Bitter in the Mouth (6 page)

What Harper Evan Burch didn’t say, but that everyone else in Boiling Springs knew, was that, in the case of the Burch family, God had already balanced out the world by destroying a whole generation. The “smiting” had taken place two weeks after Iris’s wedding to Walter Wendell. Her mother and father had escorted her father’s two spinster sisters back to the ladies’ hometown of Macon, North Carolina, where the Burch family’s streak of mean had earned these two women a new last name. There they were known as the “Burr Sisters.” There a fire swept through the family’s former plantation house and killed them all in their sleep. Iris and Baby Harper were left with the green-shuttered colonial in Boiling Springs, but the land in Macon, according to the sisters’ will, went to a local society of cat lovers, a member of which had traveled to Venice, Italy, and reported back that there were entire islands there set aside as cemeteries for their friends the noble felines. The charred remains of the house and the surrounding fifty-five acres became just that kind of island right there in Macon. After the will had gone through probate and the deed to the land was transferred, an allegation surfaced that the Burr Sisters hadn’t even liked cats. They just liked their niece and nephew less.

I never saw even a hint of my great-uncle’s early feelings toward DeAnne. When I was growing up, he spent a lot of time over at the blue and gray ranch house, though he avoided dinnertime whenever possible. My great-uncle would show up right as dessert was being served. DeAnne never had any pretensions that she could produce edible baked goods, so store-bought cakes and pies or wobbly cubes of Jell-O (“homemade”) were what we all looked forward to at the end of our meals.

Baby Harper usually brought with him a couple of shirts along with an envelope containing the buttons that had fallen off them. DeAnne would take out her sewing basket, and my great-uncle would sit down next to her on the couch, leaning his head in to hers as if he were the one guiding the needle up and down. DeAnne never seemed to mind. I thought there was real affection between them.

I asked him that August night if that was true.

He nodded and said, “Linda Vista, I fell in love with your momma the day she married Thomas.”

T
HERE WAS A GHOST WHO HAUNTED
N
ORTH
C
AROLINA
. H
ER
name was Virginia Dare, and there was no historical record of her after the ninth day of her life. Her father’s name was Ananias, and her mother’s was Eleanor. She was born on August 18, 1587, which was a Monday, and she was baptized that following Sunday. Because of that drop of water, whatever became of her body, her soul was welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. This fact kept John White, her grandfather and the man who failed her, from drowning himself at high tide. Virginia—or should I call her by her last name, because from the first day of her life she had earned it—was born on Roanoke Island off the coast of what would be called North Carolina, where no English child’s umbilical cord had ever been cut and tied. Dare was brave and foolish and defiant to have survived the circumstances of her birth. It was undeniable that her arrival gave hope to the adults in the colony, a hope so pure and unreasonable that it lasted for only a couple of hours. Then her arrival reminded these adults that they were low on food and supplies and that their first winter in the New World was nearing. Dare reminded them that they could die. A small bundle of pink flesh triggered these emotions in them. The adults met and debated and decided that some among them would have to return to England for provisions and for additional men and women, who, and this part was left unsaid, would have a stronger resolve than they. When it came time for the roll call for volunteers for the journey, the three who didn’t say “aye” were Ananias, Eleanor, and Eleanor’s father, John White. A small bundle of pink flesh had made these three foolish and defiant and brave. John White, though, was destined to leave his grandchild behind. He was the governor of the colony, and without his presence on the returning ship there would have been the strong suspicion of desertion or mutiny. On August 27, he looked back at Roanoke Island and saw his daughter, Eleanor, standing on the sandy shore with Dare in her arms. Where was Ananias, John White wanted to know. The question grew in importance in John White’s mind as the ship crossed the Atlantic. He knew that he would have to wait many months before he could learn the answer, and that made him angry with his son-in-law for prompting the question in the first place.

The Atlantic was too cooperative, John White also found himself thinking during the journey away from his new home. The ocean he knew was always brutal but in different ways. John White was right. The Atlantic safely returned him and his crew to a country at war. England’s ships, sailors, supplies, and every available maritime resource for the next three years were devoted to the sinking of the Spanish fleet. John White, during those years, developed a hatred for his son-in-law that bordered on a kind of obsession. The vein in John White’s temple throbbed and threatened to explode. He needed to focus on that anger because otherwise his breaking heart would have caused him to let out a sound like that of a sheep bleating. His Eleanor and his Dare standing alone on the shores of Roanoke Island for who knows how long? That was the question that was driving John White mad.

