"It's just show business news," said Martha, but she added, "It's still a damn shame."
When things weren't busy in the department, which was most of the time, Martha listened to WJCW in Johnson City, a progressive country station that could be relied upon to serve up
Dwight Yoakum, Don Williams, and Reba McEntire without too much bluegrass in between.
Joe LeDonne came as close as he ever got to smiling. "Let me tell him, Martha. I had a workshop in dealing with the bereaved."
Martha glanced through the open doorway at Spencer's empty office, and shrugged. "We shouldn't be flip about it. It is a shock."
Spencer took a long swallow of coffee and waited for the latest mayor-of-Nashville joke, or a sensational story from the morning's national news. "Fire away," he said.
"We heard it on the radio this morning," said LeDonne. "The Judds are breaking up. Sorry. No joke."
"The Judds?" repeated Spencer, as if there weren't a two-foot poster of the mother-daughter duo above his desk.
"The deejay just said so. They held a press conference—in Nashville, I think—and announced it. Naomi has liver damage from hepatitis, and she has to quit show business. The doctors want her to take it easy. They think she's going home to Ashland."
"Naomi is the mother, isn't she?" asked LeDonne, peering through the doorway for a look at the sheriff's poster. "Damn! She's the pretty one, too!"
Spencer turned to look at the photograph, a gag birthday gift from the staff last April but one he secretly prized. Two women in sparkling country-and-western costumes stood onstage, sharing a microphone. Both were dark-haired
and lovely, with a family resemblance that marked them as kin at first glance. But first glance said "sisters," which wasn't the case. The slender one on the right, the one with the darkest hair, the finest porcelain features, and a look of gentle sweetness that made you think of a doe—that was Naomi Judd. She was Wynonna's mother. "Well, they marry young in Ashland, Kentucky," people said philosophically, but the fact was that while Wynonna Judd was about twenty-three, Naomi Judd didn't look much over twenty herself. And she was beautiful, with that kind of fine-boned beauty that would last a lifetime. Wynonna was pretty because she was twenty-something, but Naomi was something out of a Renaissance painting, a mountain Madonna.
"It's a damn shame," Martha said again.
Spencer felt an irrational urge to swear, out of all proportion to his interest in music. What, after all, did it matter to him whether a total stranger continued to make records or not? "How'd she get hepatitis?" he finally asked.
LeDonne shrugged. "The deejay didn't say. Probably all that bad food singers have to eat when they're on the road. I hear seafood can be dangerous."
"Well, how long will it take her to get over it?"
LeDonne and Martha looked at each other. "I don't think she will," said Martha. "Liver damage is permanent. It's the one organ that doesn't get better, and you can't do without it."
Spencer looked down at his rapidly cooling 73
cup of coffee, trying to figure out who he was angry at—them for spoiling his morning with bad news, or Naomi Judd for her mortality. He walked into his office without another word.
Martha shrugged. " 'Mama, He's Crazy,' " she said to Joe.
He gave her half a smile to show that he recognized the title of the Judds' greatest hit.
After a few more minutes' silence, broken only by a Floyd Kramer oldie from the radio, Spencer called out, "Martha, can you get me the zip code for Ashland, Kentucky?"
Laura Bruce took a tentative sip of the tea-colored beverage in the earthenware mug. "What did you say this was?"
"Betony," said Nora Bonesteel. "Go on, drink it. It will do you good—in your condition."
She froze with the steaming mug inches from her lips. "My condition," she echoed. "You really do know things, don't you?"
"Some things." The old woman was not looking at her. She had turned to gaze out the big window at the meadow of brown stubble stretching down to the wood's edge. The lowering sky was gray with clouds, bleaching the color from the landscape. "When anybody says November, this is the image that always comes to my mind: bleak, as if the whole world was graveyard dead."
