Charming Grace Read online

  At Ladyslipper Lost. Here.

  I put both hands to my heart and stared. The forest floor was decorated with the most incredible pink flowers. They resembled their name, delicate little pink slippers no more than a few inches long, each hanging like a Christmas ornament from a graceful green stem about a foot tall. Those stems rose from clusters of large, dark green leaves. Ladyslippers, I whispered. For one or two brief weeks in the enchanted month of May, they treated me to a sight few people got to see. Hundreds of orchids in bloom. “Ladyslippers,” I repeated.

  I advanced into that magical kingdom like a small princess, ten years old, permed auburn hair up in a disco-gold scrunchy, feet clad in high-topped sneakers, the rest of me decked out in little-girl designer jeans and a luxurious silk top from the junior miss racks at Neiman Marcus, down in Atlanta. I stopped suddenly. I saw red on the orchids.

  The brilliant contrast stood out like crimson paint splattered across pink balloons. I dropped to my heels and looked at the flowers. At least a dozen of them were speckled with the strange color. I reached out slowly and dabbed a fingertip into a dime-sized spot. My finger came away crimson. I studied it, bending close to the red dab on my own skin. Blood. Blood.

  I gave a soft shriek and shot to my feet, looking around wildly. “Harp! You’re alive!”

  No answer. The blood-freckled ladyslippers led me across the floor of the secluded cove. By the time I reached the other side I was nearly running. The glen’s west edge was bordered by a shallow gulley, just a crevice of exposed roots and muddy rain puddles.

  And there he was.

  Harp lay in the mud among the lost roots of trees, looking up at me like something from a horror movie. He was bony-thin and sallow, filthy, smelling like a dead thing on the road, his pecan-brown hair matted in long wads that clumped around his neck. He clutched a wrap of oily black animal fur around him from shoulders to knees; later I would find out it was a crudely skinned pelt from an old bear he’d found dead during the winter. He held a ragged ladyslipper in one fist. The bloom had wilted—no wonder, because he’d pulled the whole plant up by the roots. Even that ladyslipper was speckled with his blood. He’d wrapped his cheap tennis shoes in pieces of the same bear skin. Below the pelt, the left leg of his jeans was stained and torn, but serviceable. It was the other leg that held my attention. The denim was ripped open and bloody from the knee down. The jagged bone of the lower leg stuck up from a putrid gash.

  I gagged then wiped my mouth and climbed down in the gulley and sat beside him. “Harp Vance,” I moaned. “You smell like you’re dead, but you’re not.”

  He blinked slowly, struggling to focus. Finally he formed words through cracked, bleeding lips. “Is this like that day in the dime store? Are you an angel?”

  I fell in love with him at that moment. “I’m surely not any kind of angel.”

  “My leg’s busted. I fell chasin’ a deer.”

  “How bad does it hurt?”

  “Not at all, no more. I can’t feel it.” He paused. “It’s time for me to die.”

  “No it’s not! Don’t ever say that.”

  “Don’t tell nobody where I’m at. They’ll put me away. Somewhere I don’t want to go.”

  “No, they won’t. I promise. I swear.”

  “Where’s my sister? Is she all right?”

  “She…had to leave. My grandmother got a postcard. She went up north.”

  His eyes, large and dull and full of pain, glimmered with tears. But his mouth tightened. “Good. Then she got away. She’s free. So now I can die.”

  I took him by the shoulders. “She told my grandmother to find you and take care of you. And G. Helen has tried! All of us have tried! We want to help you! You have to believe me. You have to.”

  “What made you come here?”

  “I dreamed about you.”

  He stared up at me, blinking slowly, only half-conscious. “Nobody,” he said in a slurred voice, “Dreams about me.”

  I shook him. “I’ll run all the way to my house. And you better be alive when I get back with help. The ladyslippers helped me find you, and they’ll take care of you.” I touched the wilted one in his fist. “See? One’s been keeping you company.”

  “I . . . I pulled it up by accident. Just grabbin’ for a hold on anything. You’re the only ladyslipper I believe in.” He shut his eyes and his head rolled to one side. I squealed and put my hand under his nose, the way I’d seen TV doctors do it. The soft feather of his breath warmed my skin. I staggered to my feet. “Don’t die,” I whispered. “I need you.” Lost in a world below the level of the flowering earth, he didn’t hear me.

