A Place to Call Home (21 page)

Fired with regrets and determination, Mama made a huge layer cake covered with white icing and blooming with blue sugar roses and fifteen blue candles. I had to make an artistic contribution, I told her, so she filled one of her cake-decorating cones with green icing and I wrote,
Happy Birthday, Roanie
, across the top of the cake.

My icing script looked like the work of a tipsy garden snail. Mama said, kindly, that it gave the cake a certain character, but she turned
Roanie
into
Roan
with a dab of white icing. “He’s getting too old to go by Roanie,” she explained.

I didn’t want him to get that old. I had no corresponding name change to look forward to. If I dropped the e off Claire, it would still sound the same.

I’d never seen a look on Roanie’s face like the one I saw when I carried that birthday cake, candles blazing, out of the pantry and set it in front of him on the breakfast table. Not just surprise or gratitude, but the slow, dawning
glow
of understanding. This was what families were all about—a whole bunch of people who showed you they were glad you’d been born.

“Make a wish and blow out the candles, Roan,” Mama instructed.

“Wish for a fire extinguisher,” Hop interjected. “Man, if you lean any closer to those candles, you’re gonna lose your eyebrows.”

“Wish for things to stop getting in the way of my wheels,” Evan said glumly.

“No, wish for an early spring,” Grandpa said. “That’s our only hope for gettin’ one.”

“Wish for extra rain this summer,” Daddy added.

“Wish for my tennis elbow to stop aching,” Grandma Dottie told Roanie, smiling.

“I know precisely what I would wish for,” Grandmother Elizabeth said, darting a smug look at Great-Gran.

“I wish you’d lay down and die, too,” Great-Gran shot back.

“She was special, wasn’t she,” Roanie said suddenly.

Puzzled silence. “Who?” I asked in a hushed tone.

His somber gaze moved around the table, then stopped on Mama and Daddy. “My … my mama. I mean, she didn’t hurt nobody—anybody. She would have been a real lady if she’d had a chance. Wouldn’t she?”

More silence. Fragile, delicate, like paper-thin glass in our hands. Grandma Maloney raised her fingertips to her lips to catch a soft, sad sound. Mama blinked hard. Daddy and Grandpa got the funny look men get when they don’t want anybody to see their feelings. Hop and Evan looked as if they’d been asked to recite a love poem in front of girls. Not comfortable.

“Sure,” I said quickly. “She got married and everything. She was a lady.”

Mama cleared her throat. “Roan, she was a sweet girl, and she loved you dearly. She did the best she could. She was a lady. And I know she’d be proud of you.”

After a moment of stillness, his solemn face dappled with the flickering light cast up by fifteen years of uncertainty, he nodded and blew out the candles.

“Did you make a wish?” I asked fervently.

“I forgot.”

“Make one quick! Before the candles stop smoking!”

“I, uh, I wish—”

“Not out loud! If you say it out loud it won’t come true!”

Hop snorted. “Claire knows all the wishing rules. She’s some kind of leprechaun.”

“I am not!”

“Tooth fairy,” Evan deadpanned. “Elf, troll—” Roanie blew on the smoking candles. I stared at him. “Did you make a wish?”

“Yep.”

“Good. Let me know when it comes true.”

“I will,” he said quietly.

The spell of the sad mood was broken. Carried away on
the smoke. Relief. Movement. I galloped into the pantry and came back with my arms full of presents. He gaped at them. I had to prod him on one arm to make him start unwrapping the boxes.

Mama had orchestrated the gifts with practical matters in mind—a nice leather belt, new socks, a pair of cufflinks, things like that. But I’d persuaded her to let me give him good stuff. He unwrapped my gift and examined it with a slight, pleased smile. It was one of those bulky red Swiss Army knives. He pried each section open until it bristled with blades and bottle opener and corkscrew and scissors. It wasn’t just a pocketknife to me, it was a symbol. We’d come a long way in five years since the time he’d threatened to cut Carlton’s throat. He wouldn’t poke a knife at anybody else, but at least if he did, it’d be a nice knife.

