Stranger Here Below

by Joyce Hinnefeld

  But Maze could see, if Vista herself couldn’t, that none of it was working. None of it could stave off Vista’s deep loneliness, the disappointment behind her sharp laughter, at the corners of her eyes. Maybe her mama had been the one who’d taught Maze how she did, and did not, want to live.

  What Maze failed to notice, while she spoke in the student lounge that evening, was how the young men in the room started to sit up and listen, to shift a bit in their seats. What was a man supposed to do, graduating from college in Kentucky in 1963 with woodworking skills and a degree in philosophy and not much else, with a mysterious war starting up overseas, with nuclear bombs aimed at all their heads?

  Dr. Wendt spoke up first, of course. “But didn’t the Shakers take a vow of chastity or something along those lines—weren’t they celibate? I thought that was how they died out in the first place. Except for the woman your mother cares for, of course,” he said, nodding toward Maze. Dr. Wendt had a pretty young wife and two young children with a third one on the way, and a deep appreciation for “the ways of the flesh,” he’d been known to announce in class, to the embarrassment of the freshman girls.

  Phil and Sarabeth—who, Maze knew, had recently begun sleeping together—sat back in their seats on an old sofa, deflated, and Harris laughed and looked over at Maze in a way that made her blush and look away. “Well, maybe we wouldn’t actually have to become Shakers,” she said.

  “That’s good,” Daniel said, “since most of us don’t even believe in God.”

  Now Dr. Wendt was nodding. “You know,” he said, “I could see this. I could see all of you making that work. A new utopia, grounded in different values. You’d be latter-day Thoreaus. Or the Vanderbilt Agrarians maybe, but without all that ugly nostalgia for the Old South.”

  That was the thing that always bothered Maze about Wendt—the way every idea had to be his. She only came to the fireside chats because Harris did. On the other hand, when Dr. Wendt got interested, it seemed like others in the room did, too.

  No nostalgia for the Old South, no. Sister Georgia would never hear of that. Maze looked around the room, at all the white faces. Daniel would never actually join them, she thought. But what if she could persuade Mary Elizabeth somehow, to come for the summer even? Maze had never stopped hoping for that, imagining the four of them—she and Harris, Mary Elizabeth and Daniel—together, away from Berea somewhere. Or maybe there, in the town, but not students at the college anymore. Just weaving, building things out of wood, dancing. Mary Elizabeth playing the piano again.

  Maze shook her head. Foolish dreaming, all of it. Mary Elizabeth had certainly made that clear. All she did now was study and check the mail every day for word from the University of Chicago. Foolish, Maze supposed, to think any of them would take her seriously.

  But at the end of the term, when Daniel, Phil, and Sarabeth graduated and Maze withdrew from Berea, all five moved, along with Harris Whitman, into the old Shaker Inn at Pleasant Hill.

  Squatters, some of the locals from Shakertown called them. Others called them communists, or worse. But still others, people who had known Maze since she was a child and watched her grow up at Pleasant Hill, brought them bread and cakes and pies and helped them repair the leaking roof and the broken windows.

  Vista washed her hands of the whole thing and got an apartment in Harrodsburg. And Sister Georgia watched the bearded boys and the girls in blue jeans, unloading Harris’s old pickup truck and carrying their boxes and suitcases into the old inn, with a kind of wonder.

  It was the summer of her second visit to Pleasant Hill, a month before she would leave for Chicago, when Mary Elizabeth began to take things. Small things, nothing all that valuable, but objects that would surely be missed. She kept them in a hand-stitched muslin bag that she carried with her to Chicago in the fall of 1963. Her second visit to Pleasant Hill was a brief one—only an afternoon. That was all the time she could afford away from house-cleaning and caretaking in Richmond; she needed every penny she could earn that summer for her move to Chicago in the fall. Maze and Harris, Phil and Sarabeth, and Daniel had already fixed themselves rooms in the old Shaker Inn and gotten to work on a wide field behind the building. Mary Elizabeth saw Daniel pushing an old handheld plow as she walked with Maze and Sister Georgia to the path to Holy Sinai’s Plain. He looked up briefly and gave a tentative wave.

  Maze had been walking to Holy Sinai’s Plain each day with Sister Georgia, who’d grown frailer in the year since Mary Elizabeth had seen her. “I don’t think she could do this on her own anymore,” Maze said while they watched the old woman run through her daily worship, with considerably less fervor than the summer before.