My father believed in the Old North State. When I was eight years old, a significant age in our family, my father gave me a book entitled
North Carolina Parade: Stories of History and People
. The book was published in 1966, two years before I was born. It had the look and feel of a book written in a much less complicated decade than the sixties. The illustrations were inky black and white, gestural and naïve. The text, co-written by a man who, per his photo on the dust jacket, looked like a 1940s movie star, and a woman who took her photo with her cat, had much of the same qualities. Thirty-two short chapters all with the tone and depth of a sixth-grade book report. I was immediately pulled in. There was something reassuring about having the history and people of your world reduced to 209 pages and a handful of drawings. True to his nature, my father wanted me to have a book that would foster a sense of security and belonging.
North Carolina
contained easy-to-read histories, and he thought that they would do the trick. They did. But the trick was a different one from what he had intended.
North Carolina
was a bait and switch.

As with all fairy tales, a crime was committed. In “Snow White,” there was a poisoning. A hostage situation was at the heart of “Beauty and the Beast.” “Hansel and Gretel” featured attempted cannibalism. “Cinderella” involved the lesser offense of party crashing.
North Carolina
began with a trespassing. Not a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” domestic breaking and entering but an act of large-scale land grabbing. But at first I thought
North Carolina’s
opening chapter about the baby Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island was about the crime of kidnapping or mass murder. Of course I did. I was being shown the world through Dare’s barely opened eyes. History always had a point of view. That was a trick worth learning.

Another was that history was what you wanted to remember. In
North Carolina
there was only one mention of a slave, George Moses Horton, who had earned extra money for his master by writing love poems for the young men of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. George Moses composed these poems while he worked the land on his master’s farm. Little Virginia Dare would have asked how terrible could this “peculiar institution” have been if there was poetry in the fields?

North Carolina
had yet another trick up its sleeve. History was in the missing details. The Wright brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, was witnessed by a small group of people, including “a boy from Kitty Hawk village.” Why did the co-authors of
North Carolina
—the movie star look-alike and the cat lover—separate this boy from the group, and then leave him standing on the sand of Kitty Hawk, nameless and without a word to contribute? Another forgotten child on the coast of North Carolina was, perhaps, their theme.
North Carolina
was chock-full of children, well loved and well remembered. Buck Duke, Andrew Johnson, Daniel Boone, who all grew up to be somebody. Yet, it was this anonymous boy and the baby Virginia Dare, one without a name and the other without a future, who drew me in again and again.
North Carolina’s
final trick was this. It was neither a history nor a fairy tale, but a mystery.

When I left Boiling Springs for the optimistically named New Haven, I took
North Carolina
with me to remind me of my father’s face when I thanked him for the book and to remind me of the place where he was born and where he died. His afterbirth and his body were buried in the same land that had received his father’s and forefathers’ bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Carolina to Carolina. In that way, my father belonged to an ancient order of men. In all other ways, my father was a modern man. He had traveled far from his home to educate himself among the race of men known as Yankees. He was never afraid, because his father and grandfather had commingled with these same folks and returned home to Charlotte, North Carolina, more or less unchanged. Within the Hammerick clan, a change of any kind was one more than was necessary. My great-grandfather Graven Hammerick, upon his return from New Haven, was said to have refused the cornbreads served to him by his mother because they weren’t sweet enough for his northern-influenced palate. Because she couldn’t stand the sight of him not eating, his mother always had a batch made just for him with heaping spoonfuls of sugar added to the batter, but she also made it a point to wrap these squares in a black cloth before bringing them to the table. She wanted to remind her son that something inside of him had died. My grandfather Spartan Hammerick caught the travel bug after his graduation from Yale and spent two years crisscrossing Europe. During this time abroad, he sent home only two postcards, each written and postmarked on the date of his mother’s birthday. Spartan returned to Charlotte with a stack of letters scented by the hands of an Italian baronessa, which his mother found and made him burn. For the Hammericks, the important thing was that their men came home again. When my great-uncle Harper told me this, I thought, Of course they came home. Where else in the world could they live with those first names?

