Tina Mcelroy Ansa (10 page)

Folks she had known all her life. Folks she had sold homes to all over Mulberry who had insisted that Lena see each and every inch of their new abodes waited and waited for the invitation—formal or impromptu—to view Lena’s new quarters. But they waited in vain.

Her house and property out by the river were hers.

For a brief time when Lena lived in a number of houses all over Mulberry that she redid and then sold for a tidy profit, she was never able to fully make any of them—the Victorian three-story prize with a stand of ginger lily and climbing white roses out front that had been the home of her piano teacher, Mrs. Frazier, behind her school in Pleasant Hill; the little cottage in East Mulberry with a tiny bathroom with fifty candleholders around the tub—her own, the way the house out by the river was. Her true home was located, designed, built and decorated especially for her. Lena wanted it to be a combination of a ranch and a woodsy lodge.

It was set smack in the middle of a huge stand of woods that looked untouched since the time that only Cherokee and Seminole Indians marched through single file on their way down from the Smoky Mountains to ceremonial mounds east of Mulberry. The surveying and landscaping crew cut one long winding road into the heart of the property from the main highway to get Lena the best site for her home and still leave most of the big and valued trees—like the grove of rare golden Japanese rain trees that had seeded themselves over a half acre—and vegetation undisturbed. The comfortable rutted dirt road twisted and turned all kinds of ways just to avoid a beautiful old magnolia. And it swerved and detoured to bypass other stretches of land—like the bog where ice-blue irises and wild orange gladioli grew in natural ovals—that the surveying crew knew were especially prized by the nature-loving landowner.

The site she decided on for her house and other structures was on a shoulder of land that somehow extended into the bend of the river so that she had water on the east and west sides of her home. And it was high dry land, too. That was how she was able to have a wine cellar so near the river.

Her bedroom suite, the pool room, the dining room and the wraparound deck with the enclosed porch off her bedroom faced the river on the east. Her office, the sewing room and the greenhouse faced the river on the west through a long wooden screened porch. The main Great Jonah Room, now filled with hickory tables and oak bookcases that ran the width of the house, faced both ways.

For more than a month, Lena had walked and driven around the property with Renfroe, the gardener, and the architect—a tall sturdy dark woman from North Carolina—to see where the sun set among the trees in the summer, spring, autumn and winter.

Long before they laid the foundation for the sprawling house, Lena knew how the dappled sunlight would look at daybreak from plush damask love seats by the bay window in her bedroom.

And she knew the lay of her land—land she had found herself just driving around one day in late summer—and how the view and the sunrise would change over the passing of the seasons.

In the spring, she knew she would be able to sit at the computer in her work space, with French doors thrown open, and smell the tangle of wisteria vines that covered and, Mr. Renfroe warned her, threatened to kill two tall pines sticking out of a grove of cypress trees.

She knew that from her kitchen window, she could pause in the late autumn and watch the low golden light glance off the rustling leaves on the tops of the hundred-year-old pecan trees on the other side of the well-worn bridle path that would weave along the river and throughout her property. In the dead of winter, she knew she could stand and warm herself by the fireplace in her bedroom and see the cold wind coming off the Ocawatchee and chilling the blooming tea olive bushes on her land on the other shore.

Nature had already done so much. Blessing the bucolic site, She
had placed sweet fragile-looking dogwood trees with white blossoms throughout the woods and all around the planned site of her house; scattered mounds of vivid pink, crimson, violet, rose and vermilion wild azaleas and wild hydrangeas at the base of tall Georgia pines; seeded wild cherry trees in a clearing where the blossoms could be easily seen from three directions; planted tall hedges of wild-species roses and Indian hawthorn in sunlit spots; strung vines of yellow jasmine all up and through the oaks and pines and rhododendrons like garland on a Christmas tree; blew ageratum on the wind from the south to brighten a cove, loblollies and magnolias springing up out of the ground tall and displaying their nearly obscenely fragrant white blossoms. At first, Lena and Mr. Renfroe felt they were gilding the lily by adding their own landscaping ideas. But they could not help joining in. They just took their cues from Mother Nature and continued her theme.

