When Venus Fell (35 page)

I needed protection from FeeMolly, everyone joked. I found a bodyguard, or rather, she found me.

She had maniacal green eyes, black fur with a lightning-bolt smear of white between her ears, and the personality of a feline chain saw.

“That black kitten inherited a hell-raising spirit,” Gib said, “or else she’s part panther.” And then he added, “I say you and she are a perfect match.”

She was the only offspring of an unspayed tabby cat who had taken up residence at the Hall during the last winter and a pampered Siamese tom who escaped from the mayor’s wife in Hightower and went walkabout in the mountains. My cat was only half-grown but already fought with every other four-legged animal in sight, including the small, troublesome English pigs. Min banished her from the Hall because she climbed drapes and chewed silk flowers. She was in serious danger of living the life of a loner in one of the barns.

But she showed up at my cottage one day and eyed me from the edge of my own porch as if I smelled like food. Haughtiness was an art form to her. I found her curled up
asleep on the porch welcome mat after a cool night, and I let her in the kitchen and gave her a tepid scrambled egg.

She ate the egg, licked her paws and my fingers, then jumped into my lap while I played the keyboard. As my hands moved, her head swiveled as if she were watching Ping-Pong. Finally she curled up and went to sleep, purring.

“That wildebeest slept in your lap and purred?” Isabel said incredulously, echoing a sentiment I heard from Ebb, Flo, and Min: “She bit the pee out of me for just
lookin
’ at her wrong,” Ebb noted. “I mean to tell you, that cat come over and
bit my ankle out of spite
.”

“She and I obviously have an instinctive bond,” I said proudly. I’d often wanted to bite people.

I’d never had a pet before. Pop had been allergic to animal fur, and Ella had had asthma as a child, so pets were out of the question. Suddenly I cherished this small, lonely, odd creature who deserted all its kindred kitties at the Hall to keep me company through the dark, cold nights in the mountains. Min gave me a litter box and a bag of cat necessities, including a paper bag filled with dried catnip from the herb garden.

“We never got around to naming her,” Min said wistfully, as if even the smallest domestic niceties had fallen apart during the past year. “She’s your cat now. You name her.”

This duty became more profound to me than I’d ever admit out loud, and I thought about it for several days. I watched my housemate scale the walls, doors, kitchen cabinets, and
me
with a velocity approaching the speed of sound. She was quick, she was fast, she was merciless. I had cat-paw skid marks on one shoulder and both legs.

“Allegra?” I said to her one night, testing.

She raced across the cottage’s main room, skidded on the wood floor, then slammed into my ankles before leaping onto the kitchen counter, where she swatted at nothing then convulsed into a fuzzed, madly devilish-eyed stalking routine. “Allegra,” I confirmed happily. “I think your brain’s set on high tempo.
Allegra
.”

When I walked to the Hall each morning I took her with me. She quickly decided to ride piggyback in a knapsack Kelly loaned me, and sat regally with her small black head poking out the knapsack’s unzippered top.

I arrived one chilly morning just as Gib stepped out a back door. He carefully held something in his cupped hands. He halted and I did, too. He studied me and Allegra with a frown. “Do you dress for effect?” he asked finally.

“Have cat, will travel.”

Besides the cat-bearing knapsack I was wearing a baggy white sweater, cutoff jeans, and black army boots with neon laces. I had all my braids wound up on top of my head with a long red scarf threaded through them. “The cat’s just the icing on the fruitcake,” he countered.

Something moved in his hands. He opened them slightly and I saw a rectangular, clear-plastic mousetrap with a frantic live mouse bumping around inside it. A dab of yellow showed where cheese bait had been placed in one end of the tiny box. “Dead mouse walking,” Gib said. “Aunt Olivia believes it’s bad luck to kill any animal inside the house, so I give the mice a head start for the woods. What happens to them after that is their own problem.”

“So this is your idea of fun. Wrestling Mickey Mouse into a box—” I began.

Allegra sank her front claws in my back, launched herself to my right shoulder, and then in a flash of black fur made two leaps—one to the ground, and another squarely at Gib’s mouse-bearing hands.

He took a step back, but Allegra hung from his shirtfront, yowling, with the trap caught between Gib’s chest and her underside. Through some fluke of plastic-mousetrap engineering the trap’s door popped open.

