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The Stone Flower Garden
A rich, gothic Southern story about the darker
side of family myths
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- Best Book of the Year 2002 – Romance Reviews
Today
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"On a dark spring night twenty-five years after I
helped bury my Great Aunt Clara Hardigree, I found myself
digging her up. I felt as if I was playing the lead in a
scene from some grotesque southern soap opera. Scarlett
O'Hara does the graveside scene in Hamlet. Alas, poor
Clara, I knew her well."
For Darl Union, life in Burnt Stand, North Carolina, has
always been a mixture of wealth, privilege, loneliness and
sinister family secrets. Even her childhood love for Eli
Wade, the son of a stone cutter, was tangled in a web of
deceit and murder. His father, an innocent man, died for
killing her great aunt.
Darleen Union and Eli Wade are childhood friends torn
apart by a murder that has never been solved. Raised by her
grandmother, Darleen is the heir to Hardigree Marble
Company, which controls the small North Carolina town of
Burnt Stand, and Eli is the boy genius destined to make
something of himself when his family is forced to leave. But
now, years later, long-buried secrets are about to be,
literally, dug up. This is a rich, gothic Southern story
about the darker side of family myths.
Top of Page
I call The Stone Flower Garden my southern gothic
“homage.” All it lacks is a Confederate ghost, a brooding
lord of the manor, and the evil housekeeper from Du
Maurier’s “Rebecca.”
The idea for the book came from such disparate sources as
a nearby granite quarry, the odd name of a local road here
in Lumpkin County, and my queenly grandmother’s turbulent
relationship with her somewhat disreputable sisters.
Grandmother never tried to kill one of her sisters (so far
as I know,) but I expect the thought crossed her mind a time
or two.
For a different glimpse into the “grandma versus her
sisters” history in my family, you’ll find one in a short
story I wrote for a BelleBooks’ collection,
Sweet Tea and Jesus Shoes.
Top of Page
“A richly
textured Southern Gothic novel destined to be a bestseller.”
-- Southern Scribe Reviews
“Passionate, compelling” -- Author Mary
Jo Putney
“A novel of searing emotions and fierce
compassion” -- Antoinette Stockenberg
“Haunting” -- Associated Press
“Gripping and atmospheric” -- San
Jose Mercury News
“One of those rare, rich stories that
grabs you with an uproarious first line and holds you with
unforgettable characters until the last page.” -- Kathleen
Eagle
“Enjoy the magic of Deb Smith.” --
Katherine Stone
“This book touches the heart.” -- Romance Readers Connection
Top of Page
On a dark spring night twenty-five years after I helped
bury my Great Aunt Clara Hardigree, I found myself digging
her up. I felt as if I was playing the lead in a scene from
some grotesque southern soap opera. Scarlett O'Hara does the
gravesite scene in Hamlet.
"Alas, poor Clara, I knew her well".
A propane camp lantern hissed and flickered among the
ferns by my feet. I dug for my great aunt's bones as quickly
as I could in the moonlit woods. A huge marble urn loomed
over me, its cascading marble flowers and marble vines
poking my shoulders and head like hard fingers. The Stone
Flower Garden was as much a part of the forest, as much a
Hardigree symbol, as Clara's hidden grave. I shivered.
Appalachian mountains as old as the earth looked down on my
shame, and beyond the deep glen with the bones and the
marble urn, the lights of Burnt Stand, North Carolina, my
sleeping hometown, winked knowingly at me.
"We always suspected you weren't cut from the
strongest Hardigree stone." The Hardigree name stood
for unbreakable women and unbreakable marble. But I, Darl
Union, granddaughter of Swan Hardigree Samples,
great-granddaughter of Esta Hardigree, had cracked.
And it was all because of a man. I looked up at Eli Wade,
the man whose trust I'd betrayed, just as my silence had
betrayed his wrongfully accused father, twenty-five years
earlier. Eli watched me with no understanding of what I was
about to show him.
I finally found Clara's skeleton no more than an arm's
length down in the loamy forest sod. When I was a child,
watching my Grandmother Swan dig the grave, it had seemed
like a mile. Now Clara was just dirty bones waiting to be
pulled up one at a time. Perhaps I should have brought one
of Swan's finest linen tablecloths to wrap her in. A
monogrammed one. We Hardigrees set a nice table.
