One Mountain Away (26 page)

First Day Journal: May 23

Taylor is almost two when my father dies of exposure in the front yard of my grandmother’s farmhouse, unable to find his way out of a snowstorm. With effort I’ve continued to pay the annual property taxes, using a post office box to avoid Hearty’s arrival on my doorstep. Two weeks after his death I find a letter in the box from Bill Johnston, our helpful neighbor, who’s tracked me down through a courthouse clerk. I can only mourn the man my father never was, and when Ethan insists on accompanying me to pick up and deal with Hearty’s ashes, I agree.

An aunt I’ve seen only once has made arrangements for a cremation, since hers was the only address the authorities found in the house. To her credit, she cleans before we arrive, making neat piles of Hearty’s belongings for me to go through. She tells me the family is sorry they haven’t gotten to know me better, but they felt every contact with Hearty was like diving into quicksand.

I understand only too well.

Because Ethan and Taylor are with me, I see my family home with new eyes. The house is in desperate need of repair, but Ethan crows over the chestnut logs, the fieldstone fireplace, the setting with its view of far-off mountains. He says it was built by true country craftsmen, and thinks it can and should be saved.

Since real estate in the area is selling for very little, Ethan suggests I find a renter with carpentry skills who can do the work under his tutelage. He feels sure the arrangement will be appealing, since the forty acres surrounding the house can be put back into production by someone with energy and enthusiasm.

On a warm afternoon with Taylor in a backpack carrier, we take my father’s ashes to scatter them on the mountain land he logged, because burying them in the Sawyer family cemetery is out of the question. By then my aunt is gone, leaving me with addresses of the family who are and will forever after remain strangers. While I understand their desire to sever ties with Hearty, it does not make me love them.

We drive most of the way and hike the rest on a logging path. The land looks so different. Many of the grand old trees are gone, and what was an impenetrable forest now opens to some of the most beautiful views I’ve ever seen. I’m stunned. With developers just beginning to build upscale communities on pristine mountain land, Hearty has been sitting on a gold mine. Whatever drinking buddy he’s gifted with these acres will surely see the potential.

Ethan loves the land and the wildlife we spot, including a rare peregrine falcon, just coming back after near-extinction. He says the falcon’s a good omen that someday the land, too, will revive, if managed well.

A bigger surprise is waiting when we go to the county seat to investigate dividing the farm. There is no will. My father didn’t, as threatened, make one. In the end, despite all threats to the contrary and by default, he’s left both properties to me. I like to think it was latent kindness or a sense of responsibility, but sadly, I’m almost certain it was inertia.

Bill Johnston, still thriving on the farm next door, suggests his brother, a talented carpenter, might be interested in renting the farm, and we strike a deal.

The mountain land is a question I’m not ready to answer. But already a plan is forming.

Chapter Twenty-Four

THE TELEPHONE RANG just as Charlotte began fishing through her handbag for the car keys. Harmony and Glenda were in Charlotte’s closet with Velvet and the five gorgeous puppies that had arrived without incident twenty-four hours earlier. Charlotte had invited the young women on her duty trip up Doggett Mountain, but they had declined, enraptured by the unfolding maternal drama.

She had just fielded one phone call from a member of the Falconview executive committee and scheduled a short call for that evening to go over business, and now she was in a hurry to get away before someone else demanded even more of her time.

She grabbed the receiver as she continued to fish.

“Charlotte?”

She recognized Analiese’s voice. “Reverend Ana.” They exchanged the expected pleasantries before Analiese unveiled the reason for the call.

“I wondered if you were free for lunch?”

Charlotte knew the reason for the invitation. She had revealed her illness, and in good conscience, Analiese couldn’t ignore it. She’d probably been waiting for Charlotte to talk to her again, and since she hadn’t, she was offering lunch as encouragement.

“I’m on my way out the door. I’m heading out into the country.” She glanced up at the clock again and did the calculations. She had told her renters she would be at the farmhouse by noon to collect their keys and go through the house before she returned their security deposit. The couple had already moved to Mars Hill, and it was past time to tidy final details.

