When Venus Fell (38 page)

Gib levered himself up to a higher ledge, so that only his
lower legs dangled beside me in the water. He took something from his jeans pocket. Holding it awkwardly between his thumb and scarred forefinger, he rested his maimed hand on the knee closest to me.

I looked at the small white pebble in his grasp. I struggled for a second with the knot in my throat. It was white quartz, like mine. My nerves were shot, my life was unraveling. But I wasn’t so bad off I’d cry over our sentimental rocks. Not yet, anyway. “Part of your valuable wishing-rock collection?” I said.

Smiling thinly, he nodded. “I was sitting right here when I gave the other one to your mother.”

Now he had me. My breath seemed to catch. “Do you remember anything else about her?”

He nodded, again. “I was only five years old, but that weekend was a turning point in my life. Because your mother almost drowned here.”

I stared up at him in shock. And listened.

“The story of that time has been told and retold so often by Bea, and Min, and Simon over the years that it’s taken on a life of its own. Aunt Olivia wrote in her journals about every word that was said and reported and done that year. So I’m not making up much detail, Nellie, or embroidering any more than can be helped, and some of it’s even word-for-word. And all of it’s the truth, as far as we’re concerned.

“I was scared and confused and only five years old. It sounds odd to say, but that’s why so many details have stuck in my mind. What I don’t remember exactly I remember as it seems to me now. Plus I’ve made it my business to study that year since then. As if I could figure out something in the atmosphere.

“Nineteen sixty-eight was the year my parents were eaten by the world. That’s how it felt—like the world was a big hungry Thing that had opened its mouth and swallowed them.

“That January they loaded a half-dozen suitcases into Dad’s Cadillac. He was so proud of that car. It was an old fifty-six model with tail fins the size of a cartoon space rocket. He worked for the government, specializing in geo-thermal research.

“I don’t remember much about him, but it’s all good. I’ve heard that his science interest centered around the valley’s hot spring when he was a boy—trying to understand the thermal makeup of the warm water and the geology of the minerals in the water.

“He wasn’t much of an outdoorsman—at least not in the sense of hunting and fishing and raisin’ hell in these mountains, and that alone set him apart from his father and most of the Cameron men who grew up here. He had bad asthma, I know that much, and when he was stuck in the house he read all the time. Mother did, too.

“There wasn’t a lot of money in our branch of the family then. The Hall was shabby, but I remember feeling that we had the most wonderful life here.

“That day they left for London, Mother sat in the Cadillac’s passenger seat and cried and waved. Isabel was only three months old, and Mother hated the idea of leaving her to be bottle-fed so soon.

“But Dad really wanted Mother to see London with him. She’d never traveled outside the country before. The trip was a conference on nuclear energy. Only supposed to last a week. She looked so pretty in a blue coat with her hands covered in a pair of bright red gloves she always wore. She was dark-haired and on the short side, soft and curvy, more fashionable then than she would be now. I’d guess back then people called her bohemian.

“She wrote poetry and recited Shakespeare. She played the piano and roamed the mountains looking for wild plants to collect. She kept a garden and she made papier-mâché Christmas ornaments that looked like lopsided angels.

“That day she blew kisses to us, and the air was so cold they steamed.

“I stood there trying not to cry, and Simon took my hand. He was tall and skinny and on the quiet side—I never in my life then or later heard him raise his voice—and until that day it’s fair to say his dreams were simple. He’d joined some tiny
little church over in Hightower, and he wanted to go to college and then seminary to become a minister. He was only sixteen then.

“Standing out there that day, it was only me, him, and Aunt Olivia. Ruth was barely old enough to totter around without falling. ‘Aunt Olivia’s in charge but you’re the man of the house,’ was the last thing Dad told Simon. But he told me, ‘You’re the
assistant
man of the house.’

“I was so proud of that.

“They never came home from that trip. The bomb the IRA hid in the lobby of their hotel in London killed a dozen people. Including my folks. Gone. Caught up in some gutless bastards’ private war on innocent people.

“Scotland Yard forwarded their luggage and Dad’s twisted-up gold wedding ring, because the detectives found it in the debris. They’d been able to make out Dad’s and Mother’s initials engraved inside it. That was all we got to touch. That ring.

