A Place to Call Home

by Deborah Smith

  I nodded fervently. “I forgot before. But now I’m sure.”

  “There you go,” Uncle Ralph announced. “That settles it. There’s no question about the justification. That’s just added confirmation. Case closed.”

  “Roanie can’t go to jail!” I yelled. “It wasn’t his fault!”

  “Whoa, whoa,” Vince said. “It’s all right, Claire. We’re just getting all the details. He’s not in trouble.”

  I exhaled shakily. “Promise?” I looked at Mama, at Daddy, at Uncle Ralph. “Promise?”

  “I promise, cutie,” Uncle Ralph said.

  “Everybody promises?”

  “He’s not going to jail,” Daddy said, looking away. “Mama?”

  “I promise,” she said, covering her face with one hand.

  “Okay. Then I’ll go see him now.”

  “No,” Mama said. “He needs to rest.”

  Something was peculiar. I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

  I lay in the dark beside Mama in her and Daddy’s big bed, staring owl-eyed at the wooden slats in the ceiling. I felt as if I were in a dream, the kind where a person can only think, not move or talk. My small, important lie had settled in my chest like a heavy acorn and I think Daddy and Mama suspected it.

  Josh and Brady arrived from the university about midnight. I heard the clocks chime twelve and the soft, deep song of their voices downstairs. They and Daddy and Grandpa Maloney went over to Uncle Bert’s farm to have some kind of powwow.

  Roanie will absolutely stay here forever now, I thought as I fell asleep. Because Big Roan’s gone and Roanie did the right thing. And we’re fair.

  I didn’t suspect it then, but fairness had nothing to do with it.

  Sullivan’s Hollow burned that night. Big Roan’s spattered blood and brains, his trailer, his garbage dump, his junk, his old truck, everything. Of course it wasn’t an accident. Daddy and my brothers and our relatives did it, but nobody said so.

  The next morning Daddy trailered the farm’s bulldozer over there and pushed every speck of Big Roan Sullivan’s existence into the gully at the bottom of the Hollow and covered it over and planted some kudzu vines on top, which is about the most insulting thing a farmer can do to a piece of land. He tore down the mailbox and wiped out the driveway. He erased the Sullivan from Sullivan’s Hollow forever.

  And he meant to erase Roanie, too.

  But I didn’t know about all that until later on.

  “Where’s Roanie?” I asked the next morning when Daddy carried me downstairs. It was just him and Mama at the kitchen table. The house felt too quiet, eerily quiet. And it wasn’t even morning, I discovered. I’d slept past lunch.

  “He and Grandpa went up on Dunshinnog,” Daddy said. I watched the careful glances being exchanged.

  “Why?”

  Mama stood behind me, her hands cupped on my hair, stroking it. Daddy said gruffly, “Just to talk about things.” I blinked. This made no sense. It was so strange. My brain seemed to be disconnected. I could think, but the thoughts didn’t reach the rest of me.

  “For God’s sake, Holt,” Mama said tearfully. “I gave her some medicine when she woke up. She can’t reason this out. Don’t try to talk to her right now.”

  “She understands. She needs to know. Claire, we’re trying to decide what’s best for Roan to do.”

  “I’m going up to Dunshinnog,” I whispered. “I have to go help him. You know he needs me. ’Cause it’s my fault he had to shoot Big Roan.”

  Mama started crying again. I didn’t get to go to Dunshinnog. I didn’t get to help Roanie when he needed me. I had to go back to bed. The odd thing was, I didn’t mind.

  I hurt so bad for Roanie, I couldn’t think at all.

  My family wouldn’t even let Big Roan be buried inside the county, not in Dunderry soil, as if he would seep into our earth and poison it. What was left of him was carted off to some anonymous public cemetery. Grandpa and Grandma had taken Roanie to the funeral, not to Dunshinnog. It was just the three of them and Aunt Dockey, who had volunteered to say some unofficial preaching words since no minister would.

  Daisy showed up at the farm later. I heard her screaming in the yard, saying that it was all jealousy, jealousy over Sally that made Roan kill Big Roan, that Big Roan wouldn’t hurt a little girl, that we’d put uppity ideas into Roanie’s head, had turned him against his own daddy.

