Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  You could hardly blame her, really—Vista felt like reaching out and touching it herself; she’d never seen a dress as soft and fine as that, or a pink as pale and shimmering. She reached for Maze and pulled her up into her arms.

  “Is this little angel your daughter?” the woman said then, and before Vista could answer, she chirped, “Well, of course she is! Just look—I can see where she got her curls and those adorable freckles.” She reached over and wrapped her fingers inside two of Maze’s curls.

  Later, when she asked Shade Nixon about Nora, Vista learned that the woman and her husband ran a small inn at Pleasant Hill, just five miles east of Harrodsburg; they called it the Shaker Inn because it was in one of the old dwelling houses used by the odd religious group that had had one of their places at Pleasant Hill. Selma, who worked with Vista in the kitchen, told her about them; supposedly they danced in church, she said, and that was how they got their name.

  “Funny lot—I believe they’ve all died out now. Pretty spot, though,” Selma said. “You oughta take Maze over and see it one day.”

  Shade, loyal as always to his employers, was more dismissive. He sniffed when he told her about the Shaker Inn. “It’ll never last,” he said. “It’s just a hobby for those two, Russell and Nora.” He leaned closer and whispered in her ear, “Old money from up near Louisville.” He rolled his eyes and winked at her before he walked away, but Vista recognized the longing that was always there behind Shade’s smugness about other people’s wealth.

  She quickly forgot about the Shaker Inn, but a week after she’d stumbled on Nora Taylor in Shade’s office, one of the waitresses came to tell her that a lady in the dining room wanted to talk to her. When she walked out to see who it was, drying her hands on a stained old tea towel, she found the whole room emptied out except for one young couple. It was Nora Bates Taylor and her husband.

  “Russell, pull up a chair for Mrs. Jansen,” she said to the tall man in a suit who wore little round eyeglasses and didn’t smile. Vista thanked him and sat down, hiding the tea towel under her thigh.

  “Now, just so you don’t think we’re sneakin’ around behind anybody’s back, I want you to know we’ve already talked to your boss here, and we have a business arrangement to propose to you,” Nora Bates Taylor began.

  Fifteen minutes later, Vista had agreed to ride back with them that afternoon to see the Shaker Inn and the grounds at Pleasant Hill. What they had offered her was a job as the assistant cook in their inn, for which they were willing to pay her nearly double what she was being paid at the Beau Rive Hotel, along with providing a fully furnished room for her and Maze.

  Pleasant Hill was more than a pretty spot. By now it was a little town all its own, laid out on a neat, square grid with a gas station set up in the old stone Deacons’ Shop and a general store in the old Broom Shop. All the buildings, most of them over eighty years old, had been built by those religious people, the Shakers, and the locals had taken to calling the town Shakertown. Though a few of the buildings—the meetinghouse, the old Trustees’ Office, the Sisters’ Shop and the Shaker Inn—were still in good repair, not all of Shakertown looked so nice. Much of the land was overgrown with weeds, and some of the buildings, with their broken windows, rotting frames, and sinking foundations, made Vista think of Torchlight.

  There was only one actual Shaker left on the grounds, Nora told her—an old woman called Sister Georgia. “Crazy as a loon,” Nora said. “She still does the Shaker worship, dancing and all, all by herself, and she talks to the ghosts of the dead ones, or so they say. But she’s harmless. We don’t see much of her, to tell you the truth.”

  Those decaying buildings and stories about Shaker ghosts gave Vista pause that first afternoon, but then Nora walked her up the back steps of the inn—the old East Family Dwelling House, she called it, pointing to a special kind of rain spout that the Shakers had designed as she stepped up to the door—and showed her the room she and Maze would share.

  There were two beds, each with its own hand-stitched quilt and featherbed. There were two dressers, a writing table, a big old wardrobe, and a set of bookshelves. With books. And there was still room for a pretty oriental rug, like the kind they had in the lobby of the Beau Rive Hotel, Vista realized, sucking in her breath. She walked over to the window and pulled back the lace curtain; outside, she saw Maze running and playing with two other children, who, Nora said, belonged to a couple down the road.

