Charming Grace (6 page)

“James Bagshaw, you cannot blame a burst artery on passion. You couldn’t stop what happened to Willy. No one can prevent a freak tragedy of nature—”

“I despise ‘nature.’ Give me artificial security any day.”

By now I had clamped myself to the inside of the hospital room’s door, which stood open just an inch, enough for me to hear every nuance, including my grandmother’s long sigh. “I’d hoped you’d agree with me,” she said in a tired tone, “but I can see that won’t happen. All right, so be it. I’ve already made my decision, regardless. I’m taking responsibility for Harp Vance. He’s coming to live at Bagshaw Downs.” She paused. “Like it or lump it, son.”

“You do what you have to do, but I will, too. From now on, Grace will only visit the Downs when Candace and I are with her.”

I clutched the edge of the door.
Misery
. Though Daddy and Candace had built a big house just outside Dahlonega, I happily spent most of my time at Bagshaw Downs with G. Helen. Daddy traveled a lot in his job as a junior partner working on big corporate law cases for a large Atlanta law firm, and he often took Candace with him. I got to run free with G. Helen.

“Nonsense,” G. Helen said. “Don’t be prissy. I’ll need Grace’s help to keep Harper in line. Did you see how he struggled when he came to in the emergency room while the nurses were cleaning out his jean’s pockets? And then Grace stepped in like a little grown-up woman and said to him, ‘I’ll take care of your pocket knife. I promise you.’ And he quieted down.”

“He was half-conscious and vulnerable, that’s all. Look, I’m not letting my little girl hang out at Bagshaw Downs around a boy no one can control, and that’s that. God knows what he’s capable of.”

“So far, he’s been capable of extraordinary pride and determination.”

“He’s barely literate. His sister was into drugs and God knows what else.”

“God knows a lot of condemning information but not much else, according to you.”

“Mother.”

“I believe Sass, Mettie, T-John and I have sufficed as Grace’s caretakers in the past, haven’t we? If Harp Vance is a threat, I do believe we’ll be able to control him. Not that I think he
is
a threat. I’m a good judge of character. Some would say
too
good for their own comfort.”

I held my breath. Mettie and T-John were stalwart farm managers who lived in a small house at the Downs. Sass was G. Helen’s housekeeper. All three watched over me like mother tigers on the Serengeti. Daddy couldn’t deny that.

Or could he? When his silence began to speak volumes, I decided to jump in.

“I apologize,” I said loudly, then popped outside the door. “I’ve been overhearing.” Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

G. Helen and Daddy gazed down at me with arched brows; him young, handsome, and frowning, giving off lawyerly vibes even in rumpled khakis and a golf shirt; her bathing me with a tongue-in-cheek smile, such an auburn-haired showstopper in her fashionable pantsuit of pastel tweed, one long, tanned hand impatiently flicking the white stiletto of an unlit cigarette. “Well, who would have imagined,” my grandmother deadpanned. “Grace, listening at the door.”

“Daddy, you always say people have to give something to get what they want. And you say the law’s not made up of wishes and promises. It’s made up of real collateral and clauses that fix it so people can sue when they’re mad.”

His shoulders sagged. “Honey, no, that’s not—”

“I can work the way your laws work, Daddy. I can give up something to get what I want. I can give you collateral.” I drew myself up formally, attempting to look like an honest plaintiff despite the spring mud staining my clothes with small smears of Harp’s blood. “I hereby do and forthwith state to all the parties of this part that I, Grace Wilhemina Bagshaw, will never complain again, as long as I’m a kid, about being in beauty pageants. I herewith and for your cause do guarantee that I will give my very very best to every talent Candace tells me to practice, even how to smile without swallowing and sing
The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow
. I’ll wear every fluffy thing she wants me to wear, and I won’t be scared of doing a leap in dance class, no matter how many times I fall down. I’ll work on my tan and say all the right things when the judges ask me why I deserve to be Miss Junior Peach Festival or whatever. I’ll try out for TV commercials, too. Anything that makes Candace happy.”

