Eli.
By the time Karen and I dressed and hurried across the steep hills and deep hollows, Eli had cleared all the old yard around the Stone Cottage. He sat high in one orange bulldozer, operating it with expert skill—another of his talents. Leon maneuvered a second machine. A dozen men I recognized as stonecutters sifted through the dirt and debris with their gloved hands. Searching. Nearby, Bell lingered over a shovel full of dirt, peering down into it like an archaeologist. She was as delicate as ever in jeans and a bright green t-shirt, her soft brown hair pulled up in a girlish braid, her baby nestled in a colorful woven sling against her breasts. Annie Gwen sat in a lawn chair, a broad straw hat shielding her face, a Bible open on the lap of her denim jumper.
“What can they possibly hope to find?” Karen said under her breath. “Darl, this is sad.”
The futility of Eli’s mission tore at me, holding me in place. When Eli saw us he stopped his bulldozer and climbed down. Leon pulled his machine so close to us the dust rose in a cloud around our feet. The stonecutters who’d come to help stopped working. Bell and Annie Gwen looked up. In that poignant theater, smelling of torn wood and earth, we became the focus of attention. As Eli walked up to me his intense gaze shifted to Karen, then back to me. I nodded. “Thank you for sending William to find her.”
“No problem.”
“Thank you, Eli,” Karen echoed. The awkward moment rose up like a cloud. They shared a grandfather. They were close cousins, this golden, black-haired woman and ruddy backwoodsman.
“Karen?” Bell’s voice, quiet and tearful. She was standing beside us. Annie Gwen joined her. Bell lifted a small crocheted cap from the head of her baby. “This is your newest Wade cousin. She’s glad to meet you.”
“Mighty glad,” Annie Gwen added softly.
Karen began to cry, silent tears streaming down her face. Leon climbed out on the huge metal caterpillar tread of the machine he’d driven. He held down his hand to Karen. “Want to take a look at the world from up here with me?” As if hypnotized, she took his hand, climbed up, and left me standing there. I suddenly felt very alone. Eli looked at me. “That invitation goes for you, too.” He held out a hand.
Please, don’t do this to me. I’d tell you where to tear apart this land if I could. I’d do anything you wanted, if it were just about me. I shook my head. “I can’t, Eli.” He continued to stand there, his face resolute, his hand thrust out. “You mean you won’t,” he said gruffly.
“Eli, don’t make it harder for her,” Bell said. I turned to her and Annie Gwen. “I know I seem heartless,” I said. “I’m not. I’m caught between your wishes and my grandmother’s. I’m sorry all of this is happening.”
Annie Gwen said quietly, “We know you’re not against us. We’ve heard.” She held out a hand, and I did the same. I touched just my fingertips to Bell’s shoulder, then to the head of her child, and finally to Annie Gwen’s outstretched fingers. Asking for their blessing, wanting their forgiveness for sins they didn’t know I’d committed. “I wish it were this simple,” I said.
I walked back into the woods without looking at Eli again. That took all my willpower.
Neddler’s Place was still up on the mountain, though old Bill Neddler had died long ago. The new owner called the bar The Quarry Pit. The stonecutters who went there just called it The Pit. Eli stood in the center of the main room that evening, surrounded by dusty men with beer mugs and pool cues frozen in their hands. They gaped at the blank check he held up. “Fifty thousand dollars,” Eli said loudly, “to every man, woman or child who tells me something that leads to the truth. That’s the standin’ offer.”
No one said a word.
He walked out.
“He’s hired a dozen divers to go up to Briscoe Lake,” Leon told me as he walked into Swan’s office at the quarry. I was hunched over her magnificent desk, studying computer printouts of accounts and bills. Leon had insisted I look over the company’s books.
I sat back slowly. “Oh, Leon.”
“Man’s got to look everywhere. Scratching for needles in a haystack, but he says it’s got to be that way. He’s bringing in high-tech equipment, too—sonar, underwater cameras, things like that. He’s got a whole team set up. That friend of his—the Jamaican—is up there running the operation.”
