The Stone Flower Garden Page 6

  “Hell, no. My family got no money for stitches.” Leon jerked Eli’s coat open. “Did they cut you, too?”

  “Nah. I’m too skinny and the coat’s a size too big.”

  “You’re crazy. Stay out of my trouble.”

  “What’s your trouble?”

  “Aw, those shits are from over at Ludawissee Gap. One of ’em said some bad things to my sister Prig. She owns a grocery store over there. They always comin’ in, stealin’ from her. I took me some kin and we went over and kicked some ass. They just returnin’ the favor.”

  So Leon had a sister to protect. Eli recognized the nobility and honor in that instantly. He would tell Darl about Leon’s heroics. Then he could slip in news of his own close escape from gutting. Darl would be impressed. “You did good,” he told Leon. “But fist fightin’ won’t you get you very far. I’ve given it up as best I can.”

  “Huh. So you think you’re cured of the itch? You punched at them bad mothers like a idiot. Who you think you are? Joe Frazier?” Leon smiled painfully then slapped him on the back. They got up, and Eli pulled a wad of filler from his sliced jacket. “Here. You can put this to your face ’til you get home.”

  Pa walked into the lot about then, casting looks in the dusk for Eli. “Come on, you need a ride?” Eli said to Leon, but figured Leon wouldn’t take help from white folks. He was right. The older boy shook his head. He clamped the stuffing to his bloody cheek and started off through the woods. Then he turned and looked back. “Someday,” he said, “I’ll help you out, too.”

  Eli took all vows seriously. “I’ll thank you kindly, when you do.”

  He told Darl about Leon, and she whispered the incident to Matilda, and Matilda made certain Leon Forrest got his face sewed up by a doctor. Leon’s troubles sparked a chord in Matilda, and she discreetly took him underwing after that. She’d kept herself and Karen aloof from the few black families around Burnt Stand, and those families rejected her in kind. Eli always wondered if helping Leon was her only way of telling them she was sorry.

  This, he decided, was the magic he and Darl made together.

  On my tenth birthday, a Sunday in late September, Swan and I sat across from each other in the formal dining room at Marble Hall, eating off fine china filled with roasted chicken, sweet corn muffins, and cold black-eyed pea salad. I was so pleased to have a rare meal alone with her, to have earned her full attention. As usual, we’d attended the morning sermon at Burnt Stand Methodist, a historic marble sanctuary adorned with a plaque warning God that Great-Grandmother Esta had built it.

  Annie Gwen pushed through the butler door, carrying a silver tray where something bulky lay shrouded in a white napkin. She smiled at my surprised look, set the tray on the room’s stalwart antique buffet, then reached under the napkin and pulled out the plug end of a brown extension cord. My fork froze over my salad as I watched her plug the cord into a wall socket.

  She looked at Swan, who nodded her dismissal. “Happy Birthday, Miss Darl,” Annie Gwen said, then left the room. I gazed from the plugged-in mystery to my grandmother. She rose from the table, as elegant as always in a calf-length skirt and matching jacket, favoring a soft amber shade for the season. I was still stuck in pink.

  “You’re ten years old,” Swan said. “That’s a milestone.” She pulled a bottle of champagne from a silver bucket on the buffet, then filled two tall crystal flutes with the golden liquid. She topped the champagne with orange juice from a silver pitcher. “Your first mimosa. Come here.”

  I stood and moved warily to the buffet, still eyeing the electric whatever hidden under the crisp white napkin. For all I knew she intended to brand me. Swan handed me a champagne glass and I held it high, mimicking every adult I’d ever seen at a party. She clicked hers to it, the sound like a fine chime. I waited for her to say something, even Happy Birthday, but she didn’t. I sighed and put the glass to my lips. So this was how it tasted to be halfway to adulthood. Sweet, tangy, with a rush of effervescent warmth all the way to my toes.

  I drank the entire glass in one gulp. I wanted to be grown so badly. To make her even more proud of me. “Don’t ever do that again,” Swan ordered. Blinking, already a little giddy, I gave her a bewildered look. Her eyes flashed. “Don’t inhale an alcoholic beverage as if you’re a barroom drunk downing a beer. Sip it. And always leave at least an inch in the bottom of the glass. Never be a glutton, particularly where alcohol is concerned. And never have more than two drinks at a time—and no drinks at all if you’re alone in the company of a male.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She took my glass and set it aside with her demurely unemptied one. “I have a present for you.”

