“Carl had worked as a stonecutter since the old days in town. He had known Matilda’s mother—he was a favorite customer of hers before my father commandeered her services exclusively. I believe Carl truly loved her, and he was devoted to Matilda, as if she were his own daughter.
“Carl saved Anthony’s life, but not before the men had beaten him so badly he was ruined for life. Carl carried Anthony to a hospital over the state line in Tennessee and left him there. I paid the medical bills. No one expected Anthony to live. He did live, but he was scarred and damaged. As soon as he could walk, he disappeared.
“Mother threw Matilda out of our home and told her never to come back. I hid Matilda with friends in Asheville. I thought she’d die over losing Anthony. And worse—she was pregnant with his child. That news reached her colored beau—the insurance man—and he cut off all contact with her. Mother threatened to disinherit me if I continued to help her. It was a terrible time—and Clara gloated over it all. Wonder of wonders, I managed to keep all of this turmoil so quiet that your grandfather’s family didn’t suspect at first, but then the rumblings about my family began to reach them. I was engaged to him, by then. I knew I had to do something to save my future and Matilda’s.”
Swan was silent for a moment. I drifted in and out, the lurid, tragic story wafting through my mind, mingling with death and grief and shame and the pain I had seen in Eli as he and Annie Gwen held Jasper in their arms, covered in blood. A tapestry of unspeakable images began to wrap me in stone chains. Swan said finally, “Then Mother died unexpectedly, and that changed everything.” There was another long silence, while drugged horror crept over my brain. I couldn’t put a name to what she was hinting, just as I could only steep in a nameless understanding that Clara’s death had been no accident. “I sent Clara away to a kind of school in Illinois,” Swan went on. “Run by Catholic nuns.”
A kind of school. My head whirled. A prison.
“I made certain I inherited everything from Mother—the quarry, this house, all the money. Suddenly, any qualms the Samples family may have had—any whispers or rumors they’d heard about my family—paled in comparison to my fortune. I married your grandfather and we came back here to live. When Matilda’s daughter was born in Asheville she was as white as you or I. Katherine. She was a beauty. Dark-haired and dark-eyed—like Anthony Wade—but as pale as pink stone. Hardly a colored child.
“I brought her here and told your grandfather she was the orphan of a distant cousin of mine. We kept her to raise. Then I brought Matilda home, and I gave her a house in town and a job managing this household for me, so she was able to be with her daughter. A year later, your mother was born. Julia and Katherine—what a lovely pair they made. Matilda and I raised our daughters together, keeping our secrets from them, indulging them but training them to be ladies, to have pride. They were fine girls, smart and beautiful and strong. Katherine had no idea she was anything other than a white Hardigree. She enjoyed all the privileges that that entailed. Matilda protected her with painful pride.”
Swan hesitated. Her words were coming slower, harder. “Clara returned suddenly when Julia and Katherine were about to graduate from the Larson School in Asheville. They were both so excited about the prospects of college the next fall—they talked constantly of joining sororities, of all the wonderful young men they’d meet. Their lives were golden.
“Clara had not fared so well. She’d worked her way through a series of notorious men with money, and she’d acquired the trashy attitudes of lowlifes and gangsters. She was in her late thirties then—and she knew her appeal to that kind of man was beginning to fade. She wanted an income from me. I said No. I underestimated her vindictiveness. In revenge—” Swan’s voice slowed to a lethargic drone—“she went to Katherine and Julia and told them our family history—including the fact that Katherine was Matilda’s daughter.”
Swan stopped. I stared at her haunted expression in a hypnotic daze, my mind an open wound into which she poured one scalding secret after another. “Clara threatened to spread the word to all their school friends, to the society who had accepted them, to everyone who revered the exquisite Hardigree cousins. I was devastated, and Matilda, too. I gave Clara the money she wanted, and promised her more in the future. I bought her silence and she left, but the damage was done.
