Guilt soured Eli’s throat. “Yessir.” He stepped in front of his mother and sister, but couldn’t stop Darl from joining him. He was secretly grateful, but pushed her behind him, too. She, Mama and Bell pressed against his back, holding onto each other, and to him.
Pa faced the chief. “We’re leavin’. I’m not waitin’ for Miz Samples to fire me.”
Chief Lowden sighed heavily. Behind him, Officer Canton stood with his feet apart and his hand still on the butt of his gun. “Not so quick, Jasper,” the chief said. “I got to talk to you. Just be straight with me.”
“I’m an honest man.”
“Good. ’Cause I hear you had a second run-in with Clara Hardigree that night at the bar up on Doe Mountain.” Eli felt his mother’s fingers convulse in shock against his shoulder. His heart sank as the chief described every detail of the ugly scene Eli had witnessed along with Mr. Neddler. Mama made a soft sound of horror. Pa, who had his back to them, seemed to hunch his big shoulders more with every word. The chief studied his face. “Where’d you go after you drove off with Miss Hardigree following you?”
“He came straight home,” Mama called hoarsely. “He was here the rest of the night.”
Pa pivoted and looked at her with tears of love and regret in his eyes. “Annie, don’t,” he said gruffly. Then he turned back to face the chief. “My wife’s tryin’ to help, but I don’t need to cover up nothing. I’m tellin’ you the truth. I let Clara Hardigree go by me, then I drove up to Cheetawk Point and sat lookin’ at the stars and thinking things through. I come home just before dawn.”
Chief Lowden shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Jasper, but that means you’ve got no alibi. I’m sorry to put it this way, but you had time that night to kill Clara Hardigree and drive an hour to Briscoe Lake and dump her body with her car. You had time to commit murder that night, Jasper, and you had reason.”
Pa clenched his fists. “I didn’t kill Clara Hardigree and dump her in that lake. That’s crazy.”
“I hope so. But you’re gonna have to come into town with me and answer some more questions.”
“Are you arrestin’ me?”
“Now, let’s not call it that. I just want you to tell your story for the record. Just go over it a few times with some fellows from outside the county, and you give me your fingerprints, and things like that. Come on, now. Get in my car and let’s go onto town and get this over with. I’m not even sayin’ you’ll spend a night in jail, man. Just cooperate and come talk to some folks.”
Pa didn’t move a muscle. Eli’s legs went weak. He knew what Pa must be thinking. Raised with nothing, his own father killed in a quarry accident when he was a boy, hampered by something in his brain that scrambled every word he tried to read, ignored in every way except for his skill with marble, brought here as a charity case, built up, and now torn down—Pa couldn’t take anymore. To be accused of murder in front of his wife, his son, his fragile daughter, to be told that he would be taken into town in the back of a police car, where everyone could see his final shame. It was one day before Christmas Eve, and Pa’s whole lifetime of bad luck had caught up with him.
“Just go talk to the police,” Eli called. “Pa, I’ll go with you.”
His father shook his head imperceptibly. “Chief, I’ll pack up my family and be out by tonight, but I’m not going to your jail. Not even for questionin’.”
“I can’t let you go, Jasper. Get in my car, man.”
Pa turned instead and walked to the truck. Chief Lowden gaped at him. “Hold on, Jasper. You’re making me nervous, and Officer Canton doesn’t like it when I get nervous.” Canton lifted his revolver from its holster. Pa opened the truck’s driver door and reached beneath the front seat. Eli suddenly realized what Pa had put there beside the box with their money in it. No, no, don’t, Pa, don’t. Eli opened his mouth to yell the words, and Mama, knowing also, screamed.
Pa lifted a pistol from beneath the seat.
“Jasper Wade, drop that gun,” Chief Lowden called. Canton lifted his own revolver. Pa only held the gun in his palm, not pointing it, but he brought it up in the air and his hand began to shift into place around the handle and the trigger. “Get out of my yard,” Pa said. “I’m taking my family and leavin’ this town. That’s all I want.”
