When Venus Fell

  Fifteen

  “Good morning,” I said brightly to the half-dozen visitors who had stayed overnight. I sat down reluctantly in a chair Gib held for me at the dining table and looked over cantaloupe and strawberries piled in an etched crystal compote. I surveyed Ella’s and Carter’s empty chairs. I hoped Carter wouldn’t show up for breakfast. “Ella will be down in a minute,” I announced to the assembled—Gib, Min, Isabel, Goldfish, Hoover Bird, and Bo Burton. “She was just about finished dressing when I left our room.”

  I began spearing strawberries with a heavy sterling fork. Then I realized that Goldfish was peering at me and nervously biting her pruny, pink-rimmed lower lip. In tight white jeans and a button-popping white blouse, with her eyes made up elaborately in rainbow hues, she looked like an aging L.A. hooker. “Hell, honey, your sis just headed for the hills with Carter,” she said. “I saw ’em going out the back kitchen door. He brought up a couple of riding horses.” Goldfish went pluuuff in dismissal, pawed the air with red-tipped nails, and hooted. “Don’t worry, honey. Your sis’ll have a fine time.”

  “I see,” I said, as a knot of anxiety and fury formed in my stomach. I started to get up.

  Gib put a hand on my shoulder and bent close to my side. “Don’t make a scene and ruin Min’s mood this morning. Do that for me and I promise I’ll help you find Ella after breakfast.”

  I looked desperately at Min, whose eyes were a little brighter with the crowd around at the table. She was even smiling at a joke Bo Burton had just told.

  I had no choice. I’d never find my sister in the mountains around there without Gib’s help. But I knew the truth, deep down. For the first time in my life I was willing to make a compromise.

  Because Gib Cameron asked me to.

  Gib stopped his jeep at the top of a mountain hiking trail so narrow I’d spent the entire steep ten-minute drive battling small tree branches.

  “Hunting the elusive Ella,” he said in a mock-documentary whisper. “This variety of the little-known yellow-crested violinist appears friendly but is, in fact, only seen when lured out of hiding by her sister, who warbles the ritual song of female kinship.” He cupped his left hand around his mouth. “Give-men-no-nooky,” he yodeled softly. “Givemennonooky.”

  I plucked leaves, twigs, and several caterpillars from my braids. “I don’t dislike men. I just dislike men who are smartasses.”

  He jumped out of the jeep and walked to a rocky overlook. Above us to the right a tiny stream trickled from a crevice in the mountain’s craggy, lichen-covered side. The sound was as soothing as a fountain, and the air was scented with water and green, ripe life. I stood beside Gib and looked down a hundred yards through a jungle of laurel and trees, into a glen where the tiny stream bottomed into a small, lovely pool surrounded by tall ferns.

  I caught my breath. In front of us and below us was a world for dreaming. A world like some fabulous fantasy medieval landscape drawn in one of those dragon-and-elf computer games or calendars. Sheer towers of mountains, breathtaking views, cliffs, flowers, clouds, shadow and light—a dreamscape from a modern Eden. The earth had birthed rocks; it was seeded with fist-sized and football-sized rocks in harmony with every stone hoe, shovel blade, rake tine, or pick point wielded in the attempt to clear this unconquerable forest.

  When Gib dropped to his heels I squatted beside him. The rocky grotto of the creek glen below us made a very seductive setting. “They haven’t been there,” Gib said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “If they’d ridden in on the trail down there we’d see where the horses trampled some of the ferns. So we can cross this off the list. They haven’t been here at Arrowhead Pond.”

  “Arrowhead Pond?”

  “Hmmm. Up in an attic at the Hall we’ve got a collection of arrowheads from those bottoms that date back a thousand years. That’s what the scientists say. When I was a boy I used to come here alone all the time and hunt for more.”

  I looked at the wild territory below, above, and all around us. We were a long way from the Hall. “No one worried about you? You roamed all the way out here and no one worried?”

  He smiled below solemn, worldly eyes. “In our family this is the backyard.”

  “Didn’t you have friends?”

  “A few. I was a loner.”