The only thing that startled me was a necklace I plucked
from the grave soil. When I wiped its small pendant and held
it to the lantern light, I saw the twinkle of a diamond set
in a tiny, polished chip of milk-white Hardigree marble.
Grandmother had one just like it. So did it. It was a
tradition in our family. Not a family crest, but the next
best thing: Hard stone on hard stone, tinged with the soil
of our ambitions.
I shivered again. Done, then. Every piece of
infamous misery lay exposed. Nausea rose in my throat and I
sat back on my heels with Clara's pendant clasped in my
fist, my head bowed, my eyes shut. As a child I never meant
to help Grandmother murder her and blame it on someone else.
Like all the unforeseen fates "hate and true love and
success and failure" it just happened.
"Your father didn't kill Clara," I told Eli. "Swan and I
did."
Eli looked at the grave in shock, and then, slowly, back
at me. Ineffable sadness and anger began to crowd the night
air between us. I believed at that moment that he could
never forgive me, and I could never forgive myself. "How
could you do this to me?" he asked.
"Family," I whispered.
Children lose their innocence piece by piece. The layers
are carved away until our hearts have been exposed and
polished into an unnatural gloss. We spend the rest of our
lives trying to remember why we ever loved so passionately
and how we dreamed so simply, before life chiseled us down
to the core.
#
"When I grow up, I'll live somewhere as flat as spit
on a marble table," Eli vowed. He was ten years old,
homely, dirt-poor, smart, determined, and on an uphill
course in his young life. Eli sweated and heaved as he
helped his father, Jasper, push their overloaded pick-up
truck up the frying-hot pavement of an unusually well-kept
mountain road. The Wades had been moving uphill for two
weeks, rising from their familiar Tennessee hill country
into the Smoky Mountains, crossing the state line into
western North Carolina then straight up the backbone of the
tallest southern highlands. The damned old red-rusted truck
had fainted on every steep grade.
Cooking pots, kerosene lanterns, and a rusty charcoal
grill clanked on the sides of the truck's camper back like
metal fish struggling on stringer lines. Low tree limbs
tried to snag the dingy mattresses and lawn chairs bound
atop. A dish cloth flapped from one of the camper's
cranked-open side windows, as if waving at plain Annie Gwen
Wade, Eli's mother, who plodded stoically along the mown
roadside with sweat streaking her face and Eli's
four-year-old sister, Bell, clinging to her neck.
Eli squinted ahead, watching sweat drip from Pa's grim
face and thick arms. Pa maneuvered the steering wheel with
one hand and threw his weight into the truck's open door
frame. Eli winced. Sweat, poverty and pride clung to the
Wade family like dust from Pa's quarry jobs. He was both
ashamed of his father and fervently devoted to him. Suddenly
Eli noticed a thin pine tree along the roadside. Five small
handpainted signs were tacked in a row down its trunk.
God Bless President Nixon.
Jesus Won't Save Hippies.
Stop the war.
The first three were ordinary enough. He'd seen their
kind all along the backroads. But the bottom two signs
popped out at Eli like neon.
BURNT STAND, N.C. IS BUILT ON BLOOD, FIRE AND WHORES.
JEZEBEL'S DAUGHTER RULES HERE.
Good godawmighty. "Hey, look, Mama," Eli said loudly,
directing attention to the signs with a jab of his hand.
Mama gasped. "You turn your eyes away."
"What do they mean?"
"I'm not sure how to tell you, so you don't look."
He bent his head and kept pushing. What kind of place
were they headed to? When they rounded a curve Eli glanced
up through wet, dark hair, scrubbed a dirty forefinger
across the lenses of his cheap glasses, and saw the most
amazing thing. There, white against the deep evergreen
forest, stood two towering pillars of pinkish-white marble,
one on each side of the road. Both sported handsome marble
plaques filled with finely carved words. Eli gaped. More
signs. Did Jezebel rule at the Pearly Gates?
"Now these here words are worth lookin' at," Mama
said in soft awe. Eli read the plaques out loud, for Pa's
sake. Pa, bare-eyed, could pick out the finest crack in a
slab of marble, or find a shooting star across the Milky
Way. He just couldn't read.