  I stared at the covered platter. My tongue felt thick. “Will it hurt?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

  She pulled back the edge of the napkin, revealing a beautiful gold jeweler’s box. She held it out, and opened the lid. I made a soft sound of pleasure as I gazed at the delicate pendant on a fine gold chain. A flat dewdrop of pink marble had been encased in a gold filigreed rim. The twisted gold held a one-carat diamond in the center of the stone. “It’s just like yours!”

  “Yes. That’s the point.” She lifted the necklace out and laid the box on the buffet. Swan pulled an identical pendant from beneath the soft collar of her jacket. “I received mine from my mother when I was ten. If you’ll look at her portrait, you’ll see she’s wearing one.” Swan paused. Her mouth curled just slightly. “My sister Clara has one, as well. And—” Another pause, then she said quietly, “I gave your mother one when she was your age. All of us, we Hardigree women. We all wear one.”

  “You loved my mother. Do you love me?” I blurted.

  Her expression became instantly implacable. “You are my granddaughter,” she said, “and my only heir. That’s very important to me.”

  All my joy, my excitement and pride, vanished. She couldn’t even say the words. Why was I so undeserving? She slid the opened necklace around my neck and latched it. The short chain held the pendant high on my chest. Swan pulled the napkin off the silver tray.

  I stared at what appeared to be some kind of needle gun. My head reeled. “This is a soldering iron,” Swan said. Swan slid her fingers under my necklace. She folded the napkin and tucked it beneath the chain’s latch. I froze. She made a shushing sound. “I’m only going to solder the lock.”

  “Why?”

  Her unwavering blue eyes bored into me. “Because it’s our tradition, and I want you to honor it. Because mine is soldered shut, and so was your mother’s. And Clara’s. And your great-grandmother’s. All soldered.”

  “You mean I can never take it off?”

  “That’s right.”

  I stood there like a prize calf while she maneuvered the soldering gun and a bit of silver soldering wire over the latch. I smelled a smoky, acrid scent, and my stomach rolled. She doesn’t love me, and that’s why she’s putting a chain around my neck. Like I’m a dog. I’m wearing a dog tag. “There,” Swan said, and stepped back. “Done.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I managed to say.

  At the first diplomatic chance I left the dining room and rushed outside, down the terrace steps, past the koi pond, and into the woods, where I threw up.

  “No way, Baby Sister, not that one.” Eli snagged the balloon just as Bell was about to tie it to the low branch of a young sassafras seedling. The tree had sprouted from the earth a year ago on the slope of the Stone Flower Garden. Though he, Bell, and Darl had raked and pruned and tidied the wild glen, they’d decided to leave the sassafras, with its funny, mitten-shaped leaves.

  Bell frowned as Eli took the balloon by its string. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It’s pink. No pink.”

  She made a tenderly aghast face. “Oh! Darl would hate that!” Eli let th
e air out and stuffed the limp balloon in a pocket of his jeans. He checked the wristwatch his folks had given him for his thirteenth birthday, three months earlier. “All right. It’s time. I reckon I’ll go over the hill and wait for her now. You be ready.”

  Bell smiled. “I will.” At seven she was still quiet and easily spooked, but there was no comparison to the huddled toddler who had shivered at any stranger’s glance. Dressed in cut-offs and a t-shirt, she bounded behind the stone flower vase and hunkered down. Eli nodded his approval then walked up the hill, adjusting his glasses as he went.

  Mama and Pa had bought him metal aviator frames, which he didn’t mind so much. He got his hair trimmed neatly once every six weeks at the Burnt Stand Barber Shop, where his and Pa’s coarse black locks fell on the pink marble floor just as nicely as any man’s hair in town. Gone was the side-skinned, chopped-top look of his first year.

  Everything was looking up. There was talk at the quarry that Pa might be promoted to foreman soon. Mama had saved enough money from her job as a maid at Marble Hall to purchase an oak-veneer living room suite at a discount furniture store in Asheville, and Pa had proudly added twenty dollars to buy two fancy lamps at the flea market.