I clasped both hands together, over my heart, pleading. “And all you have to do, Daddy, is let me be friends with Harp Vance. Because without me he doesn’t have any friends at all. And because—” my voice trembled—“Mother would want you to let me help a poor little boy who loves the ladyslippers just like she did.”

No doubt I won the argument when I invoked my mother. The rims of Daddy’s eyes turned the deep sad color of dark cherries. He was a humorless but adoring father and I loved him as much as he loved me—and as much as we’d both loved my mother. He sat down on his heels in front of me. “Baby,” he said gruffly, “do you know how much your bravery and happiness remind me of your mother?”

I nodded. Tears rolled down my face. “Daddy,” I mewled. “Daddy. I’m not going to get hurt or die. I promise I won’t leave you like Mother did.”

He cried, too, then hugged me.

“If Harp Vance ruffles so much as a hair on her head,” Daddy told G. Helen later, “I’ll kill the little bastard.”

I went back in Harp’s room and sat beside his bed again with my chin propped on my fists, watching him sleep. Harp was not handsome. Not then. He would grow into his big, dark eyes and gangly body, become a solid man and not a wild mountain refugee. He would soften from kindness and education and deep, soul-comforting nights in his own Bagshaw Downian bed with snapshots of me, his sister, and G. Helen on the nightstand. His smile would emerge along with a devastating dimple on the right side of his mouth, and his chopped-off brown hair would become the glossy, well-fed color of a walnut armoire. But he would never be comfortable among my family or the rest of the world, and he would never trust anyone, really, but me. No, Harper wasn’t handsome or charming in the easy ways, but then again, he didn’t have to be. I had already looked into the future and decided he would match his heart.

“I have to go,” I told my sleeping prince. “But I’ll be back in the morning. Don’t you dare try to escape. You can’t get away from me.” It would not be the last time I’d threaten or bully him for his own good.

Harp’s eyes fluttered. He stared at me, half-awake and groggy, before his dark gaze shifted. He took in the shadowy room with a horrified expression that twisted my stomach. We existed in its center, under a small umbrella of sepia light. “Don’t let nobody turn out the light,” he whispered. “I can’t stand to be alone in the dark no more.”

I gasped. Harp Vance was afraid of the dark—one of his many small, painful peculiarities, like loving glossy Santas and believing I was an angel. I thought of all those lonely mountain nights in the pitch-black woods. What that must have done to him. How much darkness he’d endured. Nobody but him in his darkness, he thought.

I opened my Barbie purse and pulled out the ladyslipper he’d been clutching when I found him. ““Look what I have! I saved her for you. G. Helen got me some wet paper towels and a little plastic bag full of dirt, so look! She’s been watered and she’s all perked up! She says she’s feeling much better, thank you.”

He watched in dull amazement as I set the battered little orchid in a water cup on his nightstand. “You’re plain
crazy
, you know.”

“No. I’m
peculiar
. That’s much more interesting.” I pointed to the orchid. “She’s your angel. She’ll stay right here and make sure you’re just fine whenever I’m not around to look after you. But she needs a name. You
have
to name your angels, otherwise they won’t know to come when you call.”

He frowned in groggy silence. “Dancer,” he said.

“Dancer. Oh, that’s beautiful! Perfect!” I carefully put one hand over his and whispered, “Dancer and me, we’ll always be here. You’re not alone in the dark. Not anymore.”

Finally, he smiled.

HERO

SCRIPT AND DIRECTOR’S NOTES

PROPERTY OF STONE SENTERRA

WHOEVER YOU ARE, DO NOT TRY TO GET INTO THIS FILE, AGAIN!

DAHLONEGA:
Classic small town, nice little state college, lots of trees, big old houses, historic square. Mayberry with money. Kids on sidewalk in front of the fudge shop, (note to self: order more chocolate pecan fudge,) old people sunning on the courthouse lawn, ROTC cadets practicing salutes. In the mountains outside town there’s the U.S. Army Ranger Camp. Kickass bastards. God I love those guys.

