Home to Big Stone Gap (24 page)

“All their lives, really. It hasn’t always been easy for them.”

“The theater life is tough—and I’ve only been involved on the amateur level.”

“Their professional lives have gone quite nicely. It’s the home life that’s been difficult—or, I should say, was difficult.”

“What happened?”

“They had a daughter, Elspeth. She died when she was at university in London,” he says sadly.

“No.”

“She was eighteen years old. It was a car accident. I wish you would have known Donald before it happened. His hair was the color of coal, and his posture was as straight as a plank. The loss aged him considerably.”

“I know all about it.”

“Rosalind told you?”

“No, but Jack and I lost a son. Our Joe was just a little boy.”

“Awful.”

“What can you do, Arthur? Nothing at all. You have to let life play out the way it’s going to, and hope that those you love are somehow spared the painful parts.” I pour myself another cup of tea. “What’s
your
sadness?”

Arthur sits back in his chair, his spine straightening as though he’s been insulted. “What do you mean?”

“Terribly American of me, isn’t it? To just blurt it out.”

“It’s a bit off-putting.”

“Yeah, well, that’s a Yankee for you. Though we’re not called Yankees where we’re from. Yankees are ferriners from the north. Because I’m Italian, I’m considered a ferriner.”

“Who married a local.”

“Right.”

Arthur takes a deep breath. “I’d rather not answer your question, Ave Maria.”

“That’s a blunt answer to my blunt question.”

He smiles. “Right.”

Jack holds my hand as he leads me into the main quad of the University of Aberdeen, where he’s arranged for us to have a private tour of the grounds and buildings. The interior court is the site of the Crown Tower, which is an actual sculpted crown of sandstone, suspended in the air by six ribbons of white stone. The edges of the stone are mottled from the weather but otherwise sturdy. Sunlight pours through the open vaulting, throwing shadows onto the courtyard.

Jack tells me, “This was built in 1500. It was preserved during a squabble with the barons of the Mearns, who came at night and stole the bell. The principal armed the student body with weapons to protect the crown, which is why it’s still here. I’ll show you the library where I’ve been doing my research.”

Jack leads me into the library—modern by local standards, it was built around 1700. The oak panels and some of the tables and chairs are original. In every corner, students work on their laptop computers. It’s a crazy sight to see: antiquity and modernity moving in harmony.

“Hello, Jack.” A beautiful blond woman in her twenties greets Jack. Her blue eyes and champagne-colored hair crackle against the dark paneled walls. It’s as if someone opened a window and a yellow butterfly flew in.

“Paige, this is my wife, Ave Maria.”

She extends her hand. “I’m Paige Toon. I’m in charge of genealogy research here.”

“So you’ve been helping my husband.”

“I am giving it a try.” She smiles. “Ave Maria. What an interesting name. Did you know the University of Aberdeen was originally called Saint Mary’s College?”

“I didn’t know that. With my name, I fit right in.”

“Brilliant!” she says. “Follow me.”

I let her take the lead and whisper to Jack, “Now I see why you spend so much time at the library.”

“With all the reading, I need to rest my eyes once in a while,” he says, and gives me a teasing wink and a quick kiss.

Paige leads us into a research room and closes the door. “I thought it would be fun to tell you what we’ve found in our hall of records.”

“Let me guess. Jack descends from a clan of thugs and deviants.”

“Close. They were educators.”

“Really?”

“Are you surprised?” Paige asks.

“Jack’s family were all laborers in the States,” I explain, then turn to him. “Were there any teachers in your family?”

“Not that I know of,” he says.

“Here’s the MacChesney plaid.” Paige shows us a picture of a swatch in the book. It’s a red and yellow plaid with a black repeat weave.

“But it says McGuiness.”

“Somewhere between here and there, McGuiness became MacChesney.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“More than you know. I often think your processors at Ellis Island must have been hard of hearing. It’s not a common name—and as far as I can tell, your people did not emigrate from Ireland. We found McGuinesses in Surrey, which is fairly close to London. That also happens. You have to be hardy and persistent to stay in the north. The summers are cool, and the winters are frigid.”

I say, “So that’s why people are so obsessed with their gardens. Signs of spring and life and color. You need them after a long winter.”

“Right. I rather like the winters, though—I love to build fires and ski. It all depends upon your point of view, I suppose.”

We follow Paige to Mitchell Hall, where graduation is held. It was built in 1895. “This is a baby building,” she says.

I laugh. “In America, this would be ancient.”

Paige takes us on a tour of the meeting hall, where Queen Elizabeth herself delivered an address to the Scottish Parliament. I take a picture of Jack at the podium where she spoke. Paige shows us the Cruickshank Botanic Garden, which makes the Stonemans’ conservatory look like a countertop terrarium. “This garden was founded with pure organic ideals in mind. Since we live on an island, essentially—the UK, that is—we have a sense of the preciousness of every bit of land. It’s different from having limitless space, like you do in the States. We have to respect every leaf on every tree. There’s only so much to go ’round.”

“We have some organic farming in the United States,” I say.

“It’s all we have here,” she says.

Students mill about between classes, looking very much of their moment, but there is a hushed reverence here that can only come from five hundred years of scholarship.

A few days later, Arthur and Jack are shoring up the irrigation ditches in the garden. Arthur shows Jack how to make the pits in the earth with a long, thin metal pipe. I watch through the conservatory as Jack perfects the technique, with Arthur supervising. My husband is down on his knees, and when he has to attack another patch of ground, he springs up to standing. He looks as young as he did in high school, and I’m not exaggerating. This trip has added years to his life.