  I ran for his salvation, and mine.

  What I said about being born in the ladyslipper glen was true.

  My art-student mother, Wilhemina “Willy” Osterman Bagshaw, of Connecticut was always reckless when it came to joy. She made a long hike into the deep, mountainous woods behind Bagshaw Downs, ancestral home of her new deep-South in-laws, despite being eight months’ pregnant with me. Willy insisted to my father that she could manage the three-mile round-trip hike. She wanted to see his family’s legendary ladyslipper orchid glen in full bloom. The hidden hollow had been named Ladyslipper Lost by a melodramatic Bagshaw—“melodramatic” and “Bagshaw” being redundant—in Victorian times.

  “I want to paint Ladyslipper Lost, Jimmy,” she said. She was an artist, and flowers were her specialty. When she and Dad reached the amazing hollow she cried, laughed, and sat down, enchanted among the pink orchids. “Jimmy,” she said in her Carly Simon clarinet voice, “My water just broke and I think I’m going to bloom right here with these fantastic plants.”

  “No, no, no,” said my dad, who thought she was joking. “Bagshaws have their babies in hospitals now. My father made it a rule after I was born. My mother spent twenty hours in labor—with no painkillers—in a bedroom at the Downs, while my father, our private doctor, and a hired nurse kept telling her, ‘Think patriotic thoughts, Helen. Japan just surrendered to the Allies!’ My mother finally said to my father, ‘I can wave the goddamn flag or I can give birth. I can’t do both. Now please get me a big drink of whiskey and hit me in the head with a tire iron. I don’t want to wake up until after this baby is out of me. I’m never doing this again without morphine.’”

  Willy laughed. “But your mother would agree that our baby is a rule waiting to be broken. In fact, Jimmy, I’d say . . .ohmygod—” She jerked up the soggy front of her peasant skirt, lay back among the ladyslippers, and yelled in pain. My handsome, earnest, barely grown dad, a rich-boy law student who had no idea how to argue with the law of Mother Nature, squatted between the flayed hem of her silk peasant skirt. “Willy?”

  “I’m serious!”

  He tore her panties off, held her knees apart, and thirty minutes later, he caught me in his hands. He and she laid me among the pink orchids. I was born in record time—early, alert, and hungry. They were stunned. And thrilled. Of course I can’t remember the moment, but I know I must have been pink and happy.

  Four years later, my mother died of a blood clot in her brain, her hand simply stopping on the half-finished canvas of a ladyslipper, a slip of pink color on the tip of her brush, her hand falling like an leaf into her lap, her body melting into a relaxed, abstract-dancer heap on a knoll looking down into Ladyslipper Lost. It was her favorite place to paint. I was four years old when she died, and I have only a blurry memory I have of watching her die, while I sat on a child-sized folding chair beside her with a coloring book frozen in my hands, screaming.

  When my father and G. Helen found us, several hours later, I was holding her hand.

  She left us dozens of ethereal paintings; my favorites are the soft, sexy, mystical ladyslippers. The unfinished ladyslipper painting hangs in a special room at the Downs. I visit it often. She also left behind a lullaby in honor of the orchids who watched me come into the world.

  Ladyslipper, ladyslipper

  What do you know?

  Destiny�
��s dancers, on their toes

  Pink shoes, green stage, pirouette in place

  All for the joy of charming Grace.

  G. Helen framed my mother’s handwritten copy of the poem and I kept it on the nightstand beside my bed, singing it to myself at night instead of a prayer. My other memories of Willy Osterman Bagshaw were submerged under bleak gray half-tones of horror, tangled with recollections of her death, and of my handsome, stalwart father crying, and my eventual realization that he would never be perfectly happy again, and neither would I. He never went back to the orchid glen. “The day you were born was the happiest day of your daddy’s life,” G. Helen told me once. “And he is sorely afraid of admitting that happiness has more power than sorrow.”

  Without my mother he reverted to Bagshaw stuffiness; despite having a bohemian Yankee artist for a wife and the notorious G. Helen for a mother, he was doomed to lead a serious life.

