“She was working at a downtown mission, helping the homeless. Go ahead and say it.”
“What did she do—scare them off the streets?”
Macy laughed. “Sometimes.”
“How did the two of you decide to come here?”
“I’d visited this area a lot when I was at Duke. These mountains . . . Alberta and I love them. They have the most incredible energy. Don’t laugh, but a lot of people believe they’re the most powerful spiritual vortexes on the planet.”
“I was raised Episcopalian. I’m sorry, but we laugh at everybody’s beliefs.”
“I was raised Methodist, and all I remember is wearing a pink dress with a poofy, pink crinoline skirt to Easter services. I think I was five years old. About 1970. Did you know they still made crinoline skirts in 1970?”
“You’re forty years old?”
“Don’t say it like it’s a curse. Alberta’s thirty-five. I’m forty. We’ve been together for nearly ten years. Tomorrow I’ll bring pictures of our two kids to show you. Alberta is their birth mother. I have fibroids. I assume you know that Santa Whittlespoon is their father? Everyone knows; we just pretend it’s a secret.”
“I’m still trying to apologize for saying you’re forty. You look younger.”
“Happy people look young. You’re really afraid of getting older, aren’t you? You should only be afraid of getting less happy.”
“I’m afraid of both.”
She scooped her hands toward her nose. “Inhale the energy of these ancient mountains, feel the power of these vortexes, and you’ll know how young you are by comparison.” She patted her thighs. “Your vagina is a vortex, too. Feel its magnetic pull. Rejoice in the siren song it sings. Can’t you hear it?”
“I thought I’d just forgotten to turn my radio off.”
Macy laughed. “The pseudo-scientific people argue that these mountains have an abundance of quartz rock, which acts as a kind of electro-magnetic generator. The Cherokees designated some of their most sacred sites here. They believed a person can’t truly know herself unless she has a strong sense of place. Alberta and I found our place here. We found ourselves.”
I loved Granny’s mountains, but I wasn’t ready to admit I’d found myself and my true calling by getting roasted in a fire and running here to hide. Since I couldn’t think of anything profound to say instead, I looked at Macy earnestly and announced, “Krispy Kreme Doughnuts started in North Carolina.”
She laughed and nodded. “I see you channel your spiritual discussions through food analogies and tourist trivia.”
“When I was struggling to make it through each day back in California, Delta’s biscuits came to symbolize every good memory I had of my grandmother and her home here. I was never happier as a child than when I visited her. I knew who I wanted to be, here, and it had nothing to do with my looks. This was the only place in the world where I was allowed to forget what I looked like. Granny gave me biscuits with cream gravy and didn’t care if I gained weight. So yes, biscuits represent a lot of things to me. Rebellion and freedom, to name a couple. Biscuits are a state of mind. A North Carolina state of mind, to me.”
“All right, good. Let’s see, can I think of other famous state foods?” She squinted and looked skyward for a second. Then, “No. But here’s some other trivia. “Andy Griffith and Ava Gardner are from North Carolina. Edward R. Murrow, O Henry, the Wright Brothers, oh, and Blackbeard the pirate. He wasn’t from here, but he spent a lot of time hiding around Ocracoke Island.”
“Andy Griffith and Blackbeard. I smell a reality TV show. ‘Mayberry, Arrrr. F.D.’”
She laughed. “The state motto is Esse quam videri, meaning “To be rather than to seem.”
To be, rather than to seem. I sagged a little. “I was happy just seeming to be somebody.”
“No, you weren’t. Once you accept your reality, you’ll be ecstatic at your transformation.”
“I’ll have a chat with my vortex about that and get back to you.”
She sighed. “You’re still working through your denial phase. I understand. I see that a lot among the women at our farm. We talk about it in our counseling sessions.”
I stared at her. “Are you saying I have the attitudes of a battered woman?”
“The desperate need to win approval from men, the feelings of unworthiness, the lack of self-love. Yes, some of the same issues we see at the farm, sure. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
I groaned. We sat for a moment, at an impasse. Macy picked up a CD. “On a lighter note . . . did you know Carl Sandburg retired to Flat Rock? It’s south of Asheville. Beautiful little town. These mountains lure poets and artists and singers. You can feel their heights in your soul.” She pressed the CD to her heart and recited, “‘Come and show me another city with lifted head singing, so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.’”
