Chapter 9 - The Gathering of the Shears
At eight o'clock, the mountain dark came down all at once, cold and smelling of woodsmoke from the chimney.
The guests were dancing on the timber porch, thirty couples moving under the yellow string lights that had been strung from the rafters. The music had shifted to slow waltzes—old mountain tunes that had come across the water from Antrim and Skye two hundred years ago, played with that low, dragging beat that makes people lean their heads together in the shadows.
Callum and I stood by the stone railing overlooking the turbine pool.
I had taken off the veil; it was folded neatly on the mantelpiece in the suite above. But the 1958 gown remained entirely intact, the four-ply faille as crisp and uncreased as it had been when Nadine lifted it from the unbleached canvas bag that morning.
Callum reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small, flat brass key.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The key to the farm gate in Little River,” he said. “Dad signed the deed over to the lawyer on Friday. We own the forty acres on the south side of the creek.”
I looked at the key. It was old, brass, with three square notches cut into the bit—the key to a gate that had been hung when his grandfather was still clearing the bottomland.
“Callum,” I said. “Your mother’s dress.”
“What about it?”
“We’re going to have to clean it. The hem has meadow dust on it. And Mrs. Alakoa’s gown... it’s still hanging in the window up there. Shredded.”
Callum leaned his elbows on the stone rail, his shoulder touching mine through the heavy faille sleeve.
“Mrs. Alakoa called while you were having your hair pinned,” he said.
I turned my head. “You called Charleston?”
“Nadine called her at noon,” Callum said, his voice quiet against the roar of the water below. “She told Mrs. Alakoa what happened. Not the family nonsense—just that the gown had been damaged by an accident with shears while hanging.”
“And?”
“Mrs. Alakoa said she had three yards of the matching silk from the same dye lot in her storage drawers. She told Nadine that if you bring the pieces down to Charleston next month, she’ll use the bodice to make a baptismal robe, and she’ll take the handmade flowers and sew them into a quilt border for our bed.”
I felt a sudden, sharp prickling behind my eyes—the first real tears of the day, hot and clean, rising from a place that had nothing to do with anger.
“She said that?”
“She did,” Callum said. “She also said that anyone who tries to cut four-ply French silk with ordinary tailoring shears is an amateur who doesn't know how to handle a blade.”
He reached down, took my hand, and turned the gold band around my fourth finger.
“Your father is in the driveway,” he said.
I looked through the breezeway toward the gravel turnaround.
Dad’s old blue truck was parked under the hemlocks, the engine idling with that familiar, rhythmic chug that sounded like an old tractor. The tailgate was down, and Dad was standing by the rear wheel, smoking his pipe in the dark.
“I need to see him,” I said.
“Go on,” Callum said. “I’ll get our coats from the hall.”
I walked down the stone steps into the cold air.
The gravel was loud under my pumps, but the heavy faille skirts kept the wind from my legs. The smell of tobacco—Sir Walter Raleigh, the same brand he had smoked since 1974—drifted through the spruce needles.
Dad took the pipe from his mouth as I reached the truck. He looked at the gown in the moonlight, his gray eyes steady beneath his thick, bushy brows.
“They’re at the Holiday Inn in Brevard,” he said.
I stopped three feet away. “Did she scream the whole way down the mountain?”
“Mostly between the gap and the second bridge,” Dad said. “After that, she ran out of breath. Ren’s on the phone with some fellow from Charlotte, trying to get him to drive up and bring her a different suitcase.”
He reached into the truck bed, picked up a flat, heavy wooden box, and held it out to me.
It was made of black walnut, eight inches long, with brass hinges that had been rubbed with oil until they were the color of honey.
“What’s this, Dad?”
“Open it,” he said.
I lifted the brass clasp.
Inside, resting on a bed of green billiard felt that had been cut to fit their contours with a sharp knife, were the German tailoring shears.
They had been cleaned. The blades had been wiped with three-in-one oil, the pivot screw adjusted until there was no play in the joint, and the small nick Ren had put in the tip when she slammed them onto the copper basin had been stoned out on Dad’s hard Arkansas oilstone.
“I bought those in sixty-eight,” Dad said, his voice dropping into that low, flat timber that meant he was speaking of things he would never repeat. “Before you were born. I used them to cut the canvas when I was surveying the parkway line in the Smokies. Your mother took them for her sewing box when we got married, and then she gave them to you because she thought they were too heavy for her hands.”
He looked at the polished carbon steel.
“They’re not for cutting silk, Lyra,” he said. “They’re for cutting heavy canvas and line. A person who uses them on silk doesn't know what they’re holding.”
“Dad,” I whispered.
“You keep them in the truck,” he said, shutting the box with his thumb and pressing it into my hands. “A surveyor needs a good pair of shears in the box. You never know when you’re going to have to clear an old fence line to find the iron pin.”
He leaned down, kissed my cheek—his skin rough as sandstone, smelling of pipe smoke and winter tallow—and then climbed into the cab of the truck.
He pulled the heavy door shut. The glass was rolled down three inches.
“He’s a good boy, that Callum,” Dad said through the gap. “His grandfather was an honest man. He never moved a corner stake in fifty years of farming. That’s more than you can say for most of the people between here and the river.”
May you like
He put the truck into gear, the transmission whining as he backed out of the shadows, and then he was gone down the gravel lane, his red taillights winking through the hemlocks until the dark swallowed them completely.
***
