A Place to Call Home (18 page)

“Tell Roanie how Sean and Bridget named the mountain,” I said to Grandpa during the long hike.

Grandpa grinned. “The
sidhe
are in charge up there.”

“Irish fairies,” I explained to Roanie, who arched a dark brow but didn’t dare laugh.

“The
sidhe
helped foxes slip down into the valley at night to steal Maloney hens,” Grandpa went on, with grand drama in his voice. “And the foxes were good at it, too, because the fairies put gloves on their paws, so no people could hear ’em sneak in or out of the chicken coops.”
Grandpa raised his stubby hands and wiggled his fingers. “Every night the fairies would take the blooms off the flowers and put ’em on the foxes’ paws, and when the foxes came home to the mountain every morning the fairies put the blooms back on the stems, so a person could never catch on to the magic.”

“Foxgloves,” I interjected helpfully. “That’s how come foxglove flowers are called foxgloves. Except you can see the fairy handprints inside the flowers. The little speckles. That’s the only way you can see what the fairies have been up to.”

“Claire,” Grandpa snorted, “hush up and let me talk. When you’re old you get to tell all the whoppers. It’s my turn right now.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“So Sean and Bridget, being from the old country, they knew the only smart thing to do was honor the fairies and the foxes, just grant ’em their due and be glad for God’s bounty to share.” Grandpa finished with a majestic nod. “So they named the mountain
Dun
-
sionnach-sidh
, which was Irish for the ‘fortress of the foxes and fairies.’ ”

“But that big name was a mouthful,” I told Roanie solemnly. “And hard to spell, too. So it ended up being Dunshinnog. There. What d’ya think?”

Roanie mulled it all over for a second. If he’d laughed at the story, he’d have lost a lot of ground in Maloney territory that day. “Makes sense to me,” he said.

The green mistletoe hung in the tops of the tallest trees like remnants of forgotten summer. Grandpa pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his backpack. He and Roanie took turns shooting into the branches. Clumps of mistletoe fell into the lower ones and Grandpa hoisted me up to retrieve it. Hunting mistletoe was a great game. We stuffed most of it into a sack, but I kept a sprig for myself.

I held up my personal commission in mistletoe. I had traditions, too. “I’ve got a smooch craving,” I announced.

Grandpa laughed. He bent down and I held the mistletoe over his head and kissed his cheek, and he kissed mine. Then I looked at Roanie. I felt a little sad and giddy, the way I had in the parking deck at Rich’s, and I couldn’t understand why. I just knew I had to kiss him, too. “Com’ere.”

He shifted uncomfortably and stuck his hands in his pants pockets. “Get it over with,” Grandpa said, laughing harder. “It’s something Claire has to do every year.”

Roanie dropped to his heels. My hand shook. I held the mistletoe above his dark hair and quickly pecked a spot on his jaw. His skin was so warm. “Now you gotta do me,” I ordered in a small, reedy voice. He’d never kissed me before, and I wasn’t certain he’d do it then. “Come on, come on,” I squeaked impatiently. “Get it over with.”

He turned his face toward me. His winter-gray eyes met mine for an instant. “I think you’re some kind of fairy yourself,” he teased. Then he brushed his lips across my forehead. I shut my eyes.

I felt as if I were on fire and I could fly.

“Let’s take in the view,” Grandpa said. He led us through a meadow to a smooth shelf of silver-gray granite that jutted from the mountain’s brow like the brim of a cap. The world as I knew it was spread out below us—the Maloney fields and pastures, our big house with its wide porches and triple chimneys, our barns and long, low chicken houses, and the small house where Grandpa and Grandma Maloney lived. In the distance we could even see the narrow paved ribbon of Soap Falls Road peeping through the trees. It was as if Sullivan’s Hollow didn’t exist, because it was the only place we
couldn’t
see from Dunshinnog.

“This is a good place,” Roanie said gruffly. “This is above everybody. This is a great place. Yeah. I can believe there’s magic up here.”