Leon left the office. I put my head in my hands. Eli was looking for clues that didn’t exist. The answers were buried in the earth, not the water. And they were buried in me.
Chapter Eighteen
A week passed in the forest, killing the trees, scalping the hills, pushing up nothing. In his sleep Eli dreamed of finding spheres of light, of unearthing stones that talked. He tossed and turned, his brain trying to calculate the endless tons of empty dirt—weight, volume, the grains of granite and mica, the invisible universe of marble dust, the infinite solar systems whirling around him. The truth was the tiniest speck of gold. Faceless miseries sent him floating back to Tennessee. Look in your own pa’s grave. There’s the murderer.
During the day Eli ate dust until it choked him atop the bulldozer. He tasted it in his sleep, scrubbed it from his body at night, and lay naked but not clean in the fine bed pride had bought him, alone, unhappy, and thinking of Darl.
Thoughts of Darl wrapped him up every day, hurtful and warm, loving, proud, desperate. She was just on the other side of a forest that seemed to shrink by only inches, becoming piles of stripped logs he sold for timber, because he couldn’t bear the waste.
Nothing was just weights and lengths and prices. Nothing could be reduced to mere numbers, anymore. In a few weeks he’d clear the whole forest. He’d leave just an island of trees around the Stone Flower Garden, and if he’d found nothing by then, the garden would go, too.
Mama fervently read and re-read a file of information Darl had sent her concerning the Stand Tall project. She came to Eli one night as he scrubbed dirt from his hands in the sink of the Broadside’s handsome kitchen, and the hopeful look in her eyes filled him with quiet misery. She held the dog-eared Stand Tall file. “No matter what else comes of us being here,” she told Eli, pressing the file to her heart, “we were meant to take part in this good work.”
He nodded, for her sake. “I’ll set up a meeting with Swan,” he said.
Swan’s hospital bed was empty. “Where is she?” I asked, as if she could make herself invisible at will. Afternoon sun poured through the room’s window. Karen sat next to Matilda’s bed, looking a little dusty and guilty. Matilda, who looked gaunt, raised a hand and pointed to the window, the IV tube moving along with her. “She insisted on being taken outside.”
“Outside?”
“To a more private garden on the other side of the building. Ask the ladies at the lobby desk to direct you. It’s called the chapel garden.”
“I’ll still be here when you come back,” Karen said. “I told Grandmother we’d stay through dinner. All right?” I nodded, watching Karen and Matilda link hands. Karen was determined to explain her life and her homecoming to Matilda without upsetting her, though she still wasn’t ready to announce her pregnancy. She’d already told Matilda about meeting Leon and the Wades. In return, Matilda had filled Karen with glowing accounts of Leon’s rise to executive status at Hardigree Marble. She’d also told Karen all about his wife’s death, the two fine children Leon was raising alone, and the nice marble house he’d built for his family on the old Forrest farm. She was matchmaking, no doubt.
I went downstairs reluctantly. Talking to Swan always made me aware of my place in her universe, where the weight of loving her and hating her made me too heavy to escape her gravity. The information ladies pointed me to a narrow alcove between the main hospital building and auxiliary offices. Beyond a glass exterior door, the tiny garden was mostly hidden by high, see-through walls of marble block draped in confederate jasmine. A placid-looking woman dressed in the blue scrubs and th
e bright smiley buttons of a nurse’s aide stood politely by the door. She recognized me and gave me a hangdog look. “I’m not supposed to let anybody go in. Your grandma said she wanted to be alone.”
“I’ll take the rap for invading her privacy. It’s all right. Thank you.” As I reached for the door the aide said, “She paid for computers at the new elementary school last year. And my boy won a computer contest Hardigree Marble sponsored. He got his own laptop. She’s such a good person. She makes this town a paradise on God’s green earth.”
