The Stone Flower Garden Read online

  “Not enough sun for a garden,” Pa complained, but even he couldn’t find fault with anything else. The kitchen appliances were clean and decent and all worked, there were two handsome bathrooms with big marble tubs, and at night the little cottage glowed with light from wrought-iron wall sconces and ceiling fixtures. There was even a washing machine.

  When Eli lay next to Bell on their shared bed at night, clean from a tub bath, he cradled an old paperback copy of Gulliver’s Travels to his chest and swore he’d do whatever anybody asked, if his family could only, please Jesus, stay there until the hard times faded behind them like a bad taste. He went to the Stone Flower Garden every day, and prayed some more.

  Pa hung a wallet-sized picture of Grandpa Wade on the living room wall near the fireplace. It was the only picture they had of him, and was tattered. Grandpa had cut it from a bigger picture, Pa said, but didn’t know what the bigger picture was or where it was taken. Grandpa had been the best stonecutter in five states then, before a quarry accident left him nearly crippled. Pa had not been born yet. The picture was taken before Grandpa, already a ruined man, had met Grandma Wade. She’d married him regardless and made their living working as a cook and a nurse. He’d killed himself drinking when Pa was just a boy.

  But in the picture he stood, young and handsome, in the open wall of some grand marble house he was building, his legs braced apart, his thumbs hitched on his pants, his smile turned just a little downward, as if somebody below had earned it more than the rest of the world.

  Eli always wondered who that someone was, and where his Grandpa had been so happy.

  Over the fall and winter I spied on the Stone Cottage innumerable times, catching a glimpse of Eli as he helped his mother hang clothes outside to dry. His father came to the quarry office one day when Swan was there, and hat in hand, asked permission to clear a half acre near the cottage for a spring vegetable garden. “You do good work, Mr. Wade,” Swan answered from behind her big mahogany desk with the marble inlay, “and so I grant my permission.” This was a stunning show of praise from a woman who rarely found anything or anyone worthy of reward.

  During the bitter cold months of winter I hunkered on the knoll above the Stone Cottage in my soft woolen coats and cashmere sweaters, watching Eli and his father cut down large hemlocks, firs and white pines in the family’s new garden spot. I could see Eli shiver in a thin army jacket and ratty yarn cap. I watched Jasper Wade shiver, too, but neither of them ever gave up and went indoors. Jasper patiently taught Eli to use a dangerous chainsaw so heavy it sagged Eli down when he held it. I’m sure Jasper could have saved time cutting the trees himself, but he didn’t.

  Each time a mighty tree fell through the combined efforts of father and son, gruff, unemotional Jasper Wade put an arm around Eli in a quick, rough hug, and I saw Eli’s upturned grin of pleasure. I knew, then, without being able to put it in words, that Eli adored his father the way I loved Swan. I yearned to earn one smile, one hug, one ounce of expressed love, just one.

  Annie Gwen regularly came outside, bringing hot drinks and stoking a fire they built from chopped branches. Bell, bundled in blankets and cheap polyester scarves, prodded the edges of the fire with a stick. Annie Gwen got marshmallows and hot dogs, and often the family sat around the fire at the end of a long day, roasting such simple food in the flames. Bell curled up in her mother’s lap and Eli sat cross-legged on the ground between her and his father. Sometimes, Annie Gwen would sing old country songs, and Jasper smoked a cigarette, listening. The pungent, sweet pine scent of their fire rose to me and I inhaled it with a loneliness that nearly tore my skin.

  This was the scent of a loving family.

  Eli crept through the deep mountain woods the next March, scuffing his jeans and camouflage hunting shirt—a disguise, because he was very methodical. He had waited for the trees to sprout enough leaves to hide him. He glimpsed the pink Hardigree mansion through the woods and inhaled sharply at its size. He crawled under a thicket of laurel on the ridge facing the mansion’s back gardens until finally he had a clear view. His breath caught in his throat. The first spring gnats swarmed him. He stared in worried awe at the splendor before him.