  “And later on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you were grown?”

  “I get by, Nellie. I’m just careful about the company I keep. Quality, not quantity.”

  You never know who might be dangerous. Who might hurt you or the people you love. “Really? Sophia said—” I halted. “Never mind. Let’s keep looking.”

  I started to rise. He put his bad hand on my forearm. The contact—and his new willingness to use the hand—sent warm tremors through my skin. I stayed still.

  “Play fair,” he said. “Finish that sentence.”

  “She said at least a dozen of your former lady friends converged on you after the accident. A dozen. That’s not the batting average of a true loner.”

  “A dozen over a lot of years. Not exactly a league record, either.”

  “I’m surprised at least a couple didn’t stick around. Have you got a few hidden somewhere?”

  “Most of them are married now.”

  “But not to you, I take it. At least not recently.”

  “I’ve never tied the knot. I didn’t want the commitment. I traveled too much. Put my career first. I saw how hard it was for other agents to keep their marriages together. And to be honest about it, I thought I had the best of everything and I didn’t have any big urge to fall in love. Now don’t start analyzing—”

  “I understand perfectly. I’m the same way.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t think so.”

  “Who are you to tell me what I—”

  “I want to love somebody. I’m not sure you do at all.”

  I was silent. How wrong he was about me. How hard I must look, more isolated and cold-blooded than I realized. “You’re the wrong one to lecture me,” I said finally, keeping my tone as light as I could. “Out of all those women who cared about you, you couldn’t pick even one who was special.”

  “Ditto,” he countered. “Ella tells me you haven’t been out on a real date in years.”

  He got me right in the solar plexus. I stood and took a deep breath. “That’s meaningless information. Don’t use my sister to spy on me. She’s an easy mark and too sentimental. That’s not fair.”

  Gib squinted up at me, unshaken. “All’s fair in love and war with Camerons,” he said.

  • • •

  Carter’s houseboat, vintage 1930s, was set on short, massive, saltwater-pickled sections cut from a pier salvaged off some inland waterway in Florida. The river gurgled outside his front steps. A punching bag dangled from a low limb of a shade tree beside the strange home. Flying on a dual pair of flagpoles on the bow were the Stars and Stripes but also a Cherokee tribal flag.

  “He brought the houseboat with him from Oklahoma,” Gib explained. “It’s a Macintosh family heirloom.”

  I stared at a saltwater houseboat from a state located at least a thousand miles in every direction from the nearest ocean. “That makes sense,” I said.

  “They’ve been here.” Gib pointed to hoofprints in the yard near Carter’s purple truck. He knelt and touched the indentations. “It’s been a while, though. The dirt crumbles around the edges of the impressions. Takes several hours of drying in the sun to crumble like that.”

  “Can you tell if he coaxed my sister indoors and put any moves on her?”

  “Not unless he left a note. ‘I snared the unsuspecting babe. Hahahaha. You’ll never get her back.’ ”

  “Thanks for the comedy, Daniel Boone.”

  Gib stood. “Don’t joke. My ancestors knew Daniel Boone, Daniel Boone was a friend of theirs, and—”

  “Right, right, but you’re no Daniel Boone. Very cute.”

  “Actually, I’m a damned good tra
cker. When we were teenagers Ruth and I used to hunt wild pigs with the Hodgers. Ruth had an incredible eye for the trail marks, but I was even better.”

  I had no doubt that Ruth could run a wild boar down and scare the tusks off him, but I kept that opinion to myself. “Fine. But we’re not looking for a wild pig, we’re looking for my sister. Even though she doesn’t oink she ought to be easy to locate.”

  Gib shrugged. As we walked back to the jeep he said, “I should have mentioned one little mitigating fact.”

  “Yes?”

  He smiled wickedly. “Carter’s the best. Nobody can find him when he doesn’t want to be found.”

  “Try,” I said in a steely voice.

  He patiently took me along every road, every drivable hiking trail, every moonshine hollow, ridge, overlook, creek bottom, and hidden glen of the great valley and the mountains around it, until I was drunk with history and scenery, swept along in the rich, ancient veins of a place so wonderful I was dizzy at times. He was trying to distract me. It worked.

