The Story Keeper (26 page)

He seemed to be on the level, and yet what he was telling me didn’t fit. “Evan, someone’s been bringing chapters of that manuscript and leaving them wedged in the cabin door. I’ve read eight chapters now. From what you’re saying, I guess that’s all of it. Maybe that’s why nothing new has shown up in the last couple days.”

“Chapters?” His disbelief was obvious. I couldn’t blame him. But I could also see the wheels turning. He was trying to figure out how it could be true. One thing was for certain
 
—he had nothing to do with those mysterious deliveries to the cabin.

Chapter 22

T
he phone conversation replayed in my head as I drove
 
—my youngest sister, Lily Clarette, calling to ask whether I was coming to this afternoon’s birthday party. “I just wanna see you before you go, okay?” She had Coral Rebecca’s sweet, musical voice. I wondered if she also possessed the same singing talent. I realized I’d never talked to her on the phone. Not once. She’d written to me about school projects a couple times over the years, but that was it.

I didn’t even know her voice. There was something so wrong in that.

“Maybe I can try to get by there. We’ll see.”

I’d secured a few more days here on Looking Glass Lake
 
—how could I not, after talking to Evan? He was as baffled by the appearance of the manuscript pages at the cabin as I was. He had come by to see them when he’d picked up the horse and
confirmed that they were his. He was trying to get to the bottom of the whole thing. Granny Vi and Helen wouldn’t admit to having anything to do with it.

According to Evan, I’d now read all that had ever existed of
The Story Keeper
. We’d sat on the cabin porch and chatted about it as Hannah soothed the nervous gray horse through the stock trailer window.

Suddenly Evan Hall and I were no longer enemies. The mystery had, in some way, turned us into uneasy allies. Both of us wanted to know where those chapters had come from.

Neither of us knew who else to ask.

The mystery was both fascinating and frustrating, but the memory of Lily Clarette’s call edged out the questions about
The Story Keeper
as I drove. “Come on, Jennia Beth. Just for a little while. Coral Rebecca says Levi’s takin’ a half day off work and goin’ over to the Walmart in Sylva to pick up this big ol’ cake, and we dug round the old barn and found the pitchin’ horseshoes. It’s gonna be fun. Daddy and Roy got the dog all traded for the four-wheeler, and the four-wheeler’s already sold, so everybody’s happy. Coral Rebecca wants you to come so bad. She’s gonna be heartbroke if you don’t. We’ve never, ever all been together.”

We had, but of course, Lily Clarette couldn’t remember it. Other than those few e-mails back and forth to her account at school and her
Flat Stanley
project in the fourth grade, we were complete strangers. “I’ll try. I will. I’m in the middle of something work-related here, though. It’s a little unpredictable.”

My sister sighed. “In Isaiah it says, ‘Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing.’ It’s time for a new thing, Jennia Beth.”

The Scripture came out of nowhere, blindsided me. Something
crippled and battered inside me rose toward the words. I recognized it as hope. “Okay. I’ll be there.”

Now here I was, snaking through the mountains with window herb gardens and kid-size sandpile sets neatly gift-wrapped in the backseat. Friday and I had stopped by the Mountain Leaf store on the way to find presents, so as not to show up empty-handed. Given the family’s financial state and the condition of Daddy’s house, the kids’ birthdays might be pretty slim.

Apparently, though, someone had managed enough money to order a customized birthday cake at the Walmart bakery, or else they’d leaned on Coral Rebecca and Levi to pay for it.

Don’t think about it, don’t think about it . . .

My jaw was already stiffening up, bones and teeth clenching, stress taking over.

I tried to focus, instead, on the research materials I’d picked up from the library in Looking Glass Gap. The librarian had been unbelievably helpful. She hadn’t been able to find anything about the origins of Sarra Creek, other than that the name predated the establishment of the La Belle Mission. She’d given me a book about La Belle, a mission school founded around 1904, as well as copies of census documents and tax rolls from the turn of the century, but I hadn’t found Rand Champlain’s name or Sarra’s mentioned anywhere.

Driving the winding road, slipping through sunlight and shade, I lost myself in time, gazing over mountain slopes and into settlements tucked in lush valleys. My imagination ran along deer trails and and old Cherokee trade routes, painting images of Rand and Sarra here and there as they fought to survive. Beyond that, there was the deeper question: Could they overcome the barriers that separated them? Could there be any kind of life for the two of them together?

