A Place to Call Home Read online

  Uncle Dwayne glared at me. “Now, Claire. Are you sure you’re not getting back at Carlton because he spit boiled peanuts at you outside Sunday school last week?”

  No, but I knew how a boiled peanut felt. Hot, real hot. “Roanie didn’t take the money,” I repeated. I jabbed a finger at Carlton. “Carlton did. I saw him, Daddy. I saw him stick it in his front pocket.”

  Daddy and Uncle Dwayne pivoted slowly. Carlton’s face, already sweaty and red, turned crimson. “Carlton,” Uncle Dwayne said.

  “She’s just picking on me!”

  Uncle Dwayne stuck a hand in Carlton’s pocket and pulled out two wadded-up dollar bills.

  And that was that.

  Uncle Dwayne hauled Carlton off to find Uncle Eugene and Aunt Arnetta, Carlton’s folks. Daddy let go of Roanie Sullivan. “Go on. Get out of here.”

  “He pulled that knife, Holt,” Uncle Pete said behind me.

  Daddy scowled. “He couldn’t cut his way out of a paper sack with a knife that little.”

  “But he pulled it on Carlton.”

  “Forget about it, Pete. Go on, everybody.”

  Roanie stared at me. I held his gaze as if hypnotized. Isolation radiated from him like an invisible shield, but there was this gleam in his eyes, made up of surprise and gratitude and suspicion, bearing on me like concentrated fire, and I felt singed. Daddy put a hand on the collar of the faded, floppy football jersey he wore and dragged him away. I started to follow, but Mama had gotten through the crowd by then, and she snagged me by the back of my dress. “Hold on, Claire Karleen Maloney. You’ve put on enough of a show.”

  Dazed, I looked up at her. Hop and Evan peered at me from her side. Violet and Rebecca watched me, openmouthed. A whole bunch of Maloneys scrutinized me. “Carlton’s a weasel,” I explained finally.

  Mama nodded. “You told the truth. That’s fine. You’re done. I’m proud of you.”

  “Then how come everybody’s lookin’ at me like I’m weird?”

  “Because you are,” Rebecca blurted out. “Aren’t you scared of Roanie Sullivan?”

  “He didn’t laugh at me when I was dancing. I think he’s okay.”

  “You’ve got a strange way of sortin’ things out,” Evan said.

  “She’s one brick short of a load,” Hop added.

  So that was the year I realized Roanie was not just trashy, not just different, he was dangerous, and taking his side was a surefire way to seed my own mild reputation as a troublemaker and Independent Thinker.

  I was fascinated by him from then on.

  The world in general didn’t even know that Dunderry, Georgia, existed. I searched for us on the enameled globe in the living room and we weren’t there. We were barely find-able on the creased, coffee-stained road map of Georgia that Mama and Daddy kept in the glove compartment of our station wagon. Atlanta rated a fat star and Gainesville was marked with a circle. But Dunderry was only a black dot. We lived an inch to the left of Gainesville and an inch and a half above Atlanta.

  We had peace and quiet, a beautiful little courthouse square with tree-lined streets, and sweet, handsome, old homes, big farms tucked in broad, lush valleys, and cathedral-like mountains around it all, to keep us safe.

  Our ancestors would still have recognized the town they’d founded, despite electricity, paved roads, indoor plumbing, and monuments to five wars—including the one that left a dozen young Dunderry men dead in far-off states and gave us, in return, four anonymous Yankee soldiers whose graves at the edge of the First Baptist Church’s cemetery had become a tourist attraction.

  I asked Mama, who was a Delaney by birth and a Maloney by marriage—in other words, she stood proudly at the crossroads of the two oldest families in Dunderry—if we were as small as the map said. “Don’t you worry,” she told me. “If you study an ant under a magnifying glass, it’s as big as an elephant. Size is all in how you look at things, and we’re very big.”

  I pointed out that Hop had held a magnifying glass over an ant in the front yard once and after a minute in the sun it had looked like a Rice Krispie with legs. Mama studied me the way she did when I stumped her and then she told me to stop thinking so much.

  But I decided we’d better be careful how we looked at ourselves.

