The Cherokee Rose, page 12
“Did I lose you two? This way, ladies.” Cheyenne raised her voice and gave them a long-suffering look over her shoulder, gesturing like Vanna White as she exited the drawing room. A velvet rope, unhooked from its mooring, hung loose in the hallway. “This is the formal dining room. Beyond it is a butler’s pantry with a modern kitchen nook—microwave, mini-fridge, hot plate—and a three-quarter bath.”
Folds of gold silk drapery flowed around the windows. A portrait of a brooding, dark-haired man dressed in a deep blue vest and red velvet jacket hung above the fireplace. The dining table was lavishly set below a brass chandelier topped with dusty wax candles.
“James Hold?” Jinx asked, facing the oversized portrait that made her feel as though the eyes were sizing her up.
Cheyenne nodded. “The handsome devil. He built this estate from the ground up and ran it until his death in 1816. He got to be the richest man in the Cherokee Nation, and most of upper Georgia too. This plantation sat right at the crossroads, the frontier line where Georgia and Cherokee country met. James was murdered in a nearby tavern—drinking brandy, the story goes.”
“Who killed him?” Jinx said.
“Who indeed?” Cheyenne answered.
Jinx saw Ruth jot a note in her book and then tuck it under her arm.
“That galley kitchen must have been added later,” Ruth said, surveying the layout. “In a house like this, the kitchen would have been outside originally.”
“That’s right,” Cheyenne said. “The kitchen was located out back when the home was built, to protect the house from fire. Then the kitchen structure became the Moravian missionaries’ cabin, where they lived and held worship services. The plantation kitchen was rebuilt in the basement of this building, a practice James Hold would have seen in the Savannah homes he visited on business. The park service added the kitchenette for convenience. They used the original kitchen outside as storage space. I’m planning to have it connected to the main house through a glass breezeway that will frame out the garden and river below the property.”
“I passed that river on the highway,” Ruth said. “More than once. It’s not easy to find this place.”
“You never did have the best sense of direction. But you two popping in is already proving helpful. It’s a trove of market research now and promises to be advanced marketing when your stories come out. I’ll update the signage and include video directions in online listings.” Cheyenne turned toward Jinx. “The Conasauga River—I believe that’s a name from the Cherokee language—was a main thoroughfare in James Hold’s day. He operated a ferry and trading post along its banks. His plantation stretched much farther then. It encompassed most of this township.”
Cheyenne led them through the rear parlor, then exited French doors to wind back into the center hallway.
“This is the home’s only phone.” She gestured to a walnut secretary holding a coal-black telephone that looked as ancient as the house. “You won’t get a cell phone signal or an Internet connection unless you drive down to the gas station at the bottom of the hill. Feel free to use the house phone for local calls.”
Cheyenne glided toward the central staircase, which made a graceful turn at a landing before rising to the second story of the house. There the stairs dovetailed into a wooden archway—a footbridge indoors. The sight was so odd that Jinx half expected the floorboards to shift under her feet, morphing into a mountain stream or the River Styx. She saw that Ruth was not only scribbling notes down, but also taking photos of the walkway with her phone.
“Good eye, Ruth. This bridge is the famous architectural feature of the house,” Cheyenne said. “There’s only one element similar to it in Georgia, according to the tour brochures—the hanging staircase in the Owens-Thomas House in Savannah. But Hold built his much earlier and concentrated his workmen’s attention on the top of the stairs rather than the middle. Obviously, these are the second-floor bedrooms. This one would have been used as a children’s or guest room.” The indicated chamber contained a pencil-post bed swathed in a coverlet of handmade lace, a satin-covered slip chair, and a dark mahogany sleigh bed.
Cheyenne led them across the bridge.
“The master bedroom,” she said, showing them a room aglow with sunlight. “James Hold and his wife would have slept here.”
Jinx stepped inside the room. Behind a floral folding screen, she saw a suitcase lying open. Fluted skirts danced from sateen-lined hangers in an unlatched wooden armoire. A chest of drawers held personal emollients and high-gloss cosmetics. A cashmere wrap was neatly folded across a needlepoint footstool. Cheyenne had wasted no time moving in.
