Mary Eve’s parents built the farm’s showplace home when she was a girl. Even then it was the talk of the mountains. The Netties picked a fancy, modern, Craftsman-cottage blueprint, “The Hollywood,” out of a Sears and Roebuck catalog and mailed off a check for five-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty-two dollars to Sears’ Chicago headquarters—an astonishing amount at the time. Their extravagant mail-order purchase made them folk heroes to the entire mountain region, pissing off legions of Internal Revenue agents who couldn’t prove the Netties hadn’t earned the money panning rubies.
Sears shipped the entire three-bedroom bungalow by train from the company’s northern lumber yards. Everything—including floorboards, mantels, cabinets, windows, doors, trimwork, and even the cedar shingles—arrived in North Carolina’s Asheville depot in crates and stacks. Franklin Nettie, Mary Eve’s father, trucked the materials over fifty miles of terrifying, high-mountain roads to the Crossroads Cove, where everything was transferred onto mule wagons for the rough trip by trail up to the farm on the ridge. Then Franklin and his crew of men assembled the house.
The finished cottage was a marvel of fine workmanship and detail. Mary Eve later embellished it in small, perfect ways, with handmade floor and counter tiles in the kitchen and stained-glass trim for the windows and front door. The bungalow was one of the few unsullied examples of a Sears Craftsman-style kit home. There wasn’t another place like it in the country. I couldn’t comprehend the neglect. A historic house like that, sitting empty. Uninhabited, ignored, left to rot. Sacrilege.
Clearly, Barnard Deen, the owner, a wealthy lawyer down in Georgia, simply didn’t give a damn about his mother-in-law’s mountain legacy. I camped out near the café and launched a campaign to buy the farm. I sent a dozen offers to Deen, each one more generous than the last.
Deen rejected all of them. He wouldn’t even talk with me. After he died I tried to contact his heir, the famous Cathryn, with no success. Just more letters from attorneys telling me to forget it, and not to contact Ms. Deen again, and not to trespass on her property.
So, naturally, I had been trespassing and doing repairs at the farm, ever since. I’d spent many a night sleeping on the front porch among my hand tools and supplies. I’d watched thunderstorms roll grandly over the western horizon, where Hog Back Mountain, a neighbor of the Ten Sisters, filled the sky. I watched snow fall on the oaks; I’d watched the forest turn red and gold in autumn.
Everyone in the Cove knew the Nettie house and I were having an illicit affair, but they didn’t mind. At the Crossroads, man-cottage love is tolerated.
In the meantime, I set up housekeeping next door on thirty acres I won at poker from Delta’s brother-in-law, Joe Whittlespoon, aka the pot-farming “Santa” Whittlespoon. The Nettie place occupied one end of Wild Woman Ridge; the newly christened “Mitternich place” occupied the other end. I built a cabin on my land, and when I wasn’t drunk, I planted a vineyard. I wasn’t a farmer or a winemaker but I had a strong need to make new life take root on that ridge even if, some dark, drunken night, I ended my own.
Gruff and manipulative, Sheriff Pike Whittlespoon wasn’t a lovable Andy Taylor of Mayberry, no, but a pragmatic officer of the peace for greater Jefferson County including the Crossroads Cove. He could track a lost kid across the roughest mountainside, sweet-talk an abused wife into testifying against her husband, or break up a meth lab with his bare fists. He and Delta had been married since they were sixteen—nearly thirty-five years—and he quietly worshipped the ground she walked on. He was a friend to his and Delta’s sensitive, mullet-haired, ex-military son, Jeb, a fiercely protective grandpa to Jeb and Becka’s likable kids, and a resigned defender of his unconventional older bro, Joe, the aforesaid hemp-scented Santa Whittlespoon.
At six-five and two-eighty, Pike outweighed me but couldn’t look over my head without craning his. You could say we saw eye to eye on the justice system. He’d never clobbered me when I was drunk, and I’d never given him a reason to.
“Tommy-Son,” Pike told me not long after my arrival in the community, christening me with both a paterfamilial relationship and an inferior rank, “if you ever get into that piece-of-shit ‘vintage’ truck of yours when you’re drunk, and you attempt to drive that piece-of-shit ‘vintage’ truck of yours on my roads, I’ll make sure you spend the next twelve months in zebra stripes, shoveling piles of Hereford shit at the county’s ‘vintage’ prison farm.”
