When Venus Fell (8 page)

Every note of music and every musical sound in life radiates
outward. The vibrations become infinitely small, but they never quite fade. They can still reach you, when you’re suddenly quiet enough and empty enough to catch the echoes inside you.

Promises and betrayals are the same way.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I told Ella the next morning. “I can’t believe what’s happening to us.”

Ella looked at me with her strong, graceful hands clasped gently to her lips. “We have to go,” she whispered. “I don’t care about the money. I don’t think it’s a betrayal of Pop’s ideals to visit Gib and his family. Gib seems to be a very honorable man who held a very honorable and important job. We have to be fair to him. Pop would agree with that. He preached fairness all his life.”

“There’s still no rational reason to drive hundreds of miles to spend two weeks with strangers. For all we know these people eat barbecued possum and really do marry their cousins.”

Ella laughed. “Not at all like us decent folk from Louisiana, where our culture includes sex shows, gambling, and enough government corruption to sink a third-world dictatorship.”

“But at least we don’t eat possums.”

“It would be nice to be wanted, for once,” Ella said wistfully. “And I wouldn’t mind taking the money.” She looked at me in utter seriousness. “We could give half of it to a homeless shelter.”

I sighed. Where did honor end? “The IRA killed Gib’s parents when he was a little boy,” I reminded Ella. “Don’t imagine he and his family regard Pop as anything other than a fanatic and a terrorist, just like the Irish who did that to them.”

“You don’t know how they really feel. You always assume the worst.” Ella linked her cool, trembling fingers through mine. “Everyone condemns Pop, except us.” I looked at her angrily, but she was right. “We have to go there and represent Pop’s good side to them. And Mom’s. And not be ashamed.”

“I am not ashamed.”

“Good. Then we’ll go.”

Exhausted and shaky with emotion, I made a shooing motion at the bum who tapped on the RV’s locked door that afternoon. He responded by holding up a Chicago Police Department badge.

I thought,
What fresh hell is this?
and formed my best Dorothy Parker smirk of sarcasm as I opened a side window vent.
“You
couldn’t possibly have any business here.” I had a problem with authority figures, even cops apparently working undercover in dirty jeans and a three-day beard.

“Chill out, ma’am,” he said politely. “I just wanted to let you know I’ll be working around here at night. You and your sister can sit out at the picnic table and none of the creeps’ll bother you anymore.”

I managed a garbled thank-you, then asked bluntly, “Did Gib Cameron use his connections to get this protection for us?”

“Maybe. He’s got friends in the right places. Have a nice day.” After he walked away I stood in confused silence.

I knew no other man who would have done this for me. I wasn’t at all sure why Gib had. Ella and I seemed to be under the umbrella of Cameron noblesse oblige already, and we weren’t even in Tennessee yet.

It was a strange sensation. For years I’d either shoved people away or ignored them. I couldn’t take chances. I’d fought for decent bookings in the early years right after Ella and I disappeared into the boonies. I’d lied about her age to get us into nightclubs, then battled men who tried to hit on her. I’d begged or pilfered meals from the club chefs, even shoplifted petty necessities like shampoo and underwear. Whatever it took to keep Ella and me together, keep us working toward the day when we didn’t have to ask anyone for anything, I’d do it.

I sat down in the RV’s driver’s seat. The white quartz rock lay on the dash. I scooped it into my hand. The lure of childhood fantasies was proud and seductive and probably disastrous.

Ella and I finished our contract with the Hers Truly club and turned down the manager’s offer to extend our stay for better money.

“We’re leaving early,” I announced to Ella. “I want to check out the situation in advance. I think we should go on to Nashville after our visit. I’ve got some feelers out. We could find work there. For one thing, Opryland is hiring for a piano bar in one of its restaurants. We’ll have to come up with some discreet ways to invest our money. We can’t just plop it in the bank as if a customer suddenly gave us a huge tip. The IRS could be watching.”

Ella stared at me over an issue of her Martha Stewart magazine. “If this were a song,” she said gently, “I’d have to say it has no coherent melody.”

“I’m just saying we should get a head start in case we end up ditching the whole visit to Cameron Hall.”

