Silk and Stone

by Deborah Smith

  They were quiet as Samantha stroked her fingertips over Carl’s damp face, her eyes wide with distress. “Don’t be sad, Daddy.”

  He laughed. “I’m not sad. I’m damned happy to see my girls.” He leaned across to Frannie, who was crying too, and kissed her. They bowed their heads together. “I was afraid you might not ever come back,” he said gruffly. “Even if Sam never spoke a word, I didn’t mean to drive you away.”

  Frannie nuzzled his face and smiled. “We’re together again, and everything’s finally all right.”

  Samantha watched them kiss some more. “Jake promised,” she said, and sighed.

  A year later they brought the new baby home from the base hospital, sat on the living room couch, and introduced her to her older sister. “Samantha,” Frannie said softly, holding the pink bundle with squinty eyes and blond hair on her lap so Samantha could stand close to her. “This is your baby sister. This is Charlotte.”

  “Named after my hometown, not a witch,” Carl interjected.

  Samantha stood for a moment, gazing at Charlotte with giant, somber blue eyes. Then she nodded, patted the baby’s head carefully, and said in a calm, strong voice, “I’ll take care of you, Miss Charlotte. Stick with me. I have lots to tell you.” She looked at her parents evenly. “And when you’re old enough to talk, we’ll go to visit Jake.”

  Chapter

  Six

  Ellie and I turned ten last week, Jake wrote in the dog-eared notebook he kept stuffed under his mattress. The old people at Cawatie said it was important to keep track of where you were going, so you’d have trail markers if you got lost. Like Father, who said he’d never forget being sent to Indian boarding school on the reservation, where the teachers washed his mouth out with soap whenever he spoke Cherokee. Like Mother, who remembered every bit of the day Uncle William married Aunt Alexandra and gave her Mother’s ruby.

  Ellie and me found five aquamarines along the creek at Eagles Gap last week, he added. Father sold the two biggest ones for $100 each. He put it in the bank with the rest of our stone money. Mother says it’s for college. But I don’t want to go to college. I want to stay in the Cove forever and pay taxes.

  Mother and Father promised the taxes were getting paid without their stone money. As long as the sheriff didn’t come to make them move, Jake felt reassured. Ellie actually wanted to go to college and be a doctor, like Father, so he guessed their stone money wasn’t being wasted in the bank.

  I wonder about Samantha, he wrote next. Mrs. Ryder sent a picture in a Christmas card. Samantha is six, and she has a baby sister. She still talks. Me, Jacob Lee Raincrow—I taught her to talk. When I get old enough, I’ll take my college money and go to Germany, and visit her. I hope she doesn’t just talk German by then. If she does, I guess I can learn it. It couldn’t be harder than Cherokee, and I learned Cherokee when I was only a kid.

  He closed his notebook. There. Birthdays, stone money, the Cove, and Samantha. He had recorded all the important markers.

  Moe Pettycorn was one of Father’s patients, and he’d just come back from Vietnam a month ago with his right foot missing and a rainbow of pink scars along the right side of his neck. He’d played quarterback on the state all-star team, and everyone said he could have gotten into college on a football scholarship if he hadn’t flunked out of high school on the third go-round of his senior year. But the army got him after he flunked the last time, and he went off to war, where he drove a jeep over a mine and got blown up.

  His parents bought him a brand-new TransAm as a welcome-home present, and sometimes when Jake was hanging out at Father’s office on Main Street he saw Moe creep by, sitting up straight and rigid, clutching the steering wheel with both hands, his face pale as a ghost’s. People joked that squirrels could outrun Moe, the way he drove.

  Moe limped into Father’s waiting room one Saturday morning when the receptionist had gone to buy light bulbs. Jake and Ellie were manning her desk. “You got no appointment,” Ellie told him.

  Ellie was like Father. She took medicine seriously, and didn’t beat around any bushes.

  Moe stared at them in his tight, skittery way, his scars turning redder where they showed above his shirt collar. “I need a refill on my prescription,” he said. “I got the shakes.”

  Jake felt sorry for him. “I’ll get Father,” he said. But Ellie made a huffing sound. “Father’s cuttin’ off Mrs. Simpson’s corn. If he stops, she’ll keel over like she did the other time.” She nodded at Moe. “You gotta wait.”

