A Place to Call Home (51 page)

Tweet trotted to the truck’s carcass, peered at it with her small blond head cocked to one side, thumped one warped door that hung by a single hinge, then looked at Roan solemnly. “Looks like a fixer-upper to me.”

Some in the crowd burst into relieved laughter. Roan and I looked at Josh, who held Amanda tighter. She patted his cheek. We hadn’t brought him a son with no compromises, but we had given him a wholehearted daughter.

Cans, the battered hulk of a washing machine, rotting tires, mysterious shards of who-knew-what origins—we dug it all up and lugged it away, we scooped it and flung it and dumped it into the big trucks.

Deeper, deeper. The backhoe was sunk so low in the gouge it had made that we could hand Hop a cup of iced tea without reaching up. Water began to seep among the garbage, big, muddy puddles of it from the narrow creek that used to trickle through the gully at the very bottom of the Hollow.

The daylight was fading fast. Several dozen camping lanterns glowed with weird, festive charm. “There it is,” Hop yelled as his scoop thudded on a metal wall. The trailer.

“How big was it?” Matthew asked Roan.

“Not big enough,” he said, without taking his eyes off the pit below us.

It took the backhoe and the bulldozer working together to wrestle that sunken hulk from the ground. Charred, collapsed, the skull-eyes of its broken windows looking at us, it rolled out of the pit and shuddered upright, like a cardboard box stomped by a giant. It lay there in the flickering lantern light, its closed, battered door dripping grotesque streams of muddy-red water.

And then, through some obscene quirk of physics or fate, the door slowly swung open.

There was a collective gasp as everyone except Roan and me backed away. We stared into that black rectangle jumbled with muddy, rotten, charred furniture. Fetid water trickled over the threshold. I was ten years old again and Roan was fifteen, and the old nightmare came at us.

Suddenly Roan’s arms were around me and mine around him, and he hid my face in the crook of his neck, and I pulled his head close to mine and shielded his eyes with my hand.

I heard the door slam shut. Josh and Matthew stood there together, holding it closed.

The rotting trailer was hauled away. The old truck, gone. The garbage, gone. The pit filled in.

We lingered in the darkness, in the lantern light, dozens of us, at a loss for something, I didn’t know what, that would sum it all up and send us to our homes with a feeling that it all made sense.

Aunt Dockey, the Reverend Maloney, who had arrived after her Sunday sermon at the tiny Unitarian church in town, stepped forward. “I have something to say.” She looked at Roan and me. “If y’all feel the need to hear it.”

Roan looked dazed, so I answered, “We feel the need.”

We sat down, all of us sat, old, young, in-betweens, black and white, a patchwork quilt of people sharing a network of strong seams. We sat on the muddy ground and Aunt Dockey stood before us, and there was something powerful and dignified about the stocky, graying woman wearing grimy tennis shoes, a mud-flecked blue golf shirt, and a denim skirt with a small crucifix sewn in rhinestones on one hip pocket. She could rant confidently against the darkness and the wilderness.

She spoke in casual commentary, an ad-libbed sermon woven around sound bites from the Big Scriptwriter, and
my dazed, exhausted thoughts wandered and came back, faded, then focused.

“ ‘The seed sown by the wayside withers in poor soil. The seed sown on good earth grows, and bears fruit.’ ”

I held Roan’s hand, I wound my arm inside his; he squeezed my fingers in a rhythm of gentle contemplation.

“ ‘… and David gave thanks because his soul had been brought up from the grave, he was alive, he would not sink down into the pit.’ ”

Not ever again.

“ ‘… brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my path.’ ”

Aunt Dockey was heavily into pit analogies, and she picked through the Bible as if it were a cross-referenced book of quotations. But we needed that; we weren’t sorting out theology, we were hunting for comfort.

“ ‘Let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be silent in the grave. Let the lying lips that speak grievous things proudly and with contempt against the righteous, let them be silent.’ ”

There would always be idle gossip about Roan, Matthew, the Sullivan history in general, and me, my part in it, and how I came home and why. But idle gossip is no match for Maloney stubbornness or Sullivan pride.

