Once Upon Forever

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  One hundred and twenty-nine years off in the future, Cluney Summerland rubbed her tired eyes and closed the old journal. How many times had she read that final entry? Would she ever discover what Major Hunter Breckinridge had seen in the moonbow that night? The Civil War soldier’s flourished handwriting was easy to decipher now, but the last paragraph in the diary still baffled her.

  Sitting in a sunny corner of the living room of her apartment in faculty housing on the campus of Whitley College, she rubbed her fingers over the brittle leather that bound the mysterious journal. Hunter Breckinridge and his wife Larissa now seemed as much a part of Cluney’s life as her best friend and co-teacher, B.J. Jackson. She’d been helping B.J. clean out the basement of the school library two months ago when she’d unearthed the major’s chronicle of the Civil War.

  Had it been only two months since her fiancé’s death? The pain made it seem so much longer. She and B.J. had worked late that afternoon at the library. When she’d arrived home, the telegram informing her that Lieutenant Jeff Layton’s plane had crashed during carrier exercises in the Mediterranean Sea had been waiting. Numb with shock—too numb even to cry—Cluney had buried herself that night in Hunter Breckinridge’s diary, sharing his pain because she could not yet face her own.

  War, however, had not been the major’s main topic. He’d given an occasional line or two to some battle or skirmish, but his obsession had been Larissa—his beloved wife, missing in the midst of the conflict.

  Over the weeks, Cluney had become more and more obsessed with the major’s writings, and especially with his final, mysterious entry. She had even launched a campaign to save his former home, Bluefield, which was up for sale and likely to face the wrecker’s ball soon, unless a buyer could be found who was more concerned with preserving history than with building a new shopping mall.

  Putting the diary aside, she opened her window to let in a breath of spring breeze. The very air smelled green and new. Commencement season was here again. The Class of 1992 would graduate in just two weeks.

  “And then what?” she wondered aloud. “Shall I stay or go?”

  For weeks now, she’d been toying with the idea of simply throwing all her belongings in her van and taking off. Her longing to leave this place had grown ever stronger since Jeff’s death. His hitch in the Navy had been almost at its end when the accident happened. After their marriage, they had planned to move to his home state, California. Cluney knew only the mountains and the college. Lately, though, something out there somewhere had been calling to her, urging her to hit the road. And she knew where the highway would lead her. Jeff’s mother lived in San Francisco. She longed to go there and share her own loss with the other woman who had loved him.

  Now that the end of the college year was approaching and her history students were about to graduate and go out into the world, the only things holding her here were the mystery of Hunter Breckinridge and her seemingly futile battle to save Bluefield.

  “But none of that’s really my problem,” she told herself. “And besides, it’s ancient history. I need to get away. I want to see …” She thought for a moment, then her violet-blue eyes misted. “I want to see Jeff’s home.”

  The phone rang, interrupting her thoughts. She reached for it, feeling her usual annoyance at the bothersome instrument.

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “Hey, take it easy! No need to bite my head off, girl.”

  “Oh, B.J., I’m sorry. I was in the middle of something…”

  “You don’t have to tell me. The major’s diary.”

  “Well, yes, that, too, but I was mostly making plans for my trip.”

  B.J. laughed. “Yeah, sure! Where are you going this time? You know you won’t leave this place.”

  “No, I mean it. I’m really going—right after graduation.”

  B.J. brushed her friend’s declaration aside. “Well, before you take off, how about helping me straighten the library for next year’s crop of students?”

  “Oh, sure. No problem. But then I’m off.”

  B.J. chuckled. “Whatever you say, girl. I’ll see you around later.”

  Cluney hung up the phone, but kept staring at it. Why did she feel so odd everytime she had to talk into a telephone? She got the same queer feeling when she worked at her computer. She didn’t understand where her typed words went or how they got from the keyboard to the printer. It made her head swim just to think about it. She didn’t like watching television either. The faces on the screen gave her the eerie feeling that she was being spied upon, her every move being carefully watched. She’d never turn on the small black-and-white set she owned if she was alone in her apartment. Jeff used to laugh at her, but then Jeff had laughed at life in general. She didn’t think he had ever taken anything seriously except his flying and their love for each other.

