When Venus Fell

Praise for

A Place to Call Home

BY DEBORAH SMITH
from bantam books

When Venus Fell
A Place to Call Home
Silk and Stone
Blue Willow

Well into her elderly years my paternal grandmother regularly tucked her sawed-off shotgun into the crook of her arm, set her straw sunhat firmly on her head, and set out to walk the boundaries of our farm. She never found any trespassers worth shooting, and I was never quite certain who or what she feared might threaten us, but her message was clear and strong.

Protecting our family’s land was a sacred duty.

That isn’t an uncommon idea among farm-born southerners of an older generation. As suburban subdivisions and malls creep across the farmland there are still stories of old men and old women who turn down millions of dollars in order to leave their homesteads to their children and grandchildren. To own even a small piece of land is to have roots, to have a home, to never turn your face away from who and what and where you are.

And so it’s natural for me to write about the Camerons, a family of southerners who will go to any lengths to preserve their isolated mountain valley and historic house. The allure of old homes, whether grand or simple, is as powerful as the love for the land. An old home breathes with memories; its walls can talk if you listen hard enough.

When my family finally had no choice except to sell our farm and move on, the new owner cut the old house in two, carted half of it away, and bulldozed the rest. I collected a wheelbarrow full of faded, red, handmade bricks from the foundation, and hundred-pound granite rocks that lined my grandmother’s side yard.

These solid pieces are part of my homeplace, now. Part of my land, which I walk with pride and defense and love, as my grandmother did.

And so this book is for her, my father’s mother, my grandmother Rachel Bennett Brown. And as always, for my husband, Hank, and for my mother, who walk with me.

Let the music swell the breeze
,
And ring from all the trees
Sweet freedom’s song
,
Let mortal tongues awake;
Let all that breathe partake;
Let rocks their silence break
,
the sound prolong
.

“My Country ’Tis of Thee”

—
THE SECOND VERSE, WHICH NO ONE SINGS

By the time Gib Cameron found us, my sister and I were failed southern belles who could no longer count on the kindness of strangers. We lived like gypsies. Home was a forgotten memory. Like lost birds, we had migrated to a cold climate. Our distant connection to Gib and his family was all we had left of an innocent and proud past.

“Pride and self-respect are earned, not given by birth,” Pop always told us when we were growing up amid the gothic gentility of New Orleans. “Nothing else matters.” He had had more pride beaten into him than any man deserved, and it nearly destroyed us.

Ella had developed a chronic case of what would have been called the fancies in more polite eras, and I was well on my way to becoming what would have been deemed a pinched-heart hellion. In more polite eras, of course.

Purists might insist my sister and I were never southern belles to begin with. Pedigree alone should have disqualified us. Our steel-magnolia family tree included one Japanese grandmother and one grandmother of Swedish extraction, who was a truck-stop floozy. Our father was a California-bred Italian-Asian American, not to mention a Communist.
He spent his childhood in a California internment camp during World War II. His Japanese mother—my grandmother Akiko—died there, and Pop swore he’d hate the United States government for the rest of his life.

So maybe my sister and I were doomed from the start.

When I was a child my piano tutors told stories about the Phantom Alligator Lady of Bayou Caveaux. Rumor had it she was a failed concert pianist, though when I was a little girl none of my tutors would admit she existed except in self-serving piano-tutor mythology.

They claimed folks glimpsed her around one of the concrete-walled, rusty-roofed little houses off a swampy back road a few miles outside New Orleans. She had doomed her career, her youth, her very soul because she let worldly distractions steal her art. Thus she turned into a crazy, bitter old failure who lured children into her home and forced them to play an untuned upright until they died, mind you—and then she carried their bodies outside and fed them to her alligators. I guess you could say she was the ultimate music critic.

I not only believed in the Alligator Lady, I carried the fear of her into adulthood. I heard her whispering encouragement in the back of my mind like a ten-cent harmonica gone sharp.

I pictured myself growing old and mean, peering spitefully out my windows at strangers while I eked out a living, teaching piano lessons to nose-picking ten-year-olds who deserved no better audience than my asthmatic pet toy poodle—which I would name Dog, or Poodle, because my mind would be gone by then. And while my students practiced I’d drink iced tea mixed with gin as I apathetically watched the poodle hoist his tiny hind leg and pee on dusty scrapbooks filled with clippings that proved I’d been a child piano prodigy, once upon a time.

And those clippings might have been all that was worth telling about Venus Arinelli. Or about any Arinelli, I guess. We were culturally jumbled but southern clear through by the
grace of a god who obviously knows where odd people will best fit in. Yet everyone is made up of parts and pieces of their family’s music. The saddest thing is to forget where our songs end and our parents’ begin, because each of us plays the next note for them.

Before Gib Cameron found me, I was sinking into silence.

When the Oklahoma City federal building blew up, Ella and I had just signed a six-month contract to perform in the piano lounge of a hotel in New York. It was the best job we’d had in years.

“You and your sister are fired,” the manager announced. “Pack up your equipment and get out. I won’t have people like you working in my club.”

The TV sets above the club’s bar were turned to CNN, where a tape replay showed rescue workers carrying dead and injured children from the rubble in Oklahoma City. Ella had been pale and hollow-eyed for two days. I was scared and on alert, expecting trouble.

“We have a contract,” I reminded the manager, a burly man whose suits cost more than he paid us in a month. “And we haven’t done anything wrong.”

“I know about your old man,” he replied, jerking his head toward the TV, his face as red as the rare prime rib served in the bar’s dining room. “A couple of federal agents are in my office. They want to ask you and your sister some questions. They say you’ve got connections to antigovernment groups.”

“They always do. If a kid throws a rock at a government
building, these guys show up wherever we are and ask us if we know who did it. But we have nothing to do with that. We never had anything to do with it. We just want to be left alone to earn a living.”

“Government agents don’t ask questions unless they think you know something. I was in the Army. I believe in this country. I don’t want my business associated with a group of immoral fanatics.”

“Neither do I, but they show up more often than a government holiday.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The FBI. Government men. It was a joke.”

“You think our government is a joke?”

“Not at the moment. Look, my sister and I need this job, but I won’t apologize for my father. He wasn’t a monster.”

“That’s enough! Get out of my club. You’re trouble.”

This wasn’t the first time Ella and I had been fired because the Feds dropped by to tell our boss we were Max Arinelli’s daughters. I dragged myself back to our dressing room. Ella was watching CNN on a portable TV and crying softly.

“We’re outta here, Sis.” I grabbed a piece of our gear and hoisted it to one shoulder. She turned to stare at me. Behind her, on TV, a paramedic bent over a bloody, limp little boy. “Oh, no,” she said brokenly. “Oh,
Vee
. How could
anyone
think we’d know anything about the person or the group who committed a horror like this.”