Tina Mcelroy Ansa (9 page)

Lena hadn’t told anyone. Not Gloria, not Sister, not Frank Petersen. No one. But years before her father even bought a plane, she herself had seen her parents’ demise in the fiery crash along the coast of Florida in the fall of 1985. It left her with one of the biggest dilemmas of her life. Did she trust her own visions or not?

No, Lena thought, I don’t
ever
have to go back in that house.

And she turned to the distracted nervous man holding the truck door open for her and told him so.

“Mr. Jackson,” she said wearily but evenly, “you know I don’t live here. No one lives here. Take me
home!
”

L
ena felt better the moment Mr. Jackson hit his blinking signal and turned into the dirt road leading onto her own property. With the window on her side of the truck’s cab down, she could feel the familiar breeze from the river. She felt on safe ground.

She had to chuckle to herself at the way Mr. Jackson had reacted when she turned him around on Forest Avenue.

He had looked at Lena as if she were speaking Martian.

She had repeated it. “I don’t live here, Mr. Jackson. No one lives here.”

Lena thought that for a minute, Mr. Jackson looked as if someone had hit him in the head. “Wha’? What you say, Lena?”

“I live out by the river, Mr. Jackson. This was my parents’ home.”

“Way out there in the country?” he had asked gruffly, trying to recover as he threw the truck in reverse and motioned for his man to follow him back out to the Forest Avenue entrance. “You gon’ be by yourself?”

“Oh, no, James Petersen, Frank Petersen’s brother, is always out
there at the gatehouse,” Lena rushed to say of the man who now took care of her and her house. But she thought, Now, why the hell do I have to go around making everybody else feel comfortable about me going to my own house?

When she passed the small cottage that belonged to her houseman, she envied him for a moment. She knew he was sitting in there, his feet up on an ottoman, his duties done for the day, his dinner eaten, his next day loosely planned, and open on the table beside him, a new mystery Lena’s favorite bookseller had sent.

This time of night sometimes, it felt as if Lena’s day were just beginning. She knew as soon as she got rid of Mr. Jackson, she had calls to answer and bridges to cross before she slept.

She rubbed her hand over her forehead wearily at the thought and was grateful when she realized that the gesture quieted the man sitting beside her. She certainly didn’t feel like talking and entertaining Mr. Jackson and, besides, that breeze was in the cab of the truck now and was caressing her head and forehead. She was too tired to fight it anymore. All she wanted to do was lean back and let it stroke her. And that’s exactly what she did all the way out to her house by the river.

Lena had named her estate “You Belong.” It was how the land made her feel. In all on both sides of the river, she owned a hundred acres. She had purchased the first eighty acres when she turned thirty. The next year, as a gift to his future grandchildren, Jonah bought the ten acres on either side of her when he heard they were for sale.

The house was built only about fifty yards from the river at its closest point, but the way the buildings were situated on a shoulder of land nuzzling into the water, the river ran on three sides of her property.

She had also built a pier and deck at the end of a natural path in the woods that extended over the river. She did not own a boat, but she agreed to the architect’s idea to include the dock.

Even though Lena’s house was much too sprawling and grand to be called a cabin, that’s how Lena always thought of it: her own
private cabin in the woods. The way she referred to it, folks who didn’t know her thought that it
was
a cabin. “My place out in the woods. Out by the river,” she’d say casually.

She never intended for it to be so big. But she just kept adding all the luxuries, accoutrements and special features that she had ever wanted. She knew she had to have an automatic clothes rack that spun the selections in front of where she stood. Lena loved to stroll through her closet, walk past her mother’s beautiful things—tailored suits, sexy sleeveless dresses, cashmere jackets—past her own designer originals that Yvonne in Atlanta and Yvette in Chicago, twins from Mulberry, sent for her selection, past her racks of shoes, past Miss Christine’s vintage tailored suits and sheer silk blouses.

Then Jonah had come through and insisted, “Lena, you in the liquor business. You
ought
to have a wine cellar.” Then Nellie had put in, “Oh, baby, steam would be so good for your skin.”