“Put the gun down!”
“I can’t do it.” Pa curled his finger over the trigger. Maybe he only meant to fire a shot toward heaven, just one bitter bullet in God’s direction before he laid the gun on the hood of the truck and went with the police as he’d been told to do, but he never got the chance.
Officer Canton shot him through the heart.
Chapter Nine
I lay in my bed in the dark, drugged on some kind of tranquilizers and just aware enough to hear the drifting words spoken between Swan, Chief Lowden, and our family doctor. “Doc, I swear to you I got her away from the scene as soon as I noticed her standing there,” the chief said. “She was wild. I had to drag her. You saw how she was when you got here. Just crazy hysterical.” My room was in shambles, things broken, clothes strewn. I’d smashed out panes of glass in the big window looking toward the woods. My hands were bandaged.
“I want this child kept under sedation for at least the next week,” the doctor whispered. “Possibly much longer than that.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Swan said. Her voice sounded tired.
“Miss Swan, in the past month she’s seen Preacher Al fall into the quarry, she’s lost her great-aunt, and now she’s watched a man shot to death. She’ll end up with a nervous breakdown, Miss Swan.”
“No, she’ll be the strongest soul you’ve ever met in your life. She’s already stronger than either of you can imagine.”
“She’ll be hard, Miss Swan. Not just strong. Peculiar and hard.”
“Both those traits can be an asset. The world is not particularly kind to weak women.”
The men gave her an astonished look. The doctor cleared his throat. “Be that as it may—the only way you’re going to keep her in this house right now, and keep her from hurtin’ herself—is to keep her drugged.”
After a long silence, Swan said, “Write a prescription and I’ll have it filled.”
The men left. I dimly felt Swan’s hand on my face, and opened my eyes. She sat down beside me on the bed. The rush of her fine perfume filled my mind. The scent of her perfume would make me ill, after that night. “When I was a little girl,” she said in a low voice, as if beginning a bedtime story, “I learned to cry quietly, so the men in my mother’s house couldn’t find me.”
I blinked slowly, burning inside. Cry? My grandmother had ever cried? “They were not friendly in a way a little girl would like,” Swan went on. “I taught Matilda to cry silently, as well. We had the same father, but he didn’t protect either of us. As for our mothers—Matilda’s mother worked for mine, and she was colored, of course, so she meant less than nothing to our father. She died of a disease certain working women suffered from in those times, and my mother—your Great-Grandmother Esta—was left with Matilda to raise.
“Mother debated sending her to a colored orphanage in Asheville, but I begged her not to do it, and finally, she relented. As long as you’re a good girl, I’ll let you keep her, she said, as if we were still in slave times and could own a person. In Mother’s mind, none of us were better off than slaves of some kind or other. She made her living selling women to men, after all.
“From then on, Mother told everyone Matilda was my own little colored maid, and that made her a novelty. Mother’s customers found it charming. But Matilda and I knew we were half-sisters. We knew we could only depend on each other. Together we discovered all the best hiding places in my mother’s large house. The other women could never find us.” She paused. “And neither could the men.”
Swan took one of my bandaged fists between her ha
nds. I think she assumed I was too drugged to remember anything she was telling me, but every word branded itself on my brain. “We were about five years old when Clara was born. Our father, A. A. Hardigree, was drunk at the time, and he spent that evening downstairs in the company of one of the women who worked for Mother. Matilda and I hid in a hallway armoire and peeked out at him as he staggered from the woman’s room. His clothes were half-buttoned and he stank of liquor and sweat. He was a big, handsome man, with hands like a stonecutter but so finely dressed you knew he’d never cut marble again. He owned the quarry. He’d built the town for his men to use. He ruled like a king. We watched him in terrible awe and fear. Then we heard a sound on the stair landing above us.
