The Stone Flower Garden Read online

  “You’ve never disobeyed me, before.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry you got caught?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am.”

  To my astonishment, the thinnest little smile cut her mouth. “Tell me exactly what happened.” She settled behind a heavily carved desk and tapped a gold fountain pen on the dark marble surface. Imported. A gift from the Italian marble baron.

  “You always say we have a duty to our employees, so I thought I needed to do my duty, and they were hitting him, and I just couldn’t stand there.”

  “This boy, Eli, strikes me as troublemaker. He was barely provoked, it seems, before he started swinging at the other boys. What do you think?”

  “I think he’s used to being made fun of and having to fight back. But he didn’t hit anybody until they picked on his little sister.”

  “I see. So he’s a noble person, in your estimation?”

  “He helped me up. He stood in front of me so I wouldn’t get knocked down again.”

  “I see. Be that as it may, I don’t want any more trouble between you and Eli Wade.”

  My heart sank. “Yes, ma’am.” Swan never issued casual orders.

  “Don’t ever lower yourself to the level of your inferiors.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But do fight for what is yours.”

  I stared at her, bewildered. “Ma’am? So it’s all right?”

  “This time.” She waved me away. “Go.”

  I leapt for the doors, a huge weight lifting from me, though I realized my grandmother’s complex rules had become more tangled than ever. When I was older I’d understand that I’d impressed her. The meek might inherit the earth, but not Hardigree Marble. I halted at the huge doors, and looked back. “Where are the Wades going to live, ma’am?” I always called her ma’am.

  Swan had already opened a drawer and removed a stack of ledgers to consider. She looked at me over them, a little impatient. “At the Stone Cottage. I needed a caretaker for it.”

  I bit back a gasp. The Stone Cottage belonged to us; in fact it sat not ten minutes’ walk away in the vast wooded property behind Marble Hall. This meant the Wades were special. This meant Karen and I would no longer be all by ourselves in the woodlands where we played our solitary games. Unbelievable good luck had come to me.

  I had been born between a rock and a hard place. A pink rock. But now my small, lonely, protected world had just increased in membership by one fascinating soul.

  Eli Wade.

  Chapter Two

  She’s lookin’ at us like we’re up for sale. The thought burned Eli’s brain as he, Mama, Pa and Bell lined up on the tiled floor of Swan Hardigree Sample’s fine, antique-filled office at the Hardigree Marble quarry. She sat at her desk, studying them. She was the most beautiful woman Eli had ever seen, not how he’d pictured anybody’s grandma. Behind her, standing like a guard, was the beautiful colored lady, Miz Dove. Miz Dove kept looking at Pa as if the sight was a stinging balm to her eyes. Eli couldn’t figure her out.

  “Have you done any work as a maid?” Swan Samples asked Mama. And Mama nodded eagerly. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Mrs. Dove—” Swan gestured at her, “may contact you. She runs my estate.”

  Mama bobbed her head at her, then at Miz Dove. “Thank you, ma’am.” Miz Dove inclined her head in return.

  “What is your girl’s name?” Swan asked Pa. Bell shivered in Pa’s arms, her thin legs sticking out of a homemade dress. She burrowed her head in the crook of his neck. He protectively cupped one big hand around the back of her head. “Annette Bell, ma’am. She’s mighty shy. We can’t get her to talk much. Just born that way, a doctor said.”

  “Weaknesses of birth can be overcome by willpower and discipline, Mr. Wade.”

  Pa’s shoulders hunched. He couldn’t read, no matter how hard he tried. People like Swan were the reason he guarded his shameful secret so fiercely, and why it tormented him so much. The weakness of it. Eli burned with grief and embarrassment, watching him. “Yes, ma’am, we’re working on her,” he said finally.

  Her gaze turned to Eli. He tried to give her a poker face, but she saw through it. “Why are you frowning at me, young man?”

  He felt Mama and Pa’s worried eyes on him. Think quick, stop giving yourself away! His struggle to produce a bland expression made a muscle twitch beneath his right eye. The weaker of the two. He pushed his glasses up. Guess she’d tell him that eyeball just needed more willpower. “I . . . was frowning at that paintin’ behind you and Miz Dove, ma’am,” he lied quickly.