"Welcome to Burnt Stand, North Carolina," Eli read in a
heavy drawl. "Marble Crown Of The Mountains.' And the other
sign says, "Home of the Hardigree Marble Company.
Established with pride in 1925 by Esta Hardigree, who lit
the fire of progress and never let a stone go unturned for
commerce."
Beyond the strange marble monuments were huge fir trees
and blue-green mountains. The rhododendron-hemmed two-lane
led up an escalating hill between high mountain forest so
deep it cast cool, blue-black shadows in the broiling August
sun. Eli and Pa pushed the truck a few more yards, finally
cresting that last, torturous hill.
"My god," Pa said suddenly. Eli, Mama, and Bell gathered
next to him in the middle of the road, gazing in stunned
silence at a pristine valley and a kind of a town they'd
never imagined.
"It's pink," Eli said.
Burnt Stand blushed, deceptively innocent under the sun.
#
Pink. My whole life was pink. Pink town, pink marble
fortune, pink marble mansion, pink frothy clothes, pink
skin. My name was Darleen Swannoa Union, but it might as
well have been Pinky. Swan Hardigree Samples, my
grandmother and namesake, kept me scrubbed and shaded so
much I was probably the only white seven-year-old girl in
Hardigree County, North Carolina, who had no freckles. I was
the heir to the Hardigree Marble Company, a princess of
southern mountain marble. I was pink and miserable.
We were in the dog days of summer. The air felt like a
warm wash cloth over my nose. At night the frogs and
crickets and whippoorwills outside my ornate bedroom windows
at Marble Hall sang sadly, as if waning summer moons were a
call to mourn. Not many weeks earlier, terrorists had killed
nearly a dozen Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics.
Our local Baptist minister said that proved the end of the
world was near, which made sense to me, since Jerusalem was
in Israel.
The ground seemed to bake on a stone griddle. Burnt Stand
hunkered over the state's only major marble vein. Polished
pink stone gave the courthouse, the city offices, the
library, and other downtown buildings a sheen of old-world
elegance, an almost Mediterranean lightness among the green
mountain forest. Barnyard fences glistened with it. Cast-off
chunks lined our flower gardens. Back-yard tomatoes draped
themselves on rough marble walls. The chamber brochure
claimed every house and public edifice contained at least a
foundation or trim of our precious bedrock. For decades
tourists had come just to view our fabulous town square and
stroll our marble sidewalks.
I hated those sidewalks. On that miserable summer day in
1972 they burned my pink-toe-nailed feet even through my
pink sandals. Yet I stood under the awning in front of the
Hardigree Marble Showroom as Grandmother commanded that I do
whenever I waited in public: Shoulders squared, head up,
hands clasped around my pink straw purse in front of my
spotless pink jumper with the embroidered pink rose on the
front. Itchy sweat flattened the pink ribbons that streamed
from my long French braid. I was a sturdy brunette child
with dark blue eyes interested in seeing the world without a
pink veneer.
Standing next to me, nearly identical in her own pink
jumper and ribboned braids, was my best friend and only
playmate, Karen Noland. Karen and I shared a tutor at Marble
Hall, my grandmother's estate, and didn't attend public
school. We were never allowed to play with other children in
town, and could only run free in the woods behind the hall.
We were lonely but adored each other. We were both orphans
being raised by our grandmothers. Swan Hardigree Samples and
Matilda Dove, my grandmother's assistant, had known each
other all their lives, and so had their dead daughters--our
mothers--and so had we. There was only one major difference
between my family and Karen's.
We were white, and they weren't. Even in our cloistered
town, defined and ruled by my grandmother, that made all
the difference.
I couldn't say Karen and her grandmother, Matilda, were
black, because they were more of a honey color, with pale
hazel eyes and long coarse hair the color of chocolate ice
cream. Neither Karen nor I had ever seen a picture of
Karen's dead mother, Katherine, so we had no idea what color
she had been. Karen kept a picture of her father on her
nightstand, and he was a nice looking black man in a Marine
uniform. I knew only that Karen and Matilda were not the
same as us, but not the same as the black people on farms
around town, not black as the ace of spades, as
people said. And I knew only that I loved them dearly.
"Wish we could walk down the street to the Hall," Karen
whispered from the side of her mouth, as we stood at
attention, sweltering. "We look like fools.".
