You are walking on the snow-covered ground. There is a crunching that accompanies your steps. If you walk for long enough you forget that there is a sound that accompanies your every footfall. You forget until you walk onto a patch where the snow has melted away. That first silent step startles you and reminds you that there isn’t always snow.
No one called him Baby Harper—not to his face, that is—but Iris and me. Even I loved my grandmother when she said his name aloud.
“Babyhoney Harpercelery.”
The honey, a percolating bubble full of flowers and citrus, bursts wide open when the sea of celery—the only vegetable I know that comes pre-salted—washes in. An unexpectedly pleasurable combination of flavors that made me wobbly in the knees.
It wouldn’t be the last time that I would fall for a name. Canned peaches. Dill. Orange sherbet. Parsnip (to my great regret). None of those whom I have loved since Baby Harper have ever given me more.
Baby Harper asked me where DeAnne was tonight. In between bites of Bridges’s pulled pork, I said that DeAnne was a witch. Baby Harper let out another little hiccup. He always enjoyed it when my responses didn’t answer his questions. He liked it when they came close but then would swerve and miss. What I wanted my great-uncle to know was that I held DeAnne responsible for Bobby, but under the fluorescent lights, amid the drone of nuclear families dining, awash in the vinegary miasma of Bridges, I couldn’t say his name aloud.
Monster. Menace. Blade.
Later that night, when I finally told my great-uncle Harper, he cried. He held my hands and cried. His own hands were trembling. I told him that it would be all right, that it had been all right for years now, seven, in fact, which did little to console him. We were sitting side by side by then, on the green velvet divan that was the centerpiece of his living room. My great-uncle was a sixty-two-year-old, never-married male librarian with a velvet divan, which he pointed out to me was the same color as the curtains that Scarlett O’Hara had made into a gown. These weren’t clues; they were flashing signs. I loved him more because of them. The good folks of the greater Boiling Springs–Shelby area looked at my great-uncle and looked right past him. They are the unlit pigs, I remembered thinking that night.
Revelation is when God tells us the truth. Confession is when we tell it to Him. Or when we tell it to the person in our lives who makes us feel closest to Him. Kelly and I had come up with the “Or” and what followed it. Before Bobby, before the summer of Dill and Wade, Kelly and I were amateur theologians who supplemented our Sunday-school education with our own addition to the Scriptures. We drafted a new book of the New Testament, and we entitled it Illumination. Kelly came up with the name. She had a sophisticated vocabulary for a ten-year-old. She said the title aloud to me and asked, “So?”
“Prunesscallion,” I replied, making a face.
Kelly laughed. She understood that there was something unpleasant hidden within the word “prune” as well as the word “illumination,” so she repeated both words until I begged her to stop.
“Or whatgrahamcracker?” Kelly asked.
“I’ll neverbubblegum speaklemonade to youcannedgreenbeans againpancakenosyrup!”
“Youcannedgreenbeans neverbubblegum say anyricethingtomato to me now,” Kelly said, rolling her eyes.
If you charted our friendship, 1978 was a peak year for us. Our world was small and intimate and complete. We were ten years old. We were in the fourth grade. We had no pets, no siblings, and no crushes. We had our devotion to each other, to Dolly Parton, and, with Illumination, our devotion to Jesus. In letter #253, I asked Kelly what that word meant.
“Light,” she wrote back. “Also what happens when we have light. We can see more and better things.” Kelly dotted the i in the two lights and the one things with a heart, an anatomically correct one, complete with left and right ventricles.
Illumination began with how we felt about Jesus. We started with a list of the things that we loved about Him.
We love you Jesus! because you were a real cute baby.
We love you Jesus! because your arms are always wide open, and you want to hug us.
We love you Jesus! because people follow you around like sheep.
We love you Jesus! because your hair is long and shiny. (We think you use Breck shampoo.)
We love you Jesus! because wherever you go you bring your own illumination.
At the end of the writing of Illumination, when we were almost eleven and felt very confident about our faith (which was good, as we were about to stop believing in ourselves), we listed the Ten Commandments and then the ways out of them. Kelly said they were called “Exemptions,” and then she asked, “So?”