“Your mother and Katherine never recovered. They were so young, so cloistered in this pink, innocent world Matilda and I had created for them. Now they had to deal with the fact that they were the granddaughters of outcast women—and that Katherine was a mixed-race girl on top of that. Katherine was so upset, looking at Matilda, whom she’d adored as if she were family but still just a dear employee. Now she knew this was her mother—a colored woman who couldn’t stay at the finest hotels when we traveled unless I listed her as my maid—a woman who couldn’t use a public bathroom or a fountain marked for whites only. This was Katherine’s mother. This was Katherine, now.
“Both she and Julia were inconsolable. They accused us of hypocrisy, of lies, as if somehow we were to blame for the heritage from which we’d tried so hard to shield them. They were heartbroken and ashamed and thoughtlessly cruel. Both saw only one solution—to rebel bitterly against their life, here—just flailing out in anger and pain at any likely target. Katherine rejected us all and ran away. I was so afraid Julia would do the same thing—I made her a prisoner here, threatened her, had her watched, wouldn’t let her go anywhere alone. And of course, that only made her more determined to hurt me.”
Swan looked down at me with something almost like apology on her face. “She was a princess trapped in a castle, and your father must have seen it as his duty to rescue her. And she wanted to be rescued—particularly if her hero was the lowest and last man I’d pick for her. A stonecutter. She was pregnant by him—and secretly married to him—before I realized she’d outsmarted me.
“And so I, in my desperate, mistaken wisdom, tried to control her new husband with a show of generosity—the gift of the Stone Cottage, and a foreman’s job at the quarry. He was easy to persuade. But your mother hated me for manipulating him, and began to hate him for accepting it all. They were never meant to be together—he was rough and uneducated, and she quickly realized they had no future together. They fought, but she refused to leave him—just to spite me, I think. When you were born, I took you away from them. The day your mother and father died they were rushing to a court hearing in Asheville, trying to regain custody of you.” She paused. “In fighting me, they realized they were a family. But it was too late.”
Whether she was telling all this to me—a tranquilized, traumatized ten-year-old girl—as an apology, an explanation, a bizarre attempt at comfort, or all three—I now knew that my mother had not deserted me. It was the only bright thought I clung to. Swan watched me quietly. “You’ve absorbed every word,” she said. “Amazing.”
She cupped my bandaged hand a little tighter. “Now hear the rest. We found Katherine finally, in New York. She’d spent some time working for one of the civil rights organizations, and she’d met a young man doing that same work, a young colored man, and she’d told him her mother was colored, and she married him. I suppose she loved him. I don’t know. He was drafted and went to Vietnam, and he was killed there, in combat. A week later Katherine left her little girl, Karen, with a friend. And then she killed herself.
“Matilda and I went to New York, and we took Karen, and we brought Katherine’s body back here, and we buried her beside Julia, in an unmarked crypt. People don’t know it, but she’s there—in the Hardigree mausoleum. We brought Karen to be raised with you. We knew that someday we’d have to tell you and her as much of the truth as we could—when you were old enough to hear it.” Swan hesitated. “It seems that time has come.”
I moved my mouth, but no words came out. Swan put her fingers to my lips. “We made a well-intentioned mistake three years ago by seeking out Anthony’s famil
y and bringing them here. Matilda wanted to help them, but we failed. I’m very sorry. I promise you that. But I’ve told you all this because I want you to understand: I have only one true regret.” She paused. “I should have drowned Clara when she was a baby, that night at Bald Stone Trace.”
Everything she’d told me—every warped and yet desperately sad fact about her life and Matilda’s, our mothers, ourselves, Anthony Wade, Clara—all paled next to the remorseless destruction she’d forced others to endure along with her. She forced me to accept our heritage as a rite of passage, and I made peace with it the only way I could. “I hate you,” I whispered.
She looked away, then back. Her gaze went hard and dry. “If it were that easy to stop loving someone, I’d believe you.”
She left me there in the darkness, and I shut my eyes.
