A Day in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  I’d reached the porch by then and stood beside Lucy Belle. “I thought she was still tethered to that oxygen machine. How did she make it all the way over here on foot?”

  “She’s doing a lot better since they changed her medication and she started taking Tai Chi at the senior center,” explained Lucy Belle. “Her portable oxygen tank was gone, so I guess she took it with her and hoofed it on over here.”

  We heard a crash from behind the door and the sound of old-lady cussing.

  “You’d better let me go in first,” I said. I really wanted to draw my gun just to get their attention, but that’s against regulations.

  “I’m not going to fight you for that privilege,” Lucy Belle said, raising her palms. “In fact, if you have a flak jacket in the truck, I suggest you use it.”

  “Aw, it won’t get that bad.” I thought about drawing the gun again.

  “Maybe not. But just keep in mind that they’re both a lot more spry than they let on. Remember that incident when old man Dexter next door climbed up in that pecan tree not long ago to try and pull some vines out? It turned out he was on Aunt Addie Lou’s property and she thought he was a peeping Tom. She whacked him upside the ribs a few times with that cane before she realized who he was.”

  I nodded. “I remember that. He said she had a swing like Chipper Jones. Came at him from both sides.”

  “Yeah, she’s a switch hitter. Anyway, old man Dexter, who can’t see two feet in front of his face, didn’t know what had got after him. He just climbed higher and higher up that tree.”

  “Boo told me about having to get him down out. It was real hard. The boys had to use a cherry picker. Didn’t he have to go to the hospital?”

  “Yeah, but not from the beating, or else I expect the old coot would have sued her garters off. Turned out the vines were mostly poison ivy, which he couldn’t identify what with the nearsightedness and all.”

  I winced. “Weeee doggies!” I exclaimed sympathetically. “You hate to see that. Why didn’t he ever get him some glasses?”

  “Vanity, I reckon. Aunt Addie Lou said he was done in by his own vanity.”

  “Of course, her beating him with a stick didn’t help him none.”

  “That is a fact in this world if I ever heard one,” agreed Lucy Belle.

  We both flinched in unison at the sound of something shattering and some more cussing. “I expect we ought to go on in. She seems to be hurling something breakable. I hope she can’t pitch as good as she can hit . . .”

  Lucy Belle finished my thought. “Or else I’ll be picking pottery shards of out of Grandma’s tough old hide for a week.”

  “What do you reckon she’s throwing in there?”

  “She keeps her collection of Precious Memories figurines in a case by the front door. That would be my guess.”

  “That’s a shame.”

  “Yeah, what with them being collectable and all.” Lucy Belle shook her head sadly.

  “Well, here goes nothing.” I cleared my throat and hollered, “This is Officer Sandy Crane. I’m coming in!” I opened the door, expecting to get beaned by a porcelain cherub.

  I must say the scene that greeted me and Lucy Belle was somewhat surreal. Miss Addie Lou was decked out in a house dress, fuzzy slippers, and polyester duster, the kind with snaps all the way up the front and a Peter Pan collar. She had her aluminum cane raised in one hand and pointed at her sister, Inez. In the other she held a porcelain bell with two sad-eyed, ceramic angels perched on the top.

  Miss Inez wore pull-on stretch jeans, a tee shirt, and slip-on tennis shoes. She had on a hooded fleecy sweater open over the tee shirt, which read, “Cooking Philosophy: A little cat hair never hurt anybody.” I thought about all her chow-chow I’d eaten and my mouth went a little dry. One of these days after eating a wiener slathered in Miss Inez’s chili concoction, I expect I’d be harking up a hair ball. But I swear it’d be worth it. The stuff is just that good.

  “It’s about time you got here, Sandy,” Miss Addie Lou said. “This old heifer was trying to make off with my Mama’s best quilt, what she gave to me right before she died.”

  A shock of Miss Inez’s snow-white hair had escaped the fleece hood and was standing on end, due probably to the static electricity that seems to be everywhere in the winter. It made the tall, formidable woman look even wilder than usual. Her oxygen tank was stuffed into the backpack she had strapped behind her back. She gripped the handles of her aluminum walker with both hands.

