The Stone Flower Garden

by Deborah Smith

  “My soul,” I corrected.

  “What happened between you and your grandmother today? Will you stop drinking and tell me?”

  I looked at her without any hope. “She made me hate her. She made me love her. She bought Eli’s loyalty. And she kept mine.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Webs of stone were closing around us. I could feel them in my sleep. Secrets and lies, old shames, old loves. All there, with faces or without. Karen felt them, too—our mixed heritage, our awkward relationship in a modern world where everything was supposed to be so easy, so fashionably equal. One afternoon Leon drove up to the Hall with his children, a boy and a girl, well-behaved and well-spoken, who melted into pools of awe when Karen shook their hands. “Cassandra,” the little girl said. “Daddy lets me watch your TV show, except when you kiss Jeremy. You’re so pretty. I want to be just like you.” She touched Karen’s pale brown skin and chocolate hair.

  “No, I want to be just like you,” Karen replied, smiling and gently caressing the girl’s stiff black braids and darker skin. “Because you’re the most beautiful little girl I’ve ever seen.”

  The girl beamed at her. And the boy, a little shy, said, “Ma’am, I’d like to kiss you on the cheek when I’m older.”

  “Well, for now, may I kiss you?”

  His dark eyes went wide. He looked at his father, who said, “I wouldn’t turn the opportunity down, son.” And so he stood stock still while Karen planted a feather-soft kiss on his cheek.

  The children dissolved into broad smiles. Karen looked at them as if she could taste their sweet innocence on her tongue, and then her eyes filled with tears. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” she said in a strained voice, and left the living room hurriedly. I gave Leon a worried look, asked the maid to bring the kids some ice cream, then went after her.

  I found her in a linen room off the kitchen, sobbing into the folded softness of a monogrammed tablecloth. “Leon asked me to go to dinner with him the other day,” she explained. “I put him off. But now he’s brought his kids to meet me. You know what this all means.”

  “He’s a gentleman and he’s crazy about you.”

  “But he doesn’t know I’m pregnant.”

  I sighed and sat down on a heavy oak trunk where Swan’s monogrammed silver flatware was stored. The heavy flatware bore an H for Hardigree, not an S for Samples. I’d always found that telling. “You’re a Noland,” I said to Karen. “Your father was a Marine and a war hero. And you’re a Wade. Your grandfather was the finest stonecutter in the South. I believe he was a good man caught up in a bad situation. And you’re a Dove. Your grandmother has survived unspeakable prejudice and unfairness in her life, but she’s kept her dignity.” I paused. “And you’re a Hardigree. That means—” she looked at me as if expecting the worst—“that means you can’t hide this from me, anymore.” I reached up and hooked a finger in the collar of her soft blue sweater, then filched the Hardigree chain and pendant from beneath it.

  She sighed raggedly. “Grandmother gave it to me when I was a teenager. I refused to wear it. Until now.”

  “You’re a Hardigree,” I repeated quietly. “And that means you and I will always be here for each other, because that’s the best tradition in this family.”

  She took my hand. “You’re saying I have to tell Leon the truth and live up to what got me here?”

  “Live up to it, or live it down,” I said with a tired smile. “But just never forget who you are, and that you have a family who is proud of you no matter what.”

  She blew out a long breath. “I’ll tell him in private, when his kids aren’t with us, and take my chances.”

  As we left the room, she stopped me. “Are you proud to be a Hardigree?”

  No one had ever asked me that question before. It struck at a tangled push-pull of emotions. I couldn’t divorce the shame from the success, the love from the regret. “I haven’t proved I’m strong enough to survive the name,” I said.

  “A man shouldn’t stand outside when the beer is inside,” Leon said as he walked up to Eli outside The Quarry Pit’s rust-streaked steel door.

  “I’ve been inside already. I came to see if anybody had anything to tell me, yet. Nobody did. I don’t know if I want to drink, here. I have bad memories.”

  “The men aren’t holding back. They just don’t know anything to tell.”