Eli, Mama, and Bell buried Pa in the cemetery of the same run-down Tennessee church where Anthony had been buried decades before him. It was just south of Nashville, and for the next two days after the funeral Eli drove the truck up the interstate toward anywhere—he didn’t care, and neither did Mama or Bell. At a truck-stop motel one night he said to them, “I’m goin’ to take care of us.” Bell, who had shrunk into silence for a week by then, suddenly sobbed, “Did Pa do it?” And Mama broke down crying again. “No, no, he never did, he never could.”
“I’m goin’ to take care of us,” Eli repeated in a daze. Deep in his heart he believed his father had killed Darl’s great-aunt, and he would remember the look in Darl’s eyes as Chief Lowden dragged her away, a look he interpreted as not just shame for him but shame for loving him and shock over his father’s obvious guilt. Eli’s anger and grief and vows to make something of his family would never change the rejection he believed he’d seen in her eyes.
He had lost Darl forever.
I had lost Eli. I could never go after him, never tell him the truth, never expect forgiveness. I had no right. No matter where I went or what I did with my life from that time on, no matter how I dealt with Swan and how I escaped her plans for me—which I would do—I would remain trapped in memories, my secret guilt as unchanging as our stone flowers. Some mystic instinct, memories merging with experience, began to whisper to me. My mother hadn’t deserted me. Swan had driven her away. I couldn’t get away from Swan myself yet, but I would someday.
Between a rock and a hard place, only love and defiance could survive.
When I was taken off medication, sometime in February or March I believe, I went into a small plain room upstairs at the mansion, filled with storage boxes. I dug in them until I found clothes my mother had worn as a teenager. She’d been smaller than me, so the slender tan skirt and white blouse fit even though I was younger than she’d been when she wore them. I even found a pair of her penny loafers. Swan had kept everything, trying to seal my mother’s memory away from us both. As I grew older I would understand my grandmother’s pain because I had pain of my own, but I’d never forgive her.
Even my mother’s shoes fit me. I wouldn’t follow her path, but now I knew, at least, why she’d walked it. I dressed in the tan skirt and white blouse then went downstairs. Swan stood beside a central table in the chandeliered foyer, her eyes distant, her hands idle on a thin marble vase she held. In my brief glimpse of her before she saw me, she appeared unspeakably lonely. I hesitated on the bottom stairs, but marble gives away even the sound of a heartbeat. She heard my footsteps and looked up.
For one second I must have been my mother to her. Swan’s hands fumbled. The marble vase fell and cracked in two on the marble floor.
I didn’t even flinch.
“No more pink,” I said.
PART TWO
Twenty-five years later
Chapter Ten
On a late-autumn afternoon when the heat rose like a vapor, Eli flew his twin-engine Cessna along the Mississippi River outside Memphis, Tennessee. Pine forest and marsh aproned the ancient waterway, warning him to stay above them. Ace it, the odds are easy, he thought grimly. He’d landed the Cessna in South American jungles, in Canadian mountains, in western deserts and coastal fishing burgs where alligators groaned in the swampy ditches near the plane’s wheels. He was 38 years old, with a weathered, homely-handsome face, the rich, dark eyes of his boyhood, his father’s broad-shouldered build, no wife, no children, and over fifty million dollars in the bank. Gambler, investor, inventor—he’d seen the world wherever a smart play took him.
But there was nothing smart about this day’s mission.
Now the grand old mother-river of his native South spread like a long silver lake beneath him. He found a landmark on its banks and swung low over the trees, angry and a little reckless. Construction swaths appeared in the forest, the land gaping in torn sections of dirt and heavy machinery. The top of a billboard-sized sign flashed beneath him. Rivercross Landing, he recalled that it said. Estate homes from $300,000.
He found the long, straight stretch of paved boulevard that was the development’s main entrance road, then guided the plane down into the alley between the trees in a harrowing exercise of skill and determination. Han Solo, a flight instructor and more than a few passengers had dubbed him. Solo. The nickname had stuck. Eli craned his head, calculating distance and speed expertly as the wooden construction skeletons of behemoth homes flashed by. Touch down. Flat land. He taxied the plane slowly, dust whirling from the deforested homesites on either side, until he reached a white construction-office trailer bearing a Canetree Development sign next to the door.