I decided we’d come back for the RV if we found long-term work down south. I left it in a tract-house suburb south of Chicago, at the three-bedroom ranch where an old friend of our grandfather Paolo’s lived with his granddaughter. Fifty
years ago the friend had been a young trumpet player in Grandfather’s studio orchestra.

And so, in the last week of August, sticky with heat, fanning ourselves in our tank tops and thin cotton skirts and flip-flops, a blues CD blasting on the car’s high-tech player—all right, we spent money where it counted—Ella and I drove south out of the Windy City, me eating a Polish sausage and Ella sipping mineral water. “If we keep our expectations low we’ll probably have a decent enough visit,” I said, to which my sister replied, with her eyes shut dreamily, “My expectations have been growing wings for so long, I want to fly.” She stroked a white goose feather she’d attached to the rearview mirror.

I didn’t tell her I thought her expectations had molted pretty badly over the past ten years. On a map Gib Cameron had sent, I set course for an area that appeared to be no more than a handful of remote roads crisscrossing the green splash of the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee.

Tennessee. Land of riverboats and mountain lions, Elvis, Davy Crockett, blues, bluegrass, hillbillies, honky-tonks, antebellum mansions, log cabins, moonshine liquor, fine bourbon, and a huge share of the music business.

And Camerons.

Ella ceremoniously placed Gib’s driving directions on a clipboard I’d super-glued to the car’s fading vinyl dashboard. She arranged several of her prize feathers around it. We looked at the bizarre little shrine fixedly.

Thirty years earlier, almost to the day, our parents had visited an inn that had just opened in the mountains. Cameron Hall. They’d married there, written “Evening Star” there, and, on a whim, selected a name for their first child there. Me.

Now Ella and I were going there to represent what was left of our family’s pride. I put on dark rhinestone-outlined sunglasses and tried not to hope for the best.

•   •   •

Around noon the next day we crested a ridge on a nearly deserted two-lane road, passed a sign that welcomed us to Tennessee, the Volunteer State, and gasped in unison.

The low-country bayou gals had arrived at the top of the world. “Toto,” I said in a small voice, “we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Ella gave a soft, stunned sigh. “This has to be the Emerald City.”

They are ancient and awesome, those Appalachian Mountains. Round and lush and green. From our vantage point looking out over them, the view startled and mesmerized me, too, because it was like suddenly flying over a cliff into sheer space. My hands trembled. I pulled off to one side of the road and got out of the car. Ella came to stand beside me.

The wind was warm but fast; the scent was green earth, blue sky, and waterways hidden in deep valleys we couldn’t see. There were hawks and songbirds in the blue sky, and an unending, amazing, unsettling symphony of majestic wilderness. Somewhere down in one of those wild, secluded places was the chapel where Mom and Pop had married, and the room in the Cameron mansion where they had slept and made love on their first night of sanctified intimacy, and where I had come into being, no matter how small and casually biological. I had come to exist in these mountains.

“Can you imagine?” Ella whispered respectfully, “how the first settlers must have felt when they crossed this spot and saw the view?”

Oh, yes.

“Vee?” Ella said softly. She was crying. “Mom suspected she wouldn’t live to be old! She knew it and she tried to find friends for us! Even before we were born she tried to make sure we’d always have someone besides Pop! She must have been so afraid he’d lose his way if she wasn’t beside him! Oh, don’t say it, don’t say I’m imagining things! And I think Pop couldn’t bring himself to completely forget what the Camerons meant to Mom. That’s why he trusted Simon Cameron
with our money. Oh, Vee, we were right to come here! It was meant to be!”

She cried with the lilting joy of relief and celebration. I took deep breaths, not wanting to stomp on her hopes. I wouldn’t shout Praise Mary and rouse the saints. I was a lapsed Catholic and nobody’s fool. Ella hurried along the roadside, bending down. “A wild turkey carcass!” she called happily. When she straightened she shook a ratty brown feather at me happily. “We were right to come! Our lives are on the right path!”

“I don’t know,” I said dryly. “It wasn’t such a good path for that turkey.”

I’d never openly admit that Mom had dreamed of this day coming to pass and later Pop, in his desperation, had guaranteed it.

New Inverness, the sign proclaimed. Unincorporated. Est. 1895. Population 25. Speed Limit 35.