  She arched a brow. On the wall behind her, a huge painting depicted a half-naked Lady Liberty leading Washington and his troops across a storm-tossed sky. “What disturbs you about it?”

  “Well, if Liberty really wanted General Washington to take her serious, wouldn’t she’ve done better to cover her bra with some armor?”

  Mama darted one hand out and pinched the back of his plaid shirt. One more word, that clutch said, and I’ll pinch skin. Eli darted an apologetic glance up at his father, and saw anger. But when he forced his gaze back to Swan, she was looking at him differently. “The best armor is often invisible.” He said nothing to that. Every word risked more trouble. “You’re a thinker and a student,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Good. Keep it up.” She paused. “But don’t ever frown at me again.”

  He nearly strangled. He looked at Pa, and Pa nodded. This was a dogfight, and they had to roll over in defeat. Let this woman bite them on the balls, if she had a mind to.

  Eli shivered with fury. “Yes, ma’am.”

  He would never forget.

  When I heard Eli had poked fun at Swan’s Liberty painting, I was stunned. What kind of brave soul was he? Didn’t he understand my grandmother’s power? She never tolerated disrespect.

  Just the year before she had broken off her friendship entirely with a lady of great social esteem, who lived in the mountain city of Asheville. Asheville was a hair-raising ninety-minute drive from Burnt Stand, across two steep ranges with twisting roads. Swan and I stayed at the woman’s Asheville estate whenever Swan hosted balls or gave parties at the Grove Park Inn, which with its towering lobby and massive stone verandah was the most elegant hotel in all of North Carolina, to me. I loved it because it wasn’t pink, and it wasn’t made of marble, and it held no dark mysteries, unlike Burnt Stand.

  Burnt Stand—the town so full of vice the Devil burned it down.

  I read that inscription on an old photograph in a North Carolina history book I found in the Asheville lady’s living room bookshelves. The photograph showed Burnt Stand in the early 1920s, not long before the fire that killed my great-grandfather. My great-grandmother, Esta, escaped with Swan, baby Clara, and Matilda, the daughter of a black servant.

  It was easy to see why Esta decided to rebuild the town in unburnable marble. The original burg was just a collection of awful log and tar-paper buildings crowding the valley. Every tree had been cut down, a mule and wagon were mired in the mud of what was now Main Street, surly groups of men and unkempt-looking women lounged on warped wooden boardwalks and even our glorious blue-green mountains appeared dull. In one corner, the anonymous diarist had drawn an arrow to a cloud of dust. “Only a half mile to the quarry and no trees, so on a windy day all of A. A. Hardigree’s gals turn pink. Hah hah.”

  I showed the inscribed picture to Swan. “What’s vice, Grandmother? Why does this man say ‘hah hah’ about the girls? Wasn’t Great-Grandfather a nice man? What kind of girls did he have? What’s this picture mean, ma’am?”

  “It means my friend is no longer my friend,” Swan answered coolly. “She has very poor taste in history books, and very little respect for my good name.” Swan took the book from me and said no more. But we nev
er visited that woman’s home again.

  The Stone Cottage was another of the mysteries associated with my family’s past. Great-Grandmother Esta had built it in the late 1930s, at the same time she built Marble Hall and all the fabulous Esta Houses in town. It included three bedrooms, a parlor, a dining room, a kitchen and even a detached one-car garage—all in pink marble, of course. An azalea-rimmed dirt lane led to it from a back road on the opposite side of Marble Hall’s property.

  When I was a child Swan told me only that the place had been Esta’s guest house, which seemed peculiar to me, since it was hidden from Marble Hall by several hills and the Marble Creek hollow, and reaching it from the Hall required a long hike through our back woods, past the Stone Flower Garden, another peculiar but magical place.

  Swan sent Carl McCarl to do regular maintenance but never visited the cottage herself. Occasionally some friend or business acquaintance in need of solitude would move in for a month or two, but before the Wades arrived the cottage had been empty for several years.

  Now, it glowed with light.