“An ode to Alberta,” I said drily.
“That’s from Sandburg’s ‘Chicago.’”
Chicago. Thomas. I had a deep need to be near Thomas in some small, harmless way. Just a quick inhalation of his essence, a toke off the energy of his vortex.
I looked at the hulking orange Kubota tractor sitting in my yard. Slow, sturdy, safe. “Can you teach me how to drive that tractor?” I asked Macy.
“Of course!” She smiled. “See, the power of the machine is the power of the universe, and you instinctively want to connect.”
No, I instinctively wanted to see Thomas’s cabin. But whatever.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Seated atop a humming diesel mammoth, I looked up and down Ruby Creek Trail. Through the deep winter forest I could just make out the rutted side-trail that led to Thomas’s land. Delta had warned me that his road was even rougher than mine, and that the road dipped down into Ruby Creek. I’d have to drive through rushing, foot-deep creek water.
Maybe I should try this trip again tomorrow. Pat myself on the back. Take baby steps.
No, Alberta will smell defeat on me. She’ll know I wimped out. She’ll eat my liver with homegrown strawberry preserves on it.
“Onward, beast,” I said to the tractor, shifting its gearshift and gunning the engine. “Robert Frost and I are fearless. Let’s take the road less graveled.”
I stood in Thomas’s front yard, admiring a high-mountain pasture with long views in nearly every direction. I walked among the perfectly aligned grape trellises, trailing my fingertips over the wooden posts and steel wires, stopping here and there to gently stroke the woody, gnarled vines already reaching the top wires.
“He’ll have a harvest this year, for the first time,” Delta had said. “I put in a word with somebody at the Biltmore Estate, and they’ll buy the grapes. He could have himself a business, just selling grapes.”
I turned in a slow circle, picturing the ridgetop full of luscious trellises filled with fruit. There’s something about a man who grows things, who nurtures other living beings, even plants, that’s warm and sexual and reassuring. I walked up the hill to his cabin with twinges of guilt on my spine.
“You made yourself at home at my house the past few years,” I said aloud. “It’s only fair that I get to take a look around your house.”
His cabin was functional and authentic, built of logs with clay chinking. At the corners, the logs had been notched to fit together. Even a girly-girl like me recognized the pioneer craftsmanship. I walked completely around the tiny structure, touching the clay-chinked river rock of the fireplace, the coarse roundness of the logs. I walked over to the outhouse, sniffed delicately—no odor, thanks to a proper design and a strong mountain breeze—studied the half-moon carved into its door, thought about taking a look inside at Thomas’s most private sitting spot, then wondered what kind of animals might have moved in while he was away, and walked quickly back to the cabin.
I sat down in a cane-seated wooden chair on a small front porch hooded in rusty, sal
vaged tin. His shovel and rake and other tools hung neatly from wooden pegs. My eyes kept flitting towards two small windows high on the wall. No curtains.
Don’t you dare look in those windows.
But there aren’t any curtains.
Don’t you dare.
Just a peek.
I stood on tiptoe and looked inside.
Monks’ cells had more décor.
The bed was more of a giant cot than a modern bedstead, built of rough logs and covered in piles of quilts and blankets. It occupied about half the available floor space and sat not more than spitting distance from the rock fireplace. Chills went over me. One popped ember and he’d wake up in a burning cocoon.
What I did next has no explanation other than ‘I couldn’t help myself.’ And I mean that seriously. The depth of my fears swallowed calm reason. I couldn’t leave that bed close to that fireplace. No matter what the consequences, I had to move it. My hands shook as I tried the cabin’s plank door. I was fully prepared to take a sledge hammer from Thomas’s tools and break the door off its bolt if I had to.
I didn’t have to. It wasn’t locked.
