The Swan House (34 page)

I narrowed my eyes. “Are you telling me the truth?”

Carl nodded, all serious-like. “Of course I am, Mary Swan. Marvin never bothered me again, and right then and there I gave my heart to Jesus and got baptized the next week. And if you want to hear about the other things He's done in my life, well, I guess we'll have plenty of time on the way to that there Resthaven.”

My face broke into a smile almost as wide as Carl's. “I knew you'd take us!”

So, as if I didn't already have enough to think about, with civil rights and Russians and Mama and Resthaven and Daddy and eligible ladies and Robbie and painting, now I had one more thing to keep in my mind: Carl being saved by angels.

Chapter 16

I
t turned out to be pretty easy to get the Cadillac. Jimmy was invited to spend the night at Andy Bartholomew's on Friday, and I told Ella Mae on Thursday that I couldn't go down to Grant Park, and Rachel invited me to spend the night Friday. I already knew that Daddy was determined to get in eighteen holes of golf at the club on Saturday while the weather was still warm enough. So by the time Saturday morning came, anyone who could possibly be worried about us for the next twelve hours thought that we'd be with someone else.

At eight-thirty, Rachel and I raced from her house to mine, made sure Daddy's Jag was gone, and slipped into the Cadillac. I had rarely driven it, so Rachel volunteered to get behind the wheel.

“Look out!” I shrieked as she backed dangerously close to the BMW that Daddy used for business deals. “And there's the boxwood over there! Turn more to the left, Rach, for heaven's sake.”

“Shh. Let me concentrate, will you? Your driveway is a catastrophe to navigate.” It was one of the few times I'd seen practical Rachel a bit unnerved.

By the time we made it to the bottom of the hill, I was sure that Trixie and every other neighbor must have heard the screeching on and off of brakes. I expected her to emerge from her front door at any moment, hair in rollers, and question us. But we made it around the corner without being seen.

“You would have to pick the most conspicuous bus stop in Buck-head, you idiot,” Rachel said sharply as she puttered toward West Paces Ferry Road. “What time is it anyway?”

“Five 'til nine. Don't worry. He'll be there.”

And he was, pulling a jacket around him and stomping his big brown boots on the ground. It took only a matter of seconds for Rachel to put the car into Neutral and hop into the backseat.

Carl was smiling. “Mornin', ladies. Pleased to see you.”

“Hi, Carl.”

“Now listen, both of you. If anybody questions us about anything, anything, you understand, I'm just your chauffeur.”

We giggled at that, but Carl's face was somber. “I can't afford to be getting into any trouble, Mary Swan. I mean it. You get in the backseat with Rachel.”

So I obeyed.

Rachel had the map and agreed to play the navigator. I had the letter Henry Becker had written my mother as well as my copy of the Raven Dare and the scrapbook with the sketch of Mr. Becker in it. And Carl had the wheel.

“All right, Carl, you've got to turn here and then go down a ways to get onto I–85.” Rachel's head was buried in an Atlanta map.

It took Carl a few minutes of jostling and jerking us around to get used to the Cadillac. He finally made it onto the expressway. “Oh, wee! Mighty fine to be driving out here. Mighty fine,” he called back to us, and I could hear the pure pleasure in his voice. It had never occurred to me to ask Carl if he'd ever driven on the freeway before. He pushed his foot down on the accelerator really hard, and we took off fast.

Rachel and I eyed each other, shrugged, and then giggled. “An adventure,” she mouthed to me, and I nodded.

The first part of the trip was like a montage from a dozen different Broadway plays. First, Carl's deep bass voice rolled out “Ole Man River, dat ole Man River. He don't say nuttin'. He jus' keep movin' along.” He sang it with so much feeling that both Rachel and I got tears in our eyes. Then he sang “Moon River” and moved to “Oklahoma.” We both joined in on the chorus: “When I say, yip a yipa yipa yah, I'm only saying you're doing fine, Oklahoma, Oklahoma, OK-L-A-H-O-M-A,” and then we shouted at the top of our lungs, “Oklahoma!”

“Bravo, girls!”