Then everybody in Mulberry who heard Lena McPherson was building her own house out by the river got into the act.

The best black masons, bricklayers, carpenters and plumbers in the area assumed they would be called into service. It took a great deal of smoothing over to hire the ones she wanted and not crush the others.

Folks would call her and her parents all the time with suggestions. Even Mr. Holbry, one of Jonah’s business competitors and staunch enemies, to hear them tell it, couldn’t stand holding on to the information he had just to spite his rival. So he called Lena late one night at her house with the phone number of a man in South Georgia who had gotten his hands on some twenty-four-inch-wide oak flooring—enough for three large rooms—that had been salvaged years before from an old plantation house leveled by a tornado down by Thomas-ville.

“These some beautiful wood panels, Lena,” Mr. Holbry said over the phone, almost in a whisper as if not to let anyone, especially Jonah, know what he was doing. “A few of ’em got nicks and burn
marks, but that just give ’em age and c’arcture. They been sanded lightly and varnished ’bout four times already. You know the mens that made this flooring, had to be black mens, slaves, was some kind of artists. The man that got this wood—now, you call right after we hang up … if you interested. This man say each plank a’ wood fit together with the next so smoothly that it’s a pure-T joy just to work with ’em.”

Mr. Holbry had hung up the phone right proud of himself. But he never took Lena up on her invitations for him and his wife to come out for a drink and to see the floors in the living room, Lena’s bedroom and her office until after Jonah died.

“This ain’t hardly no
cabin
, Lena,” Mr. Holbry said as he and his wife walked out on her deck with Baccarat wineglasses in their hands. He shook his head in admiration of the house’s mitered corners.

The landscaping and construction took more than a year. It was spring when she finally moved in. It wasn’t a two-story house, but it might as well have been. The ceilings were so high, another floor could have easily fit above. In the back of her mind, Lena optimistically thought, if my family expands, we can build a loft up there for the children.

Building her house at thirty-two, Lena felt sure she had childbearing years ahead. Children, a mate, a family that would fill the house. She never envisioned the future without a family. It was one of the reasons she prayed never to be blessed with a calling to be a nun.

The dwelling
did
have many of the elements and feeling of a cabin. The house was made of Georgia pine and white oak logs with hard-to-find cypress logs for the decks and trim. All of it was cinched together with sturdy homespun-looking notches and wooden nails by local master carpenters and builders.

There were hardly any paintings hanging on the beautifully finished walls. Instead, Lena was drawn to textile art—fabrics, hemp, woods, metal, rock—things that had texture that she could see
and
feel.

All through her big wooden house, dramatic mud cloth from West Africa hung within reaching distance of a muted Cherokee Indian blanket from northeast Georgia and next to a delicately stitched old circle quilt Miss Zimmie, who had grown up in South Mulberry, had made for her own marriage bed.

In the main Great Jonah Room, she had hung Native American brown and orange and gray and green blankets and rugs high on the walls among the rafters. They were made by Seminoles in North Florida and by Cherokee Indians before and after they were forced to leave their homeland and make a death march west to Oklahoma. Some were so fragile, delicate and aged that she had them hanging under glass. Some were modern works she had bought in the last five years from a Native American community down by Wrightsville.

Her treasured African and Caribbean pieces were the same. Ancient and modern hung in community on the walls of Lena’s home. A two-hundred-year-old flat basket woven and used by African slaves on the Georgia coast to fan the chaff from the rice they grew made a perfect companion to the fanned basket from Sierra Leone, used for the same purpose, and the straw tray woven the year before by a black woman artist who had moved to a farm outside of Mulberry. Sister, in her travels around the world, prided herself on instinctively knowing just the piece Lena would love as a gift.

In Kenya, Sister had bartered for the mud cloth that was now hanging over Lena’s dining room table. She had also introduced Lena to the yellow, blue, black and white works of Ndebele women from southern Africa.

