When Venus Fell (18 page)

“Simon restored the smokehouse a few years ago,” Min said, still gazing into the lonely distances. “We’d used it as a storage shed but guests were always curious about it, so he cleaned it out and turned it into a one-room cottage. We offered it as a separate rental for the guests.”

“When will you reopen the inn?” I asked carefully.

Min looked at me, then away again. “I don’t know. I’m not sure we ever will. Simon knew every guest by name. Most of them had been coming here for years. They loved him. We all loved him. I can’t begin to imagine how the Hall would operate without him.”

Silence. Awkwardly, I laid a piece of buttered biscuit on Min’s coffee saucer. My idea of domesticity was peeling the plastic wrap off a pack of vending-machine crackers. “You should eat,” I said, like an Italian mother. She looked at me, touched my hand gently in a show of gratitude, then shook her head and looked away again.

•   •   •

Min went for a walk alone—something she did every day, Isabel said, so Ella and I visited Isabel’s studio. The best I can say about her art is that big-eyed bunnies, angels, jewel-toned birds, and fluffy kittens appeal to many people, though not to me. I could see, however, why her work was popular in decorators’ galleries around the South. The bunnies, kittens, et al. were somehow southern, frolicking among the pastel fantasies of cornhusk baskets and magnolia blossoms.

“These would be fantastic in a child’s bedroom,” Ella said in a wavering voice. I went on alert. I knew that note of desperation.

“I’d be honored to give you one,” Isabel promised.

My sister looked away, blinking hard. “Oh, I couldn’t. I have no place to even store it. But thank you. Bless your heart. Thank you so much.”

“When you have your first baby you can come back here and pick out any original of mine that you like. All righty?”

Ella fumbled with her hands and struggled not to burst into tears. The last thing I wanted was for her to spill the story of her lost love, lost child, and nervous breakdown in Detroit. The less this family knew about us, the better. “What’s your basic thesis here?” I interjected loudly.

Isabel blinked. “You mean, why do I love to paint?”

“Yes.”

“I like to look at my work and believe the world really looks that way. I want to pretend I’m only looking through a window.” She paused. “I don’t like grim reality.”

“I’m sorry about your husband,” Ella said softly. She seemed to have recovered her composure, but smiled at me wistfully.

Isabel sighed. “He was a spiritual chameleon. Love is blind. I saw what I wanted to see.”

Ella’s eyes gleamed. “That’s so true about love.”

We walked back across to the Hall with Ella and Isabel
still chatting like hummingbirds and me all too aware of my cynicism. Suddenly Carter bounded from the back door of the family wing and held out a large wicker picnic basket.

“Brought y’all some lunch,” he said. He looked at Isabel and grew a bit solemn. “FeeMolly made it up for me while I was in town. She says she’s coming over tomorrow. And not just to cook for the week. For good.”

Isabel clutched her throat. “No!”

“And Flo’s coming, too. They sure are determined to start back fulltime. They consider our havin’ the Nellies here a sign that all’s right again and Minnie’s ready to rock ’n’ roll.”

“I’ll talk to Gib,” Isabel said, fluttery with trepidation. “We can’t upset Minnie with this kind of pressure.”

He nodded. Suddenly his smile reappeared. He flipped the picnicbasket lid open and winked at us. “Lunch made fresh this morning by FeeMolly Hodger, the absolute best cook in the entire state of Tennessee.”

“Where are Gib and my car?” I asked darkly.

“Gib’s still in town and your car’s on the rack at Charley’s Auto World shop. I am sure sorry, but it’s looking pretty bad. Probably at least a busted gas line and a burned-out transmission. But don’t you worry. Gib told Charley to fix it up and he’d pay the bill.”

“No, he can’t do that.”

“You can’t turn down his offer, it’s not hospitable.”

“It’s a gift,” Ella echoed. “Please, Vee.” She glided to Carter then looked through his basket, offering exuberant sighs and compliments on potato salad, chocolate layer cake, and fried chicken. I recognized this as the polite forerunner of her mating call. One time she fell in love with a man at an opening party for a local theater revival of
Mame
. He offered her a miniature egg roll from the buffet. When Ella and I got back to our camper that night she spent an hour mulling the romantic first encounter. “A man who speaks through food symbolism is very sensitive,” she said.

“Some enchanted evening,” I sang at her that night, “you may share some soy sauce.”