  And so was I.

  Within a couple of years of Mother’s death he remarried, picking a female so lovable but so different from my mother that she could only put distance between him and the memory. Candace Upton was a brunette beauty queen from sultry Mississippi, with a talent for everything gracious and gentle; she doted on Daddy and on me, and we loved her. But even with a new mother cooing over me I never felt less than alone, a piece of me missing. My mother’s joy and Dad’s smile had been lost among the wild orchids.

  Poor sweet Candace decided that she could cheer me up and make me her little girl by making me a beauty queen, like her. But that plan, like everything else she and Dad tried in an effort to make me forget watching my mother die, only gilded my peculiar misery.

  I was always looking for a fellow lost soul to explain death to me.

  Harp Vance fit the bill.

  Harp came from the lowest end of the social totem pole. I sat at the top. As Little Miss North Georgia 1977 I already wore the invisible crown of a rich, well-meaning, but prim mountain family who were determined to see me grow up to be a credit to their status quo. Candace entered me in beauty contests all over the South as if I were a prized, red-headed poodle.

  As in most small towns, the lives of rich and poor intersected in small, public spaces where each could be polite but pretend the other didn’t exist. For Harp and me, our first encounter across class lines occurred in the Dahlonega Dime Store. I was seven and he was nine.

  His grandmother was examining half-price boxes of Nunnally’s chocolates left over from Valentine’s Day and his slinky older sister, Michelle, was slipping Maybelline into her macramé tote. I had time on my hands while G. Helen’s housekeeper shopped for birthday cards and dental floss. So I sidled up an aisle to this handsome but shabby boy who lived so far from my world he might as well have been a Martian. He was standing stock-still, gazing upward at a shelf of brilliantly colored, ceramic Santa figurines marked down to fifty cents each. It was July, after all. He held up one hand toward them. The shelf was a good four feet above his reach. He frowned.

  As I peeked at him around a riser filled with plastic flowers—the kind old ladies bought to decorate graves—he plucked a long pocket knife from his jeans, took it by the tip of the blade, then drew his arm back and took careful aim at the shelf of Santas. With a flick of his wrist he launched the knife in a delicate arch above his head. It twirled like a baton. The handle gently thunked a ceramic Santa on the edge of the unreachable shelf. The Santa rocked, toppled, and landed in Harper Vance’s right hand. With his left hand, he caught the falling knife.

  No circus performer ever performed a neater trick. I gaped at him as he closed the knife and slipped it back into his jeans. He raised the captured Santa to catch every glimmer of the store’s florescent lights, turning it in his long, agile hands, touching dirty fingertips to the smooth colors and molded grooves. It was clear the cheap dime-store Santa was a prize he coveted. He cuddled it to his chest as he filched some change from his jeans and studied the coins on his palm. His lips moved, counting. He nodded.

  He had the fifty cents.

  I was enthralled. There I stood, dressed in a frilly Little Miss Rich Girl sundress with matching yellow sandals, auburn hair puffed up in a permed mass of curls that hung to my waist, like a handmade doll kept on an invisible leash. I’d just witnessed a raw act of self-sufficiency by a boy who clearly made his own rules. I burned with envy.

  “Could you teach me to do that?” I blurted.

  He jumped. His hands opened like the wings of startled birds. The Santa hit the store’s hard linoleum floor and cracked in two. We both stared at it in horror. I rushed over. “We can hide it under the bottom shelf,” I whispered. “I hid a whole box of broken Christmas ornaments under there once.”

  His face tightened. “That’d be wrong!” That single sentence, barked out in a backwoods twang, summed up his refusal to take the easy way out.

  “What’s going on here?” The store manager, a woman armored in lavender polyester, stomped up the aisle. She glowered only at Harp. I was, after all, a Bagshaw. “What are you up to, mister? Did you climb up on these shelves and knock that Santa off? I swear, I’m never letting you trashy Vances in here again, I swear—”

  “I broke it,” I announced loudly.

  Where those words came from when I was only seven years old, I don’t know. Perhaps G. Helen’s fight-for-the-underdog attitudes had already begun sinking in. At any rate, despite Harper Vance staring at me as if I’d lost my mind, I raised my chin and repeated, “I climbed up and grabbed at the Santa and knocked it off.”