  “They’re living in a haunted house for sure,” Karen whispered as we lay on our stomachs at the edge of a laurel thicket on the hill above the Stone Cottage. Karen had a fixation on death and ghosts, since her father had died in Vietnam when she was a baby and her mother, Katherine, had died of some unknown disease not long after. I tried not to wonder if my own parents remained in the ether.

  Karen slapped one golden hand at a mosquito that buzzed past her precisely braided brown hair. “This boy better be worth it,” she said. We lay flat in the woods. I worked up a bulb of liquid on my tongue and bombed a mosquito in midflight. “Got one.”

  “You’re gross.”

  “At least I’m not scared of ghosts.”

  “You just don’t know better.” She craned her head. “The Stone Cottage is full of spirits.”

  “Nah, this is just a lonely place, not haunted.”

  “I bet our mothers’ ghosts are around here.”

  “Why?”

  “They used to play in these woods. My grandmother said so.”

  “Huh. They didn’t stay,” I said flatly. “So they must not have been very happy here. And they don’t care about us anyway, so they’re not hanging around.” I brushed gnats from my face and hoped no green snake or centipede would crawl out of the leaf mold into my cut-off overalls. Suddenly, I saw movement at the cottage. “There he is!”

  We flattened ourselves more and watched Eli emerge from the cottage’s handsome back door. It was early September by then, just past Labor Day, a feasting time of late summer when every road intersection in the county hosted a barbecue stand selling pork sandwiches, Brunswick stew and pork ribs sopping in rich sauce. We had already spotted Eli’s mama and daddy’s arrival in the now-working truck. They’d carried shoeboxes packed with food into the house. Jasper Wade had been on the payroll of Hardigree Marble for nearly a month.

  Eli carried a dripping section of ribs in his bare hands. As he stood on the cottage’s back patio alone he savored that cheap country meal as if it were the finest gourmet food, catching the sauce on his tongue, licking the bones. He got sauce on his eyeglasses and had to stop to clean them. He licked the sauce from the lens before he polished them.

  “He’s not much to look at,” Karen whispered. “Ol’ bug-eyed, four-eyed, kind of skinny—”

  I elbowed her. “He’s poor. He just needs to fatten up. I think he’s really handsome. And noble. He’s been places, and he doesn’t just have to stand around waiting on something. He’s like Galahad, or . . . Chad Everett on Medical Center.”

  “Noble? Huh.”

  My heart twisted as I watched him go over the cleaned bones a second time, sucking them for even the last remnant of flavor. The new school year would start the next week, and since Karen and I were schooled at Marble Hall I wouldn’t get to see him much. “Noble,” I repeated. “And handsome.”

  Karen groaned with exasperation. “What do you think you’re going to do? Turn him into your boyfriend? Your grandmother’s never going to let you have a boyfriend, until she picks one out when you’re grown up and she wants you to get married.”

  “I can have a boyfriend whenever I want one!”

  “Hah. Are you crazy? You and me are important people. We have to marry rich men.”

  I reared up on my elbows. “I’ll marry anybody I want!”

  Karen gasped. “Shhh, you fool! Get down!”

  I flattened myself again, but it was too late. Eli stared right up at our hiding spot. His jaw tightened. He threw the bones into the bushes and charged up the hill. The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Beside me, Karen shrieked, “Run!”

  And we did.

  I tore through the woods, scrambling up hills and sliding down gulleys, stumbling over the exposed gray roots of a big beech, hearing Eli’s furious footsteps gaining on me. Karen sprinted down a narrow deer path and deserted me entirely. Soon I heard only my own soft shrieks, my panting breath and Eli’s feet. I headed for the only place I felt safe.

  I crested a steep knoll, started down it, then tripped on muscadine vine and sprawled into a narrow, shadowy glen. I realized where I was the instant before my forehead struck a smooth, hard, moss-speckled base of marble. The thud shook my brain, and I went very still, flat on my back, watching golden stars swim in the air. Above me, intricately carved marble flowers and vines curled down from a huge pink marble vase, taller than a man. Around me, weathered marble benches hunkered among ferns and honeysuckle vines, and pink marble urns stood empty, waiting for fresh plantings that never came. I had run to the Stone Flower Garden, and it had trapped me in its marble arms.

