A Place to Call Home (26 page)

Aunt Jane, sparrowlike and still peeping, asked loudly, “Is this a funeral service or a political convention?”

A minister’s voice boomed some sort of preliminary welcome over speakers set up at the periphery of a huge mortuary tent. The advancing camera crew tried to push past my brothers, who blocked them, Josh in front. “Claire, it’s Mark Creeson from Channel Three! Just give me ten seconds on tape!”

“Keep that
television man
away,” Mama hissed. Daddy stopped my chair and stepped in front of me. Violet and Rebecca flanked me on either side. Grandma Dottie clutched my shoulders from behind. I began to tremble. Sweat trickled down my face, over bruises and into the raw cuts that speckled across my cheeks. My cast-encased leg, propped straight out in front of me on a wheelchair foot-rest, began to throb. Groups of curious people curled away from the gravesite and pushed up to the human barricade of my family. Strangers craned their heads to peer at me. “Can I have your autograph?” a woman yelled.

“I have to get out of here,” I said. “This isn’t for Terri. This is a circus and I’m responsible for it.”

“We’re trapped,” my cousin Rebecca moaned.

Two burly men in dark suits pushed through the family. Daddy confronted them with an icy, bulldog look on his face. “We’re here to help, Mr. Maloney,” one of them said politely. “We’ll clear the way back to your car.”

“Who the hell are you?” Daddy thundered.

“Personal security. Hired by a friend.”

“A friend of who?”

“Your daughter, sir.”

I heard all this dimly, because I felt faint. What friend? I thought vaguely as my family and I reversed direction and the two security men plowed through the crowd without the least diplomacy. Hop and Evan lifted me into the backseat
of a car. The security men disappeared before I could ask who’d sent them.

I felt that if I could just unravel the confusion and remember who I was, I wouldn’t lose my mind.

“I’d like to go home,” I said.

S
o I came home to the blue-green mountains, the family, the farm, the big, rambling house where generations of Maloneys had thrived, surrounded by the constant activity of family events and family business—farmhands who tromped in and out of the kitchen as they had when I was a girl, plus dozens of people who called or visited Josh, because as a state senator he represented ten mountain counties. There was also a daily stream of locals conferring with Daddy, who had been elected county commissioner after he turned the poultry business over to Josh, and flocks of women involved in Mama’s various art societies and charity projects. Josh’s daughter, Amanda, lived with my folks because Josh traveled so much. She became my constant companion.

So there I was, helpless, gawked at every time I crept out in a wheelchair. I was the only nonmoving part of a well-oiled machine.

I’d left for college when I was seventeen, vowing I’d never live in Dunderry again. My father had had his heart attack a year later and I couldn’t bear to stay away, so I returned for a summer. My mother took antidepressants for a year after I moved to Florida after college. I came home when Josh’s wife died after giving birth to Amanda; I came home when Grandma Dottie fell and fractured a hip; and
when Grandpa died. But I made certain everyone understood that it took birth, death, and illness to force me back into the fold each time.

Finally, now, I’d broken the cycle by contributing to it.

Mama put me in Roan’s old bedroom because it was on the main floor and near the kitchen. Hop and Evan hung one of those trapezelike bars over the hospital bed Daddy rented and another from the ceiling of the bathroom shower. I could ask for anything and be pampered without question. I called for help using an air horn Aunt Irene brought me.

As spring unfolded, I hid as well as I could on the veranda or at windows, drinking in the sights, seeing everything with mystical clarity, pushing guilt and anger down under layers of familiarity.

I wanted to forget who I’d been before the accident. I wanted to stamp out the driven, ambitious, reckless woman who risked other people’s lives. I wanted to subdue the Claire who’d treated newspaper work like games of intrigue, snooping into the private problems of others, bribing, charming, and manipulating my way into confidential relationships. I’d been the kind of reporter who put on a tight, low-cut black dress and sneaked into the governor’s inaugural ball, where I danced provocatively with one of the governor’s fresh-faced junior aides. I let him ogle my cleavage while I asked him whether the governor had taken campaign contributions from several developers who opposed a network of community centers for the homeless.

