The Bourbon Thief(103)
In the letter the writer said she’d had her ancestry investigated (who did that?) as she’d been looking for the descendants of a woman who’d been enslaved on an ancestor’s hemp farm (white ladies sure had a lot of free time it seemed). It turned out that Paris herself was the last living female descendant in the long line from then until now. Paris didn’t know her father very well, but he sometimes sent cards, sometimes a little money. His mother was dead; she knew that because she’d asked her mother about her grandparents on her father’s side and she hadn’t gotten the answer she wanted.
The letter had been signed “Tamara Shelby.”
When her mother married her longtime boyfriend, a man Paris had never gotten along with, Paris had made plans to leave home as soon as possible. The letter had come to her the day after she’d inquired at school about taking her GED so she could graduate early and get on with her life. Paris wrote back to the woman, Mrs. Tamara Shelby, and had asked for more information. Another letter followed containing the name Veritas and the name Jacob Maddox and the words Red Thread. Paris went straight to the public library, which was also a stone’s throw from the river, which was not an exaggeration at all. She really could throw stones into the river from the library parking lot. She could have jumped in it and swam had she wanted to. Instead, she went inside and got books and newspapers and discovered the letter writer wasn’t crazy. Red Thread had been a real company in town off what was now Fair Oaks Lane. A bourbon distillery known far and wide for its fine bourbon and the red ribbons on the necks of the pricey bottles, the fancy stuff. The man who started the company had once owned Paris’s grandmother’s grandmother. Apparently to Tamara Shelby, who had been born Tamara Maddox, that made Paris her relative.
Well, if she insisted.
When the invitation to come and visit was offered, Paris accepted without asking her mother’s permission first. Her mother was a good woman and Paris was a good girl, but they were good in different ways and living under the same roof wore them both out. She let Paris go, and for the first time in her entire life, Paris left Kentucky.
It was love at first sight when Paris laid eyes on Tamara Maddox Shelby that June day when the car pulled up to the front of the house, a gleaming white farmhouse, newly constructed from the looks of it. Tamara Shelby stood on the porch, a woman in her midthirties at the height of her beauty. It was love at second sight when Paris saw Tamara’s striking husband, whom she at first thought was Italian with his tanned olive skin and thick black wavy hair with enough gray to give him a distinguished air. But when he spoke, it was in English with a Kentucky accent so familiar he could have been her own cousin. Tamara, it turned out, was thirty-three, and Levi, her husband, forty-five. Paris had been a baby the year she and Levi married. Hard to believe a woman of only thirty-three had already been married for sixteen years.
As rich as they were, Paris expected them to be pretentious. Wine snobs. Horse snobs. Money snobs. But they weren’t. They were both from Kentucky and they were kind to her, down-to-earth. She was treated like family by Levi and Tamara, doted upon. She was the child they never had. They loved her. Paris loved them.
At the end of the summer, Paris refused to go home. Tamara and Levi told her she could stay with them, and her mother’s new husband wasn’t too sad to see her go. They taught her everything they knew about horses, about the island, about the park they were turning it into. She learned to ride. She learned the business of running a farm. She learned how to make herself indispensable to these two people she worshipped almost as gods. They had plucked her from her old life living in a decaying two-bedroom house with a mother and stepfather she couldn’t stand to be around a minute more and brought her to paradise. They valued her, Tamara and Levi did. They loved her. And when Tamara learned she was dying of the same disease that had killed her mother, she brought Paris to her bed, wrapped her arms around her shoulders and told her the true story of Red Thread, who she was and who Levi was. The story Paris had told Cooper tonight.
Paris hadn’t taken it nearly as well as Cooper had. She’d run away from home, run back to Kentucky, driving all night in the truck Levi and Tamara had given her, Levi’s old truck he’d paid a fortune to keep running. She made it halfway to Frankfort before turning around and driving back to the island. Levi was waiting for her when she pulled into the drive.
“I’ve made that drive, too, kid,” he’d told her. “And I came back.”
“I don’t know if I can carry it,” she’d said.
“You’ll carry it here or you’ll carry it away, but you have to carry it. At least if you stay, we can help you carry it. I can help you,” he’d said, remembering that the plural would soon become that terrible singular.
After Tamara was gone, gone to wherever gods go after they die, they buried her in a clearing on the island, Levi and Paris and Bowen Berry and a dozen horses standing around her grave. Paris couldn’t leave after that. Her heart was in that island and to leave that farm was to leave herself behind. She stayed and she worked. And she learned.
She went to school down in South Carolina. Went to college, went to graduate school and eventually got her PhD in chemistry. Levi didn’t say a word about it, although she knew he knew what she was planning to do. He had plans of his own, too. When Paris was thirty-four years old, he gave her the shock of her life by asking her to marry him. She’d been horrified at first—this man who’d been a second father to her proposing marriage. But he promised it wasn’t like that. He wanted to ensure that all he had would be hers when he died and that no other Maddox—and she knew by that he meant none of the white members of the Maddox clan—could take it from her.