by Debra Dixon
I should have known I’d win. But I have to give Sue Ora a lot of credit for letting me and the rest of the staff write pretty much what our subscribers want to read, even if it is quaint, local, and very, very personal. We don’t print any national news and very little state news. We barely even mention our own county seat, Bigelow, if we can avoid it. After all, there’s always so much happening right here in Mossy Creek. Who has time to cover the rest of the world? Have to dash now. I’m on the trail of a mysterious night rider who roams our hills on a Harley.
Your inquiring, award-winning reporter
Katie Bell
Who might like to visit New York again, but there’s no place like Mossy Creek.
P.S. What happened to your recipe for scones? I’m getting requests from our readers.
Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope
The Cliffs, Seaward Road
St. Ives, Cornwall TR37PJ
United Kingdom
My dear Katie:
Congratulations! I believe you’d find St. Ives to be quaint enough to win newspaper awards, too! Our little house was considered by my husband’s ancestors to be their regal cottage by the sea. I won’t argue with Stanhope family history, but I have learned that it also housed fishing boats and smugglers. Somehow I can’t see the Stanhopes as fishermen. We could live in London where the Stanhope Investment firm is located, but we prefer to stay here. My husband goes into the city twice a week but conducts the rest of his business by computer. Oh, by the way — I’ve found a connection to one of the original children from the marriage of Isabella Salter and Richard Stanhope in Mossy Creek. It seems their son, Salter Stanhope, immigrated to Australia about 1880 to look for gold. Apparently he didn’t find any because he seems to have kept going.
As for my scone recipe, I’ve written it on the other side of this letter.
By the way, I’m investing in my neighbor’s antique shop, so if you want any real English pieces, let me know.
Vicki
Victoria’s Recipe for English Scones
1 lb. self-rising flour
1 tsp. salt
4 oz. butter
2 oz. sugar
1 cup half and half
Set oven for 450 degrees.
In a mixing bowl, sift flour and salt. Rub in butter until mixture resembles fine bread crumbs. Then add sugar and mix with the half and half until it becomes a soft dough. Turn out on a lightly floured surface and knead quickly. Then roll out to 1/2” thick. Cut into triangular sections.
Place scones on greased baking sheet and brush tops with beaten egg or milk. Bake (this is a hot oven) for 8-10 minutes. Cool on a wire rack. When they are cold, split and serve with preserves and clotted cream.
You probably can’t get authentic clotted cream in Mossy Creek, but you might try making your own with this recipe a friend shared with me.
Clotted Cream
1/2 pt. whipping cream (already whipped)
1 tablespoon sour cream
Mix together thoroughly and spread on top of preserves on the split scone.
Chapter 3
In Mossy Creek, people expect generosity, but they know that sacrifice deserves reward.
Rewards
Chapter 3
Dear Katie Bell:
This past summer I worked really hard, read a lot of books, and learned some important things. I guess you could call ’em blessings. Mainly I learned how great a place Mossy Creek is to grow up. And I learned who I am and where I belong. My full name is John Wesley McCready, and I am nine years old. My mom is the secretary at Mount Gilead Methodist Church, and my dad works at the bank.
While I was out of school this summer, I did some odd jobs around town to earn the money to get my mom a nice birthday present. My mom says Mossy Creek is about the only town left where you can let a kid roam around on his own for the summer and not worry. Still, I had to check in with her at the church and my dad at the bank a few times every day. But other than that, I was pretty much on my own. My grandpa used to take care of me on summer vacations, but he passed away this spring. I sure do miss him.
My odd jobs were easy, but it was harder than usual to stay out of trouble. Everything I did seemed to go wrong.
Before my grandpa died, I used to visit him most days at the Magnolia Manor nursing home. He liked it when I read books to him that he read as a boy, like Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn. Sometimes I would climb up next to Grandpa and we’d pretend that his hospital bed was a raft and we were Huck and Jim going down the Mississippi. Grandpa liked that, but the nurses said I was jumping on the bed and being too “boisterous.” One of them told my mom on me.