  Cluney rose quickly from her chair and strode across the small room. She tried not to, but she couldn’t help thinking about Jeff and how their life would have been. His sudden death had done something to her; she would never be herself again. Thinking about him made her feel restless—out of sorts and out of place. A misfit. A lost soul.

  “All the more reason to get away from here,” she told herself.

  She stood for a moment at her window, looking out over the greening mountains. Here and there, she spied bright dots of pink and white—the redbuds and dogwoods just bursting into bloom. She could see Baldy Rock in the distance.

  The old cabin was still there on the mountain, but empty now. She’d removed a few mementos after her parents’ deaths two years ago. Since then, she hadn’t been back. Without her ma and pa the place no longer felt like home. It almost seemed as if she had no home.

  “Maybe that’s why I have to leave,” she mused. “Maybe I think that somewhere out there I’ll find a place where I really belong.”

  Nervous suddenly, she rubbed the old burn scar on her arm. After all these years, it still itched when she got upset. Her ma had explained that she’d been holding a lantern when she fell and her arm had been burned in the accident that took her memory. But in her nightmares, she saw a burning building. What building? Where? She didn’t know.

  Pure impulse moved her suddenly. She hurried into her small, neat bedroom and pulled open the desk drawer. On a piece of old motel stationery, with a leaky ballpoint pen, she quickly scrawled her letter of resignation. With her intentions down on paper, she leaned back and sighed. Later she could type it up on her computer. But the deed was done.

  “No turning back now,” she said. “I’m going to California. I need to be with Jeff’s mother.”

  When Jeff’s plane had crashed, Cluney had felt that her fiancé’s death signaled the end of her world. Now, for the first time in months, she felt the clouds part to let the moon shine through.

  Chapter Five

  The Whitley College Library was quiet—too quiet—on that hot Monday morning, May 18, following the graduation ceremonies of the Class of ‘92. The whole campus was like a ghost town, but the library was more like a morgue. The two women, working side by side, broke the stillness only occasionally, most often when Cluney Summerland sneezed explosively from a combination of book dust, spring allergies, and a cold she’d picked up in the past week.

  B.J. Jackson shoved a box of tissues toward her. “Here—help yourself.” Then as Cluney blew loudly, her friend asked, “Hey, how’d you ever get a name like Clair de Lune anyway?”

  “Didn’t I ever tell you that, B.J.? It was my mama’s favorite piece of music. She used to sit on the front porch on summer evenings and play it on her dulcimer. Seemed like it would flow out over the mountaintop until the birds all hushed to listen.”

  With a cackle and a smart-aleck crack, B.J. quickly erased the pretty picture Cluney had painted. “I’ll bet you’re real glad your ma wasn’t partial to ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’ or ‘Froggy Went A-Courtin’.”

  Both young women laughed, but their humor was forc
ed since they both knew they were spending their final few hours together. They understood how difficult it was going to be to say goodbye when the time came. And that time would come very shortly—as soon as they finished rearranging and dusting the books on the shelves and sorting through the last box of long-stored textbooks from the library basement.

  Eight years they had been best friends—Cluney Summerland and B.J. Jackson—through their undergraduate years at Whitley College, through graduate school, and, finally, as staff members at their alma mater, Cluney in the history department and B.J. as assistant librarian.

  They made an odd pair. Cluney was tall and slender, delicate-looking with her long, silver-blond hair and pale-blue eyes tinged with lavender, the exact shade of a type of Chinese porcelain called “moonglow.” B.J., on the other hand, was smaller and more compact, and as dark as one of the polished stones beneath nearby Cumberland Falls—her ebony hair and eyes only a shade darker than her smooth skin. Their friends kidded them, calling Cluney “Ms. Sunlight” and B.J. “Ms. Shadow.”

