The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  who’ve given me so much help

  on this book, and

  so much joy in my life.

  “Definition of a grapefruit: A lemon that had a chance and took advantage of it.”

  —OSCAR WILDE

  Contents

  Acknowledgment

  Part One: The Castle Tree

  Part Two

  Chapter One: A Team That’s on the Beam

  Chapter Two: The Sadie Hawkins Day Dance

  Chapter Three: The Minstrel Show

  Chapter Four: Hollowed Be Thy Name

  Chapter Five: The Plantation Ball

  Chapter Six: Booklearning

  Chapter Seven: Independence Day

  Chapter Eight: Miss Newland

  Chapter Nine: Homecoming Queen

  Chapter Ten: Touch Your Woman

  Chapter Eleven: Black-Eyed Peas

  Chapter Twelve: Graduation

  Part Three

  Chapter One: Emily

  Chapter Two: Raymond

  Chapter Three: Donny

  Chapter Four: Jed

  Chapter Five: Sally

  Part Four

  Chapter One: Emily

  Chapter Two: Raymond

  Chapter Three: Donny

  Chapter Four: Sally

  Part Five: The Castle Tree

  Part One

  The

  Castle Tree

  The Five had always known they were special. During the summers of the polio scare, when their mothers insisted their legs would shrivel if they didn’t take afternoon naps, they complied only to humor the poor women. They themselves had good reason to believe they were invulnerable.

  The plan was that the Prince sisters, Emily and Sally, would marry the Tatro brothers, Jed and Raymond, so that their children would be double-first cousins—more than double-first cousins since their families were distant cousins to start with. (This arrangement excluded Donny, of course, but he understood the charmed status of double-first cousinhood.) Emily and Raymond, Sally and Jed had signed in blood a lifetime pact to this effect; it lay in a hollow in the Castle Tree. The remainder of the plan involved Emily’s going to the top plateau on “The $64,000 Question.” With her prize money they would build a treehouse in the Castle Tree, with an elevator. Maybe they would buy a penthouse in New York City as well—so as to live the lives of glamour and achievement they were destined for. They had decided on New York City because the Statue of Liberty was there. (Also in the hollow of the Castle Tree lay a rolled-up picture of the Statue of Liberty with the inscription “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”) Although they didn’t know exactly what jobs they’d do in New York City, they knew that whatever they decided on—baseball star or ballet dancer or waitress—they’d have no difficulty doing it, since, number one, they were special. And number two, they lived in the Land of the Free. Every now and then they saw Senator McCarthy on the evening news. He looked mean, but their parents assured them that because he was getting rid of all the Reds up North, Miss Liberty would be able to forever hold her torch on high. Yes, they would be like the daughter of Dr. Bradley down the street, who played Elvira on the afternoon soap opera “Love for Life.” Occasionally she would come down from New York City. The Five would crouch behind the boxwoods next door and watch her sweep down the sidewalk to her parents’ white Impala, wrapping her fur coat around herself and impatiently shaking her long blonde hair out from under the collar. Her real name was Mary Lou Bradley, but the screen magazines listed her as Marya Bradford.

  Sometimes The Five sat in the Castle Tree and discussed what they would change their names to when they got to New York City. Donny favored Lorenzo. Emily was thinking about Amelia, or Emeline. Jed insisted he liked his name fine just like it was.

  The Castle Tree was a weeping beech that grew in the side yard of Mr. Fulton, the Southern history teacher at the high school. It was maybe sixty feet tall, and its branches drooped like a willow’s to form a tent. Within, the branches twisted and curled into fantastic sitting places. They sat in them according to a revolving pecking order. The Tire, for instance, was far more desirable than the Couch. And the Throne was preferable to both. Here they’d perch, day after day, a treeful of Cheshire cats, as the Southern sun burned down outside. They would run their hands up and down the smooth grey bark, studying the initials and cryptic symbols carved by generations of climbing children. Mr. Fulton had carved his name on the arm rest of the Couch fifty years earlier. They couldn’t believe that the grey stooped old man, whose primary interest in life now seemed to be whether or not Raymond was over-collecting from him on his paper route, could ever have hoisted himself way up here. But there was his name—Arthur F., ‘05. It was swollen up like scar tissue.

