by Pamela Morsi
“You don’t believe that?” Jesse asked. “I mean, personally you don’t think that Aunt Will is some kind of good witch or voodoo woman or something?”
Piney chuckled. “No. Not me. I’m more of a pragmatic science guy. I believe in cause and effect, at least for most things in the world.”
“But you still seem to like and admire her,” Jesse said. “Even though you don’t believe in her.”
“I believe she’s a very genuine, caring woman who’s always tried to help this whole community—and me specifically,” Piney answered. “I wouldn’t have been able to go to college without her.”
“Aunt Will sent you to college?”
“Sort of. I’d certainly say she played her part,” he answered. “My last year in high school I did a science project based on Ozark folk healing. Aunt Will let me follow her around like an old hound dog for months on end and answered every possible question. My project was good enough to win the Arkansas Science Scholarship. That’s how I got my undergrad.”
“Wow,” Jesse said with a thoughtful whisper. “Interesting. You surprise me.”
“Me?” Piney chuckled.
“You were interested in yarbing. And then you go into the medical field. I would have thought those two were on the opposite ends of the spectrum.”
“Not really,” he answered. “It’s all about health and fighting disease. There are different ways to go after the same thing. Even in medicine when you’ve got something wrong, a surgeon wants to cut it out and an internist wants to dose it up. But they both are trying to get to healing in the way they understand it best.”
“So you’re okay with nontraditional medicine,” she said.
Piney shrugged. “To some degree.” He held his hand out as if to weigh each side. “I want the best for my patients. That’s the bottom line for me. Sometimes a folk remedy they believe in can be better than a medical protocol that they don’t. But I am opposed to particular things that don’t make sense and aren’t helpful,” he said.
“Such as?”
Piney thought for a moment. “We still get evangelist-healers through here that want to talk people out of cancer treatment and into buying prayer cloths. That disgusts me. And there’s an old guy in Mountain Home who says he can cure Down syndrome with diet supplements. I’d be the first one to speak up if one of my patients wanted to start that treatment.”
They had reached the area near the bathtub trough. He ran his hand along the rim, wiping off any mud or dust before offering her a seat. Jesse perched herself on the narrow edge, her legs crossed at the knee, and he sat beside her stretching out his limbs to balance against the ground.
“Aunt Will’s granny cures are not some craziness she thought up overnight. Mostly they are tried and true, or handed down through generations,” he said. “She’s been working with plants and herbs for a lifetime. And that is, after all, where we get a lot of pharmaceuticals in the first place.”
“Still, a lot of the stuff she does isn’t as much herbs as it is superstition,” Jesse pointed out.
“Well, there is that, too,” he agreed. “We’re a religious community. That’s a good thing, but it does make us a little more vulnerable to accepting in things we don’t really understand.”
Jesse shook her head. “Faith in God should be a lot different than faith in salves or poultices.”
“True,” Piney said. “But a lot of this has less to do with faith than with a warped backwoods logic,” he said. “Like, if you steal a pig it brings good luck.”
“I’ve never heard that,” she said.
“You haven’t been here that long,” he answered. “Now you’ll know to keep an eye on your pigs.” He was teasing and she responded with a slight smile. “My thinking on this is,” he continued, “that if your luck has been bad and suddenly you manage to ‘acquire’ a pig that you hadn’t had to raise or feed, you’d feel pretty lucky.”
Jesse laughed. “Yes, I imagine I would.”
“So stealing a pig is lucky.”
“Only if you don’t get caught,” she pointed out.
“That goes without saying,” he agreed. “And a genuine Ozark pig stealer never gets caught. That’s purely against nature.”
She laughed again. He really liked the sound of that.
“Some of the lore that’s passed down exists for the betterment of the society.”
“Oh, yeah, right.”
“Honest!”
“Like what?”
“Well,” he said. “If you think your wife is cheating on you, you’re advised to make a pawpaw conjure.”
“A pawpaw conjure?”
Piney nodded. “You have to secretly find a piece of wood that your wife has touched, fashion it into a peg and then find a pawpaw tree. At the stroke of midnight you hammer it into the main divide of the limbs.”
“And this does what?” Jesse’s tone was skeptical.
“They say it reinforces your marriage,” Piney answered. “Your wife won’t stray again.”
“Really?”
“That’s what they say. And, no, I’m not speaking from personal experience.”
Jesse ignored that confession.
“And this helps the community how?” she asked.
“I’d say it gets a very angry man out of his house and gives him something to do for several hours. Long enough to cool down. It won’t change the behavior of a wife beater, but it can keep a decent guy from doing something that he’d always regret.”
“Yeah, I guess it would do that,” she admitted.
“You have to remember that when these old folkways first came into use, there weren’t lawyers to call, police to the rescue, no counseling, no rehab. The world here was isolated enough that the basic rules of civilization only hung on by a thread. Most people who settled here had the good book and a deck of cards. If you couldn’t find the answers in one, you would have to start looking at the other.”
Jesse nodded slowly. “Imprisoned by your geology,” she said.