“Does that lead to the attic?” Ruth asked. Hanging back at the threshold, she pointed to a narrow door at the end of the hall, catty-corner to the master bedroom.
“I haven’t ventured up,” Cheyenne said. “It’s bound to be icky, and I don’t have a house cleaner lined up yet.”
“May I?” Ruth cracked the door before Cheyenne could answer. Jinx followed Ruth, leaving Cheyenne with little choice but to bring up the rear of her own grand tour.
The door led into a small closet full of mops with dingy heads, straw brooms, empty spray bottles, and dust cloths. Peering into the darkness over Ruth’s shoulder, Jinx saw steps behind the clutter—steep, narrow, spindly steps with cobwebs at the corners. A dank smell—caused perhaps by a moldy rag or dead mouse—wafted from the top of the stairwell. A row of dusty woven baskets dangled from hooks along one wall of the dark, steep space. The baskets emitted a faint scent of tumbled earth that cut the stifling air of the closet. Jinx watched as Ruth drew closer to the baskets as if pulled by some magnetic force, sinking into the darkness of the narrow recess.
Ruth bent toward one of the baskets, stroking the two-toned weave with her forefinger. Particles of pale dust dotted her fingertip like the powder of a cabbage butterfly wing. “What are these made of?” she asked. She had stopped writing. Her pen was now lodged beneath the stretchy fabric headband near her ear.
“River cane. The place is overrun with it,” Cheyenne answered.
“The weave is so intricate, the cane so thick. It’s hard to imagine someone could work with this material, let alone make something so exquisite out of it,” Ruth said. “My mother had a basket like this when I was growing up. She kept her heirloom flower seeds in it.”
Jinx watched Ruth, filing away the detail that Ruth’s mother was a gardener—or used to be. Ruth spoke of her mother in the past tense. I know, Ruth had begun to say when they were speaking of Jinx’s deceased aunt. Grief. It was at least one of the unstated emotions behind this three-way conversation. Jinx added it to her mental list behind resentment, suspicion, and envy.
“That’s a sifter,” Jinx said gently. “Your mother was sorting with it. Separating the seeds she wanted to grow from debris.” Jinx watched Ruth suck in a breath, swallowing some squall of feeling before it could escape. “Ruth, are you—”
Cheyenne cleared her throat with a studied delicacy. “We’re getting rather off track. The third story is unfinished,” she said. “I was told the museum never made use of it. I’ll have to start from scratch up there, gut the space. It should work well as a family suite. I expect innkeepers can stick kids and their hassled parents anywhere. You didn’t come all this way to write about dingy storage closets. Why don’t I show you the gardens?”
Cheyenne trooped down the maze of halls and stairs, past the rear parlor and toward the back exit. “The servants’ entrance,” she announced.
“Or, in plain language, the entrance enslaved people used as they carried out their forced labor tasks,” Ruth said, her dark eyes distant again. “Blacks were owned as property here. Or do you plan to hide this part of the Hold House history from your future guests?”
“Isn’t hiding from history your department, Ruthie?” Cheyenne said with a frosty look as she opened the door and stepped outside.
TWELVE
Hurt by Cheyenne’s below-the-belt comeback, Ruth tucked her shoulder, elbowed past the other two women, and stepped onto the wide-plank porch. The unkempt land before her spilled into a sea of green where tousled flowers stretched across the crest of the hill. Cheyenne was rambling on to Jennifer Micco about her Native American ancestry and the DNA test results she was expecting. Ruth shut out Cheyenne’s voice and even the response of the Oklahoma columnist who was smart, funny, and had seemed so sensitive to her feelings.
She stood in awe of the garden.