Which is why I spent a lot of time sleeping in my truck under the café’s oak trees.
I was outdoors at my cabin not long after sunrise that Sunday morning, sweating away my bleak Saturday-night mood and a full bottle of vodka. The twin handles of a post-hole digger felt righteous against the calluses of my hands. Blood, sweat, tears. Mother Nature’s fertilizer. Blister by blister, I built my vineyard, an homage to the stained-glass windows of Frank Lloyd Wright.
I had just finished setting the last trellis post in the top-right geometric branch of the middle abstract tree in Wright’s “Tree of Life” pattern. The original stained-glass window could be seen inside a turn-of-the-century home in Buffalo, New York. My version was six-hundred feet long, four-hundred feet wide, and could be seen by small planes and hang gliders. When I was done building trellises and planting grapevines, the Nazca lines of Peru would pale by comparison.
A rumbling noise crept through the fog in my brain. For a few seconds I ignored it, bending down to measure the precise depth of my newest post hole. When I was communing with the vineyard and fighting a hangover it took a lot to get my attention. But the rumble grew louder, and finally I looked up.
Pike’s blue-and-gray patrol car roar out of the woods with the lights flashing. I dropped my tape measure. A fist closed around my chest, and for a moment I smelled terror and saw falling bodies on a Manhattan street. Doctors call this hyper-alert reaction ‘post traumatic stress syndrome.’ I called it ‘smart.’
Pike slid to a stop within spitting distance of my sweat-dappled work boots. I set my post-hole digger aside and straightened my surveyor’s tripod, giving myself a few seconds to breathe. “Don’t cut me any slack, Pike. Just say it. What’s happened to my brother? Or his wife or kids—”
“Relax. Your brother and his family are fine. Tommy-Son, why the hell don’t you get a spare cell phone?”
I exhaled. “Delta, Jeb . . . Banger? All okay?”
“Fine. But Delta needs to see you pronto. She needs your help.”
“What about?”
“Cathryn Deen.”
“Let me guess. Cathryn Deen’s business manager finally sent a personal reply to one of Delta’s letters, and Delta’s so shocked she wants everyone in the Crossroads to see it?”
The joke failed to register. There was something about the look on Pike’s beefy, barn-board face that made me uneasy again. This was how John Wayne looked before he broke grisly news to the troops in Sands of Iwo Jima. If the Duke had to swallow his spit before he gave some hardened dog faces bad news, it was really bad. “Cathyrn Deen was in a car accident yesterday,” Pike said. “Nearly burned to death.”
The blood drained to my feet as he told me the gory details. CNN was reporting Cathryn would live, but she’d be badly scarred. “A shame,” Pike finished. “What a looker. She favored Delta around the eyes.”
Self-preservation kicked in. Cynicism makes a good antidote for caring too much. If Cathryn Deen dies, maybe I can buy the Nettie place from her estate. I’m not proud of that thought, but I admit it. “Why does Delta think I can do anything for her movie-star cousin?”
“You know how to pull strings in the great wide world. Get a phone call through to Cathryn’s hospital room in California.” Delta and Pike thought I could make miracles happen because I’d crawled out on a cliff once, up on Devil’s Knob, not long after Jeb came home from Iraq, and talked Jeb out of jumping. When you’re full of vodka and don’t care about your own safety, it’s easy to be a hero. I shook my head. “Pike, I’m sorry. But—”
“L
ook, you and me know Cathryn Deen’s fancy husband isn’t gonna let Delta talk to Cathryn’s doctors. But will you at least try to help Delta out? She hates not being able to meddle in her kinfolk’s troubles. Even if the kinfolk live on the other side of the country and haven’t visited her in twenty years.”
Across the deep-blue mountain sky, a hawk, hunting, sang its fierce and forlorn call as it glided like an angel on the high currents. No past, no future, just living in that glorious moment, suspended on thin air. Hawks are practical, they know the cosmic score. At best Cathyrn Deen probably didn’t care about her Crossroads heritage or her grandmother’s old farm, and might recoil at the idea of an obscure relative coming to her aid.
