When Venus Fell (16 page)

Gib left to talk to her, then came back with his head bowed. “She can’t do it. It’s too much for her to take.”

Olivia, who had not changed her dress or put on shoes, held Bea’s forearm lightly for balance. They advanced on me, Olivia’s bare feet scuffing a pair of unbroken ski trails in the sawdust. Olivia wrote on her pad.

Speak for me. Do something
.

“Ma’am, I’m not a miracle worker. I’m not even sure your family really needs or wants me here. I’m a stranger.”

She stamped a foot and looked at Bea for assistance. Bea scowled at me. “Of course we want you here, as long as you’re not going to stay a bloody useless complainer.”

I walked outside. Two cars were parked there along with the large flatbed lumber truck. Min sat sideways in the open door of a large burgundy sedan, the kind little old Republican ladies drive to bingo-and-drinks at the club. Her face buried in her hands, she rocked slowly. Jasper and Isabel knelt beside her, and Kelly hung on the doorframe, one hand trailing along her mother’s bowed head.

“Minnie Cameron,” I said loudly. “Look, I don’t want to be here. This isn’t my fight, really. But since I am
stuck
with this situation I want you to get up and go in there and make your husband proud. Or I’ll never forgive you for wasting my damned time.” She stared at me.

Kelly said, wide-eyed, “You are
nuts.”

“Yes, but I recognize a debt of honor when I see one. Minnie, you owe your husband the honor of finishing the chapel floor. He wanted that work done. You have to do it for him. Your determination keeps his memory alive. Doesn’t it?”

Min pressed her hands to her mouth. “You’re
right.”
She rose and staggered inside the building. She stared at the sawblade and then at Gib. The material of her work pants trembled around her thin legs as she shivered then hunched over. “Min, come on, Minnie,” Isabel begged, huddling with her pale, soft arms around her sister-in-law’s shoulders.

“Leave her to settle herself,” Bea said from a corner
where she stood beside a wooden stool Carter had fetched for Olivia. Olivia waved Isabel aside. Min hugged her stomach and retched water on the sawdust floor. Isabel crooned to her while Carter leaped forward with a red bandanna he pulled from his jeans pocket. He took Min by the arm.

But Min straightened. She wiped her mouth then stood as if at attention. She nodded to Gib. He started the blade.

Carter ran over to the towering stack of chestnut slabs and guided one onto the metal feeder track. Gib laid his hands on its peeled and flat-hewn surface. Carter and Jasper positioned themselves to catch the plank on the other end, where a second track waited to guide cut boards to a pallet.

It wasn’t easy to watch their faces. Gib eased a slab of wood toward the blade. I shivered as I heard the deep, off-key whine of steel slicing hard chestnut.

A fine yellow mist sprayed into the air. Sweat poured down Gib’s face, and Min stood rigidly, forcing herself to watch the blade. It sliced a single wide board from the square-hewn slab taken from a tree that had been cut by a Cameron before the birth of any of us except Olivia and Bea.

The board fell neatly into Jasper’s gloved hands. Gib started the log back through in the opposite direction, never taking his eyes off its progress. And when the second board lay under his fingertips Minnie walked over to it and smoothed her fingers over the wood.

Olivia wrote on her pad and pressed the pad into my hands.

Exceptional miracle-working for your first day here
.

Darkness. The moon was up again. Things crept through the forest, small creatures and larger ones, whose eyes caught the light as they moved. No one seemed to notice except Ella and me. I was grateful for the dogs who lazed at the edge of the cemetery below the chapel, keeping all of us safe inside our primitive circle of light. Stacks of fresh-cut chestnut boards
sat in the eerie glow of work lamps run by a large gasoline-powered generator outside the door.

I drank in everything, the family most of all. I’d known these people forever and a day. Isabel was as fairy-fey as my own sister, divorced, easily fooled and hurt by men, eager to keep everyone happy. She glided about, dispensing nails and cinnamon cookies, humming gently to the sleeping son she carried in a brightly colored sling across her chest. Min kept to herself, stacking discarded old boards and policing the grassy chapel mound for bits of debris. Kelly and Jasper vied for her attention by competing with each other for buckets of nails and wheelbarrows of trash.

