South of Broad (45 page)

“That’s all very beautiful and touching,” Starla said, “but I’ve got to pee.”

“Use the outhouse across the road from the second house,” Niles said. “There’s some newspaper in there.”

“I want to pee, not read,” she said.

“You’ve been gone from the mountains too long,” Niles said. “C’mon. I’ll show you the way.”

When Niles returned with Starla, Fraser and I told him everything that had happened since his and Trevor’s humiliation. He laughed at our story about the cousin in the pickup truck. One memory sparked another until Niles was taken up by a flood of them. Soon, it was only Niles’s voice that was heard in that dilapidated house. I think our arrival had shaken something loose in him, had touched him in a long-buried place, so he decided to open up in all the protection that fire and cold and darkness could provide when a soul has a butterfly-like moment and decides to soar toward the high, urgent places. That night, his soul was a living thing born by firelight. He told us his history, one he had never told even Starla.

He was born in the house we were now in; his thirteen-year-old mother, whose name was Bright, had walked over to her mother’s house at noon when her water broke. Bright’s husband, a solid, big-chested guy, worked as a janitor in an insane asylum in Asheville, and didn’t get home very often. He was Bright’s third cousin from the Asheville Whiteheads. They named Niles after the river in the Bible after hearing the preacher mention it in church, although he did not know why they made it plural. When Starla came a year later, they named her after the star that shown over the stable in Bethlehem.

His grandmother was twenty-seven when Niles was born, and she was a midwife. Niles’s two uncles lived in the middle houses, both sullen, hardworking men. The sons of Niles’s grandfather, Pickerill, made the best moonshine in that part of North Carolina, and had a prison record to back it up. Niles’s mother was a sweet woman who had cried when Starla was born because now she had a perfect set of dolls to play with, a boy and a girl, never having had a doll to play with in her childhood. Niles and Starla agreed that their mother had adored them and spoiled them, as did their grandmother. No one in the family could read or write, but they spent the evenings entertaining one another with tall tales of hunting and mayhem and family feuds. Uncle Fordham played the banjo, and they would sing the old church songs as well as the mountain songs passed down for generations, songs that brought news of life’s hardships.

Niles had little memory of his father, none of it good. He often arrived drunk on his rare visits to the creek. By the way, Niles said, its official name was Whitehead Creek, and he guaranteed he would catch us all a trout for breakfast.

“If we’re still alive,” Fraser said, as we huddled in a tight circle. I fed the fire with more wood.

Their father would cuff their mother around, bringing the menfolk into the mix to defend her. Niles recalled the arguments along the creek as red-hot and vile. Usually, his father would stay the weekend, then hitch a ride back to Asheville. His visits became less frequent, which was fine by him and Starla. His mother, Bright, raised enough honeybees to support herself, and jars of her honey sold in stores as far away as Raleigh. There were two cows that provided butter, milk, and cheese, and they raised pigs that they slaughtered for their meat. Their grandmother was a marvelous cook. On Sunday, they would take a mule, hitch it to a wagon, and ride two miles down to Chimney Rock to the Church of God. After the service, there was a luncheon in the churchyard, which provided their social life.

“As kids, you don’t know if you’re happy or not,” Niles told us. “Starla and I were just in the business of being kids, but strong in the knowledge that we were cherished and loved and well fed. Mama was sure that we’d be the first kids in the family to get an education. It was a bitter blow to lose her, but we’ve had to wake up to that bitterness for more years than anyone should count. It’s when you fall in love with your life that some demon force decides to take it all away.”

His father returned from the city again. Niles did not know his first name because he and Starla called him Daddy and his mama called him sweetheart and those kinds of names. He brought papers written up by his lawyer to divorce his wife. He wanted Bright to put an
X
on the paper, so he could go ahead and marry another woman. She went crazy and ran to her own mama’s house and got her daddy’s shotgun out of his closet, and was heading back to her house when she spotted her husband running as fast as he could, being chased and bitten by the pack of dogs that served as an alarm system for strangers coming up the road. Because she was afraid of hitting the dogs, she unloaded the shotgun into the creek just to scare the sorry son of a bitch and make him think twice about bothering her again. But Bright took it harder than she let on, which Niles knew in his heart, though she never uttered a word against his daddy. That was not part of the Whitehead code.

