4
Highway 17, a long stretch of four-lane divided highway, took Ella Elizabeth Majors toward what she’d hoped would be the beginning of something new in her life. She wasn’t looking for magic. She wasn’t looking for love. What she was looking for, at the very least, was a rest stop between where she’d been and where she was heading.
The open map lying on the passenger seat of her modest four-door sedan informed her that the highway dated back to the colonial days when it was called King’s Highway. Redcoats, “Swamp Fox” Frances Marion, slaves and planters had all traveled up and down this roadbed once upon a time.
But it was all new to her. She’d arrived in Charleston a month earlier, and though she’d moved to the south to stay, she was as yet a Yankee tourist—and would be for another twenty years, if the guidebooks she’d read were true.
Ella liked to drive and was accustomed to long journeys alone along highways and winding roads. In her home state of Vermont, she’d driven through deep snow and acres of mud, driven through periods of ecstasy and despair, driven in a glassy-eyed stupor after double shifts in the emergency room. She’d driven in the pinks and yellows of dawn when only the dairy farmers waved from the fields, and she’d driven in the primordial darkness of night on a county road when she saw little but the yellow eyes of raccoons as they scampered across her line of vision.
Yet even her experienced knuckles had whitened on the steering wheel as she crossed over Charleston’s narrow Cooper River Bridge and saw an enormous tanker the size of several football fields ease its way beneath her with seemingly inches to spare. A few minutes and several Hail Marys later, she was over the bridge and following the highway down a long, straight stretch through Mount Pleasant, where shops and strip malls crowded both sides and traffic was slow but polite. As she traveled farther north, the tentacles of the city’s growth thinned. Clusters of stores gave way to a few showy entrances of gated communities, occasional rickety wooden roadside stands where sweet-grass baskets were sold by descendants of slaves, some gas stations and, here and there, small homes barely visible behind foliage.
Less than an hour after leaving the bridge, the road began to curve, the traffic whittled down to a few vehicles and vast tracts of pinewoods bordered both sides of the road. She breathed deeply, more at home in the open space. The flat landscape was different from the cragged, green mountains of Vermont. Here, the blue sky stretched uninterrupted over broad vistas of marsh and, beyond, the glistening blue of water. Above the treetops, the ubiquitous vulture tipped its wings as it circled.
It was hard to believe that only a month earlier she’d packed up her sedan and made the drive from the Green Mountain State to the Lowcountry. In the few weeks since she’d arrived in Charleston, she’d stayed at a hotel and interviewed for several nursing positions. There was a shortage of nurses in the city and hospitals were clamoring to have her.
But the plain truth was, she couldn’t go back to work at a hospital. Not yet. Ella’s heart was bled dry. Her very soul was parched, and her instincts told her to find an oasis quick or she’d wither up forever.
That was when she’d found the ad in the newspaper. It was a small ad, barely catching her notice. Someone needed full-time help caring for a child with diabetes. Some medical knowledge was preferred. That drew her in. But it was the phrase We need someone who cares that made Ella circle the ad and call the number. She wasn’t the type to believe in miracles, but she wasn’t about to deny fate.
So here she was again, with all she owned crammed in the back of her sedan, driving toward a new destination. This time to a rural town called Awendaw, a short ways north of Charleston. When she’d left Vermont, her aunts had told her to have a fine adventure. Choosing to live as a nanny in a private home that she’d never seen certainly qualified as an adventure in her book. She’d thought it best not to write her maiden aunts about her latest decision, however, lest they flutter with worry like two old hens. Truth was, her own heart was jumping in her chest each time she wondered if the child would like her, if the family was friendly and whether or not the house would be clean.
After a dozen or so more miles she began paying attention to the mile markers, then slowed to turn off Highway 17 onto a narrow, gravel-strewn road that seemed to lead to nowhere. She stopped, adjusted her eyeglasses, checked her written directions, then craned her neck as she searched the area. There was no sign or mailbox to indicate where she was.
She gazed warily down the road, then pressed the gas and drove twenty yards farther, her tires crunching in the gravel. She came to a stop before a wide metal gate that crossed the road. And sitting on it, not the least flustered that her car had driven within a foot of the gate, was a plump white rooster that stared haughtily at her over its yellow beak. She chuckled. This just had to be the Coastal Carolina Center for Birds of Prey.
She opened the car door and put out a foot. “Hey there!” she called.
The rooster watched her with dark, shining eyes and without so much as a shake from its bright red wattle.
“Okay, old boy. Have it your way.” She was well acquainted with the stubbornness of roosters, having lived with them for most of her childhood. She drove slowly closer to the gate, sure that at any moment the rooster would fly off, squawking.
It didn’t happen. The bird sat unflinchingly as she walked straight up to the gate and lifted the heavy chain from it. Then it hitched a ride as she swung open the gate and walked it along its arc across the road. After she drove the car through, the whole scene repeated itself as she closed the gate back again. Driving away, she saw the white rooster in her rearview mirror, still sitting, still staring impassively. Ella laughed out loud, liking the bird’s spirit enormously.
Passing the gate and its mysterious guardian, it felt as if she was entering another world. Here, the impersonal highway gave way to a narrow gravel road bordered by a jungle of pines, live oaks and choking clusters of chinaberry. Taking it at a crawl, Ella rolled down the window, letting the cool, moist air permeate the stale cabin of her car. It was January in the Lowcountry, yet she didn’t need more than a fleece jacket. She didn’t even need gloves or a hat. Yet, for the first time since leaving Vermont, she felt a twinge of homesickness. These southern trees had to compete with sand and marsh for bits of scrubby soil to exist and their leaves were paler and scrappier compared to their northern cousins. Still, she was surrounded by the familiar smell of grass, moss, mold and damp earth. Songbirds called in the trees. Her senses came alive, awakening dormant memories under her skin.
She followed the curving road to a clearing in the woods where a few cars were parked. She stopped here and got out to stretch her legs and look around. Beyond a barrier of leafless trees, she caught a glimpse of a pod of small wood structures. Up front and closer, and a bit larger than the others, was a Cape Cod house.
She crossed her arms and studied the white clapboard house nestled snug between two enormous longleaf pines, rather like a scene from a Japanese woodblock print. At first glance, the little house made a welcoming impression with its long, narrow veranda, the low-slung roof above it and a solid base of red brick. The porch pillars stood as straight as a spinster’s back and white smoke curled from a blunt chimney, filling the air with the delicious scent of cedar. But the house was weathered gray in spots and the surrounding yard barely held back the wilderness. On the porch, two handsome twig chairs, iron garden tools, all-weather boots and a wooden barrel filled with scrap wood lent the house that shabby-chic, comfortable feel of a home truly lived in.
It was a man’s house, she thought.
Leaving her bags in the car, she removed her eyeglasses and gathered her long brown hair into a clasp, even as she gathered her courage. If all went well, she thought, smoothing the wrinkles from her long khaki skirt, this little house nestled in these woods would be her home for the next twelve months. She would become intimately involved with the family within those walls, help a child adapt to the lifestyle of a diabetic and, if she was lucky, in