2010
It’s time for me to have a serious talk with my father. I remember the way he’d acted when I first told him I’d met Ellie, the way he blew me off with a wave of his hand as if he hardly knew her name. Now to learn that they had once been a couple? And that letter he sent to Jackson! I still have no idea what to make of that.
I invite him over to dinner for that night, fairly late in the evening so Rainie will go to bed before he leaves and we can talk. When he arrives, he plays with Rainie and her Legos in the great room while I grill hot dogs on my new range and bake French fries in my wall oven. I’ve barely noticed the new top-of-the-line appliances I should be appreciating. Over dinner, he tells me he’s sold most of the furniture he’ll no longer need when he’s in the new condo and he has a firm move-in date a couple of weeks away. He doesn’t seem the least bit sad or nostalgic. He’s ready for a change and probably would have made it months ago if Rainie and I hadn’t landed on his doorstep. I feel sad about losing the safe haven of my childhood home. I loved knowing it was there for us if we ever needed it again, but I’m glad for my father. He already has friends in that condo complex. It’ll be a good change for him.
I can’t focus on his move right now, though. I’m too caught up in thinking about his letter to Jackson. I can’t figure out if I’m angry at him or not. If he had misgivings about Shadow Ridge, why didn’t he share them with me, too, instead of just writing to Jackson? And not telling me about his relationship with Ellie … that just seems weird to me, but who knows? He must have his reasons. I intend to find out what they are.
After dinner, I get Rainie ready for bed and Daddy reads her a story while I straighten the kitchen. Then I pour myself a glass of wine and sit down in the great room, Daddy’s letter to Jackson in my lap.
“Want a glass of wine, Dad?” I ask when he walks into the room. He’s smiling, no doubt from his time with his granddaughter.
“Sure,” he says. “Don’t get up. I’ll get it.”
I hear him in the kitchen as I think about how to begin this conversation. I feel almost like a snoop, having read the letter that was not meant for me. Daddy’s still smiling when he returns to the room with a glass of white wine.
“This house is gorgeous, sweetheart,” he says as he sits down on the other end of the sectional from me. “And Rainie loves her new room, doesn’t she? What do you call that wall color? Fuchsia?”
“She just calls it purple. Her favorite color.”
“It suits her.”
“Dad, I need to talk to you.” I set my wine on the table next to me. His smile disappears.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, but there are a few things bugging me,” I say. “You haven’t been honest with me, and I don’t understand why.”
His frown deepens. “What are you talking about?”
“First of all, I found this letter you wrote to Jackson.” I hold up the letter.
He raises his eyebrows as though he doesn’t quite know what I’m holding in my hand. Then it sinks in. “Oh,” he says. “My trying-to-dissuade-you-two-from-building-here letter.”
“Yes. You said the Hockleys will make sure their house is never demolished even after they’re dead, and—”
“I was exaggerating,” he says. “But I knew that the Hockley house could be an eyesore in this neighborhood for another twenty years. That’s before I learned that Buddy Hockley was so sick, of course.”
“And what were you talking about when you said the woods are haunted?” I have to laugh. My father is so grounded in reality. “Since when do you believe in ghosts?”
He takes a sip of his wine, then looks away from me for a moment. “Well,” he says finally, “I didn’t want you to build here and maybe I was grasping at straws, but I wasn’t lying exactly.” He looks at me. “When we were kids, we all thought this area was haunted. All the kudzu. And the woods … You could hear the strangest noises coming from those woods, and—”
“You still can,” I say.
“Look, honey.” He sets down his glass and leans forward, elbows resting on his knees. “I didn’t want to get into this, so I guess I was beating around the bush in the letter. I’d hoped you and Jackson had some other option and if you were weighing one against the other, maybe I could sway both of you by writing to him. When he decided he wasn’t afraid of the Hockleys’ house and he wasn’t afraid of ghosts, I just let it go and said no more. But there used to be an area back there—” He nods toward the rear of the house. Toward the woods. “—a circular area where there weren’t any trees, and—”
“It’s still there,” I say.
“It is? After all this time?”
“Well, I think so. I mean, there’s like … a clearing. And it’s roughly circular. Nothing much growing in it. It’s kind of weird.” I remember feeling a chill in that circle. I feel another now.
Daddy sits back, clearly a bit stunned that the circle is still there. “Well,” he says finally, “the Klan would meet there.”
“The KKK met in my backyard?”
He nods. “A very long time ago, yes. There was a dirt road back then … Hockley Street itself was a dirt road … but this was more of a skinny, muddy trail, just wide enough for a single vehicle to get down. And it led all the way from the end of Hockley Street through where this house is now and back to that clearing. And it became—”
“When was this? I mean, like, what years?”
“When I was a young man. The sixties. The Klan was active then because of all the civil rights legislation. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, et cetera. The Klan would have big rallies in much bigger venues than your little circle in the woods, but some of the local Klavern held secret meetings there. Here.” He points toward the rear of my house. “At the end of Hockley Street.”