  We sat on a mountaintop—a bald, he called it—among a meadow of wildflowers dotted with large rhododendrons. The sky seemed to go on forever, and the warm wind blew small clouds of exploding dandelion seeds into the air.

  The Cameron Valley was two miles long and a mile wide in the center of the Cameron Mountains of northeast Tennessee. Gib said it took a good hour to walk the valley by following the river through the heart of it from east to west. There were another two thousand acres of Cameron land around the valley, all steep mountain terrain. “We don’t count it except when taxes are due,” Gib said. “Then we’re sure it’s ours.”

  “Gib, face it. To most people this is the hind end of nowhere.”

  “That’s not what you’re thinking when you look at the valley. I don’t see that kind of quick dismissal in your attitude. Can’t you just admit you understand the appeal?”

  “Why don’t you tell me what it means to you?” I waited in contented victory. He couldn’t resist, and I’d enjoy hearing him talk some more. His voice was deep and rich, the mountain accents long and smooth. He had taken these wild southern mountains with him in his heart all over the world, and that showed in his voice.

  “I don’t have words to describe how I feel about this place,” he said.

  “For God’s sake, you obviously haven’t had a long conversation with anyone other than your own bullheaded self in the past year. You’ve forgotten how.”

  He looked at me quietly. “You go right to the point, don’t you? Excuse me.” He made a plucking motion at his neck. “There. I got the arrow out.”

  “Somebody has to get to the point around here. Beating around the bush seems to be the family hobby.”

  He smiled slightly. “All right. You want my poetic description. People love the sense of grandeur here. The past. Something big. Something special. But human. Warm. We’re not special people—just ordinary people thankful for a special place. And what we own is what we are. The hundred-year-old bearskin rug from a bear Lucy Cameron stabbed with a pitchfork when it killed her pet pig. Esau Cameron’s fifty-year-old Harvard diploma with the corners burned off, from a fire in the main chimney during the winter when the snow was so deep it covered the doorways.

  “We have a Confederate saber with teeth marks on the ivory handle. Because the next generation of Cameron babies after the Civil War were all given their father’s sword to cut their teeth on.”

  “That’s a joke.”

  “No, it’s not. It really happened. Don’t look at me that way. We’re not eccentric, we’re patriotic. My father was a geologist. A scientist. He worked for the government. And my mother—I guess you’d call her an artist of some kind, though she made her living as a secretary. That’s what little I remember of them, and what I’ve been told.

  “All in all, we’re caretakers in mountains so old they make the Rockies look like teenagers. Breathe the air in our valley and you feel right. Like you’ve inhaled a balm.”

  He halted. I was leaning forward and caught up in his words. I loved them. And I loved the way he spoke so freely and comfortably about the land and its people.

  And me, dammit, I listened so closely I forgot again that I was hunting for Ella. I blinked. “Don’t stop.” That came out in a husky and fervent tone. He and I traded a long look.

  “I promise you one thing,” he said finally. “Your father was about the only guest we ever had who chose not to visit again. That says something about his determination to forget everybody who ever treated him decently. And obviously he wanted to forget the kindness your mother believed in.”

  I sat back. “You should have stopped before you reached that last part.”

  “I know,” he said.

  Everything of real importance in the valley seemed to be situated near water. Pioneering wisdom at work, I guessed. When we reached a thick log-and-stone lodge by a large waterfall deep in the woods I thought nothing was left to amaze me, but the beauty of the place and the comfortable strength of the small lodge left me speechless. The waterfall hung in silvery patterns among dark, brooding rocks, forming a small grotto not a dozen yards from the lodge’s front porch.

