The Stone Flower Garden Read online

  “Draw,” I said urgently.

  The visitor whipped her glasses off. I gasped. Her blue Hardigree eyes gazed at Swan the way a mongoose stares down a cobra. “Hello, Sister,” the woman said.

  The sound Swan made was almost a hiss. “Hello, Clara.”

  “And then she got out four or five huge suitcases and dragged them indoors,” I went on quickly, my words tumbling over each other. “My grandmother just stood there. Grandmother didn’t say Stop, or No, or You’re not welcome here. Grandmother just let her go in. And so my . . . my Great-Aunt Clara took all her suitcases upstairs and went into the biggest guest bedroom in the house and slammed the door. And Grandmother went in her office and shut that door. And I just stood there with my eyeballs up on poles like a snail, trying to see what was going to happen next.”

  Eli, Karen and Bell sat before me in the Stone Flower Garden. Eli’s angular face was tight with concentration. Bell’s mouth made a permanent Oh! of intrigue. Karen whistled under her breath. Eli finally squinted in thought and shook his head. “Well, it doesn’t have nothing to do with you, and that’s all that really matters to me.”

  I leaned closer to him. “Do y’all ever hear your mother say anything about my grandmother and Clara? I mean, I’m sure Matilda knows things about us that she won’t tell, but maybe she talks to your mother.”

  “Mama’s quiet as a mouse,” Bell whispered. “That’s where I get it from.”

  “I’ve got to figure this out. Grandmother and Clara hate each other. But nobody will tell me why.”

  Eli frowned and pushed his aviator glasses higher up his nose. “You just stay outta their way. If they get to whacking each other or pullin’ guns or firing atomic missiles, give a yell and I’ll come get you.”

  My heart melted. “I’ll hide beside the koi pond and yell Duck! when the bombs fire.”

  “Not Duck,” Karen corrected drily. “Swan.”

  Everyone burst into chortles—that was the effect we all had on each other, even in dark moments. In the midst of it we heard a distant clanging sound. Karen and I jumped up worriedly. A brass bell hung from a handsome oak post in the back gardens. Grandmother and Matilda used it to call us from our forest rambles. “We have to go.”

  Eli and Bell scrambled to their feet. “Watch out for ducks and Clara!” Bell cried. I hugged her. “I’m not afraid of Clara. She’s so red I’d see her coming a mile away. She can’t sneak up on me.”

  Eli frowned. I loved to look into his protective gaze, his eyes so dark they sweetened him like syrup. “You yell if you need me,” he said quietly. “Promise.”

  I wanted to kiss him. I got the urge under control and merely nodded.

  A thick knot of anxiety filled my stomach as soon as Karen and I came within view of the back terrace. Matilda stood at the top, watching for us. Her graying brown hair did not move in the afternoon breeze; her golden face was set in a frown, her body looked rigid in a tailored dress of umber wool. We hurried up the stone steps. “Darl, go pack your weekend bag,” she ordered crisply. “Your grandmother’s sending you to my house with Karen for a few days.”

  “All right!” Karen said happily.

  “Are Grandmother and Clara going to fight?” I asked.

  “Clara has come for money, and when she gets as much as she wants, she’ll leave. It’s only a question of how much your grandmother will give her, and when, and how long Clara will wait.” I couldn’t believe Matilda told us that. It was more than anyone had ever confessed before.

  I grabbed Karen’s hand and we hurried inside to pack my things. I listened to the tension in the house, to the stealthy, bewildering silence of Grandmother and her sister, waiting for their blue-eyed bombs to explode in my world.

  “I don’t mind staying here,” I whispered to Karen, as we huddled under a downy quilt in her four-poster canopy bed that night. The room was done in fluffy cream colors and bright yellows. Even a photograph of Karen’s Vietnam-hero father in his Marine uniform sat on her dresser in a cream-and-yellow frame. “It’s not pink.”

  She snuggled closer to me in a flannel nightgown. The mountain days could be hot in autumn, but the nights turned cold. “If you weren’t a white girl, you could come to visit all the time. People wouldn’t talk.”

  “I wish you could visit overnight at Marble Hall with me. Nobody dares talk ugly about my grandmother’s guests.”