  The mansion crowned the opposite ridge like a pink palace in a painting of Shangri-La in one of his books. Marble balconies and soaring windows glistened in the sun. Big, draping willows and dogwoods surrounded the house, and the lawn of the backyard looked as green and smooth as the felt on a pool table. There were amazing flower gardens, and a marble gazebo, and a pool! A personal, private swimming pool! All held together by an incredible stone terrace across the back—a wall of pink marble blocks at least thirty feet tall. A marble staircase zigzagged down that wall and ended at a kind of patio at the edge of the forest.

  Dappled in sunlight, that secluded patio curled around a large pond with a slender marble fountain, shaped like a pagoda. Water trickled delicately from the pagoda’s marble roof. Flowering white water lilies floated on the pond’s surface, and as Eli watched, a gold-and-white fish the size of a large trout crested for a second. The sight was amazing, even for an avid reader such as Eli. His mind filled with stories of exotic locales and fabulous ways. Darl had a private fishpond, with monster-sized goldfish and a miniature pagoda. She lived like the child of a Japanese samurai.

  He had barely caught his breath when his eyes returned to the top of the terrace, and an eerie current prickled his skin. Spaced between towering snowball bushes were a dozen large, marble swans. They sat in fixed glory atop the terrace in the space between each big shrub. They stared straight at Eli fiercely, a flock of angry-looking marble birds, as if daring him to breach the pink wall of their namesake’s fortress. They were guards. The Devil had incubi and succubae.

  Darl’s grandmother had marble birds.

  He made himself stare back at them, angry and scared, wanting to throw a few rocks at them then run like hell. Suddenly a door opened in a gleaming glass sunroom across the back of the mansion. His heart stopped as Darl’s grandmother walked out. She appeared from the giant pink mansion as if she knew he’d trespassed to the very edge of her castle moat. He flattened himself beneath the big green leaves of the rhododendron.

  “Goodgodawmighty,” he whispered. She looked like a movie star in a black bathing suit, black sunglasses, and a long, see-through black robe. She walked past the pool and went to the edge of the terrace, stroking her dark brown hair back from her face, gazing into the woods. Eli’s skin drew up a size smaller. He couldn’t move. But she was coming his way.

  She went down the long marble steps and halted on the patio. He watched in amazement as she knelt by the fishpond and dabbled her fingers in the dark water. A second later she lifted one of those foot-long goldfish from the pond and stood, holding the poor thing up in front of her like she meant to eat it alive or watch it drown in the air, just for fun. The fish struggled wildly. She didn’t let go.

  Finally, just as the fish began to give up, she knelt and slid him back into the water. With a relieved flip of his tail he disappeared. She rinsed her hands and flung water from them, then rose and climbed the stairs. She tossed her robe aside and dived into the blue pool. She was in charge. She could play God. Nobody could drown her in air or water.

  Eli released a long, fearful breath. He had seen her in her full armor, now.

  Chapter Three

  “Stand up, Mister Wade.” The fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dane, glared at Eli through her square, amber-rimmed glasses. She held his test papers in one hand as if she meant to flail him with them. She looked capable of ax murder—small, lethal, strong, with a roll around her middle and a face like a pug dog. She wore a blonde wig that let strands of her own brown hair escape around the edges. She always seemed on the verge of coming unstuffed.

  The hair rose on Eli’s neck. He slid from his desk as slowly as syrup draining from a bottle. He hated being called on in class, hated standing up i
n his Salvation Army flannel shirt and his floppy jeans, which were already too short for his growing legs. The faintest trace of snickers rose around him like a bad stink. He adjusted his black-rimmed glasses, fingering a scuffed place on one temple. Mrs. Dane squinted at him through her fancy amber windows. He gazed back, resolute.

  “Mister Wade,” she said evenly. “You finished this math test in five minutes. The rest of the class needed a whole hour.” She slapped the papers down. “You cheated.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said simply. “I sure didn’t cheat. Ma’am.”

  She shook his papers. “Then explain how you did this.”

  “I just . . . don’t have to think much. The numbers just come right out.”

  “Like pus,” some boy whispered. “He’s a Pus Head.”

