Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different

by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb

  Katie rolled her eyes at me, then turned and batted her eyelashes at Jeremiah. I knew she was up to something ’cause her earlobe was getting worked over nice. “Oh, you. Just slip it in with the rest of your stock. No one will even notice. Consider it my wedding present.” She tilted her head and flipped her bouncy hair.

  Jeremiah turned about six shades of red. “Will do, Katie. And happy, uh . . . wedding.”

  Katie pulled me aside. “There,” she whispered, giving me a peck on the cheek before flitting away toward the wedding cake. “You may not get a letter from me that often, but you’ll hear from somebody!”

  Katie and Peter T. divvied up the cake and started handing out huge hunks of it. Cake—ugh. I tasted all that tobacco juice I’d swallowed rise up in the back of my throat. I ran over to the bushes and heaved so hard, I thought I might see my toes come flying out.

  Add to that list of things I’d lost:

  My lunch

  14

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when you’re

  duping tourists

  for cash money.

  Three days later, I trudged home from school and went straight to the room I now shared with just Mama. I lay sprawled across my bed, hand tucked under my mattress, fingertips barely touching the stick of dynamite that still lay in wait. I must’ve looked like a hyena that’d lost its laugh, because Mama came into our little nook of a bedroom, took one look at me, and said, “Winnie, you got to stop breathing water.”

  Mama uses all these sayings, but this one was new to me. “Come again?”

  “Your granny used to say that.” Mama smiled like she could hear her mama’s voice just then. She wrapped a quilt around my shoulders. “You don’t even notice the air you breathe. Until you have to breathe water.”

  I nodded, and we sat there all quiet for another bit. It was nice.

  “You’d be breathing water in Knoxville, wouldn’t you, Mama?”

  Mama nodded. “I’m afraid I’d breathe water anywhere but the Cove, Winnie.”

  I saw something then in Mama’s eyes I hadn’t noticed before: a small black spot, a tiny pool of sadness and worry. “You wanted this park, too, didn’t you? You and Pop and Gramps all wanted this.”

  Mama blinked several times, but the pool didn’t wash away. I knew I was right.

  “Gramps is breathing water, too.”

  Mama thought about that one for a moment. “Has been since your granny died.”

  Over Mama’s shoulder and out the front door, the leather britches beans we’d strung together at the Syrup Soppin’ Festival began to rustle. We’d carted them home from the festival and tacked them to the eaves of the front porch to dry. Now the wind scratched through them, and the dry strings of beans eked out a parched tune. The dust that’d gathered on them over the past few weeks blew off and danced in sparkly sunlit circles before disappearing.

  I finally ’fessed up. “Mama, I’m scared.”

  I expected Mama to tell me that the Lord will provide, to trust her and Pop, to stop acting like such a baby. But instead, Mama hugged me close. “I’m scared, too, Winnie.”

  Now, how it is that I felt better knowing that, I don’t know. I hugged her back. “Well, then, we’ll just be scared together.”

  The next day after school, Gramps dragged Cody and me halfway up Gregory Bald in search of chestnuts. The afternoon was cold and our feet crunched through piles of crackly brown leaves.

  We’d walked for nearly two miles and had seen nary a chestnut.

  “In my day,” Gramps grumbled, “chestnuts covered the ground this time of year. Why, they was so many of them . . .”

  I sighed. The old-timers were fond of telling us young’uns how many chestnuts there used to be. Blight swept through and killed most of the trees a decade or so back. You’d think chestnuts were chiseled from solid gold, the way they went on and on about them.

  Gramps paused, then commenced to suck his teeth. “They was so many chestnuts, you could get a running head start, jump atop the lot of them, and roll all the way to Gatlinburg.”

  I pictured Gramps as a boy (broader shoulders but same shriveled head) skating on a pile of chestnuts, bony elbows and knocky knees flying everywhere. The thought of it made me titter. Cody must’ve been thinking the same thing, because he laughed, too. I almost didn’t hear the snap of a twig behind us.

  “C’mere!” Gramps whispered. He grabbed my elbow in one hand, Cody’s in the other, and pulled us behind a huge birch. He pointed downhill at the broad, new hiking trail carving its way up the side of the mountain. “Tourists!”