We had arrived at the meeting point of two equally obscure little state roads, one of which we’d been following through the middle of nowhere for the past hour. New Inverness was the landmark Gib had mentioned in his printed directions. It wasn’t even a town. It was barely a wide spot in the road.

I stopped the car. There was no traffic in any direction, so I could simply let the car idle in the middle of the intersection. I studied a bevy of sun-faded road signs, most of them pockmarked with bullet holes. Hightower 10 miles. Attenborough 18 miles. Knoxville 102 miles. Watch Out for Falling Rocks. Steep Grades Ahead.

“Now I know what Nowhere looks like,” I said.

Ella craned her head. “It’s just the way Gib described it in his driving directions.”

“Small.” But on one corner of the crossroads sat a large, handsome stone house among vegetable gardens, roses, and
outbuildings that sheltered tractors, trucks, a school bus, and an ambulance. The opposite corner was home to a hodgepodge of buildings. On closer inspection they made up one single low structure with additions of various concoctions. Numerous doors and windows led to God alone knew where, but the main entrance was a double-screen door set under a big porch across the front, where farm equipment, animal traps, and decrepit lawn chairs argued for space. A fat black Labrador waddled a few yards toward our car, then lay down in the road and wagged its tail.

I snorted. “Must be the welcoming committee.” I drove in and parked on a cracked concrete lot. In front of the main building was a parade of aged and dented gas, diesel, and kerosene pumps under a high tin awning. A huge, hook-necked, enormously ugly black bird perched menacingly on the awning’s peak. “I think that’s something prehistoric.”

“It must be a buzzard,” Ella said incredulously.

“I wonder what kind of meal it’s hoping for in this parking lot. When we get out of the car, keep moving. And don’t mention your feather collection.”

We crossed the lot, giving the buzzard wary glances. The building before us bore a collection of fading gasoline signs and logos for companies that had been defunct for years, a weathered carved sign that said Sophia’s Restaurant and Gift Shop, a rusting metal sign that proclaimed one end of the conglomerate Hoss’s General Store, and beneath that sign a smaller one, very official in metallic green and white, that listed all of the New Inverness community services, including the post office, which were located inside.

We stepped into a general store with creaking wooden floors, clutter, video rentals, hardware, groceries, a potbellied stove, an espresso machine, and every curio known to mountain men. “Look at that stuffed turtle,” Ella whispered, gesturing toward a wall covered in the musty heads and carcasses of wildlife, including rabbits, foxes, possums, and a
hamster
.

“I’m not sure he’s stuffed,” I whispered back. “I think he might just be scared to move. What kind of people stuff hamsters?”

A stocky older man with thick white hair and a face like a bulldog poked his head up from behind the cash register of a long counter crammed with displays and dusty knickknacks. “I loved that hamster,” he said. “My youngest daughter named him after me.”

We jumped. Grinning, he tucked reading glasses in the pocket of a Hawaiian shirt and got up from a recliner. His eyes narrowed into twinkling curiosity as he studied my mop of braids tied back with a fringed black scarf.

“Hold the fort,” he said. “Where’d you get that yellow crown of fancy hair?” And in the same breath, “What can I do for you fine girls?”

I touched Gib’s folded driving directions in a pocket of my skirt. “I need directions from here to Cameron Hall, please. I was told to stop at the store here and ask. And I understand you have some cabins to rent nearby. We’re going to need a cabin for tonight if you have one available. I’m Ann Nelson and this is my sister, Jane. We’re visiting—”

“We got cabins so darned modern the plumbing’s inside.” He waved his hands dramatically. “Why, you should see the way the outhouse works!”

Either he was practicing to audition for a remake of
The Beverly Hillbillies
, or he was making fun of us. “We’ll take the nonsmoking and nonbuzzard cabin, please.”

He roared. “You don’t know whether to grin or skedaddle, do you? I own this store, and I’m just a bored old man who enjoys pulling your leg!”

Ella gushed, “You must be Colonel Cameron,” blowing all hopes I’d had of quietly assessing these people before they learned who we were. “In his directions Gib said you were his cousin and that you run this store.”

“Yes, ma’am! I’m Gib’s father’s first cousin’s oldest son. Retired Air Force. Colonel Cameron. You can call me Hoss.”