Gib drank deeply from the tea I offered him. I squatted beside him and watched a trickle of amber liquid escape down his neck.
“Why didn’t your other sister come today?”
“She doesn’t approve of you.”
“I see.”
He handed the cup back to me. “Thank you.” I started to rise. “No, thank you,” he repeated meaningfully, amid the drumming of multiple hammers striking handmade iron nails from a dusty collection in a Cameron storehouse.
I dropped back to my heels and studied him. “I earn my keep. I tried to say and do whatever might help your family. In some strange way it seems to have worked. So think of me kindly when I take my sister and our money and get the hell out of here in a few days.”
“You can’t wait, can you?” he asked darkly.
I stood quickly, negotiating people and stripped floor beams, then finally made my way to the antique organ, which was perched on a section of planking across the open maw of the floor. I sat down carefully on the stool, which felt precarious, and put my hands on the yellowed keyboards. Olivia and Bea stood in the doorway, watching. Jasper fetched a folding chair and helped Olivia sit. She pressed her bare feet together atop one of the new floorboards then inclined her head regally.
Everyone stopped hammering for a moment to stare at me. I arched a brow at Gib. “I would like to contribute something to the moment. How about a little Beethoven?”
“I don’t know Beethoven from a spider’s hind leg,” he admitted. “But I’d appreciate whatever you play.”
I pressed keys, pulled stops, and played with my head bowed and my concentration focused raggedly on my own two hands. Then I gave what Arinellis give best. Music.
• • •
The chapel’s floor was fully restored sometime after midnight. All it required was varnishing, which could be done later. Everyone stood with exhausted satisfaction. Gib reached across Olivia’s shoulders and brushed his good hand across the braids behind my ears, feathering my earlobe as he did. When I stared at him he said, “There was a firefly in your hair.”
“Venus was twinkling,” Isabel announced. That brought a few genuine smiles from the dirty, tired group, and a fake one from me. I was already on emotional overload without Gib’s casual caress.
Min did not have to cry to grieve, and one look at her pale, thin face and the poignant expression in her eyes said this milestone had brought small comfort. “It’s done,” she said, her voice raspy, and it was as if she were speaking to Simon.
“Bring in some chairs,” Bea ordered. “Herself wants a ceremony.” Olivia waved a hand with quiet command. Jasper and Kelly ran to obey.
The chapel had been wired for electricity years before, but ornate oil lamps, hooded with stained-glass shades dripping tiny prisms, still lined the walls, set on wooden pedestals high on the thick chestnut ribs between the murals. After we were seated, Gib raised a long match to the wick of a lamp.
“I love candles and lamps,” Ella said softly. “I’ve loved them since the earliest times I can remember, going to mass and listening to the organ and the choir, enthralled with the purity of it all. The altar candles always seemed to me like promises.”
“A light in the darkness,” Carter agreed. He turned from his chair beside hers and patted her hand.
She leaned toward him. “I knew you’d understand.” They gazed raptly at each other.
I kept my eyes on Gib and the lamp. A scrap of thread on the lamp wick caught fire and floated upward, glowing red and gold before Gib closed his bad hand around it in a suffocating fist. If the tiny flame burned his palm he didn’t show it, but his face was already pale and set, hollows shadowed beneath his cheekbones, his eyes remote. I watched him shake the lamp slightly then study the wick as if it had a mind of its own, threatening his family’s priceless heirloom chapel.
Carter leaped up and lit the lamps on the opposite wall before Gib could get to them. The lamps’ flickering, pungent glow gave the gathering a sepia-toned effect. Except for our modern clothes, we could have been time-traveling. A hundred years, two hundred, vanished in the primitive gentility of small flames.
The pews, each of which weighed several hundred pounds, were still stacked atop one another at the back of the chamber. We sat in a hodgepodge of metal folding chairs, a dozen worn-out and pensive people, in the middle of the night.
Bea stood. “Herself,” she said, gesturing to Olivia, “is wanting each of you to give a speech. ’Twould no’ be a Cameron event without a bit of wind and pomp.”
