Blue Willow (6 page)

Lily blushed red from the hair down. “And a princess,” she whispered, then got up and ran into the house.

Mr. MacKenzie drove him to Aunt Maude’s house, in town. Drew MacKenzie couldn’t work the farm very well with one good hand and only Mrs. MacKenzie to help him. Artemas was shocked to realize Mr. MacKenzie had brought him to Aunt Maude’s because the farm had no phone. Then he remembered it hadn’t ever had one. That merely curious fact from Artemas’s childhood now became a grim one as he understood: The MacKenzies couldn’t afford a phone.

During the ride to town he cast pensive glances at Mr. MacKenzie, who was still a strong giant with a smile for everyone. But he looked grim and tired, and his brown hair had thinned so much that Artemas could glimpse the freckled tan scalp of his crown. He wasn’t old, but his shoulders were stooped. He’d lost his left hand in a hunting accident as a boy, and the metal hook he wore had fascinated Artemas. Now, he saw that the hook was tarnished and dented, ugly, pitiful.

Artemas called his grandmother in New York. She lectured him about his responsibilities and said she’d arrange a plane ticket for him. She’d negotiate with the school about his punishment.

Grandmother said he’d only end up bitter and small, like Uncle Charles, if he didn’t stay at school. A military career was her dream for him; a Colebrook could redeem the family’s name with discipline and service. She’d use her
connections to have him nominated to West Point after he graduated from prep school.

After all, he was a top student, a leader, and a Colebrook. That might not mean much to the rest of the world anymore, but it meant everything to her. The whole world sat on Artemas’s shoulders.

Humbled and depressed, Artemas barely touched his dinner of peas and corn bread with the MacKenzies that night. Grandpa MacKenzie had died a year ago. Grandma MacKenzie had heart trouble and stayed in bed all day, knitting and reading her Bible. They helped her to the table. As she gummed corn bread and buttermilk, she watched him with bright little eyes.

“You’ve got to go back, boy,” she said. “You’re too old to run off from responsibility.”

Responsibility
. Artemas hung his head. All grandmothers had that word welded to their dentures. They didn’t know just how much responsibility he had. His parents had lost Port’s Heart to the bank. They’d moved the family to Uncle Charles’s shabby but still respectable estate, where Charles disdainfully refused to share the main house. Instead, he gave them an old ten-room cottage that had served as the estate manager’s home in the glory years long before Artemas’s birth. Dismayed by the ignominy, Artemas’s parents cultivated their far-flung friends and were always visiting somewhere, often for weeks or even months at a time. They left Artemas’s brother and sisters in the care of governesses.

Grandmother, who lived in the main house, was constantly fighting and scheming to evade Uncle Charles’s control. Charles’s wife snubbed the entire Colebrook clan and paraded their college-age daughters in society, telling everyone that she’d get them safely married to money and a better name.

Grandmother told Artemas that neither Uncle Charles nor Father were the men she would have raised them to be, if she’d had the power to keep them with her at Blue Willow, but at least Uncle Charles was bright enough
to keep Colebrook China out of bankruptcy. She put up with him.

Artemas tried to set an example for his brothers and sisters and make certain they were treated decently. He tried to live up to Grandmothers expectations. He tried manfully to ignore his uncle’s nasty comments and petty humiliations.

He was filled up to the throat with trying, and he knew how it felt to strangle.

Mrs. MacKenzie clucked at his lack of appetite, then rose and came to him. “I’ll put some more liniment on you after I’ve washed the dishes,” she said, smoothing her warm, callused hands over his throbbing face. “You rest now, you hear? You have to go back to New York, but you sure don’t have to worry about it until tomorrow.”

He was shocked at how her touch embarrassed him. He wanted to stare at the large breasts making mounds under her short-sleeved flannel shirt. He’d never thought of her that way, almost six years ago. He flushed from the inside out, filling with strange, discomforting sensations he’d begun suffering lately around the opposite sex. Guilty and confused, he looked away. Nothing was the same.

But Mrs. MacKenzie ruffled his crew cut as if he were still a child. “I think it’s time Lily heard the bear story. I bet you don’t even remember me tellin’ it to you when you were little, do you, Artie?”

“I remember.” He shot a grateful look at her, warming to the memory. Cutting his eyes across the table at Lily, he added, “But I bet it’s too scary for a little girl.”

