Once Upon Forever

by Becky Lee Weyrich

  She remembered so well that feeling of excitement the afternoon she discovered it in a box of old books at the library.

  “Hey, come look at this,” she’d called to B.J. “It’s an old diary written during the Civil War. Wonder how it got here.”

  At first glance, neither of them could read it. The handwriting was all fancy flourishes and curlicues and some of the pages were badly water-stained.

  “You take it home and see if you can decipher it,” B.J. had told her, obviously less than interested in the old, illegible work. “Somebody probably donated it years ago and it’s been locked away in our basement ever since. I doubt there’s much of interest in it, even if you can figure it out. Looks like a foreign language to me.”

  Cluney did take the journal home that day. She poured over the script, straining to make out each letter, each word. She made her own handwritten duplicate of the book and finally typed the entire contents, donating one copy to the Whitley College Library and sending another to the Filson Club in Louisville. She had hoped the historical club’s members might be able to tell her something about Major Breckinridge, but nothing had come of it, other than finding out—disappointingly—that Bluefield, the old plantation house at the site of the Breckinridge horse farm, would soon be leveled to make way for a suburban Lexington shopping mall.

  The journal was all she had of the man—all except a lot of fantasies. She no longer needed her neatly typed pages; she could now read Major Breckinridge’s handwriting at a glance. Better than that, she knew every word he had written by heart. Still, she felt closer to him when she could hold his diary in her hands and watch the ebb and flow of his fanciful script. In the margins, the romantic U. S. Cavalry officer had drawn hearts with lilies and roses springing from their centers and the moon in all its phases.

  The moon! It had been their secret talisman. On many nights while they were apart during the war, Hunter had noted in his journal that the moon was especially lovely or that he had sent his wife a kiss by way of the moon. Cluney felt she knew this couple as if they were part of her own family.

  Hunter’s feelings had changed markedly after his wife’s disappearance. A bitter tone had crept into his words. He seemed to doubt his wife’s loyalty, and often confided his fears to his diary that she had gone away with another man. He still loved Larissa, clearly, even though his entries were edged with pain and jealousy. In spite of his suspicions, he obviously blamed himself more than he blamed his wife.

  Cluney had no idea what had happened to either Larissa or Hunter Breckinridge, or what he had seen that night of the moonbow—the same night he had written the final entry in his journal. He had said he “surrendered.”

  “Surrendered to what?” She sighed. “I guess I’ll never know. But at least I won’t lie awake nights any longer, staring at their moon and wondering.”

  Cluney frowned suddenly. She hoped once she was away from here she could sort out and separate her feelings for Jeff and those strange yearnings she felt for Hunter Breckinridge. It was almost as if her mind were playing tricks on her, blending the two men into one image, making her heart ache equally for both of them. She was sure this had happened because Hunter’s diary had come into her hands the same day she received news of Jeff’s death. Still, her mingled emotions for the two men grew more puzzling as time passed. It was almost as if she had convinced herself that if she could solve the mystery of Hunter Breckinridge and his lost wife that she could get Jeff back.

  “And that borders on insanity,” she warned.

  An enormous pothole jounced Cluney’s thoughts back to the business at hand. The road to Miss Redbird’s was a narrow, tortured mountain trail. Folks said that in the old days horse-drawn wagons had made this same treacherous climb. But Cluney doubted if a horse could stay on his feet to pull a load clear to the top. She leaned forward in her seat, physically trying to urge her van upward.

  Easing around a hairpin curve, Cluney hit the brakes suddenly. A familiar sign—one that she hadn’t seen on the road for the past month or so—sat propped against a rotting fence post, COFFINS, the weathered board announced in uneven black letters. And below that, WOOTER CRENSHAW.

  “I wonder where he goes when he takes his sign in,” Cluney mused aloud.

  The whole county knew that this strange little man made coffins and moonshine, and that if his sign was not out, you might as well drive on by because Wooter Crenshaw was no longer in residence—his residence being a rough, one-room log cabin that perched crazily on the side of Baldy Rock.