  “What’s she think about all of you living here like this?” Mary Elizabeth said.

  “I don’t really know,” Maze said, then looked over at Mary Elizabeth and smiled. “I guess you not movin’ here with us makes you the only pure one left in her eyes.”

  Mary Elizabeth gave a hollow laugh but didn’t look back at Maze.

  Why wouldn’t she come stay with them through the summer, at least? Maze had prodded back in May.

  “Maze, I can’t,” Mary Elizabeth had said. “I’ve got too much to do at home.” She hadn’t said a word, though, about her mama, still in the Colored Home in Stanford. Or about the things Clarisa Pool had told her at Christmastime. For some reason she couldn’t tell Maze any of it; she couldn’t bear the thought of the girl’s steady breath and her silence, or her stream of questions, or her sympathy.

  She was hardly the pure one, Mary Elizabeth thought. Sometimes, that afternoon, when she caught Sister Georgia looking at her, she had an eerie feeling that the old woman knew that about her, knew there were secrets she was keeping. They all looked at her that way at Pleasant Hill—even Maze. Like maybe they felt she thought too highly of herself, with her big University of Chicago plans. Or, in Maze and Sister Georgia’s case, almost as if they felt sorry for her.

  “I can’t see why you’ve turned so private,” Maze had said to her as they packed up their room at the end of the year. And Mary Elizabeth had thought, Well, no, I’m sure you can’t.

  Harris could drive her over to Richmond for a visit one day, Maze had said, once they’d gotten settled at Pleasant Hill; how would that be? But Mary Elizabeth had said no, she didn’t think so. Finally, to get Maze to leave her alone, she’d agreed to take the bus to Pleasant Hill one day in June.

  Only Vista, who’d picked Mary Elizabeth up at the bus station and driven her to Pleasant Hill, seemed to approve of her plans.

  “Good for you, Mary Elizabeth,” she said as she pulled up alongside the Sisters’ Shop. “You’re gonna make somethin’ of yourself. Unlike that lot,” and she pointed behind her in the direction of the old Shaker Inn. “Lord knows what’s gonna become of them. Probably a mess of babies before long, and that’ll be the end of that.”

  She shook her head and lit a cigarette then, waving away Mary Elizabeth’s offer of a dollar for gas. “Call me if he still can’t get that pickup started later,” she said. “I’ll make sure you get to your bus on time.” And then she drove away, without a word for Maze or Sister Georgia.

  Mary Elizabeth was there for only a few hours, most of that time spent with Maze, who showed her around the moldy old Shaker Inn and told her about their plans to fix it up, along with the kitchen garden outside the Center Family Dwelling House and a woodworking shop for Harris in the old Brethren’s Shop. They sat at a picnic table in the shade behind the inn, next to an overgrown flower garden. The others—Harris and Daniel, Phil, Sarabeth—stopped by at various points to say a polite hello to Mary Elizabeth, then went back to their various chores.

  When it was time to get Mary Elizabeth to the bus station in Harrodsburg, they walked to the Sisters’ Shop so Mary Elizabeth could tell Sister Georgia good-bye. While Maze went to get Harris’s pickup and Sister Georgia rested upstairs, Mary Elizabeth opened the trunk behind Sister Georgia’s loom. Inside, she found piles of old Shaker books, inclu
ding the ledger book from the summer before. She turned the pages, laughing quietly when she saw the recipe “For Sisters who have erred.” In a corner of the trunk, wrapped in tissue paper, she found the stiff little bonnet Georgia had shown her the previous summer, saying she’d always imagined it as Sister Daphna’s. Before she put back all the books and closed the lid of the trunk, for reasons that were inexplicable to her, Mary Elizabeth took the little bonnet out of its wrapping and tucked it into her purse.

  Then, on a table beside the loom, next to a row of bobbins and a big basket of yarn, she saw the pattern Maze had sketched for the narrow piece she’d been working on at the loom; “child’s blanket,” it said in the corner. Hearing Harris’s pickup, Mary Elizabeth started for the door, then stopped and hurried back to the table, grabbed the draft, and folded it into her purse as well. That one she took on Vista’s behalf, she told herself, as she climbed into the cab of the truck.