I looked at the door suspiciously, pushed it with my fingertips, and it swung open. I stepped inside and looked around, breathing hard. What a claustrophobic space, with a bucket on a ledge instead of a sink, one chair, and an old aluminum TV table. Deep shelves lined one end of the room from floor to ceiling. Stacks of canned food shared the space with rows of vodka bottles and dozens of books—mostly art and architecture texts, but also a Bible and an eclectic mix of novels and nonfiction, Studs Turkel, Hunter S. Thompson. Working-class homages to rebellion.
Then I saw the special shelf. About head high, not jumbled and packed like the others, but a small, sacred clearing among the clutter. It held children’s picture books, a fat white candle that had been lit so many times the wick guttered in a smoky cavern, and saddest of all, the blackened, mangled remnant of a metal toy truck. The toy Thomas’s son had held when he died. I stood there crying, with my hands spread like birds’ wings on my chest. Beside the ruined toy was a framed photo of a smiling, brown-haired toddler. Ethan.
I should never have invaded Thomas’s shrine to his son. I turned wildly, staring at the obsessive spectre of the damned bed too close to the fireplace. If I moved it, he’d know I’d trespassed. But if I didn’t move it, I’d have nightmares about him burning alive.
“Move it,” I ordered aloud. “Move it and let him be furious with you. Maybe you’ll keep him safe. That’s all that matters.”
I grabbed a bed post and began tugging.
An hour later, exhausted, aching and all-too-aware that even the most charming neurotic can’t justify trespassing, I staggered out the front door and shut it behind me. Inside, the bed now lived among the shelves, and the chair with the aluminum tray table lived next to the fireplace.
The sun was sinking in a blue-gold cloud. Cold wind whipped around me. I should head back to my house that instant, but I felt the need to leave some soft statement of apology, something that said, “I’m a friend, not a stalker.”
I hurried across the pasture and into the woods, found a small pine tree, broke off an armful of its boughs, and carried them back to the cabin. Using a fragment of steel wire from the grape trellises, I tied the boughs together. I got Thomas’s hammer, rummaged up a nail from a storage can, and efficiently hammered the nail into the upper-center of his door. “Take that, Alberta,” I muttered.
Then I hung my Christmas decoration on the nail. Green pine boughs with a wire belt. It didn’t make enough of a statement. I pulled my scarf off my head. It was a dark winter plaid, russet and gold—Old English Christmas colors, one might say. I tied it around the pine spray, knotted it in a bow, and stepped back. Martha Stewart would be proud.
By the time I drove the tractor back into my own yard my mood had sunk. What in hell had I been thinking? Darkness began closing in. Alberta and Macy, with their crew, stood around their trucks. Obviously they were waiting for me to bring their expensive tractor back before they left for the night.
“We were worried,” Macy said as I climbed down. “Are you all right? What happened to your scarf?”
I gave up all subtlety and covered the right side of my face with my gloved hand. “Sorry, I took longer than expected. See you in the morning. G’night.” As I strode past Alberta, she grunted her usual grunt and said, “Let me guess. You lost your idiotic scarf and you’ve spent all this time looking for it.”
I pivoted and looked her in the eyes. “There are a lot of ways to deal with the nasty little fears of ordinary life. Everyone handles them differently. You act as if you’ve earned the right to badger and judge other people, but no one has that right. I expected someone who’s been through what you’ve been through to have more compassion, or at least more basic decency. You’re a disappointment, Alberta, but that’s your problem, not mine.” I took a deep breath. “To sum it up, if you fuck with me right now, I’ll beat you to death with your own hammer. My aim may be amateurish when it comes to nails, but I guarantee I won’t miss a single whack on your fat head.”
I stomped inside the house.
For once, Alberta was speechless.
I took some solace in that.
Thomas
A few days before Christmas I became the star attraction at a cocktail party John and Monica hosted. Their mini-mansion glowed with synthetic garlands and silk poinsettias. Everything felt beautiful, clean and safe inside that bubble of money and possessions. An electric menorah flickered in the atrium window of the foyer, next to a twenty-foot Christmas tree done by an interior designer with a fetish for white—white lights, white ornaments, white flowers. Bing Crosby even sang White Christmas on the intercom music system.
