Chapter 9 - The Garden at Country Club Road
On the first Saturday of October, the estate on Country Club Road was sold at public auction.
It was not a private society affair. There were no white linen tents, no silver trays of barbecue, and no string quartets playing beneath the cedar pergola.
There was a three-axle diesel flatbed from the county probate court, an auctioneer with an electronic bullhorn standing on the bluestone patio, and two hundred people in work jackets, flannel shirts, and muddy boots standing across the lawn where seventy-five cowards had sipped gin two months ago.
The seventy acres of residential land were subdivided into forty-four parcels: twenty-eight designated for the municipal land trust as an extension of the Reedy River nature preserve, and sixteen five-acre tracts sold directly to local family farmers with agricultural conservation easements that barred commercial development in perpetuity.
The main house—the six-thousand-square-foot neo-colonial mansion with its imported limestone columns, its sweeping curved staircase, and its six fireplaces—was not sold to a developer.
It was sold to the Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System for one dollar.
By nine that morning, a crew from Carolina Demolition was already at work on the rear terrace.
I stood by the edge of the woods, wearing my old field coat, my right hand in my pocket, watching a twenty-ton excavator with a hydraulic breaker attachment move across the bluestone.
The machine's heavy steel tooth rose, positioned itself above the bluestone patio where Daniel had driven my wrist into the firebox, and dropped with the concussive, deafening crack of a thunderbolt.
The polished Pennsylvania bluestone—the stone that had absorbed my sweat, my silence, and my skin—fractured into fifty thousand gray fragments. The hydraulic tooth rose and fell again, chewing the patio into gravel, turning the decorative retaining walls into crushed aggregate, ripping the boxwood roots from the soil like rotting teeth from an old jaw.
Beside me stood Arthur Pendelton, his hands resting on his wooden walking stick, his eyes crinkled against the autumn sun.
"They're starting the renovation on the main house next week, Clara," Arthur said, his voice competing with the roar of the diesel excavator. "A thirty-bed residential transition facility for women and children leaving domestic violence situations. Full medical clinic on the ground floor. Legal aid office in Daniel’s old study."
"And the garden?" I asked.
Arthur pointed toward the lower bank where the overturned grill had once rested among the ruined hydrangeas.
"A community greenhouse," he said. "Three thousand square feet of raised cedar beds. Heated by geothermal lines from the old quarry well. The county agricultural extension is going to run vocational programs there: master gardeners, organic production, commercial propagation."
I looked at the excavator as it scooped up the shattered fragments of the patio, dumping them with a hollow roar into the bed of an industrial dump truck.
The smell of the fire was gone. The smell of the vinegar-molasses glaze was gone. The smell of sixty years of unearned Mercer vanity had been scrubbed from the air, replaced by the clean, sharp tang of freshly turned earth, diesel exhaust, and the sweet, resinous smoke of autumn leaves burning across the river valley.
"You're not keeping a single acre, Clara?" Arthur asked, looking at me sideways.
"I have eighty acres on the Saluda River, Arthur," I said, a small, genuine smile touching my lips. "It has an old timber house built in 1920, three barns that need new tin roofs, and five miles of trout water that doesn't have a single country club gate between the mountain and the sea."
"And the company?"
"We poured the first bridge footings this morning at five," I said. "Three thousand yards of eight-thousand-PSI mix. Core samples tested at four thousand pounds above spec. We’ll have the deck on by Thanksgiving."
I pulled my right hand from my field coat pocket.
The compression glove was gone. The pink, diamond-meshed pattern of the skin graft covered the thenar muscle like a badge of pale, tough leather, slightly raised above the surrounding skin, permanent and indestructible.
I flexed the fingers. They closed into a fist—tight, solid, and without a tremor.
"Arthur," I said.
May you like
"Yes, Clara?"
"Let's go home," I said. "The concrete is curing."