  “There are lots of little ones around,” she said. “I guess Russell and I are the only ones livin’ like Shakers around here now!” Then she laughed, harshly, and Vista decided not to ask any more about that.

  She turned back to the window to watch Maze. She looked the way a child should look, Vista thought—wild and free, happy. Chasing after a loose chicken instead of roaming around a hotel lobby full of things she was forbidden to touch. By the end of the week, Vista and Maze had packed their few things and left the Beau Rive Hotel for their big new room in the Shaker Inn.

  “I hope you know what you’re doin’” were Shade Nixon’s parting words to her, but, basking in the glow of her sudden good fortune, Vista only hugged him and thanked him for his help, refusing to be bothered by his bad temper.

  The glow did wear off, though it took a while, mainly because she was so busy through the holidays. The rooms and the dining table were always full—more with Nora and Russell’s friends and family members than with paying guests, it seemed to Vista—but Nora loved the crowds and all the bustle, and when Nora was happy, Vista soon realized, so was Russell.

  So this was what old money from Louisville looked like. What that meant, as far as Vista could see, was drinking a lot and having people wait on you hand and foot. Also, feeling free to nose into her kitchen with one more favor to ask and one more piece of advice to give her for cooking the turkey that Cape, the hired man, had killed and plucked that morning.

  Because it had quickly become Vista’s kitchen. The assistant-cook business had really just been a ruse to get her there, she realized early on, for there was no other cook. Or rather, the “other cook,” a woman named Dot, was on her way out—the last in a series of short-term employees, Vista learned from Dot on her first day in the kitchen at the Shaker Inn. Some—about half—had left of their own will, unable to tolerate all of Nora and Russell’s intrusions and persnickety demands, not to mention those of their visitors; the rest had been let go when Russell had found them unable to comply with his two solid pages of carefully typed General Orders for Each Day of the Week. When to sweep and dust the breakfast, sitting, or dining room (for the job of cook involved, it turned out, considerably more than cooking); which juice to serve for which meal on which day, and in which glass, and placed in proximity to which plate; the order, and manner, in which the fine china, crystal, and silver were to be washed, dried, and carefully put away.

  Vista set her mind to memorizing Russell’s General Orders and tried to take everyone’s intrusions and suggestions in stride because now that she was there at the Shaker Inn, she knew she would have to make it work. Where else could she go? There’d be no going back to the Beau Rive Hotel, she assumed; she hadn’t heard a word from Shade Nixon since the day she and Maze had left.

  And as exhausted as she often felt, it was true that her room was lovely, and at night, when she wasn’t too tired, she could sit and read at the big table, having chosen from among the many books on the shelves. Sometimes, inexplicably and with no warning, Nora would burst into the kitchen as Vista and Myron, the boy who helped with the serving, were finishing cleaning up; cheeks burning and eyes dancing, her breath sweet with wine, she would drag Vista into the main drawing room, pour her a glass of sherry, and pull her into that night’s game of charades. Or, more often, she’d beg Vista to rouse Maze from sleep and bring her into the room, where Nora would stroke and coddle the drowsy child as if she were her own, showing off her pretty curls and laughingly recounting the story of her name for all the assembled guests.

  O
n those occasions, with everyone as tipsy and glowing as their host, they would treat Vista like a friend, a fellow guest—even the ones who, a few hours before, had snapped their fingers at her without a word to take away their plates or called impatiently to her or Myron because they were out of butter or cream for their coffee.

  But then the holidays ended. It was winter, and winter on the bluegrass, where Vista and Maze found themselves now, was different. It was bare and still. Snow would fall, but just in little dustings, not enough for Maze to make a snow angel, much less a snowman. With so few guests, there was next to nothing to do in the kitchen, and not even any new dirt or dust to chase on Russell Taylor’s daily schedule.