  Eli crashed down on his knees beside me and cupped my face between his hands. “Jesus. Don’t pass out or nothing.” His own face was pale, and any anger he’d felt seemed to have vanished. “I’ll get creek water.” He disappeared for a minute, and when he returned he held out the bottom of his sopping white t-shirt in his hands. I sat up woozily, leaning against the massive vase behind me, as he patted the cool, dripping shirt to my forehead and cheeks. “What’d you think?” he almost yelled. “That I was gonna chase you down and kill you?”

  The stars faded and my head cleared. “Well, you were running like it! You sounded mad!”

  “I was. But I wasn’t gonna hit you or nothing. I don’t hit girls.”

  “You just chase them like a wolf.” I touched a finger to the egg-sized knot rising on my scalp. He pushed his black-rimmed glasses up his nose and studied my head, then looked into my eyes. His hands, lean and already strong, plucked at leaves on my overalls. “You gonna cry?”

  “No. I’m a Hardigree. I cry marble tears and spit marble spit.”

  He whistled under his breath and sat back on his heels. “You’re a sneak, that’s what.”

  “I only wanted to see if you were doing okay in your new home.”

  “Look, I just want to be left alone and not screw up nothing. My pa needs this job here. He hadn’t had no good job in six months. The quarry in Tennessee closed on him. Quarry work is all he can do.”

  “Why? He looks big and smart.”

  For a full five minutes I waited, but he said nothing. “He’s not smart,” Eli said finally. “Not in any way that counts.” Silence. His head drooped.

  Pangs of sympathy shot through me. “Is he a good daddy, anyway?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay. Then be glad. I don’t have a daddy. Or a mama.”

  He stood up, frowning. “How come?”

  “They ran off the road when I was a baby. You can still see the scrapes on the big rocks down below Hightower Ridge.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “My daddy was a stonecutter at Hardigree Marble. Like yours.”

  He stared at me. “Jesus.”

 
; Jesus. He was going to hell. All right, I’d go with him. “Damn,” I said bravely.

  He suddenly became aware of the hidden glen surrounded by deep forest, and his eyes widened as he studied the giant marble flower vase. “What kind of place is this?”

  “A good place to hide, except when you are chasing me. My great-grandmother built it. Nobody knows why.”

  “I bet there’s magic, here.”

  Excitement shot through me. He understood. “Lots of it.”

  “Who comes here?”

  “Just me. My friend Karen’s scared of it.” I hesitated. “But you can come here. I won’t mind.”

  His eyes hardened. “Why are you bein’ nice to me? What do you want? I’m not your kind.”

  “I say you are.” When he went quiet again I sighed with disappointment. I got up, brushed leaves off my overalls and began to make my way, weak-kneed, up the opposite slope.

  “Hey,” he called. I stopped and turned. He looked up at me in a way that made my heart patter softly. “I ain’t ever gonna be pink like you,” he declared. “But I think you’re a fine shade of friend.”

  I fell in love with him that day, at only seven years old.

  Why is she nice to me? Eli wondered constantly. Back in Tennessee he’d grown used to being ignored or teased, called white trash, poor, four-eyes, ugly, and worse, the son of a dummy who couldn’t read, the brother of a sister who barely spoke. He’d fought all those fights alone, until the pink girl took up his cause.

  Greetings, Darl Union had said like a princess.

  Greetings, he had answered, like a prince.

  And now she had shown him the fantastic hidden garden. Magic and good luck began to come to him. The garden, with its stone flowers, was changing his family’s lives.

  Eli discovered his mother crying with joy every morning when she cooked up grits and fried eggs in their nice new home, even if the strange little house didn’t belong to them and was only free board from the Hardigree Marble Company. For years they’d lived in rented rooms, old trailers, even the truck for the last few weeks. They’d never had a house, before, especially not a marble one. The air was cool and sweet. Ivy curled up the cottage’s walls and draped the cornices of the roof. The walls, inside and out, where a cool, clean pink. The whole place made him think of Darl Union.