Sarah sank back in her chair, her face so pale and exhausted that Frannie, on the verge of tears, grasped one of her hands. “I’m so sorry … so sorry. I can’t change my sister any more than you can change William. I can only try to live my life by my own morals, my own ideas of what’s right, but—” Frannie choked up and struggled to continue speaking. Her shoulders drooped. “—But right now I can’t even do that.”
Frannie told her about Samantha, and the expensive specialists Alexandra had arranged for Samantha to see soon at the university medical center at Durham, and how generous Alexandra was being to loan Frannie the money. Sarah listened so gently, squeezing Frannie’s hand in sympathy, that Frannie broke down and also told her that Carl blamed her for causing Samantha’s problem. “I can’t go back to my husband without some kind of success,” Frannie finished, her voice trembling. “I have to solve our daughter’s problem, no matter what it takes. All my ideals are just hypocritical bullshit, because I’ll accept every bit of my sister’s help and generosity even though I despise the way she lives her life.”
“Listen to me, Frannie. Don’t let pride keep you from doing what’s best for Samantha. Just don’t assume Alexandra’s help is unselfish.” Sarah pushed her chair back and stood. “I have to go. I promised my kids a gallon of French vanilla.” Sarah looked away again, her eyes shadowed and distracted. “They need something to cheer them up, and that’s the best I can do.”
Frannie rose anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
“Their grandmother died a couple of weeks ago.” Sarah hesitated, frowning. “I think, in some ways, they needed her more than they need Hugh and me. She always seemed to know what they were thinking.” Sarah and Frannie traded a somber look. “Do you ever look at Samantha and wonder if she sees the world in a way you can’t quite understand?”
Frannie’s shoulders slumped. “All the time. All the time.”
Chapter
Five
The western drive across the state from Durham to the mountains took several hours. Alexandra kept the big gray sedan to the back roads, to stretch the drive out as long as possible. Time for her to talk Frannie into an agreement.
The car moved smoothly through the rolling piedmont, past broad pastures dotted with cattle and through small heartland towns with aged brick courthouses. The trees were budding; everything had the delicate patinas of new greens, and the dogwoods scattered in sunny spots along the road were at the full peak of their white blooms. Alexandra glanced occasionally at Frannie, who stared straight ahead, oblivious to the pretty scenery, her hands clasping a sweating paper cup of melted ice and cola, her blue sweater hanging ajar around her rumpled pantsuit. Frannie was inconsolable.
Samantha lay asleep, curled on the car’s deep leather rear seat, one arm around the new doll Alexandra had given her. The week of medical tests in Durham had not been wasted, Alexandra thought. The expensive pediatric specialists had confirmed the brilliant conclusions made by army medical hacks.
Samantha did not talk. She was extremely bright and alert, had extraordinary motor skills for a three-year-old, and was unhampered by any discernible physical or emotional problems. She was potty-trained, fearless, and ate like a horse. She made a variety of noises and imitated animal sounds, which had led one doctor to joke that perhaps she’d invented her own language and simply expected everyone else to learn it.
Alexandra liked that whimsical idea—the notion of her niece molding others’ expectations to fit her own. She liked the child’s amazing, self-possessed grace, the clear spirit in her blue eyes—in short, the qualities that Tim lacked, qualities that reminded Alexandra of herself.
She was now convinced that Samantha was the child she deserved to raise.
Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, and her heart pounded. Careful, now, she told herself. Don’t be obvious. “I wish I could cheer you up,” she said to Frannie.
Her sister dropped the drink cup into a small vinyl trash bag hanging from the car’s ashtray, then pressed her fingertips to her temples. “Those specialists were my last resort.” Her voice was hollow. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Carl they couldn’t help us. What it might do to his feelings for me.”
Alexandra cleared her throat. “I have a suggestion. It’s not a perfect plan, but if you’re willing to consider it—”
“What?” Frannie swiveled toward her. “I’ll consider anything at this point.”
“It would mean a hard decision on your part.”
“Tell me. Please.”
“If you don’t go back to Germany—if you’ll stay here, where there’s access to the best care money can buy, I’ll pay for Samantha to have speech therapy. You know, the doctors said that was an option. Regular one-on-one sessions with a therapist.” Alexandra hesitated tactfully. “It might take weeks. It might take months. But surely, in time, it would work.”
Frannie sank back and hugged herself. Alexandra cast a furtive look at her. She appeared to be lost in agonized thought. Alexandra added, “If Carl wants what’s best for Samantha, I know he’ll agree—even though he’ll miss the two of you.”
“I’m not sure he’d miss me,” Frannie said wearily.
“Sweetie, of course he will. And think how wonderful it will be when you eventually take Samantha back to him, and she calls him ‘Daddy.’ That will make the separation worth it. You’ll have Carl’s respect again, and you’ll both be happy. Then you can work at having that second baby you want so badly.”
“Alex, you’re being so wonderful to me. But I’ll just have to think about this.” Her voice shook. “Not seeing Carl,” she said slowly. “For months, maybe. I miss him now, and it’s been only two weeks.”
“Can you honestly say you want to go back right away, as a failure?” There was silence. Alexandra let those skillfully painful words sink in.
Frannie gave a soft moan. “No, I don’t want that.”
“You think it over, but I’m going to make plans.” Alexandra reached over gently and squeezed her sister’s cold, clammy hand. “I adore Samantha. There’s so much I can give her. Don’t deny me the chance to pamper your little girl. I promise I’m not trying to run her life, or yours. But I can’t have—you know—William and I don’t have a little girl of our own. I’m not a cold-blooded creature, even if I act that way sometimes.”
Slowly, Frannie’s hand closed around Alexandra’s. “I believe you.”
Alexandra smiled.
Granny was gone, her room empty, her bed always made up, her big flowery work dresses hanging lone-somely inside the closed closet, the smell of liniment and old-lady things getting thinner every day.
Jake and Ellie sat on her bed a lot, talking to her. Granny had explained more than once that someday she’d mosey away to be with Grandpa Raincrow and Father’s older brother, Graham, who’d died in Korea. She’d promised that when that happened, she’d still listen to them and that if they paid close attention, they’d know it.
So far they had watched and listened intently, with no luck.
“Somebody’s coming,” Ellie said, pushing her long black hair back from her face and turning toward Granny’s window.
Jake eyed her hopefully. “Granny told you?”
“No, I heard the dogs bark.”
“Oh.” Disappointed, he shoved himself off Granny’s bed. “Let’s go see.”
“You go.” Ellie flopped back on the old quilt. “If Granny says anything, I’ll let you know.”
Jake bristled, and his eyes burned with tears. “She’s not going to talk to you without talking to me too.”
Ellie peered at him with one eye shut. “Well, I always know where you are, so I just guess Granny will figure that out, won’t she?”
Ellie had an easy way with words that left Jake behind. There was no arguing with her. His mouth set, he stalked out of the room.
He heard the car now, crunching along the narrow gravel path that snaked through the woods back toward the river. Father said the mountains were l
ike a fat lady lying on her back with the Cove hidden in a crease; town was on top of one of her tea jugs.
Jake pictured the lady with concrete roads around her pink teat like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Visitors turned off onto the shadowy dirt road to the Cove, driving down the lady’s jug. In this way Jake had formed a satisfying mental map of the world as he knew it: Asheville, a big city, was way up on the lady’s head, and Cawatie Township, where their Indian relatives lived, was just above her belly button. Durham, an even bigger city than Asheville, was at her right elbow when she had her arm stretched out, and the ocean started at her fingertips. Her left arm lay across Tennessee, her feet were Florida, and her left knee was Atlanta, Georgia.
Mother and Father had taken them to Atlanta for a weekend once, and Atlanta was so big, it deserved a whole knee.
He hadn’t decided what belonged in the spot at the top of her legs yet, but having studied Mother and Ellie in the bathtub, he didn’t see how anyone could live there anyway.
Lost in this and other distracted, tired thoughts, he went down the cool central hallway, dragging a hand along one of the log walls. Mother came out of the kitchen door, wiping flour on a dishrag tucked in the waist of her blue jeans. She hurried ahead of him to the screen door, peered through it at the yard beyond the porch rafters, and called Father. “It’s Frannie Ryder,” she added. “Good Lord.”
Jake leaned against the broad opening to the living room and watched with somber curiosity as Father got up from a desk full of books and papers in one corner and walked over, rubbing his eyes. Father moved slowly. Jake had seen him cry twice—once when he wrapped Granny’s body in an Indian blanket to carry her to the station wagon, and when the preacher finished talking over her casket, at the cemetery in town.
Jake had an abiding determination to watch over Father and make certain he felt better.
Father and Mother went out on the porch. Jake slipped up to the screen door and leaned against the smooth-worn facing. Granny had taught him and Ellie to stay back and take in a situation carefully.
A lady with straight gold hair got out of a big car. Squinting, Jake noticed the back of another blond head—a little one with a ponytail, above a ruffled white collar—craned out the open window on the car’s far side. White dog paws were planted on either side of the small head. Rastus was too short to reach car windows, but he liked to rear up and offer air kisses with his tongue.
The lady came up on the porch. “I’m sorry to show up on your doorstep without calling,” she said. “But what I want to ask you would sound even stranger over the phone.”
Mother said, “Frannie, you’re the only Duke I’d have at my house.”
Duke. Jake knew what that name meant. It meant his aunt Alexandra’s family, and for reasons he and Ellie hadn’t figured out yet, they were no good.
But Mother and Father asked the lady to sit with them on the porch, so she must be different. Jake couldn’t quite see around the doorjamb. He listened to the rocking chairs creak.
“The doctors in Durham didn’t tell me anything about Samantha that I didn’t already know,” the woman said. “She can’t talk. She’s not deaf, she’s not retarded, she’s just … slow.” The lady’s voice cracked on that word. “I hate that term. She’s not slow, she’s … I don’t know what she is, but slow isn’t it. You should see her when she gets her hands on something that interests her. She ties knots like a sailor. She braids my hair. Once she took a woven hemp place mat apart a string at a time. By the time I caught her, she had all the strings laid out in crisscrossing rows. I swear she looked as if she were scrutinizing them to figure out the design. Even the doctors admit she’s remarkable for a three-year-old—in some ways.”
She’s got an extra part, Jake thought suddenly. Maybe not like his and Ellie’s, but something just as strange.
“Give her time,” Father said. “It sounds like the talking will come soon enough. I had a cousin who grunted like a pig for years.”
“What happened to him?”
“Runs a barbecue joint over in Wasoga.”
“Hugh,” Mother said. “Frannie, go on.”
“Alexandra has offered to hire a private speech therapist for her. But it means we’d have to stay in Pandora, maybe for months.”
Jake heard nothing but silence for what seemed like a long time. Finally Mother said, so softly he had to cup a hand behind his ear to catch it, “You take your little girl and go back to your husband, Frannie. Your sister is closing doors faster than you can even find them.”
“No, I swear, it’s not like that. I can’t turn down a chance to give my child all the help she needs.”
“Don’t you get it, Frannie? Alexandra doesn’t want her sister married to an army sergeant whose parents worked in the mills. Dukes don’t marry into a class of people they own. And I’d bet money that Carl figured that out a long time ago. He’s got to hate the fact that you came back here to ask for your family’s help.”
“He does,” the lady answered, her voice so sad it sent shivers down Jake’s back. “But everything will be all right if Samantha learns to talk.”
“Carl agreed to let you stay here awhile?”
“He said”—the lady made a snuffling sound—“he said I’m looking for excuses to give up on our marriage. But I’m not. What kind of marriage do we have as long as he blames me for Samantha’s problem? I blame myself too.”