“But Daddy,” I say, still perplexed as to why this would disturb him decades later. “That’s ancient history. Yes, it’s creepy. But someone could find fault with any place we chose to build. Don’t you think?”
He nods. “You’re right, of course. It’s just that I was … so aware of this. I mean, I knew some of those Klansmen.”
“You knew them? Like, as friends?”
“It wasn’t the way you think of the Klan today. Back then, a lot of otherwise upstanding people in town belonged. I guess I felt like, if it was up to me, I wouldn’t want that sort of history in the backyard where my kids were going to play.”
“Well, that’s—” I hunt for a word. “—unsavory, I guess,” I say. “But it’s not like they lynched anybody back there, right?”
He doesn’t answer as quickly as I would have liked. “Right,” he says finally.
“They didn’t, did they?” I ask, thinking of those eerie animal screams I’d hear at night.
“No honey,” he says. “No one was lynched in your backyard.”
“If that’s what you were worried about, why didn’t you just tell us?” I ask. “Let us decide if it bothered us enough that we didn’t want to build here?”
He looks at the ceiling. “In retrospect, that’s what I should have done,” he says.
“That wouldn’t have stopped us.” Actually, I think it might have, but it’s too late now. “But on another note, Daddy, here’s my bigger question.” I kick off my sandals and tuck my legs under me on the sectional. “I practiced yoga with Ellie Hockley today and I learned that you and she were once an item.”
His eyes widen. “She told you that?” he asks.
“Not directly. Her friend came over. Brenda. She told me.”
“Brenda was there?” he asks. “That surprises me. She and Ellie had some sort of falling-out decades ago, after her husband died.”
“Garner,” I say. “Brenda said you were good friends with him and he died in a fall. Sort of like Jackson.”
He lets out his breath as though he’d been holding it in. Sets his wineglass on the side table. “Garner. Yeah,” he says. “We were good friends back then. It was awful. Brenda lost her baby. I tried to comfort her after it happened, but she withdrew from everyone. I almost never see her around town; she became sort of reclusive, I guess.”
“And what was with you and Ellie?”
“What did she say?”
“Ellie said nothing, but Brenda said you were a couple.”
“We were very young. It was all … you know, typical. She was my first serious girlfriend. We started dating my senior year of high school. She was a couple of years behind me. We doubled a lot with Garner and Brenda. We’d go to dances. She loved to dance.” For a moment he looks lost in memory and he nearly smiles, but not quite. “Then we eventually went to different colleges, had different experiences, and drifted apart,” he says. “Garner and I went to ECU in Greenville. Brenda and Ellie went to UNC. Brenda and Garner dropped out to get married. Ellie dropped out and moved to California.”
“Who broke up with whom?” I ask.
He looks away again. I’m not used to my father’s discomfort when he talks to me. “I don’t remember the specifics, it was so long ago.” He lets out a long sigh. I think I’m tiring him. “She got involved with a political group called SCOPE. It was the sixties, you know? Everything was about civil rights back then. She met someone there. Fell in love with him and that was that. I was … hurt.” He gives me an embarrassed smile. “Jealous and angry. We were all very young,” he says again. “That’s when she moved to California. She lost touch with everyone, as far as I know.”
I can easily picture the Ellie I was with today being a radical in her youth. “Were you hippies?” I grin. I doubt it. I’ve seen pictures of my father during his college years. His hair was never much longer than his collar.
“We broke up before the hippies really came along.” He shuts his eyes for a moment. I am tiring him. “You know, honey, it was a long time ago. We were kids. It’s hard for you to imagine what the times were like. Vietnam. Assassinations left and right. Racial problems. A President Obama would have been unthinkable back then. I don’t like to go back there in my memory, and I’m betting Ellie doesn’t like to either.”
I get up. Walk over and lean down to hug him. “I love you,” I say. “And I’m sorry if I brought up bad memories. You don’t have to worry. I’m done badgering you for tonight.”
We talk about Rainie then, always a safe topic. I tell him how disappointed she was about the ugly lake and how she loved the old tree house. We have a second glass of wine and when I walk him to the door and step out on the front porch, he turns to me. The porch light glitters in his thick white hair, but his blue eyes look tired.
“Don’t let Rainie play in those woods, Kayla,” he says, his voice serious. “Not till she’s older. All right? Maybe not even then.”
“Daddy?” I wrinkle my nose at him. “What—”
“Just humor me,” he says, leaning over to kiss my cheek. “I love you, honey. Good night.”
I watch him walk to his car, and although the night is warm, almost hot, I rub my arms as though I’m chilled. I feel a wave of sadness wash over me. I wish Jackson had heeded my father’s letter, no matter how silly or misguided his reasons for writing it. I wish he’d told me about it.
I wish we had found us a different place to build our home.