We left the letter on the kitchen table, held down by the glazed iris-blue mug Mom had made when she was in her ceramic-pottery phase.
Two people got
off the bus when it pulled into the depot, so we were able to snag their primo seats up front on the right side,
which had better views than the left side, behind the driver. Liz let me have the window, and I held Fido in his Tupperware bowl with a little water in the bottom, an upside-down saucer for him to
sit on, and holes punched in the lid so he could breathe.
As we pulled away, I looked out the window, hoping Mom had returned and would come running up the street before we left for parts unknown. But the street was empty.
The bus was crowded, and since everyone on it was making a journey with a purpose, we played What’s Their Story?—another game Liz had made up—trying to guess where the
passengers were going and why, whether they were happy or scared, whether they were heading toward something wonderful and exciting or fleeing from danger or failure, whether they were going off on
a visit or leaving their home forever. Some were easy. The young military guy snoozing with his head on his duffel bag was on home leave to visit his family and girlfriend in ranchland. A frail
woman with a small daughter had a strained look in her eyes and one hand wrapped in a splint. Liz guessed that she was on the run from a man who beat her. A thin guy in a plaid jacket with lank
hair pushed behind his jug ears was sitting across from us. As I looked at him, trying to figure out if he was an absentminded mathematical genius or just a schlub, he caught my eye and winked.
I quickly looked away—it was always so embarrassing to be caught staring at people—but when I glanced back at him a little bit later, he was still eyeballing me. He winked again. I
had that uh-oh feeling, and sure enough, when Liz got up to go to the bathroom, the schlub came over and sat down next to me, draping his arm across the back of my seat. He pressed his finger down
on Fido’s Tupperware bowl.
“What you got in there?” he asked.
“My pet turtle.”
“You got a ticket for him?” He looked at me intently, then gave another wink. “Just funning you,” he said. “You girls going far?”
“Virginia,” I said.
“All on your own?”
“We’ve got our mother’s permission.” And then I added, “And our father’s.”
“I see,” he said. “You’re sisters.” He leaned in on me. “You’ve got incredibly beautiful eyes, you know.”
“Thank you,” I said, and looked down. All of a sudden, I felt very uncomfortable.
Just then Liz came back from the bathroom. “You’re in my seat, mister,” she said.
“Simply getting to know your sister, miss.” He rose up out of the seat. “She says you’re going all the way to Virginia? Heck of a long journey for two pretty young gals
to be making on their own.”
“None of your business,” Liz told him. She sat down. “A total perv,” she whispered to me. “I can’t believe you told that odiosity where we were going.
That’s such a Bean-headed thing to do.”
The Perv took his seat but kept staring over at us, so Liz decided we needed to move. The only two free seats were at the very back, next to the bathroom. You could smell the chemicals and the
other gross stuff in the toilet, and every time folks squeezed past us to use it, you could hear them running the water, blowing their noses, and hawking, not to mention doing number one or number
two.
The Perv came back to use the bathroom a couple of times, but we stared straight ahead, pretending not to see him.
The bus went only as far as New Orleans. Since we were sitting in the back, we were the last ones off. When we went to pick up our luggage, the Perv was gone. Our next bus
didn’t leave for two hours, so we put the luggage in a locker with Fido and went for a walk. Liz and I both had a serious case of what she called rigor buttis.
It was a hot, hazy day, and the air was so thick and humid that you could barely breathe. Outside the depot, a long-haired guy in an American-flag vest was playing “House of the Rising
Sun” on a saxophone. There were people everywhere, wearing either crazy clothes—tuxedo jackets but no shirts, top hats with feathers—or hardly anything, and they were all eating,
drinking, laughing, and dancing to the music that street performers were playing on just about every corner.
“You can really feel the voodoo,” Liz said.
A trolley car came down the street, and we got on for a quick tour of the city. It was less than half full, and we took a seat in the middle. Just before the doors closed, a man shoved his hand
between them, and they opened again. It was the Perv. He took the seat right behind us.
