Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  Now, I’d heard enough to know about the feud between Bigelowans and Mossy Creekites, but I received nothing but courtesy from those men. Maybe it’s because I was a transplanted Yankee and not a native Mossy Creekite. Maybe it’s because they couldn’t look into my eyes without seeing the truth of what I was saying. Or maybe it’s because there are some things even a long-standing feud stands aside for. Whatever the reason, they promised I would have everything I needed by the agreed-upon date.

  So I packed my bag, checked out of the hotel and went home.

  Tweedle Dee was frantically happy to see me, since he’d never been left alone before. I let him out, gave him fresh food and water, and got into a clean nightgown. He followed me from room to room, as if he didn’t trust me not to disappear again.

  I forced myself to heat up and eat a bowl of soup. Then I crawled into bed.

  Tweedle settled on the pillow beside my head. As I fell asleep, I felt him give my chin a little nibble kiss and heard him softly whistling “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

  I HOARDED MY strength like a miser over the next few weeks, and when help was offered, I didn’t turn it down.

  Sandy Crane came by and helped me clean the cottage. Or, rather, she cleaned and I helped by staying out of the way. Jayne came by with rolls from Beechum’s bakery, and shortbread cookies and chamomile tea from the Naked Bean. Pearl came by with new paperbacks and meals from Mama’s All You Can Eat Café.

  And Mac Campbell came by with the papers I needed to sign, assuring me he’d already taken care of the other things I’d asked of him.

  I didn’t see Amos Royden. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. Besides, from what Jayne and Sandy had told me, Amos had his own problems in the form of a close encounter with the furry kind.

  Finally, the evening came when I called Nadine. A hard phone call for both of us, but I was glad to talk to her one last time.

  THE PACKAGE FROM the sound studio arrived on the promised day. I called Mac, and he picked up the package and promised to mail the padded envelope I’d addressed to Nadine.

  That night, I packed a small bag with a clean nightgown, a change of clothes and two favorite paperbacks. I hung my favorite dress and the tiger-eye pendant on the closet door where they would be easy to find.

  The next morning, I called Sandy at the police station.

  “Morning, Laurie,” Sandy said.

  “Do you still have that extra set of keys I gave you?”

  There was a slight hesitation before she said, “We’ve got them.” Which made me wonder who had them.

  “Laurie? Is there something I can do for you?”

  “You could call the paramedics—and Dr. Champion, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  She didn’t ask me why. She didn’t have to.

  “Boo and Andy will be there as soon as they can,” Sandy said.

  “Thanks. Good-bye, Sandy.”

  I put down the phone and gathered my strength. I had one more good-bye to make.

  Tweedle Dee was silent when I opened his cage. He didn’t hop out as he usually did. He just politely stepped up on my offered finger. I lifted him up so that we could look at each other.

  “You’ve been a good friend, Tweedle Dee,” I said softly. “I wish I could have stayed around longer for you. But these are good people. You’ll do all right here.”

  As I started to lower my arm, he stretched his neck in order to give my chin a last nibble kiss.

  I put him back in his cage. As I closed the cage door, I heard Boo and Andy pulling into the driveway.

  SEEING HANK Blackshear heading toward me, I waited on the sidewalk outside the police station, dreading the conversation I’d already had a dozen times that day.

  “Afternoon, Amos,” Hank said.

  “Afternoon, Hank.”

  Hank scuffed his shoe on the hot summer sidewalk. “It was a nice service.”

  “Yeah.”

  “We were all pleased that her friend could make it down for the funeral.”

  “Yeah. Nadine is a nice lady.”

  “Mac said you asked him to play the bagpipes at the service.”

  “Laurie liked Celtic music. It wasn’t an Irish whistle, but it was the best we could do.” I waited, knowing the question I dreaded most was coming.

  “How’s Tweedle Dee?”

  Because Hank was Mossy Creek’s vet, I told the truth for the first time that day. “He’s grieving. He was all right, pretty much, for those few days she was in the hospital. I think he thought he was just visiting until she came back. But . . .” I sighed. “He stopped eating the day of the funeral. He just went into a corner of his cage and hasn’t come out since.”