And the mouse popped out.

At which point Gib tried calmly to pull Allegra off his flannel shirt while she scrambled to nab the mouse. The terrified
mouse wriggled between Gib’s shirt buttons. It disappeared inside his shirt.

“Don’t hurt my cat,” I called, running over and tugging at Allegra.

“The damned mouse is plowing a furrow through my chest hair,” Gib said through gritted teeth. “And your cat is digging post holes.”

Allegra climbed him in pursuit of the large, moving, flannel-covered mouse-bump. Gib cursed, fumbling with buttons that his right hand couldn’t manage. His face carved with frustration, he gave up and jerked his shirt open, ripping buttons. The mouse shot up to his shoulder then disappeared down his back. He shrugged the shirt down his arms and dropped it—and the mouse inside it—to the ground. The shirt moved wildly as the mouse hunted for an escape. Allegra pounced on the undulating shirt, got her head under the edge of it, and scooted beneath the fabric.

The mouse shot out one sleeve, headed straight across the open lawn, and disappeared into the zinnia beds. The zinnia blooms had long since fallen off, leaving only tall, drying stalks. Allegra raced after her prey. She was still covered in Gib’s shirt.

We watched his shirt go humping across the lawn and into the rattling zinnia stalks like an armadillo wearing a plaid dress.

I faced him reluctantly, my face compressed in an apologetic wince. He glared at the flower bed and then at me. “I never thought I’d see the day,” he said darkly, “when one of my shirts would run away from home.”

“I’m sorry. I am, really. I—” My gaze went to his bare chest, which was broad, well formed, and elegantly haired, leading down to a handsome belly.

A small, gold ring gleamed in the rim of his navel.

I jerked my gaze up to his face. His brows flattened and he looked grim. “The woman at the piercing parlor in
Knoxville didn’t warn me it would itch for six weeks. That’s what I get for trusting a woman who had more metal stuck in her face than a bucktoothed tenth grader.”

“I—you, I can’t believe it—”

“Why? You can’t believe I’m capable of getting a hole punched in my skin? There’s nothing to
that
, Nellie. If you mean you can’t believe I want to associate with the social and political ideas of the pierced-parts crowd, well, you’re right. This is only a piece of jewelry, Nellie. Not a personal statement.”

“Why did you do it?”

“Because I’ve always wanted to be a pirate. I told her to put a ring
in my ear
but she missed.”

“I’m serious. Why did you do it?”

“Because it helps me to concentrate on some other section of my hide besides my hand.”

“Why?”
I insisted, my voice rising.

“Because I want something to rattle me every time I close my mind to new ideas. Something to remind me that I’m capable of taking new directions. I touch my belly ring and hear you haranguing me. You telling me what to do. This”—he jabbed a finger at the ring—“is
your
opinion, Nellie. This is your voice. This
is you
.”

I reached out. I didn’t think. There was nothing calculated about it. I just reached out naturally and touched my fingertips to the tiny gold ring protruding from his skin. The flesh around it was warm and slightly pink. When he breathed his stomach shifted in tight shivers.

“Be careful what you touch,” he warned in a low, uneven tone.

“When I had mine pierced I had to leave the tops of my pants undone for weeks. I couldn’t bear to have them scrape against the ring.”

“There’s a mental image,” he said.

“Does it hurt?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Put antiseptic on it every day. Keep it clean.” I drew my hand back. My hand trembled. “I shouldn’t have touched it so much until it’s completely healed. Germs.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

Both of us were caught up in something helplessly provocative. We stood there in the yard, in the clear cool morning sunshine of late autumn, and I said, “Let’s see if there’re other surprises,” and with no guile at all I walked around him, looking at his back and shoulders, while he stood still. I touched his skin here and there. “Allegra scratched you,” I said. “You’re bleeding a little.” I showed him my fingertips with traces of his blood on them. “Do you want me to get something to put on it?”

“My shirt,” he said distractedly.

We walked over to the zinnia bed. His shirt hung on a few broken stalks. He examined it a moment, then put it on. “Your buttons,” I murmured, dazed. Several were missing. The buttonholes were torn.

“I have trouble with buttons, anyway,” he told me.

He struggled with his shirt buttons, the two knotty, stiff fingers of his injured hand refusing to perform that simple task. Color rose in his face. Protective sympathy swelled inside my chest; I understood lost dignity.

