Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  I took the same toward her. We stopped at the same time.

  “Let’s keep some root room between us,” she said in a shaky voice.

  She still talked in apple metaphors. All Baileys did. I slid my hands in the pockets of my khakis and tried to look like a man who’d flown in battle many times without breaking a sweat or rattling words. “Your voice is the same.”

  She put a hand to her heart. “So is yours.”

  “I hope not. I sounded like a hillbilly when you made me read books out loud to you.”

  “You had a deep, beautiful drawl and a way with words that had nothing to do with good grammar. You spoke from the heart. And I loved—” She stopped. Her hand clenched over her heart, squeezing my heart along with hers.

  We looked at each other in the pieces of light and shadow that made the old bridge feel like a doorway between this world and memories. She was nearly forty and still the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen in my life. I was just over forty but felt nineteen again.

  “I spent years wondering how this would feel,” I said finally.

  “So did I.”

  “I was sorry to hear about Charlie. I swear to you. Sorry.”

  “It’s been a year. How long have you known?”

  “A year.”

  Silence. With two words I’d exposed the fact that I’d kept close tabs on her life. Her expression froze. “I should have known Ida would let you know.”

  “Incredible lady. I stayed in touch with her—and she let me.”

  “I know,” Hope said. “I asked her to send you things.”

  Now the surprised silence belonged to me. I had scrapbooks full of mementos Ida had mailed to me wherever I was stationed over the years—articles from the Mossy Creek Gazette about Hope Bailey Stanton, CEO of Sweet Hope Orchards, Inc., pictures of Joel and Samantha when they won some award or trophy at school and casual snapshots of them grinning alongside Hope as she and they worked in the orchards during the colorful fall apple season. My throat tightened. “Thank you,” I finally said.

  By then, Hope was knotting her hands in her sweater, as if holding onto her control for dear life. “It was only right. And Ida was glad to help. She knew you weren’t to blame for what Creighton did to her husband.”

  Inside, deep down where the boy who had been Creighton Settles’ younger brother still lived, I flinched. Creighton had gone down in local history as the reason Ida Hamilton Walker’s legendary husband had died in a helicopter crash up on Colchick Mountain. And I had gone down in local history as the boy who tracked his own worthless brother down and brought him to justice.

  More silence. One heartbeat, then two. Hope studied me with tears in her eyes. I nearly moved toward her again, but she stood at attention, warning me off. “Why have you come back now?” she whispered.

  “I want to make my family’s name good here, again.” I took my eyes off her long enough to indicate the majestic bridge of chestnut logs and creek stone. “When my great grandfather was hired to build this bridge for your great grandfather, the Settles name was respected.”

  “You have nothing to prove. I always told you that. Families fall on hard times. People understand that.”

  “Not the people who warned me to leave the county after Creighton—”

  “Those people don’t matter. There are always a few rotten apples, even in the best barrels.”

  “Your own father was one of them. And he was right to want me gone.”

  “Marle. Marle.” She said my name for the first time in twenty-two years, once with soft rebuke, the next with a harder tone. Regardless, the sound of my name on her lips made me dizzy. I held out a hand. “I want to buy this piece of land from you. The bridge, the old creek bed, a few acres around it. I want to build a house here. I want a home, here. But it’s your decision.”

  “You’re asking me to make an impossible choice.”

  “I’ll give you as much time as you need to decide. And if the answer’s no, I’ll leave without an argument.”

  She made a hoarse sound. “I’ve left this bridge the way my father wanted it, high and dry, for a reason. No amount of water can wash away the consequences—”

  “I’m not asking you to baptize me in Bailey Branch so I can start over as if nothing else mattered.”

  Hope studied me with an intensity that made my knees weak. “You’ll leave if I tell you I believe it’s best?”

  “Yes.”

  She held onto the creek stone piling, braced her legs, sagged a little. “You don’t deserve to be cast out again—”

  “Consult with your children about it. Tell them an old friend of yours and Charlie’s wants to be your neighbor again. That’s the truth.”

  She shut her eyes for a moment. “I’ll talk to them.”