Several months later, their father died in Asheville. The family preacher had received a call from Asheville, so he drove his car up to the White-head compound to bring the grim news. His mama let out a howl, and the Reverend Grubb offered to drive the family to the funeral, which was gratefully accepted.

“We were in our Sunday finest when we waited for the preacher on the Asheville Highway to pick us up,” Niles told us. His grandmother was the only adult to accompany her daughter to the funeral, since the menfolk had reached the conclusion that the husband was worth less than their egg-sucking dog with mange. On the ride to Asheville, Starla and Niles both got sick on the curves.

The church was too fancy for their mama’s country taste. Bright had never met a Presbyterian. Though hesitating, she and her mother both drew shaky
Xs
in the guest book, then went up to view the body.

It was hard for Niles to tell the rest of this story. He tended to the fire before he continued.

His mama began wailing and keening in the ancient way—decidedly not in the Asheville Presbyterian way. People were looking at Niles’s family group like they were from outer space. A woman approached Bright when she started planting kisses on her dead husband’s face. In a curt tone, she asked Niles’s mama, what did she think she was doing? Bright turned on the woman and screamed out so everyone in the church could hear: “I’m crying for the death of my husband here, the father of my two children. That okay, city girl?” Niles appreciated the danger of Bright’s outburst when he saw a look of horror pass over the Reverend Grubb’s face as he conferred with an usher. Before the Reverend Grubb could get back to Niles’s mother, another woman approached her and said, “I was married to that man in this same church eighteen years ago. Those are my three sons in the front row. We ask that you leave this house of worship. You have no place here.”

“Reverend Clyde Grubb married me to this dead man under the sight of God and in the presence of my family six years ago when I was pregnant with my son, Niles,” Bright responded. “And this here is his daughter, Starla. So don’t you go telling me I ain’t got a place here. I’m his lawful wedded wife.”

Then Mrs. Asheville Whitehead made a serious mistake when she said to the head usher, “Throw her out of here. Make as little noise as possible.” Though Asheville was in the mountains, the city had long ago lost its deep knowledge about the psychology of mountain women. Pride grows as dense as the laurel in the high mountains, which Mrs. Fancy-pants Asheville learned the hard way when Niles’s distraught mother took out her hunting knife and put it into her rival’s retreating back. It made a terrible, but not fatal, wound. Then Niles watched helplessly as two ushers grabbed his mama from behind. Soon, one of the ushers was on the ground with his grandmother’s hunting knife protruding out of his shoulder. Bedlam was set loose in that very proper church.

“We never saw our mama again. We never saw Meemaw either. That night we began our lifelong tour of orphanages. Starla and I always thought they were going to find us. We heard they both went to prison. We knew that when they got out, they wouldn’t quit until they found us. That dream kept us going for all these years. That dream and nothing else,” Niles said.

“I’ve still got that dream,” Starla said. “I need them to hold me again.”

“I’ll show you their graves tomorrow,” Niles said. “They’re in the family plot up the hill a ways.”

The wail that echoed through that house was mountain born. It told of mountain sorrow with an awesome eloquence, and it rose out of Starla like a storm assaulting her heart. We took turns comforting her, but some wounds are not healable, and some hurts are born with inhuman powers of endurance. Fraser took Niles into her arms that night and wouldn’t let him go.

Before we left the next morning, we visited the graveyard and said prayers over the bodies of the two women who had grown in my mind until I felt I had approached the tomb of goddesses.

Niles and Starla let us take over the details after that. I drove them to a restaurant in Lake Lure and told everybody to order everything. From the restaurant, I called my parents with the good news that we were heading back to Charleston with Niles. Mother assured me that Niles was cleared with the orphanage, his high school, and the police force. There would be no repercussions for his running off. She had suspended Chad Rutledge from school for a week and had almost come to blows with Chad’s parents in her office. Drive safely and great job, son, they both said. I felt giddy and coddled by their love. By a long shot, I had the best parents of anybody riding in my car.

Later, Niles would reveal something to me that he had left out of his story. After a fruitless search for her children when she was released from prison, his mama hanged herself from a tree not far from the house we had stayed in the night before. After her funeral, his grandmother visited her daughter’s fresh grave and put a bullet through her own head. Niles thought Starla was too fragile to take in that horrifying tale. I agreed, and never revealed that part of her mama’s story to her, even after we married and began our disastrous life together.