  From a distance the tree looked like the mountaintop castles belonging to wicked giants in fairy tales. It was cone-shaped, but with turrets thrusting up like the humps of hunchbacks. Its grey-green leaves would shimmy in even the faintest breeze, making it look as if the tree might vaporize at any instant. With the shimmering went a rustling sound, as though a crowd of faceless strangers were whispering secrets. The tree had to be two hundred years old. Maybe three hundred. But where had it come from? Weeping beeches didn’t just spring up in fields like wild raspberry canes. Someone, they suspected, had planted this tree, placing it on purpose in the exact middle of Mr. Fulton’s yard. It was intended to convey a message across the years: The Five who now climbed it were meant to know that they were special, had a unique destiny, were being watched over and protected.

  Once in the Anderson’s Drugstore parking lot, when they emerged with grape snowcones, they saw a coral Cadillac with orange and dark blue New York license plates that read “The Empire State.” A fitting destination for denizens of a Castle Tree. The Five peered inside, to see what a car from such a place would look like. They were not disappointed: The seats were covered with white leather, and on a small white satin pillow slept a miniature white poodle with a scarlet bow on its head and a rhinestone collar. They sat on the curb crunching ice for as long as they could without missing “Superman” on television. The owner never appeared, but The Five got the message.

  They would ponder these messages as they sat in the Castle Tree and parted the branches and gazed down, down, down into the smoky valley at the mills and factories. Along the Cherokee River was the paper mill—a boxy grey structure surrounded by railroad tracks and flatcars. A yellow crane towered over mountains of logs and tossed the huge tree trunks as though they were toothpicks in the tartared teeth of a giant.

  Upriver was the shopping area, the simple townhouses of the original market settlement transformed by plate glass and molded plastic into furniture stores and finance companies. And downriver, often obscured by smog, was Pine Woods, the Negro development of low, red-brick apartments, where Donny lived with his mother Kathryn and his grandmother Ruby, who had worked for Emily and Sally’s family as cook for many years.

  Next to Pine Woods was the brickyard, filled with acres of stacked bricks in every shade of red and grey, made from the clay of the surrounding countryside. Lining the river below the brickyard were tobacco warehouses, semicircles of corrugated aluminum.

  Back from the river, at the base of the hill that was crowned by the Castle Tree, was the red-brick cotton mill, windowless for humidity control, with round towers at each corner. The mill village of nearly identical one-story cottages, where Jed and Raymond lived, surrounded the mill like vassals’ huts in the shadow of a medieval fortress. The village crept up the hill almost to the street of rambling, neo-Georgian and late Victorian houses owned by the town professionals and factory managers, among them Emily and Sally’s father, who ran the cotton mill. The Five felt great pride in this mill—the largest under one roof in the whole entire South! Jed and Raymond’s father would bring home bundles of small cloth squares, samples of the plaids and checks and ginghams woven at the mill. The mill ends of these fabrics, sewn by housewives into shirts and dresses, appeared on people all
over town.

  In the middle of the river, across from Pine Woods, was a long narrow island called Cherokee Shoals, which had been a sacred site to the Cherokees. With the arrival of white men, the Cherokees hid out there and attacked the flatboats as they wove through the shallows. In a savage battle the white men disposed of these pirates. The treaty between the United States Government and the Overhill Cherokees was signed on Cherokee Shoals, opening the territory to white settlement Now the island was covered with shacks and gardens belonging to poor white people and to a few half-breed Cherokees whose forebears had evaded the Removal.

  Across the river on a bluff stood the ruins of the lead mine that had supplied the entire Confederacy with bullets—some rusted equipment, stone foundations. In school they studied how Union troops marched north from Knoxville to destroy it. They gathered near Pine Woods, only to discover that the ferry had been sunk by Confederate sympathizers. The Yankees offered area residents huge sums for conveyance across the river. The offers were refused. Finally a few soldiers swam their horses across, burned the sheds and ripped up some equipment. Then they marched off, taking as prisoners the locals who had refused help. Two days later the mine was again turning out Confederate bullets.

