“No, I didn’t. What?”
“Gave me a reason to keep trying.”
“Trying to do what?”
“Not give up.”
I brightened. “Really?”
“Don’t get a big head over it.”
I punched him on the arm. “Now you’re teasing me!”
“Beep,” he said darkly.
“Shitbird!”
We started inside the flea market, but an old sedan pulled past us into a parking space. Peeling paint. Missing hubcaps. Duct-taped windows. Yep. A McClendon car. Sally climbed out. She was dressed in a fuzzy white jacket and tight jeans and fuzzy white boots. Her hair was piled up in a curly yellow topknot. She spotted us and looked Roanie up and down with her black-mascaraed eyes. Maybe she’d never seen him in nice clothes before.
Roanie pushed me ahead of him, on into the warehouse. I dug the heels of my loafers into the ground and twisted away. “What are you doing? I want to talk to her.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t like the way she eyeballs you. I’m gonna tell her to mind her own business.”
“She’s all bark and not much bite,” he told me grimly. “If you want to feel sorry for somebody, feel sorry for her.”
That shut me up.
“You’re a good baby-sitter, Roanie,” Sally called, grinning at him as she sauntered over. “We miss havin’ you around.”
Baby-sitter. I wanted to pull out her fuzz one clump at a time. Roanie clamped a hand on my shoulder. “I got tired of draggin’ my old man home when you and Daisy kicked him out. Y’all oughta kick him out for good.”
Sally stopped in front of him. Her grin faded. “You ain’t ever coming back to see us, are you?” she asked in a small voice.
“I can’t change what goes on down there, but I don’t have to be part of it.”
“You’re not like your daddy.” She tossed that off with a thin smile. “He cain’t stay away. Cain’t keep his pants zipped neither.”
Roanie turned me around and nudged me toward the door. His face was red. “Claire, go inside. I’ll be along in a minute.”
I pivoted and glared up at him. “Oh, no. I’m not budging.”
“Claire.”
“No.”
Sally seemed to have urgent words burning inside her. She edged closer to Roanie. “He’s a dog, but lots of the fine men around here ain’t any better. It’s gonna catch up one day. Be hell to pay. One of these days I might just move on. I saved that money you gimme.”
Money? Roanie had given her money?
“I ain’t like you, Roanie,” she went on sadly. “I ain’t foolin’ myself.” She reached out and smoothed the collar of his jacket.
Roanie shook his head. “There’s people who’ll give you a chance to do better. But you gotta meet them halfway.”
“What?” She pointed at me. “Her and her kin? They’re lyin’ to you. They don’t give a damn about you. Her people ain’t nothin’ special. Her Uncle Pete’ll fuck anything that stands still long enough. And he ain’t the only one.”
I screeched wordlessly and lunged at her with one hand drawn back in a fist. Roanie grabbed me. Picked me up without a word, circling my waist with one arm and lifting me, dangling, off my feet. I swung my arms and kicked. Sally laughed. “Don’t be jealous, queenie. Roanie got away before I had a chance. You take care of him, you hear?”
“Put me down!” I shrieked as Roanie carried me away. He took me inside and ducked into a corner hidden behind the stalls. He set me down. “Cool off.”
“What’s she talkin’ about?” I demanded. “Did you give her money?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Why?”
“Because she needs the help, Claire.”
“Why?”
“Like I said about Beep, I can’t stand by and just watch somebody get kicked in the teeth.”
I took several deep breaths. “I’m trying to feel sorry for her,” I told him. “I really am. But I need to go pull some of her fur out first.”
He leaned toward me. His harsh eyes burned into my defiant ones. “She gets hurt in ways I never had to put up with. You get it? By the time she wasn’t much older than you, she was scared of men. Scared. That’s why she acts like she does.”
I looked at him with slowly dawning horror. “She shoulda asked for help.”
“Like me? I wouldn’t a-taken help if it hadn’t been for you. She don’t … she doesn’t have anybody special like you.”
“Beep?” Beep said, poking his head around a corner and shaking his trash bucket at us.
I ran to Beep. I threw my arms around his stout waist and hugged him hard. He looked stunned. “Beep,” he purred, and awkwardly patted my back.
