I found the metal box on the top shelf of my grandmother's closet a month after her funeral, hidden by hats that she had not worn for twenty years and old ladies' orthopedic shoes with black laces.
The influenza that had run rampant through the section of Columbus, Ohio, where we lived, the disease that Gran had refused to give in to until just before it claimed her life, had left me still curiously weak. Other than that—unless the return of the dreams that had troubled me as a child was a result of the illness, of the high fever that had disoriented me, keeping me lost in time and space and unable to differentiate between drams and reality for almost two days—it might never have touched me.
I pushed back feelings of guilt as I went through my grandmother's things; she no longer needed them, and I had never been happy surrounded by the faded remnants of her past.
There was no key to the box, at least none that I could find, and as I knelt on the floor, prying at the lock with a rust-pocked screwdriver, I wondered about the secrets of Grandmother's life that she had found necessary to hide from me. It wasn't her secrets I found, but mine.
Beneath a one-page will leaving anything she might own to me, two small insurance policies, yellowed receipts and tax returns, and long-expired warranties, I found the book I had bought when I was twelve, a moldy old history that I had found in the basement of a used book store and brought home because of a compelling picture it contained.
"Am I related to him?" I had asked my grandmother, hungry for any family, and especially hungry for any tie to the man portrayed, and I showed her the picture of David Richards, a copy of a painting done by the now-famous artist Stephen Ward before the Civil War.
"Richards is a common name, Elizabeth," she told me in the always slightly disapproving tone she used when I questioned her about my parents or when I did something of which she didn't approve. "Don't go borrowing trouble."
The book had disappeared the next day; it just wasn't where I left it when I returned home from school, and Gran denied any knowledge of it. Now, ten years later, I held it in my hands. I rocked back on my heels in front of the closet door in the middle of the jumble of the contents of the box and opened brittle pages, surrendering to the smell of age and history that wafted around me.
I couldn't find the picture at first; I had to search the index. And when I did find it . . . I slumped over the page trying to remember. Had I bought the book because of the name? Or had I recognized him then as I did now? Because the face that smiled at me in recognition was a face as familiar to me as my own. It was the face of the man I now saw nightly—in my dreams. And it was the only face I could recall clearly from those dreams.
I settled onto the floor, clutching the book, before I noticed that the box was not empty. Two other things remained: an age-browned photocopy of a letter from my father to an attorney in Fairview, Oklahoma, and the attorney's return letter to him.
"Am I related to him?" I had asked Gran long ago, and she, knowing that I was, had hidden the truth from me, as she had hidden everything else about my father's family from me, as she had hidden the knowledge that I now knew I had to act upon.
The hill had filled my vision for miles. Shrouded in shadows, it beckoned me onward. The music of Beethoven spilling from the tape deck at a volume loud enough to mute the wind-driven flapping of the car's canvas top seemed a more than fitting accompaniment for the beauty of the view and the ever-growing sense of expectancy I felt.
The cautiously phrased letters from Stanley McCollum, the estate trustee, which had begun arriving after a discreet inquiry from the attorney I hired to handle Gran's tiny estate, lay in a neat bundle on the seat beside me in the well-used little M. G. Midget I bought with the last of Gran's insurance money; bought for three reasons— it was the right size for my less than impressive height, it was cheap, and it fed a sense of adventure I had not realized I had until I tried to persuade myself to buy the sedate, and dull, sedan parked next to it on the lot.
That sense of adventure had grown in the past few weeks; a family connection I had not known of, a home I had not known of, an inheritance I had not known of, and underlying it all, a sense of completion, hurried me through the days and nights until all the details of my past life in Columbus were disposed of and Mr. McCollum was reluctantly convinced that I was who I claimed to be.
I glanced at the directions Mr. McCollum had sent. I had long since decided not to drive into Fairview but to go directly to Richards Spur. Richards Spur. An entire town named for an ancestor of mine. I found the turn from the highway and headed toward it, and the hill.
At the base of the hill I drove through the cluster of shabby stone buildings that was all that remained of Richards Spur. Only the post office, an ugly brick square, protested that the town still lived. I hurried past it, unreasonably disappointed by the remnants of the town and intent on finding the road to the top of the hill, but something tugged at the edges of my memory, urging me to slow, urging me to look.
I silenced the music as I braked my little car to a stop in front of the general store. It was impossibly, vaguely familiar. I could never have seen it before, and yet I knew that I had. The board sidewalk sagged under the weight of years, and the roof rested limply on the remains of cedar posts. An empty padlock hasp hung between the double doors, which bore the remnants of rusted metal signs touting "the pause that refreshes." The store was open; I could no more turn away from it than I could have turned away from the information I had found in my father's letter.