  Mama’s great-grandparents, Glen and Fiona Delaney, immigrated from Ireland in 1838, the same year as the Maloneys. But they were educated shopkeepers, born and raised in the city of Dublin, while the Maloneys were descended from illiterate tenant farmers in the Irish backcountry. More important, the Delaneys were Protestant and my father’s ancestors, the Maloneys, Catholic. Glen and Fiona established Dunderry’s first drygoods store and the first bank and built the first two-story house in town, and Glen was elected the first county magistrate. He and Fiona supported the Union during the Civil War, and their two oldest sons served in General Grant’s army. The Dunderry Home Guard retaliated by looting the drygoods store and burning the Delaney buggy shed. A Maloney, my great-great-grandfather Liam, was the Home Guard’s captain.

  So pride, class, religion, and politics kept several generations of Delaneys and Maloneys from intermarrying, even as they all gradually turned into prosperous Methodist Democrats. It took more than a hundred years until Mama and Daddy broke the stalemate.

  Great-Grandfather Howard Maloney built the house I grew up in, on the foundation of a log cabin his grandfather Sean had built. It is where my Grandpa Joseph Maloney and his five brothers were born, and where Daddy and all six of his brothers and sisters were born.

  Each generation added to it like a hope chest; by the time my brothers and I were born (in the hospital at Gainesville, except for Brady, who came two weeks early in an upstairs bedroom with Mama screaming, “Holt, get me an aspirin!”) the house had ten bedrooms, four bathrooms, and three chimneys, and its bottom-level additions sprawled from a two-story center inside wide porches, front and back. It sat in the center of the Estatoe Valley with round, green mountains rising on all sides. There was not another house, the light of another window, or the soft white smoke from any other chimney in sight. We were a kingdom of our own making.

  Mama ran our household like a business. Spick-and-span, no room for messy customers. Beds made, fresh flowers in the vases, meals on time, clothes mended, silver polished, toilets sparkling, floors waxed, rugs and drapes vacuumed to the dustless sheen of old velvet. She marshaled doctors’ appointments, school activities, and homework. She pickled and preserved, canned and baked; she sent old chairs to be reupholstered and antique mirrors to be resilvered. The land was Daddy’s but the house was hers, and everything that went on in it was under her dominion, and we’d better not forget that.

  Daddy took her on a second honeymoon once to tour the California wine country. She broke out in hives, and they had to come home two days early. “I couldn’t stand all that relaxation,” she said.

  When I was a girl, my British-born Grandmother Delaney (I never called her Grandma—she considered it coarse and disrespectful) and my Great-Grandma Maloney lived with us. I learned the fine points of stubbornness and pride from them. Daddy said the Old Grannies could worry the horns off a brass billy goat, and Mama said anyone who lived in the house with her Mawmaw and Daddy’s grandma could qualify as a saint. Or a lunatic.

  Great-Grandma Maloney was a frisky eighty-eight, while Grandmother Delaney, as she herself reminded us often in her delicate English accent, was a very, very frail seventy. Frail like a cedar stump. Virginia Elizabeth Wallingford Delaney dyed her gray hair a flat, unrelenting nut-brown color and wore it pinned up with a hairpiece of coiled brown braids at the crown, which, combined with her pointy-tipped bifocals, gave her the look of a strangely youthful, squinting, grandmotherly queen.

  She never sat outdoors without a broad-brimmed hat to shade her complexion, which remained, despite jowls and a few age spots, as milky and smooth as a porcelain doll’s. She wore slender, pale dresses with a small cameo brooch anchoring a lace handkerchief to her right shoulder, and if anyone failed
to jump up fast enough when she asked for something, she hooked the offender with the brass, goosehead handle of her mahogany cane.

  She always reminded us that she had been only seventeen, an orphan consigned to an English boarding school, when she met Grandpa Patrick Delaney in London during the First World War. She said he was a dashing American infantryman who carried racy postcards of French cabaret dancers in his pockets and regaled her with stories about his Southern homeland. She married him and crossed the ocean with visions of antebellum plantations in her head.

  She never quite forgave Grandpa Patrick after she discovered that her new home was a mountain town fed by dirt roads and the big house a drafty Victorian shared by Grandpa’s overbearing parents and two spinster sisters, Vida and Maedelle. Grandmother Elizabeth was appalled when her female in-laws dipped snuff, wore their stockings rolled down, and drank their tea cold.