I turned and met Roanie’s shrewd, troubled eyes. “I care,” I said slowly. “And don’t you forget it.”
I told Mama that Sally had hinted about leaving town someday. I thought Mama might be relieved to know. I was wrong.
“That baby of hers isn’t some stranger,” I heard Mama crying to Daddy late that night as I hid on the back stairs with Roanie. “Poor little Matthew. None of us even talk about him as if he has a name. I don’t even know whether Sally named him after Matthew the apostle or Matt Dillon on Gunsmoke. What kind of life will he have if Sally decides to run off with him?”
“I’ll tell you what’ll happen if you try to take him away from her,” Daddy said quietly. “We’ll have to go to court, and no judge is likely to see it our way. She’s the baby’s mother. She’s got rights.”
“Oh, Holt! From all I’ve heard she’s no better than a cat! When some new tom yowls at her, she’ll forget she ever had a baby.”
“Hon, even if we could adopt Matthew, we’d never get your brother to admit to anything. What would you do? Force Pete to take a blood test?”
“We could. Ralph told me he could get a court order—”
“Set my brother against your brother? Good God, hon, you want to do that to the family? What about your mother? She’s old, and Pete’s a misery to her as it is. You keep pushing the idea that Matthew’s his little boy, you’ll break her heart.”
I listened to Mama crying as Daddy murmured soothing sounds to her. I looked at Roanie, who stared into space, frowning. I could never get him to talk about his mood that night.
I realized much later that there’s nothing worse than realizing the limit of good intentions.
The trouble with Roanie was that he didn’t know his place yet; he had been pulled up by the roots too many times. There was a lot of talk about place in my family. It was no small matter to know your place in the world, and I don’t mean in the way spiteful people talk about keeping someone in their place, I mean the sense of belonging. A place at the table. A place in a family. A place on the land. A place in the heart.
That might be a very Southern concern—places. Aunt Jane was founder and president of the Eudora Welty Literary Society, which met at the library every Tuesday night, and it was a telling fact that she named her book lovers’ club after a Southern writer who’d said we had a profound sense of place, that our feelings were all tied up in place.
Roanie had a place in our family, as far as I was concerned, and a deep, secure place in my heart, but he needed something else and I couldn’t decide what it was, until the day Grandpa took us up to Dunshinnog Mountain to gather mistletoe.
Dunshinnog towered over the eastern edge of our valley like the king of all mountains. Maloneys had owned it since the very first pioneer land-grant years, which was amazing when you considered the frugal choices old Sean and Bridget Maloney had to make to survive and prosper in the parceled-out wilderness.
After all, Dunshinnog wasn’t valuable farmland, like the valley. You could only look at it, and love it. I thought that bit of appreciation said a lot about the hearts of those old ancestors of mine, that they must have been romantic, even without their teeth.
The mountaintop was wide and almost level, with a natural meadow at one end. We sk
irted patches of pine trees that stairstepped down the easiest side, the west, where some long-dead Maloneys had once built terraced pastures for cattle. I could find the foundation of a house and barns on a low ridge, but only because I knew where to look.
Otherwise the mountain was covered in old hardwood forest, and each spring we gazed up at its white clouds of dogwood blooms and then the pinkish clusters of laurel. In autumn it blazed with red and gold. In the early winter, when Roanie and Grandpa and I went there, Dunshinnog was a spartan world of somber gray. Small herds of deer roamed it, and raccoons, and wild turkey. Hawks hung over it on a clear day, and we saw an eagle once. There was even a bear or two left when I was a girl, though we never saw one.
But foxes were the mountain’s barter in local legend, foxes and the whimsy of Irish tall tales. Like Mr. Tobbler and his yellow jackets, we chicken-farming Maloneys had long ago made peace with our enemies in trade.
“Tell Roanie how Sean and Bridget named the mountain,” I said to Grandpa during the long hike.
Grandpa grinned. “The sidhe are in charge up there.”
“Irish fairies,” I explained to Roanie, who arched a dark brow but didn’t dare laugh.