  The whole effect of Miss Inez’s getup was pretty impressive, but I think it was mostly the hood, the oxygen tank, and the competitive gleam in her rheumy eyes that made her look the most like an octogenarian mountain climber getting ready to shuffle up the side of Mount Everest.

  “If my Mama gave you that quilt, I’m a suck-egg mule,” declared Miss Inez. “I’m the oldest. That quilt should have gone to me, and you know it.”

  “You’re as stubborn as a mule, all right. I done told you she gave it to me. Are you calling me a liar?” Miss Addie Lou brandished the cane again, looking like a bad actor in a swashbuckling movie.

  “If the shoe fits,” sniffed Miss Inez, adjusting the plastic tubing that went from underneath her nose on each side, beneath the hood, to hook behind both ears. “And put down that tacky dime store gewgaw before you hurt somebody.”

  Miss Addie Lou hoisted her ceramic cherubs higher and gasped in indignation. “It’s collectable.”

  Lucy Belle and me exchanged glances. Neither of us liked where this was going.

  “Collectable my hind end,” Miss Inez said. “I’ll bet they’re the same ones as they got at the Dollar Store in Bigelow. Them what was made in China.”

  I expect that was about the last straw as far as Miss Addie Lou was concerned. You just don’t defame a Southern woman’s choice of ceramics. Not and expect to ever be given a good name by the offended party. Taste in decorating is too close to one’s heart. My mother was once taken to task for her choice of curtain material by one of her own sisters.

  I’ll admit the print she’d picked out at Aunt Effie’s Fine Fabrics Shop was unfortunate, but it was on sale, and besides, Mama just loves daffodils. My baby brother, Boo, was a baby then, and Aunt Janey Sue blamed his stubborn colic on being surrounded by the jaundiced shade of yellow in the giant jonquils.

  Mama retaliated by saying that she’d never much cared for Janey Sue’s living room couch on account of the cheap vinyl upholstery which always made you sweat like a hog when you sat on it, even in the winter.

  Janey Sue said that the couch was genuine Naugahyde and cost a pretty penny. Mama came back with how she didn’t care whose hide it was or how much it cost, it was a fire trap and tacky besides, and if it was her couch, she’d leave it on the side of the road until some poor broke bastard took it off her hands.

  Long story short, those two didn’t speak to each other for a year. No sir, you should never criticize what a woman chooses to surround herself with in her own home. In fact, I do believe you would cause less of a fuss if you criticized a husband than if you criticized the couch he sat on.

  Miss Addie Lou, pushed to the brink, eyed Miss Inez’s oxygen tank darkly. “Why, I ought to light a match and watch you go up like a torch.”

  “Yeah, well, I ought to take that cane away from you and beat you like a rented mule!” Miss Inez growled.

  Lucy Belle stepped between them and said, “I ought to take the both of you and knock your heads together until you see stars, you pair of old battle axes!”

  I got out my brand new police whistle that Jess bought me when I was promoted to officer and blew it until all three of them covered their ears and my lips were turning numb. When I had their attention, I quit blowing and said, “Now, listen here to me, all y’all. Nobody’s going to knock heads or kick asses or set anybody afire while I’m her
e. Everybody just simmer down, now.”

  Miss Inez continued to rant as if I hadn’t said a thing. “I had wondered what happened to that quilt all these years. The last time I saw it, it was on my dear Mama’s deathbed. And then lo and behold, when I was over here t’other day, I saw it on the spare bed in yonder.”

  “So rather than asking me about it,” Miss Addie Lou hissed, “you sneaked back in here through the back door while my stories was on and you knew I wouldn’t be paying attention—on account of how this is the week that Dawn finds out who the father of her baby is on the Saturday re-runs of The Young And The Restless—and tried to steal it.”

  Lucy Belle turned to me. “It’s Victor’s. I’ll bet you anything.”

  “I’d put my money on Juan-Carlos, but that’s just me,” Addie Lou said.

  “You’re both wrong.” Miss Inez picked up her walker and pounded it back onto the floor. “It’s gonna turn out to be Joaquin’s. It looks like him around the eyes.”