Now I headed Carter off at the pass. I walked over and put a hand on Ella’s shoulder. “Thank you, but we’re not hungry. We just finished breakfast a little while ago.”

Ella frowned at me. “Why,
I’m
still hungry.”

Carter laughed and slapped one leg. “Well, then, come on, Ella Mae Nellie, you go picnic with me by yourself! Come take a look-see at the transportation.” He grabbed Ella’s hand and led her around the looming stone pediment at one corner of the Hall. I stood in the yard fuming.

“You’ve been hornswoggled,” Isabel said lightly. “But don’t worry. Carter’s a good guy.”

“There’s good and then there’s good.”

“I can’t make any guarantees on that. But he’s a gentleman. A gentleman and a flirt, but a gentleman, I swear.”

Then I heard Ella laughing. For the first time in years my baby sister laughed in long, hooting, carefree gulps. I ran around the corner and halted in surprise. In the middle of a finely graveled driveway shaded by huge, gracious water oaks, Carter patted his transportation on its hump. It was a two-wheeled buggy pulled by a buffalo. A dozen tongue-lolling dogs and a few brave cats circled the vehicle.

Ella pivoted toward me, her face glowing. “I’ll be back after lunch! Do you mind if I leave you on your own?”

I shrugged as nonchalantly as possible. “It’s not as if I can go anywhere.” Ella hugged me then darted to Carter’s outstretched hand and climbed into the cart. He climbed up beside her, gave me a mischievous salute, then said, “Giddyap,” to the buffalo.

And so I watched my only family—the sisterly yin to my yang, a delicate soul whose trusting nature had necessitated many years of hand-holding and belligerent interventions on my part, the only person in the world who loved me and trusted me with unfailing loyalty and unselfishness—ride off
down a dirt road toward the wild forest and the rhododendron-tucked mountainsides behind a shuffling brown buffalo, sitting next to a copper-skinned man with the luscious appeal of a rich candy bar. I remembered how women drooled over Pop’s ethnic mystique, and I was convinced Carter played up his own brand of exotic seduction. I was sure he hoped to carve Ella’s initials in his bedpost along with about a thousand other female monograms he’d collected.

And I was afraid he’d break her heart into pieces too small for me to fix.

Bea, unshakable Bea, who grunted softly when she walked and sipped a homemade dark beer she called her midmorning toddy, took me on a tour of the Hall’s main section, the part that had been opened to the public as an inn. She offered me one of her thick brown brews and I drank it, immediately developing a glow in my brain that distracted my worries about Ella enough to make me hoist my beer stein in a salute to the Cameron family Scottish clan tartan, displayed in a parlor off the library.

“You’re a bold young woman, Venus Arinelli,” Bea observed with tipsy appreciation. “Are you sure you have no wild Celtic blood in your veins?”

“Anything’s possible,” I said. “Because what I know about my family tree wouldn’t make a good stump.”

“I say you’re a Scot at heart, and more’s the pity for any who cross you!” From that moment onward Bea and I had an understanding, a camaraderie, if not outright friendship. She had the aura of old rebellions about her. This was my hunch. Maybe I was drawn to her because of it.

“Nearly two hundred years old, it is,” she told me as we explored the mansion. “The first Cameron’s son built it after
he made his fortune in shipping over on the coast of the Carolinas. Human cargo and tobacco. Slaves. There’s always a bit of shame in every great family. Makes the whole lot more fascinating, eh, dearie?”

I stared at her. Was she trying to tell me most of the Camerons wouldn’t hypocritically condemn my own notorious family history? “Eh,” I said uncertainly.

Bea pointed out spur scars and bullet holes, door moldings where some visiting backwoodsman had lodged his hunting knife more than a century before, and creaking floorboards showing faded scorch marks from spilled oil lamps and beeswax candles. Places where some long-dead hunting dog had chewed a furniture leg. An ax mark where an athletic Cameron female had thrown a hatchet at a Yankee officer.

“She missed,” Bea said proudly. “More’s the better, since she married him happily, after the war.”

“This valley must be one of those magnetic centers in the earth,” I told her with beer-induced profundity. “But I don’t know if I believe in whimsies.”