Grandpa performed the little ceremony his own grandpa had taught him, as his grandpa had been taught by his grandpa, the ritual stepping back through the generations to Sean Maloney himself. He took an Irish pennywhistle
from the pocket of his shirt, maneuvered his thick fingertips over a half-dozen small holes in its shiny tin barrel, fitted the tip in his mouth, and played “Amazing Grace.”

The sweet, haunting song surrounded us and was picked up by the wind, singing out toward the valley. Goosebumps crept up my arms.
I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see
. Roanie’s eyes gleamed, his lips parted in absolute wonder.

He became, on that mountaintop, a boy who found magic and history, who joined a tradition that could fill empty places deep in his heart. The
sidhe
had given my fox a view of the world, they’d given him to me; our paws were slippered in their magic. We could come and go as we pleased, together.

Dunshinnog was our special place from then on.

Josh and Brady were home from college for the Christmas holidays. They were he-men, cool and handsome, with coppery shocks of hair and beautiful smiles. They had thick muscles on their shoulders and tight bellies that didn’t flinch when I socked them during wrestling matches. They drove swell sportscars and dated beautiful college girls who sucked up to me shamelessly because I was Josh and Brady Maloney’s little sister.

Josh was twenty-five—four years older than Brady—but both of them were seniors at the university because of the years Josh had spent in the army after high school. He had served two tours as an M.P. in Saigon.

I remembered vague, troubling currents of the fear in our home, of everyone huddling around the living-room TV to watch the news each night, of seeing Mama cry as she packed boxes and letters to send to Josh, and of myself somberly including my fingerpainted portraits of the farm and the family, so he’d know we were okay. Painted in broad strokes, maybe, blotchy and runny, but okay.

I found out later that Josh had spent most of his time
breaking up bar fights, patrolling whorehouses, and dragging soldiers out of opium dens. There was a lot he wouldn’t talk about, a lot that worried Mama and Daddy about him. He was not just my oldest brother, he was my old brother, ancient around the eyes, and he didn’t laugh much, and when he did talk it was mostly about politics.

Brady, on the other hand, took nothing seriously. Brady had big dreams, trendy dreams. He played the drums about as well as a trained monkey, but he had organized his own rock band in high school. Daddy had let him hold concerts in one of the fields. Brady ran a few electrical cords out there and built a stage out of packing crates, but no more than twenty of his friends showed up at any given event. Brady’s music was that bad.

Mama’s favorite pet terrier, whose name was Jawbone, chewed through an extension cord one night. The concert ended abruptly with Jawbone’s sizzling yelp and the last squawking guitar chord of a Rolling Stones song. Jawbone was never quite the same after that, and Mama lowered the boom on Brady’s dream of becoming a rich and decadent rock star. At the university he majored in business and was president of his fraternity, and when he wasn’t talking about girls, he talked about money.

Brady didn’t seem to notice Roanie one way or the other. Josh seemed to avoid him. Josh swung me up on his back and walked down to the creek one afternoon. “What are you after, baby sister? You want another brother?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“Roanie.”

I chortled. “He’s better than a brother. I can order him around.”

Josh and I squatted on the creekbank. He stared into the cold silver water. “It’s easy to get confused about people,” he said in a patient, big-brother tone. “Sometimes you make a friend for the wrong reason, because you feel
lonely. And when you stop feeling lonely you don’t need that friend anymore. That’s not fair to the friend, is it?”

I had never imagined Josh feeling confused about anything in his entire life. “I’m not lonely. And there’s nothing wrong with Roanie.”

“When I was in Vietnam, I made friends with a lot of people who had different ideas from mine. I started to talk like them and act like them and think like them. When I came home, it was hard to stop being that way. I had to work at it. Sometimes I still have to work at it.”

“What kind of weird friends did you
have
?”