"Only white trash and nobodies tread the side of the road
like a gypsy," I intoned. It was a favorite saying of our
grandmothers.
"Hot pink fools," Karen insisted.
I sighed. It was true. We stood like silly marble statues
in front of the Hardigree Marble Showroom, where the south's
well-to-do could order anything from a ton of marble
flooring to a hand-carved cherub. Across from us, on the
shady town park at the center of the square, an immodest
replica of the Parthenon served as our park gazebo. Given
to a grateful citizenry by Esta Hardigree, 1931, a
plaque on the Parthenon confirmed. A group of ordinary
children chased each other wildly across the park lawn. My
heart ached with enforced dignity. Karen made a mewling
sound. We could not violate our grandmothers' edicts.
As we stood there sweltering under our peculiar
status--one little pink white girl and one little pink honey
girl--an odd site appeared beyond the dip in West Main. An
old pickup truck entered the square between giant magnolias
along the marble sidewalk, creeping along without any
apparent human guidance. Pots and pans swung from ropes on
the camper back. The truck rattled like a cow bell. Mounds
of boxes and burlap bags were strapped to the top with
ropes, and a rusty pink tricycle had been chained to the
truck's front bumper.
From our sidewalks, our park, and our shop fronts, people
stared. I craned my head and finally made out a tall,
handsome but rough-looking man pushing the truck from the
driver's side. A thin, brown-haired woman walked behind, the
skirt of her limp polyester dress swaying above her thin
tennis shoes. She carried a little girl who burrowed her
head into her mother's neck.
And then, I saw the boy.
He was tough looking, with skinned black-brown hair
except for a shaggy lock that fell across his high forehead
and his thick, black-rimmed glasses, the kind old men wore.
His body looked long and thin inside faded jeans and a
t-shirt. He bent his slender shoulders to the truck's back
corner like an ant pushing a boulder. Lean muscles strained
in his arms. He looked like a boy Jesus, pushing a pick-up
truck instead of pulling a cross.
"No, a Gypsy boy", I thought for redemption's
sake, though there'd never been evidence of Gypsies
traveling through Burnt Stand, before. At least the boy was
in charge of his world, moving it. My world was as rooted as
the marble cherubs in the Hardigree showroom window, and I
had no control over any of it. I watched with fascination as
the rattling truck inched around the oval circuit of the
town square, then headed toward me. Slowly, the boy and his
world eased into a small, empty parking space directly in
front of the Hardigree Marble Showroom's elaborate white
doors and soaring arched windows. Twenty feet from Karen and
me. We had a front row seat.
"Strangers and white trash," Karen whispered fearfully,
and backed up until she was pressed against the marble
façade of the showroom offices. She gave me a comical
Lucille Ball look of horror. "You better come over here with
me!"
I shook my head. The exciting, frightening outside world
had suddenly parked right before me. The boy's chest heaved.
He dragged a hand over his glasses, smearing dirt and
moisture on them as he raised his head. When he spotted me,
he did a double take. I knew I looked like a big, pink-dyed
Easter chick, and my face burned with humiliation. As if he
couldn't be certain I was real, he pulled his glasses off
and cleaned them on the tail of his white t-shirt. I stared
at him openly, and he stared back. His eyes were large,
brown, and soulful, with long lashes. The most beautiful
eyes I'd ever seen. He tilted his head as he tried to see me
without aid. "Yep," he said. "You're still pink."
"Eli, you wait right here with Bell," the woman said,
setting the little girl down next to him. "Your pa and me'll
be right out, you hear?"
"Yes, ma'am." He took his baby sister's hand. She slammed
herself against him and hid her face in his stomach. His
mouth flattened in resignation, but he patted her on the
head. His mother looked my way and smiled shyly. "Hello,"
she said. "You're the prettiest sight."
"Hello, ma'am," I replied primly. "And thank you."
Grandmother had trained me in graciousness via innumerable
teas, dinners, and picnics. I had been presented to the
governor, the vice president, and more than a few marble
barons, including an Italian man friend of hers who barely
noticed me except to call me il mio piccolo e aumentato.
My little rose. Italian for pink. "How do you do, ma'am?"
"Why, pretty good, thanks."
"Annie, let's go." The hard-looking man scraped a comb
through his dark hair and rubbed his face with a towel he
pulled from the truck's cracked vinyl dash. He ignored me
and went instead to Carl McCarl, my grandmother's handyman.