She focused on the swamp sunflowers, snowy asters, salvias, and sedums intertwining with abandon in the untamed yard. Butterfly weed and Indian blanket blazed in vibrant hues. White roses sprang up among the colorful wildflowers, tingeing the stiff hillside breeze with a sweet, old-fashioned perfume. Each bloom—beside a gate, beneath a tree, along a path—was full and brilliant, knowing it would soon burn out with the full onslaught of autumn. Ruth’s trust in this garden was immediate. She felt something as she stood before these plants, sewn from seed generations ago and still growing, still thriving, even though their gardener had long since turned to dust. Ruth breathed in, thinking for the first time in years of the fragrant musk that used to cling to her mother’s ebony skin: lily of the valley mixed with perspiration from long hours spent gardening in their double-lot yard. Ruth sank into the memory of her mother’s scent and stepped off the porch, her tin-can heart creaking open.
She crossed a patch of dirt and waded into the garden. Her feet found a path of gray river stones, winding between a weathered cabin and a row of dilapidated dependency buildings. She stopped when she could go no farther, where the slope took a steep dive to the river. The wildflowers faded into a grove of river cane that crowded out the sunlight, with thin stalks shooting up into a mass of feathery tufts all the way down to the water’s edge. The reeds were as tall as trees and had the likeness of bamboo, lovely and primitive as they swayed, whispering in the wind. It was a wonder this canebrake had not been chopped down like most of the others across the region. It was a wonder the cane here had been allowed to live. Shh, shh, the cane stalks seemed to whisper to her. Shh, shh.
Ruth breathed in the loamy smell of river water flowing at the bottom of the incline. Mud. Fish. Sunlight. A picture of the St. Paul house where she had spent her early childhood flooded her quiet mind. She remembered those long hours in the garden, many hours like one unbroken thread. She remembered her mother looking out from beneath the brim of her rattan hat, smiling at her, smiling at Ruthie, the little girl. Ruthie had always been underfoot, tracing ant trails, mixing mud pies, scouting for rain-soaked worms along the garden’s edge, never knowing how much her mother was teaching her there, or that it would all disappear like a faded sepia photograph. That garden was the laboratory where her mother had developed the natural products of Canebrake Botanicals, her wildly successful body-care company. That garden was also their private haven, their secret place away from the prison-like house.
Gazing at the canebrake that girdled the Hold Plantation, Ruth recognized the likeness. Around the perimeter of their yard, in soil made rich by the Mississippi River, her mother had nursed river cane from her home state of Georgia. She had never taken Ruth to meet their Georgia relatives, had never taken her to see their family’s homeplace, but surely her mother had missed it, loved it, wished she could return to it. Why else had she struggled to grow a little piece of Georgia in her frigid Minnesota yard? Ruth tore her glasses off. The garden blurred before her eyes, the raw pattern of color and light revealing hidden shapes. She returned the glasses to her nose, smudged and wet, and glanced back at the others.
“How much land did the Holds control?” Jennifer was asking Cheyenne where the two stood talking in the shade of the porch.
“A few thousand acres, according to the brochures. This was the working yard, where servants did their outdoor tasks—laundering, soap making, log sawing, corn shucking. I’ll have it landscaped and put in outdoor patio seating. Past the work yard was the flower garden, and then the vegetable and herb gardens. There’s no water view now, but when I have the cane cut back, the vista will be spectacular.”
“And where were the slave quarters?” Jennifer asked, casting her gaze across the grounds.
Ruth wondered if the columnist had posed the question on her behalf. She glanced at her, caught her eye, and knew. The sense of being seen, of having her interest recognized without needing to put herself forward, made Ruth feel even more emotionally off-kilter.
Cheyenne sighed. “The servants’ quarters haven’t survived. In the 1950s, the state had an archaeological survey done. They speculated that there must have been at least twenty workers’ cabins on the grounds to support a force of a hundred people. They were probably located a mile out, near the cornfields and gristmill.”
“Have you thought about reconstructing them?” Jennifer said.
“Ladies. Honestly. People don’t want to pay to think about racism on the weekends. They want to relax. And I want to pamper my guests, not preach to them.” Cheyenne tossed a hand to a hip, switching her slight weight from one wedged heel to the other.
Did Ruth see Jennifer’s expression change at the mention of racism? She wasn’t sure about that, and while she was considering the question, she was startled to see the columnist jump off the porch, maneuvering toward her through the overgrown blooms.
“Can I join you?” Jennifer said. “You seem to know what you’re looking at out here. My aunt had the green thumb, not me.”