It had been a week since Laura's night ride through the holler in answer to the sheriff's summons. The color and animation had returned to the younger woman's face, and she no
longer seemed so tired. The burgundy sweater she wore complemented her dark hair, making her seem less pale. She was curled up on Nora Bonesteel's sofa, enjoying another "parish visit." She had set out to visit the Underhills' farm, but a twinge of nausea—and perhaps dread at the memory of her last visit—had made her turn off before she reached their road, and head up Ashe Mountain to spend a comforting morning with Nora Bonesteel.
Laura looked about her for the pet groundhog. "Has Persey gone out to hibernate yet?"
"She left last week. Waddled out into the backyard and dug herself a hole under the grape arbor. Sometimes I envy her that little death of hers. The world is always warm and green when Persey's in it. She never sees the bleakness. Autumn can be pretty, too, I know, but it's a brittle kind of beauty. I'm always surprised to see blue skies and sunny days in November; seems like they never stick in my mind the way this does."
"We had a pretty day for the Underhills' funeral," Laura said. "But somehow it felt just as desolate as today looks." She shivered, and ventured another sip of herbal tea. "I was sad for Mark and Maggie, left with not a soul in the world but each other. There was even talk of putting them out of their home because they were under age."
Nora Bonesteel's face remained impassive. She busied herself with stirring a dollop of honey into her own tea. Laura studied the high cheekbones and angular features of the still-
handsome old woman and wondered if she had Cherokee blood in her. The steel-blue eyes bespoke her Scots ancestry—and the Sight, of course. At last she spoke. "I'd have thought you had enough to keep you occupied without taking on grown young'uns to raise."
Laura squirmed under the tranquil gaze. "It didn't seem much to ask," she protested. "The sheriff came up to me after the funeral, and said that the Underhills had asked that I be appointed guardian. It's only until Mark turns eighteen in a few months' time. He said that all I have to do is check on them every now and then, and that he would do the same. He seemed so sincere and so worried about them that I couldn't very well refuse. How would it look if the minister's wife turned her back on two orphans?"
"You know best," said Nora Bonesteel in a tone that meant only that the discussion would end. She had finished her tea now and had taken out the workbasket of knitting that always sat by her chair. Her restless hands unraveled yarn as they talked.
"It's such a tragedy. They didn't talk about it, and of course I didn't ask them, but imagine! An insane older brother plotting to kill the family, and them escaping just because they had play practice at the high school. Living with him must have been a nightmare."
Nora shook her head. "Josh Underhill was a soft-spoken boy. Very earnest, though. I spoke with him up here a time or two. He liked to go out walking in the woods by himself. He wasn't
fierce or what you'd call crazy. Just the opposite, I think."
"You're lucky you weren't killed," said Laura with a shiver of dread. "What did you talk about?"
"Legends. He had never lived long in any one place before, and I got the feeling that he was trying to get to know the land. I told him some of the old Cherokee stories about the Bear child and the Medicine Lake, where wounded animals go to heal, and about the Nunnehi."
"What are Nunnehi?"
"My Scots kinfolk called them the seelie court. Maybe all the mountain folk in the world have tales about them. They're said to live under the streams and deep inside the mountains, invisible most of the time, but sometimes you can come upon them dancing in a forest clearing. Sometimes they'd help a lost Cherokee find his way back to the village, and Nunnehi warriors appeared a t
ime or two to fight alongside the Cherokee when they were losing a battle. You've seen fairystones, haven't you?"
Laura smiled. "Sure. They sell them in gift shops on the parkway. A dark crystalline formation in the shape of a cross. They look as if someone carved them."
The old woman drew out a chain from the folds of her dress, and held it out for Laura to see. "I've had this one sixty years and more," she said. "The old woman who gave it to me said it was formed from the Nunnehis' tears. Some say they cried when Jesus was nailed to the cross, and some say it was in sorrow over
the Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee were force marched away to Oklahoma."
"Have you ever seen the Nunnehi?"
Nora shrugged. "It's not a Christian belief. It's just stories people tell to explain a thing they don't understand. Josh Underhill said he wished he could go off and find the Nunnehi dancing in a clearing and follow them home. No, you don't, I told him. They don't like people to know where they live. People who go there die soon after."