  She snorted her disgust over my simplistic views, then sighed. “I wish we were sisters.”

  “Me too.” We linked hands. “We wouldn’t be like my grandmother and Clara. We’d like each other.”

  “Except people wouldn’t let us. I’m a nigger, Darl.”

  That word hung in the air like a shadow demon. She’d said it so plainly it had little power. Yet even our cloistered lives had not been able to escape it. I looked across the darkness at the yellow-trimmed walls, the yellow lace on the room’s creamy curtains, even the yellow picture frame with Karen’s black father gazing out proudly in the glow of a yellow nightlight. “It doesn’t matter what people say.”

  “You don’t know what they call me and Grandmother when we go someplace by ourselves.”

  “They’d never dare! Swan wouldn’t let them.”

  “Not around here. I mean when Grandmother and me go to Asheville. Ladies stare at us in the shops. Once, I heard one say, ‘Well, I swear, look at those fancy niggers.’ And when we stopped at a gas station once the man who pumped the gas said to Grandmother, ‘You must work for a rich white lady. She sure lets her nigger drive a nice car.’ It’s always like that, Darl. It’s why Grandma and me never go far alone.”

  “I’ll always protect you. I promise.”

  She snorted. “I don’t want you to protect me, fool. Besides, you can’t even do it. The rest of the world isn’t like Burnt Stand.”

  My heart ached. What good was power and money if I was still helpless to defend my most-loved people? “Dammit. Dammit.”

  I pounded the pillows. I felt as if every muscle in my body had clenched.

  The rest of the world was like Clara.

  Chapter Five

  Matilda left to run errands the next afternoon, and Karen fell asleep on the living room couch with her schoolbooks spread around her and a forbidden episode of Days Of Our Lives playing on Matilda’s only concession to tawdry entertainments—an old black-and-white television. I put a pink sweater over my pink wool skirt and pink blouse, slipped from Matilda’s handsome bungalow on pink tennis shoes, and headed one mile due west through hilly woods and across the narrow dirt roads of secluded mountain farms.

  The October afternoon was hot; I wound the sweater around my waist. The sun made deep slanted shadows through the golden autumn trees when I finally walked up the marble-stoned driveway at Marble Hall. It wasn’t five o’clock, yet, so I knew Swan might still be at the quarry offices or at the marble showroom in town. I skirted the front of the house and sneaked through the clipped boxwood garden on one side. I had a kitchen door key, and I planned to use it. I’d quietly seek out Clara inside the mansion and see if her lethal aura sizzled like ice in the warm fall air.

  I didn’t have to go that far. I stepped out of the boxwoods garden through an open wrought-iron gate in the tall marble wall that enclosed that side of the backyard. There in the bright sun beside the swimming pool, sunning herself on a plushly pillowed white wicker lounge chair, sat Clara.

  Completely naked.

  I stopped like a fawn before a wild dog, hoping the mere act of standing still would hide me against the pink garden wall. Perhaps this was why Swan always clothed me in pink—camouflaged for my own safety. But it was too late. Clara’s lounge chair faced me. She tilted her head forward, and a smirk crossed her mouth. I couldn’t see her eyes behind large, white-rimmed, octagonal sunglasses, which gave her the alien appearance of a mutant insect in a horror movie.
Maybe she was thinking of eating me alive, just for fun. Her tinted brunette hair fell in wide curls from a jaunty topknot. Her long, lean legs jiggled provocatively as she crossed them at the ankles.

  She was forty-eight years old but still had the lithe body that made Hardigree women so alluring and quick on the attack. I’d never seen a naked person in the flesh before, much less a relative. I stared helplessly at her bare breasts, which rode high on her chest with manufactured roundness, and I tried desperately not to notice anything about her crotch.

  “Come here, Darling Darl,” she drawled softly. I was surprised at the friendliness in her tone. “I won’t bite.”

  “I just stopped by for a, hmmm, visit, Ma’am. Just to pick up some more clothes.”