Liz grabbed my hand, and we moved up to a seat at the front. The Perv followed. We moved to the back. He followed. The other passengers were watching us, but no one said a thing. It was one of
those situations where people knew something wasn’t right, but at the same time, there was no law against a man changing seats.
At the next stop, Liz and I got off, still holding hands. So did the Perv. Liz led me into the crowd on the sidewalk, the Perv behind us. Then Liz quickly pulled me around, and we jumped back on
the trolley. This time, the doors closed before the Perv could get his hand in. The other passengers all started hooting and cheering, pointing and clapping, shouting things like “Dusted
him!” and “Ditched his ass!” As we pulled away, we could see the Perv through the window. He actually stomped his foot.
Once we were safely on the bus heading east—the Perv didn’t get on—we had a lot of fun rehashing the whole encounter, the way we not only tricked the Perv but
humiliated him in front of a trolley full of people. It made me feel like we could handle just about anything the world might throw at us. When it got dark, I fell asleep with my head resting on
Liz’s shoulder but I woke up a short while later and could hear her very quietly crying.
In Atlanta, we changed for the bus to Richmond, and in Richmond, we changed buses for the ride to Byler. For the first time since coming east, we left the freeway for the
smaller back roads. The Virginia countryside rolled and dipped, so we were always either swinging through a curve or climbing up or dropping down a hill. It was all so green. There were shiny green
cornfields, dark green mountains, and golden-green hay fields lined with deep green hedgerows and soft green trees.
After heading west for three hours, we reached Byler late in the afternoon. It was a small, low-lying town on a bending river with layers of blue mountains rising up behind it. The bridge across
the river clanked under the wheels of the bus. The streets of the town, lined with two-story brick buildings painted in fading colors, were quiet and had plenty of empty parking spaces. The bus
stopped at a brick depot with a black metal roof. I had never seen a metal roof on anything except a shack.
We were the only passengers who got off. As the bus pulled away, a middle-aged woman came through the door of the depot. She wore a red sweatshirt with a bulldog on it and was carrying a ring of
keys. “You all waiting for someone?” she asked.
“Not really,” Liz said. “You don’t happen to know how to get to Tinsley Holladay’s house, do you?”
The woman studied Liz with sudden interest. “Mayfield?” she asked. “The Holladay house? You all know Tinsley Holladay?”
“He’s our uncle,” I said.
Liz gave me a glance that said I should let her do the talking.
“Well, knock me over with a feather. You all are Charlotte’s girls?”
“That’s right,” Liz said.
“Where’s your momma?”
“We’re visiting on our own,” Liz said.
The woman locked the depot door. “It’s quite a hike to Mayfield,” she said. “I’ll give you all a ride.”
The woman obviously wasn’t a perv, so we put the suitcases in the back of her battered pickup and climbed into the front. “Charlotte Holladay,” the woman said. “She was a
year ahead of me at Byler High.”
We drove out of the town and into the countryside. The woman kept fishing for details about Mom, but Liz was evasive, so the woman started talking about Mayfield, how twenty years ago there was
always something going on there—oyster roasts, Christmas parties, cotillions, moonlight horseback rides, Civil War costume balls. “In those days everyone was hankering for an invitation
there,” she said. “All us girls would have given our left arm to be Charlotte Holladay. She had everything.” The woman gave a little nod.
A couple of miles outside town, we came to a small white church surrounded by tall trees and a group of old houses—some big and fancy, some fairly run-down. We continued past the church to
a low stone wall with a set of wrought-iron gates held up by thick stone pillars. Carved into one of the pillars was
MAYFIELD
.
The woman stopped. “Charlotte Holladay,” she said once more. “When you all see your momma, tell her Tammy Elbert says hello.”
The gates were locked, so we climbed over the low stone wall and followed the gravel driveway up a slope and around a thick stand of trees. There at the top of the hill stood the house, three
stories high, painted white, with a dark green metal roof and what looked to be about twenty brick chimneys sprouting up all over the place. There were six fat white columns holding up the roof of
the long front porch and, off to one side, a wing with a row of French doors.
“Oh my gosh,” I told Liz. “It’s the house I’ve been dreaming about all my life.”