But Ruth wouldn’t let herself say “yes” to that question or let on that she had even considered it. She didn’t open up to people, socially or romantically. She never let them close enough to discover the emptiness inside her.
Strands of dark hair had escaped the columnist’s braid and were fluttering around her inquisitive face, which Ruth noticed was the appealing brown color of perfectly toasted marshmallows. Her cargo shorts were wrinkled, her T-shirt curled at the hem. And she was smiling with a warmth that crinkled the corners of her eyes. Jennifer Micco was more than a little interesting. And she was one of the few humans, male or female, apparently unaffected by Cheyenne Cotterell’s charms.
“Suit yourself,” Ruth said, and then, because that sounded abrupt even to her own ear, she kept on talking. “I was just thinking this garden has a theme. Roses are growing everywhere, though they’re hard to spot at first. Rambler roses, tea roses, English roses, even the powder-pink Cinderella roses my mother used to call ‘the babies of the rose family.’ And see those wild Cherokee roses? The ones still in bloom? They grow in places people have occupied but left behind.”
“Like memories,” the columnist said.
Ruth paged open her notebook to write that down. “This is definitely a rose garden. Hidden among the weeds and wildflowers, and it’s been here for years.”
“I didn’t realize you knew so much about gardens.” Cheyenne had finally reached them, carefully navigating on her wedged heels. “Maybe you take after your mother after all. It’s surprising how much a child can pick up so young. Fun fact. I read a Georgia Backroads magazine article over the weekend that had interview snippets with people who worked here years ago. One was a Black woman who said she picked cotton on the place as a girl in the 1940s, back when it was used for sharecropping. She said the Blacks who lived in town then—before the white residents made it an official historic township, increased property values, and drove most of them out—used to call this estate ‘the Cherokee Rose Plantation.’ The name never made it onto any map or brochure.”
“The Cherokee Rose,” the columnist repeated as Ruth opened her notebook and wrote the name down.
“I believe this is the building you’re looking for, Jennifer,” Cheyenne said, stepping along a fieldstone path and indicating the rough cabin behind the main house. “The original kitchen for the home that was refashioned as a missionary station, the one you asked about.” She gestured toward a row of stout batten-board sheds that sat across from the kitchen and formed an enclosure of the rear acreage. “Those were the corncrib, smokehouse, and weaving house.”
“And what about that?” Jennifer pointed past the southeastern edge of the garden, where an oddly shaped shelter crouched among the cane stalks. It was made of mud or clay and crowned by a conical roof. The sun shone hard on its walls and dry thatch top, as if the roof made of reeds could still absorb sunlight, converting the rays into chlorophyll, into energy, into life. Wild sevenbark hydrangea with ivory blooms trailed the perimeter of the spherical house, interspersed with milkweed plants. Golden and orange-winged monarch butterflies fluttered over the plants, giving the scene a fairy-tale glow.
“Another of the Hold House mysteries,” Cheyenne said, one hand slanted upward to protect her face from the sun. “According to the state archaeologist quoted in the brochure, it’s not a structure James Hold would have built. His style was classically European.”
“It’s old,” Jennifer said. “Maybe even eighteenth-century.”
“It could be African-influenced,” Ruth said, thinking that her years of being assigned the ethnic stories at Abode might be paying off, and jotting in her notebook as she spoke. “West African houses were round. Enslaved people here might have remembered how to construct them.”
“Or it could be an early Cherokee winter lodge,” Jennifer said. “They were round houses too.”
“It could be a hybrid form,” Ruth said, wondering if anything else like it existed in the region. She stared at the habitation in the cane. Who had lived there? Had they found a sanctuary in that little earthen house? Or had it been a prison cell? She wanted to go to the structure, to touch its walls, to see what secrets lay inside. Her thoughts flashed to her colleagues in the retro brick loft of the magazine’s offices. They would eat their hearts out to see this place—a classic plantation wreathed by gardens with a wattle-and-daub Indigenous lodge tucked out back. And her heart could be devoured, too, if she let it, by the melancholy beauty of a place that pulled her back in time.