  “Right. Sure.” She slid further down on a long blue pool towel, its ends trailing onto the pink marble surface of the pool patio. As if humoring my modesty she flipped one trailing end of the towel over her groin, though she made no effort to cover her breasts. “Come here and visit.” She gestured at a wicker chair nearby. When I didn’t budge her eyebrows arched over the white rims of her glasses. “Not afraid of your own great-aunt, are you, Hon? I can’t believe Swan raised a sissy.”

  I marched toward her with grim dignity. A pungent aroma hit my nostrils, and I saw the ashtray half-hidden beneath her lounge. A strange, homemade cigarette wafted its smoke into the air. Next to it sat one of Swan’s finest Baccarat martini glasses, empty. I knew plenty about liquor but I’d never smelled marijuana before. I sat down on the edge of the chair with my knees pressed tightly together, as if the exotic, burnt-rope scent might creep up my skirt and make me want to throw off all my clothes, too.

  And then, gathering my wits, I saw it. The necklace. The marble and diamond pendant hung from a gold chain around Clara’s neck just like mine and Swan’s. My heart eased with familial relief. How bad could she be if she still honored our Hardigree traditions? “I have one of those pendants, too, ma’am.” I slid my necklace from the pink collar of my blouse.

  She uttered a throaty laugh. “Branded for life. I ought to rip mine off and throw it in the nearest toilet, but it’s about the only thing of my mother’s I got to keep when Swan kicked me out of town. I was only sixteen at the time. Do you know that story?”

  I stiffened, once again uncertain. “No, ma’am.” I stood. “I better go. I have clothes to find.”

  Clara held up a reassuring hand decked with long, white-tipped nails. “I’m only bitching at you because I’m bored. I can’t leave the premises.” She laughed. “Swan has me under house arrest.”

  “What—what did you do wrong, ma’am?”

  “I was born with all our family’s worst traits, Darling Darl, if you believe Swan.”

  I slid my hand in my skirt pocket and clenched a small marble stone Eli had given me. Clara scared me, and I needed the comforting feel of Eli’s talisman. “She’s never told me much about you.”

  “Of course not. I live on the dark side of the Hardigree planet. Where all the fun is.” She leaned forward. Her breasts swayed. I felt hypnotized. Clara grinned. “I can tell you stories about our family . . . but I won’t.”

  I gripped the stone harder. My palm was slick with nerves, and the stone scooted backwards as if oiled. It shot from my skirt pocket and clattered on the patio stones. A jumping bean couldn’t have been more agile. It skittered and bounced toward Clara. She dropped her long-clawed hand to the patio surface and scooped it up. “Aw, you’ve got a little marble keepsake. Isn’t that sweet? What’s this figure eight mean?”

  “Nothing, ma’am.” I held out a hand. “May I have it back, please?”

  “No.” She closed her fist around it. “Tell me what it means, or I’ll throw it in the pool.”

  I shivered. “The eight means nothing. Really. Nothing. And everything. It’s not an eight. You’re supposed to look at it sideways. It’s a math symbol. It stands for infinity. Forever.”

  “Hmmm. God, you’re a queer little thinker, aren’t you?”

  “May I have it back, now?”

  “Not yet.” She opened her hand, flipped the stone over and perused the other side. She cackled. “Now, we’re talking. A heart. And initials. D. U. That’s for you. And E. W. Hmmm. Darl’s got a boyfriend. Who’s E. W.?”

  “He’s just a friend.”

  “No, he’s a boyfriend. And he cuts stone.”

  “No, Ma’am. No.”

  She laughed. “A stonecutter’s kid, that’s who he is! Oh, shit, that’s perfect!” She held her breasts, leaned back in the chair, and laughed like a truck driver. In the meantime she tossed the stone at me. I grabbed it in midair and hid it in my skirt pocket again. Clara pulled her sunglasses down the tip of her nose and gazed at me with amused disgust. “Don’t you understand? Swan’s trying so hard to suck the life out of you, but you’re struck with the family curse. See, we can’t keep our hands off men who work with stone—and the dirtier, the better. Give him up, Hon. He’ll ruin you or kill you or break your heart. And if he doesn’t, Swan will.”