  I turned to leave.

  Hope spoke very quietly. “Because they’re your children, too.”

  I took a second to make sure my voice was okay. I have this stupid thing about upholding the tough-ass image of the military. “That’s one of the secret joys of my life,” I said finally. “But I never want them to know it.”

  She began to cry. The Hope Bailey I remembered would rather be barbecued than seen crying.

  I left before I cried, too.

  THAT NIGHT, TOSSING in the big applewood bedstead Charlie carved as a gift for our twentieth anniversary, I pressed the sweet, raw cider from memories of Marle I had tried to forget.

  We were no more than ten years old, laying flat on our stomachs on the floor of the covered bridge, watching through a crack as the silver water of Bailey Branch swirled below us. “I’m gonna follow the water all the way to the other side of the world some day,” Marle drawled. Bold talk for a poor boy who lived in a rusty house trailer with his mean, sleazy, teenaged brother and a half-crazy old grandma who drank too much. But I believed in him. I was bound to earth. He had the sky in his eyes.

  “You’re not going anywhere, “I announced firmly. “You pick apples for my daddy and that means you belong to me, and when we grow up I’ll marry you and you’ll stay right here.”

  He turned somber, silver-blue eyes on me beneath golden brown hair. “I ain’t no apple farmer. I’m going to fly planes. Mr. Walker down at Hamilton Farm says he’ll teach me. He’s gonna take me out to his air strip and teach me to fly crop dusters and Pipers and even his helicopter. So someday I’m gonna fly along the path of this here creek all the way to the ocean, and out to the great beyond.” He took a deep breath, then finished, “And you’ll belong to me, and you’ll sure enough have to come along wherever I say.”

  “I can’t leave my apples! I’m named after them! I’m Sweet Hope Bailey!”

  “I’ll marry you and then you’ll be Sweet Hope Settles. So you can sneak off, and your apples ain’t gonna know it was you that left.”

  That argument made no sense, but I was flattered anyway. I punched him on one shoulder like a kiss. We grinned and went back to watching the creek.

  Another memory: I was seventeen and he was nineteen. We were naked and wrapped in each other’s arms on an old patchwork quilt. Overhead, the mossy timbers of the covered bridge made a bower of spring shadows. The bridge had been our sanctuary and secret meeting place for so many years, it seemed only right that we should make love there the first time. I was scared and happy and full of plans for the future. Marle held me tightly against his chest and whispered, “You okay? You sure?”

  I looked up at him and smiled. “I’m a woman now. You’re a man. We’re together. I feel perfect.”

  “Good. Will you marry me?”

  I sat up, hugging a corner of the blanket over my breasts, suddenly shy, then smiling. “We’ve been engaged since we were kids. Of course you’ll marry me!”

  He feigned a frown. “Now, hold on, you’ve got that backward. I do the
asking and you do the accepting. I don’t pick apples for your Papa anymore. I’m a certified pilot and a newly accepted college boy, going to Georgia famous Tech to be an aviation engineer, and I do the engagement asking.”

  I punched him on the shoulder, and he laughed. I kissed him. “You belong to me and my apples,” I whispered, “and that’s all that matters.”

  Giving a dramatic sigh that became a soft, deep sound of pleasure, he made love to me, again. It was one of the happiest days of my life, his life, our life.

  Another memory: “Hope! Hope, where are you!” Charlie Stanton yelled like a Banshee as he leapt out of the Stanton family van and ran inside the apple barns later that same summer. I was knee-deep in empty apple baskets, counting the supply and trying to decide how to tell Marle my period was two weeks late. Not to mention telling Papa. No, Marle and I would get married, first, then tell Papa. Problem was, Papa didn’t realize Marle and I were more than princess-and-the-peasant friends. Bailey girls didn’t marry the hired help. Even the former hired help who was going to college. Thunder rumbled outside the big barn, and a high wind raked the orchards. The air smelled of tornadoes. I looked up weakly, feeling a little sick at my stomach. “Hi, Charlie. What’s up?” Charlie, Marle and I had been friends since first grade at Mossy Creek Elementary. I couldn’t muster much curiosity about his harried entrance. Charlie was always intense.