It was entirely possible that I might never find the answers. The librarian knew her stuff, but in terms of historical proof, she hadn’t been able to turn up anything beyond the folktales Evan had been told about a young white man and a part-Cherokee girl who’d jumped over the falls rather than allow themselves to be separated. According to legend, the spirits of the star-crossed lovers still wandered the hollows along Sarra Creek, their love creating rainbows over the Sagua Falls on sunlit days.

It struck me again that, unless something magically turned up in these library materials, I was quite possibly at the end of the line. What if Rand and Sarra really were no more than an old mountain tale? What if there was no more history to discover or the history had been lost forever? While Evan was interested in digging up the facts if we could, he wasn’t interested in inventing an ending for Rand and Sarra’s story. He said he couldn’t see the point.

I had to face the fact that in the long run, the only solution might be to let it go.

Perhaps this entire trip wasn’t even about my discovering a long-lost story or about my dusting it off and bringing it to print. Maybe this trip was about
my
story, about writing a new chapter rather than discovering what had been written long ago.

Maybe here, where peace had always eluded me, I could finally make peace with the past.

What if I wasn’t strong enough to face the reckoning
 
—the one I’d sensed when I’d started on this trip?

Turn around, make excuses, go back to the cabin.
The voice of doubt was almost too strong to resist.

I tried to silence it as I circled through Towash, but sitting at the crossroads, I debated again, fought angel and devil until a car with a dragging tailpipe rumbled up behind me and honked,
forcing a decision. The turn toward Lane’s Hill was almost more than I could muster. Doubt and ghosts haunted the slowly narrowing road that led to the remnants of a turn-of-the-century post office and store, marking what had once been a tiny community at a water crossing. I felt the whispers closing in, the ghosts peering through the car windows, pounding on the glass, threatening to overtake me.

A quarter mile farther along, the dirt road to Lane’s Hill Church seemed almost abandoned. Tree limbs clawed the car like fingernails, the long, high moans drilling into my brain. The tires slid in muddy ruts, and a rising sense of doom gathered, growing stronger with each revolution of the wheels, becoming almost unbearable when I passed the place where Joey had liked to catch salamanders while the adults lingered uphill at the church. Friday woke and positioned himself with paws on the dashboard, seeming to sense the change inside the car, the taking on of greater and greater weight, the increasing lack of oxygen.

I felt like I was suffocating.

Ahead, the tiny, squat building peeked through the trees, then came into view. The short steeple and faded clapboard were strangely unremarkable, considering how large this place had loomed in my memory. I had both dreaded and feared it, and now, gazing at it as I pulled in among the hodgepodge of vehicles, I realized how insignificant it was. Just a building, created by men, filled with bits of God’s Word torn from context and recombined like the pieces of a ransom note.

There had never been, I realized now, anything but hate and fear and punishment here. Brutal control. This building was not the gateway to heaven or hell. There was no love or grace here
 
—none of the things that had confused me when I tried reading the family Bible myself. Men had wrested this place from God,
turned it into a golden calf, an idol. If I continued to give power to it, I was as lost as the people who still gathered at the foot of this ragged tar paper–and–tin god of their own making.

It was time to take away from Lane’s Hill what should never have belonged to Lane’s Hill in the first place.

With a fortifying breath, I squared myself and stepped from the car, then retrieved the gifts from the backseat, determined to take this next step toward freedom.

A hum of voices stirred the air as I rounded the building. Beneath the trees, tables had been set among the aging teeter-totters and swing sets that marked the remains of an old school, long since closed down by busing and consolidation. Girls with hair in frayed plaits and boys in oversize hand-me-down jeans ran among the rotted swings and lopsided merry-go-rounds, playing games of tag, their high-pitched voices conjuring the past.

So many times after prayer meetings we’d slipped away to the old schoolyard, where the laughter and boisterous games of childhood were permitted. In church, even the youngest were made to sit statue still, in the proper position for worship. Fidgeting earned a quick, sharp strike of the short rod
 
—a small, thin length of dowel wood carried in the pocket or tucked in the Bible of a parent. Longer, more powerful rods waited at home, for use when needed.

