Burnt Mountain Read online

  Burnt

  Mountain

  A NOVEL

  ANNE

  RIVERS

  SIDDONS

  New York Boston

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  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  For Annie Simmons, Tom Higgins, and Bob McDonald

  Heart friends

  Prologue

  We heard it first on an early morning in June. I thought then that it might have been going on for many mornings, but given what we know about it now, I realize that this must have been one of the first times that it sounded, perhaps the very first. This year, anyway.

  It wafted into our bedroom on a soft green wind, along with the sleepy twitter of songbirds and the heartbreaking sweetness of wild honeysuckle from the woods behind the house. We had had one of Atlanta’s not-infrequent and unadvertised long, cold springs and had only slept with our windows open for the past month.

  We had moved into our house just recently, and the sounds and smells of our new neighborhood were still unfamiliar to us, exotic in their strangeness. But we were learning. The sleep-murdering a.m. roar down the street had become the Suttles’ scowling teenage son starting his motorcycle; the choking miasma that often drifted over the lower end of the street was old Mr. Christian Wells, who had a widely known fear of West Nile virus, spraying his extensive lawn with a virulent pesticide; the shrill shriek that set every dog on Bell’s Ferry Road barking was Isobel Emmett across the street, who had forgotten once again that she had armed the house alarm.

  This morning’s sound was different, though. This was the sound of children, many children, far away. Singing.

  I lay for a moment without opening my eyes, trying to see if the sound tasted of dreams. It didn’t; the singing children seemed to be coming nearer, from somewhere in the west, and their song grew louder. I could almost make it out. It was a raucous shouted noise, somehow a summer song. I felt that. I knew it.

  I turned over and looked at Aengus. He did not move, but his eyes were open. Even in the dimness, they burned the banked-fire blue that I had fallen in love with, the blue of the hot embers of coal. His crow’s wing of black hair fell over one eye. I had fallen in love with that, too. And the straight thick black eyebrows. I even loved the scattering of black freckles across his nose and cheeks. Aengus at the time I met him was as unlike any of the other young men in my small southern town and only slightly larger southern college as a raven to a flock of sparrows. The fact that my mother was appalled by him when I first brought him home from school lit my budding infatuation into a bonfire.

  “Angus,” she had murmured sweetly, looking up at him from under her celebrated inch-long lashes. “Like the cows?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Aengus said agreeably, in the rich lilt that could not have been cultivated in the Deep South or possibly anywhere else in the country.

  Mother lifted her perfectly arched eyebrows and smiled.

  “I don’t believe we know any Anguses, do we, Mother?” she said to my grandmother, who lay reading on the chaise on the screened porch where we had gathered.

  “He has fire in his head,” my grandmother murmured, not looking up from her magazine.

  We believe she’s starting Alzheimer’s, Mother mouthed confidently to Aengus. Don’t mind anything she says.

  Grand gave a disgusted sniff, still not looking up. She was wearing one of the bright silk caftans she had brought home from India, and her vermeil hair was piled on top of her small, elegant head. I thought she looked beautiful.

  “Well, she certainly knows her Yeats.” Aengus grinned. “I spell it that way, too, Mrs. Wentworth. With an A before the e. Nobody uses it like that but my mother, but there it is. Will you come dance with me in Ireland?”

  “I have no idea what either of you is talking about,” my mother said dismissively. “Thayer, go get us some iced tea. The sweet, in the pitcher. There’s mint in the fridge.”

  I got up, but before I left the porch I saw my grandmother lift her head and give Aengus her dazzling full smile. She had been a great beauty; everybody said so. When she smiled like that she still was.

  “I will dance with you anywhere, Mr. O’Neill,” she said, and from that moment on she loved him almost as much as I did, until the day she died.

  Aengus looked over at me now, half-smiling in the dimness.

  “Do you hear that?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “What on earth do you think it is?”

  “The children of Llyr,” he said, stretching luxuriously. “Grieving for the human children they were before the Dagda turned them into swans.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of your damned Irish bog fairy tales,” I said. “Really, what do you think that is?”

  We listened for a moment. The singing children were coming closer. Their song was a real shout now. Its familiarity tickled my tongue.

  “Kids having a good time. They’re obviously going somewhere in a car or something, the way they’re moving closer.”

  Another moment passed, and then I said, “I know what it is! It’s ‘The Cannibal King’! It’s a great kids’ song; we used to sing it endlessly on the bus to camp and coming home….”

  Just then we heard the shushhhh of air brakes and the grinding of big gears changing.

  “It is a bus,” I said. “Where on earth are those kids going this early in the morning on a bus? There aren’t that many kids around here….”

  “Isn’t there a camp or something that all those assholes in Happy Hollow whomped up for their little darlings?” Aengus said peevishly. “God knows there are enough toddling scions and scionesses over there.”

  Our street, Bell’s Ferry Road, ran through the hilly river forest surrounding the Chattahoochee River just to the west of Atlanta. Many of the big old houses had been summer places for well-to-do Atlantans for decades—ours was one of those—and the newer ones were gracefully and conservatively built to blend in. It was a cool ribbon of a street, winding its way down to the bridge that spanned the river.