“Sing some more, Carl,” I begged him time and time again. Somehow he seemed to know all of the Broadway musicals. I was sitting directly behind him, and since I couldn't see his face, I watched his shoulders. They were enormous. Much wider than Daddy's or Robbie's or anyone else's I knew. But as he sang, they shifted up and down, and the expression I couldn't see on his face translated into his upper body language.

“You have one beautiful voice,” Rachel commented when he paused between songs. “Do you sing a lot with your jazz band?”

“Some, but mostly I sing every Sunday in church with the choir. Or sometimes we prepare men's quartet or the like.”

“But you don't sing show tunes in church?”

“Oh no. Not in church. That's just when we're messin' around.” He turned his head and smiled back at us. “Wanna hear what we sing in church?”

“Sure!” we squealed in unison. And for the next fifteen minutes we listened to a medley of Negro spirituals, songs like “Let My People Go” and “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” We hummed right along with him. Finally he belted out in a mournful voice, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh-oh-oh-oh. Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”

I did start trembling ever so slightly, and goose bumps broke out on my arms. I don't know what it felt like to Rachel, but to me, it felt like someone was putting his finger on my heart and asking me that question, sung out so hauntingly, so mysteriously in Carl's deep voice. I almost expected two big black men holding big black books to appear before us in the middle of the highway and to hold up their books as we zipped by, crying out to me, “Believe, girl. You gotta believe.”

When Carl finished that song, he said, “I don't have much voice left.”

“Let's stop and get a Coke!” I suggested, relieved to think of something besides black angels.

“Good idea, Mary Swan. We'll be needing some gas anyway.”

While we searched for a filling station, Rachel and I started singing a song that Papy had taught me from the war. “It's a long way to Tiperary, it's a long way to go. It's a long way to Tiperary to the sweetest girl I know. Good-bye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square. It's a long, long way to Tiperary, but my heart lies there.”

About ten o'clock, we pulled into a filling station. I hadn't thought of needing gas, but thankfully, I'd brought a little bit of cash with me. Carl sat straight up and kept his eyes down when the attendant approached the car.

He was skinny and tall with a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead. “What'll it be?” he asked cheerily, and then he noticed the strange combination of teens in the car.

“Five dollars of regular,” I said quickly.

The young man peered in the back window, which I had rolled down, and said, “You ladies all right?”

“Perfect,” Rachel said, batting her eyes.

“Well, if you're sure,” he said, with another wary glance at Carl.

My heart had stopped pumping for a long minute, and when the attendant walked away, it started hammering hard. I hated the way he looked at Carl with a mixture of suspicion and condescension in his eyes. But Carl didn't seem to mind. He took my money and paid for the gas and then bought each of us a bottle of Coke from the machine.

When we left the filling station, I let out a sigh of relief.

Rachel snapped, “That was simply awful, rude, the way he treated you, Carl!”

“You girls did just fine. Keep your calm and smile and don't say a word. And we'll be all right. It's all okay.”

We tried to start up the songs again, but the gusto had gone, and instead, we contented ourselves with sipping our Cokes. Every once in a while Carl would exclaim, “Look at that fiery red maple. And that flaming orange oak. Woo-ee, ain't this a splendid view of the Almighty's creation! Have you ever seen hills so full of color? They look like they're on fire!”

Mama had always loved to drive into the North Georgia mountains in late October when the trees' vibrant colors were at their peak. I had grown up admiring that wild beauty. On this day, Mama would have said, “Well, aren't we lucky! First week in November and the trees are still as stunning.” But hearing Carl talk, it reminded me of taking him to the High Museum and his looking at an oil painting for the first time. He had an innocent excitement about the things that I knew were supposed to be beautiful.

“Have you ever seen the mountains before, Carl?”

“I haven't ever left good ole 'lanty, Georgia, before, Mary Swan. First time I've been out of the city.”

Rachel had traveled extensively in Europe with her parents. I'd been throughout the southeastern United States and even up East. It took us a moment to register what Carl had said.

After a few minutes of silence, Rachel called up to Carl, “Have you ever heard how Coke got invented?”

“Nope, never.”

“Well, you know it started right in Atlanta, don't you?” I put in.

“Never thought anything about it, Mary Swan.”