Gib, his eyes like dull topaz stones in a face smeared with sweat and sawdust, directed the others with calm, quick instructions. He organized the stacked lumber and the tools, and he lifted his head from his own hammering duties each time the electric handsaw buzzed outdoors. He listened protectively, and he watched like a hawk as Carter cut lengths of the new boards atop a pair of sawhorses.

I saw Gib order the irascible Kelly onto the chapel porch. “The area around the electric saw is off-limits,” he said firmly. “The perimeter intersects the door.”

“Uncle Gib, I’m not the President and you’re not in the Secret Service anymore,” she protested. “I’m not even old enough to
vote.”

“Pretend, for my sake,” Gib ordered, frowning. His dedication to detail and methodical precision was obvious. He would have made a fine pianist, in that regard.

“More’s the better,” Bea answered, as she passed around a silver flask of finely aged Scotch whisky. I took a large swallow then tottered inside the chapel. The night was pitch-dark outside the stained-glass windows.

I carried a tall plastic cup of iced tea to Gib, who was on his knees hammering nails into a board. I tiptoed along the aisle across massive, exposed floor beams. Below the beams lay hard-packed black earth, the top of the ancient mound. I
felt I was walking the backbone of some sleeping, mystical giant. Carter, Jasper, Kelly, Minnie, and Isabel were all working diligently at various spots. So was Hoss. Sophia handed him nails from a leather pouch.

Gib drank deeply from the tea I offered him. I squatted beside him and watched a trickle of amber liquid escape down his neck.

“Why didn’t your other sister come today?”

“She doesn’t approve of you.”

“I see.”

He handed the cup back to me. “Thank you.” I started to rise. “No, thank you,” he repeated meaningfully, amid the drumming of multiple hammers striking handmade iron nails from a dusty collection in a Cameron storehouse.

I dropped back to my heels and studied him. “I earn my keep. I tried to say and do whatever might help your family. In some strange way it seems to have worked. So think of me kindly when I take my sister and our money and get the hell out of here in a few days.”

“You can’t wait, can you?” he asked darkly.

I stood quickly, negotiating people and stripped floor beams, then finally made my way to the antique organ, which was perched on a section of planking across the open maw of the floor. I sat down carefully on the stool, which felt precarious, and put my hands on the yellowed keyboards. Olivia and Bea stood in the doorway, watching. Jasper fetched a folding chair and helped Olivia sit. She pressed her bare feet together atop one of the new floorboards then inclined her head regally.

Everyone stopped hammering for a moment to stare at me. I arched a brow at Gib. “I would like to contribute something to the moment. How about a little Beethoven?”

“I don’t know Beethoven from a spider’s hind leg,” he admitted. “But I’d appreciate whatever you play.”

I pressed keys, pulled stops, and played with my head bowed and my concentration focused raggedly on my own two hands. Then I gave what Arinellis give best. Music.

•   •   •

The chapel’s floor was fully restored sometime after midnight. All it required was varnishing, which could be done later. Everyone stood with exhausted satisfaction. Gib reached across Olivia’s shoulders and brushed his good hand across the braids behind my ears, feathering my earlobe as he did. When I stared at him he said, “There was a firefly in your hair.”

“Venus was twinkling,” Isabel announced. That brought a few genuine smiles from the dirty, tired group, and a fake one from me. I was already on emotional overload without Gib’s casual caress.

Min did not have to cry to grieve, and one look at her pale, thin face and the poignant expression in her eyes said this milestone had brought small comfort. “It’s done,” she said, her voice raspy, and it was as if she were speaking to Simon.

“Bring in some chairs,” Bea ordered. “Herself wants a ceremony.” Olivia waved a hand with quiet command. Jasper and Kelly ran to obey.

The chapel had been wired for electricity years before, but ornate oil lamps, hooded with stained-glass shades dripping tiny prisms, still lined the walls, set on wooden pedestals high on the thick chestnut ribs between the murals. After we were seated, Gib raised a long match to the wick of a lamp.

“I love candles and lamps,” Ella said softly. “I’ve loved them since the earliest times I can remember, going to mass and listening to the organ and the choir, enthralled with the purity of it all. The altar candles always seemed to me like promises.”

“A light in the darkness,” Carter agreed. He turned from his chair beside hers and patted her hand.

She leaned toward him. “I knew you’d understand.” They gazed raptly at each other.