  So she cleaned beyond the dust. The inn’s front parlor sparkled in the winter light that poured through the wide windows, much as it must have when the East Family Shakers had lived there, from what she’d been told. She scrubbed floors and shined silver and read books to Maze every afternoon, and for the first months of the year she saw very little of Nora, who spent most of the week after New Year’s Day in bed with a cold and a pile of magazines, then went off for an extended visit to her parents. Russell, in the meantime, went to stay with friends in Lexington, going over a long list of typed instructions for what to do should any guests arrive in his absence. But he needn’t have worried; from New Year’s Day till early March, all Vista needed to do was cook a quick supper for two businessmen from Lexington who rang the bell one evening in search of a meal before they headed home.

  When Nora returned from Louisville, she had a bit more energy. She also had three new dresses—unheard of, in Vista’s experience, anytime, but truly beyond belief since the war. And she had a pile of seed catalogs.

  “You know, my hollyhocks grew six feet tall last summer,” she said, and Vista only nodded, having heard this several times already and having been shown the pictures in the photo album more times than she could count the previous fall.

  “The Shakers were known for their fine seeds, you know,” Nora went on, “and they grew all kinds of herbs and used them for all kinds of things, even for medicines. I’m gonna make a beautiful Shaker garden out in front of the inn this spring,” she said, then spread herself out on the sofa in the front parlor, surrounded by her catalogs, and asked Vista to bring her the bottle of sherry and a glass, even though it was only two o’clock in the afternoon.

  Herbs as medicine was no particular surprise to Vista, who’d gone up the ridge with Mamaw Marthie many times in search of tansy or yarrow root to ease her gout or to use in a tea for croupy chests in the winter. But to send money off to a catalog company to order seeds for such things—when she knew there’d been patches of lobelia growing wild near the old Center Family House, and just last fall she’d spotted plenty of sarsaparilla and liverwort in the woods below Shawnee Creek—struck her as wasteful and ridiculous.

  But so was buying three new dresses in a week or drinking liquor in the middle of the day to a mountain girl like her, Vista thought with a sigh as she went to the kitchen to get the kind of glass she knew Nora liked.

  By the time those seeds came in the mail, in three little boxes that Vista kept for Maze, who liked to gather things when she rambled out along the creek or in the woods with the other children—pine cones, rocks with fossils from the creekbed, tail feathers dropped by a hoot owl—Nora hardly seemed to notice them. She had lost interest in the idea of the Shaker garden, it seemed. By April—only a few weeks away from planting time, Vista tried to remind her—Nora was generally bleary-eyed from drinking by the middle of the afternoon.

  Russell seemed to spend more and more time in his office in Lexington. Exactly what Russell did, Vista never understood, and it was Nora who led her to believe that “office” was just a code name for something else. A woman’s apartment, perhaps, or, as Nora called it, the abode of “some old coal-country whore.”

  At first Vista had wondered what the attraction could have been. She herself found Russell Taylor unbearably stiff and formal at first—a cold fish. But gradually, over her first weeks at the Shaker Inn, watching him at parties with the couple’s many friends and family members, when the two of them still seemed to be enjoying their lives as innkeepers—and even each other from time to time—Vista thought, at moments, she could see it. It was something unnameable, a slow seductiveness in his smile, an easing of his admittedly handsome square jaw. His thin but strong body, more visible in the relaxed and expensive shirts and trousers he wore on the weekends.

  And, undeniably, the sure appeal, the sturdy confidence of a man with wealth and power. She had seen this in the men who stayed at the Beau Rive Hotel, and she had laughed at herself, the poor coal-country girl hidden in the kitchen, when she felt a wave of longing well up inside her at the sight of those men in their crisp suits and gold cufflinks. She couldn’t even get a dirt-poor boy like Nicklaus Jansen to stay put; what kind of hold could she ever have on a man like that?

  Originally Nora had planned to write a book, she said. And she had, in fact, pursued her project with a certain diligence, at first. During that first spring—the spring of the planting of the famous hollyhocks and the furnishing of the newly purchased Shaker Inn with an incongruous mix of lavish rugs, crystal, and silver, with straight-backed Shaker chairs and curved wooden boxes—she had come up with an outline for a novel about a young Shaker woman at Pleasant Hill at the end of the last century. But since her arrival in the fall, Vista hadn’t seen Nora do any writing.