  On the other side of the bridge there was a gated community of houses so jaw-droppingly expensive and baroquely designed that first-time visitors were often stricken to silence—the few who were invited into the enclave. It was called Riverwood, and it gleamed, as my grandfather used to say, like new money on a bear’s behind and was as impenetrable as Gibraltar. It was a mark of distinction among many people we knew not to know anyone who lived there.

  To get anywhere near the city or the freeway, the Riverwoodies had to drive back east up Bell’s Ferry Road toward town, and it was all I could do to stop Aengus from throwing rocks or squirrel turds at their Jaguars and Land Rovers and chauffeured limos. I don’t know why Riverwood and its denizens riled him so. Aengus had no temper to speak of, and had never seemed to care who lived where.

  But Riverwood maddened him.

  “I think it does have a camp,” I said now. “Up in North Georgia near Burnt Mountain, maybe. It’s private; only their kids can go. This would be the time of year for it to start and that was a bus, and that song…”

  He grinned again.

  ” ‘The Cannibal King’?”

  “Yes. I don’t think there’s a southern kid alive who doesn’t know it.”

  “Sing it.”

  “Oh, Aengus…”

  “Sing it, Thayer. I’ll perish if I can’t hear it.”

  So I sat down on my side of the bed and sang:

  Oh, the Cannibal King with the big nose ring

  Fell in love with a dusky mai-ai-aid,

  And every night in the pale moonlight

  Across the lake he’d wa-a-a-ade.

  He’d hug and kiss his pretty little miss

  In the s
hade of the bamboo tree-ee-eee,

  And every night, in the pale moonlight,

  It sounded like this to mee-eee-eee:

  “Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph-tiddy i-dee-aye…

  Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph! Aye-oomph-tiddy i-dee-aye-aye-ay!”

  “You were supposed to give your arm a big sloppy smack after all the ‘aye-oomphs,’ ” I said. I was smiling slightly; I could feel it on my lips. The hot, dusty cocoon of the yellow bus, and the blue and green young mountains of North Georgia flying by, and the smell of suntan oil and Popsicles, and sweet young voices shrieking at the tops of their lungs. Camp. Going to camp.

  He laughed.

  “I’ll never hear ‘The Cannibal King’ again without thinking of you,” he said.

  I looked over at him, and suddenly, unaccountably, my eyes filmed with tears and my chest and throat constricted, and I saw, not Aengus’s dark, sloe-eyed face but another one: tanned nose peeling, sun-bleached hair hanging over gray-green eyes, chipped front tooth, a slow smile that made my breath stop. Always.

  This is where we should get married, a deep voice said from the other pillow. A top bunk, I remembered…

  I jumped to my feet and went to the window and looked out, not seeing the tender new green or smelling the sweet honey of the sun dappling through the branches onto our lawn. I was stony with pain and surprise. I had buried it all so deep…. It was so long ago….

  Up at the end of the street I heard the bus’s air brakes hiss again and the gears growl as it made the turn onto the road that would take it to the freeway north. A last banner of song floated behind it: “Oh, the Cannibal King with the big nose ring…”

  It did not sound cheeky and summer-day and young now. It sounded somehow menacing. Knowing, in a crawling, terrible way. Wrong.

  I turned and ran across the rug and slipped into bed and buried my face in Aengus’s neck. He pulled me close to him, holding me hard against the long length of him.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “You’re shaking.”

  “Cold,” I whispered. “Just cold.”

  He held me that way for a long time, but I did not get warm again. At least not that day.

  CHAPTER 1

  You don’t know my mother.”

  Once, in my freshman year at Sewanee, I lay in the infirmary shaking with influenza and tried to estimate the number of times I might conceivably have said those words to someone. Within five minutes I realized that even without the burning forehead and the throbbing bones I would have had more luck tallying stars.

  “Why are you still wearing shoes? It’s the middle of June.”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  “Those pigtails are geeky. I wouldn’t wear them if I was dead.”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  “You told Sonny Etheridge you didn’t want to go to the prom with him? Are you out of your mind?”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  “Sewanee? Nobody even knows where that is! Everybody else is going to Georgia. You could be a cheerleader without even trying out.”

  “You don’t know my mother.”

  I stopped there. It was a rhetorical statement, anyway. By that time almost everybody in my world knew my mother. Everyone except, perhaps, me.

  She was the prettiest girl in Lytton. Everybody said so. Even today there are still people who will tell you that there was never a prettier girl in town than Crystal Thayer, and for all I know she still may be. I don’t go back to Lytton now and it has been a long time since I have seen my mother, but by the time I came along it was one of those small-town dogmas that had been repeated so often that it had passed into local mythology, like our toehold on history (“All them rails was twisted into knots by the Yankees; Sherman’s Neckties, they called ‘em”) and the obligatory haunt in our cemetery. (“Nat Turnipseed. Folks have seen him skulkin’ around in that graveyard since he passed, and that’s been eighty, ninety years now. Wring your neck soon as he’d look at you.”)