  I peeked around the broad tree at the couple hefting themselves toward us. The man sported a bright orange vest with a thousand pockets, and a pair of binoculars swung from his neck. The woman wore a floppy straw hat and fanned herself with a store-bought map, though her breath showed in the cool air in tiny puffs.

  “My goodness, Philip,” she sniffed. Her voice came out of her nose instead of her mouth, seemed like. “Did we have to start on the trail marked ‘advanced’?”

  Gramps bent in half and pulled off his boots. “Quick—take off your shoes!”

  Cody shot me a look full of question marks, but I shrugged and kicked off my Mary Janes. Cody followed suit.

  Gramps tucked in a plug of tobacco, sucked his teeth, and ran his eyes over Cody and me.

  “Don’t say nothing. Nothing.” He popped out from behind the birch onto the trail and nearly scared the pants off the couple.

  “Howdy,” he mumbled, then spit right near their feet. The husband took a step backwards and almost fell over a tree root.

  “Oh, Philip, look!” the woman cried. “Mountaineers!” She caught sight of me and Cody, leaned over, and pinched my cheek so hard I thought I might have to pinch her right back. “Aren’t they cute?

  “Where are your shoes, sweetie-pie?” she yelled at me, like I didn’t understand English or something. I looked at Gramps.

  He shook his head. “She don’t talk, ma’am. Not since the accident.”

  Talks Through Her Nose sucked in a quick breath. “Accident? Oh, my!” She turned to Cody. “Your shoes?” she shouted at him, and pointed at his feet.

  Cody played along and danced a quick jig. Pretty funny, if you ask me.

  Gramps sighed real showy-like. “Well, he surely can’t talk neither, ma’am. He’s only nine.”

  Talks Through Her Nose gasped. She wheeled around and snapped her fingers at her husband. “Philip, give them some money. These poor children need shoes.” She waved her open hand in front of Philip until he laid three one-dollar bills in it. Three dollars!

  Gramps shook his head. “Oh, no thanky, ma’am. We surely can’t take no charity.” He was laying on his words extra thick. I could hardly understand him myself.

  “What?” Talks Through Her Nose yelled at him. “Oh, no charity! Yes, yes, I see. . . .” She tapped the side of her thick head like it took some jarring to move those dusty old thoughts around inside.

  “Ah, yes!” she shouted again at Gramps. “Can I pay you to take a picture with me? One dollar each? With a camera?” She made the motion of clicking a photo with her hands.

  Gramps shook his head. “Camera . . .?” Oh, boy. She had to feel her leg getting pulled now.

  But old Talks Through Her Nose snapped again at her hubby, who pulled a boxy Kodak from one of his many pockets. “A camera . . .” She showed Gramps the contraption. He shrugged.

  “He doesn’t understand you, Claire,” Philip chimed in, like Gramps wasn’t standing right there.

  But Talks Through Her Nose—Claire—was pushing us and shoving us and arranging us next to a mountain laurel bush. “You stand there, and you get right there . . . perfect!” She wriggled between me and Cody and pulled Gramps over behind me. “Say cheese—I mean, uh, smile!”

  Philip clicked the shutter and the flashbulb went off with a lightning-bolt pop.

  “A
rrrgghhhh!” Gramps growled, and jammed his fists in his eyes. “I’m blinded! You done blinded me with your devil box! Git! Git now! Git thee behind me, Satan!”

  Talks Through Her Nose and Philip hopped back down that mountain like two fleas trying to outrun a vinegar wash on a mangy mutt. The three of us bowled over laughing, me so hard I thought I might pee. Through my teary eyes, I saw the crisp dollar bills laying on the pine straw.

  Gramps balled up the money and stuffed it in the front pocket of his overalls. “Might be the only money we ever see from this park.”

  15

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when you haunt

  the Missionary

  Baptist Church.

  I began to think Gramps was deliberately trying to cheer me up, because the very next day he came in and grabbed me by my elbow, hefting me off my spot on the floor in front of the fire.

