Clio Rising

by Paula Martinac

  I hadn’t planned on Clio freeing me like that, and wasn’t sure what to do with a luxurious four hours— with my daddy’s car, no less. The last thing I wanted was to go back home. I could drive to campus to see if anything had changed, but the place would be deserted in the days leading up to Christmas, making the trip pointless. I considered driving past Hallie’s street. If she or Tom spotted me, though, I’d be caught shame-faced, without a plan. It wasn’t a main thoroughfare, but a side street in the Montford neighborhood that you had to go out of your way to get to.

  I quickly shook myself out of that idea and drove in a more sensible direction. Because I’d overslept and skipped breakfast to be on time for Clio, I opted to read my book over coffee and eggs at the Mediterranean, a diner in town.

  The waitress was a girl I’d gone to high school with. She’d sat in front of me in a few classes, so her last name had to be something alphabetically close to mine. “Livvie Bliss!” she said, like we were lifelong pals. If she hadn’t been wearing a name tag, I would have labored to excavate her name. “Hey, Peg!” I said, as friendly as could be. A memory of her shiny blond hair rippling down her back popped into my mind.

  “Where’ve you been, girl? I haven’t seen you here in ages.”

  “Oh, I moved out of town,” I said, thinking that admitting I now lived in New York might sound uppity.

  “Don’t tell me! You’re in Charlotte, right?”

  “How’d you guess?”

  Her face lit with pride. “You always said you were going to get the hell out. I figured you for a city girl.” I had no recollection of ever telling Peg my future plans, but from a young age I’d dreamed of adventure and excitement beyond the confines of our little mountain town.

  “I’ll never forget. You wrote the funniest thing in my yearbook,” Peg said. I braced myself; I’d been such a dork in high school. “You said, ‘We’ll always have Paris.’ Nobody wrote stuff like that. Most people just said ‘Friends forever’ or ‘Don’t change’ or something dumb. You sure were different.”

  My youthful affectations made me flush to the roots of my hair. Did I write that in everyone’s yearbook or just Peg’s?

  “‘Different’ is sure a nice way to put it,” I said. “And what are you up to now?”

  She chuckled at the question. “Well, right now, I’m taking your order.” I tugged at one of my very hot ears as I recited an unusually large order of fried eggs, crispy bacon, home fries, and two biscuits. With jam.

  “Good appetite,” she said, turning to the kitchen.

  I’d gotten a few pages into Zami when Peg returned with my order and a coffee refill. “Still a reader,” she commented as she poured.

  “Always.”

  “How do you say that title?”

  “Zah-mee,” I pronounced— something I only knew because Thea had said it for me first.

  “Sounds, maybe, African?”

  She was a nice girl, but now I really wanted her to go away so I could enjoy my breakfast. “It is,” I replied, hoping my curt response would end the conversation.

  “What’s it about?”

  I sighed. “I just started it. I don’t know,” I lied. Thea had told me it was a memoir about growing up in Harlem and coming out as a lesbian in the fifties. “It’s so vivid, I felt like I was right there in the old bars!” she’d said. But I wasn’t going to admit that to Peg, even though the truth would probably send her scurrying away for good. “I’ll let you know.” The snippiness in that last comment was uncalled for and sounded more like Barb than me.

  “Well, I’ll leave you to it then,” Peg said, her own face reddening as she stepped away from the table.

  My rudeness to Peg distracted me so that I kept reading the same line over and over, as if it were in a language I vaguely understood but whose vocabulary I hadn’t mastered: “She taught me that women who want without needing are expensive and sometimes wasteful, but women who need without wanting are dangerous— they suck you in and pretend not to notice.” On the edge of grasping the first clause, I’d realized that the twist in the second clause had left me stymied.

  And that was only the introduction.

  I slapped the book closed and finished my breakfast staring out the window. Peg came back once to refill my cup and to rip my check off her pad. When she slid it onto the table, she put something else down, too— a flyer on mint-green copy paper.