  Lucy Belle rolled her own eyes. “Grandma, that’s not his real baby. That’s an acting baby.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Miss Inez looked a little embarrassed before getting back onto the main subject. “I don’t care whose baby it is. I deserve that quilt if for no other reason than Addie Lou tried to poison me with rancid rabbit here awhile back.”

  Me and Lucy Belle exchanged a look at this point. I couldn’t have heard that right. Maybe “Rancid Rabbit” was a Native American character in one of Miss Addie Lou’s soap operas. “Will somebody tell me what’s going on? I thought we were talking about a quilt.” I said.

  Miss Inez inclined her head toward her younger sister. “Ask her. It makes me right bilious every time I think about it. I’m getting all sour even now.”

  Lucy Belle, who stands about a head taller than me, bent down to whisper in my ear. “She’s as sour as a green persimmon most of the time, in actual fact.” She shook her head wearily with a long-suffering expression that you might have seen on the face of Job himself right about the time he was beset by all the sores. “It sounds like this situation has been simmering for quite a little while,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Miss Addie Lou, why don’t you just put down the cane and the figurine and start at the beginning. How did all this get started?”

  “Very well,” Miss Addie Lou said, lowering the cane and leaning on it. She’d been waving it around so much I had to wonder if she ever needed it to begin with. “It all started the other day when I asked my sister here to come over and have dinner. I had fried up a rabbit and made some biscuits and white pepper gravy to go with it.” She turned her attention back to Inez. “And you can’t say it wasn’t good.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty good eatin’,” Miss Inez admitted. “But then I wondered to myself where you got that rabbit. I mean, it had been a coon’s age since I’d had any rabbit or seen any for sale at the butcher’s department at the Piggly Wiggly. So I asked you. I said, ‘Where’d you get this here rabbit, anyway?’” Miss Inez turned to us with an indignant look. “And do you know what she said? She said, ‘Enloe Crump found it on the side of the road.’ Why, I like to have upchucked right then and there. My own sister was feeding me road kill!”

  “There weren’t nothing wrong with that rabbit!” Miss Addie Lou shot back. “Enloe said he’d seen it get hit by that car and it just had a glancin’ blow to the head. It would have been a shame to have let a perfectly good rabbit go to waste.”

  “Well, then why didn’t he eat it?” Miss Inez demanded. “He’s a deacon of the First Baptist church and makes plenty of money. Is it his idea of Christian charity to pick up road kill and take it to old widow women just like they don’t have anything better to eat?”

  Lucy Belle lost it. She bent from the waist, propping herself by one hand on the back of one of Miss Addie Lou’s matching, overstuffed wing chairs. She laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks. I must admit it was all I could do to keep a straight face. Lucy Belle finally looked up at her grandma, who was glaring at her, and then started laughing again.

  She started to wipe her eyes on the tail of her apron but must’ve remembered the hot chili pepper juice it was soaked in and went for the crocheted doily on the back of Miss Addie Lou’s chair instead. “Ahhh . . . “she groaned, like you will whenever you pull yourself together after a good giggling fit. Then she hiccoughed and started laughing again. I could tell she wasn’t going to be any help for a while.

  “It’s not funny,” Miss Addie Lou and Miss Inez said in unison.

  “Like I said,” Miss Inez complained. “My stomach’s not over it ‘til yet.”

  “If there’s anything wrong with your digestion, it’s because the acid of those chili peppers has done et through your stomach lining. Or maybe it’s because of the rot-gut ‘secret ingredient’ that ain’t quite as secret as you seem to think it is,” Miss Addie Lou jeered.

  Miss Inez started getting dangerously red in the face, and Lucy Belle patted her on the shoulder to try and calm her down. What Miss Addie Lou said was true. The fact that the chow-chow contained moonshine was the worst-kept secret in the county. You know that TV chef who talks about ‘kicking it up a notch?’ That moonshine gives that chow-chow a kick like a mule. ‘Bam,’ indeed. Miss Inez can show you ‘bam!’

  I cleared by throat and tried to get them back on the subject of quilt-napping. “So what happened then?”

