Chapter 10 - The Color of Morning
The small dining room was lit by the amber glow of a low-hanging brass lamp that had hung over our kitchen table in the old house since I was seven years old.
We ate slowly: fried chicken, biscuits that flaked into four layers when split, green beans cooked with a piece of cured pork until they were tender enough to cut with a fork, and blackberry cobbler made from the wild bushes that grew along the north fence line.
There were no crystal flutes. There were no four-thousand-dollar calla lilies. There were only two thick, white ceramic mugs filled with dark coffee, and the sound of the crickets beginning to sing in the high grass near the river.
After dinner, my mother went into the back bedroom and returned carrying a cardboard box, bound with old twine.
"I found this in the cedar chest when we were moving the linen," she said, setting the box on the oilcloth tablecloth.
I cut the twine with my pocketknife.
Inside, wrapped in layers of yellowed tissue paper, was the blue shantung silk dress.
It had been professionally cleaned, but the red Georgia clay was not a substance that surrendered easily to dry-cleaning solvent. Along the hem, and across the right bodice where she had fallen against the culvert, the silk had taken on a soft, permanent, terracotta stain—a pale, reddish shadow that ran through the blue weave like a vein through marble.
"The dry-cleaner in town said he could bleach it," my mother said, her fingers running gently over the stiff fabric. "He said if he used the industrial acid, he could get the color out, but it might eat through the threads."
"What did you tell him?" I asked.
My mother picked up the dress by the shoulders, holding it up against the warm light of the lamp.
The dress was no longer the symbol of her humiliation. It was no longer the layaway purchase she had made to prove she could sit among people who despised her.
It was an armor.
"I told him to leave it alone," my mother said, her voice clear, steady, and filled with a quiet, magnificent pride that made the small room feel larger than any ballroom in Atlanta. "I told him the dirt was part of the dress now."
She folded it carefully, smoothing the tissue paper over the blue silk, and laid it back into the box.
"We don't hide where we've been, Danny," she whispered, looking at me across the table. "We just make sure we don't go back."
I stood up, walked around the table, and pulled her into my arms.
Outside, the river moved silently through the dark, carrying the waters of the north down toward the sea, indifferent to the cities, the courts, and the small, foolish monuments men built to their own vanity.
May you like
The house on the hill stood firm.
The windows were open to the cool night air. The screens let in the scent of pine, wet stone, and river mud. And for the first time in thirty years, there was not a single door in my life that could not be opened from the inside.