Because of what happened to Starla, it still fills me with dread and astonishment that I never told her the details of her mother’s death.

CHAPTER 23
Fog and Mist

O
ne night soon after we returned from the mountains, the doorbell rang. Father had been helping Ike Jefferson with his trigonometry and Betty Roberts with her physics homework, and got up to answer the door. At the piano, Trevor was playing Schubert because he said it was “a Schubert kind of night,” one of those lines that we had come to expect from Trevor, and that we’d repeat to one another for the rest of our lives. Working side by side at two sewing machines, Sheba and I were concentrating on the prom dresses we were making for Betty and Starla, who interrupted their homework every once in a while to let Sheba measure them with a tape measure. The dresses would be lovely—“Showstoppers,” Sheba declared with confidence. Niles was studying in silence at my desk in the bedroom. The music had an ache to it, bringing with it all the accounts of melancholy you would ever need.

Father opened the door. Chad Rutledge stood in the light, flanked by his sister and his girlfriend. Sheba and I were concentrating and didn’t look up, but we got distracted when the music stopped with unnatural abruptness. Chad, Molly, and Fraser stepped into the room just as Mother emerged from her bedroom at the back of the house. An awkward silence settled on us all. Niles, sensing the mood of the house, came downstairs and froze at the sight of Chad.

Mother said, “I asked Chad and the girls to drop by. Everyone here has quit talking to Chad since you got back from the mountains. At school, Chad is isolated and shunned by his fellow students. He did something stupid, something almost unforgivable. But there isn’t any crime that lies beyond forgiveness. That’s what literature teaches us, as does art and religion. Chad?”

Chad stepped forward, visibly shaken by our enemy stares. He began to say something, then stopped, cleared his throat, and started to speak again, all the Rutledge arrogance purged from his quavering voice. “I owe everyone here an apology. I don’t deserve forgiveness from any of you. I wanted to tell you face-to-face, and I wanted you to hear me say it. Niles and Trevor can spit in my face like Fraser did, and I’d deserve it. I can’t explain what I did, even to myself. Niles, you haven’t called my sister since you got back. We hear her crying in her room every night. It’s driving my parents nuts. She didn’t know anything about the Middleton Assembly. I’m sorry. I apologize. I don’t know what else to say.”

I turned my back on Chad and continued to work on the hemline of Starla’s prom dress. Sheba did likewise, and Trevor resumed his Schubert. Niles walked back to my room, and Chad stood in the middle of the room looking thunderstruck.

“Just a minute,” Mother said. “Niles, come back here! Trevor, knock it off. Leo, you and Sheba look at me. You can choose not to accept Chad’s apology, but tell him so to his face. Your rudeness I will not tolerate. This is not about Chad, really. It’s about the kind of people you are.”

“Niles, why haven’t you called me?” Her voice breaking, Fraser cried out to Niles when he reluctantly came and joined us. “I went up to the mountains to find you, so I thought everything was good between us.”

Niles looked at the floor, his fists clenched. “How can I call your house again? What if your mother answers, or your dad? Or even your brother? What do I say to those people? ‘Hi, this is Niles, the neighborhood orphan. May I please speak to your daughter, Fraser, who lives in a mansion and whose family hates everything I am or ever will be?’”

“It’s not what
I
think,” Fraser said. “I don’t care what they think.”

“You say that now,” Niles said. “But let’s look at the future. What if we got married? Can you see the looks of your parents and their snot-nosed friends when they see a Charleston Rutledge marrying the mountain nigger? Ike and Betty, I mean no offense to you, and wouldn’t use that term to hurt you.”

“We dig,” Ike said, looking hard at Chad.

“Mr. and Mrs. Rutledge feel terrible too,” Molly said. “They wish none of this ever happened.”

“If Trevor forgives you, I’ll forgive you, Chad,” Sheba said. “I’ve thought about what you did to my brother and to Niles. What I hate about your sorry ass is that you picked on the two sweetest and most vulnerable boys in the world. What do you think it’s been like for Trevor to grow up? Always the sissy boy, the sensitive one, the effeminate little pansy boy. He’s been a magnet for bullies like you his entire life. And they’re everywhere, in every town and every school, waiting for my brother. To beat him up. Or strip him bare and take his money.”

“I liked it when they stripped me bare,” Trevor said, winking at the room, causing a slight break in the tension.