However, unlike a hawk, I had nightmares filled with regrets when I slept. Lots of karmic misery to pay back.
“Will you at least come and listen?” Pike persisted.
I nodded.
The hawk caught a perfect gust of air and floated, motionless, on the invisible palm of redemption.
Delta was not a crier. A woman who worked her butt off running a restaurant so successful Southern Living called it “a well-known jewel in the middle of the wilderness,” who ruled over a rambunctious mountain family and a bearded drunk who slept with a goat under her oak, no, a woman like that wasn’t going to break down and cry because her cousin’s husband’s cousin’s lay in a Los Angeles hospital, maimed for life. “Life doesn’t settle for ‘simmer’ just because you want to turn down the heat,” Delta liked to say. That didn’t make much sense, but it sounded profound.
“I intend to find out how Cathryn’s doing,” she declared. “That’s all there is to it. And you’re gonna help me, Thomas.”
Delta, Pike, and the entire immediate Whittlespoon family stared at me in the crowded confines of the café’s kitchen. A food-scented breeze curled around us. As usual, the wooden doors stood open and only the inner screened doors kept numerous cats, dogs, goats and squirrels from entering. A floor fan whirred even in the chill of the spring morning. Mouth-watering aromas wafted from a steam table filled with food. Cars and trucks crowded the parking lot. There were people who drove all the way from Asheville on weekend mornings, just for breakfast.
But they weren’t being served, because Delta and all of her gang were all standing in the kitchen, giving me the pressure-wash of group power. In Southern terms, I was being eyeballed.
“You New Yorkers, you can get things done,” Delta insisted. “You have ways.”
“Contrary to popular belief,” I said quietly, “Not everyone from New York has mafia connections or friends in show business. Delta, I’ve spent the past few years trying to get in touch with Cathryn Deen to buy the Nettie farm, with no luck. What makes you think I can get through to her hospital room now?”
She shook her apron at me. “You’re my only hope! When I called that hospital in Los Angeles they wouldn’t even tell me how she’s doing! And when I said ‘I’m family,’ they told me I’m not on their list. I said, ‘Well, let me talk to Cathryn’s husband and I’ll get on your list,’ and they said, ‘You’ll have to go through his publicist.’ What kind of husband needs a publicist to handle calls from his wife’s family?”
Pike sighed and draped a long arm around her short shoulders. “ Baby, Cathryn’s daddy cut you and the rest of her mountain kin out of the picture twenty years ago, and since then all you’ve talked to are publicity people and lawyers and business managers every time you’ve tried to reach her. Now her husband’s put up the same wall around her. This is nothing new. You can’t help the girl, Baby. You just can’t. She probably doesn’t need or even want your help.”
“But I don’t know that.” Delta flung a hand toward the small television attached to the kitchen’s aging, beadboard wall between wire shelves stacked with pots and pans. CNN was showing a gruesome picture of Cathryn’s burned Trans Am. “She’s all they’re talking about on the morning news shows! A member of my family is laying in a hospital bed on the other side of the country, in terrible misery, and she needs to know she’s got kin who care!”
“If it makes you feel any better,” I said gently, “I doubt she’s aware of anything. Doctors sedate burn victims for the first few days after they’re injured. Nobody who’s been burned the way she has is conscious, at this point.”
“But she’ll wake up eventually, and when she does, she’ll need her family. Her daddy’s gone, her mama’s gone, all those prissy old Atlanta aunts on her Deen side are dead or senile. I’m the last root left in her family tree! Thomas, you used to be an important architect in New York, and you were married to a rich wife who . . . well, you had big connections. You can find some way to get me through to Cathryn.”
The mention of my old life didn’t help matters. I turned away. Cleo scowled at me. “Don’t be a quitter. Jesus believes in you, even if you don’t believe in yourself.”
“Jesus doesn’t know me the way I do.” I nodded my goodbyes and walked out. I was halfway across the back yard to my truck when Delta caught up to me. Small but stubborn, she blocked my way. “You can’t hide from the world for the rest of your life!”
I looked down at her grimly. “I don’t want responsibility for anyone’s life but my own.”
“Liar! If it weren’t for you, my son’d be dead! You risked your own hide to stop Jeb from jumping off Devil’s Knob when you were still just a newcomer around here!”
