Chapter 10 - The Horizon of the Vances
We left the mill at nine o'clock in Callum’s old station wagon, the back seat loaded with two ironstone platters of ham, Nadine’s canvas bag, and the black walnut box containing the shears.
The drive to the farm in Little River took forty minutes through the winding gaps of the Blue Ridge, the headlights picking out the white trunks of the sycamores and the gray granite outcrops where the springs trickled into the ditches.
We did not speak about Ren. We did not speak about my mother.
They had become like the weather of the previous Tuesday—a storm that had passed through the county, broken three dead branches off the black walnut tree, and left the ditches running with red clay, but had not altered the bearing of the house or the level of the well.
The farm gate was five miles past the river bridge, hung from two massive locust posts that had been set three feet into the gravel.
Callum stopped the car, got out, and unlocked the chain with the flat brass key. The iron swung back without a sound; Callum had oiled the hinges before he drove to the church that morning.
We pulled up the long lane between the apple trees.
The house was not grand. It was a two-story farmhouse built of chestnut logs in 1890, weatherboarded in the twenties, with a wide tin-roofed porch that faced the south toward the high wall of the mountain. A light was burning on the kitchen table—Nadine had come down between the ceremony and the reception to leave a pot of beef stew on the stove and light the wood range in the hearth.
I got out of the car.
The mountain night was completely silent except for the branch creek running through the laurel hell at the bottom of the orchard. The air was twenty degrees colder than it had been in the valley, crisp with the first frost that was already silvering the blades of the orchard grass.
Callum carried our bags onto the porch.
I stood on the bottom step, looking up at the house.
The faille dress had done its work. The sixteen buttons on the wrists remained fastened; the bateau neckline sat square against my clavicles; the heavy six-panel skirt hung straight and true to the floorboards.
Callum came back to the edge of the porch, leaned down, and held out both hands.
“Come inside, Mrs. Vance,” he said.
I took his hands. The weight of the silk was nothing now; it was simply the skin I wore, the cloth that had survived three generations of mountain women who had faced down bank failures, timber fires, and the small, vicious cuts of people who had no work of their own to do.
I stepped onto the porch.
Inside, the kitchen was warm. The wood range was ticking as the iron cooled, the kettle was singing on the back plate, and on the scrubbed pine table sat a clean stone crock of apple butter with a note written in Nadine’s small, architectural hand:
*The bone crochet hook is in the drawer by the flour bin. Don't pull the fourth button; it needs to be turned to the left before it clears the loop. The breakfast eggs are in the pantry.*
I looked at Callum.
He had already hung his jacket over the back of the settle, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up to the elbows as he reached for the kettle.
I took the black walnut box from my arm, set it on the dry-sink beside the iron pump, and clicked the brass clasp open.
The shears lay in their green billiard felt, heavy, cold, and ready for work.
I walked to the window.
Through the glass, the orchard stretched away into the blue darkness, row after row of Rome Beauties and Stayman Winesaps standing in the grass, their branches heavy with fruit that had survived the hail in June and the drought in August.
May you like
Behind them rose the mountain—not a pretty, decorative hill from a postcard, but a great, dark shoulder of ancient gneiss that had sat there for five hundred million years, indifferent to the wind, indifferent to the frost, indifferent to the small, sharp shears of the women who lived in the valley below.
I reached behind my neck, found the first covered button at the top of the spine, and began to unfasten the dress myself.
