When Venus Fell

  He radioed to the Hall, where Ella insisted on speaking to me in tearful disbelief. “I wasn’t lost,” I lied. “I was exploring.”

  Gib and I walked back down the mountain into a deeply sided lane that wandered through the low coves and hollows. “I was just following this old trail,” I explained. “I thought it must come out on a public road somewhere.” Gesturing toward the steep sides, I added, “Someone must have bulldozed this trail years ago. I mean, it’s cut so deep in places.”

  “This trail was here a thousand years ago,” Gib said quietly. “And probably for thousands before that. It wasn’t cut by machines. It was worn into the earth by buffalo herds and war parties and traders between the southern tribes and the northern ones. If you knew where to look for what’s left of it, you could follow this trail all the way to Canada.”

  I halted. The ground felt rich beneath my feet. “I read somewhere, there’s a theory, that prehistoric Asian tribes came over the Bering Strait and settled in the Americas, and that the Native Americans are their descendants.”

  He nodded. “So you’re feeling a little déjà vu? Reclaiming the old prehistoric stomping grounds?” But his teasing was gentle.

  “Did you know Elvis might have been a Turk?”

  “What?”

  “His ancestors came from a part of the mountains where there were descendants of Turks and Moors and Portuguese and all sorts of Mediterranean people who had been brought to the New World by Spain in the fifteen hundreds. These beautiful black-haired people and their languages. Elvis is a town in Portugal. It’s not spelled the same as our Elvis, but still—”

  “I could believe Elvis was a Turk,” Gib admitted. “I could believe he was from Mars after he entered his sequined jumpsuit phase.”

  “Oh, don’t humor me. I’m giddy.”

  “There are no outsiders here. Nobody who belongs more than any other kind. Your Asian ancestors may have walked this path when it was just a twinkle in the mountain’s eyes. And since they begat the Indians, and since I’ve got a little Indian blood in me, we’re probably related, Nellie. So you are family. Blood kin. Make you feel better?”

  “Your line of reasoning is more outrageous than mine. And that’s saying a lot.”

  “You set out into the mountains because they called to you. Your instincts heard and responded. You’re home.” He cocked his head and listened. “I can hear them right now.” He crooned in a droll, singsong voice, “Welcome back, modern descendant of really old Asians. Don’t forget to pack a compass.”

  “You fool,” I said, but couldn’t help laughing.

  He pointed. “Look. Up there. That ridge. My grandfather’s cousin Jonathan Cameron shot and ate turkeys to keep from starving when he was trapped up on that ridge with a broken leg. It was right after his wife left him. She was afraid to live in the mountains. And she was mad as hell because she’d found out that Jonathan was running whisky. In fact he’d become the local liquor baron. We’re talking nineteen thirties. Depression era. The family was nearly bankrupt. Jonathan saved the day by bootlegging liquor. Cuban rum he bought off the South Carolina coast. Local sour-mash whisky. Until he crashed his car up on Hodger’s Ridge one night with the revenuers after him. He managed to get this far before he collapsed. He nearly died up there before anybody found him.”

  “What happened to his wife?”

  “She came back to take care of him while he recuperated. She stayed and he went legit. They kept a couple of turkey feet and Jonathan had them gilded as an anniversary gift. In the family we’ve always called that story The Thrill of Victory and the Agony of De-feet.”

  I stared at him. “Is that story true?”

  “Of course. I can call their granddaughter in Atlanta if you insist. She inherited the gold turkey feet.”

  I shook my head. “I guess by Cameron standards that’s a perfectly credible tale.”

  “Not a tail Feet.”

  We walked for a while in companionable silence. There was human history, drama Joy, and romance embedded in the land of that valley: the old hedgerows, the faint outlines of houses, cabins, barns still visible in the grass, the tumbled stones of chimneys, the remnants of old fences and old roads. As for the deep path in the woods—I was amazed. Centuries of human and animal traffic had cut the broad path into the hillside. Trees draped it in a golden tunnel.

  We were walking back in time. This was the same path the first Cameron walked on his trip there from the coast, another world, half a world away from his homeland, the possession of a woman who must have seemed completely mysterious and dangerous to him.

  “It’s worth it,” I said to Gib. “This valley. It deserves to be left just the way it is. It’s worth fighting for.”