Ever since I could remember, I’d been having this dream at least once a month about a big white house at the top of a knoll. In the dream, Liz and I open the front door and run through the
halls, exploring room after room after room of beautiful paintings and fine furniture and flowing curtains. There are fireplaces and tall windows, French doors with lots of panes of glass that let
in long shafts of sunlight, and wonderful views of gardens, trees, and hills. I always thought it was just a dream, but this was the exact house.
As we got closer, we realized the house was in pretty sorry shape. The paint was peeling, the dark green roof had brown rust stains, and brambly vines crawled up the walls. At one corner of the
house, where a piece of gutter had broken off, the siding was dark and rotting. We climbed the wide steps to the porch, and a blackbird flew out of a broken window.
Liz rapped the brass knocker and then, after several seconds, rapped it again. At first I thought no one was home, but then, through the small glass panes on the sides of the door, I saw some
shadowy movement. We heard the scraping and sliding of bolts, and the door opened. A man appeared holding a shotgun across his chest. He had rumpled graying hair, his hazel eyes were bloodshot, and
he was wearing only a bathrobe and a pair of argyle socks.
“Get off my property,” he said.
“Uncle Tinsley?” Liz asked.
“Who are you?”
“It’s me. Liz.”
He stared at her
“Your niece.”
“And I’m Bean. Or Jean.”
“We’re Charlotte’s daughters,” Liz said.
“Charlotte’s girls?” He stared at us. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here?”
“We came for a visit,” I said.
“Where’s Charlotte?”
“We’re not exactly sure,” Liz said. She took a deep breath and started explaining how Mom had needed some time to herself and we were fine on our own until the police got
snoopy. “So we decided to come visit you.”
“You decided to come all the way from California to visit me?”
“That’s right,” Liz said.
“And I’m supposed to just take you in?”
“It’s a visit,” I said.
“You can’t simply show up here out of the blue.” He wasn’t expecting guests, he went on. The housekeeper hadn’t been around in a while. He was in the midst of
several important projects and had papers and research material spread throughout the house that couldn’t be disturbed. “I can’t just let you all in here,” he said.
“We don’t mind a mess,” I said. “We’re used to messes.” I tried to peer behind Uncle Tinsley into the house, but he blocked the doorway.
“Where’s Aunt Martha?” Liz asked.
Uncle Tinsley ignored the question. “It’s not that it’s a mess,” he said to me. “It’s all highly organized, and it can’t be disturbed.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do?” Liz asked.
Uncle Tinsley looked at the two of us for a long moment, then leaned the shotgun against the wall. “You can sleep in the barn.”
Uncle Tinsley led us along a brick path that ran beneath towering trees with peeling white bark. It was twilight by then. Fireflies floated upward like little points of light
in the tall grass.
“Charlotte needed time by herself, so she just took off?” Uncle Tinsley asked.
“More or less,” Liz said.
“She’s going to come back,” I said. “She wrote us a letter.”
“So this is another one of Charlotte’s debacles?” Uncle Tinsley shook his head in disgust. “Charlotte,” he muttered. His sister was nothing but trouble, he went on.
She was spoiled as a girl, a pampered little princess, and by the time she had grown up, she expected to get whatever she wanted. Not only that, whatever you did for her, it wasn’t enough.
Give her money and she thought she deserved more. Try to set up a job for her and the work was beneath her. Then, when her life got difficult, she blamed Mother and Father for everything that went
wrong.
Uncle Tinsley was being pretty harsh about Mom, and I felt the urge to defend her, but this didn’t seem like a good time to start arguing with him. Liz seemed to feel the same way, because
she didn’t say anything, either.
The barn, which stood at the end of the tree line, was huge, with peeling white paint and a green metal roof, just like the house. Inside, on a floor made of brick laid in a zigzag pattern, was
a black carriage with gilt trim. Next to it was a station wagon with real wooden sides.
Uncle Tinsley led us through a room with dusty saddles and bridles and all these faded horse-show ribbons hanging on the walls, then up a narrow flight of stairs. At the top, there was this neat
little room that I didn’t expect at all, with a bed and table, a kitchenette, and a woodburning stove.