  “I don’t know how long you’re around,” she said in a casual way that suggested she was trying too hard. “You asked what I’ve been doing. Long story short— textiles.”

  Her words didn’t register at first. I’d placed her in a little box that said, “Waitress: Not worth my time.” The flyer advertised a group mixed-media show at an art gallery I’d never heard of. Artists had been filtering into Asheville over the past decade, taking advantage of a depressed real estate market to create a nascent art scene. Peg Bailey was apparently part of it; her name topped the list of about seven artists.

  “This is very cool,” I remarked. “What kind of textiles?”

  “Mostly fabric collages,” she said. I tried to meet her eyes, but she kept them down on the flyer. “Some quilting. That kind of thing. You’re probably busy with your family and all—”

  “No, I’m definitely going to try to fit this in,” I said. “Maybe Christmas Eve. I’m here till the twenty-sixth.”

  “I know it’s a little show,” Peg said with a shrug of her left shoulder, “but I’m psyched. This—” she nodded toward the rest of the diner, “—just pays the bills.”

  “I used to wait tables,” I said. “I hear you.” She finally caught my eye and smiled. Relief that she hadn’t dismissed me as a pretentious loser flooded through me.

  My eyes had been bigger than my stomach, as my mother would have said. I left a lot on my plate and took one of the biscuits I’d ordered to go. I reckoned that Clio might like a taste of home after spending the morning with Rufe.

  • • •

  Clio had dozed off in a wingback chair in the Margaret House lobby. Although I tried saying her name, what roused her were several gentle nudges of her shoulder.

  “Oh,” she said. She removed a handkerchief from her bag and wiped a bit of drool from the corner of her mouth. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “I just got here.” I checked my watch, which read 1:50. “I’m a little early. How was your visit?”

  “We can go now,” she said, waving off the hand I’d extended to help her from the chair. As we passed the reception desk, she called out to the attendant. “Thank you again for the sweet tea.”

  How long had she been sitting in the lobby?

  “I brought you a biscuit,” I said when we were back in my daddy’s car. “Thought that might hit the spot.” I located the tinfoil wrapper in my bag, but she declined it.

  “So did something happen back there at the home?”

  “Not to speak of.”

  “Well, when I left you, you were petting your brother, but when I came back—”

  “We talked a bit and then he slept the rest of the time while they piped in Mozart or Bach or some other music he would have hated.” Clio smoothed the folds of her skirt. “It was a waste to come all this way to watch him sleep.”

  “Was he lucid?”

  “I don’t know if I believe anything he said.” She paused for a long minute, considering the passing landscape. “Where are we going?”

  “I thought you might like to rest back at your cabin. Later . . . well, my mama invited you to supper, if you like. She’s making chicken stew.”

  Clio didn’t seem to register the invitation. “I’ve been resting for hours. Do you know how to get us to Hendersonville? I need to see something.”

  The more precise instructions I was waiting for weren’t forthcoming, so I just headed for the road I’d always taken to Hendersonville and drove. After a few minutes of silence, I flipped on a local radio station that was playing back-to-back Christmas carols from singers like Amy G
rant and Charley Pride.

  “Rufe would have liked this,” Clio commented, her focus still on the scenery. “This would have been the music to play.”

  As we approached downtown Hendersonville, Clio leaned forward slightly in her seat like a restless child. Main Street had gone from straight to serpentine only a decade earlier, and I knew she must be unprepared for the change in her hometown’s appearance.

  “Where are we?”

  “Hendersonville.”

  “It can’t be.” But then I pointed out landmarks like the old train station and the county courthouse, and she slumped backward. “I don’t understand why they did this.”

  “I think it’s pretty,” I offered. “Artistic.”

  “Sickening, if you ask me,” she said, “making people weave back and forth like that.”

  The change in the road threw off her sense of direction, and we made a couple of wrong turns before she directed me onto Kanuga Road.

  “We’re heading out of town,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “The homeplace was in Crab Creek,” Clio replied. She’d never told me that, but I couldn’t fault her for fudging the location. After all, I always said I was from Asheville.