  “C’mon, girl, we got errands to run.”

  Errands? Gramps doesn’t run errands—things come to him.

  We loaded into the cart. I bundled under a wool blanket that carried the musty smell of horse. It was a cool day, but the sun shone down in yellow ribbons from a sky so big and so blue it made your eyes ache for something less dazzling. But finding that wasn’t as easy as it sounds. The trees had turned into a showy blaze of orange and red and yellow bursts—miniature suns, each one. Those durn trees! They put on this spectacle every year, and I swannee they get better at it with practice.

  Somebody on a nearby farm was burning leaves. There’s something about the dusty-dry smell of smoke rising off a pile of charred leaves that makes me think too much. So I usually don’t cotton to the scent, but today it seemed like the afternoon’s perfume.

  Gramps pointed a crooked, shaky finger at the puff of smoke. “It’s too big. Somebody doesn’t know what they’s doing, burning all them leaves at once.”

  We clip-clopped toward the now-black cloud of smoke and soon realized it was coming from the general area of the Missionary Baptist Church.

  “Dadburned CCC boys!” Gramps whipped the team of horses to speed them up. “Hee-yah!”

  When we got to the church, there was nary a soul in sight. The pile of leaves was burning near the cemetery. The danger wasn’t that the fire was too close to the church; the danger was that the fire was too tall. Way too tall. If it kept burning like it was, it’d stretch right up and start licking the dry leaves on the trees overhead. If those caught fire, there was no telling how far and how fast the flames could go. Maybe through the whole Cove.

  I ran to grab a bucket from the storage closet inside the church, then dashed to the pump and put my whole weight behind the up-and-down motion it took to draw off a pail of water. I hefted the full bucket back to the fire and dumped it at the edge of the leaf pile. A handful of leaves sizzled for a moment, then the fire crawled right around the small wet spot. This fire was hungry. And hot.

  Gramps had found a rake and was reaching into the flames, thinning out the pile of leaves so the fire couldn’t climb as high. It was working, but not fast enough. He threw the rake at me and yelled, “Spread ’em as thin as you can! Don’t get burnt!”

  And then I saw something I’ll never forget if I live to be a hundred and two. Gramps began stomping the blaze like a crazed clogger. What a sight—Gramps dancing through flames like the devil hisself against the stark white outline of the Missionary Baptist Church. Heaven and hell, right here in Cades Cove!

  I threw the head of the rake into the blaze, then pulled it back toward me, flattening the fiery pile of leaves. I was careful not to let the handle catch fire. It couldn’t’ve been hotter if I was standing on the face of the sun. The flames lapped at my elbows, and every once in a while, I had to leap backwards to keep from getting a fiery kiss on the cheek.

  After a bunch of sweating and (Heaven help us for doing it on the church grounds) cussing, we finally got the leaves spread out thin enough. The fire dwindled to a few spitting flames. It was only at that point that we heard the hardy-har-har of a group of boys around the side of the church.

  Gramps and I looked around the corner, him wheezing and sweating to beat all. Huddled there was a group of boys, including that uniformed nose honker hisself, Jonathon Parker.

  He had his penknife out and was carving something. We stumbled closer.

  Jonathon loves Mary 4-ever

  Scratched into the side of our church! Jonathon thumped a fellow CCCer on the back and offered up his knife.

  “Carve it up now, boys. This place is going to be seen by millions!”

  If Gramps was even a hair as mad as I was, he didn’t show it. Instead, he stepped forward, sucking his teeth.

  “You boys sleeping in the church tonight?” he asked, patting the side of the building like a loyal old dog.

  Jonathon and the rest of the CCC crew startled at his voice, but Jonathon straightened quickly. “Yep. Me and the boys”—at this, he twitched his thumb at the others—“we’ve got lots more work to do in this area before the park opens. Need to make it presentable, you know?”

  Gramps clicked his tongue and shook his head. “Mighty sorry to hear it, boys. Last fella to spend a full night in here was Otis Plunk. Old Otis went loopy and hanged hisself from the rafters.” Gramps jerked a pretend noose around his neck and made a gagging sound in the back of his throat.