In open spaces on high ground, they planted peach trees and plum trees and pear trees and pomegranate trees, dotting the grassy rises. Mr. Renfroe gave her a few ground rules about planting fruit trees—distance apart, soil requirements, sun required—and then turned her loose to decide where to plant things. He only had to come back and rearrange a few of her choices and she could see right away they were the best decisions. Mr. Renfroe knew his horticulture.

Between her house and the stables, a cluster of pecan trees, ten years old when she built the house, grew thirty feet into the air. A tangle of lavender wisteria had overtaken one side of the stable. In the spring, the scent of the flowers in the air made it impossible to smell the horses’ manure.

The stable with its brick flooring and wood and steel paddocks was erected at the edge of a winding road at the northern side of the house. Goldie was a magnificent golden palomino that only Lena and the best riders could handle. Keba was a dark red chestnut mare whose coat looked like Lena’s hair in the sun when she washed her braids and stood outside to let them dry. Baby, a black filly, was truly the baby, the last animal she added to her family, expecting and getting
most of the attention from Lena and the stable hands. She was not as large in stature as her “sisters,” Goldie and Keba, but she was strong and frisky and adventurous, sometimes too much so. With Lena on her back, Baby would take on any obstacle they faced in their rides: ford rushing creeks, plunge down treacherous ravines, strain up fierce inclines.

When Lena drove her burnished Mercedes into her compound in the evenings, the three steeds would gallop along the corral’s wooden fence with her car, their big heads and hers thrown back in an arc, all their tresses—her braided hair and their free manes—blowing in the river-cooled wind. Their spirits seemed to ride each other.

Just at the turn where the wild grapevines grew, throwing tight sweet purple and green scuppernongs at her feet, the horses would veer off to the right, and she would take the road to the left. They would meet again at the exercise rink near the barn.

Nearby, there was a sprawling weeping willow tree. She had seen it in the spring down by the river about to be washed into the still-rushing waters as the Big Flood of ’94 receded. She was able to get a few of her mother’s boys from down at The Place—one with a truck and hoisting equipment—to come out and save the tree for replanting.

Just that week in April, Lena had noticed that the big graceful tree was putting out lime-green leaves all along its slender tendrils, turning the very air around it verdant. It had seemed to happen overnight.

Lena missed so much in the passing parade of life. She would look up one day and the trees on her property were just putting out baby buds. Then, she would look up in what seemed like the next week and the same trees would be dropping their brown and gold and orange leaves.

“Good God, don’t time fly,” she would say as she zipped along to another meeting or house closing or banker’s appointment, sounding like her own grandmother.

Deeper in the woods in the opposite direction from the river, Lena
and Mr. Renfroe even found two mulberry trees growing in a clearing. One was a weeping mulberry that formed a houselike canopy over the two of them that reminded Lena of the chinaberry tree house that she and her first childhood friend, Sarah, shared on Forest Avenue. The gardener said the trees were at least two hundred years old. He was as pleased as Lena was to find them there.

“You got a good-luck piece a’ land here, Lena,” Mr. Renfroe told her with pride as if she had personally cultivated every stick on the place.

And he was right, too. To be so close to the river, the surveyors found that Lena’s land was on extraordinarily high ground. When the big floods of ’94 had come, no one could hardly believe that Lena wasn’t washed away out there by the river. But she wasn’t. Even the wooden bridge on her land that spanned the river where it narrowed before rushing into town was not washed away by the deluge. Her wine cellar wasn’t even flooded.

From the beginning, Lena felt it was a blessed place. From the moment she stepped foot on the property, she felt she belonged there.

On her first trip to Mulberry after Lena started building her new house, Sister declared the property out by the river an “ecotone.”

“See how the river meets the land meets the air meets the woods?” Sister asked as they walked the land for the first time, explaining the meaning of the term. “It’s an ecotone, the overlapping of all these environments. It’s the best place for life to form. You know, like the Garden of Eden, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile Valley.