“Nothingtomato,” I replied.
Kelly took out a small spiral notebook that she kept in her purse—I didn’t have one yet because my father said that everything that I needed should fit in my back pockets—and she wrote down “exemption.” She was keeping a list of words that fired blanks. She thought eventually we would see a pattern. None emerged because she lost interest and then she lost the notebook.
Thou shall not kill, unless thou is killing to save Jesus.
Thou shall not steal, unless it is to take back what was stolen from thou, which meant it was yours in the first place.
Thou shall not covet thy neighbor’s wife, unless thy own wife is dead and thou are very lonely.
Kelly kept our only copy of Illumination because she was the scribe. She was the scribe because her handwriting was better than mine. Her handwriting was better than mine because she had written letters even before I came into her life. She told me that the letters had been addressed to Nobody and signed Somebody. Or maybe it was the other way around.
My great-uncle Harper and I were both the confessors that night. My hands, in fact, had been the first to tremble. After our dinner at Bridges, we drove back to Boiling Springs and to his house, a Greek Revival with a pristine exterior painted in “Clotted Cream,” which he proudly noted was a color that he had researched for period authenticity and then had had custom-mixed. Baby Harper began as he usually did: “Linda Vista, come sit by me.” We arranged ourselves on the divan, and he returned to the subject that I had introduced earlier at Bridges. “Now you know your momma is not a witch, Vista Girl,” he said. “But when we were both young, I thought she was one too.”
DeAnne and her uncle Harper were only eight years apart in age. That I knew. What I didn’t know was that from the moment Iris and Walter Wendell brought DeAnne down the stairs of the green-shuttered colonial on Piedmont Street, wrapped in the same baby blanket that had covered Baby Harper during his first hours of life, he decided that he didn’t care for his niece, and he told her so every time he was left alone with her. He whispered, “You’re a bag of bones,” into her infant ears. He handed her “Your name is Mud” notes when she began to walk but long before she could read. As his vocabulary developed and hers was still limited to “momma” and “papa,” Baby Harper’s scribbling became more direct and to the point: “Incubus, Succubus, wish you weren’t with us.” When Iris pried these slips of paper from DeAnne’s moist little hands, the ink was already smudged and the messages were beyond reproach. As my great-uncle told this to me, he flipped through the pages of H.E.B. Nine and stopped at a photograph of DeAnne standing beside a cake with eight lit candles. He pointed to her right hand balled into a fist and to what looked like the corners of a handkerchief poking through it. He said that was the last note that he ever gave to her. I asked him what the note said. Then I asked him why he stopped.
“I forgive you,” the note said.
When DeAnne turned eight, the age that Baby Harper was when she came into the world, he realized something very important about her, something that was probably inborn and fixed. His niece would never write a note back to him. Not even to ask, “Why?” Baby Harper knew that if he continued to despise DeAnne for simply being (in the way, in between him and Iris, in the center of every family gathering enjoying the grace tha
t belongs only to the youngest of the flock) and, more important, if he continued to let her know it, he would be committing an even greater sin than he had bargained for. The meek shall inherit the earth. Baby Harper wasn’t sure he understood why they would, but he sure wasn’t going to bet against God. His niece, DeAnne, was a Whatley in name and in blood. She hadn’t inherited a drop of the Burch battery acid that flowed through Iris’s veins (and to a lesser extent his own). My great-uncle Harper, and this was the revelation, said that maybe skipping a generation was God’s way of balancing out the world.