“So along comes Chad Rutledge,” Sheba continued. “Handsome, vain, aristocratic, born with a silver spoon so far up his behind it looks natural. Chad—who doesn’t know a thing about suffering, about misery. The worst thing that’s ever happened to Chad is when he finished third in a fucking regatta.”

“Your language, Sheba!” Mother interrupted.

“Sorry, Dr. King,” Sheba said. “So you take my sweet, tortured brother and you mock him as a faggot in front of a hundred young Charleston assholes in Lone Ranger masks. You let my poor brother believe that he was being inducted into an old Charleston society because his talent had amazed the city. Trevor and I got us a daddy too, Chad. Now, he’s a piece of work: a lunatic, a rapist, and even a murderer, we think. Only the King family knows about our daddy. And you know what we learned? This goddamn family’ll fight for you. That guy over there you call the Toad? Yeah, that one, Leo. My father came all the way to Charleston to hurt us right after we moved here. He tracked us down again. We’ve been running from him forever. But he found us, and we ran to the Kings for help. Know what? Mr. King loads his shotgun and throws another one to Leo, and they’re out in the night hunting that son of a bitch down.”

“Sheba,” Chad said, “I can’t help how you were born. I can’t help what Niles and Starla have gone through. I can’t even help that Fraser and I are Rutledges. All I can do is be sorry for something truly awful that I did. I can’t take back what I did. But I can beg your forgiveness for it.”

“If Dr. King and Mr. King ask me and Trevor to forgive you, we’ll do it. We owe them that much, and so much more. But the guy you call the Toad has to go first,” she said.

“That goes for me too,” Ike said.

“Second that motion,” Betty said reluctantly.

“I didn’t do a damn thing to the Toad,” Chad said, flaring and resorting to his old form.

Starla then broke her silence. “What you did, Chad, hurt your whole school. You hurt every one of us.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Chad said. “I didn’t think it through. It was a mistake made by someone who was never taught to think about anyone else. I was the center of my parents’ universe. Even made my only sister feel ugly. That’s one thing I’ll never be able to forgive myself for.”

“Does anyone have a vomit bag?” I asked. “I’m about to heave my dinner.”

“Words are easy, Chad,” Ike said. “It’s action that’s hard. How come Betty and I don’t even know where you live?”

“Our parents won’t let us invite you to our house,” Fraser said, speaking for her brother. “They don’t believe in integration, and they never will. But Chad and I don’t think that way.”

“Is it what you used to believe?” Betty asked.

“Yes,” Chad said. “We were raised to believe that.”

“That’s how I was raised too,” Father said. “People change. That’s one of the nice parts about growing up.”

“Father,” I asked, “do I have to forgive Chad tonight? Or can I go on hating him for another month or two?”

“Here’s what you don’t know about time, son,” Father said. “It moves funny and it’s hard to pin down. Occasionally, time offers you a hundred opportunities to do the right thing. Sometimes it gives you only one chance. You’ve got one chance here. I wouldn’t let it slip out of your hands.”

Under my parents’ withering glare, I went through the motions and Chad and I embraced. It was during that awkward, fumbling moment that I recognized the depth of Chad’s suffering, and that the shunning he had endured by the cold silence of an entire school had devastated him. Until then, I had never seen Chad suffer through an authentic human moment.

Then he turned toward Niles and Trevor and Starla and put his hands out, palm up. It was like a white flag, and his voice was a high-pitched whimper, and a cry of surrender. “I keep looking for a motive, Niles and Trevor, some reason that would explain to me why I did that to you guys. The only motive I can come up with is that it was the meanest thing I could think of. And that you two guys were so far removed from the society I grew up in that there couldn’t be any payback. It was the meanest thing I’ve ever done. And here’s what’s horrifying: I loved every minute of it. Until I heard that Niles had run away, that is.”

Ike and Betty walked over to embrace Chad and welcome him back into our hurt, fragmented band. Sheba skipped across the room and kissed Chad on both cheeks with the chasteness of a European nun. “Be nicer, Chad. If you were nice, you’d be almost perfect.”

“I’ll try, Sheba. You guys gotta teach me the steps.”