Buying off the old sins with good deeds. “I hope God likes pink marble.” The woman laughed. I stepped outside and entered the garden through an opening in the green-and-pink walls. A small fountain bubbled at the center of marble walkways. Unlike the meditation garden, this one had a spartan, Asian feel. Gnarled miniature maples shaded the corners. Feather-thin clumps of ornamental grasses grew from beds of pebbles. My grandmother sat in her wheelchair before the fountain. An oxygen tank was attached to the chair’s back, and her IV bag hung from a movable pole beside her. She had bowed her head and steepled her hands to her mouth. Her white hair glowed in the sunlight. The wing-like arms of her white silk robe moved gently in a wisp of autumn air.
I halted. Painful wonder cooled my skin. Swan, praying?
She sensed me and raised her head sharply. As I walked up beside her, her stern expression softened enough to say she was relieved. Then the sardonic gleam returned to her eyes. “We all have our gardens,” she said. “We all go where our memories take us.”
“Some gardens are kinder than others.” I sat down on a marble bench, feeling more depressed than angry. Swan wasn’t God here, but only an aging woman losing her closest friends and companions. Carl McCarl had died years ago. The Italian marble baron, as well. “Are you worried about Matilda?”
“Possibly. Does it strike you as unbelievable that I pray when I’m distressed? Is my piety obscene? Hypocritical?” She smiled like a cat.
“When I was a little girl, I always watched you in church. When you prayed you never shut your eyes.”
“Indeed. I’ve never believed God requires blind faith. He expects common sense.”
“I used to think you were just determined to look him in the eye if he showed up in your Methodist sanctuary.” I mimicked her drily. “God, I built this church for you. You’d better answer my prayers and destroy my enemies.” I paused, watching her. “And I pictured God shuffling and nodding as if he were a stonecutter standing on your office rug with his hat in his hands. “Yes, ma’am, Miss Swan. Whatever you want, Miss Swan. I’ll get to answerin’ prayers and smitin’ enemies right away, ma’am.”
“I expect you didn’t come here to debate my spiritual virtue.” Swan brushed off my sarcasm—and God’s too, for all I knew—with a wave of one hand. I said very quietly, “I’m here because your secrets are hurting everyone around you.” I told her about finding the bulldozers at the Stone Cottage. Her face remained neutral, but her chest moved in a deep sigh. “Great thoughts and great deeds are torn out of plain dirt,” she said. “The most beautiful stone rises from the ugliest muck of the earth. You can hate the process, but you have to love the results.”
“The ends justify the means?”
“Exactly.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Oh? Look at all the good that’s come out of my wicked life.” She smiled grimly as she said that. “A lovely town, steady jobs for several hundred citizens, and so many generous, charitable donations that I’ve made. Because of me—because of the Hardigree success and reputation—life is good here in our small, special part of the world. When the children’s home opens it will be a haven and a fresh start for small, troubled souls from all over North Carolina. So let’s not whine and gnash our teeth about the sad decisions and occasional regrets that accompanied us to this point.”
“Those decisions and regrets ruined Eli’s family.”
“Ruined? Ruined? From what I’ve been able to gather, his hard experiences here spurred him to seek his own fortune—and he wasn’t particularly choosy about how he did that. A practical soul, like me, you see? Now he’s wealthy. He indulges his mother and sister and does as he pleases. If tragedy hadn’t struck him, would he have simply made do? Been an ordinary man? I think so.”
“So you’ll take credit for how he’s turned out?”
“No, but I won’t take the blame for how he didn’t.”
“I doubt he’d see it that way.”
“I doubt you see how well you’ve turned out because of me.”
“Stop. I won’t even dignify this line of reasoning.”
“Do this much for me. Proceed with the board meeting for Stand Tall. Represent me. Represent our family. Create something wonderful.”
“I’ve told you already I’d handle it.”
“And I’ll do something for you. If you want Eli Wade, I’ll give him to you.” She lifted a platinum watch from a fine long necklace. It was a gift the Italian had given her years earlier. “He should be here any minute. He wants to meet with me. He was always a punctual little boy. Let’s see if that discipline has continued.”