Josh scrubbed a hand over his face. A fine bead of sweat slid down his temple. It was chilly outside, but Josh always looked as if he were putting out some fire in his mind. “The point is, sis, you can hurt people by making friends with them for the wrong reason. And you can hurt yourself, and you can hurt your family.”

I considered that in bewildered silence. There was no point trying to explain to Josh. Some people, Grandpa said, spent all their time cussing the dark when all they had to do was light a candle.

The Christmas parade went off without a hitch that year. But Roanie didn’t go, even though I begged and argued, and I was mad at him through the whole event.

I heard the next day that he asked Sheriff Vince to send a deputy over to Steckem Road the night of the parade. Roanie and that deputy sat in a patrol car and made sure Big Roan didn’t leave Daisy’s house.

I
reached a new level of self-control that Christmas. I was
always
the first one up on Christmas morning, always, and my first act was to fly downstairs in my nightgown and robe and fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, when the pale light of dawn was just shading gray outside the windows and the house was filled with magical, expectant silence. I would open the double doors to the living room and slip inside, alone.

But this time I hurried downstairs and tiptoed along the back hall to Roanie’s door, and with every shred of willpower I could muster, I knocked softly and persistently, whispering, “Roanie,
wake up
,” until he finally opened his door a few inches and looked down at me in sleepy confusion, a quilt wrapped around him.

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.

“Nothing. It’s
Christmas
. Come with me.”

“Wait. What?”

“Oh, you don’t
know
. I forgot. You don’t know what that means.” I cast furtive glances up and down the quiet, dark hall. “Come on!” I whispered urgently.

“Hold on. I gotta get dressed.”

“No, no, no. Nobody gets dressed right away on Christmas.” I peered through the opening at him, eager to see what kind of pajamas he slept in. Above the quilt I saw
the frayed neck of a gray sweatshirt. Below it I saw bleach-stained gray sweatpants with a hole in one knee and sagging white gym socks, thin at the toes. “You look swell,” I swore. I grabbed the edge of the quilt and tugged. “Come on. Hop and Evan’ll crawl out in a few minutes and then everybody’ll wake up. We don’t have much time.”

Frowning, he slipped down the hall behind me. I led him to the front of the house and stopped before the doors to the living room. “Now watch,” I whispered. Holding my breath, I turned the long brass handles and eased the doors open so they wouldn’t creak.

It was like looking through a mirror into Wonderland.

Glowing and winking with lights, the Christmas tree shimmered next to the fireplace, where a low fire crackled. By that age I knew, of course, that Santa hadn’t plugged the tree in or built the fire, that Mama had slipped down thirty minutes ahead of me and done it, but I didn’t say so to Roanie, who needed to see the wonder that Santa left behind.

The brightly wrapped presents stacked around the tree’s base by mere mortals had mushroomed into a bonanza during the night. That whole corner of the room burst with packages. The soft voices of some Christmas choir purred from the stereo receiver.

I heard Roanie’s quick intake of breath behind me. I looked up at him hopefully, and the expression on his face was open and easy. “Come on,” I urged. He edged into the room with me. I pulled him to the hearth. “Look.” An empty, milk-stained glass sat there, and a china plate dotted with crumbs from Mama’s cinnamon cookies. “Of course Daddy ate ’em,” I allowed solemnly. “But I used to think it was Santa.”

“I never thought I’d see nothing like this. ’Cept on TV.”

“Oh, it’s real. Sit down. Sit on the hearth. I get to open one present before everybody else ’cause I get up first. So you get to open one of yours, too. It’s okay.”

He stared at me as if I were joking. “I got presents?”

“Of
course
.” I shuffled over to the tree and pushed the stacks aside and crawled behind them, then popped up with a deep, rectangular box wrapped in red foil paper and topped with a fluffy gold bow. “This is from me.”

I held it out anxiously. He was absolutely still for a second, then he angled carefully behind the tree and dropped to his heels. When he stood, he held a tiny box in his hand. It was wrapped in green paper printed with tiny red bells. There was as much Scotch tape on it as paper, and the green bow was bigger than the box.