  Sally made the rumors worse by packing up her belongings and baby Matthew and disappearing in the middle of the night, not even telling Daisy or her other sisters where she was going. Big Roan, dead. Uncle Pete’s little boy, lost. Word spread about Daisy’s accusations—there was no stopping that gossip, just as there was no stopping the general belief that I was ruined, had nearly been raped, and would be scarred, somehow, forever.

  But I didn’t hear all that, not then, because I was trapped in my sleepy, aching, drifting dreamworld, nearly a prisoner in Mama and Daddy’s bedroom, sheltered for my own good, they decided.

  I heard the loud voices downstairs, after the funeral, and I crawled out of bed. Grandmother Elizabeth was on sentry duty in a chair beside me, but she was asleep. My legs were weak. I crept down the back stairs behind the kitchen, holding on to the rail with my good arm, the other in its sling, my pink nightgown tangling between my thighs.

  Daddy’s voice. “It’s not a punishment. It’s not a jail. It’s a group home run by the Methodist church. They’re good people. It’s just temporary, until everything calms down.”

  I sank onto the bottom step, catching my breath, blinking hard. My head throbbed. My sprained shoulder ached when I so much as twitched my fingers. Group home? What?

  “I’m not good enough for you.” Roanie’s voice, fierce and broken. “That’s all you’re sayin’. I won’t ever be good enough. Everybody’s calling me a killer, and you think about that every time you look at me. And even if I did what I had to do, and you know it, and you say it’s all right, deep down you’re thinkin’, ‘His old man was gonna do something terrible to Claire. We can’t have that kind of evil in our house.’ ”

  “Roan, there’s nothing but suspicion toward you outside this house.” Mama’s voice. “Please try to understand.”

  “I trusted y’all. I worked as hard as I could. I did everything just the way you wanted it. You can’t send me away. You can’t.”

  Send him away?

  I don’t know what kind of sound I made. I staggered through the kitchen door, weaving, crying. “What are y’all doing to him? No. No.” There were Mama and Daddy, Josh and Brady, Grandpa and Grandma. And Roanie, with his fists clenched, standing all alone in the center of them.

  He stared down at me. Oh, he looked awful. Wounded from the inside out, his face like stone, the expression in his eyes so devastated and lonely that I felt shattered. I dodged Josh, who tried to grab me, and ran to Roanie and threw my good arm around his back and held on. I wanted to crawl inside him and make sure his heart kept beating. He sank to his knees and held on to me, leaning his head against mine.

  Everybody was crying then. “You can write to him, Claire,” Mama said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t send him away! We’re his family. You can’t send him away! It’s not fair!”

  “It won’t be forever,” Daddy said, squatting down beside us.

  “I’ll take care of Claire,” Roanie begged. “Please. I tried to before. I’ll never let nothing happen to her again. Please.”

  “Don’t,” Daddy said hoarsely. “There’s a time to let go and a time to pull back. We all need that. You need the time, Roan. Look at her. She’s sick. She’s hurt. You know we don’t blame you for what happened. The church home—that’s just for a few months. You’ve got my word on that.”

  “I’ll die if you make him leave,” I sobbed. “I don’t want to write to him! I want him here!”

  “It’s going to be all right, honey. Believe me,” Daddy said, taking me by my one good hand. “Come on now, let go.”

  But I wouldn’t.
I threw my head back and looked at Roanie. “I won’t let anybody send you away. You’ll see. They’re just confused, that’s all. You tell ’em. You tell ’em you love me and we’re gonna get married when we’re grown up!”

  I probably clinched it with that announcement. And when he bent close to me and whispered, with bitterness and misery and determination, “I won’t never forget you, I won’t never forget any of this,” I knew he was going away and I couldn’t stop it.

  I kissed him. My swollen mouth against the corner of his bruised one. He didn’t flinch, he didn’t kiss me back, he was like a blank rock.

  That was what we did to him. We closed him up inside himself forever.

  Daddy and some of my uncles took him away the next morning.