Carl McCarl shuffled like an old, bald bear as he mopped
marble sidewalks and washed down buildings. He was in a bad
mood. Grandmother had ordered him to go up on the main road
when he finished there, and tear Preacher Al's signs down
off the pine tree again.
Preacher Al had been a stonecutter in the old days, but
he went crazy at some point, forcing Great-Grandmother Esta
to throw him out of town. He only preached through his pine
tree pulpit, and everybody ignored him. Swan said he was a
sad old man, and her mercy toward him always amazed me. Carl
McCarl went up on the road regularly and took down his lurid
signs. Swan would never explain their meaning to me.
"Excuse me," the boy's father said to Carl McCarl in a
deep, working-man's drawl, the voice of cornfields and
textile mills, long-haul truck routes and late-night
roadhouses. "My name's Jasper Wade. I'm here to see Tom
Alberts. Said to look for him at the Hardigree showroom here
in town. Is this it?"
My ears pricked up. Tom Alberts was my grandmother's
business manager, handling the grubby details of firing and
hiring workers at the quarry and the showroom. Hardigree
Marble employed over 300 people. A good third of Burnt
Stand's workforce.
Carl McCarl turned slowly and stared at Jasper Wade for a
long time. Jasper Wade scowled and flexed his massive
forearms. "You got a problem with me, Mister?"
"Go round back. Around that corner, yonder. Down the
alley. Ring the doorbell at the office sign. And don't worry
about that there truck. I'll get you a mechanic to look at
it."
Jasper Wade's face loosened with surprise. His expression
said his whole life had been hard work and back doors, and
any kindness was unexpected. "Thank you kindly." He motioned
for his wife to come along. I watched them walk down the
burning sidewalks and disappear down a marble alley at the
end of the block. Carl McCarl watched him until he
disappeared. I had never seen the old man so interested in
just another stonecutter, or in anyone, for that matter. He
wiped his forehead with a hand that trembled, then shuffled
inside the showroom.
I shrugged off his strange behavior as I returned my
attention to the boy, pondering how to test him.
Greetings, I said to people, instead of Hello. I
had read the salutation in a Victorian book of manners, and
it clung to me like the scent of a comforting nosegay, a
test to find the other lonely souls in the world. This
happened because Swan kept me so isolated and spoke to me as
if I were a small, pink adult. And so I had become a
caricature, like a bad reproduction of a classic marble
vase. A faux child. No one ever responded in like to my
salutations. My whimsies were far too ponderous. My heart
pounded. "Greetings," I said loudly. I waited for him to say
something stupid.
After a moment spent chewing a thought, the boy nodded.
"Greetings," he answered seriously, the first boy who ever
had.
I smiled in disbelief. "My name's Darl Union. What's
yours?"
"Eli Wade."
"Is that your sister?"
"Yeah." His little sister burrowed deeper into his
stomach, clutching his t-shirt in her small fists and hiding
her face.
I looked closer at her. "Can she breathe like that?"
He shrugged. "Aw, she's a trout. She's grown herself some
gills."
This was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and now I
fully admired Eli Wade's way with words. I opened my mouth
to say so, but from the corner of my eye I saw trouble
coming. The children in the park included several older
boys, all white except for Leon Forrest, the son of a
tobacco farmer. Leon lounged nearby, skinny and dark as
night, scowling and grimy in old jeans and a t-shirt. He was
waiting for his daddy to come out of the feed and seed
store. He sneaked peeks at Karen every time he saw her in
public. He had a crush on her. She ignored him..
My stomach clenched as a gang of boys left the park and
bounded our way. "Darl, Darl, you come over here with me!"
Karen hissed. I didn't budge. Eli's shoulders tightened and
his head came up. He pressed his glasses high against the
bridge of his nose and scoured the other boys with a look.
In return, they offered some creative spitting and sneering.
Stonecutters' sons. Tough as rock.
"What the heck kind of truck is this?" one said. The
others joined in.
"I ain't never seen nothing so sorry."
"You all live in that thing?"
Eli said nothing. As if expecting the worst, he pried his
little sister from his shirt front, picked her up, then
opened the truck's passenger door and set her on the faded
vinyl seat. She whimpered, gave the scene outside one quick,
terrified look, then scooted down, out of sight. I heard her
sobs. When Eli faced the gang again they closed in a little.
