When Venus Fell (17 page)

Ella’s voice was pure, a sweet dovelike warble, but mine had a rasp like an old cheerleader’s or Janis Joplin’s at her whisky-and-heroin pinnacle. I watched Ella’s clothes shiver with the tremor of her arms.

I filled in the harmonies with my voice cracking on the higher notes.
This is for Mom and Pop. Sing. Sing perfectly!
I felt fractured inside. Ella muffled words here and there, and trembled harder, but her distress gave the song more poignancy, and of course most of the Cameron family were sobbing by then.

Somehow we finished. Finished, thank God. Sweat trickled down my back, and between my breasts, and under my arms, yet my skin felt clammy. The Camerons seduced outsiders. That was easy to see. They enthralled the unsuspecting then absorbed the new energy. I felt as if Ella and I had been sucked dry like fruit. That we’d been stripped naked and casually examined for birthmarks. We had to collect our inheritance and get away from these people at the end of two weeks. Not a moment later.

When the song was over Gib gave me a brief nod of respect, coaxing open small pathways between us. In music the variations on a melody eventually define the melody itself. I heard his silent message in sudden, fresh tones. He was a man who had lost all surplus faith but not his kindness; his gaunt hazel eyes must have been charming and warm before the accident; he didn’t mean to look bullish as he hunched his right shoulder a fraction higher than his left. He made subconscious efforts to compensate for the ruined symmetry of his hands.

So now he stood in front of me, exposed and quiet, in plain clothes covered in dirt and the golden powder of ancient chestnuts. “Thank you,” he said. Confused at the contrasting emotions fighting inside me, I only nodded.

Arinellis had helped restore the Cameron chapel. We had contributed something these people needed, had helped build a foundation that might last. I looked at the respectful faces around us and then at Gib again. I wanted to hope.

Yet I’d already done what I’d been brought there to do, and my inner voice was telling me that the next two weeks would just be marking time.

It had been years since the Camerons had lived in the grand central section of the mansion. In the late 1960s, when Olivia opened the Hall as an inn, she and the children moved into a run-down wing that had been added around the turn of the century.

The original manor house and the more recent family wing were connected at only two points: a sunny enclosed walkway with double doors that bore a sign saying
CAMERON FAMILY QUARTERS, PRIVATE, PLEASE
, and the Hall’s enormous, high-ceilinged kitchen, which was the center of a maze of doors—one to a storage room; one to the ornate and spacious central dining room; one to a small back porch with scarred working tables, an industrial steel sink, and shelves filled with canned vegetables and preserves. A fourth door led into a handsome little breakfast nook in the family wing.

We hadn’t met FeeMolly Hodger yet, the famous cook of Cameron Hall, because Ebb said FeeMolly had been
on strike
for most of the past year.

FeeMolly was Ebb’s mother. And Ebb’s sister’s mother. Ebb informed me the next morning that her sister was named Flo. Ebb and Flo. They were in their thirties and both had
been married and divorced a number of times. Between them they had four children in elementary school and two at home. We hadn’t met Flo yet, either, because she was home with two sick children. Both sisters’ preschoolers had strep throat. I asked about FeeMolly’s strike. I couldn’t resist.

“Mama won’t cook for halfhearted mouths,” Ebb explained as I wandered around the Hall’s kitchen the next morning, groggy but freshly scrubbed, wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with Tchaikovsky Rules emblazoned in white across the chest. Ella was still sound asleep upstairs in a feather bed with a beautiful heirloom quilt tucked around her chin. “Mama’s got a reputation to keep up,” Ebb prattled on, as she sliced the most delectable-looking homegrown cantaloupe I’d ever seen.

The melon scent rose like a perfume in the whitewashed kitchen, where the islands and counters and tall cabinets were all crowded with baskets of fresh vegetables and fruit. “And she says,” Ebb went on, “it ain’t bad enough that The Cameron is gone, but the peck-and-poke of life around here died with him, God bless Mr. Simon’s sweet soul.”

“The Cameron?”

“Mr. Simon. Mama always called him The Cameron. Head man of the family. It’s an old Scottish way of speakin’. Goes way back. Even if the family’s headed by a woman she’s called The Cameron. Mama tried calling Ma’am Olivia The Cameron once upon a time, but Ma’am Olivia wouldn’t have it.”

