Adelaide Piper (42 page)

That night I wrote the Moores a “Thank you, and good-bye” note and called a cab and charged a room at the Days Inn on my credit card, though I had no money to pay for it.

The next day I called Glenda to thank her, and I took one last walk around the Washington Monument and the Mall before Lazarus picked me up after work and took me to the airport, where I purchased a one-way ticket to Charleston, South Carolina.

He hugged me hard and said, “Maybe our paths will cross again.”

“You never know,” I said. “Thanks for helping me out.”

When I walked into the terminal, I called my old house out of habit from a pay phone, and I was relieved when Dizzy answered.

“The wedding is off. I'm coming home.”

She paused for a moment and then said, “Whew! Tell me what time your plane comes in.”

“At 10:05 p.m.,” I said. “United 102.”

“I'll be there,” she said. “You'll get to see Juliabelle too. She's here giving me a secret cooking lesson while Mae Mae and Papa Great are at the wedding.”

When I hung up the phone, I made my way up the escalator and took my place at the boarding gate in front of the big, thick windows. It was 8:00 p.m., and the summer sun was just beginning to set behind the canopy of trees around the Jefferson Memorial. The pale pink in the last light of the day was glistening across the Potomac River, and the Fourteenth Street Bridge was still bustling with employees who had worked late on this random Friday night in late July. The businessmen and women filed in around me, opening up their briefcases with their important papers, and I closed my eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief, in and out and in again, as the cell phones buzzed and the intercom announced the incoming flights.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that the sun had dipped, finally, below the green trees that encircled the city. And I spent the rest of the time before they called us to board watching planes ascend from the shortest runway in the country.

22

Back Home

D
izzy picked me up in the Country Squire. She had a small gold ring through her nose and a Marlboro Light between her black fingernails, but she was as sober as a Baptist preacher and grinning. She had a plan to borrow some money and open a Gullah restaurant on Upper King Street in Charleston, and she was learning all she could about Low-Country cooking from Juliabelle before her graduation.

“I just nearly made the mistake of a lifetime,” I said as we sped past the “Holy City” and through the cypress swamp lining Route 39 toward Williamstown.

Dizzy knocked my knee with her elbow. “But you didn't.” She cracked her window to ash out of it. “Know what I think, Adelaide?”

“Hmm?”

“Someone's looking after you despite yourself.”

As she took another drag, I rolled down my window, leaned back into the soft upholstery, and let my arm out to feel the thick, moist air. It was a healing balm itself, like Juliabelle's well water hidden somewhere back behind the cypress trees in the Francis Marion Forest, and I wanted to gulp it down. I stuck my head out the window and screamed along the dark, pine-lined road.

A fireworks stand marked the Williamstown County line, and at the foot of the bridge, three boys were smoking and shooting off Roman candles beneath the smoggy sky.

The mill village stirred with country music. Smoke spiraled upward from a bonfire in the center of the dirt alleyway between the two rows of houses. It was a Friday night, not to mention payday, so the men were sitting around the fire, drinking beer and rubbing their heels in the dirt, while the women put the children to bed.

Someone had added flower boxes with marigolds along the windowsills of Harvest Time, and the lettered marquee by the road was illuminating Dale's words of the week: “Refusing Jesus is a no-win situation!” No, they didn't mince words over at Harvest Time, and I couldn't wait to see Dale and Darla and get a tight squeeze from Charlie Farley.

The rotten-egg stench filled our nostrils at once, and I pointed to the iron-ore soot as it poured into the starry sky. Main Street was dim, but I could make out the locked doors of Campbell's Pharmacy, Sugar's Funeral Home, and the mannequins casting their shadows in the window of Cato Clothes.

At the left turn toward the historic district, the grand Magnolia Club glowed with twinkling white lights strewn across the limbs of the live oak and palmetto trees for Randy's wedding. Through the tall windows, I glimpsed silver candelabras brimming with candlelight and champagne flutes and plates of sweet iced cake, and I imagined a guttural kind of laughter from the guests inside as they released their worries over this sudden union and plumb gave in to hope.