“It’s such a beautiful day I was hoping to entice you to eat outside with me,” Analiese said.

“How about a picnic in the country?” The words were out before Charlotte realized how problematic the invitation might be for her minister. “But please, it’s not a command performance. I know how busy you are, and we’ll be heading straight up a mountain.”

“I have to be back by four. Is that rushing you?”

Charlotte gauged the other woman’s tone. Analiese sounded as if she really didn’t mind coming. “Not at all. I’m dressed as casually as you’ll ever see me. I’ll put something together for lunch. Can I pick you up in, say, thirty minutes?”

She hung up a moment later and realized she was smiling.

* * *

The church parsonage, a 1920s Tudor in the eclectic Kenilworth neighborhood, wasn’t far from Charlotte’s house. When she arrived, Analiese was sitting on the porch wearing capris, a floral camp shirt and hiking boots. With her hair pulled back in a ponytail and no jewelry, she looked even less like a minister than usual.

“You have no idea how glad I am to get out of town.” Analiese climbed into Charlotte’s Jeep Cherokee and locked her seat belt in place. “I was just offered last-minute tickets to a ladies’ tea at the Methodist church. The speaker’s doing a slide show of her recent trip to the Ukraine, followed by a sing-along of Ukrainian folk tunes. They’re having cabbage rolls and borscht.”

“I could have gone in your place. I like cabbage rolls.”

“Good, when you drop me off I’ll give you the container they’ve promised to leave with the church secretary. I love them too much. How do you feel about borscht?”

“Not as good.”

“If I put enough sour cream in it, I love everything.”

Charlotte glanced at her. Analiese didn’t have an extra ounce of fat anywhere. “When was the last time you put sour cream on anything?”

“When they developed the no-fat version. I bought stock I was so happy. I have to watch every bite or I’ll blow up like a balloon, and I’m not kidding. As a kid I was so overweight my nickname was Dough Girl. My mother’s only joy in life is cooking, and she stuffed me full of food to keep me quiet. You should have seen my father. Three hundred pounds heading toward four before he died of an overdose of apple dumplings.”

This was a side of the other woman Charlotte had never seen. Analiese had always been casual, but this utterly frank woman was a ramped-up version of the one who preached Sunday sermons. She was delightful.

“So food’s your enemy,” Charlotte said. “You’re going to see mine in a little while.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The house I grew up in. The land I grew up on. The community where I was the daughter of a no-good drunk and expected by some to follow in his footsteps.”

“That explains a lot about you, doesn’t it?”

Charlotte spared her minister a glance and a smile. “Doesn’t it, though? I spent my whole life trying to prove the few people who looked down on me were wrong. Actually, I spent my whole life trying to prove the one person who
really
looked down on me was wrong.”

“
You,
right? It figures. We tend to forget the eleventh commandment—Thou Shalt Not Be Thine Own Worst Enemy.”

“You should have been on the mountain with Moses.”

“I’m afraid I’d have been down at the bottom with the golden calf, especially since that’s where the food and drink were happening. So we’re going to your childhood home?”

“Somewhere between Trust and Luck.”

“How so?”

“Those are the names of two local townships, and our farmhouse was right between. I’m not sure where trust came in, but I always thought it was luck that got me out.”

Charlotte turned onto the Leicester Highway that would lead her up Doggett Mountain, past the kennels where she and Harmony had rescued Velvet. She began the slow climb that would eventually become steeper, narrower and turn into a series of hairpin curves.

Without asking herself why, she found herself telling Analiese about her grandmother, about her parents and the hardscrabble life she’d been born into. Also about the good neighbors, as well as the taunts at school, where her father’s all-too-public antics had been a favorite topic of conversation.

“The thing is, almost no one had money,” she finished. “Even those who were well off by local standards were poor by some accounts. They were like a bunch of barnyard biddies ganging up on the scrawniest, saddest chick so they would have somebody they could feel superior to before their own date at the chopping block.”