It’s only now that I can see the rut we were in back home. We had stopped dreaming, Jack and I, and begun settling into the terrible place called “for all sakes and purposes: practically old.” Arthur is eighty, and yet he stays mentally agile by playing cards and reading; he paints to soothe his soul, and he works the garden to give himself a sense that he is responsible for his own survival.

“Gentlemen, dinner is served,” I announce from the garden gate.

“We’ll be right there, honey.”

Jack hasn’t had a man to look up to, to learn from, since his father died so many years ago. He revels in his friendship with Arthur. They do things together each day. Jack even went to the art institute to watercolor with him. I don’t know what they talk about, but I’ve never seen Jack so chatty. It’s as if he’s found his oracle.

For supper, I made roasted chicken with rosemary butter, per Donald Stoneman’s instructions. I slow-roasted root vegetables, plentiful in the basement bin, with olive oil in the fireplace oven. It took me a few tries to get the hang of it—I burned plenty of yams and red beets—but now I’m a pro, making certain to heat the oven with a roaring flame for a good bit before I put in the iron skillet. All the things I’ve learned from living in this wonderful old house will be forgotten once I return home, but it’s been great fun to experience them and live as the Scots do.

I’ve learned about my husband, living here for the past month. I see a lot of his behavior in his fellow Scots. They have great enthusiasm when it’s called for, but most of the time, they are introspective. They are also, like the mountain folk back home, extremely wary of outsiders. This probably is a result of generations of war, in which they were called upon to constantly defend their homes against mighty oppressors looking to control the mysterious sea that lies east and north.

You always feel the water around you here. So much of travel and movement is predicated on the fog and rain, which roll in abundantly during the spring. Jack has yet to water the garden—he doesn’t have to, since the morning rains give it a good dose. He has also learned to work the garden at the end of the day, at Arthur’s suggestion. “The earth is more open to manipulation then,” Arthur told us. “The earth is like us; it needs sun and water and, most importantly, rest. We have to nourish it.”

With the beauty we live in back home, you’d think I would really appreciate the land and all it has to offer. I thought I did—but it took coming to Scotland for me to realize that we really borrow the space we inhabit on earth. Arthur and the Stonemans never use chemicals in their gardens, and they have every gizmo known to man to keep the crows out. Some they make themselves—my favorite is the “tree of small mirrors.” It looks like a funky Christmas tree at the far end of the garden. It seems to be effective.

It’s a way of life worth pursuing. I haven’t bought a potato or a beet or a carrot since we arrived five weeks ago, and we’ve barely made a dent on the supply of vegetables in the basement. It’s amazing how well a family can live on one garden.

I’ve left most of the planning of day trips to Jack, who has become an expert on where to go and how to get there. We try to go most places by train, because it gives us time to savor the landscape. One of the great surprises of this trip is the reminder of how much I love spending time with my husband. He’s a lot of fun, and I forget that when we’re back home living a real life without shortbread, castles, and whiskey.

“Today we’re going to Edinburgh,” Jack announces on the train platform.

“Great.”

“We’ll train it, have lunch, you can stop at that pottery shop—”

“Emma Bridgewater!”

“Right, and then we’ll tour the castle.”

“Jack, how many castles have we been in?”

“Are you counting?” Jack puts his arms around me.

“I think it’s a hundred in four weeks.”

“You’re exaggerating. It’s ninety-nine. I can’t help it. I love them. I can’t get enough of the stonework and the moats, and hearing stories of the knights and their crusades.”

A train pulls into the station, braking slowly, wheezing and whistling until it comes to a full stop. I move to climb aboard.

“Not yet.” Jack pulls me back and holds my hand.

I watch as some passengers disembark. As they chat on cell phones, I imagine a time when there weren’t phones of any sort and the only way to send a message was to get on a train and deliver it yourself, in person.

“Mom!”

No matter where I am in the world, whenever I hear someone yell “Mom,” I always think it’s for me. I look off into the middle distance across the rows of train tracks and think about my children, which always fills me with a sense of purpose. I feel a small place in history when I picture them.

“Mom!”

I look up and see Etta waving to me from a window with both arms. I think it’s a dream until Jack scoops me up by the waist and leads me to the place where Etta and Stefano step off the train. They’re really here! My heart is racing, I can’t believe it.

I wanted to make this trip about Jack, and I’ve only recently, when we’re lying in bed, asked if we could sneak down to Italy to see our daughter when we’re done here in Scotland. Jack made it seem as though we should get home; after all, we’ve been away for six weeks. “Let’s go to Italy another time,” he said diplomatically. Now I realize he was setting me up for this wonderful surprise.

I take Etta in my arms. No matter how old my daughter becomes, she’s still my little girl with the map of the world on the wall of her bedroom in Cracker’s Neck. I hold her closely, giving her a hundred kisses. As I embrace her, she feels different to me. “Etta?”

Etta smiles and unbuttons her coat. There is no mistaking the change. “Ma, we’re going to have a baby.”

Jack whoops and does a full spin, like Joel McCrea in
Song of Missouri.
I pull my daughter close, tears forming in my eyes. “Congratulations, honey.” Jack takes Etta in his arms as I embrace Stefano. I look at my husband. I will never forget the look on his face when his highest dream came true. He’s going to be a grandfather.

“How far along are you?” I ask.

“Five months. I had an inkling when we called at Christmas, but I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure. It was so hard to talk on the phone without telling you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Good in the afternoon. The mornings are rough.”

“They were for me too. Keep a box of crackers on your nightstand and eat one before you get out of bed.”

“I will, Mama.” Etta’s smile is so real, and so dear, I begin to cry. I imagined this moment far into the future, maybe ten years from now. I could not be happier. I will commence worrying later, when the news has had time to settle. I put my arm around her as we walk. I turn and look back at Jack. “Are we going to Edinburgh?”