Randy's pickup truck waited in the center of the circular driveway, covered in shaving cream and littered with root beer cans. “Dodi and Randy” read a poster with glitter-glue script hung from the back gate of the truck. “Just Married!”

Dizzy gave a side-angled glance my way, and I gulped back my tears.

“Well,” I said, “can't unring that bell.”

“Nope,” she said. “He would've driven you nuts, anyhow. Like, way too stable.”

When we pulled up to our picturesque home on the salt marsh, I pictured Adelaide Rutledge Graydon and the twist her life had taken, and I was grateful for the white clapboard house with its wraparound porch and dark green shutters and jasmine vines climbing the outside walls. It was the very thing that said, “Nobody can guess just how things will turn out.”

The red magnetic SOLD letters slapped across the metal Williams-town Realty sign made me wince and say, “What's next for us Pipers?”

It was nearly midnight, and Juliabelle was smoking her pipe on the back porch between the crab dock and the hammock. The smoke of her burning tobacco billowed up into the Spanish moss above her head. When she heard us, she hurried in and hugged me tightly before pulling back to give me the once-over.

“Welcome back, child,” she said. She looked older than I'd remembered, and her coal-black skin was beginning to sag below her sharp jawline. Her lips were cracked and her hair was graying on the sides, but her big black eyes still held a kind of vitality that glistened above the dusty lamps in our deserted home.

“Do I have a story for you,” I said to her. “St. Christopher must be worn out with me.”

She cupped her hands around my cheeks and said, “Not for now. Now's time for a midnight snack. Your sista's been cooking up a storm, and you got some samplin' to do.”

“Check it out,” Dizzy said, pulling me over to the stove, where she and Juliabelle had been filling the musty house with the sweet smell of shrimp and hominy grits, red rice with sausage, cheese biscuits, and banana pudding.

Dizzy loaded three plates for us, and we settled ourselves on the lawn chairs by the marsh dock while the mosquitoes nipped at our ankles. The backyard smelled like pluff mud and rotten tomatoes. The kudzu must have been taking over Mama's garden.

A car door slammed behind us. Then Daddy, still dressed in his tuxedo from the wedding, strode into the house, hauling an armload of Bizway vitamins. He stopped suddenly before walking over to examine the food on the stove, then peering through the back door in disbelief.

“What in the world?” he said, opening the screen door.

“Your oldest has come back home, Zane,” Juliabelle announced.

“Better get over here and tell her it's fine that she don't marry that sweet-looking Yankee.”

“Thank You, Jesus!” Daddy yelled. Then he ran over, pulled me close, and rocked me back and forth, whispering, “You made the right choice, sister.”

“You haven't eaten in a month of Sundays,” Juliabelle said, looking Daddy up and down. “Want a plate?”

“I won't refuse it,” he said.

It was a sweet reunion. Daddy smiling down on me. And no one questioning my decision to leave Washington and break off my pending nuptials.

The four of us settled into the lawn chairs, gobbling down the savory food and laughing while Daddy described Randy's wedding: the strapless white dress with the three-foot train his cheerleader bride had chosen to sport despite the obvious bulge of her belly, and the Carolina Gamecock groom's cake that had black icing on the outside with a field goal on top and red velvet cake in the center. Heavens to Betsy!

After Dizzy and Juliabelle went in to clean the kitchen, Daddy and I settled down in our lawn chairs, and I asked him, “So who bought the house?”

“Some couple from Chicago,” he said. “It's going to be a second home for them, I reckon. We don't close for another three weeks, so you can get your feet on the ground here if you like.”

“Thanks,” I said, breathless from all the change around me. “You doing okay, Daddy?”

“Not really,” he said, slapping away a mosquito with his stump. “I miss your mama, Adelaide, and I haven't talked to my own daddy in months.” He lifted his eyebrows and said, “Some days I can't remember what in the world happened.”

I nodded and bit my tongue, because it didn't feel right to say, “You and this new business were one of the things that made it all happen.” There was a lot more to it than that, and I was finally beginning to see that sometimes it is better to just shut up and wait.