Inside, sawdust shavings slipped beneath my feet, and the slowly revolving fan above a bare light bulb churned the musty air, bringing me scents of old wood and dust and dry rot. As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw an incredibly ancient woman, dwarfed by the age-blackened rocker in which she sat. Two thin white braids hung over her shoulders, trailing past her waist. Her eyes, alert although clouded by years, were fixed on my face, and I felt myself drawn to her, knowing, but not knowing how I knew, that she was to become terribly important to me.
"Eliza." The voice that came from the depths of the rocker was cracked but still bore a ring of authority.
"Elizabeth," I said, walking toward her, "but how—"
I stopped as another woman stepped from the shadows.
"Can I help you?" she asked, wiping her hands on the butcher's apron that covered her shapeless cotton dress and peering at me with a thin, tight smile.
"We don't get many strangers in here," she said, not bothering to hide her curiosity. "I'm Louise Rustin." Then, noticing my interest in the ancient woman, she added reluctantly, "My grandmother, Marie LeFlore."
The names meant nothing to me. "I'm Elizabeth Richards," I said to the second woman, and watched her smile fade an a strange look come into her eyes.
"I—we heard you were coming." She paused. "Where will you be staying?"
I stared at her, puzzled. "At the house. Of course."
Her eyes wavered, and she once again began wiping her hands on her apron. She turned restlessly toward the back of the store. "I've got to get to work," she said abruptly. "If there's anything you need, just call out." As she edged into the shadows, she hesitated. "Fort Smith is only about a half hour's drive from here. Or there's a motel in Fairview . . . if you change your mind." Then she scurried from sight.
"Child." Marie LeFlore's voice once again commanded me.
She kept her unwavering gaze fixed on me as I went to her and knelt by her side. Then she reached out with one skeletal, quivering hand and touched my hair as it lay across my shoulder.
"Soft," she said. "Like a black cloud framing your face. And eyes the deep blue of mountains seen from a distance." She let her hand linger for a moment on my hair before she spoke again.
"Give me your arm."
I held my right arm out to her, but she shook her head, reaching for the left and pushing back my sleeve. Tentatively she traced the narrow pink birthmark on my forearm. When she spoke, she looked straight into my eyes.
"It must be a very old mark." But it was more question than statement.
"I was born with it," I said softly, puzzled by her actions and by a tug of memory, as I reached to touch her cheek.
"No." Her eyes filmed over, and a smile softened her wrinkled mouth. "I've been waiting for you for a long time."
Waiting for me? I wondered. Or waiting for the woman who would claim the house? I pulled slightly away from her.
"It's all right," she said. "One day you'll understand."
Outside, the smell of dust and the sense of dryness persisted. Even my eyes were dry, but there was a throbbing behind them, a dull ache there and somewhere deep within me. Had it been a mistake to come here? A sudden weakness shook me, and I leaned my head on my arm against the porch post as I looked out over the road.
I knew the road, and yet I didn't know it. The potholed asphalt was wrong, so wrong, and as I watched, it dissolved, becoming the hard clay-packed track the potholes had exposed. I heard voices, at first tinny sounds like those on a cheap radio but gradually becoming clearer, and I heard the vibrations of footsteps on the board sidewalk as people ran from buildings that a moment before had been deserted toward the mule-drawn wagon pulled up in a cloud of dust in front of the new porch on which I stood, unnoticed. . . .
The freight wagon finally ceased its jolting, and with stillness the stabbing pain in Eliza's side eased. She heard the Scotsman's voice calling for help and the confusing babble of voices around her.
"My God!" She recognized Wilson's vice close to her. "It's Colonel Richards's lady."
"He'll be up at the house," another voice answered, "if he hasn't already left to go get her."
"I'll catch him," Wilson's voice called, and Eliza heard footsteps running. "There'll be hell to pay if I don't."
Eliza felt the wagon shift as William MacDougal climbed in beside her. The swirling blackness came again, and only his big hand on her small one seemed to be holding her from complete surrender to it.
His slow voice drifted through the fog. "It's been a hard trip, lass, but it's almost over. Just a wee while longer and he'll be with you."
She saw the faces at the foot of the wagon then, and she read in their eyes the questions their closed lips would never ask her. His people. His nation. The nation for which he had fought so hard. Then nation for which he was still fighting.
She became aware of how she must look, aware of her torn clothes only partially hidden by the soiled blanket in which she had lain wrapped through the torturous journey.