“Oh? She abdicated to Simon?”

“Oh, no’m, I wouldn’t say Ma’am Olivia felt
decayed
, I think she just wanted Simon to have the title.”

I bit my lip over the misunderstanding and swallowed a smile. “Oh.”

“Anyhow, Mama says she can’t set her mind to cook for the family if they just gonna chew the moon every day.”

“Chew the moon?”

“Reach out for manna from heaven instead of pulling
their own spirits out of God’s good dirt. Mama can’t abide wishy-washiness. She wants her title back. Chief chef, Cameron Hall Inn. I reckon she thinks you and your sister are a sign the time’s a-comin’. She got out of her water bed this morning and commenced packing her spice sack and sharpening her knives.”

I didn’t know what to say to this strange image.

“She sounds interesting,” I finally managed.

Isabel came into the kitchen about the time Ebb finished the breakfast biscuits, set a sleepy Dylan in his playpen where Ebb could watch him while she scrambled eggs, then gave me a quick tour of the family-wing rooms. The Hall was filled with two centuries’ worth of eclectic antiques, linens, rugs, and artwork, all just a little on the well-worn side, enough to make a person feel comfortable.

The family wing alone was the size of a large house. “I have a bedroom downstairs with Dylan, and Olivia and Bea are downstairs,” Isabel explained. “Min’s room is upstairs, and so are Jasper’s and Kelly’s rooms. And the guest room where y’all are staying. We have all the upstairs guest rooms of the central house closed off. To save on heating and air conditioning. We thought you wouldn’t want to be stuck alone in the public part of the Hall, anyway.”

“Where is Carter’s room?”

“In a houseboat he set up beside the river.” A houseboat? That was good news. Carter wasn’t in the same house with us.

“Ruth lives in Hightower, with her husband and their little girl, but that’s close by. It’s the county seat. Believe it or not, it’s big enough to have a two-screen movie theater and six gas stations.” She smiled. “Practically a metropolis.”

“Hmmm.” As I pondered the missing Ruth I idly turned an interesting ashtray in my hands. Then I realized it was fashioned from sections of animal skulls and fanged jawbones. I set it down quickly. “Don’t tell anybody,” I said in a low voice, “but your ashtray has teeth.”

Isabel laughed.

“This kitchen was built in the nineteen fifties,” she explained when we circled back to our starting point. “When the first electrical lines were run in the valley Grandmother remodeled and put in the kitchen. Before that all the cooking was still done on wood stoves and fireplaces in a separate building.”

“Until the
nineteen fifties?”

She nodded. “We change slower than a possum spits,” she drawled elaborately. Isabel pointed out a tall window with a low sill. Down a worn stone path I saw a stone cottage with three stone chimneys. “That used to be the Hall’s kitchen,” she went on. “This window was a big doorway, originally”

I was overwhelmed. I already felt I was cloistered in some mythological castle, even though the general look of the place was lived-in and smoothed-off, like the worn oval river rocks that had been used to build porch steps and garden walkways around the Hall. “What’s the old kitchen used for now?”

“It’s the inn’s office. For a long time we just used it as storage for yard tools and junk. But Gib and Ruth and I cleaned it out and remodeled it for Simon’s birthday a few years ago. Gib even managed to sneak our father’s rolltop desk out of the central Hall and into the kitchen building without Simon knowing. Simon loved that desk and that office.” Suddenly downcast, she added, “I’m sure you can tell how we all felt about our big brother. He was really more like a daddy to us. Especially to Ruth and me. And now all of us just feel like we’re spinning in thin air. I guess yesterday was the closest we’ve come to touching ground since last year. Thank you for inspiring us.”

I ignored the new dose of flattery. “Do you plan to stay here now that you’re divorced?” The blunt question seemed to hit her between the eyes. She blinked. “I don’t want to think about a new husband. Or a new home. I need to stay here and just
be
, for now. I’m so tired. We all are. Gib was in
and out of the hospital for six months last year, with surgeries and physical therapy. Poor Min’s been nearly catatonic. Ruth moved from Knoxville and resigned as an assistant district attorney there, and she’s planning to run for district attorney here this fall—”

“Wait a minute. Ruth is a lawyer?”