“Shame, shame. Oh, but don’t you wish you
did
, dearie?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Oh, indeed, there are forces at work here,” Bea went on. “It’s why the Indians settled here in the old times. Why, there were wild Indians before them who built the chapel mound. The hot springs are proof of mysterious powers under the surface. An earth center, this surely is. A powerful place. And this house is as potent as an old woman. Wearin’ her wrinkles and her wisdom as jewels of the spirit. You can no’ resist her courage.”

“Don’t you ever want to go home? To Scotland? Your family?”

“And desert my dear ones here? This is my family.”

“But don’t you have Cameron relatives in—”

“I’m no’ a Cameron by name, dear child.” She drew herself up proudly. “I’m a MacCallum!”

“Oh.” This meant nothing to me.

Her bushy gray brows surged together over a nose like a pit bull’s snout. She waved a hand at a relatively modern portrait of a handsome woman in a soft beige dress suit with padded shoulders. “Herself there, Coira MacCallum Cameron, was my mother’s sister. My auntie, she was, God rest her bold soul!”

“O-kay,” I said, drawing the word out.

“She arrived like so many Cameron conquests to this wild place—she was no’ willing at all, not at first!”

“Is slavery a family hobby?”

Bea brayed with laughter. “She was won in a card game in the nineteen twenties, in the back room of an Edinburgh pub!”

“Won?”

“The young doctor William Cameron won her, so to say! From her own brother! He was no gambler, Coira’s brother Robert. He lost a bloody fortune to William, and had no way to pay the debt. So Coira, bein’ Robert’s older sister and a strict, responsible Lowland Presbyterian, Coira says, ‘I’ll be going to your homeland in the woods and working for you, Dr. Cameron, for a year to pay Rob’s debt. And then I’ll bloody well come back home!’ Because Coira, you see, was ahead of her time. She had taken trainin’ as a nurse during the First World War. And William needed a strong-hearted nurse to assist him on his rounds. The bears and the muddy trails and the mountain folk with their fearsome ways—most nurses could no’ manage it! But Coira had a MacCallum backbone o’ steel!”

“But she never intended to stay here?”

“Aye, but there was a bit of hanky-panky between her and William during the long ocean voyage over from Scotland, and a few months after she arrived here, there could be no hidin’ it. She was puffing up, she was.”

“Pregnant?”

“Aye, like a cat’s meow.”

“So she felt she
had
to marry Dr. Cameron?”

“Oh, no, dearie, she thought he meant to collect his full debt from her, that’s all. The first bairn they bred was quite the scandal. She did no’ marry William until he convinced her his heart was true. And that was only after their second bairn was born.”

“No!”

“Aye!”

I gazed, intrigued, at the woman in the portrait. I thought I now saw a gleam of rebellion in
her
eyes.

Bea went on, “And so I grew up in Scotland hearing tales of wicked Aunt Coira in America, and then when I was just past grown Coira died, poor soul, and William sent their lovely, grievin’ daughter to board with me and my parents in the Highlands for a summer. And that’s how I met my sweet cousin Olivia.”

“Did she … speak then?”

“Aye, of course! She had a voice like a dove!”

“But … what happened to her?”

“Life happened to her. Terrible life. She lost the will to talk for herself.”

“You mean she really can talk if she wants to?”

“She wants to. She can no’ force a sound. Has no’ uttered so much as a peep in more than fifty years.”

“But if her larynx and her vocal cords aren’t damaged, then what—”

“It’s her soul that’s damaged. Now let’s say no more about it. Enough sad stories for today! What are you, you talker you? A bloody morbid Scotswoman at heart, eh? What kind o’ family do you suspect I’d leave behind?
This
is my home, where I’ve been happy once and for all, and I’d have it no other way.” She looked at me closely. “I have no husband. Never had. No children. I came to help Herself manage after Winny and Simon senior died.”

“Gib’s mother and father?”

“Aye. And I’ve been here ever since. I’m a queer old beastie, but they love me here.”

Since I didn’t quite know how she meant that, and my mind buzzed with unanswered questions about Olivia, I said, “Queer beasties seem to be the order of the day around here.”

“Aye,” Bea chortled, and slapped my back so hard my teeth clicked together.

“This house,” she went on comfortably, as we walked upstairs, “is timeless, it is. A survivor. The chapel is the soul of the family but this house is the heart. It feels sad now, but Herself and I believe it will somehow come back to rights, even with Simon gone. We all miss him so. Gib, God bless his manly hide, will have to fill his big brother’s shoes.”