  Hank shook his head sadly. “Little bird like that won’t last long once he stops eating.”

  “I know it.”

  “Have you . . . Have you thought about finding him another place to live?”

  I shook my head. “He’s all right where he is—at least until we know if he’s going to stay around.”

  “You need anything, you call me.”

  I just nodded, got into my Jeep and went home. I had already lost Dog that summer. I wasn’t going to give up on Tweedle Dee easily. I walked into my living room slowly. Not that it would make any difference. Crouching down in front of the cage, I said softly, “Hey, Tweedle Dee.”

  No response. Tweedle Dee just continued to face the back corner of his cage.

  “She wouldn’t have wanted you to grieve like this. She wouldn’t want you joining her so soon. It would break her heart to see you like this.”

  Nothing.

  Sighing, I stood up, went into the kitchen for a beer, then came back to the living room.

  Laurie had made five sets of the two CDs that contained her Tweedle Dee stories. One set had been mailed to her friend Nadine. One set, with a CD player Mac had purchased at her request, had gone to Jayne at the Naked Bean. Another set with CD player had gone to Magnolia Manor. Another, along with a CD player and all of her books, had been donated to the library. The last set hadn’t been specified for a particular person, so I’d taken them.

  I thought I understood now why she’d given me the CD of Celtic music at Christmas. Her way of sharing something of herself in the only way she felt she could under the circumstances.

  Nothing I could do about that, but . . .

  I went over to the table that held Tweedle Dee’s inheritance.

  She’d set up a trust fund for her little friend so that his new person wouldn’t have to worry about covering any vet bills down the road. Besides that, the inheritance was an Irish whistle and songbooks, a CD player . . . and a CD that was simply labeled, for Tweedle Dee.

  Setting down my beer, I opened the jewel case, put the CD in the player and turned it on.

  A few seconds of silence . . . then an Irish whistle playing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

  I looked over at the cage.

  No response from Tweedle Dee.

  I listened for a few minutes as one song followed another. Then I couldn’t listen anymore and walked out of the room.

  But I kept coming back during the evening to turn the CD on again.

  Disappointed that the little bird didn’t respond, I finally went to bed.

  The next morning, before I left for work, I turned on the CD. When I got home that night and went to give Tweedle Dee fresh food and water, I noticed the bird was still in the back corner, but there was a small bare patch on the spray of millet attached to the side of the cage, and there were seed husks in the food dish. Not many, but enough to give me hope.

  For the rest of the week, I turned on the CD before I left for work. Each evening, Tweedle Dee was still in the corner, still wouldn’t respond, but there were more bare patches on the spray of millet and more seed h
usks in the dish.

  On Saturday, I turned on the coffee maker before going into the living room to give Tweedle Dee fresh food and water. I turned on the CD, then went back to the kitchen for my coffee.

  By the time I got back to the doorway of the living room, the song was “The Water is Wide.” As the Irish whistle held a long note, I heard a soft, hesitant da-da, da-da, da-da sour note.

  I stayed where I was, out of sight. As the songs progressed to the Irish/Celtic tunes Laurie had learned more recently, there were no more whistling duets. But in the pauses between the songs, I heard the scratching of a beak selectively picking out seeds.

  Finally, when the CD ended, I heard a quiet, sad two-note chirrup, like a question that had been asked over and over again—and an answer was no longer expected.

  Setting my coffee mug on the floor, I slowly walked into the living room. Tweedle Dee, perched on his food dish, just watched me.

  I crouched in front of the cage.

  “Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dee is me,” said Tweedle Dee in a hesitant little voice.

  Smiling, I said, “Hey, Tweedle Dee.”

  Mossy Creek Gazette

  Volume III, No. 7 * Mossy Creek, Georgia

  The Bell Ringer

  When We Look At The Stars

  by Katie Bell

  There’s a legend in Mossy Creek that I’d like to share with newcomers before you read any further. This land belonged to the Cherokee Indians before we drove them out. Only a few Cherokee families managed to stay here. But that’s a story for another column.