  Beyond the mines and factories were the mountains, stretching range upon range eastward into North Carolina, northwest into Kentucky, north into Virginia. The valley floor on which the town sat was the dried-up bed of an inland sea. Once upon a time waves had lapped and pounded against the mountain walls. Strange sea creatures had bred and fought and struggled and died under fathoms of salt water in the very spot where The Five now sat. Parts of the valley had been reflooded by the TVA and blocked with dams that housed the turbines that produced electricity for the factories. Each of their families had crossed back and forth over these mountains before coming to rest on this valley floor.

  Corliss Rainey was removed from a debtors’ prison in England and put on a ship. He was working as an indentured servant to a farmer in tidewater Virginia when he met Buck Tatreaux, the son of a Cherokee woman and a French trader. Tatreaux did odd jobs for Rainey’s master. One day the farmer sent them both to Williamsburg for supplies. They headed toward Richmond instead. On the way they further darkened Tatreaux’s skin with berry juice and charcoal, cut off his braids, and scorched his remaining hair into kinks. They rubbed lard over his muscled body until he gleamed with apparent good health. Rainey put on a stolen set of his master’s clothes. In Richmond they found the slave market, and Rainey put Tatreaux up for sale. Rainey soon drove away with more money than he had ever before seen. He supplied the wagon and headed down a dusty road through well-tended farmland toward the hazy mountains. At the foot of the mountains he hid.

  Tatreaux meanwhile had run away from his new master. He scrubbed with sand in a stream until his skin was its usual copper color. With a sharp stone he hacked off his kinked hair. Then he ran for the mountains.

  Rainey gave him his clothes, and a hat with the braids attached, and the two set off up the mountain. At times the slopes were so steep that they had to hitch ropes to trees and haul on them, to help the mules drag the wagon up the narrow rutted path to the pass. Upon reaching the pass, they saw below them the valley, heavily forested but dotted here and there with cleared land and cabins and sheds. And on the far side, the rugged walls of the neighboring plateau.

  Rainey and Tatreaux found their spot, up against the gullied plateau wall. They built cabins, cleared land, raised crops, bred animals, went courting, and married daughters of the Scotch-Irish and German farmers, who had flowed into the valley along the more conventional route southward from Pennsylvania. Their children married and cut down more forest and spread out down the valley with their backs against the plateau wall. By the time the bodies of Rainey and Tatreaux had been turned into topsoil, the forested valley had become rolling green fields, grazed by cattle and enclosed by fences. A Tatreaux son married a Rainey daughter, and they had two sons. When the time came for these two to find wives and build cabins and start their own farms and families, one balked. Maybe the genes from his wayward grandfathers rebelled. From the pastures up against the plateau wall he could see the dusty road down the valley, jammed with people heading south—wagons piled high with household goods and drawn by mules or oxen. These people drove livestock and talked when he ambled down about a new Eden just beyond the foothills at the end of the valley.

  He announced that the valley was too crowded, that he couldn’t stand knowing exactly what he’d be doing and seeing the rest of his life. He tied his belongings into a pack and hoisted it on his back. His mother cried and loaded him down with beef jerky and corn pones. His father stared at him with glum outrage. The boy assured them he would return and report on what he found. They all knew he wouldn’t.

  What he found: mountains. Peak after towering peak, separated by narrow valleys, most of which already contained cabins and corn patches. Through the Blue Ridge Mountains of what was to become North Carolina he walked; into the Holston Valley; across the Clinch River; up through Cumberland Gap, following the network of narrow hollows until, like an eddy against a cliff, he couldn’t go any farther, and so came to rest. Jed and Raymond were his descendants. Emily and Sally were descended from the brother who stayed behind. Donny’s ancestors had been brought to the valley farm from coastal Virginia along approximately the same route taken by Rainey and Tatreaux.