  “I’ve had divers at the lake for days, now. Findin’ nothing.” Eli spread his hands. “Nothing in the lake, nothing in the land, nothing in the people. Nothing. My sister’s sittin’ at the Broadside crying to her husband every night, and my mama’s stiff with misery.”

  “Come on. Come on in. You can’t give a place too much power over you.”

  Eli chewed his tongue. Too late, he thought. But he went inside with Leon and sat at the bar. “My kids met Karen,” Leon said. “They think she’s a fairy princess. Just goggled at her. She had ’em wrapped around her little finger just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They talked to her for two hours.”

  “Good for you. Good for her.”

  “I asked Karen would she come out to my farm and have dinner with me and the kids and my ol’ daddy soon. And she said yes. So then I said, ‘This is a good place to raise kids. Not like a city somewhere.’ I wasn’t exactly subtle.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Said I was right. Said she wanted her children to grow up with woods to roam. So she wants kids. That’s what she was tellin’ me, you know? So then I said, ‘Well, I’ve got woods.’ And she looked at me with those cool eyes that can heat a man right to the bottom of his furnace, and she said, ‘I’ll come to dinner one day soon and have a look at your forest, Mr. Forrest.’” Leon emitted a long, deep laugh.

  Eli opened his silver cigar tube, pulled a fine Macanudo from it, and handed the cigar to Leon. “Celebrate.”

  “What do you think? Old scar-face like me, country-boy-made-good? You think I’ve got a chance?” Leon shook his head and stuck the cigar between his teeth. “Any of this makin’ sense to you?”

  Eli nodded. Loneliness clung to his skin like marble dust. “Sometimes you just know she’s the right one and she knows you’re right for her. That’s the easy part.” He downed a second beer and ordered another round. “The rest is what tears your heart out.”

  The first official board meeting for Stand Tall convened at Marble Hall with me in charge and people whispering that I would be elected president of the newly formed foundation. I did not want the job but the tangle in my mind had begun to tighten in strange ways. By taking control I might protect Eli and his family from Swan’s maneuvers. She was drawing them in, waiting for the moment when she could count coup on them. This was the beginning of her conquest by assimilation.

  Karen and I ushered a dozen socially, spiritually, and politically prominent North Carolinians into the library, where caterers had moved the furniture aside and set up a long temporary table covered in white linen. Notepads and folders filled with paperwork waited before each chair. An architect’s painting of Stand Tall’s large main building, a rambling home of marble and wood, sat on an easel in one corner.

  There was an undercurrent of curiosity and excitement—looks were darted at Karen, our celebrity. “The colored babe,” as she put it wryly earlier that day, as she lay on a couch suffering morning sickness, with a cold washcloth to her forehead. She hadn’t talked to Leon about her pregnancy, yet. Now she looked perfectly in command of her body, slender and stunning in a trim black suit with thin silver jewelry. I was dressed in pale camel-colored silk pants and a flowing white blouse she’d forced on me instead of a business suit. “How beautiful you are when you’re not trying to look like Joan Crawford,” Karen had joked gently. I caught a glimpse of us in a large mirror on one wall. Sunlight and shadow. Cream and honey.

  Leon arrived at the house five min
utes before the meeting was to start. When he walked into the library looking tall, dark and not-quite-elegant in a brown suit with a hint of marble dust on one sleeve, the others gave him awkward or dismissive glances, which he caught with a frown. As I started across the large room to welcome him Karen strode past me with her chin up and her brightest Cassandra smile beaming. “Leon,” she said, turning his name into a friendly caress, her voice ringing above the conversations. She tucked her arm through his. “You’re sitting beside me.” And he looked down at her with an expression that caught my breath. He would have fought tigers for her at that moment.

  I turned to study two table settings with place cards that drew everyone’s attention. Eli Wade. Annie Gwen Wade, they announced. With only a minute or two remaining I walked into the hall and waited anxiously. My skin tightened as the front bell chimed. I nodded to the maid and she opened the ornate double doors. Annie Gwen stepped inside, followed by Eli. A soft, chic blue suit gave Annie Gwen a stately air, but she gazed around the foyer with tearful eyes and a wistful smile, remembering Marble Hall. “I used to do this very same job,” she said to the maid. Her face said she wished she could return to that time, when Jasper was alive.

