Chapter 10 - The Table and the Tide
By June, the heat had returned to Richmond, but it was the clean, green, fragrant heat of early summer, smelling of sweet magnolia blossoms, river grass, and the damp earth along the canal paths.
The dining table at 414 Monument Avenue had been restored.
I had spent three weeks working between five and seven every evening, stripping away the dead wax with denatured alcohol, smoothing the grain with four-zero steel wool, and applying eighteen coats of cold-pressed linseed oil cut with pure gum turpentine. The gray rings where the wine and the lemon juice had burned into the wood were gone; the walnut had darkened into a deep, rich, chocolate bronze that glowed with a soft, subterranean fire under the morning light.
It was Sunday noon.
The table was set for three.
There were no lobsters. There were no Chincoteague oysters on crushed ice. There were no hundred-and-ten-dollar bottles of Napa chardonnay.
In the center of the table sat a simple white porcelain bowl filled with fresh summer succotash—sweet corn cut from the cob that morning, baby lima beans, ripe tomatoes from the garden behind the carriage house, and diced smoked ham from a smokehouse in Surry County. Beside it rested a basket of hot buttermilk biscuits, covered with a clean linen cloth, and an earthenware pitcher of sweet tea with fresh mint leaves bruised against the bottom.
My mother sat at the head of the table.
She didn't use the aluminum transport chair anymore. Her right knee had been repaired three weeks ago by Marcus Vance—a ninety-minute arthroscopic procedure that had removed two loose bodies of calcified cartilage and smoothed the ragged edges of the meniscus. She walked with a light, polished hickory cane that my father had carved from a sapling on the Amelia farm fifty years ago, its handle worn smooth by his palm and now by hers.
Beside her sat Eleanor Gable, wearing a clean summer dress of blue seersucker, buttering a hot biscuit with the steady, rhythmic efficiency of a woman who had never wasted a motion in her life.
"The corn is sweet this year, Helen," Mrs. Gable said, passing the bowl across the walnut grain.
"It’s the lime we put down in the autumn, Eleanor," my mother replied, her voice firm, clear, and resonant with the quiet strength that had survived sixty-nine years of farming and twenty-four months of neglect. "Thomas always said you can't get sugar out of ground that hasn't had the sourness worked out of it."
I sat across from them, my field laptop closed and resting on the sideboard, my phone turned to silent.
The Kodiak project was finished.
The sixty-thousand-square-foot cold storage terminal at the edge of the Shelikof Strait was operational, its eight screw compressors humming at ninety-eight percent efficiency, holding twelve million pounds of wild salmon at twenty-two degrees below zero while the Pacific gales hammered against the insulated panels.
My performance bonus—a wire transfer of eighty-four thousand dollars—had cleared the Richmond National Bank on Friday morning.
It hadn't gone to an auction house in Savannah. It hadn't gone to an Audi dealership in Short Pump. It hadn't gone to a country club bar tab.
Fifty thousand had been deposited directly into the endowment account for the Helen Fenwick Rural Nursing Scholarship at Virginia Tech. The remainder sat in the operating account of 414 Monument Avenue, sufficient to pay the property taxes, the maintenance, and Mrs. Gable’s salary for the next four years.
"Audrey," my mother said, looking across the table at me.
"Yes, Mom?"
"The young man from the historical society called yesterday," she said, her milky eyes bright and steady behind her new reading glasses. "He asked if we would consider including the carriage house on the autumn garden tour."
I took a bite of the succotash. The corn was crisp, sweet, tasting of the sun and the rich, dark bottomland of the James.
"What did you tell him, Mom?"
My mother reached out, her gnarled, strong fingers resting flat against the hand-rubbed walnut of the table, feeling the solid, unyielding grain that had survived three generations of storms.
"I told him," she said with a slow, quiet smile that reached all the way to the corners of her eyes, "that the carriage house is private property. And that in this family, we don't open our doors to people who come to look at the furniture."
May you like
Mrs. Gable laughed—a short, sharp, joyful bark that echoed off the high plaster ceilings—and reached for the sweet tea.
Through the open French doors, the warm June breeze moved through the boxwood hedges, carrying the faint, distant whistle of a locomotive crossing the river bridge, moving west toward the mountains on tracks that were straight, true, and bedded deep into the Virginia stone.
