When Venus Fell (36 page)

Through the music room’s open windows I could hear the faint sounds of Ella playing guitar. Laughter drifted to me on the breezes. I swore I could smell the sweet aroma of a wood fire. Min and Gib had set up an iron stew pot filled with mulled cider.

I wanted to be outdoors drinking cider and pretending to be aloof while everyone else laughed. Instead I was in the music room with Kelly, who presented me with the sheet music for the piece she’d chosen to perform. She still insisted she was going to perform in a teenage beauty pageant. I looked at the music incredulously. “If you don’t mind my asking, why in the world do you want to sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina’?”

“I feel Evita Perón made an important statement about political corruption.”

“For or against?”

“Okay, so maybe she was all show and no substance, but she was interesting. She looked glamorous in the movie.”

“Would you consider, hmmm, something more conventional for a beauty pageant? Say, a nice tune from a musical that doesn’t require a companion primer on Latin American politics? Something from a Disney musical would be bland and harmless.”

“Oh,
puh-leeeze
. Do I
look
like a white-bread kind of girl?”

“Well, frankly, yes.”

“I want to be seen as daring and brave.”

“It’s not a matter of how you see yourself, it’s how the judges will see you. Do you really think you can sell them on the image of you as the wife of a South American dictator? You have to be able to act the song’s emotions, not just sing the words. You have to
be
Evita Perón.”

“Look, I can be cute or I can be different. Trying to be cute isn’t going to win me any points. I have to be something else.”

“You’re already something else,” I said gently. “I like you.”

“You’re being polite.”

“I’m never polite if I can help it.”

She studied me with the trademark Cameron squint, but her lips quirked and finally, she grinned. “Different can be good,” she said.

“You win.” I set her music on the piano’s backboard. “So it’s the song from
Evita
, eh? All right, we’ll determine the best key for you to sing in, and I’ll write the accompaniment for it, and we’ll work on your delivery.”

“Excellent!” She thrust out a hand. We shook.

Bobby Jim and Wally Roy crept up through the shrubbery to the music-room window, pressed their noses and tongues to the glass obscenely, then snorted with laughter and ran away.

Kelly and I traded looks of disgust. “Buffoons,” I said.

I should have known they were up to something.

Late that afternoon, I gratefully hurried outside. Everyone had moved to the back rows of the apple orchard to harvest the last round of ripe fruit. The orchard was dotted with stepladders. Isabel, Min, Jasper, Ebb, Flo, Ruth, Paul, Ella and Carter, Gib—each was perched in a tree or waiting below to catch the small, tart, dusky-red winesaps and place them in large latticework produce baskets.

Olivia and Bea supervised from queenly armchairs with a table between them, where a jug of the mulled cider sat alongside stoneware mugs and a bottle of dark rum. “Here’s for you, Rapunzel,” Bea called, and handed me a mug.

I took a deep sip, expecting warm spiced cider with a hint of rum. “Holy moly,” I said between strangled coughs. “No one should climb up on a stepladder and handle fruit after drinking one of these.”

“Oh, yours is a wee bit stronger than the others,” Bea admitted. “You have to catch up on the sippin’ we’ve been at all afternoon.”

Gib watched me as I stopped beneath his tree. I was at eye level with his thighs and hips. I looked up at him with a warm, giddy sensation already creeping through my brain. “Nice big apples,” I said.

“You should see the stem,” he replied.

Chortling under my breath, woozy with sexual insinuation and rum cider, I hurried away, as if helping Isabel carry a full bushel basket were suddenly my mission in life. Ella waved at me from across the orchard. I waved back. Carter was up in a tree. Ella stood beneath, looking pink-cheeked and pastoral in a print dress with a handsome sweater in some geometric Cherokee pattern woven in it. She caught apples in a large gingham apron she wore, then gently set them in a basket by her feet.

I didn’t go over to see her, not with Carter there. There was so much tension under the facade of our daily routines. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, and I couldn’t bring myself to pretend otherwise. Our argument still hung in the air. I knew my kind of pride could be disciplining or self-destructive, and I was always tormented by the debate over which it had become.

I got drunk. Not sloshy, overtly drunk, just drunk enough to hum Debussy off-key while I lugged baskets of apples to the kitchen’s back porch, where FeeMolly and Golwat sat peeling apples and smoking long pipes. An old radio hung
from an iron hook on an inside post. Some twangy Loretta Lynn song was playing.

“Loretta Lynn,” I said cheerfully. “I saw the movie. You know. Her biography. With Sissy Spacek.”