“The sidhe helped foxes slip down into the valley at night to steal Maloney hens,” Grandpa went on, with grand drama in his voice. “And the foxes were good at it, too, because the fairies put gloves on their paws, so no people could hear ’em sneak in or out of the chicken coops.” Grandpa raised his stubby hands and wiggled his fingers. “Every night the fairies would take the blooms off the flowers and put ’em on the foxes’ paws, and when the foxes came home to the mountain every morning the fairies put the blooms back on the stems, so a person could never catch on to the magic.”
“Foxgloves,” I interjected helpfully. “That’s how come foxglove flowers are called foxgloves. Except you can see the fairy handprints inside the flowers. The little speckles. That’s the only way you can see what the fairies have been up to.”
“Claire,” Grandpa snorted, “hush up and let me talk. When you’re old you get to tell all the whoppers. It’s my turn right now.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“So Sean and Bridget, being from the old country, they knew the only smart thing to do was honor the fairies and the foxes, just grant ’em their due and be glad for God’s bounty to share.” Grandpa finished with a majestic nod. “So they named the mountain Dun-sionnach-sidh, which was Irish for the ‘fortress of the foxes and fairies.’ ”
“But that big name was a mouthful,” I told Roanie solemnly. “And hard to spell, too. So it ended up being Dunshinnog. There. What d’ya think?”
Roanie mulled it all over for a second. If he’d laughed at the story, he’d have lost a lot of ground in Maloney territory that day. “Makes sense to me,” he said.
The green mistletoe hung in the tops of the tallest trees like remnants of forgotten summer. Grandpa pulled a sawed-off shotgun from his backpack. He and Roanie took turns shooting into the branches. Clumps of mistletoe fell into the lower ones and Grandpa hoisted me up to retrieve it. Hunting mistletoe was a great game. We stuffed most of it into a sack, but I kept a sprig for myself.
I held up my personal commission in mistletoe. I had traditions, too. “I’ve got a smooch craving,” I announced.
Grandpa laughed. He bent down and I held the mistletoe over his head and kissed his cheek, and he kissed mine. Then I looked at Roanie. I felt a little sad and giddy, the way I had in the parking deck at Rich’s, and I couldn’t understand why. I just knew I had to kiss him, too. “Com’ere.”
He shifted uncomfortably and stuck his hands in his pants pockets. “Get it over with,” Grandpa said, laughing harder. “It’s something Claire has to do every year.”
Roanie dropped to his heels. My hand shook. I held the mistletoe above his dark hair and quickly pecked a spot on his jaw. His skin was so warm. “Now you gotta do me,” I ordered in a small, reedy voice. He’d never kissed me before, and I wasn’t certain he’d do it then. “Come on, come on,” I squeaked impatiently. “Get it over with.”
He turned his face toward me. His winter-gray eyes met mine for an instant. “I think you’re some kind of fairy yourself,” he teased. Then he brushed his lips across my forehead. I shut my eyes.
I felt as if I were on fire and I could fly.
“Let’s take in the view,” Grandpa said. He led us through a meadow to a smooth shelf of silver-gray granite that jutted from the mountain’s brow like the brim of a cap. The world as I knew it was spread out below us—the Maloney fields and pastures, our big house with its wide porches and triple chimneys, our barns and long, low chicken houses, and the small house where Grandpa and Grandma Maloney lived. In the distance we could even see the narrow paved ribbon of Soap Falls Road peeping through the trees. It was as if Sullivan’s Hollow didn’t exist, because it was the only place we couldn’t see from Dunshinnog.
“This is a good place,” Roanie said gruffly. “This is above everybody. This is a great place. Yeah. I can believe there’s magic up here.”
Grandpa performed the little ceremony his own grandpa had taught him, as his grandpa had been taught by his grandpa, the ritual stepping back through the generations to Sean Maloney himself. He took an Irish pennywhistle from the pocket of his shirt, maneuvered his thick fingertips over a half-dozen small holes in its shiny tin barrel, fitted the tip in his mouth, and played “Amazing Grace.”