  This is how the world runs, he thought somberly as he sat down to wait for Darl on the wind-ravaged trunk of an old oak. You have to give a lot just to get ahead a little. God and Swan Hardigree Samples had been good to his family, but his family had worked hard for that favor, and Eli would never do anything to damage their streak of good luck. He heard footsteps in the leaves and stood quickly. His mood brightened as it always did when Darl appeared at the top of the next hill. She waved and he raised a hand in return.

  She never wore pink when she escaped to the woods. Her mink-brown hair curled in long waves down her shoulders and the front of a blue blouse. She’d grown at least four inches over the past few years, and was going to be a tall, slender girl, like her grandmother. Her arms and legs were long and strong, her skin as soft as silk, her eyes, even from a distance, the deepest blue. He watched her approach with a new feeling that tormented him inside more every day. He loved her, but he shouldn’t stare at her this way. She didn’t even have bosoms, yet.

  For every noble moment they spent in the hidden garden reading books to each other and to Bell, talking about life, and listening or dancing to songs on a portable radio, he now spent an equal—but far less dignified—amount of time fantasizing about girls in ninth grade who had large breasts, about lingerie models in the Sears catalog, and even about perversely shaped pears and bell peppers at the Burnt Stand Supermarket, a fact that embarrassed him helplessly.

  Yet here she was, his dearest friend, his faithful supporter, his lonely love, Darl Union. Her face was a little sad, but so many times she looked that way, just burdened, until he spoke to her. He liked the way her eyes lit up when she saw him.

  “Stop right there.” He strode to her, whipping a blue bandana from his jeans’ pocket. “I got to blindfold you. Bell and me got a surprise.”

  “Huh. I’ll fall over a cliff, and that’ll be a surprise.”

  “Aw, hush. I’ll lead you.” He inhaled the sweet scent of her clothes and skin as he carefully tied the scarf behind her head. Before he covered her eyes she looked up at him with sad-eyed trust, disrupting all his noble thoughts, merging gallantry with hormones. Once the mask was in place he pushed a strand of her hair back from her face, then took her by one arm. “Just walk along with me.”

  “I can do that.”

  He guided her carefully up the hill. When they overlooked the Stone Flower Garden he gently tugged the bandana off her head. “Happy Birthday.” She laughed and clamped her hands to her face as if caught in a prayer. Brightly colored balloons filled the deep glen. Anchored to the flower vase, the benches, the sassafras seedling, and the rhododendron shrubs, they bobbed and danced in the warm, early-autumn air.

  “Happy Birthday, Darl!” Bell called softly. She popped from behind the flower vase’s wide pediment, balancing a lopsided little cake with white icing on her upturned palms. Ten candles flickered atop it.

  “Oh, it’s wonderful,” Darl said softly. She grabbed Eli by one hand and they rushed down the slope. “How pretty,” she said of the cake.

  Bell blushed and preened, ducking her fluffy, dark-haired head, overcome. “I made it,” she whispered.

  “You did? Even better.”

  Eli squeezed her hand. “Make a wish and blow out the candles.”

  Darl’s expression quieted, and she gazed somberly at the funny little cake with its fragile lights. “I wish you and Bell were my family.”

  Bell beamed at her, and Eli succumbed to a warm tide of pleasure mixed with foreboding anxiety. “You’re not supposed to wish it out loud.”

  Bell gasped and nodded fervently. She believed wholeheartedly in magic. “It won’t come true!”

  Darl’s gaze hardened. “I’ll make it come true. Somehow.” She blew out the candles fiercely then looked up at Eli.

  His heart twisted. He took a small packet from his jeans pocket, and held it out. The gift was wrapped in neatly folded white tissue paper. She pulled the paper open as if it was the finest silk. Inside lay a small piece of marble, honed to a perfect oval shape and highly polished. “I made it for you,” Eli said. Carved in its center was an elongated figure eight. “That’s a math symbol,” he explained gruffly. “It stands for infinity. Forever.”