What Harper Evan Burch didn’t say, but that everyone else in Boiling Springs knew, was that, in the case of the Burch family, God had already balanced out the world by destroying a whole generation. The “smiting” had taken place two weeks after Iris’s wedding to Walter Wendell. Her mother and father had escorted her father’s two spinster sisters back to the ladies’ hometown of Macon, North Carolina, where the Burch family’s streak of mean had earned these two women a new last name. There they were known as the “Burr Sisters.” There a fire swept through the family’s former plantation house and killed them all in their sleep. Iris and Baby Harper were left with the green-shuttered colonial in Boiling Springs, but the land in Macon, according to the sisters’ will, went to a local society of cat lovers, a member of which had traveled to Venice, Italy, and reported back that there were entire islands there set aside as cemeteries for their friends the noble felines. The charred remains of the house and the surrounding fifty-five acres became just that kind of island right there in Macon. After the will had gone through probate and the deed to the land was transferred, an allegation surfaced that the Burr Sisters hadn’t even liked cats. They just liked their niece and nephew less.
I never saw even a hint of my great-uncle’s early feelings toward DeAnne. When I was growing up, he spent a lot of time over at the blue and gray ranch house, though he avoided dinnertime whenever possible. My great-uncle would show up right as dessert was being served. DeAnne never had any pretensions that she could produce edible baked goods, so store-bought cakes and pies or wobbly cubes of Jell-O (“homemade”) were what we all looked forward to at the end of our meals.
Baby Harper usually brought with him a couple of shirts along with an envelope containing the buttons that had fallen off them. DeAnne would take out her sewing basket, and my great-uncle would sit down next to her on the couch, leaning his head in to hers as if he were the one guiding the needle up and down. DeAnne never seemed to mind. I thought there was real affection between them.
I asked him that August night if that was true.
He nodded and said, “Linda Vista, I fell in love with your momma the day she married Thomas.”
THERE WAS A GHOST WHO HAUNTED NORTH CAROLINA. HER name was Virginia Dare, and there was no historical record of her after the ninth day of her life. Her father’s name was Ananias, and her mother’s was Eleanor. She was born on August 18, 1587, which was a Monday, and she was baptized that following Sunday. Because of that drop of water, whatever became of her body, her soul was welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. This fact kept John White, her grandfather and the man who failed her, from drowning himself at high tide. Virginia—or should I call her by her last name, because from the first day of her life she had earned it—was born on Roanoke Island off the coast of what would be called North Carolina, where no English child’s umbilical cord had ever been cut and tied. Dare was brave and foolish and defiant to have survived the circumstances of her birth. It was undeniable that her arrival gave hope to the adults in the colony, a hope so pure and unreasonable that it lasted for only a couple of hours. Then her arrival reminded these adults that they were low on food and supplies and that their first winter in the New World was nearing. Dare reminded them that they could die. A small bundle of pink flesh triggered these emotions in them. The adults met and debated and decided that some among them would have to return to England for provisions and for additional men and women, who, and this part was left unsaid, would have a stronger resolve than they. When it came time for the roll call for volunteers for the journey, the three who didn’t say “aye” were Ananias, Eleanor, and Eleanor’s father, John White. A small bundle of pink flesh had made these three foolish and defiant and brave. John White, though, was destined to leave his grandchild behind. He was the governor of the colony, and without his presence on the returning ship there would have been the strong suspicion of desertion or mutiny. On August 27, he looked back at Roanoke Island and saw his daughter, Eleanor, standing on the sandy shore with Dare in her arms. Where was Ananias, John White wanted to know. The question grew in importance in John White’s mind as the ship crossed the Atlantic. He knew that he would have to wait many months before he could learn the answer, and that made him angry with his son-in-law for prompting the question in the first place.
The Atlantic was too cooperative, John White also found himself thinking during the journey away from his new home. The ocean he knew was always brutal but in different ways. John White was right. The Atlantic safely returned him and his crew to a country at war. England’s ships, sailors, supplies, and every available maritime resource for the next three years were devoted to the sinking of the Spanish fleet. John White, during those years, developed a hatred for his son-in-law that bordered on a kind of obsession. The vein in John White’s temple throbbed and threatened to explode. He needed to focus on that anger because otherwise his breaking heart would have caused him to let out a sound like that of a sheep bleating. His Eleanor and his Dare standing alone on the shores of Roanoke Island for who knows how long? That was the question that was driving John White mad.