"Not like this," she whispered to MacDougal. "Not like a whipped dog crawling home."
"He'll not love you less," MacDougal said softly, "and I dare not move you."
In spite of the pain, Eliza felt a strength she had not thought she had. "Then I'll move myself," she said through clenched teeth as she tried to rise. "I'll not lie here waiting for him like a piece of broken freight."
Another pain stabbed her. Not her side this time, but lower. She caught her lip between her teeth to keep from crying out against it, and only MacDougal's arm slipped behind her shoulders kept her from falling.
"Is there a place?" he asked the group at the foot of the wagon.
A tall woman in calico, a flat black braid hanging over each shoulder, her dark features expressionless, stepped forward.
"In the store. Bring her."
Cradled in MacDougal's arms, the pain constant now, Eliza became acutely aware of her surroundings—the two steps up to the plank porch, the sap still congealing on the cedar posts supporting the roof, the double doors being held open, the chill she felt that only deepened in the dim, cool quiet of the store with its mingled odors of sawdust, tobacco, and fresh pine, and a silent, beautiful girl, no older than three, who stood hugging a stuffed doll dressed in orange calico.
"Clear a table," the woman said.
"No," Eliza was barely able to murmur. "Not lying down. Sitting up. And where I can see him coming."
"But lass . . ."
She heard the noises of the woman pushing and ordering the others from the store and away from the doorway and closing one of the doors.
"He would have been proud of me had he brought me here as his bride," Eliza whispered, "and I will not shame him any more than I already have today."
The woman produced a high-backed rocker and placed it facing the door. Eliza saw MacDougal wince when she gave in to a spasm of pain as he settled her into the cushioning pillows in the chair.
She leaned back into the pillows, closing her eyes and tensing her body against the hurt and the memories that would not release her. David! Her heart cried out for him, for his arms around her, for his love to support her.
Oh, God! She shouldn't have come. Not now. Not until the worst had healed. If her need for him had not been so great, she would have realized this before. What would he do? He must not, could not go after Owen.
A tearing at her, stronger than anything she had yet felt, doubled her over, and this time she couldn't stop her cry from escaping. When the pain passed and she leaned back, bathed in perspiration, she felt the coolness of a damp cloth on her face. Through half-opened eyes, she saw that the woman had brought a cloth and basin, and, with a thoughtfulness that brought tears to Eliza's eyes, a hairbrush. The child stood near her knees, hugging her doll tightly and staring at Eliza with wide eyes.
"He's done what he could," the woman said, nodding toward MacDougal, "but he's a man. Now we'll do what we can before the colonel gets here. Out," she said to MacDougal.
"I stay with the lass," he said, but he moved into the shadows.
Eliza felt a smile trying the corners of her lips. The Scotsman's protectiveness had been unexpected, but oh so welcome. She reached for the hairbrush and as she did, the blanket dropped, exposing her arm and shoulder. Her arm fell limply to her lap. The child came closer, but it was not the bruises or cuts that drew her attention. With one tiny brown hand, she reached out and timidly traced the long, ragged scar that still showed pink against the whiteness of Eliza's arm.
"Does it hurt very much?" she asked.
"Marie, go to your grandmother," the woman said.
"No, please," Eliza begged, caressing the child's face. At the woman's nod, she answered the girl.
"No Marie. It's a very old mark. It doesn't hurt at all."
While the woman tended her, Eliza lay back quietly, fighting the weakness that claimed her and searching the hillside she could see through the one open door. David would come down that hillside, and while her every nerve cried out for him, her mind sought to find a way to spare him, to save him from the temper he kept so closely under control—the temper that could now destroy him and bring disgrace to his people.
She saw dust high on the hill. The cloud of it billowed downward, hidden at times by the trees, and she knew David was coming. She reached mechanically for the hairbrush and saw, without comprehending, that the water in the basin was tinged pink. She tried to lift the brush but could not.
Marie edged closer. "May I brush your hair?" she asked shyly. With a grateful sigh, Eliza surrendered the brush to the child, who in turn thrust her doll into Eliza's lap and started to walk behind her.
"Not there!" Eliza said, remembering the bloody tangle at the back of her head. "Just around my face," she said more softly, "please."
While Eliza's eyes remained fixed on the ever-closer cloud of dust the child, with infinite gentleness, began smoothing matted waves.
"It's soft," Marie said with a touch of wonder in her voice. "It looks like mine, but it isn't. It has curls." She went on with the brushing. "Do you like Red Feather?"