Gib looked at Min questioningly, and she got up. But she only touched her hand to her chest over her heart, obviously unable to say a word, by the contorted emotion on her face. She sat down abruptly, and Isabel put an arm around her. Someone else rose to speak, but I was barely listening.
I was lost in my own commemorations. Mom and Pop stood up there before that altar. They played the song they’d written that very day on the old organ, and Gib watched them, and heard them, my parents, who would go back to the main house after the ceremony and make love to each other that night, creating me when they did.
I missed them, missed them so badly it hurt. Gib carried my history inside his memory, starting with the day he watched, as a five-year-old boy, while my parents said their vows in this chapel, not twenty feet from where my sister and I sat. But he couldn’t forget that I was a traitor’s daughter any more than I could forget he was a patriot’s son.
I lost track of time. My head spun from the close, pungent air. The stained-glass windows had been opened but I was caught in a deeper miasma, the drone of solemn and grieving voices, the parade of those testifying to Simon’s irreplaceable aura. This family still had a long way to go. There was soft crying all around me.
But not from me. I stared at Gib’s broad back rows ahead of me, and traced the outline of his dark-haired head to keep my concentration, and my eyes ached from the pressure behind them. He stood and spoke last. The lamplight flickered on his face and hair, figuring him in pieces of shadow, and I was suddenly drunk from looking at him.
“I didn’t want all of you to see this chapel in bad condition,” he said in a low, strained tone. “We locked the doors last year and left them locked until this week. All the time—” He lifted his maimed hand slightly “—all the time this was healing. I thought about going back to the sawmill. I thought about my brother’s love for this chapel. Our family’s love for it. It represents more than faith. It represents the power of people from different worlds to create something sacred together. That’s what Gilbert Cameron and Soquena Macintosh created when they got married, two hundred and fifty years ago, right here, in this chapel he built for her.” He inhaled sharply. “I’ll never let it be sold to Emory’s investors.”
There were discreet glances and frowns throughout the group. Min bowed her head. Isabel blushed and looked away. Olivia clapped her hands—just once, for attention—and when Gib looked her way she nodded her head adamantly.
He went on speaking, but I felt light-headed and couldn’t listen. “Vee,” Ella whispered. She clutched my arm. “Vee?” I inhaled sharply and blinked. My eyes met Gib’s. “—it’s a song that was written here, and I remember the day we heard Max and Shari Arinelli perform it in this chapel, after they said their wedding vows. Simon always thought of ‘Evening Star’ as belonging to our family in a special way. The Arinellis helped us celebrate the opening of Cameron Hall as an inn, but more than that, they helped us feel like singing again after our parents died. That’s why Max and Shari’s daughters are here tonight. Because Aunt Olivia believes they’ll help us remember how to sing.” He paused, his eyes locked on mine, challenging me.
Everyone turned to look at us expectantly. “You okay, lady?” Carter asked softly, clasping Ella’s hand atop her quivering knees. “We’re all in your corner. Go sing your heart out. Make your folks proud.”
I stood. My legs felt like heavy pendulums. I met Ella’s nervous, beseeching look and nodded. She rose to her
feet slowly, and followed me up the aisle. I sat down at the organ. Ella stood pencil-straight beside it. I began to play, and we sang in harmony:
In the soft sky the evening star shines bright,
On this night of dreams we find,
The heart of hope in starlight.
Ella’s voice was pure, a sweet dovelike warble, but mine had a rasp like an old cheerleader’s or Janis Joplin’s at her whisky-and-heroin pinnacle. I watched Ella’s clothes shiver with the tremor of her arms.
Brilliant trust within your eyes
The past is past, there is a world beyond the night,
Shadows fall, but the evening star rises,
Half a heart plus half a heart become one in its
sight.
I filled in the harmonies with my voice cracking on the higher notes. This is for Mom and Pop. Sing. Sing perfectly! I felt fractured inside. Ella muffled words here and there, and trembled harder, but her distress gave the song more poignancy, and of course most of the Cameron family were sobbing by then.
