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  “Maybe it’s a little late to be old-fashioned,” I told the man I knew only as Solo, “but I’d like to know your full name. I’d like to know where you live, and what kind of family you have, and what you really do for a living. And I’d like to know what you’ve been trying to tell me for the past three days, because I see a lot of regret in your eyes.”

  He looked down at me grimly. “Don’t mistake that for a change of heart. Whatever I’ve done here, I wanted it to happen. And I’ll always want you. I don’t have the words to tell you how much.”

  I held out my hands. “Then what you have to say can wait a little while longer.” His face convulsed in a smile, a rebuke, surrender. We were lost. He pulled me to him then picked me up off the floor. We kissed like lovers after a long separation. I dug my fingers into his back and arched against him. Instantly we were on the bed again, him twisting sideways and jerking my robe open, his mouth on my breasts and stomach and lower, then holding my face and kissing me on the lips as I cried out along with him.

  I loved him, whoever he was. I simply did.

  The Stone Flower Garden

  by

  Deborah Smith

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-935661-29-0

  Print ISBN: 978-0-4466126-5-4

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2002 by Deborah Smith

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  A hardcover edition of this book was published by Little Brown and company in 2002

  A mass market edition of this book was published by Time Warner in 2008

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Nancy Tripp - Dreamstime.com

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  Prologue

  On a dark spring night twenty-five years after I helped bury my Great-Aunt Clara Hardigree, I found myself digging her up. I felt as if I was playing the lead in a scene from some grotesque

  Southern soap opera. Scarlett O’Hara does the gravesite scene in Hamlet.

  Alas, poor Clara, I knew her well.

  A propane camp lantern hissed and flickered among the ferns by my feet. I dug for my great-aunt’s bones as quickly as I could in the moonlit woods. A huge marble urn loomed over me, its cascading marble flowers and marble vines poking my shoulders and head like hard fingers. The Stone Flower Garden was as much a part of the forest, as much a Hardigree symbol, as Clara’s hidden grave. I shivered. Appalachian mountains as old as the earth looked down on my shame, and beyond the deep glen with the bones and the marble urn, the lights of Burnt Stand, North Carolina, my sleeping hometown, winked knowingly at me.

  We always suspected you weren’t cut from the strongest Hardigree stone. The Hardigree name stood for unbreakable women and unbreakable marble. But I, Darl Union, granddaughter of Swan Hardigree Samples, great-granddaughter of Esta Hardigree, had cracked.

  And it was all because of a man. I looked up at Eli Wade, the man whose trust I’d betrayed just as my silence had betrayed his wrongfully accused father, twenty-five years earlier. Eli watched me with no understanding of what I was about to show him.

  I finally found Clara’s skeleton no more than an arm’s length down in the loamy forest sod. When I was a child, watching my Grandmother Swan dig the grave, it had seemed like a mile. Now Clara was just dirty bones waiting to be pulled up one at a time. Perhaps I should have brought one of Swan’s finest linen tablecloths to wrap her in. A monogrammed one. We Hardigrees set a nice table.

  The only thing that startled me was a necklace I plucked from the grave soil. When I wiped its small pendant and held it to the lantern light, I saw the twinkle of a diamond set in a tiny, polished chip of milk-white Hardigree marble. Grandmother had one just like it. So did I. It was a tradition in our family. Not a family crest, but the next best thing: hard stone on hard stone, tinged with the soil of our ambitions.

  I shivered again. Done, then. Every piece of infamous misery lay exposed. Nausea rose in my throat and I sat back on my heels with Clara’s pendant clasped in my fist, my head bowed, my eyes shut. As a child I never meant to help Grandmother murder her and blame it on someone else. Like all the unforeseen fates—hate and true love and success and failure—it just happened.

  “Your father didn’t kill Clara,” I told Eli. “Swan and I did.”

  Eli looked at the grave in shock, and then, slowly, back at me. Ineffable sadness and anger began to crowd the night air between us. I believed at that moment that he could never forgive me, and I could never forgive myself. “How could you do this to me?” he asked.

  “Family,” I whispered.

  Children lose their innocence piece by piece. The layers are carved away until our hearts have been exposed and polished into an unnatural gloss. We spend the rest of our lives trying to remember why we ever loved so passionately and how we dreamed so simply, before life chiseled us down to the core.

  PART ONE

  1972

  Chapter One

  When I grow up, I’ll live somewhere as flat as spit on a marble table, Eli vowed. He was ten years old, homely, dirt-poor, smart, determined, and on an uphill course in his young life. Eli sweated and heaved as he helped his father, Jasper, push their overloaded pickup truck up the frying-hot pavement of an unusually well-kept mountain road. The Wades had been moving uphill for two weeks, rising from their familiar Tennessee hill country into the Smoky Mountains, crossing the state line into western North Carolina then straight up the backbone of the tallest southern highlands. The damned old red-rusted truck had fainted on every steep grade.