  No one wanted me to know when he left, but Grandpa wouldn’t have that. He came into Mama and Daddy’s room and got me out of bed. He sat in a chair by the window, holding me on his lap, and told me. I didn’t know what to do, I was beyond hope. I pressed my good hand to the windowpane as I watched Roanie walk to the car.

  He would look up. He would know somehow.

  He didn’t. Or wouldn’t. He was gone before he left.

  His room empty. His voice beyond my hearing. His smile beyond my horizons. That church home they sent him to was somewhere in Tennessee. Not so far away, just another state. But I’d never felt such agony, such emptiness. General Patton and I slept on his bed every night.

  Mama gave me the address of the home. I wasn’t speaking to her. I wasn’t speaking to anybody. Violet and Rebecca came to visit me, but I didn’t have anything to say to them either. I had changed. They thought I was pitiful and ruined, but I was wrapped in bleak fury. I think they were glad when Mama told them they could only visit me for a little while.

  I had my plans. Roanie would be back home in a few months at the most. I had letters to write as soon as my arm worked again, and I sat staring out the windows, thinking about what I’d say.

  We’ll go swimming. We’ll shoot off some fireworks up on Dunshinnog. Everybody’s already forgetting what happened. They don’t talk about it at all. When you come home, you and me don’t have to talk about it either.

  A week later, I started writing to him. A week passed and he didn’t write back. I could feel something terrible in our house, something sad and secretive beneath the silences. “I should call him,” I announced to everyone finally. “I’ll just call him on the phone. Okay? When can I call him? How about right now?”

  Finally, after stalling me and making up excuses for a few days, Mama and Daddy told me the truth. He’d run away from that home in Tennessee the day after they sent him there.

  And nobody was able to find him.

  Even then I didn’t believe he was gone forever. I kept writing to him. I don’t know what the people at the home did with my letters; they probably threw them away. I waited all summer. There was shame and regret in my family; it curled around us like a hot, sour wind. I eavesdropped on the endless, torturous discussions at family dinners; I fed on my parents’ good-hearted misery and believed that Roanie would sense it somehow, that he would know they wanted to make it all up to him, if he would just come home.

  They hired a private investigator recommended by Uncle Ralph. Sheriff Vince sent out notices to sheriffs and police chiefs in other states. Aunt Bess talked with other social workers across the South. They were searching for Sally McClendon and Uncle Pete’s little boy, too.

  None of it did any good. Both Roanie and Sally had spent their lives learning how to hide from the good intentions of people they didn’t trust.

  Grandpa, who suddenly looked very old by autumn, finally took me up to Dunshinnog. I hadn’t been out of the house much in months. I huddled on the ledge, sobbing, and Grandpa stroked my hair with trembling gnarled fingers.

  “Look what I brought,” he said gruffly, pulling a green wad of leaves and roots from a pocket of his trousers. “We’ll start something up here, Claire Karleen. We’ll fix a little place.”

  I knew those baby plants. They had sprouted around their parents at the end of summer, along the slatted white fence of Grandma Dottie’s flower beds, and by spring they would bulge upward in mounds of big, soft leaves and thrust tall spikes into the air, and the spikes would be layered in slender, bell-shaped pinkish-lavender blooms with freckled spots in their throats.

  Foxgloves. The foxgloves had been in bloom when Roanie was sent away. “Magic,” Grandpa was saying. He thought Roanie would come back someday if there were foxgloves up here to soften his step. I helped Grandpa plant them in the soft earth of the meadow because they are strong, because they have Irish fairies to watch over them, because, even left alone on a mountaintop, they always come back.

  But one morning not long after that, just before a cold, frosty dawn, I woke up after a bad dream, and I felt that Roanie must be freezing somewhere, that he would die somewhere, all alone, and I couldn’t help him, and how would I ever know?

  I went downstairs and got Mama’s scissors from her sewing room and went back up to my bathroom, and I very carefully cut all my hair to small nubs, maybe an inch long. I found some tweezers and plucked out all my eyebrow hair, and I even cut off my eyelashes.

  Mama came up to get me for breakfast, took one look at my crew-cut head and naked, rebellious eyes, sat down on the floor, and put her head in her hands. Daddy walked up soon and found us, her still sitting there, me staring at them both with a brand of stony anguish that was tearing my heart out of my chest. He squatted between us wearily. “We’ll get over this. We’ll keep looking.”