Niles took his time as he moved nearer to Chad, his eyes hawklike and unforgiving. Leaning close, Niles stared into Chad’s eyeballs as though he were decoding a cipher that would reveal what Chad’s heart was thinking. Finally, Niles said, “I’ll let this pass, Chad, but it has nothing to do with you. I love your sister. Have since the day I met her. There’s another reason. Because I ran away, I found my mama at long last. Found my granny too. Me and Starla been looking for them since we were little kids. At the Middleton Assembly when that asshole mentioned the
Chimney Rock Times
, it was the first clue I ever had about where to look. So now me and my sister can quit looking. When you spend your life as an orphan, you don’t believe in happy endings.”

“Niles,” Fraser said, “I think you and I can have a happy ending.”

“We’ll see,” Niles replied. “In our world it’s bad luck to believe in them. And Chad, I can save you some trouble—Starla won’t forgive you and will die hating you, so don’t even ask it of her. It’s just the way she’s built.”

“Fair enough,” Chad said. Niles went over and embraced Fraser, who began sobbing on his shoulder.

“Well said, brother,” Starla admitted.

The attention of the room shifted to Trevor, who had sat through Chad’s entire performance with his back facing the room and his hands covering the keys, as though he were going to play something in B-flat minor. His eyes never wavered from the keys, but he had taken in every word that had ricocheted around that room. He rose in theatrical splendor, ready for his moment in the spotlight. He approached Chad light-footed and flamboyant; Trevor always gave the appearance that he was walking across a pillar of air. On his face, he wore a crafty look, like a jack of clubs in certain decks of cards.

“I’m sorry, Trevor,” Chad said to him. “I don’t know how else to say it.”

“It’s all right, darling,” Trevor said. “Let’s just kiss and make up.”

Trevor launched a surprise attack on Chad by kissing him right on the mouth, driving his tongue far into his throat. Chad backpedaled until his rear end collided with the front door, then he grabbed an ashtray and began to spit in it as though he’d been snakebit on the tongue. The rest of us doubled up with laughter.

“I can always spot a closet queen,” Trevor said. He returned to his piano and started playing “One Last Kiss” from the musical
Bye Bye Birdie
.

Then my parents opened the back door for a mystery guest. Monsignor Max swept into the room, his biretta rakishly angled on his head. He removed it and hurled it like a Frisbee at me as Father handed him a dry martini.

“The King family has asked me to perform an exorcism, and there’s nothing I can refuse this family. Will the miscreant introduce himself? Who is the poor sinner who needs to have the devil driven out of him?”

Chad came forward. “Sir, I think you’re looking for me.”

“Let’s make this quick, son. Boil it down for me: I want the essence of what you did. And, my title is monsignor,” Max cried out with great style and bluster.

“Monsignor,” Chad said, “I think I was something of an asshole.”

“Language, Chad,” Mother warned.

“Forgiven,” the monsignor said. “Your soul is wiped clean. Being an asshole is only another phrase for the human condition. It means that you are mere flesh and blood like the rest of us. Go now and sin no more.”

Monsignor Max blessed the room with a sign of the cross, and the night ended with a sense of recovery and fresh joy.

A
pril of that year is a blur, and May is fog-bound. But I have some photographs from that time to lend me guidance. At the junior-senior prom I am sitting at a round table holding hands with Starla, who is radiant in her new dress. Sheba and Trevor came with each other, and the camera seems to have settled on the lush beauty of the twins and refuses to move toward the other people at the table. Niles is unsmiling in his eternal gravitas as Fraser sits on his lap, elegant in a designer dress she and her mother purchased at a New York boutique; until I studied this photograph, it never occurred to me that Fraser had the prettiest shoulders and most flawless complexion I had ever seen. Ike and Betty are looking at each other instead of at the camera, and so are Molly and Chad. As I looked at the framed photo twenty years later, I was struck by the group’s wholesomeness, by the remarkable youthfulness of our faces. We looked like we could never die. It struck me as amazing that all the couples present at that fateful table, except for the twins, of course, ended up marrying their dates.

Had Starla and I already exchanged the sweet words that would eventually lead us to the altar of the Summerall Chapel, where Monsignor Max would bind us in holy matrimony on the day I graduated from The Citadel? Ike and Betty got married in the same chapel later the same day, and we took turns being in each other’s weddings. Sheba and Trevor flew in from California to be members of the wedding party, with Sheba serving as maid of honor for Starla. Niles and Fraser got married at St. Michael’s the following Saturday, and Chad and Molly followed suit the next weekend. We partied long and hard that summer.