Somehow we finished. Finished, thank God. Sweat trickled down my back, and between my breasts, and under my arms, yet my skin felt clammy. The Camerons seduced outsiders. That was easy to see. They enthralled the unsuspecting then absorbed the new energy. I felt as if Ella and I had been sucked dry like fruit. That we’d been stripped naked and casually examined for birthmarks. We had to collect our inheritance and get away from these people at the end of two weeks. Not a moment later.
When the song was over Gib gave me a brief nod of respect, coaxing open small pathways between us. In music the variations on a melody eventually define the melody itself. I heard his silent message in sudden, fresh tones. He was a man who had lost all surplus faith but not his kindness; his gaunt hazel eyes must have been charming and warm before the accident; he didn’t mean to look bullish as he hunched his right shoulder a fraction higher than his left. He made subconscious efforts to compensate for the ruined symmetry of his hands.
So now he stood in front of me, exposed and quiet, in plain clothes covered in dirt and the golden powder of ancient chestnuts. “Thank you,” he said. Confused at the contrasting emotions fighting inside me, I only nodded.
Arinellis had helped restore the Cameron chapel. We had contributed something these people needed, had helped build a foundation that might last. I looked at the respectful faces around us and then at Gib again. I wanted to hope.
Yet I’d already done what I’d been brought there to do, and my inner voice was telling me that the next two weeks would just be marking time.
Twelve
It had been years since the Camerons had lived in the grand central section of the mansion. In the late 1960s, when Olivia opened the Hall as an inn, she and the children moved into a run-down wing that had been added around the turn of the century.
The original manor house and the more recent family wing were connected at only two points: a sunny enclosed walkway with double doors that bore a sign saying CAMERON FAMILY QUARTERS, PRIVATE, PLEASE, and the Hall’s enormous, high-ceilinged kitchen, which was the center of a maze of doors—one to a storage room; one to the ornate and spacious central dining room; one to a small back porch with scarred working tables, an industrial steel sink, and shelves filled with canned vegetables and preserves. A fourth door led into a handsome little breakfast nook in the family wing.
We hadn’t met FeeMolly Hodger yet, the famous cook of Cameron Hall, because Ebb said FeeMolly had been on strike for most of the past year.
FeeMolly was Ebb’s mother. And Ebb’s sister’s mother. Ebb informed me the next morning that her sister was named Flo. Ebb and Flo. They were in their thirties and both had been married and divorced a number of times. Between them they had four children in elementary school and two at home. We hadn’t met Flo yet, either, because she was home with two sick children. Both sisters’ preschoolers had strep throat. I asked about FeeMolly’s strike. I couldn’t resist.
“Mama won’t cook for halfhearted mouths,” Ebb explained as I wandered around the Hall’s kitchen the next morning, groggy but freshly scrubbed, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with Tchaikovsky Rules emblazoned in white across the chest. Ella was still sound asleep upstairs in a feather bed with a beautiful heirloom quilt tucked around her chin. “Mama’s got a reputation to keep up,” Ebb prattled on, as she sliced the most delectable-looking homegrown cantaloupe I’d ever seen.
The melon scent rose like a perfume in the whitewashed kitchen, where the islands and counters and tall cabinets were all crowded with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit. “And she says,” Ebb went on, “it ain’t bad enough that The Cameron is gone, but the peck-and-poke of life around here died with him, God bless Mr. Simon’s sweet soul.”
“The Cameron?”
“Mr. Simon. Mama always called him The Cameron. Head man of the family. It’s an old Scottish way of speakin’. Goes way back. Even if the family’s headed by a woman she’s called The Cameron. Mama tried calling Ma’am Olivia The Cameron once upon a time, but Ma’am Olivia wouldn’t have it.”
“Oh? She abdicated to Simon?”
“Oh, no’m, I wouldn’t say Ma’am Olivia felt decayed, I think she just wanted Simon to have the title.”
I bit my lip over the misunderstanding and swallowed a smile. “Oh.”
“Anyhow, Mama says she can’t set her mind to cook for the family if they just gonna chew the moon every day.”
