A Place to Call Home (49 page)

“What? Now hold on—”

“You won’t really be home again yourself unless Roan stays. And if he insists he doesn’t belong here, you’ll go away with him, because you’ll always be trying to make it right for him. I bet you were thinking about Roan when you got involved with the problems that woman—”

“Terri Caulfield,” I said tightly. “Look, don’t use that to analyze me—”

“You think you failed Roan again, and you’ll always feel you failed him if this isn’t settled. If you can’t keep him here, you’ll go wherever he wants, even if it breaks his heart and yours, too.”

I felt the blood draining from my face; Tweet was looking at me the way she’d look at a blind owl caged at a wildlife sanctuary, as if I were hopelessly trapped. “He’s not going anywhere,” I said loudly.

“Oh, Claire,” she soothed. She patted my hand.

• • •

Josh took Matthew and Tweet on a tour of the local farms. They happened to be at Uncle Winston’s when one of his Black Angus cows was struggling with a breech birth and they delivered her twin calves. When Dr. Radcliff—Dunderry’s aging veterinarian and a cousin of Mama’s—arrived a few minutes later, he was very impressed.

“He’s a whopper. She’s little but she’s strong,” Dr. Radcliff raved to Winston and Josh. He was talking about Matthew and Tweet I decided, or perhaps them and the calves as well. At any rate, the event started a series of discussions about the two of them interning at Dr. Radcliff’s veterinary practice with an understanding that they’d buy the practice when he retired in a couple of years.

I heard this news and had to be the one to break it to Roan. I talked him into driving to the city park at the Delaney covered bridge. We sat on a blanket in the bridge’s shade, our feet inches from the river beneath it. Roan contemplated an unlit cigar in his hand, tossed it aside, and said, “You’re tugging your ears and giving me the blue-eye. Just tell me. Whatever it is, just tell me.”

I stalled. “Everybody who grew up in this town came here at least once when they were teenagers. It’s the oldest make-out spot in the county. But you and I never got a chance. Goddammit, we deserve it.” I thrust out one hand. “Come on.”

He frowned but took my hand and helped me up. I leaned on my cane and made my way up the grassy shoulder to the road. We stepped inside the shadowy tunnel of fragrant wood and faced each other. He laid the cane aside and latched his arms low behind my back. “It’s not much of a notorious place in broad daylight,” I began, losing the words when he kissed me.

“How’s that for notorious?” he asked several minutes later. We sagged against each other, breathless. “Tell me,” he repeated.

I did, and when I finished, with the river bubbling
below us, the lazy song of insects droning in our ears, and the hot, ripe sunshine seeping through the fine cracks in the wooden roof over our heads, Roan said quietly, “It’s done then. Matthew’s staying. There’s not a damn thing I can do about it. Except get out of his way.”

W
e woke the next morning at Ten Jumps with thunder rumbling in the distance and the air hot and oppressive, charged in the heavy way of summer storms. We dressed hurriedly in old jeans and T-shirts. Roan frowned at the low, bruised clouds above the bedroom’s skylight as he knelt by the bed and wordlessly pulled my bare feet onto his thighs. He slid my tennis shoes on my feet while I pushed a dark wisp of hair from his forehead. “We have to talk about the future,” he said.

“Let’s just deal with the present. Check the weather.”

We went to the porch. I leaned on my cane and surveyed the scene, with a knot of concern in my stomach. The birds and insects were silent. There was no breeze. Lightning flickered in short pulses, and the sky to the east was turning an ominous purple-black. “I don’t like this,” I said.

Roan unhooked the hanging baskets of ferns and set them on the ground along the porch’s stone foundation, then put each rocking chair on its forward tips with the headrests against the porch rail. He tapped the flat, deep chestnut logs of the cabin’s front wall. “This cabin is built like a concrete bunker. It won’t even shiver in a high wind.”

How he knew that, from childhood, brought images of
him huddled alone inside the dank and cobwebbed haven. “I’m going back in,” I said. “I’ve got goosebumps and my bad knee aches. I’m turning into a human barometer.”

The phone rang as I hobbled through the front room. Daddy was calling, with Mama on an extension, quoting the weather reports and urging us to come over to the farm. “What about Matthew and Tweet?” Roan called with strained inquiry.

“They’re with Josh. He took them and Amanda to brunch at the club.”

Roan’s expression hardened; he looked away. “We’re fine here,” I told my parents, and quickly said good-bye in the middle of their protests. I followed Roan outside again. “Afraid?” he asked with a grim smile.

“No worse than usual.”

Roan took my hand and pulled me into his arms; we braced ourselves in the growing darkness. I didn’t know how much time passed; the morning light faded into a peculiar dusk, tinted with a yellowish undertone that made a single rose on one of the yard’s newly planted shrubs stand out in sharp crimson relief.

The eastern sky churned. Suddenly, a deep wind sprang up and leaves tore from the water oaks along the lake’s rim, swirling across the yard. Tiny whitecaps broke across the lake’s surface. “Roan,” I said uneasily. “This is no ordinary thunderstorm. This feels like tornado weather.”

He straightened, his face tightening as he listened to the wind. “Go inside,” he said. “I’ll watch.”

I shivered as a gust of cold air skimmed us. “Watch what? Do what? Fight the wind with your bare hands?”

He released me and stepped into the yard. The wind pushed at him. He staggered. I clung to a porch post. “Go inside,” he called again. A limb snapped off an oak and whipped toward him, struck him across the chest, and knocked him flat on his back. I fell down the porch steps and crawled to him. He rolled over on his hands and knees.