“My mother had managed, somehow, to make her way out of her rooms and came to the landing. She clutched the railing and looked down at him, cursing him, crying. A bloody white nightgown clung to her body. She had long brunette hair like yours and mine, and the fiercest blue eyes. She was amazing, terrifying, beautiful. ‘I just gave you a second white daughter,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’”
“He threw his head back and smiled up at her as if Clara’s birth were a joke. Sons and marble stone have value, he said. But what’s a whore’s daughter worth? Not a damn thing.” Swan traced the bandages on my hand with her fingertips. “I think that must have been the night Mother decided to save us all from the fate he intended. She decided to make something of herself, and her two daughters, and their little colored half-sister. The next summer—right in the middle of the worst drought in years—she woke us late one night and sent us out of the house—Matilda and me, carrying baby Clara—with one of her women to watch over us. The woman hurried us up the hill out of town and through the woods, but then she broke down crying—she was afraid of the dark mountain woods, and afraid of my mother, too, and so she simply left us there.
“Matilda and I huddled in the dark, holding Clara. We had no idea what was happening. The hills were mostly cleared of trees then—just acres of stumps left, ugly and barren. It was easy to see the town in that languid summer heat, watching the lightning from a dry storm play over the shacks and shanties and wooden houses that made up Burnt Stand then. I’ll never forget how suddenly the buildings went up in flames, as if a dozen fires had been set at once. The heat and smoke rose up the hills toward us, and we ran.
“There was a spring—it’s long since dried up—but it existed, then, up on Bald Stone Trace, among the rock outcroppings in the woods there. It made a wonderful little pond. Matilda and I loved it. We thought fairies lived in the water. We went to that spring and sat down in the edge, finally able to breathe. Clara was gasping. We bathed her and she was all right. I’ve never forgotten how safe and free we felt there—how important it felt to save ourselves and Clara, how proud we were. I’ve loved water ever since.
“My mother’s house was a huge wooden Victorian with a tar-paper roof, and it burned like dried cornstalks. People ran screaming, some of them on fire. We never saw our father come out. He died in Mother’s bed, people said. People said the heat lightning set the town on fire. And Mother said nothing.
“But suddenly she produced our father’s will, and she hired a lawyer from Asheville to defend it. She swore he’d left the quarry to her. She swore the will named her as a wife. And she won. So, from then on, she was Mrs. Hardigree. Everything belonged to her—the horrible ruins of the town, the quarry, his name, his money. She never looked back. And we tried not to, as well.”
Swan sighed deeply and bowed her head. “But Clara never understood what we came from. She grew up very differently from Matilda and me. She never felt real fear. She never suffered humiliation. She never understood what made us so careful, so determined to raise ourselves from our past. Mother became very busy with the business of making money off the quarry and building her marble town. She ignored Clara—let her run wild. Perhaps Mother hated her for those words our father had spoken the night she was born. I don’t know. My mother never explained very much about her thoughts. She and I were never close.”
Swan smiled thinly. “Matilda and I tried to teach Clara to be a lady, but it was hopeless. She couldn’t comprehend why we were so intent on being respected. We understood that money and power and reputation are as easily lost as won. Clara understood only that she had been born rich, beautiful, and free to do as she pleased.
“By the time we were teenagers Mother was rich enough to begin her grandest building schemes here in town. She wanted a master stonecutter to build a mansion for her—and to build fine houses in her new town, all out of marble. She put out word at all the quarries in the South until she found a man named Anthony Wade, in Tennessee. He was an incredible-looking young man, big and dark haired and handsome, poor and not well educated, but gentlemanly. He was brilliant when it came to construction and stonework. He had natural instincts for calculations and logic.” She paused. “Like Eli, he was, perhaps, a kind of genius.”
I made a low, angry mewling sound and tried to pull my hand away. She wouldn’t let me. “Listen to me, and understand,” she ordered. “Given a chance in any other place and time, he might have become a famous architect. Coming here was his chance, good or bad, to make a name for himself. There are no opportunities without sacrifices. You have to learn that.”
She shut her eyes for a moment, then went on. “Mother brought him here and quickly took a fancy to more than his work. She was growing older then—losing her fine looks but still a beautiful woman. I believe she was truly taken with him, and he was—” Swan hesitated, searching the air for words—“he was not unhappy to be favored by her charms. At least not at first. The Depression was just ending, jobs were still short, people were desperate. She owned her stonecutters. She controlled the entire town.
