Unto These Hills (39 page)

Then a vast cold surface halted my catapulting somersaults, slithering me into instant, agitating, prostrate stillness. Inside, my head still orbited, albeit slower and slower as moments stretched on. “Sunny?” A man’s deep voice tugged at me from a distance. “Sunny!” it grew closer, louder. I cracked my eyelids.

“Daniel?” I rasped, squinting at the head above me that moved like an ocean wave. I flexed a finger on the hand wedged beneath my hip and identified the hardwood floor.

“Hey,” he patted my cheek, peering into my eyes. “You okay? Say something, Sunny. For God’s sake,
say something!”
He slapped my cheek a little harder.

“Stop!” I croaked, turning my head away. “You don’t have to
hit
me.”

I slowly rolled over, pushed myself up, and tentatively moved extremities until satisfied nothing was broken. Only one foot shot pains when flexed. Then I noticed all of them watching me, features tight with apprehension, Doretha, Daniel, and Emaline. Muffin was paler than usual but she did not rush to aid or comfort me. It no longer held any shock value.

“Lordy mercy,” I shrilled, “what yall looking at? Haven’t you ever seen a person fall down steps?” I struggled to stand, grasping Daniel’s arm as he pulled me with the other. When I took a hesitant step, I heard an audible release of breath all around me.

“Take more’n that to do me in,” I muttered with dark humor, favoring the throbbing right foot. It worked. A nervous chorus of titters revealed a collective relief that I’d not done serious damage to myself. Then I remembered.

I turned loose of Daniel’s arm and slowly turned, gazing about till I located Muffin. “Why?” I whispered.

“What?” she scowled, wary.

“Why did you push me?”

Chapter Twenty-One

Muffin’s bags disappeared out the front door within minutes, after she used some choice blue terms to inform me that she had
not
pushed me down the stairs.

“It’s true, Sunny,” Emaline assured me after Muffin’s Jaguar roared from the outside curb. “I came to the foot of the stairs when I heard the commotion. I’m pretty sure your foot missed the step — that’s why you fell.” Set amid pasty white features, green eyes grew bright with tears. “You scared the daylights outta me, girl.”

“Sorry,” I muttered unrepentantly, wishing I’d not been so implacable in accusing Muffin of deliberately throwing me down the stairs. “But, truth is, she wanted to kick my tail down those stairs. I know that and so do y’all.”

I stretched out on the sofa, groaning as soreness encroached upon my bones and joints, knowing I’d not get off scot-free after such a tumble.

Emaline pressed ibuprofen tablets into my palm. “Here,” she lifted a glass of water, aiming the flexible straw at my mouth, “take these.” I complied, growing aggravated at Daniel and Doretha sitting across the room, watching me like I was some daggum bug under a microscope.

“I’m
okay, y’all,”
I snapped. “Stop that.”

“Sunny, you shoulda let me tell Muffin about —”

“I meant what I said, Doretha. I’ll die before letting her know what her daddy did.” I peered at her for long moments, daring her to defy me, blinking to obliterate the wavy movement that had evened out to an occasional ripple. She dropped her gaze to her clasped hands in her lap. I rolled my head to stare at the ceiling, feeling mean and obstinate but I had no choice.