SCENE:
Fade in on storefront hardware store, 1970’s, morph to same storefront, 2002. Now a café and wine bar.
Do Drop In
, a sign says in a shop window next door. Harp Vance and GBI partner Grunt Gianelli walk into an ice cream parlor.

HARP

                        (to clerk)

This is my new partner. He’s from New Jersey. He’ll probably ask for ‘a soda pop and a strawberry ice.’ He means a Coke and a slushie.

Note to self:
No. Grunt speaks first. I play Grunt. Grunt always speaks first
.

Second Note to self:
Tell Boone he’s not really fired. AGAIN.

Chapter 4

“Tell us about your husband’s home town, Mrs. Vance,” reporters asked me after Harp died. “What made it so special to him?”

“No one but me could find him here,” I said. “He liked it that way.”

Dahlonega sprawls over a high, rolling knoll with views of blue mountains and misty valleys. Small homes and businesses, backyard gardens, churches, ball fields and a Wal-Mart are scattered among a blanket of old trees over old mine shafts and legends of untapped gold veins. North Georgia College curls along one side of downtown like a good-hearted dog laying close to a fireplace; there are no fences, no serious security gates, and no sense that the tough old military school has minded adding women and liberal arts over the years. A couple of fast roads zip down to Hwy. 400, the four-lane headed south to Atlanta, but otherwise the roads outside town are narrow and quiet, sneaking like veins into the surrounding ridges and hollows and creek valleys, where even smaller, often graveled, lanes feed life to the farthest edges of the peaceful state of mind that is Lumpkin County.

Dahlonega had been the center of celebrity attention before, but nothing like Stone Senterra. Before Stone, Dahlonega, Georgia’s major brushes with fame had been Mark Twain, Susan Hayward, and a corny silent western titled
Tom Brown and the Shady Valley Gang.

Ride fast, boys! Black Bart’s escapin’ up the ridge to that old west town that’s really a bunch of shacks left from an Appalachian gold mine. Watch out for the placer trenches and the mercury residue!

Older Dahlonegans fondly remembered Susan Hayward’s sojourn in the mountains during the 1950’s, when the friendly, beautiful, tough-talking actress filmed
Climb the Highest Mountain
. Only a few rare centenarians recalled the creaky 1920’s silent western, filmed around old gold-mining camps that hadn’t yet been bulldozed or burned.

Mark Twain’s connection to our town went back farther, to the 1840’s, when a leading citizen stood on the handsome little balcony of the Dahlonega courthouse begging a crowd of our gold miners not to heed rumors of easier pickings on the other side of the continent, in California.

The first major U.S. gold rush happened in northern Georgia during the 1830’s, with Dahlonega at its epicenter. Within ten years every stream, river, gully, and trickle of gold-flecked water within easy reach was dug, sluiced, panned, and dredged. Most of the protesting Cherokee natives were rounded up and marched westward from a local fort in Auraria, a frontier community named after the Latin word for gold. Naming places after gold was, apparently, a pioneer hobby. Lumpkin County became a place of treasure hunters, saloons, brothels, red-clay mining trenches and all-purpose gangsta fortune seekers. Only a few pioneer burgermeisters and burger-ma’ams focused on forming a polite civilization out of the ore-speckled mud. My people, the Bagshaws, were among that self-anointed core who held on and held up.

“Look at those hills, boys,” the top-hatted Dahlonega potentate orated to the disenchanted 1840’s miners, waving an arm at a fertile green mammoth called Crown Mountain. “There’s still millions in ‘em.”

The miners left for California anyway, but liked the speech so much they took it with them, embellished it, and made it famous. Out west, a young gold-field writer named Samuel Clemmons heard the tale. And so, “There’s gold in them thar hills” eventually made it into a Mark Twain short story, and the rest was Cliff Note history.

Until now.

“Incoming! Noleene, run for your life!”

Magnified by my high-tech earpiece, Tex Baker’s squeaky drawl made me jump like an armadillo on a New Orleans interstate. My spine tingled and everything soft drew up in self-defense.