The sweet, haunting song surrounded us and was picked up by the wind, singing out toward the valley. Goosebumps crept up my arms. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see. Roanie’s eyes gleamed, his lips parted in absolute wonder.
He became, on that mountaintop, a boy who found magic and history, who joined a tradition that could fill empty places deep in his heart. The sidhe had given my fox a view of the world, they’d given him to me; our paws were slippered in their magic. We could come and go as we pleased, together.
Dunshinnog was our special place from then on.
Josh and Brady were home from college for the Christmas holidays. They were he-men, cool and handsome, with coppery shocks of hair and beautiful smiles. They had thick muscles on their shoulders and tight bellies that didn’t flinch when I socked them during wrestling matches. They drove swell sportscars and dated beautiful college girls who sucked up to me shamelessly because I was Josh and Brady Maloney’s little sister.
Josh was twenty-five—four years older than Brady—but both of them were seniors at the university because of the years Josh had spent in the army after high school. He had served two tours as an M.P. in Saigon.
I remembered vague, troubling currents of the fear in our home, of everyone huddling around the living-room TV to watch the news each night, of seeing Mama cry as she packed boxes and letters to send to Josh, and of myself somberly including my fingerpainted portraits of the farm and the family, so he’d know we were okay. Painted in broad strokes, maybe, blotchy and runny, but okay.
I found out later that Josh had spent most of his time breaking up bar fights, patrolling whorehouses, and dragging soldiers out of opium dens. There was a lot he wouldn’t talk about, a lot that worried Mama and Daddy about him. He was not just my oldest brother, he was my old brother, ancient around the eyes, and he didn’t laugh much, and when he did talk it was mostly about politics.
Brady, on the other hand, took nothing seriously. Brady had big dreams, trendy dreams. He played the drums about as well as a trained monkey, but he had organized his own rock band in high school. Daddy had let him hold concerts in one of the fields. Brady ran a few electrical cords out there and built a stage out of packing crates, but no more than twenty of his friends showed up at any given event. Brady’s music was that bad.
Mama’s favorite pet terrier, whose name was Jawbone, chewed through an extension cord one night. The concert ended abruptly with Jawbone’s sizzling yelp and the last squawking guitar chord of a Rolling Stones song. Jawbone was never quite the same after tha
t, and Mama lowered the boom on Brady’s dream of becoming a rich and decadent rock star. At the university he majored in business and was president of his fraternity, and when he wasn’t talking about girls, he talked about money.
Brady didn’t seem to notice Roanie one way or the other. Josh seemed to avoid him. Josh swung me up on his back and walked down to the creek one afternoon. “What are you after, baby sister? You want another brother?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“Roanie.”
I chortled. “He’s better than a brother. I can order him around.”
Josh and I squatted on the creekbank. He stared into the cold silver water. “It’s easy to get confused about people,” he said in a patient, big-brother tone. “Sometimes you make a friend for the wrong reason, because you feel lonely. And when you stop feeling lonely you don’t need that friend anymore. That’s not fair to the friend, is it?”
I had never imagined Josh feeling confused about anything in his entire life. “I’m not lonely. And there’s nothing wrong with Roanie.”
“When I was in Vietnam, I made friends with a lot of people who had different ideas from mine. I started to talk like them and act like them and think like them. When I came home, it was hard to stop being that way. I had to work at it. Sometimes I still have to work at it.”
“What kind of weird friends did you have?”
Josh scrubbed a hand over his face. A fine bead of sweat slid down his temple. It was chilly outside, but Josh always looked as if he were putting out some fire in his mind. “The point is, sis, you can hurt people by making friends with them for the wrong reason. And you can hurt yourself, and you can hurt your family.”
I considered that in bewildered silence. There was no point trying to explain to Josh. Some people, Grandpa said, spent all their time cussing the dark when all they had to do was light a candle.
The Christmas parade went off without a hitch that year. But Roanie didn’t go, even though I begged and argued, and I was mad at him through the whole event.
I heard the next day that he asked Sheriff Vince to send a deputy over to Steckem Road the night of the parade. Roanie and that deputy sat in a patrol car and made sure Big Roan didn’t leave Daisy’s house.
A Place to Call Home Page 13