I would not sacrifice my daughter. Not ever again.

~~~~~

“Sunny,” Lee Roy peered unbelieving at me, “I can’t believe you’d put cuss words in your column.”

I burst into laughter. That week’s column was entitled,
I Hate that Dam Hole!

Lee Roy perched on the edge of his easy chair, which I’d moved into the den since Walter’s death. He clutched the Middle Tyger River Times, watching me warily as my laughter wound down. “It ain’t like you, Sunny,” he waved a hand at the paper’s column, shaking his grizzled head woefully. “What’re folks a’gonna say?”

I sniffed back more tears of mirth and peered warmly at him. “Lee Roy, what I’m talking about there is that big ol’ hole in the river dam that the foreign fellow knocked in it, the one who bought up all the land around the river area.”

Lee Roy thought on that for long moments, till realization dawned, lighting his blue eyes. “Awww, so that’s what you mean. That dam hole…” He grinned suddenly, all gaps and stubs. “Tha’s purdy good, Sunny.”

I fell solemn, throwing Lee Roy off pretty much. His grin dissolved. “You still sore ‘bout it?” he asked guardedly.

“Yeh,” I sighed, “I am, Lee Roy. I probably always will be.”

Only days before Walter’s death, unsuspecting, I drove through the village, down the hill, and started across the newer river bridge, one erected in 1980. I first spotted the machines on her bank and the rocky shoals below.

Then I saw it.

In the very center of the ancient rock dam gaped a huge
ugly
hole. I pulled over and climbed from my car, stunned.
It can’t be!
It had to be a nightmare. I squeezed my eyes shut. Surely I’d wake up and discover it the same as always.

I drew in a deep shuddering breath, held it, and released it, feeling oxygen shoot out my fingers and toes. I opened my eyes and looked again.

It was still there. Ohgod
ohgodohgod….

This one last landmark,
our landmark
, gouged and smashed like an old castaway skid row fence. Pain slammed my chest, choked me, misted my eyes.

How majestic she’d stood, our dam, strong and invincible. Or so I’d thought.

One by one our landmarks had toppled. The hotel gave way to parking. Bad enough. But when, in 1972, the Community Center, that hub of village life for longer than any of us could remember, crumbled into a brooding heap of brick, concrete, and three-inch beams, it took with it a little bit of everyone who’d ever had his hair cut at the downstairs barber shop, or cheered Hopalong Cassidy in the upstairs movie theater or sipped Cokes at Abb’s Corner Café in back.

The
Spartanburg Herald Journal
headlines read:

An Era Ends in a Pile of Brick, Wood, and Plaster

I hovered there on the river bridge with this fast-forward video flashing through my head, showing one scene after another… the mill itself succumbing, pain chopping away at me. Later, the elementary school that housed four generations of my family, shut down. At each transgression, my heart screamed
Nononono
!
Please don’t take away my roots.

Then recent headlines in my own weekly newspaper blasted:

THE WALLS CAME DOWN
Tucapau Mill Fades Into History

My spirit strained against the truth of it. At the same time, the same spirit read the accompanying story, glorying in the indomitability of ancient village folks, who remembered working at the mill in the forties for fifty-cents an hour ‘to learn’ and were later raised to seventy-five-cents an hour. They recalled paying one dollar a month for rent and, later, buying their house for $500.

Ola Trumane recalled being so short at fourteen she had to stand on a box to work, making $7 to $8 a week. “The dust was so thick,” she said, “you couldn’t see twenty-feet in front of you.”

Years later, they’d cleared the dust and added air-conditioning. Each one interviewed felt gratitude to have worked inside her walls. And I thought how those wrinkled and stooped mill hill villagers now perched on death’s cusp and would soon be gone. I swallowed a painful lump and read the history account.

In 1893 a group of Spartanburg businessmen set sail on the Middle Tyger River to cast their fishing lines. When they rounded the river’s bend and saw beautiful Penney Shoals, the idea of a textile mill on her banks was born. A village consisting of workers’ houses soon sprouted from the red clay hills, anchored later by a hotel, school, stores, churches, and shops.

“Tucapau” (pronounced
Tuck’-uh-pa)
was an Indian name for “strong cloth” and fit the mill and community like suede gloves. Predictably, some villagers slaughtered the beautiful name with deliberate mispronunciations and mill hill denigration, such as
Turkey-Paw
and
Turkey Scratch
. To some, the humorous misnomers simply hid an obstinate proclivity against ‘citified’ articulation. It provided others a venue of total disrespect for convention. 1936, Spartan Mills assumed the operation and later changed the name to “Startex.” Some folks, including me, till this day use
Tucapau
interchangeably with
Startex.

All us mill hill folk had thought, at one time, that the mill would be here till the end of time. If Mr. Montgomery, Sr. had lived, it might have been. That ninety-percent of the disassembled mill structure would be reused did not cheer me up. Nor the fact that decking would be shipped to Mississippi, the heart pine flooring to Louisiana and the beams to England.

Even the bricks were cleaned and shipped overseas. Nothing wasted.

Whoop de doo.
That was supposed to make me feel better.

In my next week’s
Things Old and New
column, which I did on my laptop, tilted back in the lounger, injured foot elevated, I wrote:

When, I now wonder, did I lay claim on everything VILLAGE as OURS? As MINE? Lord knows everything on earth is temporal. Yet, I DID lay claim and innocently embraced this little mill hill as my heritage. And felt that despite minor cosmetic adjustments to her visage, she would weather gracefully along with me, her substance prevailing on and on. She was my legacy, to pass on to descendants for generations to come. Then, overnight, an outsider swooped in, bought up some river-bordered land, and felt compelled to demolish the river dam, stopping mid-way through, leaving a big hole. I spent two days on the phone with DHEC and the Army Corps of Engineers and discovered I cannot do diddly about it. The new owner is within his legal rights even if he did leave it looking like a Stephen King nightmare. Oh, I figure he had his reasons and had it not been him, it would have been someone else. Wouldn’t it? I don’t know. All I know is that after all the other familiar, dear landmarks falling, that dam hole was the final straw. I gaze at the jagged raw edges that reveal a muddy riverbed, and grieve. For what was…what will never again be.

“Sunny? You okay?”

I blinked at Lee Roy, whose slanted blue gaze said clearly he worried for my sanity. After the fall on the stairs that’d left me bruised and fractured, I’d been as sore and addled as a morning-after, beaten boxer.

By that nightfall, my right foot had throbbed so badly I couldn’t set my weight on it. Overnight, it bulged to twice its size. I called Doretha.

“Don’t you move, now, y’hear?” she said. “I’ll be right there. Is the door unlocked?”

“No,” I groaned, back pressed to the bed headboard. “Listen, you get here and I’ll get the door unlocked.”

By the time I crawled to the door and unlatched it, sweat drenched my gown and I was near to passing out. That’s how Doretha and Daniel found me, curled into a fetal ball, moaning and nearly incoherent with pain. They threw on my housecoat and Daniel carried me as smooth as a gliding jet to the car and deposited me carefully on the backseat. There, Doretha slid downy soft pillows under my head and, from the front passenger seat, crooned to me as we rode to the hospital emergency room.

And I thought
this is getting to be a habit, them rescuing me like this.

X-rays soon told the story: my foot was fractured. I would have to be off my feet for several weeks “Don’t you worry, Sunny,” Daniel said that night after he gently laid me in my bed. “I’m not leaving you till you’re able to walk again.”

“But you can’t stay here!” I peered owl-eyed at him. “What would folks say?”

“I don’t care crap what folks say, Sunny,” Daniel said softly
.

“I’m not leaving you.” The painkillers given on the way home were taking their toll by now and I felt their buzz attack drive back the agony.

“Sunny?” Lee Roy, now on his feet, leaned forward from the waist, peering intently into my face. “You okay?”

I blinked, scattering again the deluge of memories. ‘You mean aside from being widowed?”

He nodded uncertainly.

Are you okay?
Lee Roy had asked. Well let’s see, I thought: My oldest daughter is permanently estranged from me. My younger daughter lives nearly on another planet, with her own separate life that draws her farther and farther away. I sit on a black secret that could blow up several lives. Daniel’s camping out here, giving neighbors lip-smacking fodder for gossip. I’m like a bad-luck voodoo charm to everybody around me.
Ichabod
may as well be emblazoned across my forehead because it seems God, along with everything and everybody meaningful has departed from me.

Was I okay? I managed a crooked smile, extinguishing my run-on thoughts of abandonment, yesteryear, and such.

“Yeh, Lee Roy,” I lied, “ I’m okay.”