  And so: “Crystal Thayer is the prettiest girl we ever had in Lytton, and everybody thought we’d up and lose her when she married that schoolteacher from Atlanta. Reckon she kept him on a short rope, though, ‘cause they never left there.”

  They were right. Finch Wentworth never took his pretty bride back to Atlanta with him. Everything that came after turned on that, like a ball bearing.

  My grandfather Thayer was a druggist, a kind, absentminded man who would have run a prosperous small-town drugstore if he had not been so bewildered by his flock of clamoring daughters and so apt to hand out healing potions free of charge to afflicted neighbors who could not pay for them. I don’t remember much about him; he died, still kind and still bewildered, when I was four. But I could remember the smell of the lemon drops he kept in his shirt pocket for my older sister, Lily, and me and feel on my cheek the white stubble of his chin.

  My grandmother Leona I remember not at all. She slid away on the wings of one of her famous vapors before I was born. It was said around town, I heard later, that many of the women thought the sheer grandeur and excessiveness of my mother’s wedding to my father simply sank her.

  “Don’t know what she expected, Crystal marrying one of those highfalutin Atlanta Wentworths,” was a consensus, if not the general one. “Ought to have known she couldn’t just put around some flowers and light a few candles.”

  But in truth it had been my mother, and not the highfalutin Atlanta Wentworths, who had insisted on the spectacle of her marriage to Finch Wentworth III.

  “Half the Piedmont Driving Club was there,” I heard my mother say silkily more than once. That they were there out of a sort of wincing allegiance to their Wentworth friends and not because “that’s the way they do it in Buckhead” never occurred to my mother. My father must have known, but he was oblivious to almost everything but the pretty, rose-gilt creature in his bed and was nearly as absentminded in his own scholarly way as my grandfather Thayer had been in his. If the thought struck my father, he never mentioned it.

  And my mother’s open-armed welcome into the fabled Piedmont Driving Club, to which the baroque wedding was the springboard, never happened.

  That she never thought to blame my grandmother Wentworth for that came to surprise me, for by the time I was old enough to speculate on the motivations of the adults in my family I knew that she blamed Grand for everything else that was awry in her marriage. But her most corrosive disappointment was aimed, always, at my father.

  “We could have moved there,” I heard her say to him over and over. “You know your mother wanted you there with her. Everything in your world is there. All your friends. All your clubs. Your relatives back to Adam. It wasn’t me who wanted to stay in this one-horse town; I told you that over and over. You think I wanted my daughters to grow up where they could marry dry cleaners, or… feed sellers, for God’s sake? There’s not even a Junior League here.”

  “I like Lytton,” my father would say in his mild, slow voice. It was a voice that I loved; many people did. I think it may have been one of the reasons he was such a good history teacher, and later such an effective school administrator. His voice promised, somehow, safety and acceptance.

  “And,” he would go on, “I need to live where my school is. There’s no question of that. How would it look if I taught at Hamilton and lived in Atlanta? It would look like I didn’t think Lytton was good enough.”

  “It isn’t!” I have heard my mother nearly scream, in exasperation. “Your precious mama would tell you that, if you asked her.”

  But in truth my father’s mother had told him just the opposite.

  “Your life is in Lytton with your wife and your work and your children,” she told him, even before he and my mother married. “Believe me when I say this. Crystal is a girl of great strength and purpose, and she would never be able to exercise those qualities effectively in Atlanta. She can at home; it’s her turf. She’s already a princess there. In the long run she would be bitterly
disappointed here. And I believe you and perhaps your children would suffer for that. You have just the temperament to fit perfectly into a small town; it’s not as though you’d never see Atlanta again. You’d be plenty close to keep up with all your friends. And we’ll visit back and forth often.”

  “Mom,” my father said, “she wants a big house. She wants nice things. For some reason she thinks we can’t have them in Lytton….”

  “She shall have them in Lytton,” my grandmother Caroline said to her son, hugging him. “Your father and I are going to give you the grandest house we can in Lytton, and see that it’s fittingly furnished. Wouldn’t she like that?”

  “I’d love it, Ma, but I just don’t know about Crystal….”

  “Crystal cannot live with us on Habersham Road,” his mother said crisply and finally. “Nor, I don’t think, anywhere else in Atlanta.”

  “I just don’t see how I can tell her that,” my father said miserably. “She’s practically packed up already.”

  “Don’t tell her,” Grand said. “Let her find out when we tell her about our wedding present. Surely a lovely furnished house of her own right there at home, where everyone can see how well she’s done, will take her mind off Atlanta.”

  “You don’t really like her, do you?” my father said, and his mother hugged him harder.

  “No, I really don’t, not much,” she said into his soft hair. “But you love her, and I’ll do anything I can to see that she’s happy, so that you will be, too.”

  “Except have her here,” he whispered.

  “Yes. Except that.”

  (All this I learned later, in a talk with my grandmother Wentworth before she died.)

  “So it was you all along, and not Daddy.” I smiled, picking up her thin hand.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “But I really don’t think she suspected; do you?”

  “No. Otherwise she’d have been all over you like a duck on a June bug. You were smart not to let her know.”