“Their bodies came home in sealed coffins. That made it harder. Never seeing them again—not even their bodies. I remember sitting up in a hideaway spot near the attic of the Hall. Hiding there every day. Afraid to come down and find out they were still gone. I had nightmares for years that they’d gotten lost in England and were trying to find their way home. Even as a grown man I can’t help looking for them in crowds, wherever I go.”

“Right after that, we moved into the Hall’s right wing, which had been closed off for decades. When I was a little boy, the pipes clanked and the faucets sputtered, the toilets stopped up because tree roots had taken over the drains to the septic tank, and half the light fixtures wouldn’t work because squirrels and mice had chewed through the wires. The furniture coughed dust and the windows—they’d been covered by shutters
outside and drapes inside—were caked with years of crud and mold.

“Hoss was in Europe with the Air Force but he sent money to pay for repairs, and so did a few other kin, and we used that to fix up the old wing so we could live there.

“Aunt Olivia wrote on her notepad: ‘The Hall makes up in charm what it lacks in new amenities. I plan to open it as a hotel.’ She sent that to a friend who ran the state tourism office. He wrote back and said we needed more amenities.

“Amenities. Amen Ities. Ities. Itty Bitties. Little. Amen. Prayers. ‘We need more itty-bitty prayers?’ I asked Simon, and when Simon finally figured out how I’d come to that conclusion he grabbed me and hugged me until I thought my eyes would pop. ‘We need all the prayers we can get. I’m putting you in charge of Itty-Bitty Amens.’

“I started whispering ‘Amen,’ every hour every day. I’d wish on my rocks and say amen.

“When Bea came over from Scotland she said we had plenty to offer the public—not just history and FeeMolly’s great food, but fresh air and wildlife and mountains that make people forget their troubles. She pointed out to the tourism honcho that there weren’t many inns where people could sleep under heirloom quilts and breathe in history.

“But Emory told everyone who’d listen that she and Aunt Olivia had lost their minds, that no one would be fool enough to drive over an hour from the nearest city and pay good money to vacation in a drafty old stone-block mansion.

“Nobody could scare Aunt Olivia, though. She and Bea sat down and wrote an advertising brochure. Simon used the wording for years after that, even after he and Min hired an advertising rep to handle the inn’s marketing. I remember a part about visiting our waterfalls, and sleeping on feather beds, and playing checkers in a parlor surrounded by Cameron Scottish memorabilia. ‘Find your own serenity at the heart of the sacred Cameron River Valley,’ the brochure said.

“Simon read that sentence to me, and to Min, over and over, like a protection. Aunt Olivia and Bea packaged up stacks of the brochures—the first ones were nothing fancy, and I helped stuff envelopes and carry the boxes to the car.

“We mailed them off to the state tourism offices and anywhere else Olivia could think of. And then we waited. And we waited. At least a month. I remember it feeling like half my life. Because just like Emory predicted, not one soul called to make a reservation.

“I used to sneak outside and eavesdrop on Simon and Min so I’d know how scared to be. They’d hide in the rose arbor down by the river, snuggling, and kissing, crying sometimes, making out, and talking. I knew things were bad. They’d only been married a few months. They were just kids.

“Old friends called to ask why in the world Aunt Olivia was demeaning the Cameron name, opening the Hall to paying guests. Strangers. But no strangers called to make reservations. Sometimes at meals we’d all sit there just quiet. Just full of this mood—the unspoken dread. We were going to have to leave. Go to Knoxville. Live in the city, turn the Hall over to Emory and his part of the family.

“I started carrying a stick and walking the perimeter of the front cattle pastures. I don’t know if I was patrolling for enemies or looking for help. Both, I guess.

“Then one day early in September the phone rang, and everything changed. I remember Bea and Min running out of the office they’d set up in a storage room off the kitchen. Min was whooping, ‘We’ve got customers!’

“Bea told us our first guests would be a married couple named Arinelli. We spent about ten minutes looking at the name written in the brand-new ledger Aunt Olivia had bought. Arinelli. I remember spelling it and trying to pronounce it.

“Max and Shari Kirk Arinelli. We didn’t know then that they weren’t really married. I doubt Aunt Olivia would have
turned ’em away if she’d known, but she probably would have insisted they reserve two rooms.