“Look,” I said. I plucked a metal toothpick from one end of the knife. I cast a dark look toward Hop and Evan. “This is a leprechaun sword.” I tapped Roanie on each shoulder. “Now you’re Sir Roan. You can kill dragons for King Arthur and go over the rainbow to the Emerald City.”

“Oh, Sir Roan!” Grandmother Elizabeth said, and applauded lightly. “Bold knight! Dragonslayer!”

“You’ve got leprechauns mixed in with
Camelot
and
The Wizard of Oz
,” Mama told me.

Well, I knew that
.

“Yeah, she’s the Wizard of Odd,” Evan teased. I sighed. Roanie looked at me carefully. “You bring on the dragon, Claire. I’ll clean his teeth.” Everyone laughed. Even me.

My tenth birthday, in May, was, above all, a milestone. Roanie left a dozen red carnations outside my door that morning and I thought I’d die from happiness.

I can’t quite describe what I must have been to him—innocence, loyalty, acceptance—a bossy little girl he could tease and protect and talk with on some safe level that existed nowhere else in his life. The difference in our ages and
our dreams was invisible to me then, because I loved him from a child’s viewpoint, without the influence of grim reality or raging hormones.

I’ll never know how that might have changed as we grew older. I read
Wuthering Heights
when I was a girl and hated Cathy for her snobbish cruelty toward Heathcliff; I read the book again, years later, and morbidly decided they’d been doomed from the start.

I didn’t know it on my birthday, but we’d come just about as far as we were going to go.

O
ur magic stopped working on a Saturday in early June. It was a steamy, turbulent day, with cottonball thunderheads riding the sky above Dunshinnog and the air as rich as soup. I remember the smell of plowed earth, and greenery, flowers, and wind. I remember anticipating the cold, red sugar of the first watermelon we would eat that summer, and the slow drone of bees, and the delicate whir of a hummingbird outside the back porch.

I remember that day in endless, painful detail, how it started and how it ended.

Mama and Grandma Dottie had taken Grandmother Elizabeth shopping in Atlanta. Daddy and Grandpa went to a luncheon for the poultry breeders’ association in Gainesville. Hop and Evan went bass fishing with Uncle Winston and his boys. Josh and Brady weren’t home from college yet.

Roanie stayed home to tinker with the engine of an old Volkswagen that Grandpa acquired in some barter deal for farm equipment. Grandpa told him that if he got it running they’d sell it and split the profit. Roan regarded that ugly yellow Bug as if it were gold-plated.

As for me, I was assigned to go to the beauty parlor with Great-Gran Alice. She had turned ninety-three, after all. She didn’t drive anywhere alone anymore. She shouldn’t
have been driving at all. She needed help getting out of her boxy blue Chevy, plus she needed a lookout to yell when she swerved too close to any object that couldn’t run, like a tree. Riding with Great-Gran was a rite of passage—my brothers had survived until they got their learner’s permits, and I was expected to as well.

Soap Falls Road curled through miles of hardwoods and laurel tangled on steep hills. Daddy and Grandpa always insisted that Great-Gran take Soap Falls into town, because there was practically no traffic on it and the hills hemmed her in on either side.

So there we were, hurtling down the middle of the road like a bobsled down a chute, her white gloves lying neatly on the broad lap of her blue dress, the car filled with the scent of face powder and tearose perfume. I was dressed in overalls, a pink T-shirt, and tennis shoes. I clutched a Laura Ingalls Wilder book I’d brought to read while Great-Gran got her hair permed. I wished I could be on the prairie with Laura. At that moment I could have taught Laura a thing or two about plucky perseverance.

A huge chicken truck came around a bend. The driver didn’t give—he felt lucky or else he couldn’t think fast enough to move tons of steel and chickens onto two feet of road shoulder backed by a slab-faced hill. “Watch out,” I yelled.

Great-Gran said, “Wee, laudy,” under her breath and peeled off to the opposite side of the road. I crouched low in the seat, frozen inside my overalls, as we flashed by stacks of terrified-looking hens and a Kehoe Poultry Farm sign. The Chevy’s right headlight scraped half the real estate off a red-clay bank and we plowed to a stop. White clouds of steam rose from under the hood.