“She set Anthony Wade to work building this mansion, and the Stone Cottage, and the Stone Flower Garden. She filled the cottage with fine furniture and insisted he live there like a country prince. He became something of a celebrity around here. Then she set him to work building fine marble houses and public buildings in town. People were awed by his talent. They didn’t know he had other talents where my Mother was concerned. All the time, he was just a walk away, at her beck and call.”
Swan paused. “I hated Mother for the whispers that began to rise about her and Anthony Wade. And I hated Clara, who was barely past childhood but already had a bad reputation with every young man in town—except Anthony Wade, who never gave her more than a passing glance.” Swan was silent, shutting her eyes, then opening them hard and bright. “You see, he dallied with Mother out of practical necessity, but he had fallen in love with Matilda.”
“I should have seen that coming. Matilda was so confused, so hurt by her place in the world. She and I were tall, sophisticated look-alikes in so many ways, yet we were treated so differently by society. She was darker than a white person, and her hair was coarse, Negro hair. She was stunning but she couldn’t pretend to be white, and the kind of treatment she received from white men was despicable. She became very aloof and distrustful. I tried to help her, but there was little I could do to change the world in which we lived.
“I attended private college in Asheville and took her with me, regardless of the talk it caused—me bringing my maid along everywhere. We boarded with relatives of the Samples family—that’s how I met your grandfather. Matilda wasn’t allowed to attend college or go to any of the college functions with me, which was very painful for us both. She found a job as a clerk in an insurance company owned by a very prominent colored man. He sold insurance policies to colored people all over the state. Matilda didn’t love him, but she was lonely, and he was persistent. She began to see him. They were soon the crème of colored society. Everyone believed she’d marry him.
“We came home during summer vacation on the eve of my engagement to Dr. Samples. One day Mother sent us to the Stone Cottage to deliver sketches she’d dra
wn for yet another house she wanted Anthony to build in town. I never risked my reputation alone with him, so I took Matilda with me. We drove Mother’s big, flashy Ford down to that secluded place, both of us a little nervous. Anthony Wade was Mother’s hired man. We knew all that that implied.
“The most startling sight met our eyes when we arrived. He’d built a small pen beside the cottage, and in it were two tiny fawn deer. Twins. He was feeding them cow’s milk from a teat bucket, just as if they were orphaned calves. Their mother had been killed by dogs, he told us. He’d found them in the woods and was having a time trying to keep them fed and alive. He looked exhausted but wouldn’t stop tending them. We’d never seen anything as gentle as his attention to those babies. May I help you feed them? Matilda asked. She was enthralled. She rarely spoke to white men, preferring to keep her distance. But she couldn’t resist, this time.
“And as for Anthony Wade—I will never forget this—he looked at her as if she were a princess who had deigned to speak to him. Once a lady like you touches them, he said, they’ll want to live for sure. Matilda put her hand to her heart as if to mark the spot where he’d just taken it. From then on she went there every day to help him feed the fawns. I saw her fall in love with him that day, and him with her.”
Swan sighed deeply. “Of course it was such a problem—a white man and a colored woman. I begged her to stay away from him, but it was useless. He was just as desperate to be with her as she with him. They even talked of marriage—of running away together, somewhere, where such a thing might be legal.” Swan hesitated, and a gritted tone came into her voice. “I knew the outcome would be disaster. I should have known Clara would provoke it.
“Clara discovered them together at the cottage. She was sixteen years old, childish and viciously jealous. She told Mother about Anthony and Matilda—and then she told everyone. The whole town soon knew that Anthony Wade had been caught with Esta Hardigree’s colored maid. Mother became murderous. She went to Preacher Al—who was no preacher then, but a big thug of a stonecutter—and paid him to take some men down the cottage and beat Anthony to death. Matilda heard what she intended and sent Carl McCarl to stop them in the midst of the terrible brutality.