  Eli, standing behind her, stole my thoughts, my concentration, the pulse in my veins. I had never seen him in a suit before, and that day he wore a fine one, dark and well-tailored for his broad-shouldered body, with a loosely knotted silk tie. He filled even the big foyer with a calm, righteous presence. He held my gaze and went over me the way I looked at him. The intensity burned me.

  I took Annie Gwen’s hand. “I’m glad you’re part of this.” She reached up and straightened a lock of my hair from my cheek. The gesture was motherly and kind, though her eyes seemed sad. “There are blessings,” she said. My throat ached. I nodded to Eli, then walked Annie Gwen into the library with him behind us, so close I could smell the good scent of his fine linen and subtle cologne. The other board members stared at them. I could imagine the gossip. Swan had generously made peace with the family of her sister’s murderer—even invited them into her home. How bighearted, how noble. If Eli found Clara’s bones, people would feel so sorry for Swan.

  “First I’d like for each of you to introduce yourself,” I said as I started the meeting. Heads of large ministries, presidents of prestigious charities, a former congressman, and the directors of several vital service agencies each stood and listed his or her credentials. The resumes included doctorates, awards, and exclusive executive positions. But Leon stood and said simply, “I grew up cuttin’ stone for Hardigree Marble, went to business school at the university on a Hardigree scholarship, and now I run the whole shebang for Mrs. Samples. I’m a widower, a part-time farmer, a daddy, and a son. I want to help other kids have the good life I’m tryin’ to give mine. That’s why I accept Mrs. Samples’ invitation to serve on this board.” He sat down. Karen watched him the entire time with sheer respect in her eyes.

  Finally, it came to Eli. He stood, and everyone in the room grew very still. His presence had a remarkable effect. He was solid, he was comfortable, he needed elaborate credentials even less than Leon did. “I grew up alongside Leon,” he said, “and my cousin Karen.” That stilled the air in the room.

  He paused, his eyes meeting mine, dissolving me. “And I grew up with Darl. I’m not a hometown boy here, but I had a home, here, for awhile.” He touched Annie Gwen’s shoulder. “My mother and sister ask me to speak for them, too, and so I am. We lost somebody we love here, and we’ve come to find him, if we can. But we’ve come to find ourselves, too. I’ve been a gambler, an investor, and an inventor. I was a criminal for awhile, but I’m right with God and the government now.” People gasped. “I’ve made a lot of money.” He met my eyes again. “When I was a boy Darl Union believed in me. Her family gave mine a chance, and even though things went wrong that chance has taken us a long way. So on behalf of my family, I’m giving five million dollars to Stand Tall. In the name of my father, Jasper Wade.”

  He sat down.

  The rest of the twelve-hour meeting was just talk, after that.

  The world wasn’t doomed by flood and fire, as the Bible said. Mountain rain and red mud would do the trick just as good, Eli thought. The day after the board meeting the autumn weather turned nasty. Cold water slithered down the back of his neck and followed his spine beneath a wet pullover sweater. Rusty droplets dripped from the brim of a Braves baseball cap just beyond the tip of his nose, carrying off residues of clay dust the cap had collected at the clearing site in the past week. He shrugged off the five million dollars he’d promised to Stand Tall. It was only money. He had more to prove.

  He went on working with dogged determination, a battery-powered mason’s drill whining in one big hand as he bored a second neat screw hole in the hard marble of a flat-faced Esta House he now owned. The place was beautiful, grand. It towered over a backstreet on a knoll hooded by huge oaks. People called it Olson Manor, after the heir to a railroad fortune who had moved his family to Burnt Stand in the 1940s. Olson Manor had elaborate marble eaves and cornices, doorsills carved with fleur de lis patterns—all handiwork of Eli’s own grandfather, the finest craftsmanship Eli had ever seen.