“Only because I have a particular aversion to people jumping off high places.”
“I know about those pictures you keep in your truck! I’ve watched you look at ‘em when you don’t realize anybody sees you!”
I stiffened. “I should train Banger to ‘bah’ when he hears you sneaking up on me.”
“You make yourself relive your wife and son’s misery over and over, like if you just mourn hard enough somehow you’ll travel back through time and change what happened to them. But you can’t. You can’t, Thomas. None of us can turn back time. What we can do is learn from our regrets and change the future.” She grabbed my hands. “You know how it feels to be caught up in something so terrible it’s like being down in a dark pit, not able to see even one speck of light at the top. That’s where Cathryn is, right now, down in a pit. Be her light, Thomas. Be her light.”
I stood there, my head bowed, my shoulders hunched. This is how it feels to be dragged from the cement shoes of a comfortable rut. The slow, steady strain on my legs became an excruciating amputation. My ankles pulled free from my feet. Bones snapped, cartilage tore, veins pulsed blood onto the soft brown clay of the yard.
“I’ll make some phone calls,” I told her. “But don’t get your hopes up.”
She squeezed my hands and smiled. “I already have.”
Chapter 3
Cathy Los Angeles, The Burn Ward
Unfortunately, nobody had had the foresight to let me die and become a legend. I could have joined Elvis and Marilyn in the Dead Icon Hall of Fame, but nooo.
“Cathryn Deen? Cathryn Mary Deen? Do you know where you are?”
I blinked slowly, wrapped in a cocoon of painkillers and sedatives, that cocktail of drugs given to burn victims for the first few days so they won’t realize parts of their bodies have been deep-fried. I could barely remember my name, much less what had happened to me.
“Who?” I murmured.
If I could have seen myself, naked except for sterilized sheets and the huge bandages on my head, right arm, right torso, and right leg, my arms tied down, IV’s and monitor lines everywhere, and a catheter between my thighs . . . if I could have seen my swollen, hairless head with the mass of bandages plastered to the right side, I would have willed myself to go back to sleep again. Permanently. My head was grotesquely swollen, and even the left side of my face, the side that would look normal again eventually, was raw-red.
Thank God I didn’t know how I looked, yet. I heard myself mumbling in a weak voice. “Daddy? Granny Nettie? Mother?” They’d been visiting me. Daddy simply smiled at me. He’d neve
r known what to say when I was hurt. That was the nanny’s job. Granny Nettie said, “Eat, girl. Every time life gives you biscuits and gravy, eat and rejoice.” In my dreams I stood in the kitchen with her, gazing out her wondrous stained-glass windows on Wild Woman Ridge, watching sunlight and shadows drape their smile on layers of enormous, blue-green mountains. This is no place for skinny sissies, those mountains whispered to me. The scent of lard, milk, sausage, flour, and butter filled my senses. Oddly comforting. Everything will be all right, if you find what you really want, Granny whispered. Cheer up, I left a home for you. It’s waiting.
My long-dead mother, who I’d discovered was much prettier than the photos in my scrapbooks, leaned close and whispered, Go home, yes. We’ll see you again, some day.
“Don’t leave me.” Too late. I was awake.
“Cathryn? Ms. Deen? I’m asking you again: Do you know where you are?”
My tongue felt swollen. I tested it, licking the front of my teeth. Helps your smile slide over your pearly caps. Looks sexy for the male judges. An old pageant trick.
“Ms. Deen, do you know where you are?” The voice was female and insistent. Not impressed by my teeth.
“Hell?” I finally whispered.
“No, it just feels that way. You’re in the burn unit. I’m your primary physician. You’re under the care of a large medical team.”
“My entourage.”
“In a manner of speaking. Now, listen carefully. I’ll let you go back to sleep in a minute. We just moved you out of Intensive Care. It’s been five days since your accident. We’ve deliberately kept you medicated for your benefit. The pain would be excruciating, otherwise. We don’t want you to move around. You’re hooked up to IV’s. You have a catheter in your bladder. Until a few hours ago you had a feeding tube down your throat. Your current situation is a little . . . confining, I know. We don’t want you feeling claustrophobic, so we’re keeping you medicated. That will get better in the next week or so.”