When Venus Fell (9 page)
Authors: Deborah Smith
“Oh, sir, we are so
glad
to meet you. I’m Ella Arinelli and this is my sister, Venus. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” She reverted to southernness with an ease I’d never expected, introducing us as naturally as a bird sings to identify other birds.
The old man’s eyes widened. A grin slowly spread the folds of his jowls. “You’re a day early!” He gazed at me in awe. “Venus! No need to be shy about it!” He bowled around the end of the counter, narrowly missing a small table and chairs set up for a chess game. He grinned and waved his arms and bore down on us like an old freight train. I began to back up but Ella laughed and held out her hands. He grabbed her hands then turned and bellowed, “Sophia! Sophia, the Arinelli girls are here a day early!
And they are a sight!”
“What?” a woman shrieked from a back room. We heard thumping and rustling sounds. A big-haired grandmotherly woman dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, her fingers glittering with diamond rings, hurried on short, plump legs through the narrow aisles of food and hardware and fishing tackle, spreading her Rubenesque arms to us. “Bless your hearts, little Arinellis,” she said, with a heavy Italian accent. “My mother was a Campacho from Milan!
Sono molto lieto di fare la sua conoscenza!”
Ella cried, “It’s very nice to meet you, too!
Grazie!
You must be Sophia!” That was all the bonding ritual required to win over Sophia Campacho Cameron, of Tennessee by way of Italy. She grabbed me and Hoss grabbed Ella as if we were long-lost kin.
We were hugged and hugged again, patted on the backs, praised for our good looks, glowed at, offered wine, told we were godsends. It was like water falling on parched ground, to be welcomed that way by people who knew our family history. But they were ecstatic to see us. Or so they said.
“We prayed Gib would find the Arinelli sisters,” Sophia sighed. “And that you would understand and come here. Now there is reason to celebrate.”
“Understand what?” I asked warily.
“You’re here for the thirty-year anniversary! We’re all convinced this means Gib will take his brother’s place and open the Hall again. You’re a sign that the past has brought the Hall a future!”
I took a step back. I wasn’t going to be sucked into this sentimental nonsense. I didn’t like being an icon of Cameron hospitality. I was there to collect an inheritance and leave as soon as Gib deigned to hand it over, and I wanted to say so, flat out. But Ella’s eyes were glazed with appreciation and acceptance. “I can’t wait to see where our parents were married,” she crooned. She radiated joy like a polished charm.
“Oh, but y’all can’t go to the Hall, yet,” Hoss announced. “Everybody’s gone to Knoxville for the day.”
“We weren’t intending to stay there tonight—” I began patiently.
“But as soon as Gib hears, he’ll come for y’all! We’ll put you up in our house for the afternoon, and—”
“No, no, thank you. We really insist on renting a cabin. My sister’s coming down with a headache, I’m afraid”—Ella stared at me with her mouth open in dismay at the lie—“and she needs absolute quiet. Really. So we really will rent a cabin.”
“No way, no how will I put Venus and Ella Arinelli in a little bitty cabin like y’all are just tourists!” Hoss proclaimed. “Why, my cousin Olivia would skin my hide!”
“But dear Ella needs a house, not a cabin,” Sophia crooned, reaching up to lay a hand against Ella’s cheek. “I have the perfect bedroom for you in our home. You will rest and feel so much better.”
“Why, thank you, and we accept most gratefully,” Ella said, cutting her gaze at me.
“Here,” Hoss said, snatching a pamphlet from beneath the counter. “It’s a little map to the Hall. Tells you about the place, too.”
Ella smiled. “Oh, we’ve been dying to know more about the Hall’s history—”
“Thank you,” I cut in, and took the pamphlet. On the cover a sketch of a vine-covered, tree-shaded old mansion was superimposed over a Scottish crest on a field of red plaid. “We’ll just call Gib in the morning and tell him we’re here,” I said. “He’s not expecting us until late tomorrow.”
Hoss shook his head. “Gib and the family’ll be back by then. But if they don’t make it by dinnertime we’ll set you up at the family table over yonder”—he pointed to the building next door, where lace curtains fluttered in open windows—“at the restaurant. We offer good homegrown chow to hikers and bikers and campers and general sightseers passin’ through here”—he nodded toward a hall that led to the restaurant—“so we’ll save you a two-seater tonight, all righty?”
“All righty,” Ella chirped.
Cornered by the unnerving hospitality, I fumbled a hand across a small display of snuff cans and paper pouches of Tennessee Chaw chewing tobacco, which scattered over the counter. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled, and began scooping them up.