  Visitor

  1947

  Neither Taylor wanted dinner on the evening of their champagne-fueled celebration in the Shaker Inn. And the next morning at breakfast, Vista learned what she’d been invited to celebrate the day before when Russell announced that he and Nora would be leaving Pleasant Hill and moving to Philadelphia, where his father had several business interests that needed tending to.

  “The inn hasn’t exactly been a success, as you know, Vista,” he said, speaking to her in the old familiar way—master to servant—as if he had no memory of what had happened the day before. “We’ll pay you through the end of the month, to work at cleaning and packing up our things. But you’ll need to look for other work now.”

  He cleared his throat then, and Vista feared, for a moment, that he was on the verge of saying something about that moment behind the Brethren’s Shop. But all he said was “It’s time I got Nora away from here; she hasn’t done as well as we’d hoped here in the bluegrass.” And then he left the table.

  Later, as she cleared Russell’s breakfast dishes, Vista wondered who that “we” who had hoped Nora might do better at Pleasant Hill might be. There would be no way of finding out from Nora, who did not come downstairs for the entire day, and who spoke to Vista only in clipped tones, instructing her on what was to be packed where and what was to stay, in the days that followed. At the end of three days of packing, she left for Louisville, and Vista never saw her again.

  Russell stayed on for several days after his wife’s departure, and what would surprise Vista most was how easily it happened—how, after that one moment in the garden, the exchange of a single glance as they passed each other on the stairway was all it took. One moment she was filled with contempt for this arrogant man, so cold and heartless in his dealings with others (including his wife), so sure of his superior place in the world. And the next, as he reached for her in the darkened hallway on the second floor, she was prepared to go down on her knees and lick every part of his thin, wiry body, stopping at nothing—practically panting to be his new coal-country whore. If only to have him touch and lick her back, for just that brief time, and to watch him lose his smug composure and moan and shiver, both of them weaker in this urgent need than, Vista swore to herself each time, she would ever let herself be again.

  And so for three nights she allowed it to go on, for reasons she could not quite understand; all she knew was an incredible hunger, a longing that felt like a kind of pain. The first night he entered her clumsily and finished his business so quickly that she actually wanted to laugh. She crawled out from under him afterward and left him, sleeping soundly, to go scour her body in the bathtub and then crawl into bed beside Maze.

  But the next night, and the night after that, he had had less to drink, and he took more time, and they tended to each other’s bodies with an ardor that had nothing to do with fondness or affection; it was more akin to the greed of starving prisoners, Vista thought.

  By the second morning, she ached, sore from the night before, but also troubled by this hunger that both shamed and thrilled her. During the days they barely spoke. In the morning, he packed valuable china and crystal into boxes; in the afternoon, he tended to unfinished business in Harrodsburg.

  The third night, neither of them slept at all. On the third morning, he packed the Cadillac full of boxes and left Pleasant Hill for good. And all Vista could think of, then, was finding a way to leave, too.

  She called Shade Nixon, but not to ask for her old job back. Instead she asked if he might consider going home to the mountains for a visit. She thought, she said, that she and Maze might stay there for a while. And she only heard the smallest, faintest hint of satisfaction in his voice when he told her how sorry he was to hear about the closing of the Shaker Inn, and that yes, he thought he could take a day off to drive her and Maze over to Torchlight.

  Mamaw Marthie had not weathered their absence well. Holes in the cabin roof had gone unrepaired, and by the end of May she was still limping with her winter gout. When Vista asked her what on earth she’d been doing with the money Vista sent every month, if not at least hiring a neighbor boy to patch the roof, Mamaw pointed toward an envelope in a canning jar by the dry sink; it held nearly all that Vista had sent.

  She shooed away Vista’s fretting with a toss of her hand and eased herself slowly, painfully into her rocker. “I don’t need so much, Visitor—it’s better for y’all to hold on to that money.” They stayed with her into the summer, and Vista got busy whipping her grandmother’s garden into shape and bringing in two local boys to repair the roof and several rotting beams.

  While Mamaw’s face was mostly twisted now—with pain or with confusion, Vista was never sure—the one thing that could soften her gaze was the gold head of her great-granddaughter. And Maze did seem, if it was possible, to be turning even more golden. She loved the mountains, and the sun over Harmony Ridge in the mornings seemed to sweeten her freckles and make her blond curls even more radiant. When Vista asked her if she missed Pleasant Hill, her answer was a simple “I reckon. But it’s nice here, too.”