  Charlie slid to a stop, breathing hard. “Gimme . . . a second.” He pulled an asthma inhaler from his jeans’ pocket and took a quick drag on it. Charlie was tall and gawky, the only son of a smart, thoughtful family over in town. His father was the minister of Mossy Creek Methodist, and Charlie was headed for Methodist college to follow in his father’s footsteps. The second the inhaler took effect, he leaned down and grabbed me by the shoulders. “About an hour ago, Creighton robbed Hamilton’s Department Store.”

  I dropped an apple basket. “Oh, no.” After years of trouble with the law, serving time in juvenile lock-ups before graduating to state prisons, Marle’s older brother had finally hit the big-time. “Has Chief Royden caught him?” Battle Royden would make Creighton wish he’d never been born.

  “No. Hope, he stole a car down in Bigelow and two county sheriff’s deputies chased him up on Colchick. They ran off the road up there at Big Sky Overlook. Their patrol car was totaled. They were hurt bad. Creighton got away. They say he’s hiding somewhere up on Colchick.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I stood. “We have to find Marle. Jeb Walker sent him down to Bigelow to pick up a part for one of the planes. He’s probably almost back to Hamilton Farm by now.”

  Charlie trembled. “Listen to me. You don’t understand. Chief Royden needed help getting those injured deputies out of the ravine. Jeb Walker flew his helicopter up there in a thunderstorm. He airlifted the deputies to the road. They’re going to be fine. But . . . but Hope…the wind caught his helicopter. It crashed. He’s dead. Jeb Walker is dead. Because of Marle’s brother.”

  I swayed. My cousin Ida’s husband, the handsome and beloved and respected Jeb Walker. Dead. Because of Creighton Settles. Jeb Walker had been Marle’s idol. A combination of father-figure and adopted big brother. The news swirled in my head, making me dizzy. Jeb Walker was dead, and Marle’s brother was the reason.

  “I have to find Marle,” I said.

  Charlie shook his head. “I’m trying to tell you. Marle got the news already, and he’s gone into the mountains to track down Creighton. He said he’s going to kill him.”

  By the time Charlie and I got up to Big Sky Overlook—a wide parking area along the sheer edges of a two-lane that wound up and over Colchik Mountain—two dozen police cars, ambulances and forest-ranger trucks lined the high mountain road. Gusts of wind bent the fir forest and twisted the old hardwoods. Massive, dark clouds scudded through the peaks, and silver mists filled the valleys below. Somewhere deep in the fog along the boulders and laurel of the ravine below us lay the pieces of Jeb Walker’s helicopter.

  I saw grown Creekite men crying, tough men I’d known all my life. “Ida got here before he died. She kissed him while he took his last breath,” one of them told the others. “She said she could breathe for him if he’d just let her.”

  “Little Rob’s only ten years old,” another said. “He’ll never get over losing his daddy this way. He saw him. Saw him on the stretcher all . . . broken. Poor little feller nearly went crazy. Held onto Ida like he was protecting her from the sight, and all the time she was trying to cover his eyes with her hands.”

  I threw up in the roadside bushes then staggered to Chief Royden’s squad car. Marle, bloody and bruised, sat in the back with his head bowed and his eyes shut. Creighton had nearly beaten Marle to death when he tried to bring Creighton in. I knelt in the open doorway. “Marle.” He opened his eyes as if he couldn’t quite focus on me. I took his bloody face between my hands. “Marle.”

  He pulled my hands into his, curled them away from him. “Stay away,” he said hoarsely. “Get away. I mean it. You can’t be seen with somebody like me. A Settles.”

  “Don’t talk crazy. I don’t care what anyone thinks. You’re not to blame for what happened.”

  “I took a pistol away from Creighton. I shot him.”

  A big, gentle hand clasped my shoulder from behind. Dazed, I turned and looked up at Chief Royden. To me he had always been a John Wayne kind of man. My father lived by the books—the Farmer’s Almanac, the accounting ledger, the family Bible. But Chief Royden didn’t do anything by the book. Any book. There was a little bit of larceny in him. “What Marle did was self defense,” he said. If Battle Royden said one brother was justified for killing another in Mossy Creek, it was so.

