A crowd stood waiting to greet them at the entrance to the inner garden around the main house. In fact…
“Sort of a village, judging by the numbers,” he said.
“Seems that way sometimes,” Adrienne said. “We New Virginians do go in for big families. It mounts up. Four generations now: two, four, sixteen, thirty-two.”
The Hummer came to a halt and the passengers alighted. Most of the people waved; a line of ten young nahua bowed with their straw hats in their hands; the senior adults came forward to shake hands; large dogs with a good deal of Alsatian and mastiff in their ancestry came leaping around, adding an element of chaotic enthusiasm to the whole proceedings. Particularly as several of them were dedicated crotch sniffers determined to make the tall newcomer’s olfactory acquaintance. Adrienne made introductions:
“This is Vance Henning, my mayordomo, and his wife, Jenine; his sons, Robert, Sam, Eddie… Mitchell Desjardins, crop boss and winemaker…”
The names and handshakes turned into a blur. Christ, there must be thirty people here, not counting the braceros, and the little kids, Tom thought.
The last to be named were a couple of single men and women who cheerfully classified themselves as “corks” who turned their hands to anything; he got the unspoken impression they were temporary, and they were all quite young as well.
“Got the hands we need, Vic,” Adrienne said at last to the mayordomo; he was a lean, weathered-looking man with sun-streaked brown hair going gray. “Twelve—or possibly fourteen.”
He nodded. “Thanks, Miz Rolfe,” he said. “That does relieve my mind. We’d be right pressed for time if we waited any longer.”
Tom recognized his reflexive look upward; it was the glance of a farmer worrying about weather and time.
Who ever got the idea that the countryside has less in the way of anxiety? he wondered. There’s nobody more dependent on things going right, things they can’t control at all.
Henning looked around. “Miz Rolfe will be wantin’ to settle in, everyone,” he said, and the crowd dispersed.
A murmured question to Adrienne revealed that everyone except the nahua and the corks had been born here, and there were half a dozen retirement-age parents as well. When the others had left, a final figure tottered forward—a thickset Indian woman in a Mother Hubbard who looked older than God, with wrinkled brown skin, tattooed lines from lower lip to chin, and sparse silvery hair. She had a stick clasped in one knotted hand to help her hobbling walk; when they came close Tom realized that she wouldn’t have stood over five feet even when her back was straight. The younger woman who helped her forward might have been her granddaughter, if her other three grandparents were Caucasians in that particular woodpile; she had straight raven-black hair and a hint of ruddiness to her complexion. She was also extremely good-looking—in a buxom, full-breasted and wide-hipped way. He suspected that a lot of outdoor work had contained a natural tendency to a brick-outhouse build; she was in her late twenties, possibly a year or two younger than the owner of Seven Oaks.
Adrienne sighed as the crone poured out a torrent of some language that definitely wasn’t English and hugged her around the waist. She patted her on the head and replied in the same tongue—haltingly—and waited patiently. At last the Indian woman dropped into English; she was still speaking earnestly, reaching up to grab Adrienne by the lapel with one hand while the other held her stick.
“‘…but listen to me now,’ Coyote said. ‘I am going away. My grandson doesn’t like it here, so I am going away. I am going away. We are going away.’”
Adrienne nodded. “Yes, good mother, I know. I remember the story. And then he said to his wife, Frog Old Woman: ‘Come on, old lady, gather your beads and your baskets; let’s go.’”
The old woman nodded eagerly, and took up the tale: “Then he spoke again to the human people: ‘When you die, you are to come to my land. Not living people. Dead people only. After four days they are to come to my land, the dead people.’ Then he went away with Frog Old Woman, Hawk Chief, and all his people.”
Over the bent head Adrienne mouthed something silently to the young companion. That one urged the old woman away; the wrinkled apple face was smiling as she hobbled off.
“What was that in aid of?” Tom asked, pulling their luggage out of the Hummer.
“That’s poor old Karkin,” Adrienne said. “Ah… long story. Karkin was a chief’s daughter of the Ohlone tribe around the Gate in ’forty-six. She had a child with Salvo Colletta… that sort of thing happened fairly often back then in the very early years, when there were only a few people here in the Commonwealth and not many families. It went badly, of course, and then all her people died, and… well, Aunt Chloe took her in, and her daughter—she died in childbirth—and granddaughter. That’s the granddaughter, Sandra Margolin. I met Karkin when I was a little girl, and I thought she was a witch. Quite a nice old lady; completely mad, of course.”
“What’s with the story?” he said. “That’s what she was doing, wasn’t she? Repeating some sort of legend?”
“Oh, she’s always going on with these old stories of hers. She used to tell them to me over and over, and I picked up a little of the language; as much because Mother hated me hanging around her as anything. I think Aunt Chloe wrote them all down somewhere.”
Adrienne had turned in fairly early. Without the unspoken invitation, this time, something that left him relieved and disappointed both. The mayordomo had dined with them, and Tom mostly observed the conversation—apart from the upcoming harvest, it centered on thinning the leaves of the grapevines, which was apparently important and delicate, and on the state of the livestock. Neither was something he was very familiar with: Grapes weren’t a North Dakota crop, and few of the Red River farmers kept much in the way of stock anymore; between high land values and long winters, cash crops paid much better.
He felt a little too restless to turn in early himself, his mind battered by a rush of strangeness and things half-familiar and half-alien that were harder yet. Instead he prowled about a bit. The house was just that, a big and quietly sumptuous country house, rather than a palace. He’d been surprised at that, and had gotten a laugh out of Adrienne when he mentioned it.
“Rolfe Manor’s a bit more grand” she’d said. Then, in a sardonic tone: “And Colletta Hall is what San Simeon might have been, if William Randolph Hearst hadn’t been crippled by a limited budget and aesthetic restraint.”
Coming down the stairs to the front hall put a great window to his left—glass and Venetian Gothic stone tracery, looking out on a courtyard garden; the panes had been turned out, letting in night-scent of cool air, greenery and flowers to add to the wax and herbal smell of the house. The hall went up two stories; looking from here to the carved ebony of the front doors in the dimness he saw the subdued lights gleaming off wood floors, and from heavy silk carpets that looked Oriental but weren’t, quite; at least not the Orient he’d grown up with. A long tapestry hanging on one wall was woven of hummingbird feathers, lustrous and shining in greens and blues and crimsons almost metallic; beside it was a paddle-shaped weapon of some tropical wood, edged with bronze wedges in the shape of shark’s teeth. The opposite wall held a portrait of an imperious-looking matron in a black dress with a long string of pearls, evidently the famed Aunt Chloe. A wrought-iron gallery ran along the landing above the front entranceway; each side of the hall had one large arched opening.