  On impulse, Cluney turned into the lane. Wooter had known her ma and pa all their lives. Saying goodbye to him seemed the proper thing to do, since her folks were both gone now, buried in twin coffins hewn by Wooter himself. Her parents would expect it of her, Cluney told herself. Besides, she liked the old geezer. He’d been as much a part of her life as the mountain itself.

  She drove slowly down the rutted lane between fence posts that leaned this way and that or just lay on the ground resting for a spell. Her arrival was announced by Wooter’s pack of “critters.” Most were dogs, all were strays. Besides assorted hounds, Wooter had a cat that barked like a dog and an old pair of raccoons that he claimed were really his own ma and pa who just refused to stay in the grave they missed their boy so. Like everyone else in the county, Cluney was always careful to pay her proper respects to Ma and Pa Crenshaw. As she pulled into the coffin-cluttered yard, she fished in her purse, coming up with a bag of peanuts for the ’coons.

  Rolling down her window, she called, “How are you, Wooter?”

  He yelled a stream of disparaging remarks at the hounds who were leaping at the van windows. They immediately shushed their racket and slunk under the cabin. The raccoons then scuttled forward and sat on their haunches near her door, awaiting the payment of respects. As Cluney handed them the peanuts, it suddenly struck her how much old Wooter resembled the pair—squat, bowlegged, with dark smudges around both his eyes from squinting in the sun while he worked.

  “Good to see you again, Mr. and Mrs. Crenshaw,” Cluney said dutifully, and loud enough for their “son” to hear. She watched the pair carry her offering to an old enamel dishpan, where they washed each nut industriously before consuming their feast.

  The bearded mountaineer had been stooped over one of his pine boxes, coaxing the splinters into smooth edges. When Cluney approached, he straightened up to his full four-foot, eleven-inch height. He whipped a red bandanna out of his overalls pocket and wiped his dripping face, then nodded.

  “Howdy, little girl.”

  Cluney smiled. No matter that she was twenty-seven years old, taller than him by several inches, and a college teacher to boot, to this man she would always be “the little girl from up near top of Baldy.”

  “We’ve missed you around here, Wooter.” She hoped he’d let slip and mention where he’d been for the past couple of months. But it was not to be.

  He answered simply, “Well now, won’t be no need for that no more. I’m back, ain’t I?”

  “What are you making?” Cluney knew it was a dumb question, but she always asked.

  “Coffin.” He was back at smoothing edges.

  She glanced at the stacks of pine boxes all about. “Looks like you’re ahead on your work. Who’s that one for?”

  “Redbird.”

  Cluney gasped.

  “Warn’t meaning to scare you, little girl. Ol’ Redbird, she ain’t dead yet, just fixin’ to be.”

  “I didn’t know she was sick.”

  He squinted up at her as if to see is she was serious or just joshing. “Ain’t,” he replied. “She was always one to plan ahead, you know.”

  “But you said she was fixing to die, Wooter.”

  “You get Redbird’s years on you and you’ll be fixin’ to, too. Come hot weather, it don’t pay to wait around for something to happen.”

  Cluney covered a smile by brushing at the perspiration beading her upper lip. “I’m
on my way up to visit her now, to say goodbye.”

  Wooter’s head shot up and his little, beady eyes flared wide. “She going ahead with the wake ‘fore I even finish her box?”

  “No, no,” Cluney answered. “I’m the one going.”

  He reached in another deep pocket and pulled out a measuring tape. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place, little girl? Somehow I hadn’t reckoned on you coming to put in a order just yet.”

  When he approached her with his tape, Cluney backed away, horrified. “No, you don’t understand, Wooter. I’m going away to California.”

  “Oh.” He stuffed the tape measure back in his pocket.

  “I saw your sign on the road and thought I’d stop to say goodbye on my way up to Miss Redbird’s.”

  “That’ll be a end to it, then,” he said with a sigh.

  “An end to what?”