  “Nellie,” he said, looking at me intensely, “I think you’re coming around. Watch out that you don’t fall in love here.”

  Flustered, I made a big show of scowling at him. He’d never catch me sighing over commemorative turkey feet.

  Bea and Olivia held court every afternoon in the private sitting room between their bedrooms. A person had to be invited. Some days the guests were family members, some days a visiting friend. Tea was served with serious formality, in one of Bea’s finest china tea sets imported from Scotland and carried in by FeeMolly herself on a heavy sterling tray.

  The tea was served scalding hot in teacups as thin as eggshells, so they turned blazing hot as soon as they were filled; there was no way to hold one in any but the most proper manner, clutching the delicate handle, pinky finger stuck out, desperately trying to avoid a burn.

  The sitting room Bea shared with Olivia was fascinating and a little creepy—part natural history museum, part Victorian tea parlor, part downtown sports bar. Clusters of bright silk flowers sprouted from odd vases, iron stew pots, and old jars. Frilly flowered drapes decked a row of windows with large velvet bows at the sashes. When the windows were open the room’s fringed lampshades shimmied like dancers.

  A large poster of the Atlanta Braves was framed on one wall, surrounded by a collection of bats, balls, shirts, and ticket stubs. Most of the items were autographed. Nearby was a shelf full of German beer tankards.

  The walls collided at corner knickknack shelves filled with turtle shells, snake skins, jawbones bristling with bear, bobcat, and wild boar teeth, arrowheads, pottery shards, and musket balls. At the center of the room visitors chose high-backed wing chairs and sat around a lace-covered table, facing Bea and Olivia. Olivia sat in a fat, firm mission-style chair with colorful cushions and wide oak armrests, her bare feet propped on a plaid footstool that rocked. Bea sat in a mammoth burgundy leather recliner with controls on the side to make the backrest vibrate.

  On that quiet early November afternoon, Ella and I were invited to tea along with Min and Isabel. Afterward, Olivia fell asleep in her chair. Bea placed a Braves stadium rug over Olivia’s feet and legs, then touched her fingertips to Olivia’s cheek. “She’ll sleep sound for the hour. I’ll be in the kitchen watching Oprah with old FeeMolly.” Bea shuffled out of the sitting room.

  I cleared my throat. Glancing at Olivia, I whispered, “I can’t resist asking this any longer. Is there some reason why she never wears shoes? Why she never cuts her hair?”

  Isabel blinked. “She stopped cutting her hair and wearing shoes at the same time she stopped speaking fifty-plus years ago. It’s one of her mysteries.”

  “What hurt her soul so badly?” Ella asked.

  “No one’s told you all about her past?” Min asked. “We’ll tell you. She doesn’t mind.”

  I shook my head. “I learned enough to decide she needed her privacy. I wouldn’t want someone prying into my history, so—”

  “She wants you to understand her as much as possible,” Isabel said.

  Ella, Min, Isabel, and I huddled like the witches in Macbeth, stirring the strange, intoxicating brew that was Cameron history. Isabel began to tell us the story.

  Olivia Maureen Cameron stopped speaking when she was thirty years old.
She hadn’t said a word since 1945. Not for any reason. She never made a sound of any kind. She didn’t even talk in her sleep.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to speak. And nothing was physically wrong. Over the years doctors diagnosed the condition as everything from guilt-induced trauma to psychosomatic illness. She’d been called crazy, stubborn, and just plain odd. In the family, they finally accepted her condition as permanent and harmless.

  She had been a pretty young woman. Small framed pictures of her showed an elfin, dark-haired debutante with mischievous light eyes.

  She had a sharp mind. She graduated from a women’s college in Nashville, won awards for just about every sport and club young women could excel at back then, and was the belle of the ball in Tennessee society.

  She wanted to go to Boston and work for a women’s magazine there. She was a writer—always had been. But her parents wouldn’t have it. Journalism was no career for a woman, and they didn’t want her up there being corrupted, in their view, by wild-living northern women and unscrupulous northern men.

  Then her mother died and Olivia went to spend a summer with Bea and her family in Scotland. She loved Scotland and became close friends with Bea. She begged to stay with Bea’s family indefinitely. But her father made her come home.