  She kissed him. Just rose on her toes before he realized what she meant to do, took him by the shirtfront, pulled him forward, and kissed him quickly on the lips. His face burned and hers turned red as well. She met his eyes then looked away quickly in a rare bout of shyness. “Forever,” she whispered.

  Nobody knew quite what to say after that. Eli and Darl sat down on the ground around a bench, pushing at balloons that rubbed against them tenderly, dipping their fingers into white icing and soft cake, not looking at each other as they ate, or at Bell, who began to giggle at them.

  Eli savored every second and thought his heart would break. The sweetest taste would always be Darl. Forever.

  It was a warm, bright October Saturday, in the middle of the month. I remember the stark silhouettes of the long row of oaks that lined the drive to Marble Hall, the quietness of the earth, the hushed quality inside the mansion that day. A hard autumn rain had stripped the last of the fall leaves the night before. My thoughts were stripped bare and lean, too, for the winter ahead.

  I sat in a window seat of the library, curled up in its upholstered pillows, warming myself in the sun as I avidly read a new book called Watership Down. Somewhere in the mansion Swan was on the phone with her caterer and decorator, planning the holiday season parties she would give both in Burnt Stand and Asheville. Matilda was away for the weekend, and Karen was napping in my bedroom. Annie Gwen, who often quietly managed the kitchen and house on her own now, was dusting in the living room.

  In an hour I planned to don my coat and meet Eli, Karen and Bell at the garden. I had endured painfully formal dance lessons in cotillion classes at an Asheville dance school, and I was teaching Eli to waltz. But usually he wouldn’t dance at all. Bell, Karen and I would sway and gyrate while he stretched out on the ground in his own patch of sunshine, grinning at our silliness.

  A mantel clock ticked and shushed. I turned a page in my book. A trickle of foreign sound reached my ears, but I ignored it as if it were a buzzing fly. It grew louder, and I raised my head, listening. A car coming up the drive. Nothing odd about that. Swan must have invited some of the town ladies to drop by. They knew better than to refuse Swan’s invitations.

  “I’ll get the door,” I called to Annie Gwen. I wandered into the high, chandeliered foyer and peeked out one of the sidelights around the Hall’s ornate double doors. A bright red Trans Am sports car purred up the oak-lined driveway. I did a double take. Swan didn’t associate with the kin
d of people who drove Trans Ams. The car’s top was up, and I couldn’t make out the driver. I opened the massive doors and stepped onto the portico’s wide marble apron, framed by a pair of tall, lean cedars in marble planters. I sunned myself in the autumn heat and squinted.

  A woman. A dark-haired woman, her eyes covered by sunglasses, drove the blister-red car. She swung it into the courtyard, nearly clipping an island of planters and manicured shrubs. The tires squealed as she braked inches from the polished stone steps to the portico. Such a dramatic entrance left me breathless and amazed. She flung her door open and curled herself out. High-heeled red boots hit the pink bricks. Skintight designer jeans enclosed long, lean legs. She threw back her shoulders in a fringed leather vest. Her voluptuous breasts bulged against the buttons of a white blouse so sheer I could see her little black bra through it. Her lipstick was cherry red, her hair an upswept tangle of curls.

  I gaped at her. A wild woman, on our very doorstep.

  She stared straight at me with a cocky smirk beginning to slither across her mouth, pulling several creases on the upside, accenting the softening skin of her jaw. She wasn’t as young as she wanted to look, but she was exactly as sarcastic as she meant to be. “Why, if you aren’t a perfect little copy of your goddamned grandmother,” she drawled.

  Anger prickled my skin. I snapped my mouth shut and lifted my head regally. “Ma’am, only trashy people speak that way to me.”

  She laughed. “Oh, God. Just like Swan!”

  Behind me, the mansion’s doors opened with a deep, elegant swoosh. I turned quickly. Swan stood there looking at our visitor. They could not have been more different in dress and manner. Swan was a fashion plate in her typical weekend casual wear, meaning tailored slacks and a soft gray sweater with pearls. The visitor was a blue-plate special from a roadside diner.

  Neither said a word. Swan’s eyes, as cold as arctic blue ice, never left the woman, who stared back, frozen and sullen. The silence stretched out. My lungs ached with held breath. They were like gunfighters in an old western movie, one daring the other.