“That’s a damn fine belly-button ring you got there, sir, and thank you for letting me help with your buttons.” With that warning, I pushed his hands aside. Standing close to him, I fastened the buttons that were left. He watched me. His chest moved swiftly. My hands shook.

“I can’t have a simple conversation with you,” he said. “You make me want to pull my hair out or howl at the moon.”

“You’re a brave man, Gib Cameron,” I whispered. “Or maybe we’re a good influence on each other.”

“Stranger things have happened,” he said gruffly.

We stepped away from each other when we heard the back kitchen-porch door swing open. I looked around sheepishly. Gib became very busy rechecking his torn buttonholes.

“Good morning,” Min called. She gazed out at us like a tall, benignly curious praying mantis in a shapeless jumper the rust color of old leaves. “I thought I heard a commotion out here.”

“No problem, Minnie,” Gib said. “We were just headed indoors.” She nodded, eyed us both with her head tilted, then discreetly withdrew inside the house. Gib and I walked across the lawn. “No one but you knows about this,” he said, gesturing toward his stomach. “I’d like to keep it that way.”

“No problem.”

That night I fed Allegra an entire can of tuna and stroked her fur with a soft wool sock she loved. She deserved special favors for her part in uncovering Gib’s secret.

My contentment didn’t last long.

“I have some extra bleach for you,” I said to Ella. “Your hair’s starting to take on a kind of reverse skunk stripe when you part it in the middle.”

A full two inches of silky black roots showed at her scalp. She smiled. “In a couple of months it’ll be long enough to cut the blond section off. I’ll have a full head of short, black hair. Carter’s thrilled that I’m changing it.”

“I bet. He’ll get to pretend he’s with another woman.”

“Don’t start.”

“Well, I for one don’t intend to throw away years of carefully cultivated bleached roots and synthetic braids. This is me, and it’s going to stay me.”

“Stop trying to sound smug. You’re a softie at heart. I know you’re helping Jasper practice his social skills around girls. And I also heard that Kelly brings you poetry and you set it to music for her. And you’re going to teach her to play the guitar.”

“No, I said I’d teach her the basics and then you could take over, because you’ve developed
such
an interest in the guitar,” I said sarcastically.

Carter had bought my sister a red-and-silver Gibson, the Cadillac of guitars. Ella had taken to it like an old friend. She was now playing country-western music. “We’re goin’ to have us a bunch of musical babies,” Carter told everyone who’d listen. “They’re going to grow up to be country-music stars. They’ll all be TV spokesmen for big pickup-truck companies. And at the awards shows, Ellie and me will insist we gotta be seated between Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire.”

“You’re not playing guitar because you want to head a dynasty of country yodelers,” I insisted to Ella. “You’re doing it to please Carter.”

“I wish you and I didn’t argue every time we try to have a serious conversation,” Ella said sadly. “We could
both
have nice lives! We could trust people! Love people! But the only way we can do that is if you stop rejecting every single living human being who might, just might, have a painfully unpleasant opinion about us!”

“What has that got to do with—”

“You always do it! You always assume the worst! But people shouldn’t have to pass some kind of loyalty test!”

“I will never,” I said through gritted teeth, “betray our family. And neither will you.”

“
Betray?
Oh,
Vee
. You’re hopeless. I give up on you,” she said in a tired voice. She had never said anything like that, in that tone of voice, to me before. She clasped her chest. Tears streamed down her face. She brushed past me and left the house, slamming the screen door.

After that argument, she and I didn’t speak one word to each other for a week.

Their names were Bobby Jim and Wally Roy. They were two of Ebb’s boys, both of them under the age of ten. They wore camouflage pants and T-shirts for casual dress. For toys they had four-wheeler dirt buggies decorated with squirrel tails. They hadn’t been hit with many smart sticks.

Bobby Jim and Wally Roy were yelling and racing around on their dirt buggies, but everyone except me and Kelly was out at the back orchards harvesting the remnants of the fall apples. One of the inn’s trademarks had always been FeeMolly’s apple butter. Ella had suggested that all the guests for the opening weekend find gift baskets of apple butter and fresh muffins waiting for them in their rooms. She came up with these small, Martha Stewartish ideas with an ease that impressed everyone; her most recent projects included designing new table arrangements for the dining rooms.