  Legend has it that a pioneer girl was rescued from bandits by the Cherokees. The Indians took her in, named her Shooting Star, and claimed her as their own. She grew up as the chief’s favorite daughter, married a man of royal blood and together they ruled their tribe. She became a Beloved Woman, which is a title of great respect among the Cherokee.

  The night she died, a flock of tiny, bright-colored birds came down from the sky and settled in the trees. When night fell, instead of roosting, they began to chatter, flew across the full moon and disappeared. Some say they were singing as they escorted her soul to the land of her ancestors. I prefer to think she followed them into the sky and began dancing among the stars.

  The storytellers of Mossy Creek claim that’s where the children’s nursery rhyme, Twinkle, twinkle little star came from.

  I don’t know about that, but I can definitely tell you that there’s a lot happening in Mossy Creek this summer, and so maybe a little star-gazing can help us see the light.

  Chapter Twelve

  HOPE and MARLE

  “A friend is someone who knows the song in your heart and can sing it back to you when you have forgotten the words.”

  —Unknown

  MY NAME IS HOPE Bailey Stanton, and I’m the reason part of Mossy Creek no longer flows to the sea. When I was seventeen years old my father, Lucas Bailey, climbed into our farm’s bulldozer, drove it through the back woods to a beautiful, fairytale glen just above the old Bailey Mill Road and Bailey covered bridge and there destroyed the God-given Mossy Creek tributary our Bailey ancestors had named Bailey Branch. Until then Bailey Branch flowed south to southeast through the mountains of the Bailey Mill community before merging again with its mother, Mossy Creek, just past the Mossy Creek town limits at Hamilton Farm.

  “That branch is nothing but a lure for the innocent,” Papa announced when he sent the waters of Bailey Branch off into a wooded hollow to form Bailey Swamp. He hoped the branch would just fade into the earth, but it wept into that hollow with endless grief. Marle Settles and I had found each other and lost our hearts in its waters. In my mind, Bailey Branch cried for us.

  Just as Bailey Branch is a defiant daughter of Mossy Creek, the community of Bailey Mill is to the town of Mossy Creek as Brooklyn is to Manhattan—the no-nonsense cotton panties under a silk skirt. Like other Creekite burbs—Lookover, Yonder and Chinaberry—Bailey Mill has its own mindset, its own culture and traditions. Say I’m a Bailey Millite and people know you’d rather chew your own hand off than hold it out for help. Only a few hundred hardy, apple-loving souls are tucked into our ridges and hollows. Newcomers, like Ida’s “friend,” retired Lieutenant-Colonel Del Jackson, move here for the challenge and the mountainous beauty. Apples like cold, high views from majestic hillsides, and so do Millites.

  What’s not to love?

  The Bailey Mill community includes our famous Sweet Hope Apple Orchards, Inc., several fancy “barns” where we sell apples and apple products to thousands of visitors each fall, the historic Bailey grist mill, what’s left of Bailey Branch (a trickle through a swampy pond behind the big earthen dam my father built), Bailey Mill Road (a fading pioneer wagon trail) and finally, most notoriously, the Bailey Mill covered bridge, a fantastic local landmark the Mossy Creek Historical Society lists on its tour route. The bridge is more of a notorious curiosity than a dignified historical site, since it’s sat high and dry, a marooned ship on a dry mountain sea, for more than two decades.

  Thanks to me and Marle Settles making love beneath its sweet old timbers.

  “Bailey Mill Bridge has gone unwatered for twenty-two years,” I said today, then marked off the early September date on the calendar in the farm office overlooking the orchards. Shaking a little, I put my head in my hands. A plaque on my desk, given to me by my college-student twins, Joel and Samantha, and my late husband, Rev. Charles Stanton, swam in my vision.