I tried to help Grandpa all I could before he died. When he got really sick and they had to feed him through a tube, I helped swab out his mouth with foam rubber swabs, and then I got clean ones and let him suck ice water off of them. The nurses all said I was real brave then. I started to read Harry Potter to Grandpa, but he died before Harry even got to Hogwart’s.
I still visit Grandpa, only now I visit him in the cemetery behind Mt. Gilead Methodist Church. He’s buried beside Grandma in the shade of a willow tree whose branches come all the way to the ground. Our family plot is surrounded by a little concrete wall a couple of feet high. Sometimes I like to pretend that the walled-off plot is the ship in Treasure Island and that I’m Jim Hawkins.
One day the cemetery caretaker called my dad and told him that I was stepping on graves. My dad talked to me that night and told me that was disrespectful. We like to respect the dead here in the South. That’s why people pull their cars to the side of the road when a funeral procession goes by, even if the policemen don’t make them.
My friend Little Ida Walker thinks it’s spooky and gross that I know where my dead body is going to be buried when I die, but I don’t think so at all. I know the exact spot I’ll be put to rest, and I like to lie in the grass there just a few feet from Grandma and Grandpa and watch the clouds go by.
I figure being buried in a place that you love is kind of like being planted like the tomato seedlings I planted for Miss Lorna Bingham back in the early summer. Sort of natural-like. All the McCreadys, and my mom’s family, the Hardys, are buried there in that cemetery, so I won’t be alone. It’s nice to know you have a place to belong, even after you’re dead.
I made a lot of friends among the old people at the nursing home, and so after Grandpa died I went back there to see them and do little chores for them. They tried to pay me, but I figured they needed their money for the snack machine in the lounge.
Anyway, here’s how I got in trouble. When we came back from a vacation down in Florida I brought a box of saltwater taffy to the home and gave some to all my old friends. What I didn’t think about was that almost all of them have false teeth.
The taffy was pulling out their plates right and left before I realized what was happening. They like to have never got the taffy out of their dentures, and one of the nurses got mad at me. But the old people said it was the thought that counted. Old people look funny when they talk without their teeth, and Mr. Jaybird Johnson made some funny faces that scared one of the nurses but made me and him laugh and laugh. Then that mean nurse talked to my mom again and she told me I couldn’t go back to the home until I learned to behave.
Right after I got in trouble at the nursing home, my mom suggested that I help Miss Bingham plant her vegetable and flower gardens. Miss Bingham has diabetes and is in a wheelchair so she can’t do her planting by herself. She can only hoe a little. When Mom suggests something, that means you pretty much have to do it. She said, “I think you need to help an elderly person this summer so that you’ll think twice about aggravating them, like you did at the home.” So because of the taffy trouble, I couldn’t play Little League baseball for Coach Looney. Instead I had to work for Miss Bingham for free.
She can’t hear too good, but that’s probably just as well, because she’s always a lot more interested in talking than listening. She
told me how to plant her tomato seedlings even though I already knew since I helped Grandma and Grandpa plant theirs for as far back as I can remember. She told me to be careful with the roots because without roots the plants couldn’t stand. “Plant ’em deep,” she’d say as I dug the holes. “Water ’em good,” she’d say as I carried water from the spigot at the back steps to the garden in an old bucket.
“People are like plants,” she said one day. “Without roots you have nothing to stand on. Roots help you understand who you are and where you came from. With your roots in good Mossy Creek soil and some careful tending, like these tomato plants, you’ll grow up just fine.”
“I don’t know, Miss Bingham,” I said. “Sometimes I think that I won’t stay in Mossy Creek when I grow up, no matter what the town motto on the sign says. This town is so small, every time I do the littlest thing wrong, somebody calls my mom and rats me out. I’m thinking that a bigger town might be better for me.”