  “I beat it to the bathroom because I was afraid I was going to be sick,” Miss Inez said. “And that’s when I saw that quilt on the bed in the spare room. The chenille spread she usually keeps on top of there to hide that quilt was out flapping in the breeze on the clothesline. She’d forgot to bring it in and put it back on that bed to hide that . . .” Here Miss Inez paused for effect. “Stolen property.”

  “You’ve got some nerve talking about stolen property! You took advantage of my hospitality to come in and case my home.” Miss Addie Lou turned to me. “If you shook her down right now, there’s no telling what else you might find that she may have took. Why, she might have my VCR in that backpack for all I know.”

  “I might as well,” Miss Inez huffed. “You ain’t got sense enough to use it. It’s been flashing twelve for the past ten years. At least I can program mine.”

  I looked wonderingly at Lucy Belle. She muttered under her breath just loud enough for me to hear. “No she can’t. Every time she tries to tape Matlock reruns, she winds up with Judge Judy.”

  “I heard that,” growled Miss Inez.

  “Grandma loves that Andy Griffith,” Lucy Bell said to me. “He reminds her of Grandpa.”

  “Your grandpa was a handsome man,” I said.

  “Wasn’t he, though?” Lucy Belle said.

  “Pat her down, I say,” railed Miss Addie Lou. “She might be armed.”

  “With what?” Lucy Belle demanded.

  “She used to carry Daddy’s pocket knife. The one with the hula girls on it.” Miss Addie Lou stamped her slipper-clad foot.

  I had a feeling that if I tried to ‘pat down’ Miss Inez, I’d have to call for backup. I looked at Lucy Belle, who was massaging her temples. “Damn, I wish I had some of that moonshine right about now,” she said.

  “I don’t want to have to arrest you too,” I said. “Try to get them back on the subject.”

  “Now, Aunt Addie Lou, you know it’s not necessary to search Grandma for weapons, not with you yourself letting fly with statuettes right and left. Let’s get back to that quilt. Tell us again when it was you say that Great Grandma said you could have it?”

  Miss Addie Lou paused to stoop down and pull up her thin Buster Brown socks. “She was on her deathbed with consumption when she was ninety-six. That’s when she gave it to me.”

  “Ha!” Miss Inez said. “Her mind had done gone bad right before that. You could have talked her out of anything. Why, she
tried to give her teeth to the preacher the last time he came.”

  “Huh?” Lucy Belle asked.

  Miss Inez waved her hand dismissively. “She knew she was on her way out. I guess she figured she’d just gum her grits from then on and some poor person might need her teeth more than she did.”

  “She was generous to a fault.” Miss Addie Lou agreed. She produced a faded handkerchief from her cleavage and dabbed at her eyes. “But she knew just what she was doing when she gave me that quilt.”

  “What’s so special about this quilt anyway?” Lucy Belle asked.

  Miss Inez smiled a bit. “It was made from the scraps of my little baby dresses, and a lot of the dresses I wore when I was growing up, all the way into my teenage years until I stopped growing.”

  “And my little baby dresses and all the dresses I wore,” Miss Addie Lou put in.

  “Which I take it were one in the same since you, Miss Addie Lou, would have worn Miss Inez’s hand-me-downs.” I said. I was starting to think that the old ladies’ problems with each other were more than quilt deep.

  Lucy Belle looked at me with one eyebrow raised. She was thinking the same thing I was. “So, it’s no wonder the quilt is so special to both of you,” she said soothingly. “Can Sandy and I see it?”

  Miss Addie Lou looked at each of us suspiciously, but finally agreed. Lucy Belle and I followed her into a back bedroom with Miss Inez clomping along behind with her walker. When we got there, Miss Addie Lou peeled back the chenille bedspread to reveal an ancient-looking quilt whose squares consisted of Sunbonnet Sue appliqués clothed in many different fabrics.

  Lucy Belle ran her fingers over the surface of the quilt. “Granny made this?”

  “Uh-huh,” Miss Inez said. “She did some of these appliqués back when you ironed back the seam allowances with a flat iron you had to heat over an open fire.”

  “It was a labor of love,” put in Miss Addie Lou with another dab at her eyes. She blew her nose real good and stuffed the hanky back down her lengthy cleavage.