“ ‘When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became grown, I put away childish things.’ ”

No more nightmares, in the daylight or the darkness.

“ ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ ”

Faith looks at faith and understands.

Aunt Dockey paused. Around us, people sat with bowed heads or closed eyes, touching here and there, fingertips to their cheeks. Roan exhaled and put an arm around me. We looked at each other. He smiled wearily,
and I saw more peace in him than I think I’ve ever seen before. I brushed a kiss across his mouth.

And then we realized Aunt Dockey was speaking again, and we faced her. “ ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.’ ”

We had walked. We had feared. But we had come out safely on the other side.

And so, that day, that night, Sullivan’s Hollow was unearthed, exhumed, autopsied, prayed over, and pronounced dead of the most natural causes.

Faith, hope, charity.

And forgiveness.

Late that night, at the farm, the immediate family—Mama, Daddy, Grandma Dottie, my four brothers, three sisters-in-law, the twelve grandchildren including Matthew—Tweet, Roan, and I sat on the veranda eating cold fried chicken and drinking tea. I listened to the warm, thick honey of their voices, looked at the mixture of old and young, sleek and stout, big hair and no hair—a family it would be a mistake to peg as simple or shortsighted, because they were both wide and deep in a short arc, as most families are.

Roan and I went to the barn but just stood in the lower level, holding each other in the dark. A llama stuck its head through a gate and nibbled on our shirtsleeves. “How about that. There are llamas all over the place,” Roan said, as if he’d just started looking.

After the others had left or gone to bed, I met Roan in the hallway between his old bedroom and the guest room Mama had assigned him, meaningfully, nearby. We were clean from separate showers.

We looked at each other for the first time with the freedom of contentment. Nothing left to guard against, or protect, or redeem, or restore. Fully, openly satisfied, we examined each other with a kind of brazen wonder. “There are llamas all over this place,” I said. “Hello again, boy.”

“Hello, peep.”

He picked me up and carried me into his old room. We shared the small bed together. Outside the window the moon winked above Dunshinnog. The stars were fading. “I’m so sore I can barely move,” I said.

“I won’t ask you to move.” Roan pulled the covers over us. “I’ll be careful not to take all the covers. I’ll never leave you alone in the dark. I’ll never turn my back on you. I’ll try not to crowd you. You’ve got my word on it.”

“That promise sounds like it covers a lot more than just this bed.” I curved a hand around his face, feathering my fingers over his mouth, caressing him. “It could sum up a lot of answers. It could go a long way.”

He bent his head to mine. I felt tears on his cheeks. “Just say ‘Welcome home.’ ”

I did.

H
op said to Roan, “Evan and I’ll take Matthew hunting this fall.” Evan said maybe Matthew didn’t hunt; it wouldn’t suit his profession.

“Well, we’ll take him fishing then,” Hop countered. “He’s not a fish doctor.”

They funneled every social matter through a simple system—go into the woods, commune with nature via fishing rods and hunting rifles, and camaraderie would follow without discussion.

And Brady said, in his smooth, efficient way, boiling his alliance down to dollar signs, “You’ll need a stake here, Roan. Partnerships. Some plans. I have two words to say to you. Just two. You think about the possibilities. Outlet mall.”

“Oh, I’ll think about it,” Roan promised solemnly.

We were giddy and carefree, so immersed in the pleasure of being together that we spent days together at Ten Jumps without seeing another soul.

Roan and Matthew began planning to build a barn near the lake. The dogs and birds were shipped from Alaska, and one of Tweet’s parrots immediately bit Renfrew.

And so the parrots came to live with Roan and me, temporarily.

All around us July began, the sun grew hotter, barbecue grills were scrubbed, watermelons were iced down,
colorful banners went up around the square, the Jaycees set up a stage for the Uncle Sam speeches, and small children began to feel the prickly promise of public humiliation.