  The old Victrola was still there, on its little table in a corner of the kitchen, untouched during the time that Vista and Maze had been away. At night they’d play some of the old records, mostly lively banjo and fiddle tunes like “Cindy” and “Foggy Mountain Breakdown.” Some nights Berthie Dyer’s twin grandsons, gangly fourteen-year-olds in old dungarees and bare feet, would join them, and Vista would teach her already graceful daughter and the twins, who were all arms and legs, some of the dances she remembered from years before.

  They might have stayed even longer but for the lack of work there in Torchlight. And, though she hated to admit it, Vista missed the softness of the land to the west. She couldn’t adjust to the bleakness of the place. People—whole families—packed into two-room cabins. Broken glass and rusted tin littering the dusty road through town. When she asked, she learned that the mobile library no longer came through Torchlight. Not since old Aunt Dawson, the only local user, had died the summer before. And the only men were either very young or very old. No one knew a thing about what had happened to Nicklaus Jansen. Vista no longer cared who laughed at her, behind her back, whenever she asked.

  When Mamaw Marthie died, in her rocking chair on the cabin’s porch, where she’d been sleeping through the August afternoon, it was Maze’s idea to go back to Pleasant Hill. “Let’s go see Sister Georgia,” she said when they finished packing up Mamaw Marthie’s few belongings.

  Vista stared at her daughter. She certainly had no better ideas. She put the last box into the trunk of Shade Nixon’s old Dodge, which he’d sold her for a song.

  Vista slammed the trunk closed. “All right,” she said, brushing dust from the car off her hands. “Let’s go back and talk to Sister Georgia.” Caring for a madwoman was, it seemed, the only thing left for her to do.

  Pilgrim and Stranger

  1963

  There were other things in the muslin bag Mary Elizabeth took with her to Chicago in the fall: a pair of Aunt Paulie’s lace knicker
s, which Mary Elizabeth had put aside and then stashed in her dresser drawer back when they’d pulled her aunt’s trunk down from the attic to find a dress for Maze; these, Mary Elizabeth imagined, must have been purchased for Aunt Paulie back in Paris, by one of her many admirers. Also two of her daddy’s cuff links, from two different pairs. A tarnished cross from a necklace belonging to Clarisa Pool. And a small, nearly empty notebook that had been her mama’s. Mary Elizabeth had found it on a bright day in June, when her daddy had asked her to pack up some of her mama’s warm-weather clothing to take over to the home in Stanford. Sarah wasn’t any better than she’d been at Christmastime. She’d have to stay at the home a while longer, George Cox said.

  Mary Elizabeth found the notebook at the back of her mama’s dresser drawer, in there with her underwear and stockings. Its old brown cover was stained and mildewed, and all its pages were blank except for rows of penciled squiggles on a few pages in the front and, near the end, four lines, each written in a shaky hand on its own page:

  I been

  I been there

  I am

  I am lost

  Inside the front cover was her mama’s maiden name, Sarah Henry. Written in ink, in a surer hand that looked, to Mary Elizabeth, like her Aunt Paulie’s.

  Some nights during her first quarter at the University of Chicago, Mary Elizabeth would pull her muslin bag of stolen goods from the back of a drawer and empty the items, one by one, onto her bed in the sterile dormitory where she lived in a single room. Eventually she would continue the ritual on her bed in a stuffy attic room on the top floor of an old Victorian house on a tree-lined Hyde Park street, where she moved at Christmastime that year.

  This was the home of Octavia Price, the woman who taught Mary Elizabeth’s introductory anthropology course that fall, and who took a special interest in her. She was a worldly, sophisticated black woman, clearly brilliant, and, unlike most other people at the University of Chicago, she dressed in vivid colors and long, flowing scarves. Her lips and fingernails were always painted a bright red, and her voice was deep and booming, her laugh loud and long. She had traveled all over the world and was, Mary Elizabeth decided, just like Aunt Paulie must have been when she was younger. She said this to Octavia, shyly, one afternoon in her office when they met to discuss a paper Mary Elizabeth was working on for her class. Octavia threw back her head and gave a husky laugh when she heard about an aunt in Paris in the 1920s, and her eyes glowed. “Tell me more about this flapper aunt of yours,” she said.