  “Well, well now.” The manager blinked awkwardly and formed a smile. “Accidents will happen. Don’t you worry—”

  “She didn’t break the thang. I did,” Harper said. He faced the manager. “I broke it. Here.” He thrust out his hand with his few coins spread on his palm.

  The manager bent over it, scowling. “I should have known. You don’t have enough for the price plus tax. You broke the Santa and you can’t afford to pay for it. I’m tired of you Vances coming in here and pilfering—”

  His face began to color. “I’ll get some more pennies! I can too pay for it!”

  “Maybe I’ll just call the sheriff, young man, and let him talk to you—”

  I wailed. For even better effect I also collapsed with my hands clamped to my face. “I broke the Santa but nobody believes me,” I cried in huge, dramatic gasps. I’d been competing in beauty contests for at least a year by then. I knew how to perform for an audience. “Everybody thinks I’m a liar! But I broke it, I broke it! I’m not a liar! No one listens to me!”

  “Oh, honey, shush.” The manager huddled over me. G. Helen’s housekeeper rushed up, demanding what had happened, chirping in disgust when she heard I’d broken the Santa. “Well, good lord, I’ll pay for the cheap little hickie. Gracie, hush. Hush. What in the world is the matter with you? You’re gettin’ your eyes all puffy. What will Miss Candace say? You gonna show up at your ballet class lookin’ like a frog.” And to the manager, “If she says she broke the Santie, she means it. What’d you do to upset her so?”

  “Nothing. Nothing.” The woman waved her hands urgently. “It was just an accident.”

  “Well let it be, then.”

  “Yes. Yes. No problem. Let’s forget all about it.”

  G. Helen’s housekeeper lifted me to my feet, cooing. I continued to sob but peeked through my fingers at Harp. He stared at me as if I had changed places with his precious Santa. His wild eyes were big and dark and filled with wonder

  As the housekeeper led me away, in essence putting me back on my leash, I winked at him. After a long moment, as if he had had to think hard before recognizing the tiniest thread of friendship, he put his hand to his heart. I never forgot that. His hand over his heart.

  For me.

  I rarely saw him over the next few years. I had private tutors; he went to the public elementary school—or didn’t go. Lumpkin County’s truant officer hunted lost dogs more passionately than he hunted Harp. Lost dogs were easie
r to find.

  I was ten and Harp was twelve when he ran away for good from his grandmother’s rusty double-wide trailer. It happened in the fall of the year, a month after his grandmother died, leaving Harp and Michelle on their own. A cabal of upstanding citizens (led by my Great Aunt Tess) went there to Take The Boy For His Own Good. Michelle, sixteen-years- old and built like breasts with legs, was wanted by the Atlanta police for dealing drugs, not to mention working as an underage stripper at a men’s club.

  “We can’t save the girl, but we can grab that wolf-eyed little brother of hers,” Aunt Tess proclaimed. In my family, public nudity and wild dancing were rarely tolerated, either apart or together. Mind-altering drugs, except for liquor, tobacco and Valium, belonged in big-city ghettos and not the purses of Lumpkin County teenagers. If the Atlanta police and Tess Bagshaw—patron saint of the local morals—said Michelle Vance was not fit to raise her little brother, then most of Lumpkin County agreed.

  Unfortunately, the well-meant intervention failed. Michelle might not be an upstanding citizen but she was a devoted sister. She gave Aunt Tess The Finger and shoved Harp out the trailer’s back door. Harp vanished into the wild woods with the silent ease of a boy who’d already learned to take care of himself. Michelle, after being booked and released down in Atlanta (thanks to bail paid by G. Helen,) fled to parts unknown. So did Harp.

  A few days after Harp ran for the woods and Michelle ran, period, G. Helen got a postcard from her, postmarked somewhere along a bus route in Kentucky.

  Mrs. Bagshaw, thank you for all you tried to do.

  Please catch my brother and hold onto him if you can.

  He is odd but special. He will do great things, if you can just keep him indoors.

  That was the problem. Finding him and keeping him indoors.