I had no time to react, to ask questions, to do more than stare at her in grim suspicion. Eli opened the glass door from the main building and stepped between the garden walls. “Ah,” Swan said, and smiled at me. Eli met my eyes with a look of troubled surprise. His jeans and plaid shirt were stained by red clay dust. He’d washed his arms and face, but his dark hair had a dull patina of the dust, too. He crossed the small garden space and turned to face Swan. It was the first time they’d confronted each other since his return. He gazed down at her with a clamped set to his mouth, then gallantly nodded to her. “Miss Swan,” he said.
He looked at me and gestured toward a bench, but I shook my head. He took the bench. I remained standing.
Swan cleared her throat. “Now let me confess something. I despise what you came to my town to do. I think it’s ridiculous and demeaning to us all. I loathe your sister’s tactics in getting the land, but I blame myself for foolishly allowing that to happen.”
“You sure know how to sweet-talk a person.”
“However, I apologize for any mistake of pride I made years ago. If anything I said or did contributed to the situation that resulted in your father’s death, I take full responsibility.” At this point I could only stare at her, frozen in disbelief and vividly suspicious. Eli frowned at her but leaned forward, listening intently.
She went on. “I would rather never mention my sister Clara’s name again, and I consider her death a tragic event that is no longer of importance. However she died—and by whoever’s hands—she is, undoubtedly, dead. That can’t be changed. But if you need to prove your father did not kill her, you have my blessings.”
“I came here for one reason. To tell you I want a place for me and my mother on the board of Stand Tall.”
I groaned inside. Swan never blinked. “I intended to issue an invitation to you both.”
I nearly choked. What a lie. I looked at Eli quietly. “She’s bribing you.”
“Oh?” He calmly swiveled his attention to Swan. “What do you want in return?”
“Nothing,” Swan countered. “I want the entire town to know that Swan Hardigree Samples welcomes the Wade family. Are you going to turn my offer down? Why would you?”
He stood. “My fight’s not with you. It’s with whoever killed your sister and let my pa die for it.”
“As it should be.”
“What’s in this for you and your family name?”
“To use a popular term, Closure.” She glanced at me. “And reconciliation with my granddaughter. If I involve you in Stand Tall, she’ll participate wholeheartedly, too.”
“Then I accept your offer.” It was that simple. He looked at me, his eyes sad but determined. He nodded to Swan
and left the garden.
I simply stood there in his wake, and when I was alone with Swan I stared at her furiously. She looked back with the same unyielding blue gaze. “I will always try to give you what will do you the most good.”
“You’re trying to buy his friendship.”
“And succeeding.”
“Tell me if you’ve ever loved a man so much you’d be honest with him. So much you’d sacrifice yourself.” She said nothing. I circled her as if she were a criminal client I had to interrogate. “Did you love the Italian?”
“I cared for him deeply. I miss him very much.”
“Did you sleep with him?” My tone sliced at her.
“Of course.”
“You never considered marrying him?”
“No.”
I swept around her and abruptly leaned over her, bracing my arms on the arms of her chair. “Because you thought all he really wanted was Hardigree Marble?”
“My dear, he wanted me. He adored me. He was wonderful to me. When I was still young and beautiful he would have whisked me away to Europe and I’d have lived like a contessa.”
My voice rose. “He was rich, he was pedigreed, he was perfect for you, he loved you. Marrying him would have been the ultimate step up the social ladder. And you ‘cared’ for him. So why didn’t you marry him? Tell me why you manipulate everyone who cares about you and reject their love. Tell me why you even rejected a man you admit you needed.”
She looked up at me quietly. “Because you were the center of my life, and he hated children. He wanted me, but he didn’t want you.”
I stood atop the low marble wall of the back terrace that evening with a tall glass of bourbon in one hand, bathed in the sunset, drunk enough to sway, listening to Eli’s bulldozers. They were over a half mile away across the ridges and hollows, but when the wind was right they sounded as if they were just beyond the darkening trees. I looked down thirty feet to the deceptively innocent surface of the koi pond. How easy it had been, in all the confusion, for Clara to fall. How easy for anyone to fall from grace. Karen spotted me from a window and ran to my side. “Have you lost your mind?” She pulled me back to the lawn.