  As a kid, I’d been through Crab Creek many times on the way to the state forest or with my daddy to buy bushels of apples in the fall. Clio hunched forward again, gripping the dashboard. I couldn’t tell if she was excited or confounded.

  “Here!” she screamed out. “Turn here!” We made a couple of additional right turns that finally led onto a dirt road. A weathered wooden sign read “Threatt Way.” The region had experienced a dusting of snow in recent days, and the tires on my daddy’s Nova didn’t spit back as much dust as they might have in a dry season. He wouldn’t complain about how dirty I’d gotten his baby.

  We snaked along at ten miles an hour, and I joked that Clio didn’t find her own road “sickening.” Whatever she was feeling, she didn’t say, spending the entire trip with one hand on the dash and the other clutching her armrest.

  Our route took us past several rickety cabins sprouting satellite dishes in the yards. Each cabin also had a tractor in front and roaming animals, pigs and skinny hounds. On one porch, a man looked like he’d stepped out of The Beverly Hillbillies or Green Acres. I was a small-town girl whose family had kept a few chickens, and this was more country than even I was accustomed to.

  Finally, we rounded a bend and came upon a pond with daubs of dirty snow ringing the edges. “Stop!” Clio commanded, her eyes traveling up the slope opposite the pond to a frame house. The siding could have been aluminum, but the building was in the style of a nineteenth-century farmhouse. Behind it were rows of neatly planted trees— an apple orchard, looked like.

  “That’s it. That’s the Threatt homestead.” It was like a photographic image of the setting Clio had written about in her story “Before the Fire.”

  “I thought you said it burned down,” I said, as I watched her wrestle with the car door handle.

  “It did,” she said, right before she alighted and took off up the path to the house like a woman forty years younger.

  I followed her to the front porch, where she stopped to survey the landscape with a contented sigh. From that vantage point, the wobbly-looking cabins we’d passed were hidden in trees, and all you could see were the pond where I’d parked the car, barren fields, and a ring of snow-dipped mountains in the distance, looking like marshmallow sundaes. “That’s Jeter Mountain, just over yonder, and Evans, and that big one’s Pinnacle,” she said, calling them out with delight. “We hiked there as kids.”

  “I’ve been there, I think,” I said, a shadowy picture of a picnic with extended family forming in my memory. “So is that an apple orchard in back? We used to come out here to buy apples.”

  “Threatts have been growing apples since before I was born. Made molasses, too.” She motioned toward the fields below us. “That was all cane. Looked like corn in the summer, and then in the fall the plants got yellow and red stripes and you knew it was time to cut. Daddy and the boys used machetes, and then they crushed the sap out of the stalks in a mill that was—” a hand waved vaguely to her left, “—over there, somewhere. It’s gone now. Then there was all the boiling and the jarring. Went on day and night.”

  “Did you help?”

  “That was men’s work,” she said.

  “Well, I bet the molasses was good.” Nostalgia welled in me for the molasses we’d bought at farm stands when I was little, bringing it home to slather on my mother’s biscuits.

  That snapped Clio out of her reverie. “Can’t bear the taste of it to this day.” She turned back to the front door and rapped on it loudly.

  An elderly woman with a bosom like a shelf and more salt than pepper in her hair kept the screen door closed between us. Her eyes scanned both of us quickly but settled on me. “Yes?”

  “Ivy?” Clio said. “It’s me, Birdie.”

  The woman’s mouth flapped open. “Birdie!” she said. “Is it really you? Come in, come in!”

  It was strange to hear Clio called by her given name; she never spoke about the decision to abandon her identity. I followed her into the house, throwing a shy smile toward Ivy.

  “This your . . . well, it can’t be a grandson, can it?”

  “This is Miss Livvie Bliss,” Clio corrected. “Don’t let her clothes fool you. Her folks live over in Weaverville, and she was kind enough to escort me here so I could see Rufe one last time. This is my sister-in-law, Mrs. Ivy Threatt.”