  The class’s chorus of muffled giggles was silenced by one slap of Mrs. Dane’s hand on her desk. Eli’s face flamed. “Come to the board,” she ordered Eli. His knees quivered. He walked slowly to the front of the room then stood like a soldier at attention. Mrs. Dane scribbled on a notepad. “Multiply these figures on the board. Two hundred and seventy.” Eli picked up a piece of chalk and wrote the number. “Times two hundred and fifty.” Eli wrote the second number. “The answer is sixty-seven thousand and five hundred,” he said.

  “Don’t be funny with me, mister!”

  “I don’t feel funny at all, ma’am. That’s the answer, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Dane worked the figures on her notepad. A blush rose in her cheeks. She frowned. “All right. Right.” Eli’s chest filled with a rush of relief. But her mouth thinned in challenge. “Six thousand and seven, divided by twelve.”

  He didn’t even bother to write the figures on the board. “Five hundred point fifty-eight. That gets you within point zero four of an even number.”

  She scribbled. She gasped. Her head snapped up and she peered at him incredulously. “Two million and twenty-one times sixty-seven!”

  “One hundred and thirty-four million, one thousand, four hundred and seven.” He paused. “Even.” Mrs. Dane sat down, worked the figures on her pad, then threw her pencil down. She raised her head again, gaping at him. She tugged distractedly at her blonde wig, and a whole swath of mousy brown hair cascaded from behind one ear. I made her brain blow a hairball, Eli thought. She pointed at him. “You’re a genius.”

  A wave of pride washed over him. He’d kept his temper, believed in himself, and won this humiliating contest. When he looked at the rest of the class, they were as wide-eyed as rats staring at cheese.

  The Big Cheese. Him.

  “Greetings,” he said.

  Swan took me to the quarry offices on most Saturdays to observe, to do small bits of paperwork, to learn the hard business of hard stone. I sat at my own small desk in the corner of her office, glancing wishfully out a large picture window at the open sky, the wide deep box of the marble pit and the men at work with cranes and cutting tools. I preferred the carving factory next door, where I was allowed to stand in certain areas with safety goggles covering my eyes, watching the master craftsmen grind, cut and polish the stone. On Saturdays the men could bring their sons for an hour to teach them the trade. No girls were allowed. Except me.

  On that crisp Saturday in March there stood Eli, his boyish hands sunk into oversized leather gloves, his face and clothes covered in dust, a bandana tied over his nose and mouth. He worked alongside his father, and he never looked up at me when I was looking at him, though I did catch him watching me. I looked away then slyly whipped my gaze back. Caught him.

  Swan suddenly, astonishingly, exited her office and strode onto the factory floor, something she rarely did when the dust flew. She cut quite a figure in the new career-woman fashions of the seventies. That day she wore a pantsuit—tailored blue slacks with a matching jacket. A colorful silk scarf made a belt at the jacket’s waist and trailed from her right hip like a referee’s flag. The heels of her imported blue pumps clicked on shards of marble. A choker of pearls graced her throat. Every muscle in her tall, svelte frame moved in the perfect synchronicity of confidence; every man in the plant looked up at her as she passed. She was still so beautiful; she could have been Scarlett O’Hara’s older sister, or Jacklyn Smith’s look-alike mother on Charlie’s Angels.

  I, of course, was dressed in a pink wool jumper and pink, knee-high ski boots.

  She stopped at Jasper Wade’s work area and beckoned him with a crook of a finger. When he threw off his face mask and set down his grinder, she said, “Come along to my office, Mr. Wade. And bring your son.”

  I couldn’t imagine what she wanted with Jasper and Eli, but I beamed at Eli because I was to be included. As he tugged his bandana down and wiped his glasses his big, chocolate eyes did not evade me, and I saw the worry in them. My heart twisted. “She never fires anyone herself,” I whispered as we trailed her and his father. “She makes Mr. Albert, her manager, do it. So don’t worry about your daddy.”

  He glared at me. I frowned at him. We entered the office. Swan sat down and pointed me to my own little desk. His father appeared worried, too, even standing there so tall and strong, a dark-haired and handsome man covered in marble dust and sweat and submission, even on a cold spring day. He and Eli stood in a marble-tiled area just inside the office door, not daring to set even one grimy foot on the fine Turkish rug beneath our own feet. I sat down morosely at my handsome marble-topped desk and crossed my hands on the cold stone.