Miss Bingham shook her head. “Let me tell you a story that happened to me when I was a girl. My daddy gave me some beans to plant in several rows he had just plowed in the field. I planted and planted, covering the beans up with a hoe as I went. But directly I got tired of planting beans, so I dumped the rest of them in a ditch and covered them over with dirt and went on to the house.
“But do you know what happened? Later on, those beans sprouted up all in a cluster, and my daddy knew what I did and gave me a whipping with a switch. Now the moral of that story, son, is that you reap what you sow. If you’re a good boy, good things will happen to you. Understand?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I believed her.
Later on in the summer, I went back to Miss Bingham’s to help her string and break beans and shell peas because she has arthritis and can’t do it very well on her own. The lady that stays with her cooked up a pot of beans and peas with fatback, a pone of cornbread with cracklin’s, a squash casserole and some fresh sliced tomatoes. We had a big feast and I ate so much and drank so much buttermilk that I thought I was going to pop.
Miss Bingham said it did her heart good to see a growing boy eat a hearty, home-cooked, home-grown meal at her table again.
Miss Bingham insisted on paying me to do all this work for her, but since she doesn’t have much money, I sneaked the dollars back into her change purse when she fell asleep in her wheelchair. Sometimes when I’m passing by this fall, I see her asleep in her little garden. I usually just adjust her bonnet so she won’t get too much sun and go along my way. She likes her naps.
I read a lot this summer, including all the Harry Potter books, and some adventure books like White Fang and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Like I said before, I think it’s fun to pretend that I’m in those books. Little Ida and Timmy Williams and me sometimes go over to the square and climb up the base of General Hamilton’s statue and pretend that we’re in the crow’s nest of the Pequod looking out for Moby Dick. We play Heidi and Little Women with Little Ida sometimes. Those are girls’ books, but we don’t mind.
On Wednesday mornings this summer, I went to the library and read to the little kids for story time. Sometimes I acted out the stories as I went along, which they really seemed to enjoy. And then I picked out books to read for myself.
I did most of my summer reading at night. In the daytime, I worked. Mrs. Beechum paid me a little to sweep the floor at the bakery every day and take Bob the Chihuahua for a walk so he wouldn’t pee on the customers’ legs when he got nervous, which was pretty much all the time. Since that hawk flew off with him he’s been real nervous, even for a Chihuahua.
It was trying to take care of Bob that got me in trouble again.
Bob has a bad habit of nipping at customers. Folks don’t usually like it when they come in to buy fresh bread and get peed on or bitten into. This summer Mrs. Beechum said, “A Chihuahua with personal issues can just take the joy right out of the bread-buying experience.” I decided to break Bob of his bad habit, and I thought Mrs. Beechum would be grateful, but she wasn’t. In fact, when she saw what I’d done, she told me not to come back in the shop again.
And all I did was bite him back. I figured that a dose of his own medicine might make him straighten up and fly right. No joke intended. One morning Bob seemed to get overly excited by my sweeping — he was trying to chase the broom around — and nipped me on the heel. So I got down on my all fours and bit him. Not hard enough to draw blood or anything. Just hard enough to make a point. I don’t know who was more upset — Bob or Mrs. Beechum. Bob’s eyes, which already looked like they wanted to pop out of his fuzzy head, got even bigger than usual. And so did Mrs. Beechum’s, for that matter.
I like Miss Jayne Reynold’s cat, Emma, better than Bob or even the pet ferret over at Miz Quinlan’s bookstore. Emma likes to rub noses with me, and when I hold her she purrs like a motorboat. This summer Miss Jayne let me bus the tables after the morning rush at her coffee shop and sometimes I gave Emma a little piece of doughnut off people’s plates. For a cat, she really liked doughnuts.
In fact, she decided she liked them so much she jumped up on a table and knocked off a whole tea set.