Nellie had given Lena everything out of her grandmama’s old room on Forest Avenue: a daguerreotype of another era complete with four-poster bed, red chifforobe and an heirloom dresser, where only Lena, the baby of the family, was always welcomed. Lena had dispersed her grandmother’s treasures—right down to her old chenille robes and shirtwaist dresses hanging in the chifforobe—throughout her own house so wherever she moved, she was reminded of the old lady.

It all worked beautifully together—the textiles, the wood, the glass, the sunlight, the woods, the river.

On one wall of the Great Jonah Room, Lena had hung a huge framed photograph of her paternal grandparents hanging merrily from the Silver Crescent caboose, Granddaddy Walter’s snap brim set at a cocky angle with one arm around his bride’s tiny waist. The picture had been enlarged from a daguerreotype taken on their wedding trip to New Orleans. Whenever Lena looked at the picture, she recalled her grandmama saying, “One reason Walter look so pleased is we setting off on a adventure.”

The ceilings of nearly all the rooms had intricate patterns of the same sturdy pine beams that held the house together, even the pool room, the bedroom and master bath, which had glass ceilings or skylights.

Mr. Buck had laid the red clay tiles in the kitchen to echo the naturally geometric pattern in the ceiling where Lena had hung her complete set of Calphalon cookware from long black antique iron hooks.

Although the house was centrally heated—even the sturdy stable had heating vents for her horses—there were fireplaces in practically every room. Huge sturdy fireplaces that were big enough to walk into and so exquisitely constructed that they were works of art rivaling the ones hanging in the rafters and on the walls.

Mr. Buck, the artisan who had laid each stone himself, combined local and North Georgia river stones and mortar to create pieces of massive sculpture in the Great Jonah Room, in her office, in her bedroom suite, in the extra bedroom and in the sewing room. From the outside, there were only two huge chimneys rising from the sprawling log frame.

“Um, nice
big
rooms!” Mr. Buck had boomed as he first inspected the blueprints for the house and rotated the thick smelly cigar stump in his mouth evenly.

The mantelpiece for each fireplace was made from a single white Georgia pine tree that Mr. Buck had let Lena help fell right on her
property and replace with a tiny pine seedling. Varnished pine French doors made from the same Georgia pine logs topped by more windows off every room allowed air and sunlight in everywhere.

The two main fireplaces, huge hulking creatures of stone and mortar, were like people sitting in Lena’s house. One sat in the northwest end of the house facing the Great Jonah Room on one side and Lena’s workroom on the other side. The other fireplace, as big as its sister in the opposite wing, faced Lena’s bedroom on one side and her unused sewing room on the other.

The cypress deck wrapped around the bedroom on the east to an enclosed porch on the south side that overlooked a crook in the river.

The stables and barn, nestled among pine oak and pecan trees to house her three horses—Baby, Goldie and Keba—looked as if they had been standing there for decades. The strong but weathered wood the builders used to assemble the multi-area structure on a new sturdier frame had been brought from farmland Lena had bought outside of Wrightsville. Lena had bought the property just for the barn and stables. The old farmhouse that had at one time stood nearby had burned to the ground years before and the family didn’t have the heart even to inspect the site, let alone try to build a replacement for their homeplace. Until Lena drove by one day on one of her countryside real estate explorations and spied the barn and stables surrounded by what seemed like a mile of weathered wooden slotted fencing, the property had stood vacant for years. A month after Lena purchased it, a rich deposit of kaolin chalk was discovered underground.

As sprawling as the estate was with its stables, barn and outbuildings at one end—a good hundred yards away from the house so no smell invaded her living quarters—an indoor swimming pool in the middle and an enclosed screen porch and a glass-enclosed atrium off her bedroom suite at the other end, Lena’s home was surprisingly unpretentious. It carried its size and accoutrements with such grace and naturalness that few people ever said she was putting on airs.

How could they? Few people had ever seen the whole place inside. It never dawned on Lena to offer guests tours of her home, her own
private home, even though most visitors were aching for a deeper look into Lena McPherson’s world. It seemed to her it had taken nearly a lifetime to find a refuge of some peace and privacy. She couldn’t imagine throwing her private abode open to the Mulberry public, her public, the way she had done with her very life.