  “That was back in . . . aught five, I reckon. Still haunted, she is,” he said, patting the wall again.

  The CCC boys shifted a little in their khaki pants.

  “Mean old haint, too. Otis’s ghost, he tries to slip a noose around ever’ neck that bares itself after midnight in this church. Killed three, maybe four others.”

  Then Gramps clapped. “Well, sleep tight, boys!” He spun on his boot heel and marched away.

  I followed, and heard Jonathon behind me say, “Don’t listen to that old-timer. He’s all wet!”

  I felt as unsettled as a pot of boiling water. “Gramps!” I yelled, and ran to catch up with him. “I got a real beef with that fella. Care to help me get his goat?”

  A wide yellow grin stretched across Gramps’s craggy face. “What you got in mind, girl?”

  We returned to the church near midnight, with Cody in tow. Those hooligans must’ve talked themselves out of being fearful of any haints, because the church was dark as coal, and the lot of them was snoring to beat all.

  Without so much as a peep, I led Jeb, our mangy old bloodhound, off the back of the wagon. He blinked at me with soft, trusting eyes. I scratched his graying nose. Drool dripped off his long jowls.

  I do things different. It helps to remind yourself of that when you’re about to turn loose an overweight, flatulent mutt in the Lord’s house.

  “Don’t step on nobody, okay, Jeb?”

  Cody and I shoved his rear end up the five steps leading to the church, and good old Jeb plodded directly inside. We scurried behind the maple out front where Gramps was already hiding. Us three could hear Jeb’s toenails scratch across the pine plank floor in the church, then a bunch of rustling and snorting and huffing.

  “Sweet Mary, Mother of Jesus!”

  “It’s Otis Plunk!”

  “Spare us, Mr. Plunk! Spare our souls!”

  That did it. Old Jeb started baying like he knew this was his one shot to sing in church. And whenever that dog bays, he farts. We could hear him passing that awful gas of his all the way outside. And then we could smell it—boy oh boy, could we smell it! Before anybody could light a lantern to see that this angel of death was just an ancient bloodhound, that church door flew open and a parade of pajamas streaked across the lawn.

  A scrawny pair of red long johns appeared in the doorway, supported by the two bony shoulders of Jonathon Parker. At first, I was disappointed because he wasn’t crying, wasn’t cussing, wasn’t even blanched.

  But when Gramps set eyes on him, he doubled over and laughed so hard he started to wheeze.

/>   Cody pointed at the dark red spot running down the inside of Jonathon’s leg, growing bigger and darker by the second.

  I couldn’t help myself. I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled, “Hey, Jonathon—who’s all wet?”

  16

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when you play host

  to the president of

  these United States.

  The next time I saw Gramps’s lawyer—the bow-tie-wearing Mr. Polk—was the end of November. He and Gramps ducked into the barn, so I followed. I hovered in the hayloft, so I could hear everything down below. (I just prayed I wouldn’t sneeze.) They whispered all hush-hush, but I overheard just enough.

  “It’s no use, Mr. Tipton. I can’t file a single injunction without Chapman’s team of lawyers from Nashville stomping it flat with an opposing injunction. If we don’t drop our lawsuits, they’re going to sue you and your neighbors right back.”

  “Sue us? What the devil for?”

  “They’re claiming eminent domain, which means—”

  “I know what it means.”

  “—which means the federal government can buy any piece of land it needs for a fair price.”

  “They ‘need’ our land, eh?”

  Mr. Polk cleared his throat. “For the park to be a success, yes. It’s the most beautiful land I’ve ever seen, Mr. Tipton.”

  Gramps was silent. A first, I believe.

  Mr. Polk continued. “As you know, park officials are offering to allow you and your neighbors the opportunity to lease the land back from the government and stay in the Cove. That’s certainly a first. I doubt they would’ve offered that if you hadn’t hired me.” I felt myself growing hotter and hotter at this snotty Mr. Polk.

  Gramps snorted. “Pay rent to farm our own land? A dollar an acre. Mighty steep.”

  “Well . . . yes. But I suggest we cease further legal action or they might withdraw that offer, too.”