  It made his chest swell with painful confusion. What my family might have been, except for bad odds and Hardigrees. Or would we still be poor nobodies without them? Fine stone came out of the ground dirty and dull. It had to be recognized—cut, carved, polished. Maybe all this misery had a sheen of purpose. Maybe Wades were the rough material and Hardigrees the craftsman. One couldn’t exist without the other. That was why he’d donated the money. Trying to heal the wound where his family ended and Darl’s began.

  Philosophy on a gray day. He turned to blunt logic. “This house needed a porch, Grandpa,” he said aloud as the rain increased. Eli picked up the last of five identical marble plaques. He’d made them with Leon’s expert help at the quarry factory, carved the words into them himself, beveled the edges, polished the stone. He fitted one on the walls beside the main entrances to all the Esta Houses he’d bought. Now he set the last one about head high beside the grand front door of the Olson House, and riveted it there with long brass screws. Eli stepped back on the marble floor of a wide stoop, removed his cap, and read the inscription aloud, a small ritual christened in the rain.

  Built By Anthony E. Wade, Master Stonecutter.

  The initial in his grandfather’s name stood for Elijah. Eli bowed his head for a moment, honoring the imperfect namesake who had left behind an imperfect legacy. Maybe his grandfather had been no better than a gigolo, letting women use him and using them back. Or maybe just a buck-wild fool with a talent for stonework. Either way, this wasn’t going to be an Esta House anymore. It was a Wade House. Eli wanted people to know.

  The soft sound of footsteps on the sidewalk made him pivot quickly. This was a quiet neighborhood of old homes, and the street had been deserted. Even the soft shush of a distant car could have been heard. Darl stood there at the edge of the front lawn, her long hair matted to her head and shoulders, a blue dress suit soaked where a gray raincoat hung open. An enormous oak draped over a glistening golden bower over her. She was beautiful and unreal and so lost looking it broke his heart. She looked from the plaque to him, and the despair in her face was edged with pride for him.

  “You’re a hard man to find,” she said in a hollow voice. “I’ve been to all the other houses.”

  He threw his cap aside and went to her without a word, taking her by the arm and leading her up a front walkway hedged by low boxwoods in marble urns. “You’re no smarter than me, gettin’ all wet,” he said, as water ran down his face. He shoved open a heavily carved front door and they stepped inside a broad, empty foyer hung with a chandelier. This house was unfurnished, and every footstep echoed on the marble floor. “Come on, there’s a back porch, at least.” He pulled her along a central hallway and out a door onto a small veranda. They looke
d out on a fading autumn lawn and more oaks. The yard was hemmed by sculpted shrubs nearly twenty feet tall. “Eli,” she said urgently. “Let me talk. I won’t let you donate money to—”

  “It’s done. I wanted to. I’ll buy a place by your side, if I have to.”

  “No, no, Eli—”

  “Sssh. Let’s not make the mistake of talking.” He wiped her face with his bare hands. She uttered a soft, poignant sound of rebuke under her breath, but by then he had sunk his hands into her hair, and without any word at all they came together. As they kissed wildly he picked her up then sat down on the edge of the veranda’s stone steps. She settled on the floor between his splayed thighs, both of her legs draped over one of his, and he bent her backward. As easily as rain on dust he gathered her in his hands, touching, stroking, as she kissed him and moaned. She knotted her hands in his sweater, slid them underneath and explored him, then stroked down, along his legs and groin through his soft khakis, touching him. He was nearly gone by the time she moved her hands to his hips, then around his waist and up his back, beneath the sweater. She spread her fingers on the bare skin between his shoulder blades and burrowed her face in the curve of his neck, kissing the wet skin, licking, tasting.

  A patch of acorns showered the veranda roof with the rattle of firecrackers. Both he and she flinched as if guilty. His grandpa had let himself be owned by Hardigree women. What am I doing? Eli thought. If Darl wouldn’t be with him because he was a Wade, then he shouldn’t encourage her. But she is with me. Just as suddenly as they tore into each other he and she bent their heads to each other’s necks and sat there motionless, quivering, holding tightly. It was three weeks to the day since they’d met in Florida as strangers.