Laura gasped. "What did he say to that?"
"He said he didn't care." Nora stared for a moment at the tangle of crimson thread in her lap. "This was a good while back. I just thought it was the state of melancholy that teenage boys are so partial to. Sweetheart troubles, or grades and suchlike." Her eyes glittered in the lamplight. "I wasn't given to know."
"You know enough, Nora Bonesteel," said Laura. "Let's not talk about it anymore." With a complacent smile she placed her hand on the gentle rise of her belly. "I can't get over you knowing about the baby this early," she mused aloud. "I don't think I'm showing a bit. This skirt has an elastic waistband, but it still fits like it always did."
"You look all right," said Nora, looping the strands of wool over her knitting needle.
"I told Will when he called on Sunday evening. He's just over the moon about it. And worried about me, of course. I said I was fine."
"Did you tell him you'd been out gallivanting 78
on country roads late at night visiting crime scenes?" asked Nora.
Laura grinned. "He worries enough as it is. Anyway, I didn't want to dampen the news about the baby. Will it be a boy or a girl?"
Nora Bonesteel shook her head. "I only see things in flashes every now and again. Most things aren't meant for us to know beforehand. Trust the Lord, girl."
"It's just that I'm thirty-eight, and I worry in case the baby isn't quite normal . . . You're right ... It takes wonderful courage to care for a handicapped child, and I'm no saint. I'd go insane."
"Trust—"
"Trust the Lord. That's what Will would tell me, too, isn't it?" She tried to remember if she'd prayed about the baby, about its being all right when it was born.
"I hope Will Bruce would tell you not to dwell on it," Nora replied. "If you keep this up, you'll be mighty dull company for the next six months."
"Well, if I shut up about it, will you make me something for the baby? Booties or a little blanket or something? You make such beautiful things."
Nora Bonesteel seemed intent upon her knitting for a moment or two.
"It's due in April," Laura added. "No rush."
The old woman carefully untangled a knot of crimson wool. "I will make you something for the child you will have in April."
As boys, Tavy Annis and Taw McBryde had been fishing buddies. Now, half a century later, they had renewed the custom, still fishing at the same bend in the Little Dove River, five hundred feet downhill from the Clinchfield Railroad tracks that hugged the side of the wooded mountain. It was their favorite spot, not perhaps because the fishing was any better in the rock-studded depths of the river bend, but because the prospect of treasure lay in every cast of the fishing line.
The boys had grown up listening to tales from Taw's Uncle Henry, a railroad man from Pigeon Roost. That sharp curve on the tracks above the river bend had caused more train wrecks than you could shake a stick at, he told the boys. In the old days, when trains were the country's bloodstream, there'd be a wreck on that stretch of track every couple of years, sending a freight train full of coal and timber into the gravel-bottomed shallows of the Little Dove River. The train crews mostly survived, Uncle Henry assured them, but they had a struggle getting out, and they'd shed shoes and clothes to swim for it. That's where the treasure came in. The railroad salvaged the coal and timber, but what stayed at the bottom of the Little Dove were the heavy gold watches the railroad men used to wear. Why, there must be at least a dozen of them down there, Henry declared. And since gold didn't rust or rot, or do anything except get more valuable all the time, think what a fortune you'd have if you could get those watches up out of the river. For years Tavy Annis and
Taw McBryde fished the river bend, hoping for gold instead of trout with every cast of the line. They had spent the treasure a thousand time in daydreams as adolescents, buying phantom Daisy air rifles and ten-speed bikes. But the Clinchfield gold stayed buried in sand and gravel under the currents of the river, and only the dreams dried up.
They were fishing again now; same spot, same river, but many things had changed since the old days. They were sixty-five now, with little in common except childhood memories. Nearly half a century ago, they had reached their own bend in the river, and from then on their lives had taken different paths.