I have never met anyone on my father’s side of the family. All that I know about them is courtesy of my great-uncle Harper. Unlike the Burch branch of our family, no tragic event had wiped the Hammericks from the face of the earth. The tragedy here was my father. Thomas had come home to North Carolina, but he had brought too much of the world back with him. From where they stood, scattered about the four corners of Mecklenburg County in the towns of Charlotte, Cornelius, Pineville, and Mint Hill, the Hammerick clan closed ranks, leaving Thomas and the family that he had formed standing on the outside.

The first sign that Thomas Hammerick differed from his forefathers was his decision not to attend the law school at UNC Chapel Hill. For that part of his education, he not only stayed north of the Mason-Dixon line, but he went to Columbia, a school in the Yankee epicenter, that wasps’ nest known as New York City. The fear was that Thomas would bring a girl home with him. One of the Lawson brothers had gone to New York City to study law, and he came home with a “Jewess” for a wife. That event provided for many years’ worth of chatter and gossip. The young Mrs. Lawson, née Feldmann, insisted that her husband furnish her with two of everything for the kitchen. The young Mrs. Lawson made Mr. Lawson come home before sunset but only on Friday nights. The young Mrs. Lawson performed rituals with candles and foreign-language prayers. The now-much-older Mrs. Lawson was rumored to be haughty, lacking in social graces, and rarely seen outside of her own house.

When Thomas Hammerick returned to Charlotte alone, without altered taste in foods, scented letters, or any other visible signs of a foreign attachment, his family rewarded him with a brand-new 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air, which he uncharacteristically accepted. Except for the dining room full of wedding presents three and a half years later, which weren’t his alone to refuse, Thomas never took another gift from his family. By the time I came along, his motto was “A gift means that you didn’t earn it.” Thankfully it didn’t apply to his only child. As a father, he was generous. More or less. The “less” was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver’s desire and fulfillment played an important role.

As was the case with his father and grandfather, Thomas was an only child. The quasi one-child policy within this branch of the Hammerick clan was regarded with suspicion in Mecklenburg County. It was as if the Hammerick men had stood on a street corner and announced through a bullhorn that they had lost the will to touch their wives after the first couple of tries. It also smacked of stinginess. A not-so-subtle effort to consolidate wealth, most people thought.

The second sign that Thomas had strayed from a clearly marked path was his decision not to join the family’s business. The Hammericks had made their money in cotton, which was another way of saying that they had made their money in slaves, but beginning with Graven’s generation the family’s income no longer had a direct connection to the land. Founded by Graven, the department store of Hammerick & Sons (the
s
showed that Graven was an optimist in his heart of hearts) was located in downtown Charlotte in a now-landmarked building, as it had been one of the first in the city to feature an electric elevator. Hammerick & Sons had to turn to a distant relation of the family to take over as the store’s general manager. But even that didn’t cause the family gates to shut on my father. Thomas was still in his family’s good graces because he hadn’t strayed very far. He had moved to Shelby in nearby Cleveland County and accepted a position with the law firm of Fletcher Burch, which weren’t the last names of two people but the full name of one man.

When he was alive, “Fletch” Burch had a reputation. That was all that was ever said about Fletch in polite company, and, according to Baby Harper, my grandparents Spartan and Glory Hammerick were very polite. They were also very well informed. They knew that the law firm of Fletcher Burch had been in the capable hands of his son-in-law, Walter Wendell Whatley, ever since Burch’s untimely death in a house fire. Through Spartan’s cronies within the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party, he knew that Walter Wendell was going to run for a judgeship and that he was going to win. Through Glory’s crones within the Charlotte Junior League, she knew that Walter Wendell and his wife, Iris, had an unmarried, pretty, blond daughter who was the same age as Thomas. Among the Hammericks, having a judge in the family was as good as having a minister. The Hammericks wanted to have an inside edge in both Heaven and Hell. The Hell that they feared was the one here on earth, a.k.a. any court of law. The Hammerick men, prior to Thomas, became lawyers not to practice law but to protect themselves from it. Unlike his father, Graven, Spartan was a pragmatist. If he had to choose between a judge and a minister, Spartan would rather have the judge on his side. Spartan knew that his odds, even without a minister, were better up in Heaven.