  A year later she was engaged to marry an older man named X Ogden Owens, of the Knoxville Owenses, a rich railroad clan. J. Ogden was a widower. His first wife had committed suicide after their baby died in an accident. J. Ogden was also a state senator, and he planned to run for governor. Some suspected he wanted a smart, pretty young wife with the right connections to stop some ugly rumors about his first wife and child.

  Because there was gossip that J. Ogden had a violent temper. Yet he could be a charmer, and he was brilliant, handsome, and rich. By the rules of that time a high-strung, hot-blooded gentleman was entitled to a temper.

  He and Olivia had a wedding the newspaper society columnists called the biggest of the decade. They honeymooned in Europe, then settled into one of the Owens mansions in Knoxville. Over the next few years Olivia lost two babies in miscarriages, and then she had one, a boy, who barely lived to be a year old.

  He fell down a set of stairs and broke his neck. At least that’s what was said at the time.

  When her boy died Olivia was already pregnant again. She gave birth to a girl named Katherine Maureen. In Olivia’s albums there were pictures of her, and baby bonnets, and tiny, embroidered gloves, all pressed for safekeeping. Olivia called her Katie. Katie was a few years old when J. Ogden ran for governor—right after World War II. He won.

  He would have become governor of Tennessee. Olivia would have been the state’s first lady.

  But a week before the inauguration, Katie fell off a balcony at the house in Knoxville. At least the servants gave that account of the accident.

  Two days later, Olivia poisoned J. Ogden Owens, her husband, the governor-elect, at breakfast. He died in grotesque, writhing agony by suppertime.

  I studied Olivia as she slept. Her hands were small, bony, and long-fingered, with plain oval nails that had the yellow patina of old age. Hardly dangerous-looking now. But her face was composed even as she slept. She was never off-guard.

  “So she really did kill her husband,” I said. “Just like Kelly told me.”

  Isabel said, “Hmmm, she certainly did a revenge thing on him,” which was an absurdly frivolous description but somehow appropriate. “She poisoned him with strychnine in a bowl of bread pudding.”

  “Traditional,” I ventured. “Ladylike, yet effective. I like that.”

  Min smiled, and Isabel’s eyes flashed with appreciation. “Not a pretty way for him to die.”

  “But he deserved worse,” Min said. “Aunt Olivia told the family lawyer, ‘He shook my babies to death. I knew he was dangerous but I was ashamed to speak up. I let him kill my babies.’ ”

  I looked at Ella hurriedly. Babies. She clasped her throat. “You mean Olivia suspected him in the first death but didn’t—or couldn’t—leave him?”

  Min carefully arched her pale brown brows and lifted her hands, palms up. “We’ll never know. Those are the last words anybody heard her speak. She didn’t speak in her own defense at the trial, she didn’t plead for mercy, she didn’t explain anything. The Owens family claimed she was crazy, that she must have killed her own children and then murdered her husband on top of it. Her father used all of the Cameron family’s influence to keep her out of prison or the state asylum.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  “Her poor babies,” Ella sighed tearfully. “And poor Olivia.”

  “Her father brought her home to the Hall,” Min noted. “She’s been here ever since.”

  Isabel rose and gently adjusted the blanket around Olivia’s legs. “After our parents died she became the head of the family. She’d outlasted the scandal. Simon was only a teenager, and Gib was five, and Ruth and I were just babies. Minnie, here”—Isabel smiled at Min gently—“Min married Simon the next year, and Bea came from Scotland, but it was up to Aunt Olivia to keep us all together. Emory wanted to send me and Ruth to be raised by Cameron kin in Georgia, and stick Simon and Gib and Aunt Olivia in one of his rental houses in Knoxville.”

  Min stood also, and tucked the bottom of the lap throw around Olivia’s thin, bare feet. “She feels she should have done something to help you and Ella years ago.”

  “She couldn’t have done anything to help us,” I said stonily. “No one could have.”

  “When Gib told her he’d located you in Chicago, he said you and Ella had been harassed and mistreated, and that was something none of us had ever suspected. Aunt Olivia went to her room and stayed for two full days. She barely moved. Just sat looking out the window.”