  “Oh, oh, Miss Bliss,” Ivy said, coloring at her mistake.

  Before long, I was settled in a chair with some Swiss Miss in a chipped Santa Claus mug, but I still had no idea how it was that we were in a house that had supposedly burned to the ground— and with the family pets in it. The grisly story had stayed with me since Clio first related it.

  The sisters-in-law swapped notes on Rufe’s condition like I wasn’t in the room, so I entertained myself watching Ivy’s dog sleep by the fireplace. She was a sweet senior with the face of a lab and a long, low body like a hound. Her mostly white legs and face were painted with butterscotch freckles. Every few minutes, her eyes would pop open to assess me then close dreamily again. I tried to pinpoint how many breeds had contributed to her lineage, but then I overheard the women’s talk switch to the house.

  “—and I had to see the place for myself,” Clio said.

  Ivy motioned us to take a quick tour of the downstairs, with Clio marveling that the rooms were laid out just as she remembered them. I poked my head into a compact space equipped with an old white iron bed and a brightly colored star quilt. “We had three beds in here!” Clio said. “Six of us crammed like peaches in a jar.” Trying to imagine it made my shared bedroom with Gaynelle seem luxurious.

  “So Rufe built this back up himself?” Clio said when we retook our seats in the main room. “He told me that at the home, but I thought he was delirious from the drugs they give him.”

  “It took him years, mind,” Ivy said with pride. “He started before I even met him, whenever he could save up a few dollars for wood and nails. Some buddies from the Balfour mill pitched in to help, and then Rufe Junior learned carpentry right on this spot. We moved here in forty-eight. The siding came later.”

  “Like the phoenix,” Clio mused. The reference was a hazy memory to me from a mythology book I’d read in school, but Ivy was the one to chime in: “What’s that about Phoenix? Isn’t that out west somewheres?”

  “It’s a bird in Greek mythology,” Clio said with a self-satisfied smile that suggested she knew Ivy would be baffled. “A sun bird that dies in a burst of flames, then rises again from its own ashes. This homestead is like that— rising from the ashes of its own ruin. Not better, really, just different.”

  Ivy’s body tensed visibly. “This house rose because of my Rufe’s sweat! Nobody cared a speck but him. Y’all just left the bones of it on this hill, rotting.”

  Clio straightened in her se
at, too. “Well, he should have told me when I came for Mama,” she said with pique. “I couldn’t bear to see it in ruins or think about all the animals, so I didn’t even bother to come by. It was my house, too! Seeing him build it back up would have meant something.”

  “Birdie Threatt,” Ivy said, her eyes flashing, “the last time anybody saw you was at that funeral. That’s gotta be forty years ago, and you was here for about a minute. That was the only time I ever saw the mysterious Birdie, wasn’t sure you even existed. Lord, you wouldn’t recognize your own nieces and nephews if they passed you on one of them New York City streets!” The way she drew in a breath with a pained expression, like it hurt, made me wonder about her own health. “And you sit here telling me what your brother should have done? That this house was yours? You never cared about your own kin, let alone some old farmhouse!”

  The raised voices made the dog sit up, her head swiveling from Ivy to Clio, just like mine.

  “It’s like Mama Threatt used to say about you— that girl thinks the sun comes up just to hear her crow!”

  “Well,” Clio said, lifting herself up by the arms of the wooden rocker she was in, “I think it’s time to go.”

  “Oh, sit down,” Ivy said. “You got my knickers in a knot is all. If you knew me, you’d know I have a short fuse.”

  “We have taken too much of your time,” Clio insisted. “Miss Bliss—”

  I bent over to pet the dog, who leaned in to get the most from the head scratch.

  “See?” Ivy said, nodding toward the dog, “Even Flecks wants you to stay.”

  “I’ve been up since eight, and I am fatigued. Miss Bliss will take me back to my cabin now.”

  “Cabin? When your old room is just sitting here?”

  Clio hastened toward the door without replying.

  “Thank you for the hot chocolate, Mrs. Threatt,” I said. “It was nice to meet you.”