  She was so smug, so evil. My pride overcame common sense. “My boyfriend’s the smartest person in town, he’s a genius, and he’d never do anything to hurt me. Grandmother even hired him to work with the ledgers at the office. He’s going to the university in a few years. He’s not just going to cut stone all his life. And he’s not dirty!”

  “Oh, yes, he is, and he’ll cut stone, one way or another. Is he handsome?” Her sly expression returned. “Handsome and rough around the edges? That’s how we like our men. Unpolished but hard. Poor and proud but not too proud to do what we tell them to do. Treat him like a pet puppy right now, Hon. But when he’s old enough to piss on you, get rid of him. Or Swan’ll do it for you.”

  Fury stoked my blood. I advanced on her with my fists clenched. “You’ve got a nasty mind and a nasty mouth. I see why Grandmother never invited you to visit us. Well, let me tell you something. Eli Wade is the best boy in the world. And—”

  “What did you say his name is?” Her mouth popped open.

  “Eli Wade. His parents and his sister and him came here three years ago, and they work hard and they live in the Stone Cottage. His mother works as a maid for Matilda so you know that means she’s a good person. Plus Grandmother has given the Wades special favors—and you know she doesn’t do that for trashy people. And—”

  “Wade. Wade? Oh, my God.” Clara whipped her sunglasses off and stared at me as if she couldn’t say the name often enough to make her believe it. For once there was no hint of humor or sarcasm in her eyes. She looked stunned. “Wade. You’re sure that’s their family name?”

  I took two steps back. Her intensity unnerved me. “Yes.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  “Somewhere in Tennessee.”

  “What do they look like—the men. What does this Eli’s daddy look like?”

  “I don’t know what you mean. He’s a big tall man, with muscled arms, and he’s kind of quiet—”

  “Does he have dark hair and dark eyes?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “I’ll be goddamned.” She stared into space, her blue eyes shifting as if she were comparing notes on a mental blackboard. I stared in anxious confusion. She leapt to her feet, throwing the towel around her naked body like a toga. She trembled. Her eyes were almost feverish. “Get out of here,” she spat at me, “and don’t tell anybody we talked about the Wades. And don’t you goddamn dare tell anyone I’m going into town.” Gone was any pretense of affection or even tolerant cynicism.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”

  “All bets are off. The whole damn game is different now—if what I think is true.” She threw back her head and made a furious, groaning sound. “Swan and Matilda,” she sang softly. “You lying bitches.”

  Clara strode to the h
ouse, slung open one of the French doors that faced the pool patio, and disappeared inside. I stood there in shock. Dread filled me.

  Clara had been held at bay by magic, like some demon or evil spirit.

  And somehow, I’d just set her free.

  Eli’s head swam with dreams of the future. Good luck didn’t come in single bursts—he was convinced of that, just seeing how nothing but good seemed to happen to Darl’s grandmother. Good luck was a sum that multiplied itself in ratios as pure as life itself. Once you set the calculation going in your head and believed in the numbers, that luck grew.

  And now it had paid off for the Wade family.

  “Let’s celebrate, Son.” Pa proclaimed the occasion with a rare smile, his eyes alight as the bartender at Neddler’s Place set a tall mug of beer before him and a small glass filled with beer before Eli. Neddler’s was a joint in the woods off a back road outside Burnt Stand. It had a jukebox, a bar, pool tables and a smell like a bathroom floor. The floor was made of scrap marble, and the bar was topped with a slab of the stone, too. Photographs of the quarry hung among stuffed deer heads and neon beer signs on the shabby plywood walls.

  “To Jasper Wade, the new foreman,” a man called out, and several dozen stonecutters stood with their mugs or bottles in hand. “Boss Wade, Boss Wade,” they chanted. Eli leapt to his feet and clasped his own glass of precious beer. “To my Pa,” he said proudly. “Boss Wade.”

  Everyone drank. The beer slid down Eli’s throat like bitter tonic. He fought not to gag, set the glass down on the bar, and smiled at his father, who gave a deep laugh. Pa had never looked so happy in his entire life. “We’ll get on home in a minute and tell your mama and Bell the good news,” Pa said. “And you know what? When I get the first paycheck with the raise on it, we’re all goin’ out to eat. Somewhere all the way to Asheville. With tablecloths. And candles.”