“Is not,” she chirped. “I saw a baby bear in the back pasture last year. And I didn’t run.”

“I bet
it
ran,” he countered, arching a brow. “I bet it said, There’s that monkey with the rotten apples.’ ”

“I’m not a monkey!”

Mrs. MacKenzie put her hands up. “Hush, both of you. Do you want me to tell the story, or not?”

“Yes!” they answered in unison.

After the dishes were washed and put away, and they’d helped Grandma MacKenzie back to bed, and Mr.
MacKenzie had gone out to check on the livestock for the night, Mrs. MacKenzie took Artemas and Lily to the plain little front parlor, switched on a small ceramic lamp on a claw-footed table in one corner, and told them to sit on the couch. Lily curled up beside Artemas, cheerfully elbowing him in the ribs. He thumbed his nose at her, and her mouth popped open in shock. “Mama, he—”

“Tattletale,” he interjected.

She clamped her mouth shut and gave him a slit-eyed stare, but said no more.

Suddenly Mrs. MacKenzie crouched and growled, capturing their attention. The lamp cast spooky shadows on her. She crooked her hands into ferocious bear paws and growled again. “This is the story of how the MacKenzies and the Colebrooks met. It’s about Old Artemas”—she pointed to Artemas—“who was your great-great-great-grandpa, and Elspeth MacKenzie”—she pointed to Lily—“who was your great-great-great-grandma.”

Lily couldn’t figure out why people who weren’t even around anymore were called
great
, but as long as her relatives were as great as Artemas’s, she wouldn’t protest.

“Old Artemas came straight off a ship from England and traveled through these woods looking for a place to settle. Elspeth had come here a few years before that, from Scotland. She lived right here, in a cabin where this very house stands today. Her husband died, and she had two half-grown sons to raise.”

Mama growled and clawed the air. “Old Artemas was young and strong, but he didn’t know these woods. There came a bear!” Lily jumped, then slid closer to Artemas. Her mother leaned over them, her hands hooked, glaring at Artemas, who smiled in anticipation.

“The bear, he rose up over your great-great-great-grandpa, with his fangs dripping slobber—the bear, not your grandpa—and then, then, that big black bear, he drew back one big paw and ripped your grandpa’s arm right to the bone!”

Her arms waved wildly as she pawed the air inches
from their faces. Lily was breathless with excitement. “What happened then?”

“Old Artemas whipped out his hunting knife with his good hand, and he quick-like cut that bear’s heart out!” She snatched a piece of kindling from the hearth and carved an imaginary bear. “And he ate it!”

“Agh! Neat!”

“Then he staggered off through the woods, dripping blood—Old Artemas, not the bear—with his arm hanging half off.” She let her right arm dangle as she staggered dramatically. “And finally he fell down, and he crawled, and he crawled, and he crawled, because he was a big, tough Englishman, and he wasn’t about to give up and die when he’d only been in America a few months.”

“And then Elspeth MacKenzie found him,” Artemas said, leaning forward eagerly.

“That’s right. The Widow MacKenzie, with her two half-grown sons, took in that wild-looking stranger, all torn and bloody where the bear had clawed him. There weren’t any doctors in these mountains then. The widow Elspeth sewed his arm up and nursed him while he healed, and he fell in love with her, because she was so smart and strong and pretty.”

“Like you!” Lily said.

“Elspeth’s two half-grown sons became like kin to Old Artemas, and they even forgave him for being an Englishman and city-born and a terrible farmer, what with the MacKenzies being Scots and lovers of the land.”

She clasped her hands over her heart dramatically. “Elspeth told Artemas he’d never make a farmer, and he had to do what God had gifted him to do, just like all his people before, back in England. She helped him find the white clay the Indians had told her about, right down here in the creek bottom over at Blue Willow.”

“Where the big lake is now,” Artemas said.

“Right there, yessir. Down where the bass swim now, at the bottom of Clay Lake, that’s right where old Artemas dug the clay and set up his china business.”

“Is the building still there?” Lily wanted to know. “If I held my nose and sat on the bottom, could I see it?”

“No, no, the MacKenzies burned it all down right before the war. But that’s another story. Now, where was I?”

“About Old Artemas’s clay,” Artemas told her.

