His side of the family had lived in the mountains for generations. Just how long, no one knew for sure. The story he liked to circulate was that two Stokes brothers crossed the Atlantic as trans- ported felons in the late 1700’s, wrongfully convicted of fraud and sentenced to a prison farm in Virginia. After a year of abuse and suffering, in which the younger, more vulnerable man died, the remaining sibling escaped to Carolina, where his grief at the loss of his beloved brother hardened into a desire to even the score. A spree of theft and violence followed, until finally, worn out from months of drifting, he claimed for himself a lumpy plot of red earth. Time passed. His farm prospered. He married. His sons grew into powerful men. Before long, he saw his grandsons wed the county’s most cunning and beautiful women, bestowing upon his descendants a sense of entitlement that all but ensured their future wealth. Only the bad luck of the Depression, generations later, ended the Stokes’s reign as Dunnwood’s most successful family.
Who would you believe? It was true that his family had been in the mountains for years. You could tell that much from the church cemetery, which had markers with our last name carved into them dating back to 1809. But I doubted we’d ever been a prosperous bunch. Our gravestones weren’t those giant marble blocks emblazoned with poetry and angels. No one paid to have silk flowers adorning them year round. They were just small rough slabs with a name and two dates chiseled into the surface, surrounded by a few scraggly violets poking up through the dirt.
Our father’s parents were buried there. We’d never met them, Nate and I. Our grandfather died of a heart attack when our father was in high school, and our grandmother died from oral cancer just after he returned from Vietnam. What began as a blackish sore on her tongue soon led to monstrous cauliflower growths on her lungs and brain. She never wrote to say she was sick. It wasn’t until he took our mother out to the mountains to meet her that he understood something was terribly wrong. Even then, she denied it: “There isn’t a thing wrong with me that seeing my boy won’t cure.”
When at last she confessed, glaring past him at some unseen foe, she made him promise not to tell anyone. “No one at church, no neighbors. Not even that girl of yours.” As if dying were a flaw, or a weakness. Something to be ashamed of.
After her death, he moved back home. The way he told it, he had no choice. The house and surrounding property were left to him and his two sisters. Aunt Rennie, who by then had married a furniture salesman, wanted nothing to do with the place, while their younger sibling, Baby, had run off to California and reinvented herself as “Babe.” It was she who proposed they sell the plot and divide the profits, an idea Aunt Rennie pounced on with glee. Instead, in the span of a week, our father married our mother, mortgaged the house, and bought out his sisters at a generous price. Together he and she moved to their new home in the mountains, unaware of what lay in store.
Our father had a choice, of course. He could have sold the property, taken the money, stayed in college. It would have been the reasonable thing to do. But he was ruled by a different compass, one that skirted reason every time. Our father loved that scraggy, heartbreaking mountain––it was the only place he’d ever felt at home.
A graduate of Warren Wilson College, Karen Tucker is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant for Emerging Writers. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.