A worker ran up to him as he stepped down. “What do you think you’re doin’, you crazy SOB—” the man halted. Eli was well over six feet tall, with thick arms and large, big-knuckled hands. The grime of hard labor covered his thick-soled work boots, old khakis, and sweat-stained blue shirt. He’d given up glasses for contact lenses, then laser surgery in the past year. He knew how rough he looked at that moment, and so did the worker. The man stepped back. Eli nodded to him. “I’m Alton Canetree’s brother-in-law.” Eli jerked his head toward the trailer. “Is he in there?”
“Sure. But he’s, uh, he’s havin’ a bad day. Nobody’s seen him much.”
“I bet.” Eli flicked an ace of hearts into the air, caught it with his fingertips, then palmed it like a magic coin. Patience. Temper. He counted to ten. The numbers never let a man down. As he strode to the trailer he slipped the old card into his shirt pocket and flexed his fists.
He snatched open the metal door so roughly it slapped the side of the trailer. As soon as he stepped inside he frowned at Alton, who lay stretched out on a vinyl sofa asleep with one arm thrown over his eyes, his golf shirt wrinkled, his pants flecked with cigar ashes, and his sandy hair matted with sweat. A half-empty bottle of bourbon and an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigars teetered at the edges of a short metal file cabinet Alton had pulled close to the couch.
Eli hesitated, feeling a pang of surprise and concern. Alton wasn’t much of a smoker or a drinker ordinarily. In the five years he’d been married to Bell he’d never been less than dependable. He’d become Eli’s surrogate brother and a second son to Mama. He clearly doted on Bell, and she loved him dearly in return. Their first child, Jessie, a daughter, was six months old. Alton adored her. All of which made what he’d done impossible to understand.
“Alton, goddammit, wake up.” Eli skirted the file cabinet, bent over him, and took him by the shirt. One hard shake and Alton sat up, staring at Eli with bleary, bloodshot eyes. Eli winced. Alton hadn’t just been drinking. He’d been crying. Eli clasped him by the shoulders. “What happened? Why did you walk out on my sister?”
“I didn’t know what else to do. I love her too much to go on the way we are.”
“Look, I know she has some strange ideas. But you don’t pack up and desert your wife and baby. You don’t leave your family.”
“Eli, one of her crazy psychics has finally gotten to her thi
s time. All she talks about is what happened when y’all were kids in North Carolina.”
Eli groaned silently. Bell’s obsession with the past was nothing new. Just like Mama, she had never given up, even when there were no answers. But Mama had channeled the torment into prayers and church work, while Bell had turned to tarot-card gurus and psychics. “Look, it’s her way of dealing with what happened to us. You know how unpredictable she is. This is just a phase. If she’s spending too much on her soothsayers, send me the bill.”
“It’s not just the damned psychics, anymore. It’s gone way beyond that. And I don’t want your money. If it was just money I know you’d bail us out. I won’t let you.”
“Whatever it is, you’re coming to Nashville with me right now. We’ll talk on the way. I’ll help you and Bell work things out. As bad as you look, she looks worse. Come on. She and the baby are with Mama.”
Alton shoved himself off the couch and staggered to his feet. “It’s not that easy.” His voice rose. “One of her swamis told her you all have to go back where your father died. Go back to that town—that place you lived. Bell’s psychic says the truth’s in the dirt, buried, some kind of bullshit, I don’t know—I gave up trying to reason with Bell over this one. She’s on fire since little Jessie was born! She says she owes it to our daughter to prove her grandpa wasn’t a murderer.”
“I don’t care what some half-assed fortune teller told Bell to—”
“Eli, your sister went behind my back and made a deal that wipes out our savings.” Alton shoved his hands through his hair. “She bought a half-million dollars’ worth of land without telling me.”