~~~~~

Daniel’s ministrations to me were agony. The agony had less to do with bone-fracture than his touch. The more my flesh quickened, the more I shrank from him. Sometimes his very closeness set my flesh to sizzling. That was when I totally shut down and ignored him.

Daniel watched me, his expression unreadable. But sometimes when he thought I wasn’t looking, I’d catch a flash of utter sadness before his shutters fell in place. One night, he said, “Let’s go sit on the steps and look at the stars.”

Surprised, I groped for a good reason not to. He wasn’t fooled for a second. “C’mon, Sunny. You’ve been holed up in these four walls for days on end. A little fresh air’ll do you good.”

He supported me with his arm around my waist, shoulder beneath armpit, hoisting my weight till I felt light and buoyant as I hobbled alongside him, my good foot barely brushing the floor. He leaned to lower me down onto the back door stoop and, in a blink, his grasp slipped and I went off-balance. My weight knocked him backward onto the porch. We tumbled in a heap, landing with me wedged between his sprawled legs, back joined to his torso. My touchy foot bumping the floor had me groaning. He rested beneath me, on elbows, tense for long moments.

“You okay?” he muttered, pushing upward till he fully supported me.

“Yeh,” I said, then burst into hysterical laughter at the picture we made. The next second, I felt him shaking too, laughter spilling from him. I peered back over my shoulder into his face, gurgling like a silly girl.

Big mistake. His arms, strong and warm, slid around me and those eyes, those marvelous eyes glowed like silver in the moonlight, searching mine. One hand lifted to capture and tilt my chin. Before I could react, his lips swooped to find mine. The first touch nipped, the next delved into a mind-boggling exploration that dissolved my joints and set me aflame. That fast.

I tried to pull away. “I — can’t breathe,” I gasped.

“Me neither,” he groaned, dipping again for my mouth, finding it, and kissing me thoroughly, till my head swam and my blood pounded in my ears. I reached and strained for him with all my might. Those beautiful fingers of his began a soft massage of my ribcage and next thing I knew, we lay prone, face to face, fractured foot be hanged. What was a little pain in the face of all this? I’d drifted so far from shore I was hardly aware of where we were. The pleasure of it was too much to bear…I wasn’t ready for its impact.

“Wait,” I finally managed to gasp between desperate kisses, pushing against Daniel’s broad chest. “Please, Daniel,
stop.”
A note of desperation in my plea caught his attention.

He raised up to look at me, elbows planted on either side of my shoulders. “Okay. If that’s what you want.” His voice, deep and resonant, moved over my senses like skilled fingers over harp strings. I closed my eyes and willed the feelings away. “Is that what you want, Sunny?” he said softly. “Truly want?”