  Rainey and Tatreaux’s great-great-grandson (Emily and Sally’s great-grandfather) left his farm one day wearing a grey uniform with gold braid and a hat with a plume, and riding a prancing black stallion. He returned three years later on a half-starved nag, missing his plume, several gold buttons, his left eye, and his right hand. He found his house half burned, his cattle butchered, his fence posts ripped out, and his fields lying fallow. Calling Donny’s forebears around him, he announced, “Yall are as free as I am now. Which ain’t saying much. You can leave if you want to, or you can stay here and try to keep from starving with the missus and me.”

  Donny’s great-grandmother left, joined the stream—of rejoicing freed slaves, of defeated soldiers in tattered grey with missing limbs, of victorious soldiers in tattered blue with missing limbs, of brisk scavengers from the North—that flowed through the ravaged countryside. She joined other celebrating Negroes, parted from them, stopped and harvested crops, stood in lines at federal relief kitchens in roiling towns. She meandered through Tennessee and down into Alabama, then turned around and came back to the valley farm where she gave birth to Ruby. Mr. Tatro never rebuilt his farm; he eked with his remaining hand. His son, Emily and Sally’s grandfather, moved down valley into Newland, where a cotton mill was being built, and took a job as superintendent. Young Ruby and her mother went along as house servants. Ruby still bore the Tatro family name.

  In addition to the Castle Tree, the coral Cadillac from New York, and their failure to succumb to polio, The Five had been given other signs, for as far back as they could remember. For instance, they had built a hut, like the first little pig’s, in the woods behind Emily and Sally’s house, sinking large sticks into the ground and lashing them together with vines and covering this frame with leafy branches. They would fashion loincloths from dish towels and leather belts, then paint each other’s faces with the juice from squished mulberries and stick fallen crow feathers in their hair. Then they would dig with sticks into a small hill they had decided was an Indian burial mound, despite amused denials from parents.

  But The Five knew it was a burial mound. The main highway through town had been part of the major north/ south Indian war-path. Honest Injun’s was a shack on this highway that sold country hams and jugs of molasses and chenille bedspreads and silver reflecting balls that people put on pedestals in their front yards. Also for the front yard, flamingoes on one foot, miniature Bambis, smiling plaster darkies in livery. Towering over all these objects of wonder (which their unimaginative parents would never let them buy) was a statue of a huge red Indian in a loincloth,
with dark braids. Standing at his feet and looking up, The Five decided he was almost as tall as the Castle Tree. Between his massive moccasined feet was a pond, at the bottom of which were several green iron frogs with bowl backs—ashtrays, they looked like. Customers dropped pennies into the water and won a prize if one landed in a frog. Most people missed, as evidenced by a thick layer of pennies in the bottom. The Five were sure at least twenty-five dollars in pennies would accumulate before Injun Al got around to cleaning them out. But Jed and Raymond’s father had once gotten a penny in a frog, before Jed and Raymond were born. His prize still sat on their window sill. It was a small grey teepee of plastic birch bark, laced with plastic cord and stamped with the words “See Rock City.” On its bottom was stamped “Made in Japan.”

  Injun Al French, squatting in his fringed buckskins and feathered war bonnet, with The Five and his daughter Betty squatting in a circle around him, often told them about the days when his ancestors had hunted the surrounding hills and valleys and had stalked on the packed earth underneath the very highway outside his shop—to make war or to find game, in search of a warmer or cooler climate. He explained why Cherokee country was so mountainous: After the Flood, the Great Buzzard flew low over the earth while it was still soft. Where its wings dipped down, valleys formed. Where its wings swept up, mountains appeared. He told about the first people on earth, a brother and a sister. He slapped her with a dead fish, and she had a baby seven days later. (That day at lunch Raymond sneaked up and slapped Emily with his tuna sandwich, but nothing happened. They decided it was because Raymond wasn’t her brother.)

  It was also Injun Al who taught them the old Cherokee trick of notching their middle fingernails at the base with penknives the day school got out. When the notch had grown out to the tip, it would be time to return to school. They had only to consult their fingernails to know how much vacation was left.