“Yes. Well, he knew this clay was special, just as fine and creamy as the clay the Chinamen had used to make the most beautiful china in the world. So Artemas built himself a potter’s wheel, and a furnace, and he went to work. And in a year he was sending white china down to Marthasville by wagon to be sold and shipped. He and Elspeth were so happy over it all.”

Lily nodded drolly “And then he got rich, because he was a Colebrook.”

“Hold your horses, that wasn’t till lots later. Anyhow, everything was fine until the next spring, when Old Halfman came through.”

Lily huddled closer to Artemas but looked up at him slyly. “I know what he looks like.” Artemas put an arm around her. Her sly expression dissolved into red-faced delight.

Mama drew herself up and waved her kindling like a wand. “He was half-Cherokee Indian and half-colored, and everybody was scared of him, not only because of him being different, but because he was a preacher, and a peddler, and a soothsayer.”

Lily dragged her attention back to her mother. “What’s a soot sayer?”

“A sort of witch. Halfman would look at people’s spit and blood, and tell their futures.”

“Their
spit and blood
? Ugh!”

“Halfman was sickly, and Elspeth let him stay in her barn. She fed him and took care of him. And when he got ready to leave, Elspeth called on him to tell her future. She drew a sharp knife across her forefinger.” Mama pretended to slash her finger with the stick of kindling. “
Drip, drip, drip
. Her red blood fell into Halfman’s palm. Then she spit on top of it.”

“Into his hand? Ugh!”

“But that’s the way it had to be done. Halfman, he looked at his palm, and he shook his head. Then he reached into his big ol’ peddler’s bag and pulled out a pair of little-bitty willow saplings, all wrapped in dirt and paper. And their leaves were
blue
, not like any other willows in the whole world. He smeared Elspeth’s spit and blood on them. ‘You’re the blue willow,’ he said, looking straight at Elspeth. And she stared back in horror—because she knew he meant she was going to die.”

“How did she know? How?”

“Because willows are women. That’s what the ancients said. And blue women are sad women. And the only thing that would make Elspeth sad would be to leave her land and her sons—and Artemas, her new husband.”

“Wow!”

“Then Halfman said, These here are magic trees, not like any others. For love of you they and all that grow from their seed will keep your loved ones safe, them and theirs and all that cometh from their blood.’ ”

“Neat!”

“So she planted those little saplings down by the creek, right out there”—Mama pointed to a window, making Lily crane her head in fascination, as if the original trees were right outside—“and they grew tall and beautiful.”

Lily hugged her knees. “And Elspeth went to heaven?”

“Yes, she went to heaven having Old Artemas’s baby, and the baby went with her.”

Lily looked at Artemas ruefully. “I guess God put you here to make up for that. You’re supposed to do what I tell you to do.”

“Hmmm.” He hooked his arm around her neck and jostled her as if she were a small wrestler. “I think I was put here to catch you. You don’t bounce very well.”

Her face broke into a puckish grin. Turning back to her mother, she waited for more with wide eyes. Mama was watching the two of them with a soft little smile. “Anyway, when Elspeth was being buried, Halfman showed up. No one knew how he’d heard she’d died. He just came, like some kind of all-seeing mountain spirit, to pay his respects
to Elspeth and her blue willows. People said he was never seen again, after that day.”

“But he still lives in the mountains?”

“Could be.”

“And what happened to Old Artemas?”

“Oh, it was terrible. Elspeth’s sons turned away from him. They said he’d killed their mother. Old Artemas had to leave their farm and live in the back of his potter’s shop.”

“Under the lake!”

She nodded patiently. “Under the lake now. And he grieved and grieved. He wanted to tell the whole world about his Elspeth, his blue willow. He thought about an old, old Chinese china pattern called Blue Willow, and he decided he’d make his own pattern from it, in dark blue cobalt from the iron mines over in Birmingham. And he did. And his work was so special that people couldn’t mistake any other Chinese willow pattern for the Colebrook Blue Willow, and it became famous, and Marthasville became Atlanta, and Artemas became a rich man, with a big house over by the Toqua, and a corn mill, and of course, his china factory.”

“Under the lake!”

“Under the lake, that’s right. But his money couldn’t buy love from Elspeth’s sons, who never stopped blaming him for what happened to her. To make matters worse, Artemas married a Yankee woman visiting from New York and turned to supporting the northern cause.”