  “Mr. Wade,” Swan said, “I understand from his schoolteacher that Eli is a math genius.”

  In the stunned silence that followed, I gaped at Eli, and his father’s eyes widened, as well. “He’s good with his brain, ma’am,” Jasper finally said. “And I reckon yes, the boy’s real good with figures. He’s been doing the checkbook for my wife and me, and he’s never made a mistake. Not once.”

  “How old was he when you allowed him to begin keeping your family accounts?”

  Jasper looked at Eli. “Do you know, son? I’m not sure.”

  Eli’s guarded expression said he wasn’t certain he should admit anything. He swallowed hard. “Six years old, Pa.”

  Jasper’s eyes gleamed. He looked back at Swan. “Yeah, I reckon he was in the first grade then, ma’am.”

  Swan sat back in her tall, upholstered office chair. She steepled both hands to her mouth, studying Eli with her intense blue eyes, as if calculating his value in fine stone. Suddenly she leaned forward and tapped numbers into an adding machine on her desk. The machine whirred and clanked and slid a paper receipt from its top. She tore the slip of paper from its berth and hid it in one hand. “Eli, quick, in your head. Do this arithmetic. What’s one hundred and twenty-three times forty-two?”

  Eli gazed at her and didn’t blink. “Five thousand, one hundred, and sixty-six.”

  Her brows arched. “Correct.” I nearly fell out of my miniature office chair. He was brilliant! She calculated another figure on the machine. “Eight hundred and ninety-five divided by eighty-two.”

  “Ten point ninety-one,” he said without missing a beat.

  Swan grilled him with ten more exercises. He never hesitated, and he never missed an answer. She tossed the slips of paper on her desk and leaned back in her chair again, propping her chin on the back of one graceful hand. Her gaze rose to Jasper’s. “Mr. Wade, I want Eli to work part-time after school in the office, here. I want him to learn accounting from Mr. Albert. Of course he’s just a child, but he’s no ordinary child. I provide one college scholarship every year for a deserving student from this town. If he proves himself to be a scholar and a gentleman, I expect he’ll receive that scholarship when he graduates from Hardigree High School. He’ll study business and accounting over at Duke University in Chapel Hill and then he’ll return here to work for me.”

  This was amazing. She had singled the Wades out to live in our own Stone Cottage, and g
iven Jasper Wade permission to cut down hundred-year-old trees in our forest, and now she was vowing to send Eli to the state’s finest university someday. She recognized his nobility!

  Jasper Wade looked too surprised for words. Eli’s mouth opened and shut. He stared into space until finally his gaze came to me. You’re special and she knows it, so act happy! He must have seen the excitement in my face. But in return, I only saw anger and misery in his. He was going to be owned by Hardigree Marble, whether he liked it or not.

  “Nobody in my family ever went to college,” his father said slowly.

  Swan nodded. “Then it’s about time. You have a rare opportunity to change the entire course of your family’s future. Any sacrifice is worth that.”

  “Yes, ma’am. His mama’ll be beside herself. This is her dream.”

  “Good. Then make it come true.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Thank you. He will.” Jasper looked down at Eli. Pride and command glowed in Jasper’s harsh face. His eldest child, his only son, had just been handed a chance to work with his mind instead of his hands. A chance to be somebody. “What do you say, son?”

  Eli stared up at him, searching his unyielding expression. Slowly, Eli turned toward my grandmother. A weight heavier than every slab in the quarry seemed to settle on him. “I’ll do it. Thank you, ma’am.”

  It was the sound of defeat. I would own him, someday, but against his will. Tears rose in my eyes. A hollow victory.

  This, then, was the dark side of wealth and power: In order to have that power, you had to take something away from other people, you had to control them for your own best interests and you had to be responsible for them. I spent that whole dark spring brooding over my power-wielding future and the beaten look that settled in Eli’s eyes when Swan clamped the manacles of Hardigree Marble around his young life. All right, so here was my solution: When I inherited him, I’d set him free. And then I’d marry him.