Roan snagged me by one arm, and we staggered inside
the cabin. He lifted me around the waist and carried me to the doorway between the bedroom and the kitchen, between the old and the new, where we sat down. I curled an arm over his head protectively; he did the same for me.

The wind began to howl; I’d never heard anything like it in my life. Then a limb slapped the bedroom window and the panes shattered. The curtains suddenly streamed like furious white flags; there were thumps and thuds, but submerging every other sound was the wild bellow of the wind. I met Roan’s gleaming eyes and began to count out loud, as if the numbered seconds were a chant to ward off danger.

“What are you doing?” he yelled.

“I believe in numerology,” I yelled back.

Rain whipped in through the broken window, but the wind began to subside. The light grew brighter. I fumbled for the door frame, trying to pull myself up. “Got to make some calls, call home, make sure—”

Roan vaulted up and ran to the front room. Shaking, I dragged myself up along the door frame and looked at the shards of window glass flung across the bedroom floor and the bed. I went after him. He already had the phone in his hand.

We stayed on the phone for almost an hour, as Mama gathered and relayed information. Arnetta had lost the roof off her garage, an acre or so of Uncle Winston’s Christmas tree fields had been flattened, Hop’s bass boat and boat shed had been mangled—nothing really serious, only property. Nothing had happened around the country club; Josh had left the brunch to meet with Daddy and other county officials. Matthew, Tweet, and Amanda were fine.

Finally, exhausted, we walked outside. The rain had turned into a fine drizzle and a warm mist rose from the ground and the lake. On the far side of the yard, a swath had been cut through the forest, as if a giant lawn mower had run across the trees, snapping them off halfway up. I felt Roan’s hand on mine, gripping hard. The strange, malevolent
path disappeared down the ridge, in the direction of the Hollow.

Roan slowed the car as we rounded the curve, driving over small tree limbs scattered across the pavement.

My stomach lurched when I saw the twisted alley of destruction. Twenty years’ growth of pines and kudzu had been ripped and strewn, the splayed root balls of some trees pulled out of the earth, pulled out of the buried garbage and the deeply submerged ruins of Big Roan’s trailer and pickup truck.

Like a macabre insult, the desecration of a graveyard, throwing bones and open caskets into plain sight, the jumble of downed trees and tangled vines was littered with unspeakable evidence—rotted shreds of cans, the rusted-out hulk of a steel barrel, indefinable bits and pieces of corroded, muddy artifacts. A doughnut-shaped object hung obscenely from the tattered trunk of a split pine, dripping streams of dirty water.

“That’s a half-rotted tire hanging in that tree,” Roan said.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. I looked at Roan, and his horrified expression broke my heart. His childhood, his shame, had been pulled from the ground and nakedly exposed. I put my hand on his arm, my fingers digging. “I’m sorry,” I begged. “This is too much. Don’t stop here.”

His gaze was riveted to the exposed debris, his hands clenched so tightly on the steering wheel that his knuckles were blue-white. He stopped the car on the road’s weedy shoulder, cut the engine, slung his door open, and got out. “No,” I said urgently, holding on to his shirt sleeve. He pulled his arm away and staggered down the rain-drenched slope, shoving broken limbs aside, climbing over tree trunks. He pivoted, his eyes stark and agonized, his fists clenched. “Stay back,” he called. “I don’t want you down in this with me.”

I struggled past the door he’d left open, holding on to the door frame, flinging a hand back to grab my cane. “I’ve always been part of it. You keep me out now, you’ll keep me out forever. Wait. Someone’s coming. You hear it? A car’s coming.”

It was Matthew, driving one of the farm trucks. He parked on the shoulder and leaped out, frowning at Roan. “I knew you’d be too damned stubborn to go anywhere safe in the middle of a tornado. I couldn’t find you at Ten Jumps, so I’ve been … What the hell are you doing down there?”

“Go get him!” I ordered. “Get him out of there!”

Matthew hesitated, looking from Roan to me in astonishment. “What is it? What’s here?”

“Me,” Roan said in a gutted tone. “What I was. What I’ll always be to everyone who wants to forget. Everything you don’t understand.”

Matthew shook his head. “
What?
” He bent down and picked up something from the weeds, then straightened with a dented, rust-pocked, muddy hubcap in his hands. He turned the piece of debris, frowning, examining it, then dropped it suddenly and stared at Roan. “Whatever this is about, just tell me. It couldn’t be that bad.” He clambered down the slope.

Roan lurched forward a step. “Both of you—stay up there!”

Matthew stopped, looking askance at Roan’s furious warning. Then he clamped his mouth shut and went on, swinging at limbs, angrily pushing through the mud-spattered vines. “What are you going to do? Is it like the other day—somebody gets in your face and the best you can do is knock him down? Go ahead. Show me who you really are.”

Roan snatched him by the shirt and shook him. I screamed, “Roan, don’t!” as Matthew clamped his hands on Roan’s fists. Matthew lost his balance and fell backward into a pile of branches. Roan leaned over him, still dragging on his shirt. Matthew stared up at him, frozen.

“
This is where I grew up,
” Roan said to him. “In this garbage hole! This is what I come from! Claire came here for help when we were kids, but instead of helping her, my old man tried to rape her.
And
when I got here
—”

“Roan,” I called brokenly.

Roan’s head sank. He took a long breath, then leveled a brutal, unapologetic stare at Matthew. “I killed him.”

T
he three of us sat on the soggy mat of weeds in the roadside by the Hollow, me in the middle, Roan staring straight ahead, Matthew with his arms propped on his knees and his head bowed.