The Fourth of July in Dunderry is red, white, blue, and Irish green.

The leprechauns were marching.

Our Little People looked like unhappy munchkins in an Irish version of
The Wizard of Oz
. About half of them were kin of mine.

“Why do we have to do this?” Amanda whispered miserably to me, distracted by a loose green feather on the little green leprechaun beret that went with her fluffy green leprechaun dress. “Aunt Claire, I hate this shit.”

“Good girl,” I whispered back. We stood in the spare shade of an awning around the corner from Main Street, the parade staging area, swamped in a mingled mass of participants: high school band musicians sweating in their uniforms; lawyers from Uncle Ralph’s motorcycle club, sweating in their studded, black leather jackets—I kept coaxing Uncle Ralph to have
BORN TO LITIGATE
put on the back of his, but he wouldn’t do it; and about every other strange group imaginable, including four of Daddy’s llamas draped with red-white-and-blue banners, which would be tugged up Main Street by four banner-draped Maloney grandchildren.

Immediately around me was a sea of small, flushed faces atop green dresses or green jackets with green knee-pants and green shoes. Mothers scurried everywhere. Violet rubbed an ice cube on her daughter’s glistening frown. Tula fluffed the ruffled green collars beneath the stoic brown faces of her two youngest daughters.

“Aunt Claire, why do we have to do this?” Amanda repeated.

“Because y’all need some embarrassing pictures to show your own kids someday. Snapshots and videos.” She groaned. I felt a certain gleeful satisfaction. I’d been lucky
enough to do my leprechaun duty before everybody in the family owned camcorders.

Josh walked up. He swept Amanda into his arms and beamed at her. “Papa,” she said seriously, “I look like turnip greens with red hair.”

“You’re beautiful,” he corrected. “I’ve never seen a prettier sight. I want you to keep wearing the whole outfit until Lin Su gets here tonight. I want to get a picture of you and her together. And I want some pictures of you with Matthew. Okay?”

“Sure. But Matthew has to wear something green, too.”

“Whatever you say, Princess Leprechaun.”

Amanda laughed. Josh and I traded satisfied looks. He’d brought Lin Su to meet the family recently. She was smart and charming, she obviously cared about Josh, and she had a good knack with Amanda. Mama was hoping for a marriage eventually. Amanda waved at Roan, who had walked up the street from the Maloney staked-out curbside viewing spot. He laughed as he stood there, large and handsome, and I grinned at him and rolled my eyes at the chaos.

I patted several small Maloney heads and tweaked Amanda’s hair. “All right, little people, luck o’ the Irish to y’all. Have fun. Believe me, it’d be worse if you had to tap-dance.”

Several thousand people lined the town square. Tourists wandered among craft tents on the lawn of the old courthouse and among food stands. A Sousa march blared from speakers atop the fire department’s hook-and-ladder rig, which idled a couple of blocks away, waiting to lead the parade from the corner of Main and Delaney Streets.

There were dozens of Delaneys and Maloneys on either side of Roan, me, Matthew, and Tweet. Mama smiled at us over her sunglasses, Daddy fiddled with his camcorder, and a flock of camera-toting aunts, uncles, and cousins parted to let us have choice territory.

This was not how Maloneys and Delaneys ordinarily act when they’re all vying for a shady spot under the same public elm tree.

Matthew balanced Hop and Ginger’s toddler, nicknamed Erp, on his hip. Erp gnawed a melting fruit pop. Matthew pointed to a gooey splotch on the front of his own shirt. He smelled faintly of Erp-launched peach drool. Tweet sidled in next to me. “Good spot,” she announced cheerfully. “Now Erp can hurl at the fire trucks.” The hook-and-ladder rig began to creep forward. Roan put his arms around me from behind and latched his hands in mine. The fire department trucks inched by. Hop and Evan are volunteer station captains, so they were among the men sitting on top of the rigs. They yelled and laughed like boys and made a point of pelting the family with green mint candies.