I kept my eyes on Gib and the lamp. A scrap of thread on the lamp wick caught fire and floated upward, glowing red
and gold before Gib closed his bad hand around it in a suffocating fist. If the tiny flame burned his palm he didn’t show it, but his face was already pale and set, hollows shadowed beneath his cheekbones, his eyes remote. I watched him shake the lamp slightly then study the wick as if it had a mind of its own, threatening his family’s priceless heirloom chapel.

Carter leaped up and lit the lamps on the opposite wall before Gib could get to them. The lamps’ flickering, pungent glow gave the gathering a sepia-toned effect. Except for our modern clothes, we could have been time-traveling. A hundred years, two hundred, vanished in the primitive gentility of small flames.

The pews, each of which weighed several hundred pounds, were still stacked atop one another at the back of the chamber. We sat in a hodgepodge of metal folding chairs, a dozen worn-out and pensive people, in the middle of the night.

Bea stood. “Herself,” she said, gesturing to Olivia, “is wanting each of you to give a speech. ’Twould no’ be a Cameron event without a bit of wind and pomp.”

Gib looked at Min questioningly, and she got up. But she only touched her hand to her chest over her heart, obviously unable to say a word, by the contorted emotion on her face. She sat down abruptly, and Isabel put an arm around her. Someone else rose to speak, but I was barely listening.

I was lost in my own commemorations.
Mom and Pop stood up there before that altar.
They played the song they’d written that very day on the old organ, and Gib watched them, and heard them, my parents, who would go back to the main house after the ceremony and make love to each other that night, creating me when they did.

I missed them, missed them so badly it hurt. Gib carried my history inside his memory, starting with the day he watched, as a five-year-old boy, while my parents said their vows in this chapel, not twenty feet from where my sister and I sat. But he couldn’t forget that I was a traitor’s daughter any more than I could forget he was a patriot’s son.

I lost track of time. My head spun from the close, pungent air. The stained-glass windows had been opened but I was caught in a deeper miasma, the drone of solemn and grieving voices, the parade of those testifying to Simon’s irreplaceable aura. This family still had a long way to go. There was soft crying all around me.

But not from me. I stared at Gib’s broad back rows ahead of me, and traced the outline of his dark-haired head to keep my concentration, and my eyes ached from the pressure behind them. He stood and spoke last. The lamplight flickered on his face and hair, figuring him in pieces of shadow, and I was suddenly drunk from looking at him.

“I didn’t want all of you to see this chapel in bad condition,” he said in a low, strained tone. “We locked the doors last year and left them locked until this week. All the time—” He lifted his maimed hand slightly “—all the time this was healing. I thought about going back to the sawmill. I thought about my brother’s love for this chapel. Our family’s love for it. It represents more than faith. It represents the power of people from different worlds to create something sacred together. That’s what Gilbert Cameron and Soquena Macintosh created when they got married, two hundred and fifty years ago, right here, in this chapel he built for her.” He inhaled sharply. “I’ll never let it be sold to Emory’s investors.”

There were discreet glances and frowns throughout the group. Min bowed her head. Isabel blushed and looked away. Olivia clapped her hands—just once, for attention—and when Gib looked her way she nodded her head adamantly.

He went on speaking, but I felt light-headed and couldn’t listen. “Vee,” Ella whispered. She clutched my arm. “Vee?” I inhaled sharply and blinked. My eyes met Gib’s. “—it’s a song that was written here, and I remember the day we heard Max and Shari Arinelli perform it in this chapel, after they said their wedding vows. Simon always thought of ‘Evening Star’ as belonging to our family in a special way. The Arinellis helped us celebrate the opening of Cameron Hall as an inn,
but more than that, they helped us feel like singing again after our parents died. That’s why Max and Shari’s daughters are here tonight. Because Aunt Olivia believes they’ll help us remember how to sing.” He paused, his eyes locked on mine, challenging me.

Everyone turned to look at us expectantly. “You okay, lady?” Carter asked softly, clasping Ella’s hand atop her quivering knees. “We’re all in your corner. Go sing your heart out. Make your folks proud.”

I stood. My legs felt like heavy pendulums. I met Ella’s nervous, beseeching look and nodded. She rose to her feet slowly, and followed me up the aisle. I sat down at the organ. Ella stood pencil-straight beside it. I began to play, and we sang in harmony: