Startled, she abruptly pulled herself out of that warm tent of pleasure, frightened by what they’d done. She turned away from Maze, turned her face to the wall, and within minutes Maze was asleep, softly snoring.
Mary Elizabeth climbed to the end of the bed and down to the pallet on the floor. In the morning, she woke to Maze smoothing her hair and her cheek.
“I’m sorry, Mary Elizabeth,” she said. “I didn’t mean for you to sleep down here.” She looked at her until Mary Elizabeth closed her eyes and turned away. “And I didn’t mean to make you feel bad. I won’t do that to you again.”
Mary Elizabeth nodded, her back still to Maze, her throat and mouth parched. She could have cried for days, she thought, and she did not understand why. But instead she sat up and said, “We better get ready for church.”
She wouldn’t go along to the dance, she said. After church she shook the hands of Harris Whitman and his friend Daniel, a dark, handsome boy she recognized from Berea, then succumbed to one last hug from Maze. Only after she waved one last time as they pulled away, then turned to face her daddy, waiting for her on the porch, did it dawn on her that Daniel had been along as a partner for her.
Maze found Sarah Cox so beautiful it hurt her eyes. Unearthly, she’d have said if she’d had the word at hand. More spirit than matter, than lungs and heart, skin and blood. There were depths of sorrow there, but also something about to rise, about to flutter like a delicate wing and fly far away from them all. Like Sister Georgia, who was heavier, more bound to the grass and dusty ground there on Holy Sinai’s Plain, but also about to spin off the surface of the earth. Free at last, maybe, but no thanks to God Almighty.
Maze had thought she might try to be one of them, the spinners and writhers, the risers to some sort of heaven. But then came Harris, the touch and feel and smell of Harris, and she was drawn back to the solid earth by him, held there, anchored. Pulled by something at her very core when he danced with her and held her waist and kissed her.
She was like her mother in ways she hadn’t known before. Rooted, planted, part of the earth, of the rich, dark loam. There were these others—her old mamaw sleeping in her rocker on the porch and never waking up one afternoon, Sister Georgia, Sarah Cox—who cut the ties that held them and floated free. But not she, not Maze. Not now.
And Mary Elizabeth? About Mary Elizabeth, Maze really couldn’t say.
Through the dark, cold months of winter and then on into spring, Maze’s roommate was like a ghost who came and went but never lingered. Floating somehow then, but not so much floating as racing and racing and then dropping—the heavy weight of all her books on a desk in front of her, her hands forever on the keys of a piano. Through the winter and on into spring, Maze hardly saw her.
But once, on a Friday night in February, as they ate dinner together in the cafeteria, Maze said, “You never told me your Aunt Paulie played the guitar, too.”
Mary Elizabeth looked at her over the rim of the glass while she took a drink of milk. Watched her, waiting a moment, with a look that said, I’d’ve expected craziness like that, from you.
She set down her glass and wiped her mouth with her napkin. “That’s because she didn’t,” she said.
“Well, according to your daddy she did,” Maze said, irritated. Never there to begin with, and when she was, snapping like a viper, arguing with everything Maze said.
“There was a guitar up there, too, that day I went up with him to get down your Aunt Paulie’s trunk. He told me not to bring it down. When I asked him whose it was, he said she must’ve played it, but he didn’t quite recall.”
She saw a look cross Mary Elizabeth’s face; now she was angry, too. Why were they always at each other’s throats these days? Was it what Maze had done back at New Year’s when she’d visited? she wondered. Was it the line she’d crossed that night? But she’d said she was sorry, more than once. And “It’s all right, you don’t have to be sorry, I wanted you to,” Mary Elizabeth said each time.
Now she said, “Well, if my daddy didn’t want to bring it down he must’ve had his reasons. A lot of things can set my mama off for no apparent reason. He knows we have to be careful.”
“For no apparent reason,” Maze said, watching her.
“That’s right, Maze.”
“Well, aren’t you even curious about what reasons there could be? Good Lord, Mary Elizabeth, how do you know your mama didn’t play the guitar herself? Maybe she’s just waitin’ for somebody to ask. Aren’t you even curious about it, about things like that? Who she was, why she has her fits—aren’t there things about her that you just wish you knew?”
“Maybe. Maybe there are,” Mary Elizabeth hissed at her between tight lips. “But I’m not interested in bothering my mama with questions she doesn’t want to answer, Maze.” She gathered her plate, glass, and napkin onto a tray and stood up to leave. “And I don’t know what makes you think your mama doesn’t have a few secrets of her own. How much has she told you about your daddy, for instance? What do you even know about him? And why do you think she keeps on warning you off Harris Whitman the way she does?”
With that she turned and walked away. They didn’t talk again for more than a week.
But somehow Maze felt happy after that night in the cafeteria, at least for a while. Happy that Mary Elizabeth had paid that much attention, enough to notice things about Vista, about her. It was hard not to notice, of course, the way her mama felt about Harris Whitman. It was big and loud in every phone call and every letter. Big and loud enough to make him back away a bit, to say they should be more careful, take it slower, after all she was really still a kid.
Which wasn’t true, and they both knew it. She was nineteen already, and not interested in taking it slow. And Harris was only twenty-three, just a year and a half out of college.
But he needed to get more work done in the wood shop, he said. They should take it slow. So she went to the Weaving Cabin and even, more faithfully this term, to class. She spent time with other students, older ones, most of them friends of Harris’s—Daniel and Philip, with their untrimmed beards and their shirt-tails always flapping loose, Jean and Sarabeth, who smoked cigarettes and, like her, never wore makeup or set their hair. They wrote for the college newspaper, editorials supporting the Congress of International Organizations and the UMWA, or on “Berea’s Negro Problem.” (“The problem,” began one piece that got Phil called in for a talk with the dean, “is not Berea’s, but that of the poor Negroes who are stranded here.”)
They were daring and opinionated—the way Sister Georgia must have been, Maze thought, when she herself had been at Berea so many years before. When she was the brave Miss Ward, reading poetry to her students, defying the school’s leaders and their new, and to her unacceptable, laws.
The weeks passed, and soon it was spring—pink blossoms of redbud first, then lilac on the breeze outside their window, short sleeves and fullness of streams and hikes up Devil’s Slide and Fat Man’s Misery, though now without Mary Elizabeth. Every Saturday night, a country dance with Harris as her only partner, walks in the moonlight after—and before long, rolling on that newly green hill, their blood moving again, the warmth and the scent of their own blooming bodies making them forget all about that plan to take it slow.
Maze decided to stay on a few days after the end of final exams, to finish up a few pieces in the Weaving Cabin and to be there for Mary Elizabeth’s concert. There had been posters about it up on campus, and throughout town, for weeks. Someone from the Louisville Courier-Journal had come to interview Mary Elizabeth; her daddy had sent three copies of the article.
Maze heard Daniel and the others grumbling over it one day, standing by one of the posters outside the library. This puzzled Maze; they didn’t know Mary Elizabeth as well as Maze did, of course, but they’d met her, and they liked her fine, didn’t they?
“Of course we like her,” Phil said. “That’s the problem. That’s why we can’t stand what they’re doin’ to her.”
But Daniel tugged at his arm then and shook his head, and no one said anything else.
It was Maze’s first inkling, funny to think of it later, that all the attention Mary Elizabeth was getting might not be a good thing. Her second inkling came on the morning of the concert, when Maze woke, as usual, to an empty room; Mary Elizabeth would have been up and out of the room for hours already. As she climbed out of bed that morning, Maze realized with a start that nearly all of Mary Elizabeth’s things were packed, her suitcases lined up by the door. The trash can was full of old papers and notes, and Maze saw, as her eyes gradually focused, the sheet music for “Danse Russe,” from Petrouchka—one of the pieces Mary Elizabeth had been practicing endlessly, night and day, for four and a half months but had steadfastly refused to play for Maze.
Visitor
1943 · 1947
Vista and Nicklaus Jansen’s daughter, Amazing Grace Jansen, was born on a soft April morning to the strains of the Carter Family singing the hymn for which she was named. For while Vista and Mamaw had long since branched out to try other recordings—Red Foley and Bill Monroe and others—it was the Carter Family Vista wanted to hear that morning. Shade Nixon had set the thing going. Mamaw Marthie had her hands full with other things, of course, and she’d never been willing to learn to set the needle on a record; it made her too nervous, she said.
Though it was her favorite hymn and she’d wanted it to be her daughter’s name, when Vista held the writhing, snorting little bundle in her arms, she found it hard to make a name as grand as “Grace” fit. So instead she called her daughter Maze.
Things took their time about blooming that spring, and the birds seemed to tone down their singing a little bit at dawn, or so it seemed to Vista. She felt that way through the whole spring and summer—just dreamy and soft—as she nursed her baby and dozed with her under the shade of her favorite old tulip poplar. Later, when the air had a little bite in the evenings and early mornings, she felt herself wake up just a bit, enough to chase her exploring baby away from the stove or the steps of the porch. In the winter she saw her daughter’s red-blond curls emerge, as tight as if they’d been wrapped and pinned, but with a sheen of gold that gleamed in the lamplight at night.
On winter nights, Vista danced around the stove with little Maze in her arms, and some evenings she even let Shade Nixon play his classical records. Maze seemed to like them, anyway, particularly the Chopin Waltzes, or so Shade said. Mamaw Marthie sat by the stove and rocked, trying to find a comfortable way to sit; her gout was acting up that winter.
All in all, it was a pleasant time, that winter after Maze was born. But the spring was something different altogether. This time it wasn’t soft. Because suddenly, that spring, Vista was lonely. She woke up that first sunny day and knew it: She longed for the touch of a man. But the only man who ever crossed her path was Shade, and she’d find no comfort there; there were some things a woman just knew. The other young men had been pouring out of their holler since the start of the war, and so far the ones who survived hadn’t shown much interest in coming back.
The year Maze turned three, Shade Nixon was offered a job doing the books for a big hotel in Harrodsburg, fifty miles to the west. Something about even his going, about so many people going one place or another, made Vista want to look at maps, so that summer she pulled out all her old books and papers from the days when she’d gone to Miss Drury’s school. West or north—those were definitely the only two ways to go, she thought as she looked at the map of the United States Miss Drury had given her on the day she’d packed up the schoolroom to leave. To the east was West Virginia, and Vista knew all that meant was coal mines, and surely more towns that were emptying fast. To the south, Tennessee and cities like Memphis, where a woman by herself might just be mowed down by a streetcar.
Maybe west, then—at least as far as Harrodsburg, where Shade Nixon had a nice apartment above a fancy furniture store and an office of his very own right off the lobby of a high-class hotel in Harrodsburg. Funny, Vista thought, to see the west that way. For her whole life she’d seen the west as dim and gray, the east as lighter and rimmed with pink and purple—because that was how they’d always looked from Mamaw Marthie’s cabin. To the east, the sun came up over Harmony Ridge and bathed the valley in morning light; by the time it set, it was long lost behind Pinecone Knob, in front of Mamaw’s cabin, which always seemed hidden behind a gray veil. It was the first time it had dawned on her that her west was someone else’s east and that the other side of Pinecone Knob might look, from that someone’s perspective, every bit as bright with promise as Harmony Ridge looked to her in the morning.
In July of 1946 Vista wrote to Shade Nixon to say she’d like to come and visit, and by the end of the summer she had a job in the Beau Rive Hotel kitchen. She also had a little room, with a single bed that she and Maze shared, in the “staff quarters”—one new barracks-type building and two tiny cabins that were, she would learn later, former slave cabins—a half mile down from the slight rise the hotel sat on.
In the kitchen she cooked greens and spoon bread and endless platters of fried chicken and catfish; there was nothing new about any of this for her except for using more pepper than she was accustomed to. For Vista, most of it was just special-occasion Sunday-dinner cooking, but here in Harrodsburg, apparently, or at least at the Beau Rive Hotel, food like that was part of the place’s “Southern charm and hospitality,” and people ate it every day. It was tiring work, but Vista was fast and neat, and more than once she overheard one of the cooks or waitresses say something about how she just wasn’t what you’d expect of a mountain girl.
That was the first time Vista thought maybe that was the reason Nicklaus Jansen had decided he’d made a mistake. Maybe, she thought, he woke up and realized he’d married a poor mountain girl. Maybe that was it. That was the kind of thing she thought about, standing in the hot kitchen of the Beau Rive Hotel, scraping thick layers of grease from the frying pans.
Cooking at the Beau Rive Hotel meant doing at least two meals a day—either breakfast and lunch or lunch and dinner—and all the cleanup after each meal. While the work seemed familiar at least, it soon dawned on Vista that she was by far the youngest person on the cooking staff; the three other women who cooked were all the age of Mamaw Marthie, and as troubled by rheumatism and other ailments as she was.
All the other girls Vista’s age who worked at the hotel were either maids or waitresses, which meant they picked up a little extra tip money from wealthy guests from places like Lexington or Frankfort, sometimes even Louisville or Cincinnati. And eventually she learned, from talking to a maid named Mavis who often invited her to have a cigarette on the back steps behind the kitchen, that on top of that, their hourly rate was five cents higher than her own. She asked Shade Nixon about it one afternoon in the fall, when she’d finished cleaning up after lunch and brought him a cup of coffee, as she often did, lingering at his office door to chat.
He looked mildly annoyed, staring up at her with his perpetually bleary eyes. “Well, come on now, Vista, you know you’re gettin’ extra advantages that those girls don’t get—”
“Like what?” Vista snapped, annoyed by Shade Nixon’s unbending loyalty to his bosses.
“A place to live, for one thing,” he said, nodding toward the window in the direction of the staff quarters.
“But you know as well as I do, Shade Nixon, because you do the figurin’ every week—they’re takin’ three dollars out of my pay each week to cover my rent, for a bed and a table and a leaky toilet down the hall.”
“And all your meals provided here.” He acted as if he hadn’t even heard her.
“Everybody takes their meals in this kitchen,” she answered, nearly shouting now. “I oughta know, Shade, since I’m here cookin’ them every damn day.”
Then he played the card he’d been saving—the one that always worked, that always would work, with Vista. He pointed at Maze, who sat at a little table outside his office door, d
rawing pictures out of a new set of books he’d brought her from the Harrodsburg Library.
“Where else,” he asked her in a somber voice, “do you expect to live and work where you aren’t gonna have to worry about that little girl?”
As if on cue, Maze looked up at Vista, eyes wide open, as if she’d wanted to ask that very question herself. And Shade walked out of the office.
Later Vista came back with a warm piece of that evening’s spoon bread—a peace offering—but Shade wasn’t in his office. Instead she found a pretty, brown-haired woman, maybe her own age or a few years older, wearing a pink silk dress and sitting in the chair next to Shade’s desk. On her lap sat Maze. The woman was reading one of the library books aloud, and Vista stood in the doorway holding that spoon bread for several pages before either of them noticed she was there.
The brown-haired woman was a guest—a frequent one for lunch, apparently, though Vista knew she’d never seen her in the three months she’d been at the hotel. She introduced herself as Nora something, “Taylor,” Vista thought she’d heard, with some other business stuck in the middle, the way folks from around Lexington seemed to like to do with their names.
She said something about owning an inn herself nearby, something about shakers, Vista thought she heard her say, and all Vista could think of, maybe because of all her time in the kitchen by then, was salt and pepper. Also, she was distracted by her daughter, now standing next to the woman; Nora Taylor had risen to shake Vista’s hand, and Maze was staring intently at the long, smooth skirt of her dress. It appeared, to Vista’s surprise and also to her horror, that Maze was on the verge of reaching out and stroking it.
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