FeeMolly only grunted. I was looped enough to feel magnanimous. “I’m sorry you and I started out on the wrong foot a few weeks ago,” I told her sincerely. “I really respect your work here and wish we could be friends.”

“What you care ’bout us’n folks, mop head? You ain’t nothin’ but a flutter-by. I seen ya come, I be seein’ ya go. Misser Gib need better’n you. Gully-witch. Haint. Booger. Fly away ’fore ya cream turns to sour clabber in the churn.”

“Well, thank you for listening,” I said, then wandered back to the orchards, embarrassed and depressed, my skull beginning to tighten with a rum-induced headache.

After I toted the last basket of apples I slipped away to the broad, peaceful deck around the pool, which Gib and Carter had already covered for the winter. I found a lawn chair situated where it couldn’t be seen from the tiers of windows across the back of the Hall. I stretched out on my back and watched wisps of white clouds ride a sky turning gold with sunset. I thought about Ella and FeeMolly. I was not popular.

My head hurt. I fanned my braids over the backrest of the lawn chair and let them dangle. The clouds hypnotized me. I dozed off and dreamed, in odd and worrying patterns, that FeeMolly had turned into a giant red-haired snake that hissed at me.
It’s true, what she said is true
, I dreamed. I became a bird and flew past her. A flutter-by. I circled the Hall, trying to land, but couldn’t remember how. I looked desperately for Gib. FeeMolly hissed again.

I woke up with Gib’s hand on my shoulder. It was almost dark, and the air had grown cold enough that I shivered. “Good God, quit wandering off without a word,” he scolded mildly. “It’s dinnertime.”

“I have a rum-and-apple-cider headache. I was a little stewed.”

“That was Bea’s goal. She likes to get people crocked and see how they act. It’s her hobby. She uses it as a gauge of character.”

“Well, my gauge is stewed, too.”

“You did fine. You held your liquor well, you kept working, and you didn’t turn
ill
.”

“Wrong. I do feel ill.”

“No,
turn ill.
Mean. Angry. You’re not a mean drunk. Under that crabby exterior you’re a mellow soul.”

“I’m a spicy, rum-soaked soul. I’m a fruitcake.” I sat up, rubbing my forehead. The scalp at the crown of my head felt as tight as a piano wire, and itched. My hair seemed to have coagulated into one heavy planklike weight. “I need aspirin,” I moaned. “My head feels peculiar. Maybe this is what a migraine feels like.”

“Hold on. Let me turn on some lights before you get up. I don’t want you to stagger onto the pool cover.” Gib walked over to a small metal box hidden at a corner of the deck. He flipped the lid up and pressed a switch. Around the deck and pool the landscape lights came on.

“Thanks,” I said. I stood, then clasped my hands to the top of my head, massaging.

“Good God,” Gib said. He stared at my hair. I took one look at his face and quickly ran my hands farther back.

“What? What?” My fingers touched an alarming texture. Sticky, matted. My hair was stiff. I jerked my hands down and looked at them. Dabs of orange paint colored my fingers. “What? What?” I grabbed the ends of my braids. The entire mass moved. I smelled the chemical scent of orange spray paint.

I swayed.
“Somebody painted my hair.”

Gib strode to me and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Sit down. Sit.” When I was safely planted on the lawn chair he guided my head between my knees. “Breathe,” he ordered.

I gulped air. After a few minutes I straightened shakily. “My hair,” I moaned.

His face grim, he stood and examined the ruined, spray-painted braids, trying to pry them apart. It was useless. “I promise you I’ll find out who did this, but I’m sorry, Nellie. That’s heavy-duty paint and there’s probably not a damned thing that’ll save your hair.”

Someone had turned my do into bad graffiti.

My symbol of pride, rebellion, ambition, and disguise.

Ruined.

Within an hour Gib pinned the crime on Bobby Jim and Wally Roy. “How can you be sure?” I asked him. Everyone gathered in the den of the family wing. My head was wrapped in a towel he’d brought me. I had refused to walk into the house with the horror exposed.

“Years of law-enforcement training and high-tech investigative practice combined with instinctive deduction skills,” he deadpanned. He turned to Ebb, who was red-faced. “Your boys have orange spray paint on their fingers. And they stashed the empty cans in their four-wheelers.”

“I’ll kill ’em,” she said.

“Let’s see your hair, Sis,” Ella said gently. “Come on—it’s only hair.”

“Not even real hair, for the most part,” Ruth noted.