“That happens in exclusive private schools, too. The kid whose father doesn’t have his own jet. The kid whose mother can’t claim any celebrities as friends.”

“Did you grow up like that?”

“Me? Not at all, but when I was in television news I did a story about a boy who committed suicide because his parents bought him a three-year-old Lexus instead of a new one for his sixteenth birthday. The stock market’s dips had curbed their discretionary spending. I remember the phrase ‘discretionary spending’ so well. His mother was the one who used it, like his death was just part of life’s assets and liabilities. It wasn’t at all clear which he’d been.”

“That’s so sad.”

“Isn’t it? I was public school all the way, but I spent the first four years of elementary school being teased unmercifully. So I can relate. And after my pediatrician and aunt banded together to make sure the extra pounds went away, I made a conscious decision never to be the butt of anybody’s jokes again.”

“I’d say it was successful.”

The road began to climb. They chatted comfortably as Charlotte passed farms and homes, carefully taking the curves and pulling off just once so they could look out at the panorama below.

“You didn’t say why you’re making the trip,” Analiese said as the road flattened, then began a gradual descent.

“I inherited our family property after my father died. At the time I decided not to sell it because it was worth so little. Over the years I’ve had this and that done to it, and it’s been consistently rented. But the latest couple are now home owners, so they’re handing over their keys. I have to decide what to do next.”

“How long has the place been in your family?”

“It came down from my mother’s side, and I think I’m at least the sixth generation.”

“A real home place.”

“My grandmother loved every stick, leaf and floorboard. It was all she had of my grandfather after he died, and she would have done anything to keep it.”

“That makes selling difficult for you, doesn’t it?”

“Except there’s no reason to leave it to my daughter when I die, because she’ll only sell it herself. She has no connection to it.” She didn’t add “or to me,” although she knew Analiese understood that.

“It sounds like you’ve decided to sell, then.”

“I missed the best chance a few years ago. Like everybody else I hoped rural property was just going to keep going up and up. So I don’t know what I’ll do. I want to…”

After a long moment Analiese picked up on her hesitation. “You have other ideas?”

“Not an idea, more like a feeling. I want to do something to honor Gran. But this is the middle of nowhere, so I don’t know what exactly. I donate to the Arthritis Foundation every year. It would be smarter to just give them more money, but this is where she lived and died, and it meant so much to her.” She kept her voice light so her next words couldn’t be taken wrong. “Besides, someone I respect pointed out the difference between throwing money at a problem and getting involved. I took it to heart.”

“I wasn’t at my best that afternoon.”

“I think maybe you were. And by the way, have I told you about the kennel in my closet? Minnie would have approved.” Recounting the story of Velvet and her puppies took them through Trust, nothing more these days then a dot on the map, home to an attractive general store said to serve gourmet quality lunches, a wayside chapel dedicated to St. Jude and a covered bridge that gave rise to tourist jokes about the “bridge” of Madison County, which was far removed from the novelized bridges of another state.

“The church we attended was off that way,” Charlotte said, slowing and pointing to her left. “It burned to the ground fifteen years ago, and it was never rebuilt.” She turned down a familiar road, and followed it slowly and carefully. Conversation stopped, since both women were too busy watching the narrow road and holding on as they jolted up a steep incline.

Charlotte finally pulled over at the base of a massive oak and turned off the engine. “Hard winters and lots of spring rain don’t help a road like this one. It needs grading and new gravel if anybody’s going to live here again.”

“It’s a beautiful, beautiful spot.”

Charlotte almost felt as if she herself had been praised. Ethan had seen the beauty here, but it had taken distance and time before she could begin to appreciate what she had hoped to leave behind forever.

They sat staring out the windshield for a moment. The log house was at the top of a knoll, and the ground on either side had been terraced, with massive boulders holding top soil that must have been transported there by wagon. Now she wondered how the work had been accomplished. Had her ancestors wrenched these rocks from the woods or fields with mules? Dragged them here so the ground around the house could be leveled to plant trees and flowers? In the midst of poverty and relentlessly hard work, had they taken the time to bring whatever beauty they could into their daily lives?