Piney wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that, but decided he didn’t want to get into a more serious discussion. He wanted to hear her laugh again.
“Another excellent superstition that encouraged civilization was the poop-in-the-path-piles prohibition.”
“The what?”
“It is widely believed among the people of this mountain that defecating in a footpath will give you hemorrhoids,” Piney told her.
After a moment of shocked silence, he got the exact sound he was looking for.
“Oh, my God, you’ve got to be kidding?”
“Nope,” he told her. “Some of my patients think that’s the only way you could get them and swear to me that they haven’t.”
“Why would a person believe something like that?” she asked.
“Because that’s what their mothers told them and their grandmothers told them. It’s been passed down from parent to child for two hundred years. They’ve heard it all their lives.”
“And why would anyone pass along such a myth?”
Piney grinned at her. “To keep the paths clean.”
11
Steamed-up windows enclosed the occupants of the little blue car parked in the shadows at the highway’s Scenic Overlook. Camryn Broody was straddling her boyfriend’s lap. Her fingers combed through in his hair as she sucked against his mouth. Tree had always said she was an excellent kisser. Of course, she’d had plenty of practice. They’d both had plenty of practice. They’d shared their first kiss in eighth grade. They’d come a long way since then. But Camryn was now convinced that it was not far enough.
Tree was caressing her breasts, his hands atop her sweater. It felt good, but he was maintaining a deliberate distance, a deliberate control. She couldn’t allow that. Momentarily relinquishing the taste of his mouth, she leaned away long enough to pull the slinky knit top over her head and toss it aside. She loved the sexy little micro-bra that she’d managed to sneak into her mother’s shopping cart on their last t
rip to Walmart. She’d wanted Tree to see her in it, but now it was simply more hoops to get through. It would probably take him a half hour to make his way to the single little hook in the back. She didn’t have that much time to waste. She reached behind her, quickly undid it and let it follow the sweater to the floorboards. Beneath her, Tree gasped and she knew she’d made the right move.
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
She’d heard her mother say that often enough. And Camryn had been desperate all evening. In fact, she’d been desperate for weeks.
“Our last year in high school,” her classmate Jadee Swann had commented. “By this time next year, half of us will be long gone.”
Brooke Blakemore piped in her two cents. “And the other half will be stuck here in the sticks forevermore. The question is, which half are each of us going to be counted in?”
Camryn hadn’t really thought that far ahead. Or rather, when she thought that far ahead, the world had always taken on a happy inevitable quality. Someday they’d all graduate from high school. Someday she’d be all grown-up and her mother couldn’t boss her around. And someday she’d be married to Tree and living happily ever after.
Now “someday” had an actual date: June sixth. And Camryn had come face-to-face with the reality that she and the guy she loved were going to be on different sides of the divide.
Tree was moaning and doing his “Oh baby, oh baby” thing. He’d replaced his fingers with his mouth on her breast. It felt good. She liked it and it made her feel like really warm jelly inside. Sometimes, it was even more. Sometimes it was that heart-in-the-throat, bottom-dropping-out-of-the-stomach kind of feeling that she got on a roller coaster. But even then, Camryn was pretty sure that she didn’t like it nearly as much as Tree did. Tree completely lost his mind when he was touching her. He lost his ability to think. Camryn was thinking all the time. And what she was thinking about most was not losing Tree.
“Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby.”
Camryn nipped at his ear and whispered breathily. “I want you. I want you inside me. Please, please come inside.”
“Just touch it. Just touch it,” he said. “Please, baby, just touch it.”
“No, no more touching,” she said. “I want you inside me. It’s what I want.”
“Oh baby, oh baby, we have to wait,” he said. “Just touch it.”
Camryn was sitting directly atop his penis and he was trying to rub it against her. She raised herself away from him and kept her bottom very still. She didn’t completely understand how the orgasm thing worked, what made it go off and what didn’t. But she did have enough experience to know that once it went off, Tree got all content and relaxed. He lost all his desperation for her. She needed him to be desperate. She needed to get him inside her. And tonight might be the best chance they were going to have.
She knew that Tree was most vulnerable to needing her, loving her, when he was sad or disappointed. As soon as the buzzer went off at the basketball game, she realized that he would be both.
She’d rushed her mother out of the gym and toward home.
“Don’t you want to tell Tree ‘good game’?”
“I’ll tell him tomorrow,” Camryn answered. “I’m really tired, Mom, I want to go home and go to bed.”
Less than fifteen minutes later, dressed in her pajamas, she’d kissed her mother good-night and left her sitting in front of the TV.
“I’m getting a glass of milk,” Camryn had announced as she went by the kitchen.
She did get milk. She also grabbed the set of car keys hanging on the hook. They belonged to her cousin, DuJess. Her mom always checked mileage and parked their Jeep under the carport next to the back door. DuJess’s car was in the shadows across the parking lot. It was a small car and Camryn thought she might be able to put it in Neutral and push it far enough away from the house, that her mother wouldn’t notice the engine start up.