“No problem, no problem, they’re not fragile,” Sophia said, laughing. “Nothing up here in the mountains will break that easily.” As we stacked tobacco packets I saw a yellowed photograph under the scratched Plexiglas that aproned the counter around the cash register.
And I stopped cold, mesmerized. A Citadel-age version of Gib looked up at me with smiling hazel eyes, his body posture confident, handsome, and straight-backed, his right hand whole and strong. His dark hair was shaved to a military nub. But he was dressed in a flannel shirt, old jeans, and hiking boots.
He stood with his arm draped around another man’s shoulders. They held a string of trout between them. The other man resembled Gib but was obviously a good deal older and less crisp. He had a comfortable look about his face, already wise and settled, maybe. He was dressed in a camouflage jacket and baggy trousers.
“Is this Gib’s older brother?” I asked, pointing. Ella quickly huddled over the counter, too, her hands clasped together.
Tears rose in Hoss’s eyes, to my embarrassment. “I can’t do it. I can’t talk to you about Simon,” he said hoarsely. I straightened quickly and so did Ella. She and I traded strained looks.
“I’m sorry,” Hoss said, wiping his face. “Can’t help myself. Dear Lord.” Sophia patted his shoulder, then began wiping her own eyes.
“We can talk about Simon later, if you want to know,” she said. “Come along. You can settle in our daughter’s old bedroom. Oh, Ella, you do look pale.”
At that moment a small, wiry woman burst into the store, peering at us over purple-rimmed sunglasses. She wore thick-heeled granny clompers, tan Bermuda shorts with a crisply pressed blue blouse, and large earrings made of, I swear, it looked like small animal teeth. Little fangs were glued in a starburst pattern. Her hair was long, curly, blond-streaked brown with a poof of stiff-sprayed bangs on the front, surely half a foot tall.
She waved hands done in bright red inch-long nails decorated with pink stripes across the tips. “The Nellies?” she said breathlessly, pointing at us but gazing expectantly at Hoss and Sophia. “Johnny Mac called me on the CB and said he bet it was the Nellies in the parking lot.”
“It’s them,” Hoss confirmed.
The woman raised her hands, then looked heavenward, whether in thanks or supplication I wasn’t sure. She turned and ran out the door. I watched through the screen as she threw herself into a bright blue Camaro. The tires squealed as she drove off.
“Who was that?” I asked flatly. “And how does she get her hair to stand up that high?”
Sophia smiled. “That’s Ebb Hodger. She and her sister and their mother have worked at the Hall for … oh, many years! Their grandparents before them. And their great-grandparents.
Now they have proof that all is not ended! The Nellies are here just as Nellies were here many years ago, and brought good luck! And Nellies will bring good luck again! The Hall will be open for business again! We are all convinced!”
No one could make me believe that nonsense. Ella and I had walked into a surreal world where people praised us, welcomed us, and waited to give us money. Well, I’d take the money and ignore the rest. I looked warily at all the animals parading in eternal performances along the walls.
We were not going to end up the same way.
Sophia escorted us into her and Hoss’s friendly old stone house, which was filled with European antiques, crystal, fine silver, and military memorabilia, including—out the window of our bedroom suite—a large American flag fluttering grandly on a flagpole set in a petunia garden. Hoss and Sophia had lived in Europe for many years during his Air Force career.
Now we were left to rest among their museumlike collection of keepsakes. Sophia brought us a pitcher of iced tea and pimento cheese sandwiches on a silver platter. Ella curled up on a lace-trimmed antique oak trundle bed with the hum of a tiny window air conditioner next to her and her face buried in the Cameron pamphlet. “You’re going to read?” I asked in exasperation.
Ella sighed, “Hmmm-huh.”
I heard a phone ringing somewhere downstairs. I suspected Sophia was telling the whole county that we’d arrived. “Don’t you think it’s peculiar that these people take in strangers like us?” I said.
“They know our family.”
“Excuse me? They met our parents
once
. For a weekend.”
“Then Mom and Pop made a huge impression. Relax.”
“And that big-haired chick. What was
that
all about? I don’t want anybody gaping at us that way. What does she expect?”
“We’re honored guests. The Camerons haven’t had many visitors in the past year. She was excited.”
“I want to find out what happened to Simon Cameron.”
“Don’t pry. It’s not polite. And it’s probably a story that will just make us feel bad. Listen to this!” Ella waved the pamphlet at me. “The road between here and the Hall follows an old Cherokee trail. And you won’t believe how the Camerons got started here.” She got up and pressed the booklet into my hand. “Read this. You have to read this
right now
. Olivia Cameron wrote it. Gib’s great-aunt. It’s fascinating.”