  Now the inseparables were about to part. B.J.—a transplant from Tennessee—would stay on as Whitley’s head librarian next year, while Cluney—born and bred in these mountains of Eastern Kentucky—was bound and determined to strike out for the first time in her life to see California. Her van was all packed and her apartment key turned in. The moment they finished straightening the library, she meant to hit the road and hang a sharp left, headed west.

  “Are you really going to leave?” At the quivery sound in B.J.’s voice, Cluney glanced up from the stack of dusty books she was sorting. Sure enough, she saw tears in her friend’s black eyes, making them look larger and brighter than usual.

  “You know I am,” Cluney answered, a catch in her voice at B.J.’s sudden loss of control. They had both vowed to avoid any messy farewell scenes. “I figure on being out of Kentucky by nightfall, headed west as far as the road will take me.”

  “But it’s full moon tonight, Cluney,” B.J. said in a pleading tone. “I thought you’d hang around at least long enough to see if the moonbow appears. We could drive up to the falls like we used to. Don’t you want one last chance to see what Major Breckinridge wrote about in his diary?” B.J.’s voice rose on a hopeful note. If anything could make Cluney stay one more night, it was the moonbow. “Come on, girl, let’s do it.”

  Cluney thought for a minute. The idea was tempting. But wasn’t the diary one of the reasons she’d made up her mind to leave? It had become an obsession with her. She’d been using it and her futile fight to save Bluefield to block out facing her grief over Jeff’s death. That wasn’t healthy. She had to face her loss and learn to live with it.

  Still, she had hoped to get an early start and that obviously wasn’t going to happen. She was tired after the hectic graduation weekend, and feeling dragged out from the antibiotics she’d been taking for her cold. Maybe it would be better to begin her long trip tomorrow, rested and in better spirits.

  “You want to,” B.J. said, “I can see it in your face. Do! Let’s have one last blast together. We can go to Mac’s Pizza Castle for supper, then head on up to the falls. Who knows? Tonight could be the night.”

  Cluney laughed at her friend’s arm-twisting. B.J. was good at it, always had been. “Okay! Okay! You talked me into pizza, but I’m not going to the falls again. I’m all done with that—end of chapter, clean page. No goodbyes, no looking back. I’ve given that diary too much of my time and attention, but no more. Whatever happened to Hunter Breckinridge and his wife, it’s clear to me now that it’s none of my business. Obviously, I was never meant to find out the answer to that mystery. And it’s clear I’ve lost my battle for Bluefield.”

  B.J. glanced at Cluney, but said nothing. She didn’t believe for a minute that her friend meant to walk away from those characters out of Kentucky’s past. She might be trying to run away from them, though.

  Cluney interrupted the silence once more, talking as much to herself as to B.J. “There is one person I need to say goodbye to. I’ll just have time to drive up there before supper.”

  Both B.J.’s frown and her question held a world of disapproval. “You don’t mean you’re going up the mountain to see that crazy old witch-woman?”

  “Don’t call Miss Redbird that. She’s not a witch and she’s a lot saner than most of the people up on Baldy Rock.”

  “How can you say that, girl, when your own folks lived up there? When you were born and raised there, too?”

  “I never claimed to be anything but crazy,” Cluney joked, with a wink. “As for my folks, I’ve always had a strange feeling about them. All that business they told me about how I fell down the cellar stairs when I was a teenager and got a lick on my head and couldn’t remember anything afterward. Amnesia? I mean really! B.J., would you believe a story like that? It’s like I never even existed until I was sixteen years old.”

  “If my folks said it was so, I’d believe it.”

  “But they never even took me to a doctor as far as I know. Mama said they sent for that old healing woman that lived across the mountain. In her learned opinion, I was sound, if dented.”

  “Well, you must have been okay. You’re here now, aren’t you?”

  “The part of me that’s lived since right before my seventeenth birthday is here. As for the rest—the earlier years of my life—I might as well not have lived at all. Why, it’s like I was never really born—just popped up out of the mountain, nearly grown.”

  “That is crazy talk, Cluney! If you don’t believe you were born, take a look at your birth certificate.”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “Say what?” B.J. squinted hard at her friend.