"Red Feather?" Eliza asked numbly, still watching the hillside.
"My doll."
Eliza glanced down at the doll in her lap. A stuffed fabric doll dressed in orange, named Red Feather. Would she ever understand the people of this nation that was so close, yet so far from where she had been raised? "She's beautiful."
Marie stepped back to admire her handiwork and put down the brush. "Not as beautiful as you," she said.
Eliza forced herself to look at the child. "More so," she said softly, "because she is special to you." She surrendered the treasure to Marie but had to ask, "Why is she called Red Feather?"
Marie's dark brown eyes twinkled with mischief. She lifted the orange dress, exposing a small rip in the seam of the doll's leg. With tiny fingers she poked at it until she drew forth a fluff of red down. "Because that's what we used to make her," she said proudly, "from Granny's red hens."
Eliza fought back the laugh she felt rising, knowing what it would cause her and holding her chest against the pain. A child is a child, she thought, regardless of the race. God grant that our child grow strong and healthy and happy. Fear clutched at her, chilling her. God grant that our child be safe.
She touched Marie's cheek once more before looking back toward the door. She could see two riders now, and even though she could not see their faces, she knew that the one in front was David, riding as she had first seen him, as though that troop of Yankee cavalry still pursued him.
The woman saw them, too. She redraped the blanket around Eliza and began gently exploring the wound at the back of her head. At the first touch, Eliza's stifled moan stopped her, and she gathered the bloody cloth and basin and took them from the room.
Eliza clenched and reclenched her hands beneath the blanket and listened to her heart beating loudly in the silence of the store. The figures grew closer. She could see David's hair now, not straight black and coarse as he would have it, but a rich brown and soft to her touch. She could see the golden bronze coloring his face, the finely chiseled features which flaunted before the full-blood Choctaw of his people the fact of his English father's blood, the firm, sharp line of his jaw, now tense and unyielding, and the grim, unsmiling set of his mouth.
The two riders reined in, but only David dismounted. Through the crowd that surrounded him, she could still see him, a head taller than the others. His voice rose above theirs clearly: "Damn it! Why not?"—he who so seldom swore. He turned to the other rider, Wilson, spoke to him briefly, and sent him galloping away. And when he turned to the store, she saw his eyes.
Numbness crept over her as David leaped onto the porch and into the store, slamming the door shut behind him. She sat paralyzed as he crossed the room and stood looking down at her.
The silence was unbearable.
"David," she whispered, "am I so horrible that you can't touch me?"
With a groan, he knelt beside her, gathering her in his arms. She reached for him. Through the pain came the comfort of his nearness, and her pulse quickened with the knowledge that this man loved her. In spite of everything, he loved her.
She surrendered to that love, letting her head rest against his chest as she felt his lips moving over her forehead and his hand caressing her hair.
Too late she remembered the tangled mat at the back of her head. David drew his hand away, looking at it as though it were some repulsive thing. Eliza saw fresh blood and realized the wound must have started bleeding again when the woman tried to clean it.
"Who did this to you?" David demanded in a voice that revealed how tightly he held his anger in control—and how close he was to losing that control.
"Not now, David. Please. Just hold me." A sob caught in her throat. "I need you to hold me."
He did, gathering her to him, and Eliza knew that, had the pain been ten times as great, she would not have cried out. For this it was worth it. It was worth it all.
"And if I had come to you when I promised instead of letting myself be kept at council?" She heard the bitterness in his question.
"You did what you had to do," she said. Thank God he had not been there. She crept closer to him, but as he tightened his arms around her, a spasm she could not hide made him draw away.
The blanket had slipped again, and he folded it back from her, looking for the first time at the marks that covered her, at the truth he had not known. She would have given anything to take the suffering from his eyes, but all she could do was wait passively while he covered her, all but her left arm. He bent his head to her arm and, as in times past, touched his lips to the pink scar.
"Am I never to bring you anything but pain?" he murmured without looking up at her.
She freed her hand and pressed her fingers to his lips, silencing him.
"Love," she said softly, turning his face to hers. She looked deeply into his eyes. "Love and the joy of living. Happiness, and the promise of more happiness to come. That's what you bring to me."
He placed his fingers gently over a bruise on her arm.
"You didn't do that," she said. "You have never hurt me. None of this should be on your conscience."
The woman reentered the room, and as David looked up at her he saw the big Scotsman for the first time. "Who are you?" he demanded, rising to his feet.
"William MacDougal," the man said, moving forward from the shadows.
The woman stepped between them. "He brought your lady, Colonel."
"What do you know about this?" David asked, less sharply.