“Maybe it can be fixed,” Isabel mused.

“Ebb can fix any kind of hair damage,” Flo soothed. “She’s got everything in the world out in her truck.” Ebb operated an informal mobile beauty-and-barber salon, upon request.

“Can she fix
this?
” I challenged dully. I pulled the towel off. Flo shrieked. Ella and Isabel gasped. Min put a supportive hand on my shoulder.

The central section of my hair was bright orange from the top of my head to the ends of my braids. The paint had penetrated all the way to my scalp on top. Farther down, the spray paint had combined with my synthetic weave to glue my braids into a fist-thick mess.

“Nothing’s going to get this stuff out of my hair,” I said with stony control—my only hope of holding back tears of rage and embarrassment. “Ebb, get your electric clippers. You’re going to shave my head.”

She clutched her chest. “Oh, Lord, I’d sooner cut my heart out.”

“Cutting out hearts comes later, when I get my hands on Bobby Jim and Wally Roy. But my hair is”—I took a deep breath—“beyond saving.” I wrapped the towel around my head with the melodrama of a coroner shielding the squeamish from a horrifying corpse. “Shave it.”

Ebb was the only one I allowed to witness the process—one big-haired pro to another. We sat in Min’s bedroom. I stared at myself in a mirror over the dresser when the deed was done. “I look like a fuzzy peach,” I said.

Ebb wailed, “I feel like I just tore up a masterpiece and throwed it out the window.”

I made a tight turban from a dark silk scarf of Min’s, then anchored it with a softball hat of Kelly’s. Sporting the Hightower Highlanders logo but feeling naked, I walked numbly into the big, friendly den of the family wing.

Everyone tried not to stare, but they couldn’t help it. Ella covered her mouth and left the room, Carter following her anxiously.

“You look, well, you look fine,” Gib lied.

I stared at Bobby Jim and Wally Roy, who had been herded into the room to wait for me. They were teary and terrified. Ebb whacked both of them on the fanny. As if the words had been knocked loose, Bobby Jim spouted, “I’m sorry, ma’am, for paintin’ your hair.” Wally Roy echoed the sentiment precisely.

“They’ll pay for you to get some new hair wove onto yours as soon as yours grows out enough,” Ebb assured me.

“That won’t be necessary.” I held the boys’ gazes with intensity. “Why did you do it? That’s what I want to know. Did you think it was funny?”

“We—” one began. Then halted. The other chimed, “I dunno,” and stopped. They fixed their eyes on the carpeted floor.

“You don’t have to buy me some new hair. But you do have to answer my question. Why did you do it?”

“Granny told us to!” Bobby Jim blurted.

“Big mouth!” Wally Roy shouted, and punched him in the head.

FeeMolly.

FeeMolly gave no ground, refused to apologize, and looked as if she’d spray-paint me herself if I crossed her path. “I showed your true colors,” she snarled, and then she turned to lumber out of the den. But Olivia stopped her with a raised hand. The silence was heavy. FeeMolly stared at her with obvious concern. Olivia wrote on a notepad then handed it to Bea. Bea motioned for Gib, who walked over and read the note.

“I agree,” he said to Olivia. “Min?”

Min read the note. Her eyes sad and her face drawn, she nodded. “If you’d just apologize to Venus,” she said to FeeMolly.

FeeMolly drew herself up, all three hundred pounds in stacked defiance. “I’d a-ruther die.”

Bea scanned Olivia’s message then nodded. “You’ve insulted Herself with your meanness against one who’s done you no harm,” she told Fee-Molly. “You’ll be leaving Herself’s employ.”

In the stunned moment that followed, even FeeMolly blinked in amazement and turned dark red.

“No,” I said quickly. Everyone looked at me. FeeMolly and I traded brittle stares. “I don’t give a damn about getting an apology from you,” I said. “You wouldn’t mean it and it wouldn’t mean anything to me. Keep your job. You can’t scare me off. I won’t let you.”

“You crazy,” FeeMolly growled. But she spat in her palm then thrust it out. After contemplating her silent surrender for a moment I spat in mine. We shook. It was slimy. She tried
to break my fingers, I think. I dug my thumbnail into her knuckle. I caught Gib, Olivia, and the others looking at me with troubled expressions.

But I’d saved FeeMolly’s maniacal hide, and I’d pointed out once again that I didn’t need charity from Camerons. I think FeeMolly knew it, too. She waddled out of the room, cursing under her breath, but with deep sighs of relief.