  It didn’t soothe her when Grandpa Patrick built her a large, lovely house on a hill just off the courthouse square, or when he bought her a shiny black Model T to drive, while most of the neighbors were still dependent on mule-drawn wagons. She wanted electricity; instead she had kerosene lamps and a woodburning cookstove. She wanted trolleys and cabs and trains; instead she had a dusty car that blew its tires on the rutted mountain roads.

  She recalled trips to Atlanta, not because they were grand adventures that included stays at the finest hotels and shopping sprees at Rich’s department store, but because on one horrifying occasion the car broke down on a muddy road miles from the city; she and Grandpa had to camp in a gully overnight. A moonshiner drunk on his own corn whiskey crept out of the bushes and offered to buy her from Grandpa for two dollars and a jug.

  Somehow Grandmother Elizabeth survived for the sake of four sons and four daughters. She actually thrived because the ladies in the county considered her to be an expert on all matters of fashion and decorum, and after Grandpa Patrick became president of Dunderry Savings and Loan her social dominance was cemented. She won prizes for her needlepoint, she wrote articles on etiquette for the newspaper, and she was in high demand for poetry readings, which she conducted with the drama of a Royal Shakespearean.

  When I was four, Grandpa Patrick had a series of strokes that crippled him. She moved him into a downstairs bedroom at our house and for the next year I watched her care for him tenderly, night and day, her frailty forgotten. After he died she channeled all her fierce, lonely energy toward aggravating Great-Grandma Maloney, who had the bedroom across the hall.

  It was an old feud, birthed in their youth, nurtured in their prime, and still sizzling like banked coals in their old age.

  Great-Gran’s first name was Alice, but she was named after a Confederate general. Alice Stonewall McGinnis Maloney. Her husband, Howard Maloney, died of a heart attack twenty years before I was born. He and Great-Gran had already turned the farm’s management over to their son, my Grandpa Joseph, by then, but Great-Gran still ran the whole operation. By the time Grandpa Joseph retired and Daddy took charge, she still hadn’t mellowed much.

  My brothers and I called her Stonewall behind her back. It suited her aura of command, especially the way she drove a car. She’d learned to drive when there was no traffic and no rules. Center lines didn’t mean a thing to her. At almost ninety years old she might have given up driving except for the fact that her independence nettled Grandmother Elizabeth, who’d quit driving in her late sixties after a hip operation made her right leg stiff.

  Great-Gran’s hair was a thin cap of blue-white spit curls above a thick face enormously wrinkled and weathered. She wore stern-looking brown dresses and thick-heeled flat shoes, was almost six feet tall, and weighed two hundred pounds. She had grown up in the last decade of the previous century on an enormous cattle farm fifty miles north of Dunderry. Her mother was a transplanted Vermont Unitarian who preached and ran the first mountain school for black children; her father was a Confederate veteran who’d lost an arm during the battle of Kennesaw Mountain when he was twelve.

  She met Great-Grandpa Howard at a Sunday social sponsored by the North Georgia Young Ladies’ Academy, where she was a teacher. In yellowed photographs she is a tall, big-boned, unsmiling young woman with masses of dark hair piled in a Gibson Girl bouffant, dressed in one of those tightly corseted, pigeon-postured black dresses with puffed shoulders. An old maid at twenty-six.

  She married him a month later and moved to our land in the Estatoe Valley of Dunderry County to raise children and eyebrows: she wore overalls at home, and she could milk a cow faster than any man; she marched for women’s suffrage at the state capitol years before the female vote had any chance in Washington; and she threw an egg at Great-Grandpa’s cousin, Dr. Arnold Kehoe, when he gave a speech condemning birth control. As the decades passed she worked against prohibition and for civil rights. She also organized most of the women’s clubs in the county.

  She was the empress of all she surveyed, except for Grandmother Elizabeth.

  When Grandmother Elizabeth married Grandpa Patrick and came home with him from England, she immediately usurped Great-Gran’s place as the most interesting woman in Dunderry, and became, once and for all, the only permanent thorn in Great-Gran’s side.

  Their bitter rivalry was clinched on April 4, 1920, the day Great-Gran hosted the Methodist Ladies’ Auxiliary Garden Luncheon. A majority of Methodist ladies deserted Great-Gran’s head table to huddle excitedly around Elizabeth Delaney, their exotic new member, asking her opinion on matters of taste, decorum, and all things British. Great-Gran stewed in furious silence. Someone asked Grandmother Elizabeth if she was related to any royalty. That was the last straw.

