A Place to Call Home Read Free Page B

rutted mountain roads.
    She recalled trips to Atlanta, not because they were grand adventures that included stays at the finest hotels and shopping sprees at Rich’s department store, but because on one horrifying occasion the car broke down on a muddyroad miles from the city; she and Grandpa had to camp in a gully overnight. A moonshiner drunk on his own corn whiskey crept out of the bushes and offered to buy her from Grandpa for two dollars and a jug.
    Somehow Grandmother Elizabeth survived for the sake of four sons and four daughters. She actually thrived because the ladies in the county considered her to be an expert on all matters of fashion and decorum, and after Grandpa Patrick became president of Dunderry Savings and Loan her social dominance was cemented. She won prizes for her needlepoint, she wrote articles on etiquette for the newspaper, and she was in high demand for poetry readings, which she conducted with the drama of a Royal Shakespearean.
    When I was four, Grandpa Patrick had a series of strokes that crippled him. She moved him into a downstairs bedroom at our house and for the next year I watched her care for him tenderly, night and day, her frailty forgotten. After he died she channeled all her fierce, lonely energy toward aggravating Great-Grandma Maloney, who had the bedroom across the hall.
    It was an old feud, birthed in their youth, nurtured in their prime, and still sizzling like banked coals in their old age.
    Great-Gran’s first name was Alice, but she was named after a Confederate general. Alice Stonewall McGinnis Maloney. Her husband, Howard Maloney, died of a heart attack twenty years before I was born. He and Great-Gran had already turned the farm’s management over to their son, my Grandpa Joseph, by then, but Great-Gran still ran the whole operation. By the time Grandpa Joseph retired and Daddy took charge, she still hadn’t mellowed much.
    My brothers and I called her Stonewall behind her back. It suited her aura of command, especially the way she drove a car. She’d learned to drive when there was no traffic and no rules. Center lines didn’t mean a thing to her. At almost ninety years old she might have given up drivingexcept for the fact that her independence nettled Grandmother Elizabeth, who’d quit driving in her late sixties after a hip operation made her right leg stiff.
    Great-Gran’s hair was a thin cap of blue-white spit curls above a thick face enormously wrinkled and weathered. She wore stern-looking brown dresses and thick-heeled flat shoes, was almost six feet tall, and weighed two hundred pounds. She had grown up in the last decade of the previous century on an enormous cattle farm fifty miles north of Dunderry. Her mother was a transplanted Vermont Unitarian who preached and ran the first mountain school for black children; her father was a Confederate veteran who’d lost an arm during the battle of Kennesaw Mountain when he was twelve.
    She met Great-Grandpa Howard at a Sunday social sponsored by the North Georgia Young Ladies’ Academy, where she was a teacher. In yellowed photographs she is a tall, big-boned, unsmiling young woman with masses of dark hair piled in a Gibson Girl bouffant, dressed in one of those tightly corseted, pigeon-postured black dresses with puffed shoulders. An old maid at twenty-six.
    She married him a month later and moved to our land in the Estatoe Valley of Dunderry County to raise children and eyebrows: she wore overalls at home, and she could milk a cow faster than any man; she marched for women’s suffrage at the state capitol years before the female vote had any chance in Washington; and she threw an egg at Great-Grandpa’s cousin, Dr. Arnold Kehoe, when he gave a speech condemning birth control. As the decades passed she worked against prohibition and for civil rights. She also organized most of the women’s clubs in the county.
    She was the empress of all she surveyed, except for Grandmother Elizabeth.
    When Grandmother