One of the more swaggering types hooted and shot out a hand.
He prodded Eli's shoulder. "Hey. Hey. What's wrong with that
girl--is she some kind of retard?"
Eli punched the boy as quickly as a black snake snatching
a mouse. The boy tumbled backwards into the others. Suddenly
everyone was yelling. Eli stood there with his feet apart in
dirty tennis shoes, his fists drawn up like a boxer's, his
whole attitude quiet and deadly. Heat fogged his glasses. ""Get
him"," a boy yelled, and they all stepped forward. Fists
began swinging. One of them slammed Eli in the mouth, and he
went down. The others piled atop him.
My life as a statue was over.
I leapt in a pink heap atop the downed boys, clawing and
slapping as I pushed my way to Eli. I heard Karen squealing
and looked up just enough to catch her bounding forward in
my defense. One of the boys shoved her, but suddenly Leon
Forrest had that boy by the collar of his shirt, shaking
him. When the rest of the boys realized two girls and tough,
black Leon Forrest were in the fight--and not just any two
girls--they backed off as if poisoned. Eli Wade got to his
feet and wavered in place, blood streaming down his chin. I
was sprawled on the pavement.
The whole gang stared at me, the color draining from
their faces. The pink rose appliqué had been half-torn from
my skirt, my pink hair ribbons were akimbo, and I was in a
furious pink froth, with my skirt halfway up my waist,
revealing pink panties. I glared from them to the row of
fingernail scrapes on my arm, oozing blood. "S-s-sorry," one
boy said.
"Aw, shit," another intoned.
"He's mine," I said. "You leave him alone or I'll
tell my grandmother to fire your daddies from the
quarry." I was devoid of mercy or nobility in the heat of
the moment. I felt a hand under my armpit. Eli pulled me to
my feet then stepped in front of me gallantly while I jerked
my skirt down. He squinted behind his fogged glasses, but
his fists were steady. "Git, assholes," he said to the boys.
They turned and ran.
My breath backed up into my skull, and I felt dizzy. When
my eyes cleared, Eli was looking at me with a frown. I shook
my head. "Don't be afraid. I didn't mean it about their
daddies. All the stonecutters belong to us Hardigrees. Now
those boys know you're one of them."
"Blood dripped from his nose, and he wiped it furiously.
"I don't belong to nobody. Leave me be." He climbed
into the truck, hauled his wailing sister out, and shut the
door. "Shussh, Bell," he soothed, as he sat down on the
running board with her in his lap. "Nothing ain't hurt but
our pride."
Karen snatched my arm and swung me around. "Look at you!
Oh, Darl! We're going to be in trouble." One of her braids
was mangled. Crisp, wiry brown hair tufted from the ruined
plait like stuffing from a pillow. "You okay, Karen?" Leon
Forrest asked, as he hovered nearby. "Your do's comin'
undone."
She whirled toward the tall dark farm boy as if he
intended to stain her much paler brown skin. "You go on.
Shoo. Go away."
"As long as you ain't hurt."
"I'm f-fine," she sputtered. "Go on, boy. Thank you.
Bye."
He sighed as if he could live on that small gratitude,
then headed down the sidewalk, his shoulders hunched. I
gazed unhappily at Eli and his sister. She burrowed her head
in his stomach and sobbed. He sat there stoically, ignoring
me.
At that moment Karen's grandmother, Matilda, drove up in
her gold sedan and slid out of the big car in a quiet whoosh
of fine fabric. Matilda was an imposing woman, tall,
slender, and impeccably neat in a tailored blue dress, her
thick chocolate hair molded into a short, fashionable
hairdo, her skin light enough for freckles. Only degrees of
skin tone separated her from Swan, in terms of their
majestic effect on people. "What in the world?" she asked,
and her hazel eyes flashed angrily at Eli. "Who are you,
young man?"
He stood, prying his little sister away for a moment. He
bobbed his head to her, a polite gesture few white children
made to colored women. "Eli Wade, ma'am."
She went very still, her hand rising, slowly, to her
throat. "Wade," she said softly. Like Carl McCarl, she
seemed stunned..