“Good spiritual place, girl. And you a Scorpio. The river, a swimming pool, little streams. More water. Good place, girlfriend.” And she poured a warm libation of valerian tea from her paper cup right there on the ground to sanctify the spot.

Lena felt safe and protected on her own land. It was hers. It felt like hallowed ground.

Sister had told her, “Some folks think hallowed ground is where some powerful somebody is buried, but it’s not. Actually, hallowed ground is where some powerful somebody
live!”

In the spirit of women and water and life, Lena had named her swimming pool “Rachel’s Waters” in honor of the ghost of a gentle slave she had once seen on a Georgia beach. Lena was seven when she wandered away from her brothers on a family vacation and discovered a thin, dark, damp apparition sitting on a whitened beached log, not far from the rice plantation she had fled, smelling like the very ocean itself. Rachel the ghost sat at the spot where she had drowned herself.

Rachel had explained, “This is where I wanted to be, this is where I
choose
to be. This is where I is.”

Lena tried her best now to forget the ghosts, gentle and scary, that had haunted her childhood. But Rachel—a woman who chose to kill herself in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean rather than submit to slavery—was one she wanted to remember.

It was on her property that Lena was at last able to make peace with the woods, any woods. Even though she did not know she was doing it, when she was a teenager, she had spent many a night sleepwalking in the stand of pines and oaks and magnolias and dogwoods that grew on the other side of the stream behind her parents’ house on Forest Avenue. Then one night she had actually awakened in the middle of the woods in her soaking cotton nightgown with her back propped up against the rough bark of a sycamore tree, lost and confused and scared.

For most of her life after that, she could not bear to go into any verdant patch of earth or wooded area except for her grandmother’s garden. Just the sight of a tree’s bark up close could sometimes terrify her. If she accidentally brushed against a decorative rubber tree in someone’s office or a big ficus tree in the Mulberry Mall, she would have to keep herself from crying out at the psychic pain of the touch.

But as soon as she laid eyes on the thick undeveloped land out by the river, she began to make peace with the woods. There was something of the sacred in the woods on her land. She felt it from the beginning. From there, it seemed an effortless step for her to learn truly to love the woods.

Lena had bought the land with her own money, money she had
earned herself, something she didn’t get much credit for because everyone in Mulberry knew that everything Lena touched turned to gold. She was just a damn smart and lucky child.

Jonah would brag to his friends around the poker table that Lena wasn’t allowed to gamble with him.

“Shit,” he’d say, throwing his handsome head over his shoulder, “my baby could pee in a Coke bottle swinging from a chinaberry tree on a windy day. She’s the luckiest Negro I ever seen in my life!” He tried to feign objective wonder, but all the men and the one woman at the table knew he was just eat up with pride over his wheelin’, dealin’, chip-off-the-ol’-block, look-like-he-coulda-spit-her-out, moneymaking daughter.

Her father was only briefly disappointed that she didn’t take the land that he had given her across the street from his own home on Forest Avenue and build her own home there. Nellie told him it was an “unreasonable idea.”

Later, she had just shaken her head and muttered, “Goodness gracious, men can be such fools! Why in the world would Lena want to live right across the street from us? Like we some of those old-timey people who have to live all on the same little patch. Like Lena says, ’We’re living in a
global
village now.’”

Lena’s plan to tear down the rickety old shotgun houses barely still standing there and to build single-dwelling low-to-moderate-income housing (a project she had begun planning as an economics assignment in college) in their place did little to assuage his hurt feelings. But when the moderate-income houses were snapped up in a more than break-even deal and the news of the project began spreading—first through local media, then a piece on CBS
Sunday Morning
—Jonah wouldn’t stop bragging about “my baby girl out ’changing the world around her,’ as they said on CNN. And making a profit in the bargain.”

Even Nellie had to laugh and say, “Now, you
know
that’s Jonah’s child!”

Lena had to admit she reveled in all the attention the project
brought. She couldn’t help herself, she was the baby of the family. She loved attention.