Chapter 10 - The Shoreline of Peace
Spring comes to Middle Tennessee with an explosion of dogwood and green river willow.
By May, the lake house at Percy Priest was surrounded by the deep, heavy hum of the natural world. The red clay banks, washed clean by the winter floods, had hardened under the warm sun into a bright, terra-cotta fringe that met the dark blue water of the reservoir.
I sat on the edge of the cedar dock, my feet hanging eight inches above the clean, cool surface of the lake.
Behind me, the house was quiet.
It was not a modern palace of steel and glass designed to impress commercial bankers; it was a long, low house of fieldstone and rough-sawn cedar, built to follow the contour of the limestone bluff.
Inside, the rooms were filled with light, old books, wide plank tables made of fallen white oak, and the steady, quiet rhythm of screens displaying the new architecture I was building—an open-source design library that was already being used by young programmers from Nairobi to Seoul to build tools for their own communities.
Henley walked down the wooden staircase that led from the screened porch to the dock, carrying two stoneware mugs of coffee.
She sat down beside me, her bare heels knocking softly against the cedar pilings.
“Arthur Pym called this morning,” she said, her voice competing only with the lap of the water against the floats and the distant rattle of a kingfisher diving into the cove.
“What did Arthur want?”
“He said the final decree of dismissal was signed by Whitmore without conditions. The seal is permanent. The conservatorship records are officially expunged from the state civil registry. Legally speaking, Brier... it’s like Gordon and Ronin never even filed the paper.”
I took the mug from her hand. The steam rose into the morning air, carrying the rich, bitter scent of roasted chicory.
“It never had anything to do with the paper,” I said.
“I know,” she replied. She looked out across the wide reach of the lake, toward the green islands that dotted the channel toward the dam. A solitary fishing boat was drifting along the tree line, its electric trolling motor leaving a faint, v-shaped wake that dissolved before it reached the dock. “What are you going to do with the firm’s old property on Mill Creek? Arthur said the bankruptcy court is liquidating the parcel next Tuesday.”
I looked at the water.
I could have bought it. I could have bought the eleven acres for forty cents on the dollar, cleared the broken concrete Gordon had left behind, put my name on a sign, and built the very project my father had died trying to fund.
It would have been the standard Southern ending: the vindicated son returning to plant his flag on his father’s ruined battlefield.
“Nothing,” I said.
Henley looked at me, her blue eyes narrowing slightly, then softening into a smile.
“Nothing?”
“Let the county turn it into a park,” I said, feeling the sun settle warm and steady between my shoulder blades. “Or let the weeds take it. I don't care about Gordon’s dirt, Henley. I never did.”
“Then what are we doing today?”
I took a sip of the coffee.
Across the bay, a blue heron lifted off from the shallows, its immense, gray-blue wings beating three times, heavy and slow, before it caught the morning thermal and climbed toward the ridgeline, leaving the water below undisturbed.
“We have twenty-two pull requests on the layout framework to review,” I said. “And the dock needs two new boards on the north side before the summer storms come in.”
“That’s it?” Henley asked, her shoulder bumping against mine. “A billion-dollar interface engine and a hammer?”
“That’s it,” I told her.
I reached out and set the coffee mug down on the cedar wood beside me.
May you like
My hands, resting flat against the weathered grain, were steady. They had been steady in Courtroom 4B when the gavel cracked; they had been steady when the family name was torn from the public record; and they were steady now, here on the water that no Mallerie but me would ever touch.
The wind moved through the leaves of the post oaks above the bank, a soft, rushing sound that carried neither anger nor memory, only the broad, magnificent presence of a life that had finally, completely, become my own.