  “I can’t wait!” Moe fumbled with his car keys, and they flew over the desk and landed on the floor by Jake’s feet. Jake picked them up, thinking sadly that Moe probably couldn’t throw touchdown passes anymore. The keys felt warm in his hand, and he got one of his certain feelings. He held them out to Moe, and when Moe grasped them in one big, shaky hand, Jake said softly, “There aren’t any mines around here. You just think there are right now.”

  Moe gaped at him. “You’re just a kid. How’d you know that?”

  Jake and Ellie traded a cautious look, then gazed at Moe innocently. “I reckon I’m old enough,” Jake said, “to know you’re not likely to get blown up driving to the grocery store.”

  Moe swallowed hard. “You two are strange little dudes. You give everybody the willies.”

  He stomped out. The next time he saw Jake and Ellie on Main Street, he drove faster. Before long he was up to the speed limit.

  There was power in using what they knew about people. Jake began to feel cocky about it.

  He and Eleanore draped their arms over a low board in the white wooden fence of the ring and watched their cousin ride a tall Welsh pony around in circles. It seemed to Jake that Tim rode the way Moe Pettycorn used to drive a car—as if he were scared to relax, as if he were always waiting for something to explode.

  They wore dungarees and T-shirts. Their tennis shoes lay somewhere along the dark green lawn between the brick stable and the riding ring. They were sweaty and dusty from prowling around the barn’s loft. Tim liked to go up there and play General Custer at the Little Bighorn, which didn’t bother them because their part in the drama was a lot more entertaining than his.

  They got to run around the stacks of hay and yell like warriors. Tim only got to stand on top, waving his arms at some invisible army, waiting to be scalped.

  Tim wore a neat white pullover with his name sewn in tiny gold letters on the collar, and hilarious brown pants that bulged out between his butt and his knees before the legs disappeared into shiny black boots. He also wore a hard little black hat with a chin strap.

  The pony’s name was Sir Lancelot, and he wore a flat brown saddle and a bridle with a gold name plate on the jaw piece. Tim showed the pony in jumping classes, and his mother had paid a lot of money for it, he bragged.

  They had a pony too, at home in the Cove, but it was a present from old Keet Jones, who lived in a trailer somewhere in a hollow at Cawatie. Mr. Keet had given it to them after Father fixed Mr. Keet’s gallbladder. Old Keet had taught it to do tricks, like bowing and counting with one front hoof. If you put a saddle on it, the pony lay down and rolled until the saddle fell off. A bit only made it clench its teeth, so they rode the pony bareback with a halter and two lead ropes.

  Father said it was so ugly it would never win anything but the label on a can of dog food. The first time she saw it, Mother laughed and called it grade A glue. Grade A became Grady, so that was its name. Watching Sir Lancelot plod around the ring without making any attempt to throw Tim off, Jake decided that Grady was a good deal more exciting.

  “Wanna ride him?” Tim asked, pulling Sir Lancelot to a stop by a pair of braided leather reins. “I bet you never thought I’d let you.”

  Eleanore grinned and cut her eyes at Jake. “Sure.” His twin sister oozed trouble like a new scab. So he smiled as they crawled through the fence.

  “I’ll show you how to do it right,” Tim said firmly, climbing off Sir Lancelot as they walked over. “ ’Cause you�
�re my cousins, and I don’t want you to act like dumb Injuns.”

  Jake just shrugged. Eleanore bristled like a cat. “Injuns aren’t dumb,” she retorted. “My father’s not dumb. He’s a doctor. Would everybody in town let him fix ’em up if he was dumb?”

  “He’s not dumb ’cause your granny and grandpa Raincrow were half breeds,” Tim told them. “I know all about this stuff. My mother told me.” Tim looked at them smuggly. “Your mother’s all white, so you know what you are? You’re quadroons.”

  Eleanore squinted. “What’s that?”

  Jake was tired of the whole discussion. He didn’t care what they were. “A cookie,” he explained. “Like a macaroon.” He elbowed Eleanore and gave her a be-quiet look. Mother and Father always reminded them that Tim and Uncle William were blood kin of theirs, and that they had to be polite for that reason. Even if Mother never visited Highview, she let them come. They didn’t have to like their aunt Alexandra or her ideas about Indians, but they weren’t supposed to say so.