“All right, all right.” I went over to a window and sat on the edge of a hard chair, very impatient and not intending to get sucked in by history. But then I read:
The first Cameron didn’t exactly come to these mountains peacefully or willingly. But he found what has drawn people here through the ages. Sanctuary.
And I couldn’t stop.
Even the Cherokees were looking for sanctuary when they came here centuries ago. Most of the southern Appalachians were settled by people seeking safety and freedom for one reason or another. A thousand years ago the Cherokees were pushed south by the Iroquois. The English came to get away from the king. The Scottish came to get away from the English. So did the Irish.
All looking for sanctuary.
But the first Cameron to set foot in our valley wasn’t the first Scotsman there. Our family goes back one step farther to a Macintosh. Tavis Macintosh. Tavis explored the Cherokee lands in the early 1700s. In the old maps and books the territory was labeled with its Cherokee
name, which was pronounced more or less like
Tennessee
though the spelling was
T-e-n-a-s-i
.
I expect Tavis just spelled it Eden. Paradise. That’s what it must have seemed to him. Herds of buffalo, passenger pigeons by the millions, deer, bear, beaver. Rivers full of fish. Valleys so rich the Cherokee had farmed them for generations. Thousands of Cherokees lived in permanent towns with huts and sweat lodges and ceremonial council houses and farmlands. They were the most powerful tribe in the southern mountains then.
Tavis probably followed the east Tenasi trace, an ancient hunting trail and warpath, up from the coast into the Appalachians, until he finally came to a magnificent valley. There he found one of the largest villages in the Cherokee Nation. A peace town, they called it. Neutral territory—whether it was about Cherokees fighting other tribes, or white settlers, or each other—the valley town was a sanctuary.
The valley itself had been a sacred place for centuries before the Cherokee separated from their Iroquois alliances and came south. That’s what Cherokee legends say, and that’s what the archaeologists have told us. Tavis must have marveled at the fifty-foot-tall, hundred-foot-wide ceremonial mound at the valley’s center. It predates even the Cherokee. Scientists have found arrowheads and pottery pieces in the vicinity that go back a thousand years.
Tavis built a cabin on the edge of the valley and set up a trading post. He married a prominent Cherokee woman named Two Doe and they raised a family. Tavis became an important trader in Cherokee, as well as white, society. In those early times the Scotsmen who explored in the mountains settled easily among the Cherokees. The Highland Scotsmen, being tribal folk accustomed to a clan system not unlike the Cherokees’, felt at home.
In the mid-1700s, Two Doe died and Tavis became
fatally ill himself. He wished that their youngest children might be educated in Scottish ways and Christianity after his death. So he sent his grown daughter on the long, hard journey to the coast to fetch back a Scotsman. Her name was Soquena among the Cherokees, but Susan Macintosh to the white settlers. She intended to hire a Scotsman to tutor her younger brothers and build a chapel for the family.
But when she and her entourage of Cherokee women friends and warriors arrived on the Carolina coast, the best she could find was a half-dead Highlander fresh off an English Navy ship and still in chains.
His name was Gilbert Cameron. He’d been rounded up by the English in the purges after the last Scottish rebellion. The English shipped many of the Highland clan leaders to the colonies in the West Indies and sold them into servitude on the plantations there.
Gilbert Cameron was lucky to end up on the coast of the Carolinas instead, though he was nearly starved and beaten to death during the voyage. Perhaps Susan took pity on him, or perhaps she had no choice; she purchased Gilbert Cameron from the English as an indentured servant. She believed she was buying an educated and obedient man and had little idea that he was in fact a Highland warrior intent on freedom.
Susan was as strong-willed as he, however. She marched him into the mountains, threatened him with torture when he attempted escapes, and, in short, fought a battle of control that has become a legendary frontier story. Before Gilbert Cameron and Susan Macintosh made peace with each other she sliced off the tip of his right ear. Years later, one of their children wrote that “Papa never seemed bothered by the disfigurement much, and Mother never showed a great deal of remorse for the attack.”
Gilbert did, in fact, build a chapel for her atop the ancient ceremonial mound, and together they raised six children, established the Cameron family in Hightower
County, Tennessee, survived Indian wars, smallpox epidemics, and the American Revolution.
Surely no two people better represented the collision of cultures and faiths in that era, or the loving alliances that have kept Camerons and Macintoshes at their ancestral home for all the generations since.