  “Your people in these parts. They come here from Virginny a long time back, through the Cumberland Gap. They’s a good lot of them back then, the Summerlands. Five brothers and two sisters and their spouses and young’uns all pulled up stakes to come to Baldy Rock. Summerlands used to be so thick in these parts you couldn’t stir ’em with a stick. Yessiree! Then, slow but sure, they went to drifting off.” He raised up and gave her a long, hard look. “And now you, little girl, the last of your line.” He shook his head sadly and went back to his work.

  Wooter made her feel like she had to explain her decision to leave the mountain. “I don’t feel like I belong here. I never really have.”

  He stopped scraping and squinted at her. “Don’t belong? Who you been a-talking to, little girl? What they done told you?”

  “Nobody! Nothing!” she answered quickly, defensively.

  “You belong here as much as anyone in these parts. All our people come through the Gap together back in the olden times—the Crenshaws, the Summerlands, the Renfros, the Breckinridges…”

  “Breckinridge?” Cluney interrupted. “There’s no one by that name on the mountain or even in this county.”

  “You sure?” he asked almost sarcastically. “You just ain’t been the right place at the right time, little girl.”

  “You know these people, Wooter? The Breckinridges, I mean.”

  “Course! I know ever’body. They all come to me sooner or later—for a box for the burying and a bottle for the wake.”

  “Do you know a Hunter Breckinridge?” Cluney had no idea why she asked such a question. How on earth could Wooter know a man who had died, probably from his war wounds, over a century ago?

  He answered her question with another. “Who’s been telling you about him?”

  “Nobody. I just read his name somewhere and wondered. Do you know anything about him, Wooter?”

  “I know where he’s buried—up by the falls.”

  Wooter had said the very thing that Cluney did not want to hear. She couldn’t make herself think of Hunter as dead and buried. To her he seemed as alive today as he had been back on that September night in 1863 when he’d gazed at the moonbow over Cumberland Falls.

  Cluney didn’t ask any more questions. “I guess I’d better be getting on up to Miss Redbird’s now,” she said. “So long, Wooter. Take care of yourself.”

  He just stared at her, so Cluney turned and started for the van, feeling curiously unsettled by her visit.

  His deep voice boomed, stopping her in her tracks. “Moonbow tonight!”

  She whirled back around. “How can you be sure? No one ever knows for certain when it will appear.”

  “I know. All the signs is right. You oughten to go, though. Best stay away from the falls tonight.”

  “I’d just changed my mind about going. How did you know?” Cluney asked.

  “Never you mind,” he said. “You best listen to ole Wooter, little girl. Stay clean away from there tonight.”

  She turned to leave without another word, but he stopped her again.

  “Take this on up to Redbird,” he said, handing Cluney a Mason jar of moonshine. “Tell her I’ll haul her box up for her to try it on the next day or two.”

  With that, Cluney was obviously dismissed. The old man’s warning left her so befuddled that she almost climbed into her van without saying goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Crenshaw, but at the last minute she stooped down to scratch their furry heads. For one wild moment, she considered unscrewing the lid on the jar and giving them each a swig of white lightning. It would serve Wooter right, she figured, if she got his folks drunk on ’shine. He’d gotten her that upset with his warning about the moonbow.

  Two long, mournful whistles stirred the cool air and then a third. This was the call of the redbird. Cardinals, hearing the sound, came darting through the trees and swooped down to the dirt yard at the edge of the cabin’s porch. The old woman in the rocking chair scattered handfuls of sunflower seeds for the birds. Soon her yard was as bright as a garden of poppies in full bloom.

  “There you go, pretties,” she crooned to her visitors. “Eat your fill, now.”

  Miss Redbird watched as the less vibrantly colored females of the species hung back, waiting for the males to finish before they stepped forward to eat. The animal kingdom wasn’t so different from the human females’ lot, she mused.

  All of a sudden, Redbird forgot all about her feathered friends. She sat up straighter in her rocker and keened an ear.

  “Somebody’s a-coming.”

  At that moment, Cluney Summerland was still far down the mountain, but Redbird had lived enough years to sense a change in the very air when company was on the way. With surprising agility for one of her advanced years, she rose and went inside to put on a fresh apron. Moments later, she was settled again in her rocker, waiting.