"He didn't do anything wrong," I said quickly. "I'll take
the blame for him. He's mine, Matilda. Please?" I
smoothed my hand across my arm, swiping blood from my
scratch. I had seen this in a movie. Blood rituals. Before
Eli Wade could pull away I drew my finger through the blood
beneath his nose, then dabbed it on my own cheek. Unaware of
any other forces swirling around us, I met the slow, amazed
heat of Eli's stare. "My stonecutter." I told him.
I had decided we were cut from the same rock.
#
"The past is carved in stone. Never leave the pieces
for someone to find". Swan Hardigree Samples had written
that rule on a slip of paper when she was a girl, and had
never forgotten it. The warning ran through her mind now as
she held a yellowed photograph at her desk in the dark
luxury of her library at Marble Hall. Matilda pulled an
armchair beside Swan's desk and they bent their beautiful
heads together over the photograph.
It had been taken on a rolling back street in Burnt Stand
on a spring day in the mid-1930's. Swan's aging mother,
Esta, posed with jaunty elegance before the scaffolding and
the piled stone block of yet another fine marble home she
was building. Esta Houses, she called them. She was
building her own town, building her own version of the past,
and grinding the rest to dust. A tight bow of dark material
banded her ample hips in a long-waisted dress. Her bodice
sagged a few inches too low, revealing a crevice of fine
bosom below a neck with skin going as soft as pale crepe.
Around her, workmen posed awkwardly, their hats in their
hands, obedience in their eyes. Behind her on a rough
pedestal of tumbled stone, gazing out steadily at the
camera, Swan herself stood in the glory of a 19-year-old's
future, lovely and reserved in a long slender skirt and
high-buttoned white blouse, her eyes stern but still capable
of warmth and humor. Her younger sister Clara lay on her
side atop a low stone wall, dressed in schoolgirl cotton but
lounging like a southern Cleopatra, even to the sly
expression on her face. Off to one side, away from the
whites, Matilda stood much as Swan did, with steady decorum
and quiet command, a heavy cameo closing her blouse at the
throat. Strangers assumed she was a live-in colored
companion, or a personal maid of some kind.
Behind and above them all, framed by the unfinished
marble walls of the house, a tall, dark-haired white man
stood with his long legs braced apart on scaffolding. He was
dressed in worker's clothes and had the muscular build of a
stonecutter, but there was more pride than humility in his
face. He'd hooked his thumbs in loose pockets over long
thighs. He seemed to be standing easily atop the world.
Their world.
His name had been Anthony Wade.
"What a handsome sight Anthony made that day," Matilda
said. "We could barely keep our eyes off him."
"But he only had eyes for you." Swan put the photograph
back in a small marble-and-wood box with a lock on the lid.
She flicked the dial and handed the box to Matilda. "I wish
you hadn't kept that."
"It's the only picture I have of him." She paused, her
throat working. "Thank you for helping me find his family."
They touched hands for a moment. Swan nodded to her, but
grimly. "This family of Anthony's came long after he left
Burnt Stand," Swan reminded her. "You owe them nothing."
"I owe Anthony," she said.
"If Clara hears about us bringing them here, you know
there'll be trouble."
"She won't hear. No one remembers Anthony but us--and old
Carl. No one else will associate the Wade name with him."
She rose, and took the box. "I have to help Anthony's son
and his family, Swan. I have to try."
Swan nodded wearily. She indulged Matilda, though she
herself had long since given up on sentiment and kindness of
the overt variety. She and Matilda had survived hard
childhoods, small-minded dictates, men who came and went,
and daughters who never understood and died young. She
feared that bringing the Wades to Burnt Stand was a mistake
she'd regret for the rest of her life.
"Send Darl in," she told Matilda.
Matilda frowned. "She's claimed Eli Wade as her personal
project. She'll defend him. I don't know what to make of it.
You should have seen them together. Like two little
warriors." An amazing child, Swan thought.
She steepled her chin on one hand, and shut her eyes.
Darl was bright, smart, beautiful, loving. Her future could
be ruined so easily. Like fine hard stone, she had to be
chiseled just right. Swan would not make the same mistakes
she'd made with Julia, Darl's mother.
"I'll let her have the boy for now." Swan opened her eyes
and looked at Matilda. "She'll understand her place and his,
soon enough."
"Don't we all?" Matilda said sadly, and left the room.
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