“Your mother told Bea she saw one of our brochures at an information booth at the Nashville fairgrounds. She said she and your dad were touring with the Decca Records stage show, and they had a weekend off before they went on to the next city. They wanted to see the mountains and relax.

“The Grand Ole Opry’s weekly show was all most folks thought of when anyone said ‘show’ and ‘Nashville.’ Blue-grass or country and western. But Min was a big music lover—she’d brought her stereo and all that when she married Simon—and she recognized your mother’s stage name. Shari Kirk. She ran and got her stack of forty-fives and found a song your mother had recorded. I guess it hadn’t hit the bestseller charts or anything, but Min liked it.

“Celebrities. That’s what we had coming. Min started shrieking and we played the record right then—it was ‘Summer Sometime’—and it had a little Motown flavor to it, which made it pretty exotic around here. Simon and Min slow-danced, and so did Aunt Olivia and I, and then Aunt Olivia and Bea.

“Fifty dollars a night. That was the going rate when we opened the Hall to the public. A luxury price for those days. It was one reason people said the inn idea would never fly. But we were out here miles from nowhere, with no restaurants, so the price had to include meals, otherwise we’d have had a lot of starving guests. Bea insisted on keeping the bar in the library stocked, too. Put it on the honor system. Fix yourself a drink, write a note on the bar register. Pay your tab when you leave.

“That was uptown lodging by most people’s standards at the time. The county was dry. We were practically bootleggers for having a bar. There was no such thing as a liquor license. If the county sheriff hadn’t been married to Hoss’s niece we’d have been in trouble.

“But we were ready to entertain Max and Shari Kirk Arinelli.

“Show-business people.

“I wondered if they’d look real.”

“Your parents showed up on a hot, bright Friday afternoon in a little red Mustang with the roof down and the radio turned up so loud we could hear it over the engine as the car came up the front road.

“We were all peering out the windows from behind curtains. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but Min snapped pictures. The snapshots are in Aunt Olivia’s albums, along with Olivia’s journal entries.

“Your mother looked like no woman we’d ever seen outside of the drive-in movies over in Hightower. She had blond hair cut in a sort of flip, and over it she’d tied a see-through white scarf with yellow polka dots. She wore big black sunglasses. She was so pretty. She smiled all the way up the driveway—the biggest, whitest smile I’d ever seen in my life, and she looked excited.

“When your dad stopped the car in the courtyard she stood up in the convertible and faced the Hall and put her hands together like a prayer against her mouth. ‘What’s she doing?’ I whispered to Simon. ‘She thinks this is a church?’

“Before he could answer Bea told me, ‘She’s happy to be here. The place has taken her soul in.’

“You know who she looked like the most? She looked like a blond Mary Tyler Moore. She was wearing white pedal pushers and a gold-colored top, with a fat white beaded necklace dangling down the front. Gold and yellow were her colors.

“Your dad jumped over his car door—we thought that was pretty cool, like James Bond—and he came around to her side and held up his hands. And she leaned down and gave him a little kiss on the mouth.

“And he smiled.

“In general, though, he looked less easy with himself than she did. I don’t think he ever laughed that weekend. We got the sense that he was dead serious about music and life and your mother and anything else that crossed his path. He kept to himself a lot, kept quiet, and watched us. He didn’t know what to make of us, I guess. Whether we were real. We felt the same way about him.

“He had jet-black hair, and his eyes were hooded and deep set. It wasn’t that I’d never seen anyone who wasn’t lily-white. But your father was odd to me. He wasn’t quite like us and he wasn’t Cherokee.

“For years Bea has told people he had a face like a boxer and eyes like a panther. Plus his hair was long—long enough to touch the top of his shirt collar in back.

“This was a helluva shock. Among our Macintosh kin up in Oklahoma there were men who wore their hair down their backs, but that was Indian tradition, so it was all right. And they were family.

“Not to mention the fact that your dad was dressed like something out of a San Francisco coffeehouse. He showed up at the Hall in baggy white pants, a floppy blue shirt that wasn’t tucked in, and white loafers
with no socks
. Not even Indian Camerons went without socks and their shirts tucked in.