  HOPE BAILEY STANTON

  PRESIDENT OF SWEET HOPE ORCHARDS

  THE APPLE OF OUR EYE

  The apple of their eye. Respected mother, wife, apple farmer. (And devoted daughter of Lucas Bailey, despite his stern control over my life after my mother died young.) A year ago Charles had turned to me in our front porch rockers one evening, put a hand to his chest and said in a pained voice, “My heart, Hope, my heart,” as if I held it, had always held it. I tried to save him, got him to Doc Champion’s over in town, then to the hospital down in Bigelow, but he was gone. Only in his early forties, and gone. I mourned him. I’d come to love Charlie, though not as much as he loved me. He was the best husband, the best father for her children a woman could want. I hadn’t wanted him, at first, but that had been my mistake, not his. Whether it’s people or apples, we Baileys have a history of loving slow and forever.

  I’m the fourth Hope Bailey named after the Sweet Hope apple since 1895, when my great-great-great grandmother, the first Hope, crossed a luscious Sweet Hush apple from our McGillan kin’s famous orchards, up in Chocinaw County, with a hard, tart Mossy Creek Thunker. The nationally famous Sweet Hush is a wonderful lady of an apple, while the Mossy Creek Thunker is the wild frontiersman of fruit—more than friendly with the wild mountain crabapples, and, according to proud Creekites, only good for two things: making apple liquor and throwing at somebody.

  “You want to know how to knock a grown man down with a Thunker?” my grandfather, Albert Hope Bailey, was fond of telling reporters from the regional travel magazines who came to write articles on Sweet Hope Orchards. “Give him a pint of Thunker brandy, or—” Grandfather Bailey would rear back with a sly twinkle in his Bailey blues—“hit him right between the eyes with the apple itself.”

  Like most unlikely but destined matings, the Thunker and the Sweet Hush mingled the best of themselves to produce the sturdy, delectable Sweet Hope, and the rest, as they say at the National Society of Apple Growers, is history. Generations of Sweet Hope apple harvests have made the Bailey orchards and mountain farm one of the most prosperous businesses in all of Bigelow County, and the weekend festivities at Sweet Hope Orchards draw thousands of free-spending tourists to greater Mossy Creek every fall from September to after Thanksgiving. Ida has threatened to shoot me if I ever close the orchards. Seriously, she knows I never would. No Bailey has ever been accused of deserting the Bailey legacy of Sweet Ho
pe. Even if it meant giving up the boy she loved. As I did, twenty-two years ago, when Bailey Branch went dry.

  After I marked the dark anniversary on my desk calendar, I bent my head lower and whispered the prayer I’d spoken at the end of every summer since I was seventeen.

  Please God, take care of Marle Settles and forgive me for still loving him. But this September I added a new line. And after I see him today please make him leave forever, this time.

  I OPENED MY EYES every morning for twenty-two years knowing that one day I’d go home to Hope. Not that I expected her to welcome me back, and I wouldn’t have blamed her if she told me to go fly my Piper Cub into the side of Mossy Creek’s Colchik Mountain. There were more than a few people in greater Mossy Creek who probably wished I had died along with my brother, Creighton, and more than a few who’d have trouble believing yours truly, Marle Settles, was now Lieutenant-Colonel Settles, decorated vet and newly retired fighter pilot, United States Marine Corp.

  But here I was, standing in the shadows of the Bailey Mill covered bridge where a 19 year old boy with a bad past and a shaky future had made love to the only person who’d never doubted him—Hope Bailey, named after a famous apple, the pride of the famous Baileys, an apple-pie girl. That boy—me, Marle Settles—thought giving her up had been the right thing to do. Looking back on it, I still say I did the right thing. Helluva note, being right but miserable for two decades.

  Now I listened to the dry silence, the rustle of ferns and weeds growing where the creek had once whispered to us. Water always finds its way back where it belongs, I told myself. And so will we.

  I heard footsteps in the leaves of the forest floor. A tall, auburn-haired woman stepped out of the woods and stood, silhouetted, framed by the trees, the mountains, the arching timber roof of the old bridge. An incredible sight. Hope Bailey Stanton—Charles’s widow, Joel and Samantha Stanton’s mother, my childhood love—was dressed in thigh-hugging faded jeans, a soft red sweater and an aura of September sunshine. She took a few halting, weak-kneed steps toward me.