing and keening in the ancient way—decidedly not in the Asheville Presbyterian way. People were looking at Niles’s family group like they were from outer space. A woman approached Bright when she started planting kisses on her dead husband’s face. In a curt tone, she asked Niles’s mama, what did she think she was doing? Bright turned on the woman and screamed out so everyone in the church could hear: “I’m crying for the death of my husband here, the father of my two children. That okay, city girl?” Niles appreciated the danger of Bright’s outburst when he saw a look of horror pass over the Reverend Grubb’s face as he conferred with an usher. Before the Reverend Grubb could get back to Niles’s mother, another woman approached her and said, “I was married to that man in this same church eighteen years ago. Those are my three sons in the front row. We ask that you leave this house of worship. You have no place here.”
“Reverend Clyde Grubb married me to this dead man under the sight of God and in the presence of my family six years ago when I was pregnant with my son, Niles,” Bright responded. “And this here is his daughter, Starla. So don’t you go telling me I ain’t got a place here. I’m his lawful wedded wife.”
Then Mrs. Asheville Whitehead made a serious mistake when she said to the head usher, “Throw her out of here. Make as little noise as possible.” Though Asheville was in the mountains, the city had long ago lost its deep knowledge about the psychology of mountain women. Pride grows as dense as the laurel in the high mountains, which Mrs. Fancy-pants Asheville learned the hard way when Niles’s distraught mother took out her hunting knife and put it into her rival’s retreating back. It made a terrible, but not fatal, wound. Then Niles watched helplessly as two ushers grabbed his mama from behind. Soon, one of the ushers was on the ground with his grandmother’s hunting knife protruding out of his shoulder. Bedlam was set loose in that very proper church.
“We never saw our mama again. We never saw Meemaw either. That night we began our lifelong tour of orphanages. Starla and I always thought they were going to find us. We heard they both went to prison. We knew that when they got out, they wouldn’t quit until they found us. That dream kept us going for all these years. That dream and nothing else,” Niles said.
“I’ve still got that dream,” Starla said. “I need them to hold me again.”
“I’ll show you their graves tomorrow,” Niles said. “They’re in the family plot up the hill a ways.”
The wail that echoed through that house was mountain born. It told of mountain sorrow with an awesome eloquence, and it rose out of Starla like a storm assaulting her heart. We took turns comforting her, but some wounds are not healable, and some hurts are born with inhuman powers of endurance. Fraser took Niles into her arms that night and wouldn’t let him go.
Before we left the next morning, we visited the graveyard and said prayers over the bodies of the two women who had grown in my mind until I felt I had approached the tomb of goddesses.
Niles and Starla let us take over the details after that. I drove them to a restaurant in Lake Lure and told everybody to order everything. From the restaurant, I called my parents with the good news that we were heading back to Charleston with Niles. Mother assured me that Niles was cleared with the orphanage, his high school, and the police force. There would be no repercussions for his running off. She had suspended Chad Rutledge from school for a week and had almost come to blows with Chad’s parents in her office. Drive safely and great job, son, they both said. I felt giddy and coddled by their love. By a long shot, I had the best parents of anybody riding in my car.
Later, Niles would reveal something to me that he had left out of his story. After a fruitless search for her children when she was released from prison, his mama hanged herself from a tree not far from the house we had stayed in the night before. After her funeral, his grandmother visited her daughter’s fresh grave and put a bullet through her own head. Niles thought Starla was too fragile to take in that horrifying tale. I agreed, and nev
er revealed that part of her mama’s story to her, even after we married and began our disastrous life together.
Because of what happened to Starla, it still fills me with dread and astonishment that I never told her the details of her mother’s death.
CHAPTER 23 Fog and Mist
One night soon after we returned from the mountains, the doorbell rang. Father had been helping Ike Jefferson with his trigonometry and Betty Roberts with her physics homework, and got up to answer the door. At the piano, Trevor was playing Schubert because he said it was “a Schubert kind of night,” one of those lines that we had come to expect from Trevor, and that we’d repeat to one another for the rest of our lives. Working side by side at two sewing machines, Sheba and I were concentrating on the prom dresses we were making for Betty and Starla, who interrupted their homework every once in a while to let Sheba measure them with a tape measure. The dresses would be lovely—“Showstoppers,” Sheba declared with confidence. Niles was studying in silence at my desk in the bedroom. The music had an ache to it, bringing with it all the accounts of melancholy you would ever need.
Father opened the door. Chad Rutledge stood in the light, flanked by his sister and his girlfriend. Sheba and I were concentrating and didn’t look up, but we got distracted when the music stopped with unnatural abruptness. Chad, Molly, and Fraser stepped into the room just as Mother emerged from her bedroom at the back of the house. An awkward silence settled on us all. Niles, sensing the mood of the house, came downstairs and froze at the sight of Chad.
Mother said, “I asked Chad and the girls to drop by. Everyone here has quit talking to Chad since you got back from the mountains. At school, Chad is isolated and shunned by his fellow students. He did something stupid, something almost unforgivable. But there isn’t any crime that lies beyond forgiveness. That’s what literature teaches us, as does art and religion. Chad?”