“Chew the moon?”
“Reach out for manna from heaven instead of pulling their own spirits out of God’s good dirt. Mama can’t abide wishy-washiness. She wants her title back. Chief chef, Cameron Hall Inn. I reckon she thinks you and your sister are a sign the time’s a-comin’. She got out of her water bed this morning and commenced packing her spice sack and sharpening her knives.”
I didn’t know what to say to this strange image.
“She sounds interesting,” I finally managed.
Isabel came into the kitchen about the time Ebb finished the breakfast biscuits, set a sleepy Dylan in his playpen where Ebb could watch him while she scrambled eggs, then gave me a quick tour of the family-wing rooms. The Hall was filled with two centuries’ worth of eclectic antiques, linens, rugs, and artwork, all just a little on the well-worn side, enough to make a person feel comfortable.
The family wing alone was the size of a large house. “I have a bedroom downstairs with Dylan, and Olivia and Bea are downstairs,” Isabel explained. “Min’s room is upstairs, and so are Jasper’s and Kelly’s rooms. And the guest room where y’all are staying. We have all the upstairs guest rooms of the central house closed off. To save on heating and air conditioning. We thought you wouldn’t want to be stuck alone in the public part of the Hall, anyway.”
“Where is Carter’s room?”
“In a houseboat he set up beside the river.” A houseboat? That was good news. Carter wasn’t in the same house with us.
“Ruth lives in Hightower, with her husband and their little girl, but that’s close by. It’s the county seat. Believe it or not, it’s big enough to have a two-screen movie theater and six gas stations.” She smiled. “Practically a metropolis.”
“Hmmm.” As I pondered the missing Ruth I idly turned an interesting ashtray in my hands. Then I realized it was fashioned from sections of animal skulls and fanged jawbones. I set it down quickly. “Don’t tell anybody,” I said in a low voice, “but your ashtray has teeth.”
Isabel laughed.
“This kitchen was built in the nineteen fifties,” she explained when we circled back to our starting point. “When the first electrical lines were run in the valley Grandmother remodeled and put in the kitchen. Before that all the cooking was still done on wood stoves and fireplaces in a separate building.”
“Until the nineteen fifties?”
She nodded. “We change slower than a possum spits,” she drawled elaborately. Isabel pointed out a tall window with a low sill. Down a worn stone path I saw a stone cottage with three ston
e chimneys. “That used to be the Hall’s kitchen,” she went on. “This window was a big doorway, originally”
I was overwhelmed. I already felt I was cloistered in some mythological castle, even though the general look of the place was lived-in and smoothed-off, like the worn oval river rocks that had been used to build porch steps and garden walkways around the Hall. “What’s the old kitchen used for now?”
“It’s the inn’s office. For a long time we just used it as storage for yard tools and junk. But Gib and Ruth and I cleaned it out and remodeled it for Simon’s birthday a few years ago. Gib even managed to sneak our father’s rolltop desk out of the central Hall and into the kitchen building without Simon knowing. Simon loved that desk and that office.” Suddenly downcast, she added, “I’m sure you can tell how we all felt about our big brother. He was really more like a daddy to us. Especially to Ruth and me. And now all of us just feel like we’re spinning in thin air. I guess yesterday was the closest we’ve come to touching ground since last year. Thank you for inspiring us.”
I ignored the new dose of flattery. “Do you plan to stay here now that you’re divorced?” The blunt question seemed to hit her between the eyes. She blinked. “I don’t want to think about a new husband. Or a new home. I need to stay here and just be, for now. I’m so tired. We all are. Gib was in and out of the hospital for six months last year, with surgeries and physical therapy. Poor Min’s been nearly catatonic. Ruth moved from Knoxville and resigned as an assistant district attorney there, and she’s planning to run for district attorney here this fall—”
“Wait a minute. Ruth is a lawyer?”
“Oh, yes. A prosecutor. She intends to become the first female district attorney in the Hightower district. And she’s got plenty of money for a campaign, because her husband owns a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Ruth and he moved to Hightower after the accident. Everybody had to come home and help.”