"Just that she came to the freight yards," MacDougal told him, to all appearances unintimidated by the leashed anger of the man who stood as tall as he, "asking for someone to bring her to you."
Eliza breathed a silent prayer that he not tell the rest—it was not necessary to tell the rest—even though she would forever owe him a debt of gratitude for his intervention.
"My wagon was empty. I brought her. She would not let me stop for a doctor."
"Well, there's a doctor coming now," David said. He turned to the woman. "We'll need a place for a few days, Jane, until she's ready to travel."
Eliza groped for his sleeve. "Home," she whispered. "Take me home."
"May I talk with you, Colonel Richards?" the Scotsman asked, glancing at Eliza. "By the door." She watched the two men walk across the room. They talked in a tone so low she could not hear their words, but David never took his eyes from her. When they walked back to her, he was still looking at her, but he spoke to the woman behind her.
"You'll come, Jane?"
"With the doctor."
David gathered Eliza in his arms. When he started to put her in the bed of the wagon, among the pillows MacDougal had carried out, she protested.
"On the seat with you," she said as firmly as she could. "I want to see our home as we drive up."
David hesitated so long she thought he was going to refuse, but with a look on his face she had not seen before, he nodded. With William MacDougal's help, he lifted her to the wagon and nestled her in his arms.
As the Scotsman drove carefully up the hill, cursing under his breath each rock and hole in the roadway, Eliza could no longer hold back her tears. They welled in her eyes and slid silently down her cheeks.
"Talk to me, David," she whispered, turning her face to his chest. As though sensing she needed the sound of his voice as a lifeline, he began talking, softly, melodically, about the orchard, the herds that were almost back to full number, the house.
"I've planted a magnolia for you at the gate to the terrace," he told her, "and on the terrace, all the roses you love."
Her head sank lower on his chest.
"They don't look like much now," he went on evenly, "but on each side of this road, all the way to the main gate, I've planted young pines. In a few years they'll be . . ."
The blackness swirled around her, more demanding now, and at last, safe in David's arms, she let herself surrender to it.
I lifted my head from the post and looked at the double row of giant pines leading up the hillside. I still felt a throbbing behind my eyes, but my weakness was gone, replaced by the chill of—not fear, but something so close to fear that I couldn't put a name to it.
What had happened? The potholed asphalt stretched in front of deserted buildings in a dying town. I leaned against the dry remains of a cedar post on a sagging porch. I knew those people. David Richards, yes, but more intimately than I could ever have known him from a book. And Eliza. And the others. But I couldn't know them, could I? Were they the ones who moved through my dreams? "Control your imagination, Elizabeth," Gran had said long ago. "Reality is all you need." Why? Why had she said that? I searched my memory for something she had insisted I deny, but all I found was the image of a young girl in a blackberry patch. A dream I had tried to tell Gran about? Or more? And then I remembered: A series of dreams that were more than dreams, memories that were more than memories, so much so that, in the innocence of my childhood, I had felt them to be a part of another life I led—a life as real as the one I shared with my grandmother. That was what Gran insisted I deny, and I, hungry for her love, had done so.
This hadn't been a dream. That much I knew. Had I been there? Because I felt I had been Eliza, feeling her love for David as well as her pain, knowing her thoughts, moving through her actions, and—for the time—I was her, having no knowledge of me.
Impossible. I knew that, too. I felt tears on my cheeks and raised my hand from the post to wipe them away. I looked at the post —old, dry, long ago having given up all of its juices—just as it had been when I first saw it before I walked into the store. "Impossible," I whispered.
Reality. I needed reality. I walked on slightly shaky legs to my car and slid in. My glance fell on the letters in the seat. I had come with only clothing and personal things, as David Richards's will specified, and with only the money Mr. McCollum had sent for the trip. It hadn't seemed so long when I first learned of the other specification in the will. In fact, surprising myself, I had looked upon it as something of a lark, but now the year I had to live in the house, without a job, without any independent income, before inheriting, stretched ominously before me.
Why? Why had he made such a provision in his will? Mr. McCollum didn't know, or, if he did, he hid his knowledge behind a veil of ridicule. And I? Why did I feel that the answer was within me?
I pushed those unwelcomed thoughts from my mind. Grateful for a fresh breeze on my face, I turned my little car away from the town and started toward the hill.
I, too, wanted to see it as I drove up, I realized. As much as Eliza had. I squared my shoulders. Nothing on the hill would hurt me. I sensed the truth of that as I sensed the truth in the words I heard myself repeating. "I have come home."