The aide was such a political babe-in-the-woods that he assumed he was answering questions off the record. He also assumed he’d get laid that night. I didn’t hang around the party to honor either assumption.

So I got the story and won another press association award. The aide got fired. A lot of heads deserved to roll in the governor’s administration, but that nice, harmless guy was the last person I should have used to swing the hatchet.

In short, I now wanted to erase the Claire who hadn’t
always made the kindest, wisest choices. Who couldn’t be trusted with the care and protection of her sources. The Claire who was still so caught up in childhood fantasies and nightmares that she had hallucinated a detailed conversation with a man who had been driven away because of her reckless efforts twenty years earlier. I kept trying—hopelessly—to remember everything Roan had said that night at the hospital and everything I had said in return.

As if he had been real. But Roan, unlike me, would never find his way home again.

Renfrew still worked for my folks and so did Nat Fortner; the whole, broad clan still gathered for Sunday dinners; much had changed, but much had only ripened.

The roads into town still passed old farmhouses with red-streaked tin roofs, pastures and barns with the land molded so intimately around them that deep footpaths and dirt driveways were natural features rubbed into the hills. Dunderry still wore its old farmsteads like a soft cotton shirt.

Uncle Dwayne and Aunt Rhonda had lost most of their drugstore business to a Super K mart on the interstate fifteen miles away. So they refurbished their grand marble soda fountain, added a gourmet coffee bar, and filled the old pharmacy shelves with tourist geegaws and knickknacks.

Aunt Irene became co-president of the Performing Arts Association along with Mama. They headed a drive to buy and renovate the old Dunderry cinema.

The dime store had become an antiques store. Uncle Eldon moved his hardware store outside of town and expanded it to include a plant nursery and home-decorating center. The old Dunderry Diner now served fried green tomatoes with salsa. And avocado sandwiches. And cheesecake. The county built new administration offices on the edge of town, so the white-columned little courthouse at
the center of the square was turned into a welcome center and art gallery. Mama sold some of her pottery there.

The county had voted in a beer-and-wine ordinance after a heated religious war. The Methodists were neutral, the Baptists dead-set against, the Catholics and Episcopalians all for it, and everyone else just hoped they could stop driving to Gainesville to buy a six-pack or a bottle of table wine.

Aunt Jane resigned from the library to open a book-store and tearoom in partnership with Cousin Ruby, in the shop space where Ruby used to sell the best polyester pant-suits in north Georgia.

Rebecca, like Violet, married a nice man and had nice children. She ran a boutique in town called Dunderry Irish Imports, selling Waterford crystal and linens. Tula Tobbler inherited the apple business after her grandfather, Boss, died. Her brother, Alvin, did exactly as she prophesied—he played pro football for almost ten years, for the Dallas Cowboys, before his legs gave out. Tula invested Alvin’s money in Tobbler Apple Treats, opened a shop, started a catalog business, and prospered. When Alvin quit football, he came home and joined the sheriff’s department as a deputy. Two years ago, after Vince retired, Alvin was elected sheriff.

There was now a Historic Preservation Committee in town that squabbled over every inch of ambiance around the square. Rebecca had mistakenly planted pink impatiens in the windowboxes of her shop and an hour later, Aster, who chaired the committee, pulled them all up by the roots. “
Red and white
is the floral color scheme this season,” she’d told Rebecca. “Didn’t you read the resolution?”

Since then Rebecca has called it the Hysterical Persecution Committee.

The Christmas nativity, with its old log manger and painted-plywood figures, had been replaced each December by a life-size and live tableau, with volunteers dressed in costume, two real sheep and a donkey, and a trio of camels that were trailered over from a Gainesville petting zoo.

Daddy volunteered some llamas the year Aunt Dockey chaired the nativity pageant committee. “There were no llamas in the Holy Land, Holt,” she’d said, fuming.