  “The courthouse burned the same year as my accident. All the local records went up in flames. Mama got me one of those substitute certificates by getting Pa, Miss Red-bird, and Wooter Crenshaw to swear they knew I was born. But what if they all swore to it just because my mama asked them to, B.J.?”

  B.J. rolled her eyes, then climbed to her feet and carried a stack of books to a nearby shelf. “Lord, girl, what an imagination you have! But maybe you’re right, maybe you never were born. Maybe you’re that moon child I hear tell of that came down off the mountain one dark and stormy night.”

  B.J. made the eerie do-do-do-do sound from “The Twilight Zone,” then giggled.

  “Go on, B.J.! You and your mountain tales! I thought librarians were suppposed to be levelheaded.”

  “I am, if anyone in this room is. You certainly aren’t—fixing to run off to California and traipsing all the way up to the top of Baldy Rock before you leave to see that old witch-woman. I’d be scared to go up there alone. They say she eats bats.” B.J. gave an exaggerated shiver. “Thank goodness you’re meeting me for pizza. At least you won’t be staying at her cabin for supper.”

  Cluney had to giggle at B.J.’s antics. When she crossed her eyes and shook her hair into a tangled mess, she did resemble Miss Redbird, except that the old woman’s hair was snow-white and her mouth puckered inward since she’d lost the false teeth Social Services bought her awhile back. Miss Redbird claimed they fell down the well.

  “I have a very good reason for going,” Cluney explained. “Miss Redbird’s been claiming for years that she had a secret to tell me ‘when the time’s right.’ Well, it’s now or never. Once I leave this place, I doubt I’ll ever be back. That and the fact that Miss Redbird claims to be over a hundred years old would seem to mean that there’s no time like the present.”

  B.J. stopped shelving books and leaned closer, her dark eyes wide with interest. “What kind of secret?”

  Cluney shrugged. “I have no idea. When I was younger and scared of old Redbird, I figured she used to tell me that just to get me to come up and visit her. But the last couple of times I’ve gone to her cabin, she’s mentioned this secret and promised that I’d know soon. Or as she put it, ‘The time’s right nigh for the tellin’, child.’”
/>   B.J. rubbed her bare arms briskly. “Cut it out! You’re giving me the creeps, girl.”

  “Well, anyway, I am going up to see her.”

  Finally, at three o’clock B.J. locked the library door. It had been a job and a half, but now the shelves were all neat and dusted, ready for the new wave of students in the fall. Students, they both realized with a touch of sadness, that Cluney would never meet.

  “Want to come on over to my house?” B.J. asked hopefully.

  “No, I’d better go on and finish what I have to do.” Cluney tried to keep excitement from creeping into her voice. B.J.’s mention earlier of the diary had brought it to mind for the first time in days. In spite of her declaration to B.J. that she meant to forget about the Breckinridge mystery, Cluney was eager to go off somewhere quiet and go over the entries in the diary one last time before she left Kentucky. Maybe there was something she had missed—some clue hidden in its pages that would unlock the meaning of that final entry made by Major Hunter Breckinridge on that long ago September night back in 1863—the night he saw the moonbow.

  “You’re sure?” B.J. asked.

  Cluney waved and headed for her purple van. “I’ll meet you at eight at the Pizza Castle.”

  “Don’t eat any bats! They’ll spoil your appetite.”

  Cluney laughed and started down the steep hill to the parking lot. The mountains in the distance looked a cool blue-green, but a mirage of heat shimmered up from the pavement. She climbed into the ovenlike van and turned on the motor, switching the AC to full blast. Before she pulled out of her parking place, she leaned over the seat and pawed through the clutter in her huge leather purse until she found what she was looking for. She rubbed her hand gently, lovingly over the water-and blood-stained leather cover of the old diary. Then she placed it on the seat beside her and wheeled out of the lot, headed for Baldy Rock.

  As Cluney turned off the main highway onto a narrow country road, her mind flipped back like pages in the diary itself.