  I felt a temporary rush of relief. “Sir, I want to go with Marle to the hospital. There are some things I need to tell my Papa, and tell Marle—”

  “I have a bad feeling whatever you have to say ought to wait a year until you’re eighteen and legal.” He pulled me out of the way and shut the patrol car’s door between Marle and me.

  I looked back at Marle desperately. I was his girl. His woman. He’d get out of the car and fight for me and his own self-respect, the right to have Hope Bailey believe in him. So what if he’d shot his own brother for being a no-account? So what if Creighton was responsible for injuring two Bigelow County Sheriff’s deputies and causing Jeb Walker’s death in a helicopter crash?

  I loved Marle and Marle loved me. We could still have a life among Creekites who revered Jeb Walker. We could still tell Papa we were getting married. We could still birth the next generation of Bailey Mill’s Sweet Hope apple farmers. The creek waters still ran under our sacred bridge.

  “Marle,” I called, crying.

  He stared straight ahead, bloody and beaten up by his own brother in a fight to the death, having served justice, but at a terrible price. He didn’t lift a finger to stop Chief Royden from leading me away. I knew why, and so did he. No Settles would be welcome in Mossy Creek or Bailey Mill after that day. Marle believed that, and there was nothing I could do to change it.

  I should have told Marle I was pregnant. But he couldn’t stay and I, being a Bailey, couldn’t leave.

  You have a twin son and daughter, I wrote to Marle a year later. He’d given up on college and joined the marines. I tracked him down at a base on the west coast.

  I named them Joel and Samantha. He has your eyes. She has my hair. I have married Charlie and we let everyone believe they’re his children. Papa figured out the truth and I confessed to Ida, but no one else knows. Charlie loves them and me, but we’ve agreed on what’s the right thing to do. Say the word now and we’ll tell Samantha and Joel who their father is as soon as they’re old enough to understand. We’ll tell everyone in Mossy Creek and Bailey Mill and the whole world, too. Say the word. They’re your children. I wanted to tell you before you left, but I knew you couldn’t stay and I co
uldn’t go. Papa is having trouble with his heart again and I’m managing the farm.

  Marle wrote back. His letter was this short.

  “Our kids deserve better than my name. And so do you. Tell Charlie I’ll never try to take his place. I love you and I love the babies without even knowing them, but that’s how it ought to stay until some day when I can just be their friend, and yours.”

  Just their friend. And just mine. To me, the world is one big apple tree and every one of us is trying hard to bloom. Either we grow an apple, or we shrivel up and die. You harvest your love, or you don’t. And there is no such thing as just friends.

  Memories. Miseries. I finally fell asleep in the bed Charlie made for me. But I dreamed guilty dreams of Marle, of making love to him beneath the covered bridge at Bailey Branch, and I dreamed of lost hope and of lost Hope, the naïve girl I had been. My conscience whispered to me as I slept.

  Send Marle away for the sake of your kids, who don’t suspect the truth. You’re the apple of their eye, but so was Charlie. You owe it to Charlie to let them go on thinking he was their father.

  But Marle deserves a chance to know them. They’ll accept him as just a friend of this family.

  Too risky. You’re being selfish. You want him to stay because you still love him.

  Shut up, you apple-worm of a conscience.

  Just after dawn, I got dressed and went to see Ida.

  She was the only living person in greater Mossy Creek who knew my twin apples hadn’t fallen far from Marle Settle’s tree.

  MOST WOMEN MY age would be happy to look like Ida Hamilton Walker at her age, which is nearly twenty years older than me. It’s almost unnerving the way she looks at almost sixty; there have been more than a few whispers over the years about hunting for shriveled-up portraits of her in her attic. The Hamilton clan have auburn-haired good-looking genes like their Bailey cousins, but maybe it’s something about living in Mossy Creek, too. Something in the water, so to say. Or maybe it’s her timeless talent for keeping the rest of us invested in life.