Tavy had stayed on in Wake County to farm with his daddy in Dark Hollow, and he'd been there ever since. He was lean and leathery from a lifetime of outdoor work, and he wore overalls and work boots, the uniform of his trade. He was a widower now, deacon in the church, member of the local civic club, but somewhere in there still was the kid that had helped Taw McBryde chase the Everett sisters through the meadow waving a blacksnake over his head like a bullwhip. They were twelve then.
In a long-forgotten photo album in Tavy's attic, there was a faded black-and-white picture of Taw at sixteen, raw-boned in a shirt and tie and making sheep's eyes at a pretty dark-haired girl. It was the perfect picture of young love, except that if you looked closely at the bushes behind the courting couple, you could see an Indian in war paint and feathered headdress,
brandishing a tomahawk, and ready to attack the oblivious lovers. Tavy Annis, renegade brave. He couldn't remember who had taken the picture, or whether Taw had been in on the joke. Taw was always the serious one, burning with ambition to get more than there was in little Wake County. If he couldn't find the gold in the Little Dove River, he would seek it elsewhere.
Taw had been pulled out of the hollers of east Tennessee by World War II, or maybe he had wanted to go, picturing his triumphant return with fame and fortune in his wake. But it had taken him forty years to find his way back home. He had ridden through the battlefields of France with Patton's Red Ball Express, seeing combat and learning more about the world than he'd dreamed of from the geography books of John Sevier High. How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm—indeed. After the war, he had headed north to the automobile factories in Detroit (where he learned that it was pronounced with the accent on the last syllable). Money was good in the car factories after the war. There was a waiting list a mile long for new cars, once they could start making them again, instead of turning out jeeps and tanks for the war effort. He wouldn't stay long, he told himself. Just until he earned enough money to go back to Wake County in style. But while he was in Detroit, he met Wanda, and when they got married, she had wanted to stay up there where her kinfolks were; they had bought a refrigerator on time, and he had to keep his job
to make the monthly payments. A year later, the first baby was on the way, and it seemed foolish to think of giving up a good union job to go back to an uncertain future in Appalachia.
One year stretched into the next, always with some good reason not to go, until he had spent more than half his life in Michigan and his Tennessee accent had worn away into the flat, bland sounds of midwestern speech: y'all gave way to you guys in his need for a second-person plural. He was closing in on forty-five years in urban exile, his dreams still picturing Dark Holl
ow in 1941 simplicity, when Wanda died. By then the kids were grown and gone to jobs in the Sunbelt, and he was retired from the plant with a good pension for forty years' work. Suddenly, he had run out of family, installment payments, and excuses to keep him in Detroit. One night he was down at the bar with some old friends from work when the old Bobby Bare song came on the radio, the one about the homesick Southern boy being trapped in Dee-troit City. "/ wanna go home." Taw had felt tears spring to his eyes when he heard those words, and he realized that he didn't want to see another skyscraper or sit through another traffic jam as long as he lived. He wanted to go home. His friends in Detroit kidded him about it at first. All you hillbillies go home, they said. Every time a redneck retires, he starts packing. You can get the boy out of the mountains . ..
The woman next door helped him run a yard sale, and he sent most of what was left after that to the Salvation Army. He told the realtor
not to jack up the price on the house; he wanted a quick sale. Three weeks later, Taw McBryde was back in the east Tennessee mountains, looking for a place to live, and trying as hard as he could to go home again.
Hamelin hadn't changed all that much. Main Street still looked pretty much the way it always had, except that the movie theatre had closed, and a Laundromat had been installed in the building, so that the movie marquee was permanently set to read washarama. The old hotel was closed, too, but a neatly painted sign on its front door said that the historical society had plans to restore it as a local landmark. He didn't know too many of the people in Hamelin anymore. Most of his generation had died or moved away, and the youngsters—those under fifty—didn't interest him much. But when he drove out to Tavy Annis's place, he found that one piece of his past was still intact and visitable. There was Tavy, looking weather-beaten and gray, but still the same old buddy he always was, carrying around in his head all the same memories about the days before the war.
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter Page 5