My father believed in the Old North State. When I was eight years old, a significant age in our family, my father gave me a book entitled North Carolina Parade: Stories of History and People. The book was published in 1966, two years before I was born. It had the look and feel of a book written in a much less complicated decade than the sixties. The illustrations were inky black and white, gestural and naïve. The text, co-written by a man who, per his photo on the dust jacket, looked like a 1940s movie star, and a woman who took her photo with her cat, had much of the same qualities. Thirty-two short chapters all with the tone and depth of a sixth-grade book report. I was immediately pulled in. There was something reassuring about having the history and people of your world reduced to 209 pages and a handful of drawings. True to his nature, my father wanted me to have a book that would foster a sense of security and belonging. North Carolina contained easy-to-read histories, and he thought that they would do the trick. They did. But the trick was a different one from what he had intended. North Carolina was a bait and switch.
As with all fairy tales, a crime was committed. In “Snow White,” there was a poisoning. A hostage situation was at the heart of “Beauty and the Beast.” “Hansel and Gretel” featured attempted cannibalism. “Cinderella” involved the lesser offense of party crashing. North Carolina began with a trespassing. Not a “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” domestic breaking and entering but an act of large-scale land grabbing. But at first I thought North Carolina’s opening chapter about the baby Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony of Roanoke Island was about the crime of kidnapping or mass murder. Of course I did. I was being shown the world through Dare’s barely opened eyes. History always had a point of view. That was a trick worth learning.
Another was that history was what you wanted to remember. In North Carolina there was only one mention of a slave, George Moses Horton, who had earned extra money for his master by writing love poems for the young men of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. George Moses composed these poems while he worked the land on his master’s farm. Little Virginia Dare would have asked how terrible could this “peculiar institution” have been if there was poetry in the fields?
North Carolina had yet another trick up its sleeve. History was in the missing details. The Wright brothers’ first flight on December 17, 1903, from Kitty Hawk, North Car
olina, was witnessed by a small group of people, including “a boy from Kitty Hawk village.” Why did the co-authors of North Carolina—the movie star look-alike and the cat lover—separate this boy from the group, and then leave him standing on the sand of Kitty Hawk, nameless and without a word to contribute? Another forgotten child on the coast of North Carolina was, perhaps, their theme. North Carolina was chock-full of children, well loved and well remembered. Buck Duke, Andrew Johnson, Daniel Boone, who all grew up to be somebody. Yet, it was this anonymous boy and the baby Virginia Dare, one without a name and the other without a future, who drew me in again and again. North Carolina’s final trick was this. It was neither a history nor a fairy tale, but a mystery.
When I left Boiling Springs for the optimistically named New Haven, I took North Carolina with me to remind me of my father’s face when I thanked him for the book and to remind me of the place where he was born and where he died. His afterbirth and his body were buried in the same land that had received his father’s and forefathers’ bodies. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Carolina to Carolina. In that way, my father belonged to an ancient order of men. In all other ways, my father was a modern man. He had traveled far from his home to educate himself among the race of men known as Yankees. He was never afraid, because his father and grandfather had commingled with these same folks and returned home to Charlotte, North Carolina, more or less unchanged. Within the Hammerick clan, a change of any kind was one more than was necessary. My great-grandfather Graven Hammerick, upon his return from New Haven, was said to have refused the cornbreads served to him by his mother because they weren’t sweet enough for his northern-influenced palate. Because she couldn’t stand the sight of him not eating, his mother always had a batch made just for him with heaping spoonfuls of sugar added to the batter, but she also made it a point to wrap these squares in a black cloth before bringing them to the table. She wanted to remind her son that something inside of him had died. My grandfather Spartan Hammerick caught the travel bug after his graduation from Yale and spent two years crisscrossing Europe. During this time abroad, he sent home only two postcards, each written and postmarked on the date of his mother’s birthday. Spartan returned to Charlotte with a stack of letters scented by the hands of an Italian baronessa, which his mother found and made him burn. For the Hammericks, the important thing was that their men came home again. When my great-uncle Harper told me this, I thought, Of course they came home. Where else in the world could they live with those first names?
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