It only broke a little of Miss Jayne’s china, and she was real nice about me teaching Emma to like doughnuts that much, but one of the customers got doused by a smidge of the coffee I spilled and told my mom. So Mom told me I couldn’t work there anymore.
So I had to work even harder. See, I wanted to make enough money to buy Mom a present.
The present I wanted to get her was a beautiful, genuine ruby necklace that I saw advertised in the back of one of the magazines in Rainey Cecil’s beauty shop. I stopped by Miss Rainey’s a couple of times a day to sweep up the hair, and she’d give me some change out of her tip jar. Then I took the hair and sold it to Smokey Lincoln, the forest ranger, who sprinkled it on the edge of his garden to keep the deer from eating his plants. Forest rangers know stuff like that.
Anyway, this necklace had gold all around it and a real nice chain, and I just knew my mom would love it. So I saved all my odd-job money in a Maxwell House can that I kept under my bed. I wanted it to be a big surprise for her.
* * * *
The day in early August that I finally had enough money for the necklace was a big day. I planned to take the money and the order form to Rainey, who said she would write a check for the necklace and mail the order. That morning, after I got dressed, I took the money out of the coffee can and stuffed it in the pocket of my jeans.
At a little before nine o’clock that morning, my dad dropped off me and Mom at the church as usual and went on to work at the bank. As we were walking toward the door to the church office, we saw a man standing beside an old, beat-up pickup truck parked in front of the church.
I heard my mom sigh as the man came our way. She had told me that poor people passing through town would sometimes stop at the church for handouts. This man wore ripped and dirty overalls and plow shoes and looked like he hadn’t shaved in a few days. He took off his ragged baseball cap and spoke to my mother. “Do you work at the church, Ma’am?”
Mom said that she did.
“I wonder if I could get a little help. I’m on the way to South Carolina with my family. My brother says there’s a job for me there picking peaches, but I’m about to run out of gas and I don’t have the money to buy another tank or to feed my kids another meal.” He raised a skinny arm and pointed toward the church. “Do you think the preacher would help me out?”
Mom chewed her lip. “Mister, I gave the last penny of his discretionary fund to some folks in the same shape as you who came through yesterday.” She got her wallet out of her pocketbook and took out a five dollar bill. I could see that she had no folding money left. “This is all I have. It should be enough to buy a loaf of bread and some peanut butter for your kids, but I can’t help you out with gas. I’m sorry. I would if I could.”
The man took the bill. “Bless you anyway, Ma’am.”
We watched the man wal
k away in the direction of the convenience store, his head down like he was studying the pavement. Mom looked down at me. “Count your blessings every day, son. Count your blessings that you live in a town like Mossy Creek where your neighbors will give you the shirts off their backs and nobody goes hungry.” She tousled my hair. “You run along now.”
The neighbors might give you their shirts, but they also tell on you for every little thing you do. A kid can’t sneeze in this town without some busy body telling his mom or dad. For a second I wanted to run after the man and ask him if he would take me to South Carolina with him, where nobody knew me or my telephone number. Shoot, if I ran away I probably wouldn’t even need a phone number.
My mom went in the church office and I walked over to the man’s pickup. I could see a woman in the passenger seat, probably the man’s wife, with her head propped on her hand, kind of weary like. I walked a little closer. The truck had sideboards, homemade out of lumber. Between two of the boards, I saw four pairs of eyes looking back at me. I walked closer still.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” said the biggest pair of eyes. The smaller ones just stared.
I walked around to the rear of the truck where I could see them pretty clearly between the tailgate and the lowest board. They were sitting on top of a pile of pasteboard boxes and brown paper grocery bags full of clothing, pots, pans, and other house stuff.
“Where y’all headed after South Carolina?” I asked. The oldest and the youngest were girls. The two in the middle, boys. Each was dressed in cutoff jeans shorts and tee shirts. The clothes of the littlest, a redhead with a smudge of dirt across one cheek, looked worst of all. I figured once the clothes got passed down to her, they were pretty much done for.