I wondered if that was still the practice here. It was hard to imagine Coral Rebecca hitting her girls or allowing anyone else to. Other members of the flock, observing behavior deemed improper among any of the children, were authorized to strike the offender. Here on Lane’s Hill, you learned that judgment was a perpetual shadow . . . or else you constantly took a beating.

Deedee, Coral Rebecca’s eldest, spotted Friday on his leash and the stack of gifts balanced in my hands as I approached.
The little redhead with her, one of Marah Diane’s girls, gave the presents a wide-eyed look, which narrowed and grew wary when she saw who was carrying them. I’d barely met Marah Diane’s kids on my visit to the farm, she was so busy scolding her brood and chasing them away. I could only imagine what they’d heard about me. I had, at least, worn a dress today, as per my father’s wishes
 
—a midcalf wool shift with a peasant-style top. I’d picked it up at Robin’s booth in the Time Shifters camp and belted it with a scarf from my suitcase. Combined with a blazer and dress boots, the ensemble wasn’t bad.

One of the boys tagged the redhead, and she and Deedee broke into a run, skimming past me so closely that I felt a breeze. Marah Diane glanced my way, her eyes widening. Coming toward me, she scolded the kids and told them to keep clear of the fish fryer.

“I can’t stay for prayer meeting after the party,” I preempted as we met. I hadn’t missed the fact that this was Wednesday, which meant that a gathering of the Brethren Saints would commence about the time this party wrapped up.

Right now, however, the grounds looked deceptively festive. Birthday tables waited, complete with colorful plates, napkins, and plastic silverware. A huge pan of beans and a giant hunk of cheese
 
—commodity food probably contributed by someone who was on the Cherokee tribal rolls and eligible for staples
 
—sat ready to feed the crowd of family and church friends. Fried fish and what looked like venison tenderloin or backstrap waited on a platter, and there was a propane burner blazing under a pot of grease nearby.

“I didn’t think
you’d
come inside,” Marah Diane bit out, surveying my clothes again. “I guess Coral Rebecca told you to dress proper.”

Don’t react. Don’t react.
“I brought something for the kids. Where should I put these?”

“Over there, with the rest a the presents.” She motioned to a table near the building. A quick glance at the contents left me openmouthed. There were four new bicycles next to the full-sheet bakery cake and other wrapped gifts.

“Daddy and Roy got the money for that four-wheeler already.” Marah Diane lifted her chin, looked down her nose at me. “Cash. Twenty-five
hundred
dollars.”

Heat boiled under my collar, pressing toward my face.
What about the roof, the bills, the floor that’s falling through, the broken window in Lily Clarette’s bedroom
 
—the bedroom that doesn’t even have electricity right now?

As always, it was feast into famine around here.

“The girls get to have them a good birthday for once.” She licked her lips, relishing the conflict I was struggling to keep from spilling all over the party. The windfall generated by the dog trade would be gone in a month, spent on shopping sprees and loaned off to relatives who were desperate at the moment . . . until all were equally desperate again. That was how it worked.

“Oh” was all I could come up with.

“You can put your presents back there on the table. It was nice of you to carry them somethin’.” She gave the gift bags a dismissive look that said,
You could’ve afforded bigger stuff, but you’re too selfish.

Her attention turned to the fryer, where Coral Rebecca and Levi were breading bags of home-caught fish fillets. Around the table, several of my aunts worked, while the men sat nearby in lawn chairs, my father among them, his back turned my way. Either the group hadn’t noticed me yet, or none of them cared that I’d shown up. Hard to say which.

“I better see about the fish.” Marah Diane walked away and left me standing at the gift table, awkwardly trying to decide what to do next. Finally I set the presents with the rest and tried to tell myself there were worse things they could have spent the money on than bicycles. The kids would enjoy them at least.

“I’m real glad you came.” Coral Rebecca surprised me from behind, but she stood a distance away rather than embracing me as she had when I’d visited her home. Her arms remained crossed self-consciously. We were both aware of the curious looks now coming our way, the hushed whispers circling the group. The air around us was so tight with expectation, you could’ve strummed “Pretty Polly” on it. “That was awful sweet of you to bring somethin’ for all the kids.”