“Let’s get down to brass tacks.” That was Father’s voice, deep and calm. Jake felt proud. Granny had always told him and Ellie that Father had a gift for looking at only one tree at a time. He can’t see the forest for the trees. That was how Granny put it. “There’s no love lost between your sister and the Raincrow family. From the day she married Sarah’s brother, she’s caused nothing but hard feelings. I suppose as long as she holds on to William and the old ruby, that won’t change. I’ve watched Sarah mourn the situation for years, and I’m not going to put up with anything that makes her grief worse. So, Frannie, have you come to ask us to meddle in your affairs? I can’t see how that will cause anything but more trouble.”
Jake’s heart fell. Father wasn’t going to fix the lady’s little girl? He wouldn’t even try?
Mother said quickly, “I’m sure Hugh will take a look at Samantha if you want him to. He doesn’t mean he’d turn his back on an innocent child.”
“Never have, never will,” Father answered, sounding exasperated. “But I’m no magician. I just meant—”
“I appreciate your feelings, I really do, Dr. Raincrow,” the lady said. “But I didn’t expect you could accomplish some miracle. I … I came here to ask about, well, different help. I heard you have a relative over at Cawatie who’s a medicine woman. I was hoping you’d ask her to look at Samantha.”
Jake slapped both hands to his mouth to cover a gasp of surprise. This lady wanted Mrs. Big Stick instead of Father? Boy, she had just stuck her head in a hornet’s nest.
“Frannie,” Father said slowly, as if the breath had been knocked out of him, “it would make more sense for you to sit on a hill and bay at the moon.”
“Clara and Hugh don’t see eye to eye,” Mother added. “She wants to consult on all his patients at Cawatie, and most of them won’t let him touch them without her peeping over his shoulder.”
“I didn’t become a doctor to work in the shadow of ignorance and superstition,” Father said. “I grew up watching Indians die because nobody gave a damn whether they survived the twentieth century or not. My own father died of the measles when he was fifty years old. The measles. And it’s well-intentioned old-timers like Clara Big Stick who keep pulling the people back into the dark ages.”
“But … but,” the lady said, “Dr. Raincrow, I’ve read a lot about alternative medicines, and I think, well, I think there’s something unnatural about just poking people with needles and dosing them with drugs. I mean, there’s a lot of research into herbs, and vitamins, and, uh, spiritual healing, and—”
“Clara talked my moth
er into throwing away her blood pressure pills,” Father announced, his voice getting louder. “I’ll tell you what’s unnatural—letting your ‘patient’ die of a stroke.”
Jake was stunned. Surely Father was wrong. Mrs. Big Stick hadn’t hurt Granny. Granny would have known better than to trust Mrs. Big Stick’s medicine if it wasn’t good.
“I’m sorry,” the lady whispered. Then she cleared her throat and added, “But please. Clara Big Stick can’t do any harm to Samantha. She might help her. Please. I’m desperate.”
“I won’t have any part of hocus-pocus,” Father said. His chair creaked. His heavy footsteps clumped across the porch’s wide wooden planks. Jake slid behind the heavy wooden door and flattened himself to the rough wall. “Hugh,” Mother called in her don’t-rock-the-boat voice. The footsteps halted. “I want to do this for Frannie.”
“Not inside this house,” Father answered. Jake held his breath. Father and Mother never argued. Jake touched them sometimes when he saw them frowning at each other, and he always felt a warm, shared space between the frowns. “In the yard,” Father said finally. “Just keep her in the yard, where I won’t have to watch.”
Father stalked into the house and disappeared into the living room. Jake scooted out from behind the door, eased the screen door open, and ambled out as if he just happened to be passing through. He wanted to get an up-close look at the little girl who’d caused all this trouble.
Mother gave him a squint-eyed look with one eyebrow cocked, as if she knew he’d been listening. “This is Jake,” she said. “Master of the oh-so-casual arrival. Honey, this is your aunt Alexandra’s sister, Mrs. Ryder.” Jake offered his most solemn Hello, ma’am. The lady was crying, but she smiled at him. Reassured, he asked, “Can I … may I take your little girl to see our cow?” He was amazed at the amount of words he managed in one sentence. He was a watcher, not a talker, everyone said. What a strange day this was turning out to be.
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