The Cherokee Rose. Tiya Miles
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Sally recalled the script by heart from overhearing the docents. They never really changed it up unless a black person took the tour, in which case they said “servants” instead of “slaves.” She had cleaned the place only a year before the state closed it down. She had been hired back today to get the house ready for auction. Sally was glad for the work, such as it was. Lord knew, Eddie Senior took a paying job only when he had a mind to.
Junior dropped his passy. Sally tucked it into her bag and stuck a clean blue one in his mouth. She dusted ornate mirror frames, wiped down silvered glass, swept the formal stairway and long oak halls. When she finished the foyer, she was parched and thought that Junior must be, too. After climbing the stairs to where he sat rocking contentedly on the landing, she pulled out his bottle of formula. What a good baby.
The rude honk of a horn blared through the open window. Shit, Sally thought. Eddie. She flew into motion, lifting Junior and hooking him to her hip with one arm beneath his padded bottom, grabbing the diaper bag in one hand and the bouncy seat in the other. She jogged down the staircase, jostling the baby and his things while the horn bellowed.
“What the hell took you so long, Sally?” Eddie was mad, his face puffing out and in from his worked-up breathing.
“Sorry, Ed, sorry.” Sally reached inside the open rear window to unlock the door and throw the bouncy chair inside. She eased into the passenger seat and held Junior out to his daddy. “Could you take him for a spell? I need to lock up.”
“Jesus Christ. I thought I told you to be ready when I got here.”
“I won’t be but a minute.”
Sally ran back to the house and opened the double entry doors. She reached for the oval sign that hung on a hook beside the door chime’s soundbox. Exiting, she pulled the doors shut behind her, turned the oblong metal lock, and listened for the click. Hearing it, she twined the ribbon of the sign tightly around the neck of a brass doorknob. Closed, it read. With her back to Eddie Senior, Eddie Junior, and the winding driveway that led into town, she pressed her hand to the heavy wooden door panel. “Bye, now,” she whispered to the house.
“Get a move on, Sally!” Eddie shouted. “This kid of yours is gone and shit his pants.”
Sally turned her back to the red-brick mansion, its eaves and porches, porticoes and columns. As she hustled down the broad front steps, a stiff breeze followed her, carrying with it the meadowy scent of late-summer wildflowers. The wind caught and parted Sally’s short red hair, cooling the nape of her neck.
While Eddie careened the beat-up car around the circular driveway, the breeze kept on blowing, flipping the sign to read, Open.
c
The drive stretched into a frustrating trek, heightened by Cheyenne’s nervous anticipation.
After what felt like two hours, rather than the fifty minutes promised by her GPS, she found herself pulling in front of the Chief Hold House. She eased out of her car and planted her heels in the uneven gravel, taking in the view. Bold, brick, and becoming, the home seemed to greet her like a bridegroom. Cheyenne seized a breath. Magnificent. Even the high heat couldn’t distract her from this architectural belle.
The Department of Natural Resources had arranged for a local broker to show her the house that afternoon, and a middle-aged woman in a blue pencil skirt and white blouse with a Peter Pan collar was standing in the driveway. Light brown hair hung neatly to her shoulders from a center part. She wore silver earrings and sensible shoes. She leaned in the window of a parked black SUV and smiled flirtatiously at the driver, whose face was hidden from Cheyenne. Cheyenne willed the woman to speed it up. She was desperate to get a look inside. There was no chance the photos posted on the realtor’s website did this beauty justice.
Cheyenne undid the silk scarf on her head, shaking loose her dark sheeting of hair. She retied the slip of fabric in a soft knot around her neck and shifted her weight and one hand to her hip. She stood at a polite distance, impatiently biding her time.
“Of course, Mr. Allen,” Cheyenne overheard the woman say.
She caught snatches of conversation interspersed with laughter.
“Pro forma . . . required to show it to anyone who makes a request . . .
“. . . can’t be serious . . .
“. . . gorgeous property, good bones . . .
“. . . want that river view you promised me . . .
“You have a good holiday, now.”
Cheyenne watched as the SUV’s window rolled up to seal out the sunlight and the woman straightened her back and cleared the playful look from her face.
“Miss Cotterell?” The woman held out a hand as Cheyenne closed the distance between them. “I’m Lanie Brevard. We spoke on the telephone.”
“Yes. Nice to meet you, Lanie. If I may, who was that just leaving?” Cheyenne’s voice landed on a nervous high note. Her lips puckered with concern. Someone had scheduled a viewing. Competition.
“Oh, him.” Lanie Brevard’s tone was playful again, as if she were still speaking to the man himself. She cleared her throat. “That was Mr. Allen. Mason Allen. One of the pillars of our town.”
Cheyenne frowned. “He’s interested in the Hold House?”
“Everyone around here is interested in the Hold House, Miss Cotterell. Surely you’ve read about the controversy in the papers. The Hold estate has been an economic boon to this town for centuries. With any luck, we’ll see its fortunes rise again after the auction next week. Let me show you the house.”
She escorted Cheyenne up the wide front steps, dangling a key labeled Hold like a forbidden delicacy. The metal parts of the lock released. The broker turned a knob on one of the twin oak doors that held a sign on a ribbon. Cheyenne stepped into the foyer after her. The house had a stale, closed-in smell despite the scent of cleaning products that betrayed a recent mopping. The air felt cool and still, like a root cellar. Cheyenne crossed her arms, stroking her bare skin in the sudden chill.
The broker watched the motion of Cheyenne’s hands. “Handmade bond brick,” she said. “Keeps the house cooler than a cave. You’re from Atlanta? Did I remember that right?”
“You did.”
“Mr. Allen does business down in the city every once in a while, but most of us prefer to stay here in the mountains. Our town is just right for us, fits like a hammock. Have you been up this way before?”
“Back in elementary school, we toured the Hold House. It was something like a fifth-grade pilgrimage. And I used to go to summer camp on Fort Mountain. Camp Idlewood?”
“Yes,” the broker said. “I’ve heard of it. Idlewood was an African American camp that started as a school for former slaves, wasn’t it?”
“It was a school for fifty years. The camp’s founders bought the lot in the 1920s and repurposed the old Freedmen’s Bureau buildings. African American families from all over the South, and a few from the North, paid a fortune to send their children there every summer.”
“Hmm,” the broker said noncommittally. “I believe the buildings are used for crafts and whatnot now. The state purchased the land to expand Fort Mountain State Park—which, by the way, is just one of the gifts of the Allen family to our county.”
Lanie Brevard broke off her homage to the Allens and turned to the drawing room. Cheyenne followed, pushing back worry as her Giambattista Valli skirt swirled around her knees. This was it. She was here. Inside the arms of the Hold House. She took in the elaborate carvings on the fireplace mantel, the plaster moldings that framed the walls and ceilings, and the hand-blown windows languidly filtering light.
They exited the drawing room, entered the dining room. She scanned the nine-over-nine leaded-glass panes topped with gold-leaf fixtures in the form of phoenixes rising. Dried pine needles and okra pods rested on the window sills. An old-fashioned brick of tea sat on