  “I’ll show you how to ride,” Jake told Tim. Ignoring his cousin’s exasperated protests, he undid Sir Lancelot’s saddle and pushed it off. Jake swung himself onto the pony’s back and slapped him on the rump. Sir Lancelot jumped and went around the ring at a gallop.

  Tim bawled at him to stop, but Eleanore bounded forward and caught Jake’s arm, then swung up behind him, just like they did with Grady.

  But Sir Lancelot was no Grady. He stumbled sideways, and they fell off in a heap, laughing uproariously as soon as they caught their breath. The ground was soft sand, after all. Eleanore had landed in a pile of dried horse poop. Jake held his stomach and guffawed, and she threw one of the hard round turds at his head. He threw one back. It knocked her plastic bando off and crumbled in her long black hair.

  When Tim ran over, his eyes wide, they both threw turds at him. He shrieked, then started giggling. It was soon all-out manure war in the ring, with dried green missies flying everywhere. Sir Lancelot trotted to the gate and kept out of the way. Grady would have chased somebody.

  Jake thought it was a wonderful time, even when Tim hit him in the jaw with a dung ball that was still ripe enough to make a sticky splat. He chunked one of the fresh turds back at his cousin, and it smacked Tim’s chest with a glorious wet plop.

  Tim froze. As he stared down at the big green smear on his white shirt, his mouth screwed up and his face flushed bright red. When he looked at Jake and Eleanore from under the narrow brim of his black hard hat, tears streamed down his face. “My mom”—he choked up, and his mouth quivered—“my mom is going to be mad at me.”

  Jake traded a worried look with Eleanore. They liked their cousin despite his stuck-up attitude, and hadn’t meant to get him in trouble. “He’s scared of her,” Eleanore whispered. “He’s really scared. We gotta do something.”

  Jake nodded. “We’ll tell her it was all our fault.” They pulled Tim into the barn and scrubbed his chest with water from a spigot there, but succeeded only in making the stain spread like one of their mother’s watercolors. Tim howled.

  The three of them walked across a pasture to the big stone house in silence, except for Tim’s ragged sniffling. Highview sat on a hill overlooking town, with Pandora Lake behind it and a handsome lawn around it, and a wrought iron gate at the end of a rock drive. It had belonged to the Vanderveers as long as anyone could remember, and if Uncle William hadn’t married Aunt Alexandra, it would still be a place where everyone felt welcome, Mother said.

  Aunt Alexandra’s black housekeeper, Miss Mattie, came out a back door under a grape arbor and made nervous sounds when she saw Tim’s shirt. She wrinkled her nose at the way they smelled, then hurried them into a kitchen. “Hush up,” she told Tim, who couldn’t stop making noises. “Your mama hear you, she’ll come lookin’.” Miss Mattie jerked his shirt over his head, then ran to a deep metal sink set in marble counters along one wall and turned the faucet on.

  Tim dried up. Jake, ashamed for him, tried not to look at his bare pink chest and swollen eyes. Eleanore went over and unfastened his silly hat. “There,” she said, removing the thing and placing it politely on a worktable filled with silver waiting to be polished. Jake scrubbed a friendly hand over his cousin’s short red hair. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, now.”

  That was man talk for sympathy.

  They jumped to attention at the sound of sharp heels clicking on a marble floor somewhere in the house. Miss Mattie hummed under her breath, but her hands worked faster, rinsing Tim’s shirt.

  Aunt Alexandra came into the kitchen through a swinging door. She had long, smooth blond hair, and she always wore a dress, except when she was out riding her Arabians.

  She smelled of perfume, and she painted tiny dark lines along the tops of her eyes, so they turned up at the corners. She was fastening an earring to one ear, and she had a wad of jewelry in her hand. Dropping it in a silver dish perched on the corner of the kitchen table, she stared at Tim and put her hands on her hips.

  Jake looked at the dish. The ruby gleamed like a frozen drop of blood among all the silver and gold. It wasn’t really hers, he thought grimly. It was Mother’s.

  “What have you done?” she asked Tim in a voice as smooth as glass. Mother said she’d learned to talk that way at a place called the school for social climbers.