After the dishwasher was loaded, Dizzy turned in and Juliabelle shuffled between the pittosporum shrubs back to Papa Great and Mae Mae's as if she hadn't been up to a thing this evening.

Daddy loaded his car with some water filters and headed back over to Uncle Tinka's apartment, and I felt my way to the end of the crab dock and sprawled out across the musty ropes of the hammock.

There was a rope there, tied to a palmetto in the yard, and I pulled it and swung out over the marsh, looking up through the oak trees to the crescent moon beaming through the sooty haze. It left chips of light on the water churning in the harbor beyond me.

Before long the lights came on at Mae Mae's as my grandfolks returned from the wedding, but in a few minutes their house was dark again, and I imagined the ornery Hog with his usual whistle going through his nose and Mae Mae nudging him until he rolled over.

Well, I was back to where I'd started four years ago, I mused as I stretched out across the hammock. In my own yard with an itch in my soul and my family in a heap more trouble than we were in then. And I could already guess that it wouldn't be the last time I got off track.

But the way I looked at it, I was raw material. Leveled like the houses on Pawleys Island after Hurricane David pounded them when I was a child. It wasn't such a bad place to be. To be leveled. It might be the only place where my Maker could
make
something of me.

In the kudzu a raccoon scurried through the vines before plopping into the pluff mud, and his two iridescent eyes looked back at me before he turned and parted the tall marsh grass with his pointed snout.

There was a plan for me, I was sure. Maybe it contained a husband— a soulful, nonterrified one—or an opportunity to write poetry.

But who was I to impose my will on everything?

In the backyard darkness a poem formed.

Second Breath

It starts

with a halt.

Not unlike

a mother's grip

on a boy

stepping

into the road

or a hare

just aware

of the bobcat

in the underbrush.

What precedes

resuscitation

is the stripping

to sackcloth—

the sitting down

in the cool

gray ashes.

Now I rubbed my jewel, breathed in the moist air, and remembered
sehnsucht.
It was a German word I'd learned from Mr. Lewis, and the idea of it was coming back to me. Akin to joy,
sehnsucht
was a wistful longing. A yearning like the itch of the soul.

In one of his books he described it as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” It was like poetry— how a few words pieced together in just the right sequence could pierce your heart for a moment with a kind of truth.

I was weary to the bone as I pulled my rope and swung in the hammock out over the marsh, but I had
sehnsucht
beneath the crescent moon on the crab dock, and I was waking up from a kind of sleep I'd never fall back into.

Mr. Lewis believed that our human life is just the first page of the first chapter of a very long book. And I considered this, my eyes darting back and forth in the darkness, while the crickets called and the furnace melted the iron ore, and the four converging rivers pushed their way out to sea.

Acknowledgments

I
am heartily grateful for each member of the Westbow Press team, especially my editor, Ami McConnell, whose direction significantly improved Adelaide's story. Thanks also go to my literary sounding board: Rebecca Kurson, Lisa Hughes, John Pelletier, and my husband, Edward B. Hart Jr., who has skillfully mastered the tricky technique of critiquing with love.

I am indebted to the best group of babysitters a working mom could come by: my parents, Betty and Joe Jelks, and my in-laws and friends, Ed and Mary Hart, Mary Boyd Hart, and Bitsy Andrews.

In addition, I want to thank the following South Carolina bookstores that have greatly supported these efforts: The Cozy Corner on Edisto Island, The Open Book in Greenville, Litchfield Books on Pawleys Island, and the Barnes & Noble booksellers in Mount Pleasant and Charleston.

My utmost and final thanks go to the One who called me to His marvelous light at Adelaide's vulnerable age.

Reading Group Guide Questions

1. Adelaide is a risk-taker, a pot-stirrer, and one determined debutante poetess. She's interested in justice almost to a fault, but she has a tender side that sympathizes with her peers and their mutual struggles. In what ways do Adelaide's passionate attempts to “force things back to where they belong” and to “scratch the itch of her soul” (p. 34) contribute to her sufferings and her occasional loss of control throughout the novel?