“Well, the Christ child wasn’t born in a manger on a vacant lot next to Dwayne’s drugstore either,” Daddy had told her.

The merchants’ association had taken control of Dunderry’s Christmas atmosphere. The shop owners decorated with all-white lights, plus all-natural and occasionally edible wreaths and garlands. There would be no more plastic Santas, no fake snow, no silver metallic Christmas trees revolving over blue-and-pink lamps.

Uncle Eugene finally retrieved his
cojones
and ran off with the secretary at his Ford dealership. Aunt Arnetta survived, and was still a county home economics agent. Carlton went into banking, moved to Virginia, and was arrested last year for embezzlement. Uncle Ralph marshaled some high-priced lawyers up there and got him probation.

Neely Tipton married one of my cousins. I heard that their son hid behind the doors at the elementary school and jerked girls’ hair. He never, however, touched any Maloney or Delaney female.

Uncle Pete died in a hunting accident. His son Harold was killed in a stock-car race at Talladega. Arlan moved to New Orleans and we rarely heard from him. Everyone in the family was relieved about that.

Daisy McClendon and her two remaining sisters had moved to parts unknown not long after Roan ran away and Sally disappeared. There had never been any word about Sally.

The family absorbed all the births, deaths, losses, and scandals the way it always had, with tolerance or shunning, quiet effort and loud brickbats of debate.

But no one ever discussed Roan or Big Roan. At least not in front of me.

• • •

Mr. Cicero, my old editor at the
Dunderry Shamrock
, came to visit me. He had a face as wrinkled as an accordion, he wore trifocals, and he kept his thin white hair side-combed over a large bald spot. He’d been a wire-service correspondent in Europe during World War II and then a crusading editor of a large Mississippi newspaper during the civil rights era. He proudly showed me a photo of the newspaper’s new offices and one-truck distribution center. He’d mortgaged his house to build it.

The structure resembled a small concrete bunker at a NASA radar station. Mr. Cicero had installed a huge satellite dish on the roof so that he could watch CNN during the day, as if he had to be up-to-the-minute on any world news that directly affected Dunderry. Plus he tracked one of the national wire services on a computer network. His subscriber and advertising base barely paid his bills, but his dreams were global.

He had always called me “girlie.”

“Girlie,” he said, “you wrote for me all through high school. And I couldn’t be prouder of what you’ve accomplished since then.”

“Mr. C, I look at you and think maybe there’s still something to be proud of.”

“Of course there is! Why do you even say something like that, girlie?”

“I started believing my own credentials. I guess I wanted to be famous.”

“Foo! You got caught up in a story that nearly killed you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

I pointed at the television set across from my bed. “I’ve been watching the news. They just segued from a story about a double murder to a fluff feature on the new baby gorilla at Zoo Atlanta. They didn’t even have the decency to stick a commercial in between. Nothing’s sacred, shocking, or significant. It’s all just entertainment. I started thinking in those terms, too.”

“Sure you did,” he said sarcastically. “You know we need more exploitation and cruelty in folks’ lives.”

“We need more shame and guilt,” I said seriously. “Reporters stick cameras in the faces of people who’ve just survived some horrible tragedy and we show ’em sobbing for the rest of the world to peer at, and we tell our audience it’s important news. But it’s not. It’s voyeurism.”

He squinted at me angrily. “You ever see a picture like that in the
Shamrock?
”

“Of course not. But you know what I—”

“I know there’re problems around here that need somebody younger than me to keep a hard, close eye on ’em. Greedy old-timers and greedy new-timers prowling around, the old farmland gettin’ carved up into little pieces, zoning voodoo. There’re important issues coming up this fall, girlie—your brother’s campaign for lieutenant governor, for one. For another, the church folk are planning an attack on the school board. There’s gonna be more arguing over teaching evolutionism and creationism than you can shake a monkey at. I could use you at the paper.”