“Oh, yes. A prosecutor. She intends to become the first female district attorney in the Hightower district. And she’s got plenty of money for a campaign, because her husband owns a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Ruth and he moved to Hightower after the accident. Everybody had to come home and help.”

“Ruth’s a prosecuting attorney,” I repeated distractedly, still mulling that information. I was surrounded by patriots, a former but still-dedicated government man, red-white-and-blue frontier history, and now Gib’s unseen but disapproving sister Ruth, who represented the closest, most intimate arm of faceless authority.

“I need a cup of coffee,” I said dully.

Isabel and I sat at a big pine kitchen table that could easily seat a dozen people. Cats strolled around our ankles. We sipped coffee, talked baby talk to Dylan, and helped Ebb string a bushel of green beans. I decided the kitchen was the geographic and social intersection of two worlds—the museum-quality public history of the inn and the quiet, cluttered, loving comfort of the home.

Or else it was the hole at the center of a vortex that could swallow Ella and me without a burp.

Ella, Isabel, Min, and I gathered for a late breakfast of sausage casserole, scrambled eggs, biscuits, and fresh fruit on a small porch off the back of the family wing, shaded by a large dogwood tree and orange trumpet-creeper vines. Min sat dutifully with us, sipping coffee but barely eating. There was no sign of Gib or Carter. I was reluctant to ask, but noticed how Ella craned her head eagerly at every noise.

“Where’s Carter this morning?” Ella finally blurted.

“Oh, your car!” Isabel exclaimed. “I meant to tell y’all before. Gib and Carter left early this morning to take your car to a mechanic in Hightower.” Isabel darted an apologetic look at Ella and me from under her dark, shy lashes. “They had to tow it.”

“We don’t need it this week anyway,” Ella said.

I sat there in mute frustration, chewing my tongue and wishing Gib had let me supervise my own car’s repairs. In the meantime Isabel fed Dylan from jars of baby food. Kelly and Jasper had already left for high school in Min’s big, solid car, which they shared with embarrassed bickering. Neither one of them wanted to be seen behind the wheel. Each morning they drew straws. That day Jasper got the short end.

Olivia did not eat breakfast or rise before midmorning, and Bea took breakfast in her room, where she watched the morning talk shows as she drank boiling-hot tea and ate muffins dripping honey and preserves made from the valley’s apple orchards and fruit vines.

“We have a satellite dish now,” Isabel explained between small scoops of stewed beef, which Dylan, giggling, mouthed and spit obscenely. I kept wiping beef goo off my cheek. Ella smiled at him and left the beef spray where it landed. “Until a few years ago,” Isabel went on, “the Hall had a huge antenna, but we could still only receive three TV stations. There was a hot debate in the family over installing the satellite thingy. Television is
so
distracting. I said it would be too harsh. The world is filled with such meanness and violence and people leaping into bed at every cold-blooded opportunity, if you believe TV”

TV pretty much had the world pegged right, I thought, at least the world Ella and I had known for the past decade.

“But Simon wanted to watch CNN,” Min commented. “He liked to tape it all day and then run the tape back while we went over the inn’s daily accounts after dinner. He’d watch for glimpses of Gib at presidential events.”

When she’d stopped speaking she gazed out across the
grassy yard beyond the porch. Ella, Isabel, and I regarded her in silence for a minute, and she never noticed. Hummingbirds began to dive-bomb a bright red glass feeder hung among the vines. Ella and Isabel seemed to imitate the birds’ high-pitched chitter. Finally a tiny ruby-throated male hummer perched on a leafy green tendril less than a foot away from their heads, peering down at them with apparent bird-loves-bird intrigue.

“I’m working on a watercolor mural of hummingbirds,” Isabel noted, looking on Ella as if she, too, recognized a kindred feathered spirit. “Would you like to walk over to my studio and see it? I work in that old log smokehouse behind the forsythia hedge over there.”

Ella nearly bubbled with acceptance. Every detail of cozy heritage and generous charisma filled her with appreciation. No more dingy dressing rooms and crummy RV parks. No more microwave meals in the cramped confines of our rolling metal home. For the moment, at least, we were in the Great American Homestead, with all the comfort that implied.