  “Why don’t you get back to working on your book about the Shakers?” Vista asked Nora one morning in April. She could ask that one remaining Shaker, Sister Georgia, what it had been like fifty years before, Vista said. She surely looked old enough to remember those days.

  But Nora only waved her suggestion away. “She came here when she was older, after they’d almost all died out,” she said. “I won’t get any good stories out of that strange old bird.”

  Sister Georgia was peculiar, there was no denying that, in her old-fashioned dresses and her stiff Shaker bonnet, walking along the main road to the old meetinghouse twice a day, mumbling to herself. Or maybe she was talking to her Shaker spirits. Vista had heard her dancing and clapping inside the meetinghouse. And once, shortly after she and Maze had arrived at Pleasant Hill, Vista had walked up a hill behind the Sisters’ Shop, where the old woman lived, in search of wild blackberries. When she crested the hill, she saw Sister Georgia ahead of her, in a clearing, whirling in circles like some kind of dervish, eyes closed, humming a strange, low song.

  Odd enough, all right, but not a threat. She realized that what all the other folks who lived in Shakertown said was true. Those folks would nod their heads or tip their hats when they passed Sister Georgia, and she’d nod back but never smile, except with the children. She loved the children, and since the other parents let their children drink her ginger lemonade and eat the peppermint candies she made from an old Shaker recipe, Vista let Maze do those things, too. Sister Georgia seemed especially fond of little Maze, who picked bouquets of wildflowers for her and kissed her old woman’s cheek without prompting, and without fear.

  Was it her affection for Maze that prompted the old woman to approach Vista one morning in May? Vista wondered later. And how in the world had Sister Georgia known to speak to her on that particular, fateful day?

  By then Nora was drinking steadily, and she’d turned spiteful, not just to Russell but also to Vista, ordering her around like a servant, mocking her “eastern Kentucky” speech. Even, at times, toward Maze, though every angry rebuke of the child was immediately followed by tears and contrition, then long bouts of self-loathing—“I know I’m a horrible bitch, everything he says is true, I don’t deserve to have a child of my own.” Vista was growing exhausted by the effort it took to protect her daughter, to steer her clear of Nora’s weaving path from front-parlor sofa to kitchen liquor cabinet and back again. They’d had no guests that spring, and Vista had begun sending Maze over to the homes of friends in the aftern
oons, before Russell returned from Lexington—Nora’s worst time of the day.

  Still, though, there were some days—days when Nora drank less and slept more, or the rare occasion when she got dressed and out the door for lunch or a movie in Harrodsburg—that were better. Sunny spring mornings when the house was empty and Vista could work in the back garden, birds singing loudly all around her, the smell of lilac on the breeze. Days like that had their own dangers, though—too much time to think, too much time to pine for Nicklaus Jansen, to admit her deep loneliness and her fear of what would happen next. Where, besides a crumbling cabin in a desolate hollow, could she and Maze go from here?

  That particular May day could have gone either way. A good day because it was quiet, maybe; maybe busy enough for Vista not to think too much. The fact that Nora had driven into Harrodsburg so early, no doubt to buy more liquor, was a bad sign. But maybe, Vista hoped, she’d stay in town longer, perhaps have her hair and nails done at the salon in the Beau Rive Hotel. Maybe she’d come back with news from Shade Nixon, at least.

  Meanwhile, Vista decided, she would do what she could. She would weed and hoe the two East Family Dwelling House flower beds; she’d get them ready for Nora to plant her long-forgotten hollyhocks.

  Morning gave way to noon, and since Maze was off playing with her friend Rosie for the day, Vista decided to skip lunch and keep working through the day’s high heat. The weeds were thick, the soil dry and hard, and the work slow. When she paused at last to stretch her legs and tuck away the damp curls that had come loose from the scarf she’d tied over her hair, she jumped when she saw Sister Georgia, standing beside the fence at the property’s edge, watching her.