  Isabel nodded fervently. “She does this kind of thing sometimes. She does it like a vision quest. A meditation. When she finally came out she gave Gib a note she’d written. She said if we didn’t help you two then we couldn’t help ourselves. She wrote about all the tragedy that’s been part of your family and ours. She believes there was a reason your parents came here—some kind of fate. That it meant your family and our family needed each other to survive. She told Gib to go and find you and do whatever it took to bring you here.”

  “Oh, my,” Ella said, wiping her eyes.

  I reached over and gently brushed a strand of Olivia’s long hair from her cheek. She looked like a withered little girl. “Don’t let her silence fool you,” Isabel whispered. “She’s still a fighter.”

  “I know,” I whispered back. The government had tried to punish her for evils and tragedies she couldn’t control, and she’d spent the rest of her life punishing herself.

  I understood her too well, and that scared me.

  Twenty-one

  I’d already noticed a half-dozen magazine clippings about FeeMolly Hodger’s cooking awards, which included a citation from Gourmet magazine. Each article had been matted, framed, and hung on a wall in the Hall’s huge kitchen.

  One morning when I walked into the kitchen I peered with amazement at a new clipping from Southern Cuisine.

  FeeMolly Hodger was born in 1932 in a log cabin deep in Hodger Hollow, which is next to Take Home Ridge and just over the Cameron River Valley from Oscar’s Shed, all of which are tiny, isolated hamlets in the Cameron Mountains of eastern Tennessee. Mrs. Coira Cameron—society matron, Scottish-born nurse, and self-taught midwife—attended FeeMolly’s birth along with her husband, Dr. William Cameron. The unsuspecting Mrs. Cameron innocently wrote “Female” on the yet-to-be-named baby girl’s birth certificate, and the Hodger clan concluded that the matriarch of Cameron Hall had named their daughter for them.

  You see, kinships, clan alliances, and community loyalties still run as deep as pioneer legacies in this magnificent wild country high in the ancient Appalachians. The Hodgers have worked for the Camerons for generations, with bonds of fealty that hark back to revered old-world traditions.

  And so “F
emale Hodger” was ordained in an old ritual by Coira Cameron and the baby’s proud Hodger parents, who puzzled over their new daughter’s name and finally bestowed it on her with phonetic sincerity. Today “FeeMolly” wears her quaint moniker with the pride of a mountain oath and the confidence of a master chef, commanding her kitchen on the Cameron estate with fierce devotion.

  I stepped back, astonished at the long tendrils of human fellowship that reached to and from the heart of the Cameron heritage, where I had been conceived as surely as a ripe seed dropped in rich soil. I was beginning to have absurd flashes of belonging, as if I, too, could claim a place there, since it was Gib who had named me.

  “I have to say something to you, flat out,” Ebb interjected.

  A little dazed, I pivoted toward her and shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans. “Yes?”

  She stopped kneading biscuit dough in a broad stoneware bowl to stare at my long, ropy, fake-blond braids. Her own hair was an enormous brown-teased poof above a shimmery gold-lamé headband, a true marvel of hair architecture. Yet Ebb gazed humbly at my cornrows and the pile of Medusa-like strands I’d bound up with a red silk scarf. “I ain’t worthy to hold your rat comb,” she said. Seriously.

  After a stunned moment, I nodded to her just as seriously. “I consider it an honor to be admired by someone who has mastered the art of hair elevation beyond all known human limits.”

  “But you’re the hair queen to look up to,” Ebb said in big round tones of reverent gratitude.

  “We’ll share the title,” I insisted.

  Her eyes glowed with pride. We shook hands.

  “I couldn’t live over there in the woods like you’re doing,” Flo confessed one day as she was helping me bleach my roots. “It’s haunted. The whole danged valley is full of haints, but ’specially over yonder near the chapel.”

  I laughed. Our childhood home in New Orleans was supposedly haunted, like everything else in the old sections of the city, where ghosts could easily whisper from every shady courtyard and every festoon of Spanish moss. It never worried me. Catholics talk to so many saints, invoke so many spirits anyway. Pop let me believe that Mom, Grandmother Akiko, and Grandpop Paulo were still with us, keeping us safe. He even ventured that every time I heard music they were watching over me, and every time I made music they were right beside me.