  One of the blue-eyed dogs leaped off the porch and ran over to Gib’s side of the jeep. A pair of cats strolled from behind a large wooden barrel on the porch. The barrel overflowed with ivy and tiny white wildflowers. A machete hung from a leather scabbard nailed to a post. An ax leaned beside a chopping block and a pile of small logs in the yard. The windows were covered on the inside with thick quilts. I could make out the patterns. “This is my place,” Gib said. “I’m going in and phone the Hall. Just to see if they’ve shown up there yet. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  After he disappeared beyond a heavy door under the stone-columned porch I got out of the jeep and went to the waterfall. I stood at the edge of its shallow pool, watching minnows and letting the wet, cool mist billow over me. I shouldn’t have been disappointed that Gib hadn’t asked me to step inside his personal living space.

  “Nope, no Ella back at civilization,” he admitted when he strode outdoors. He stopped when he saw me. I moved, suddenly embarrassed, from beside the pond. My clothes were damp and my face was covered in dew from the waterfall. I’d become enthralled in my own small rite of communion. “You look happy. Or maybe it’s just the damp T-shirt,” he said. Something in his eyes made my legs weak and my back arch.

  “You live like a hermit,” I said. “You need decent curtains on your windows, at least.”

  “When I want more light I pull back the quilts. When winter gets here they’ll help block the drafts around the windowsills. I’ll build a fire in the fireplace and get in bed about ten feet away, and I’ll pull a stack of blankets over me and I’ll read Tolstoy and Tom Clancy with an oil lamp while the wind howls outside. And I’ll drink a shot of good sour-mash whisky before I go to sleep.”

  I could picture him naked under a mound of quilts in that dark, isolated lodge, while firelight and lamplight flickered across his face. I could picture him being the naked center of a warm flannel cocoon, and I could picture me inside the cocoon with him, and I could imagine he would be like whisky, fine and smooth and liquid, inside me.

  “You should get an electric blanket,” I said.

  He smiled at my breasts. At least I was convinced that was his only focus. “I should get electricity, first,” he answered.

  “Last stop,” he said. It was late afternoon. Neither of us had had anything to eat since breakfast, and only spring water to drink. I felt giddy and light on my feet.

  Brainwashed.

  We went back to the sawmill. Gib’s choice. We sat beside the building on a sandy section of the riverbank under a thick-waisted beech tree, and I busied myself pretending to watch minnows in the river and prying white slivers off the beech’s curly bark. Searching for a neutral subject, I finally blurted, “According to the historical anecdotes I’ve heard so far, I’d say your family takes a lot of pride in regularly captu
ring unwilling prospective in-laws.”

  Gib smiled a little as he idly flicked smooth river pebbles into the swirling water beyond our feet. “It’s best to hear Cameron stories in the context of the bigger picture. A University of Tennessee professor wrote a paper on our history some years ago. Not the first time professors and history types have dissected us, but he sure as hell went further than most. He said we never grew out of the ‘feudal Highland-Scots mentality that pervades sections of the eastern Tennessee mountains.’ You get the drift.”

  “Ouch.”

  “He did say we prospered by capturing, buying, or bribing new blood into our family. I guess he meant to make a name for himself by coming up with a catchy thumbnail analysis of us. Made a lot of the family mad. Anytime outsiders put the facts on paper they sound peculiar.”

  “So enlighten me.”

  His gaze grew distant. “Simon believed our ancestors survived in the mountains not because they kept outsiders out, but because they brought outsiders in. They took a chance. I never used to agree with him on that. I wanted to build a fort around us and bar the gates. But since last year I’ve decided we’re not safe—no matter what we do. I want you to understand why we Camerons don’t forget people like your parents.”

  “I’d like to understand. I’m listening.”

  “We pride ourselves on never turning away a stranger. In the old days that kind of hospitality wasn’t just politeness. People up here in the mountains knew it could be the difference between life and death. Strangers who traveled the Cherokee trace down through this valley knew they could count on the Camerons for a meal and a bed. Hurt, sick, hungry, lost, freezing to death, chased by somebody or something that meant to kill them—they got help once they reached here.”

  “Are you saying my father broke some kind of generational legacy? That he insulted your family’s entire history because he rejected the Camerons’ friendship after my mother died? Sweet Mary Mother of Jesus! I thought I’d heard my father accused of some heinous things, but dissing the Cameron hospitality code is the most far-fetched yet.”