The chicken truck and its driver disappeared around the next curve and didn’t come back. Either the driver didn’t realize what had happened or he was desperate to get all those shocked chickens to the processing plant before they fainted.

For the next five minutes Great-Gran ranted about the near miss being all his fault. Then she took a nitroglycerin tablet from her purse and put it under her tongue and laid her head back on the seat. Her knobby, blue-veined hands trembled. I was shaking all over. “Great-Gran, you okay?”

“I just need to rest my heart,” she said weakly.

“I’ll get help!”

I leaped out. I was just glad I still had legs. I looked back the way we’d come. Home? Yes. No—too far. I pivoted and stared at the curve ahead. The Hollow was close.

The Hollow. Big Roan
.

I couldn’t waste time running home. I ran toward the Hollow.

My mind was blank except for whatever concentration moved my feet. When I reached the driveway, I plowed to a stop by the lopsided mailbox, sucking in deep breaths, wishing an angel would swoop down and go the rest of the way with me, as the preacher at the Methodist tent revivals swore angels would do.

I inched down the hill. I’d never been in Big Roan’s yard before, never been inside the awful trailer. His rusty truck was parked catty-cornered to the trailer’s wooden steps. I swallowed hard. My Adam’s apple felt as big as a softball.

I stepped carefully among rotting bags of garbage, old tires, car axles, a rusty washing machine with the door torn off, and piles of slimy tin cans that seemed alive with maggots. Flies buzzed around me. I smelled the smell Roanie had lived with, the stink he’d carried with him in his clothes, and I tried not to gag.

I climbed the stairs, my steps leaden, opened the warped screen door, and knocked on a wooden one with a cracked peep window. After a minute I knocked again, louder. I heard slamming sounds inside, then uneven footsteps, and finally Big Roan flung the door open and glared down at me. His dark hair looked slimy, and there were wet
stains down the front of his T-shirt. He had his metal leg on, thank God. And his pants. “Whatcha want?” he growled, swaying from side to side. A gust of his fetid breath washed over me.

I want that darned angel to get here
.

“Could I use your phone, please, sir?”

“What the hell for?”

“Great-Gran had a car accident up the road. I need to call for help.”

Roanie. Roanie’ll come get us
.

“Huh.” He rubbed his beard stubble. When his lips drew back in something like a smile, I saw the white scum on his teeth. His eyes were bloodshot, and there were patches of broken veins on his cheeks like the tiny, lacy fractures in an old plate.

He staggered to one side and I edged past him. There wasn’t much more than a dog path between the crummy furniture. A table fan whirred in the nasty air. A baseball game was showing on a little black-and-white TV with bent antennae wrapped in aluminum foil. Beer cans and liquor bottles lay everywhere.

“You scared of me?” Big Roan asked.

“No, sir.” I bumped into the arm of a couch and dust motes puffed out. He lurched over to a sagging green recliner and plopped down on it. He didn’t say another word, just watched me with his legs spread and the fake one stretched out, straight and stiff, across my path. A dirty-looking black phone sat on a stack of magazines by his chair. There was a picture of a naked woman on the top magazine’s cover. I could see her from the waist down, sticking out from under the phone.

I hopped over Big Roan’s leg with the speed of a goat.

His slithery gaze stayed on me as I dialed the phone. I clamped the receiver in my hand. Ringing. Ringing. Roan was outdoors. He wouldn’t hear. Nobody else was home. I should have run toward home, not to the Hollow. Not to Big Roan’s glowering face, his frightening eyes, his disgust.

“Hello?” Roanie answered. There
were
angels.

“Come get us! We had a car accident! I’m at the Hollow! Great-Gran’s sittin’ in her car! I’m at the
Hollow
! Come get us!”

“Claire, go back to the road,” he said immediately. His voice was low, steady, and I realized he was trying not to sound worried, which really scared me. “Go
right now
,” he added. “I’ll get Grandpa Maloney’s car and I’ll be there in five minutes. I swear to God. Just hang the phone up and
walk back to the road.
”