Chapter 9 - The Spring on the Ridge
By the middle of April, the mud had dried along the turnpike, and the redbud trees were blooming through the hardwoods like clouds of purple smoke on the ridges.
The carriage house looked different now.
The roof over the hayloft had been repaired by a crew of local men from the hollow—three brothers named Early whose grandfather had cut timber for Harold in the sixties. They had used second-hand slate from an old church in Staunton that matched the original stone within half a shade, and they had charged six thousand dollars, paid by a cashier’s check drawn on the Dominion National trust account, signed by Margaret V. Hollis, Trustee.
There was no boutique inn.
There were no luxury suites with private terraces.
The tack room had been cleaned out, the twenty years of rusted iron sorted into scrap and sold to a foundry in Lynchburg for four hundred and ten dollars, which had been deposited into Eleanor’s savings account at the village bank.
In the center of the old floor, where the oxen had once stood while their shoes were being cooled in the tub, sat Harold’s transit level on its oak tripod, its brass barrel polished until it caught the afternoon sun like a yellow lantern.
I walked down the garden path carrying Eleanor in a sling against my ribs.
She was four months old now, fat-cheeked, with hair that had curled into dark rings around her ears, and she spent most of her waking hours watching the crows fly between the chimney tops with an intense, solemn curiosity that made Rosemary laugh.
Rosemary was sitting on the stone bench beside the herb garden, wearing an old straw hat with a green ribbon and gloves that were black with potting soil.
Beside her on the bench was a letter.
It had arrived in the morning post from Charlotte.
A plain white envelope, with no return address, postmarked from the central processing facility near the railroad tracks.
“You want to read it?” Rosemary asked, not looking up from her tray of rosemary cuttings.
“No,” I said.
“Arthur Vance says he’s working forty hours a week,” she remarked, pressing a slender green stem into the damp compost with her thumb. “He’s living in the trailer. Billy says he doesn't talk much. He eats his dinner at the diner across from the scales and goes to bed at eight o'clock.”
“Is he drinking?”
“Billy says he hasn't seen him with a bottle,” she replied. “He says he bought a television for twenty dollars from one of the drivers, but the antenna doesn't work, so he mostly just sits on the steps and watches the trains go through to Atlanta.”
I looked down at Eleanor’s head. She was asleep, her cheek pressed against the linen of my shirt, her small mouth open against my heart.
“Does he ask about her?”
“He asked Arthur if she had the Hollis chin,” Rosemary said.
“And what did Arthur tell him?”
“Arthur told him she had the Vance chin,” the old woman said, a small, wicked smile touching the corners of her mouth beneath the brim of her straw hat. “He said the Hollis chin was too expensive to keep up in this economy.”
I laughed—a real, clean sound that went out over the stone walls and died away into the hemlocks by the creek.
It was the first time I had laughed like that in two years.
It sounded strange in the garden, like an unfamiliar bird that had just arrived from the south and hadn't quite figured out where the territory ended.
“The lawyer from Richmond called yesterday,” I said, sitting down on the other end of the bench and letting the warm spring sun soak into the wool of my sweater.
“Which one?”
“The bankruptcy trustee,” I said. “He wanted to know if the trust would be willing to buy the rights to the Hollis Development trade name for five hundred dollars so they could close the file.”
Rosemary snorted through her nose. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him we already had a name,” I said. “And it wasn't for sale.”
May you like
She looked at me over her spectacles, her eyes crinkling at the corners until the sixty-eight years looked less like a burden and more like a high wall that had been built to keep the wind off the young grass.
“Good girl,” she said.