“As a citizen of Atlanta, you should know,” I said.

So Rachel launched into her story, a story we'd both heard dozens of times. “Doc Pemberton—John S. Pemberton, a cavalry captain during the Civil War—became a pharmacist and lived in Columbus, Georgia. Do you know much about Columbus?”

“Not a thing.”

“Well, it's an old aristocratic town right near the Alabama border. But Doc, as everyone called him, believed that Atlanta was an up-and-coming city. So he decided to move his business up here, back when Atlanta was just a railroad town, in 1885. One of his most popular formulas was called French Wine Coca. He advertised it as ‘a delightful nerve tonic and stimulant that never intoxicates.'”

Carl looked around and raised an eyebrow. “A nerve tonic, you say? What's that?”

“Something that helped with headaches and other ailments,” I answered.

“Exactly,” Rachel said. “The only problem was that it had alcohol in it, and Atlanta went bone dry after a November referendum in 1885. But Doc was ready when the saloons closed the next summer. He concocted a new formula to replace the outlawed French Wine Coca. He used two exotic ingredients—coca from South America and kola from Africa and called the new mixture Coca-Cola.”

“Ya don't say! This here stuff has ingredients in it from South America and Africa!” Carl held out his half-empty bottle and looked at it admiringly.

“Right! Unfortunately”—I used my dramatic voice—“not much interest came of this formula. But there was a man named Asa Candler who bought it.”

“Well, not exactly, Swan,” Rachel corrected. “He bought a
fractional
interest in Coca-Cola and then other portions of the formula. Finally in 1891 Mr. Candler ended up as sole owner of the formula with a total investment in the Pemberton mixture of $2,300. A measly bit when you consider the millions this drink has made.”

“And Daddy likes to say,” I added proudly, “that if the voters had not briefly outlawed alcohol, there's no reason to believe that Coca-Cola would have been created.”

“Ya don't say!” I could see Carl's playful eyes in the rearview window. I could tell he was enjoying our story.

“But this is the best part.” I wanted to tell this part of the story. “By accident, one customer who ordered the Coca-Cola—remember, it was still being used to treat headaches—got it mixed with soda water instead of the usual tap water and found it ‘refreshing.'” I made a silly face. Then I said in a squeaky little voice, “Yummy, isn't this Coca-Cola stuff great? Made my headache go away!”

Carl let out a belly laugh.

“So a lot of people started buying it to drink for refreshment, not just for headaches. Isn't that a scream?”

“That's a good story, girls!”

“And it's completely true,” Rachel said.

“And that's not all. When Mr. Candler started putting Coke in stoppered bottles, like the ones we're drinking it out of now, sales took off like a rocket.”

“So Coca-Cola made Candler the first really wealthy man in Atlanta and the first major philanthropist,” Rachel stated. “Then later, after the First World War, he sold Coke to a group headed by an investment banker named Ernest Woodruff. And now it's his son Robert who controls all of Coca-Cola. You've heard that ad, haven't you, Carl? ‘When you don't see a Coca-Cola sign, you have passed the borders of civilization.'”

“Yeah, I believe I have.” He took another long gulp from his Coke bottle and finished with a slurp. Then he raised the empty bottle above his head and said, “Mista Pemberton, Mista Candler, Mista Woodruff, I'd like to thank y'all kindly for this here tonic for headaches. It is mighty fine stuff.”

“And you know what else?” I whispered in between giggles.

“What else you got, Mary Swan?”

“The Coca-Cola formula is still one of the world's most coveted and most closely guarded commercial secrets.”

His eyes narrowed for a moment in the rearview mirror. “Speaking of secrets, I reckon we'd better figure out just exactly what we'll be saying when we get to Resthaven.”

Confident, Rachel smiled. “Don't worry, Carl. We've got that all worked out.”

Resthaven Sanatorium, as the brick pediment read, looked exactly as Mama had sketched it. We saw it all at once as we approached it from the tree-lined driveway. Four stories high, stately, red brick, with six white columns across the front. A turnaround led us to the entrance. Rachel and I hopped out of the Cadillac while Carl waited in the car. At the reception desk, I addressed a plump blond woman in a nurse's uniform.