Deliberately casual, she made her way up the stairs. Once inside the door, she set the glass of milk on the dresser, walked normally over to her bed and climbed in. The clothes she’d taken off were still there and it only took her a minute to change back into them. She created a pillow lump in the bed, in case her mother peeked inside and then tiptoed to the window. She’d soaped the old casements until they didn’t make so much as a creak as she slid it open. Stepping outside onto the sloping porch roof, she took the extra time to lower the window. Even with the bedroom door shut, the cold night air would have been sure to catch attention.
On hands and knees, she crawled to the corner of the shingles and lay flat on her stomach as she eased her legs off the roof and around the porch post. She climbed down to the ground without so much as a splinter.
Camryn hurried across the empty gravel lot to the little blue car. She unlocked it and put the transmission in Neutral. Pushing it backward out of its parking spot proved more difficult than she’d hoped. She could move it only a few feet before it rolled back into place. Finally, annoyed and worried about time, she got in, turned the ignition and slipped it into gear. She’d have to count on the TV to muffle the sound.
Once she got to the highway, she put the pedal to the metal. She was risking terrible trouble for herself and it would count for nothing if she didn’t get back to the high school on time. The speed limit on the twisty, winding road was forty-five miles per hour. Camryn was doing almost sixty as she rounded curves like a race driver. Even so, she almost didn’t make it. When she pulled into the area in front of the doorway, Tree was standing with his gym bag, about to climb into Colby Plum’s pickup.
With gravel flying, Camryn came to a complete stop next to the truck. Tree glanced over, curious. She rolled down the glass.
“Hey, big guy, I’m going your way.”
He was surprised, but pleased to see her and waved Colby and the other guys off. “Where’d you get the car?” he asked. Bending forward he put his hands on the window frame to look inside.
“I borrowed it from my cousin,” she said. “I knew I’d never get to sleep tonight without a good-night kiss.”
He leaned forward to plant a hasty peck on her lips.
“Is that the best you can do?” she asked.
He grinned. “Everybody can have an off night,” he said, feigning serious consideration. “Natural ability can only take you so far and then it’s excellent coaching that makes the difference.”
“Get in,” she told him. “I’m going to run you through some drills.”
“Now that sounds interesting,” Tree said. “Though we might have to get some biological clarification on who’s the driller and who’s the drill-ee.”
Camryn had giggled as she always did at his semi-naughty suggestions. She knew better than anybody that her boyfriend was all talk. She drove directly to the Scenic Overlook and immediately climbed across the console to straddle his lap.
Now she was half naked, but he was still fully clothed and they weren’t that much closer to actually “doing it” than they’d been a dozen times before.
Tree took his mouth off her breast and began kissing her again, but for her purposes he was headed in the wrong direction.
“Let’s do it,” she told him. “I want to do it.”
“We can’t, baby. We can’t.”
“We can.”
“No, no, baby. We can’t. You are so beautiful. We can’t.”
“It’s okay, I want to.”
“No, baby.”
“Please.”
“No, baby.”
Camryn could feel him dialing it back, regaining control. He’d gone from “oh, baby” to “no, baby.” She was losing her advantage. She couldn’t let that happen. She scooted back enough to get her hands between them and searched for the tab on his zipper.
“We’re doing it,” she stated flatly.
Tree uttered a vivid curse and physically pushed her off of him. He opened the car door and got out.
Camryn was shocked. She was hurt. And she was angry. It wasn’t
the sexual rejection. She knew that he wanted her. It was bigger than that. He was as aware of their senior year as she was. He’d probably get a basketball scholarship, but even if he didn’t, his dad would make sure he got to go to college. Camryn was not going anywhere. And when Tree left, he’d be leaving her behind.
Through bitter tears, she felt along the floorboard for her clothes. At that moment she almost hated him. He’d humiliated her. Cast her off as if she were nothing to him. He’d do the same thing when he left the mountain. He’d dump her and never look back. A desperate painful sob escaped her. She couldn’t let that happen. She’d have to apologize. And blame it all on her love for him.
As soon as she got her sweater on, she climbed out of the car to face him. She’d plead nymphomania if she had to, but she’d make sure that he’d forgive her.
She didn’t immediately see him.
“Tree?”
She walked around the car. Staring out into the empty darkness. He’d left. He’d left? He’d left her all alone on a deserted highway overlook? Weren’t there a million stories of teenage girls being dragged into the woods and killed by crazy psycho slashers? Freddy Krueger was probably right now watching her from behind the nearest stand of timber.
Immediately she got back into the little blue car and locked the doors.
“He must really not care about you,” she said to herself aloud.
Gratefully the ignition turned over just fine. She put the car in gear and headed for the highway.
She drove in the direction of his house, thinking he couldn’t have gotten far. But he had. She was almost a mile down the road when she caught sight of him in the headlights. He was running along the white stripe at the edge of the asphalt. She pulled to a stop beside him, but he kept on running. Leaning across the car, she rolled down the window on the passenger side and called his name.
He ignored her.
She eased the car up alongside him, matching his speed.
“Tree, get in the car,” she said.
“Go home, Cammy,” he answered without a hesitation in his stride or a glance in her direction.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really, really sorry.”