  Cooking pots, kerosene lanterns, and a rusty charcoal grill clanked on the sides of the truck’s camper back like metal fish struggling on stringer lines. Low tree limbs tried to snag the dingy mattresses and lawn chairs bound atop. A dishcloth flapped from one of the camper’s cranked-open side windows, as if waving at plain Annie Gwen Wade, Eli’s mother, who plodded stoically along the mown roadside with sweat streaking her face and Eli’s four-year-old sister, Bell, clinging to her neck.

  Eli squinted ahead, watching sweat drip from Pa’s grim face and thick arms. Pa maneuvered the steering wheel with one hand and threw his weight into the truck’s open door frame. Eli winced. Sweat, poverty and pride clung to the Wade family like dust from Pa’s quarry jobs. He was both ashamed of his father and fervently devoted to him. Suddenly Eli noticed a thin pine tree along the roadside. Five small hand-painted signs were tacked in a row down its trunk.

  God Bless President Nixon.

  Jesus Won’t Save Hippies.

  Stop the War.

  The first three were ordinary enough. He’d seen their kind all along the back roads. But the bottom two signs
popped out at Eli like neon.

  BURNT STAND, N.C. IS BUILT ON BLOOD, FIRE AND WHORES.

  JEZEBEL’S DAUGHTER RULES HERE.

  Good godawmighty. “Hey, look, Mama,” Eli said loudly, directing attention to the signs with a jab of his hand.

  Mama gasped. “You turn your eyes away.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “I’m not sure how to tell you, so you don’t look.”

  He bent his head and kept pushing. What kind of place were they headed to? When they rounded a curve Eli glanced up through wet, dark hair, scrubbed a dirty forefinger across the lenses of his cheap glasses, and saw the most amazing thing. There, white against the deep evergreen forest, stood two towering pillars of pinkish-white marble, one on each side of the road. Both sported handsome marble plaques filled with finely carved words. Eli gaped. More signs. Did Jezebel rule at the Pearly Gates?

  “Now these here words are worth lookin’ at,” Mama said in soft awe. Eli read the plaques out loud, for Pa’s sake. Pa, bare-eyed, could pick out the finest crack in a slab of marble, or find a shooting star across the Milky Way. He just couldn’t read.

  “‘Welcome to Burnt Stand, North Carolina,’” Eli read in a heavy drawl. “‘Marble Crown Of The Mountains.’ And the other sign says, ‘Home of the Hardigree Marble Company. Established with pride in 1925 by Esta Hardigree, who lit the fire of progress and never let a stone go unturned for commerce.’”

  Beyond the strange marble monuments were huge fir trees and blue-green mountains. The rhododendron-hemmed two lane led up an escalating hill into high mountain forest so deep it cast cool, blue-black shadows in the broiling August sun. Eli and Pa pushed the truck a few more yards, finally cresting that last, torturous hill.

  “My God,” Pa said suddenly. Eli, Mama and Bell gathered next to him in the middle of the road, gazing in stunned silence at a pristine valley and a kind of a town they’d never imagined.

  “It’s pink,” Eli said.

  Burnt Stand blushed, deceptively innocent under the sun.

  Pink. My whole life was pink. Pink town, pink marble fortune, pink marble mansion, pink frothy clothes, pink skin. My name was Darleen Swannoa Union, but it might as well have been Pinky. Swan Hardigree Samples, my grandmother and namesake, kept me scrubbed and shaded so much I was probably the only white seven-year-old girl in Hardigree County, North Carolina, who had no freckles. I was the heir to the Hardigree Marble Company, a princess of southern mountain marble. I was pink and miserable.

  We were in the dog days of summer. The air felt like a warm washcloth over my nose. At night the frogs and crickets and whip-poor-wills outside my ornate bedroom windows at Marble Hall sang sadly, as if waning summer moons were a call to mourn. Not many weeks earlier, terrorists had killed nearly a dozen Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics. Our local Baptist minister said that proved the end of the world was near, which made sense to me, since Jerusalem was in Israel.

  The ground seemed to bake on a stone griddle. Burnt Stand hunkered over the state’s only major marble vein. Polished pink stone gave the courthouse, the city offices, the library and other downtown buildings a sheen of old-world elegance, an almost Mediterranean lightness among the green mountain forest. Barnyard fences glistened with it. Cast-off chunks lined our flower gardens. Backyard tomatoes draped themselves on rough marble walls. The chamber brochure claimed every house and public edifice contained at least a foundation or trim of our precious bedrock. For decades tourists had come just to view our fabulous town square and stroll our marble sidewalks.

  I hated those sidewalks. On that miserable summer day in 1972 they burned my pink-toenailed feet even through my pink sandals. Yet I stood under the awning in front of the Hardigree Marble Showroom as Grandmother commanded that I do whenever I waited in public: Shoulders squared, head up, hands clasped around my pink straw purse in front of my spotless pink jumper with the embroidered pink rose on the front. Itchy sweat flattened the pink ribbons that streamed from my long french braid. I was a sturdy brunette child with dark blue eyes interested in seeing the world without a pink veneer.