  “Reckon it’s Clair de Lune Summerland headin’ up here,” she told the birds. “And, sure as shootin’, she’s fixing to light out. I seen it coming these past weeks. Restless, that girl’s been, seeking answers there ain’t even any questions for. She’ll be wantin’ to know the secret today. Don’t ’spose I can keep it from her no longer. Still …” Redbird paused and sighed, rubbing one arthritic hand over her rheumy eyes. “It’d be a whole lot better could she just find it out for her own self. She won’t believe the tellin’ of it no how.”

  Redbird leaned her head back with another sigh and rocked gently. She gazed out over the mountains, watching the misty smoke hover over the tall peaks. Some said that blue-gray haze that gave the Smokies their name was the restless spirit of Indians, wanting their sacred burying grounds back from the thieving white man. Others claimed the smoke marked mystical places hidden away in the mountains and valleys—places where time stood still or doubled back on itself.

  “They’s mystery here, all right,” the old woman said. “More than a body could ever understand. Me and ole Wooter know, but is the secret ours to tell?”

  Redbird was still pondering the question when Cluney’s van crested the top of the mountain and came to rest by the cabin steps.

  Cluney climbed out, smiled, and waved. “How are you, Miss Redbird?”

  “It shore took you long enough. You must of stopped to yammer awhile with Wooter. ’Bout time you got here, girl. Come on up and rest a spell.”

  Cluney stared at her old friend curiously. If she lived to be as old as Redbird, she would never understand how the woman always knew when she was coming. But there were a lot of things the mountain woman knew that went beyond normal comprehension. B.J. wasn’t the only one in these parts to call Miss Redbird a witch.

  “You’re looking fine, ma’am,” Cluney noted with pleasure. All Wooter’s talk of coffins and wakes had left her unsettled.

  The bright-eyed woman laughed. “You sound surprised, girl. You shouldn’t be. I’ll be fine till the day I die. And I reckon that’s a ways off yet. How come you’re leaving us?”

  The question took Cluney by total surprise. Before she could answer, Redbird fluttered a thin hand in the air. “Never min
d,” she said. “I reckon I know your reasons. There’s lots of other things I know as well. Come on up here on the porch. We got to talk, girl. Time I was telling you a thing or two. High time!”

  The secret! Cluney knew she was about to hear it at last.

  She frowned slightly and a shiver ran through her. All of a sudden, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to hear the secret this ancient soul had kept to herself for so many years. Cluney had a feeling that she was about to hear something that would change her life forever.

  Chapter Six

  As Cluney settled herself in the creaking, willow rocker next to Miss Redbird’s, a hush fell over the forest surrounding the cabin. Birds stopped singing and the breeze stilled. The whole mountaintop seemed isolated suddenly in its own silent, rarefied air. It was as if Baldy Rock itself were waiting expectantly to hear what the old woman had to say.

  Redbird gave Cluney a long, quizzical look. “Well? Didn’t Wooter send me something for samplin’? He said he was gonna make up a new batch special for my wake.”

  At the moment, moonshine was the farthest thing from Cluney’s mind. She fumbled in her deep leather purse, then drew out the forgotten Mason jar. When she produced Wooter’s sample, Redbird smiled and smacked her lips, then reached eagerly for the container of colorless, fiery corn likker.

  “Well, now! That’s more like it. It wouldn’t do to strain myself telling tales without some fortifying spirits. When you get to be my age, child …” She broke off, cackled, then patted Cluney’s hand. “You wouldn’t understand, I reckon. ’Tain’t many likely to get to be my age.”

  Redbird unscrewed the lid and breathed deeply of the ’shine’s potent bouquet. “Reach me that gourd dipper yonder, will you, honey? And one for your own self, too, if you care for a nip.”

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” Cluney answered. She was more than happy that she had a legitimate reason to decline Miss Redbird’s offer. “I have to drive back down the mountain.”

  She smiled and handed the old woman the carved-out gourd.