In my rustic honor, I guess, the holiday style du jour among my brother’s friends was something I’d call “outdoorsy hiker at the mall.” Everyone wore expensively casual tweed-and-chinos, and that was just the women. As for me, I wore the latest Crossroads holiday fashion—running shoes, knee-scuffed brown corduroys, and an ancient Jerry Jeff Walker pullover Santa had traded for a fifth of Smirnoff. The title of Jerry Jeff’s classic, Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother, was printed on the shirt’s chest, but, being a gentleman, Santa had faded ‘Mother’ to a ghostly hint, using some bleach.
Everyone stole glances at me as if I’d recently come back from a foreign detainment camp or missionary work among the natives. I sipped a soft drink and pretended I didn’t want a triple Absolut on the rocks.
“I understand you live in that area of the Appalachians where Eric Rudolph was captured,” a banker in a Ralph Lauren sweater opined over his imported beer. “Is it true those mountain people supported his terrorism?”
“No, most of them didn’t like having a murderer in their forest.” Pike had helped the FBI track Rudolph, and everyone in the Cove was glad to see Rudolph arrested.
“But they’re still very gothic and tribal, aren’t they?”
“No worse than the average college fraternity.” I tossed back another rakish soda—non-diet, caffeinated, the hard stuff. Before I settled in the South I’d have been quick to believe stereotypes, too. A somber black woman took me by one arm. “Have you met any, you know, groups of ‘clannish’ men in pointed hats?”
I smiled. “Only Shriners. Oh, and the volunteer fire department puts on elf hats during the Christmas parade.”
An investment broker in a flowery brocade vest—this was a man, by the way—whispered, “So tell us, have you been to any snake-handling sermons or seen any albino banjo pickers?”
“No, I hang out with pot dealers and lesbian folk singers.”
Suddenly, David ran into the crowded party. He stared up at me with a six-year-old’s awe. “Santa’s on the phone! He wants to talk to you!”
My Santa, Joe Whittlespoon, obviously couldn’t be David’s Santa, aka St. Nick, and it scared me that Joe had a reason to call me in Chicago. David grabbed me by one hand and pointed
to a portable phone on a lamp table. “He’s right there! Calling from the North Pole!” I strode to the phone. David ran ahead of me, thrust out a remote, and activated the speaker feature. “Santa, here’s my uncle!”
“Thomas, that you?” Joe’s drawl boomed through the room.
My gut twisted. “What’s wrong?”
“I went by your cabin to check on things like I promised you I would and, uh, well, somebody had decorated the door for Christmas, and, uh, when I checked inside . . . your furniture was rearranged.”
“Was anything missing?”
“Nope. Pike came by and looked around, and couldn’t find anything wrong, just . . . strange, you know.”
“Let me get this straight: Nothing was stolen, but the furniture had been moved, and somebody decorated the door.”
“Yep. Somebody ‘decked your halls’ with pine limbs and a scarf tied in a bow.” He laughed. “You’ve been the victim of a drive-by decking.”
“Any suspects?”
“Oh, we already got your trespasser red-handed. Delta put the word out to her social circle for tips, and, well, the culprit ’fessed up the second she was confronted.”
“Who?”
“Cathryn Deen.”
Cathy? Cathy. “Cathy rearranged my furniture and decorated my door? Why?”
“She said that’s between you and her. She didn’t mean any harm, for sure. Looked embarrassed. Maybe she was doing some kind of feng shui thing to your décor. All I know is Cathryn Deen wanted your bed moved, so, by God, she moved it. If I was you, I’d be thrilled. This is probably some kind of ‘nesting’ thing. She wants you. She wants you bad. Here’s my take on it: She’s hoping you’ll walk in, trip over the new arrangement, and fall head over heels. It’s like she dug a pit to trap a wild hog.”
Cathy had moved my bed. Her hands on my sheets. Sheets I stained in her honor before I left for Chicago. I casually reached down and fluffed the bottom of my untucked Jerry Jeff Walker shirt to hide an erection. Time to end this public conversation. “Cathy’s okay?”
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