  Standing next to me, nearly identical in her own pink jumper and ribboned braids, was my best friend and only playmate, Karen Noland. Karen and I shared a tutor at Marble Hall, my grandmother’s estate, and didn’t attend public school. We were never allowed to play with other children in town, and could only run free in the woods behind the Hall. We were lonely but adored each other. We were both orphans being raised by our grandmothers. Swan Hardigree Samples and Matilda Dove, my grandmother’s assistant, had known each other all their lives, and so had their dead daughters—our mothers—and so had we. There was only one major difference between my family and Karen’s.

  We were white, and they weren’t. Even in our cloistered town, defined and ruled by my grandmother, that made all the difference.

  I couldn’t say Karen and her grandmother, Matilda, were black, because they were more of a honey color, with pale hazel eyes and long coarse hair the color of chocolate ice cream. Neither Karen nor I had ever seen a picture of Karen’s dead mother, Katherine, so we had no idea what color she had been. Karen kept a picture of her father on her nightstand, and he was a nice-looking black man in a Marine uniform. I knew only that Karen and Matilda were not the same as us, but not the same as the black people on farms around town, not black as the ace of spades, as people said. And I knew only that I loved them dearly.

  “Wish we could walk down the street to the Hall,” Karen whispered from the side of her mouth, as we stood at attention, sweltering. “We look like fools.”

  “Only white trash and nobodies tread the side of the road like a gypsy,” I intoned. It was a favorite saying of our grandmothers.

  “Hot pink fools,” Karen insisted.

  I sighed. It was true. We stood like silly marble statues in front of the Hardigree Marble Showroom, where the South’s well-to-do could order anything from a ton of marble flooring to a hand-carved cherub. Across from us, on the shady town park at the center of the square, an immodest replica of the Parthenon served as our park gazebo. Given to a grateful citizenry by Esta Hardigree, 1931, a plaque on the Parthenon confirmed. A group of ordinary children chased each other wildly across the park lawn. My heart ached with enforced dignity. Karen made a mewling sound. We could not violate our grandmothers’ edicts.

  As we stood there sweltering under our peculiar status—one little pink white girl and one little pink honey girl—an odd sight appeared beyond the dip in West Main. An old pickup truck entered the square between giant magnolias along the marble sidewalk, creeping along without any apparent human guidance. Pots and pans swung from ropes on the camper’s back. The truck rattled like a cowbell. Mounds of boxes and burlap bags were strapped to the top with ropes, and a rusty pink tricycle had been chained to the truck’s front bumper.

  From our sidewalks, our park and our shop fronts, people stared. I craned my head and finally made out a tall, handsome but rough-looking man pushing the truck from the driver’s side. A thin brown-haired woman walked behind, the skirt of her limp polyester dress swaying above her thin tennis shoes. She carried a little girl who burrowed her head into her mother’s neck.

  And then, I saw the boy.

  He was tough looking, with side-skinned black-brown hair except for a shaggy lock that fell across his high forehead and his thick, black-rimmed glasses, the kind old men wore. His body looked long and thin inside faded jeans and a t-shirt. He bent his slender shoulders to the truck’s back corner like an ant pushing a boulder. Lean muscles strained in his arms. He looked like a boy Jesus, pushing a pickup truck instead of pulling a cross.

  No, a Gypsy boy, I thought for redemption’s sake, though there’d never been evidence of Gypsies traveling through Burnt Stand before. At least the boy was in charge of his world, moving it. My world was as rooted as the marble cherubs in the Hardigree
showroom window, and I had no control over any of it. I watched with fascination as the rattling truck inched around the oval circuit of the town square, then headed toward me. Slowly, the boy and his world eased into a small, empty parking space directly in front of the Hardigree Marble Showroom’s elaborate white doors and soaring arched windows. Twenty feet from Karen and me. We had a front row seat.

  “Strangers and white trash,” Karen whispered fearfully, and backed up until she was pressed against the marble façade of the showroom offices. She gave me a comical Lucille Ball look of horror. “You better come over here with me!”

  I shook my head. The exciting, frightening outside world had suddenly parked right before me. The boy’s chest heaved. He dragged a hand over his glasses, smearing dirt and moisture on them as he raised his head. When he spotted me, he did a double take. I knew I looked like a big, pink-dyed Easter chick, and my face burned with humiliation. As if he couldn’t be certain I was real, he pulled his glasses off and cleaned them on the tail of his white t-shirt. I stared at him openly, and he stared back. His eyes were large, brown and soulful, with long lashes. The most beautiful eyes I’d ever seen. He tilted his head as he tried to see me without aid. “Yep,” he said. “You’re still pink.”

  “Eli, you wait right here with Bell,” the woman said, setting the little girl down next to him. “Your pa and me’ll be right out, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took his baby sister’s hand. She slammed herself against him and hid her face in his stomach. His mouth flattened in resignation, but he patted her on the head. His mother looked my way and smiled shyly. “Hello,” she said. “You’re the prettiest sight.”

  “Hello, ma’am,” I replied primly. “And thank you.” Grandmother had trained me in graciousness via innumerable teas, dinners and picnics. I had been presented to the governor, the vice president, and more than a few marble barons, including an Italian man friend of hers who barely noticed me except to call me mia rosa poco. My little rose. Italian for pink. “How do you do, ma’am?”