  “Just had a little accident, Mrs. Vanderveer,” Miss Mattie said, nodding and scrubbing at the sink. “Just got a spot on his shirt.”

  “Alexandra?” Uncle William’s soft voice came over a speaker on the wall. “You there, dear? I need my briefcase. I’m late for court.”

  Aunt Alexandra went to the speaker and pushed a button. “Look for it yourself. I’m getting dressed for lunch at the club.”

  She spoke to Uncle William in a sharp, ugly way Jake never heard his own parents use with each other. Uncle William was as friendly as a big, redheaded Santa Claus, but Jake couldn’t remember ever hearing him laugh.

  Mother said Uncle William had laughed a lot before he married Aunt Alexandra. Uncle William smelled funny—like mouthwash—all the time, and whenever he hugged him, Jake felt sad and lonely. Ellie said Uncle William made her feel that way too.

  Aunt Alexandra glided over to the sink, pulled the shirt out, and made a face. It smelled. Boy, did it smell like horse turds, Jake thought. The whole kitchen did.

  “What sort of accident did you have?” she asked Tim. Tim hugged himself and shook his head.

  Jake squared his shoulders. “I threw a horse tur—a piece of manure at him.”

  “Me too,” Eleanore added. Jake looked at her. She was no sissy. They could count on each other.

  Aunt Alexandra made another face. “Oh? And how did you two come to be covered in horse droppings?”

  Jake said solemnly, “Bad aim.”

  “Someone in this group’s telling fibs—or not telling the whole story. Miss Mattie, call my sister-in-law and tell her to come get her children. This visit’s over.” Aunt Alexandra and Mother didn’t speak. They hadn’t for years.

  She put a hand on Tim’s shoulder. His shoulders drew up like he had a string down his backbone. “Son?” she said in her soft, smooth tone, “What have I said, over and over, about taking care of your belongings? Hmmm. What?”

  “God helps those who help themselves,” Tim said hopefully.

  “Besides that. Think.”

  “We get as good as we give.”

  “That’s right. Do you deserve to be punished?”

  “No,” Jake interjected.

  “No, ma’am,” Eleanore added.

  Aunt Alexandra stared at them. She wadded the stained part of Tim’s wet shirt and cupped his jaw in one hand, as though he were a horse who was getting his mouth pried open to take a bit. Tim’s eyes filled with tears, and he made a little gagging sound.

  Slow horror crawled through Jake’s stomach. She stuffed that shit-dirty shirt in Tim’s mouth. Jake could taste manure as if it were on his own tongue. Eleanore coughed and put a hand over her mo
uth.

  “Go to your room,” their aunt told Tim. “Mattie, go with him and get him cleaned up.”

  Tim stumbled out behind the housekeeper, bumping into the kitchen table, his hands clutching the shirt and tears sliding down his cheeks again.

  Fury rose up in Jake like a dark cloud. He couldn’t let their aunt get away with this awful thing. The ruby drew him; without understanding why he wanted to touch it, he couldn’t help himself.

  Jake sidled over to the table, dug his hand into the silver bowl, and closed his fingers around the stone. His hand jerked, but he couldn’t let go. Once he’d touched a frayed spot on the cord of Mother’s iron. The zap of electricity was like this; it had nearly knocked him down.

  He swayed, his eyes half shut. A scene flashed in his mind, clear as a picture, then gone. “What are you doing?” Aunt Alexandra said loudly. Dropping the ruby, his head cleared. She was staring down at him. He couldn’t breathe. Never let pride get the best of you, Granny had told them. Keep what you learn to yourself. Don’t let the spirits know what you know. “Nothing,” he answered.

  “Nothing? I think you were about to take my necklace.”

  He was horrified. “I wouldn’t steal anything!”

  “Jake doesn’t even sneak grapes out of the bin at the grocery store!” Ellie added, her voice cracking. She looked flabbergasted. “And everybody does that.”

  Aunt Alexandra kept her hard eyes pinned on him. “Then why did you pick up something that doesn’t belong to you?”

  “I was only looking at it.”

  “You keep your itchy fingers off the things in this house, you understand? I’ve gone out of my way to put up with you and your sister because you’re Tim’s cousins, but I’m fed up. You’re lucky I let you come here at all, after the ugly thing you did to my niece when she was just a baby.”