  It has been a long time since then.

  Part Two

  HE CARRIED A LADDER

  ALMOST EVERYWHERE HE

  WENT & AFTER AWHILE PEOPLE

  LEFT ALL THE HIGH PLACES TO HIM.

  —BRIAN ANDREAS

  February, 1983

  Dear Claire,

  I write you letters I won’t ever mail. You probably don’t need to hear from me. Or want to. You were so little and messed up because of me when your folks sent me off. And now there are things I have to take care of. Something I’ve got to do for your sake, and mine, and for other reasons. I don’t hate your family. Won’t trust them or expect anything again, but am not too bitter. Had to get around that to do what I need to do. So that’s not why I’ve got to do this the way I am. I’m keeping the faith. Have to. You gave it to me. Have to prove I’m better than my old man.

  Been keeping track of your stories for a long time. Sent off for a subscription now that you are reporting for the college paper. So I can read every word you write. Read all about your awards, too. You sure got a way with words. But I always knew that anyhow. Easy to figure you’re not a kid anymore. You or me. If you could see me you might think I’m still pretty rough on the eyes, just bigger and filled out okay. Came out all right after some hard blocks. Got responsibilities. How to tell you? Don’t know how to say what happened to me. How crazy it turned out. What the bare truth would do to you and your folks.

  I had to get a look at you. Drove to Georgia like a fool. Nearly froze in the cold. Hunted for you at your school. I got no interest in college. Hell, I can make money without it. But I DO read. Promise you. Read, think, study, make money. Listen to smart people. You taught me. You know me. You always did.

  So I just waited outside your dorm house. Just to see you. Watched you walk across the yard. Just wanted to see how you grew up. You walked so smooth. God, your hair, it’s pretty that way. Thought I’d never see that color red again. Your eyes are so big and blue. You looked in a hurry and strong and slick. You looked so good. The way you moved. The way you turned out. Nineteen and stacked like a—forget it. I couldn’t dream you any better than you are. I’ll put it that way.

  What was that funny name you made up for me that time you wrote that story? Dirk DeBlane? You said it was romantic. I wish I knew how you would want him to say all this.

  Here goes. One look and I wanted to grab you. No, I mean hold
you. Okay, grab, then hold. Hell, you won’t ever read this anyway. I wanted to kiss you. I wanted to do everything to you. Won’t spell it out. But we’re not kids anymore, and the feelings are different.

  I wanted to love you. All right, I mean it like that. Take you off with me and make love to you and kiss your hair and hear you say my name and smile because we’re still special but in a new way. Crazy. You don’t know me anymore. Won’t ever know me, probably. Probably don’t want to know me. You grew up and I have, too.

  Sorry I came to take a look at you. Now I’m sure how to go on picturing you in my mind. It hurts. Bad.

  But I’ll be watching. Reading, anyway. And if you ever do need me I’ll know. I’ll be there. Promise. If you ever need me.

  I’ll be there.

  Roan

  • 1995 •

  Life turns in large cycles, too large to notice until they bring you back to some touchstone, to home, to fractured memories of a sanctuary you thought you’d never need again.

  On a balmy northern Florida morning in early March, I headed for lunch down a side street that bordered the peach-colored building of the Jacksonville Herald-Courier. The morning edition was still on display in banks of newspaper boxes along the curbs, the lead story, beneath a color photo of a Marlins rookie pitcher, enticed with a new baseball season’s hopes. Beside it, in a column of teasers outlined in bright blue and gold, a promotional blurb blared:

  TERRI CAULFIELD—FROM FEAR TO HOPE

  Her story of marital abuse, courage, and triumph touched readers across the city and state last year. Terri Caulfield plans a bright future in an update by staff reporter Claire Maloney, whose award-winning series turned the young Jacksonville woman’s struggles into a public crusade against domestic violence.

  I walked on, pleased. Terri Caulfield hadn’t had many opportunities to be noticed or fussed over. Abused by the uncle who raised her, beaten and then stalked by the husband she’d divorced, she was only twenty-two, scared, depressed, and willing to talk.