Deborah Smith - A Place to Call Home

By Deborah Smith

From Bantam Books

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

SILK AND STONE BLUE WILLOW

MIRACLE

FOLLOW THE SUN

THE BELOVED WOMAN

A PLACE TO CALL HOME
A Bantam Book /August 1997

Grateful acknowledgment is made to StoryPeople for permission to reprint excerpts from
"High Places," in Mostly True: Collected Stories & Drawings, by Brian Andreas.
Copyright 1993 by Brian Andreas. Reprinted by permission of StoryPeople,
216 West Water Street, P.O. Box 64, Decorah, Iowa 52101.

All rights reserved.

Copyright 1997 by Deborah Smith.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Smith, Deborah

A place to call home / Deborah Smith.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-553-10334-2 I. Title.

PS3569-M5177P53 1997 813.54

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

BVG 1098765432

Author's Note

John Power arrived in America from Donegal, Ireland, in 1761, married Rachel Duvall of Greenville District, South Carolina, and together they raised a dozen children. Their adventurous youngest son, James Power, a veteran of the War of 1812, made his home in the wilderness of north Georgia after the 1826 Georgia land lottery opened the Creek Indian territory south of the Chattahoochee River, not far from a tiny pioneer settlement known as Marthasville, which later became known as Terminus, and later still, Atlanta.

James Power was a blacksmith, surveyor, judge, and ferry barge operator who hunted and traded with his Cherokee Indian neighbors across the river. He married an Irish girl, possibly a recent immigrant, whose name and fate are not known. Their only son, Samuel Wesley, was born in 1830 and served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. Four years after General William Tecumseh Sherman commandeered Powers Ferry (prior to the Battle of Atlanta) the first of Samuel Wesley's six children, Samuel Adam, was born.

Samuel Adam Power died in 1908 when his youngest son, William, was still a baby. William married Agnes Nettie Quarles the day after Christmas in 1926. In their wedding photograph they are a handsome young couple, she in a pale, simple dress with her dark hair pulled back by a small barrette, he in a dark suit with a rosebud pinned to the lapel. He sits and she stands beside him with her arm draped gently around his shoulders. His hands, clasped around one updrawn knee, are large and strong, a workingman's hands. He and she are smiling.

Their first daughter in a family of four daughters and four sons is Dora Power Brown, and she is my mother. She grew up playing in the river bottoms James Power farmed more than a hundred years before. When I was a child, my brother, sister, and I spent nearly every Sunday and holiday there, in the company of our grandparents, three aunts, four uncles, and fifteen first cousins.

This book is dedicated to them, for the memories and expectations, shared joys, sorrows, and strengths, and to my husband, Hank, and to my Dad. A family whose heart is as deep as its heritage.

----W. B. YEATS

I planned to be the kind of old Southern lady who talked to her tomato plants and bought sweaters for her cats. I'd just turned thirty, but I was already sizing up where I'd been and where I was headed. So I knew that when I was old I'd be deliberately peculiar. I'd wear bright red lipstick and tell embarrassing true stories about my family, and people would say, "I heard she was always a little funny, if you know what I mean."

They wouldn't understand why, and I didn't intend to tell them. I thought I'd sit in a rocking chair on the porch of some fake-antebellum nursing home for decrepit journalists, get drunk on bourbon and Coca-Cola, and cry over Roan Sullivan. I was only ten the last time I saw him, and he was fifteen, and twenty years had passed since then, but I'd never forgotten him and knew I never would.

"I'd like to believe life turned out well for Roanie," Mama said periodically, and Daddy nodded without meeting her eyes, and they dropped the subject. They felt guilty about the part they'd played in driving Roan away, and they knew I couldn't forgive them for it. He was one of the disappointments between them and me, which was saying a lot, since I'd felt like such a helpless failure when they brought me home from the hospital last spring.

My two oldest brothers, Josh and Brady, didn't speak about Roan at all. They were away at college during most of the Roan Sullivan era in our family. But my two other brothers remembered him each time they came back from a hunting trip with a prize buck. "It can't hold a candle to the one Roan Sullivan shot when we were kids," Evan always said to Hop. "Nope," Hop agreed with a mournful sigh. "That buck was a king." Evan and Hop measured regret in terms of antlers.

As for the rest of the familyDaddy's side, Mama's side, merged halves of a family tree so large and complex and deeply rooted it looked like an overgrown oak to strangersRoan Sullivan was only a fading reflection in the mirror of their biases and regrets and sympathies. How they remembered him depended on how they saw themselves and our world back then, and most of them had turned that painful memory to the wall.

But he and I were a permanent fixture in local history, as vivid and tragic as anything could be in a small Georgia community isolated in the lap of the mountains, where people hoard sad stories as carefully as their great-grandmothers' china. My great-grandmother's glassware and china service, by the way, were packed in a crate in Mama and Daddy's attic. Mama had this wistful little hope that I'd use it someday, that her only girl among five children would magically and belatedly blossom into the kind of woman who set a table with china instead of plastic.

There was hope for that. But what happened to Roan Sullivan and me changed my life and changed my family. Because of him we saw ourselves as we were, made of the kindness and cruelty that bond people together by blood, marriage, and time. I tried to save him and he ended up saving me. He might have been dead for twenty yearsI didn't know thenbut I knew I'd come full circle because of him: I would always wait for him to come back, too.

The hardest memories are the pieces of what might have been.

It started the year I performed as a tap-dancing leprechaun at the St. Patrick's Day carnival and Roanie Sullivan threatened to cut my cousin Carlton's throat with a rusty pocketknife. That was also the year the Beatles broke up and the National Guard killed four students at Kent State, and Josh, who was in Vietnam, wrote home to Brady, who was a senior at Dunderry High, Don't even think about enlisting. There's nothing patriotic about this shit.

But I was only five years old; my world was narrow, deep, self-satisfied, well-off, very Southern, securely bound to the land and to a huge family descended almost entirely from Irish immigrants who had settled in the Georgia mountains over one hundred and thirty years ago. As far as I was concerned, life revolved in simple circles with me at the center.