  “Royalty, my hind foot,” Great-Gran announced to Vida Delaney, loud enough for everyone to hear. “If she hadn’t married your brother she wouldn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of.”

  Grandmother Elizabeth, livid with insult, drew herself up to her full five feet three inches and declared, “You are a shabby, mannish, jealous clodhopper. I shall never forgive you.”

  Thirty years later, in 1950, Mama eloped with Daddy the night after her high school graduation ceremony. It was a scandal—Elizabeth Delaney’s smart and beautiful daughter, Marybeth, who had just received her acceptance letter from a Methodist women’s college, and Alice Maloney’s favorite grandson, Holt, who rode a motorcycle and wore a black leather jacket, had dropped out of Georgia Tech, and was working at the Maloney chicken houses and as a lineman for the power company. Elizabeth Delaney threatened to have Holt Maloney arrested for seducing a minor. Alice Maloney tried bitterly to have the marriage annulled.

  But Mama and Daddy were already expecting my brother Josh. So that was that. For better or worse, the Delaneys and the Maloneys were shackled together by marriage. Grandmother Elizabeth and Great-Gran Alice remained dedicated to making each other miserable, and with both of them living with us, they sometimes made us miserable, too.

  Great-Grandma Alice’s son Joseph and his wife, Dottie, lived a two-minute walk away, in a small house they built after they turned the big house over to Mama and Daddy, probably to escape the Old Grannies. Dottie Maloney was still young at sixty, a hearty, thick-bodied, red-haired tower of feminine strength who wore slacks and beautifully embroidered sweaters, a smart woman who tinkered successfully in the stock market and kept the farm’s business accounts and played tennis and loved opera. I adored Grandma Dottie, but Grandpa Joseph was my dearest mentor. People said he and I were a lot alike, temperament-wise, though sometimes I wasn’t sure they meant it as a compliment. He could be honest to the point of embarrassment.

  Grandpa was a broad, strong old man, planted solidly on the ground. He moved like a bear, and he was completely bald except for a monk’s fringe of white fur around the base of his skull. He could predict the first frost of fall to the day and tell you how much it was going to rain over the summer by listening to the frogs sing. He planted by the moon and astrology signs, and his stalks of corn grew at least twelve feet high
.

  He was also an amateur and very low-rent comedian. “Pull my finger,” he’d say. And as soon as I did, he’d fart loud enough to scare the dogs. I’d roll on the floor, laughing.

  Grandpa served in World War II—hand-to-hand combat fighting on some of those godforsaken jungle islands in the Pacific, shaking with malaria, his boots rotting off his feet in the damp, fetid heat. During the war Grandma Dottie moved my daddy and the rest of the children to an apartment in Atlanta so that she could work at the Bell Bomber plant.

  When they came back home after V-J Day, the farm had just about sunk to nothing. Grandpa limped from a piece of shrapnel embedded permanently in one hip. He and Grandma were broke and would ultimately have seven children to raise. Holt—my daddy—was the oldest, and he was only sixteen. The Latchakoochee Power Company hadn’t gotten very far before the war; almost everybody in the mountains was still in the dark.

  Grandpa Joseph put together a crew that included Daddy and most of the men in the family, who were almost as broke as Grandpa was. They went into the contracting business and installed power lines all over our part of the state. They made a small fortune. And Grandma Dottie, who knew about money and investments because her daddy was a banker in Gainesville, began nurturing that fortune on the stock market.

  Which was the main reason we had, as people said, more money than we knew what to do with. Around us were our fenced pastures, our broad fields, five large barns, various storage sheds, and ten long, low chicken houses, which produced fifty thousand fryers at regular intervals throughout the year.

  So there we were—one great-grandmother, one old grandmother and one youngish grandmother, one beloved grandfather, Mama and Daddy, Hop and Evan, and Josh—after he came home from Vietnam—and Brady, visiting from college every month or so. Plus a hundred head of Hereford beef cattle, a dozen dogs, five cats, a housekeeper, ten hired hands and a foreman, tons of pumpkins, corn, and cabbages, and me.