Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  “You’re got a tough Thunker-apple soul,” Ida said as her housekeeper, Jane McEvers, ushered me into the study at Hamilton Farm. “I wondered if you’d come to see me yesterday, after meeting Marle. But no, you sweated out the night, thinking about what’s the right thing to do before you came to ask me for my opinion. You have Thunker strength of character. That’s why you’re my favorite baby cousin.”

  “You say that to all your baby cousins.”

  “Yes, but in your case, I mean it.” Ida smiled beneath somber green eyes. Her auburn hair was pinned up in a swoop of tortoise-shell combs and her tall, curvy body seemed both stately and alluring in a silk kimono Del Jackson had given her. I suspected the retired army colonel had given her other bedroom-related gifts, but she’d have threatened to shoot me if I asked her to confirm that. People whispered that Ida wasn’t serious about him, but Ida was always serious about her men. I sank down in an overstuffed leather chair and shook my head when she offered me a shot of bourbon with my tea. “Not before breakfast.”

  “Then I’ll tell Jane to bring you a biscuit and sliced ham. Voila. Breakfast.”

  “Okay, so I’ll have the bourbon. I was only trying to feign respectability.”

  “Naturally. You’re a Bailey.”

  “That feels like an insult.”

  “No, just a warning. A person should always celebrate her family’s best traits but never forget their worst ones. You Baileys tend to be prudish, then overreact and throw out the babies with the branch water.”

  That remark hit below the belt. After a quick, tearful blink or two, I inhaled sharply and recovered. “I took care of my children the best way I knew how. By keeping them at Bailey Mill. I wanted Marle to stay, too, but he felt he had no future there. Maybe he was right. What should I have done differently? And don’t say I should have followed him, because he didn’t want me to follow him. He had to go off and prove his worth all by himself.”

  “You think I don’t understand that? Hah. You’ve just identified the best and the worst trait of the Hamiltons as well as the Settles family. Pride. But what do you really know about Marle’s people?”

  “I know his great grandpa was the only special one. At least, that’s what Marle always said when we were kids. He didn’t like to talk about it.” I paused. “To me, Marle was the special one, but I never convinced him to believe that.”

  “Well, let me tell you, then. Marle’s great grandfather was a Cherokee Indian. His family stayed in these mountains despite all the government’s efforts to send them out west when the rest of the Cherokees were driven away. Like the Halfacre family over in town, they sat down on their native land and wouldn’t budge. They’d been settled here forever, they said. Half of them died fighting the army during the removal and a few, I’m sorry to say, were killed by white pioneer families around here.

  “My great grandparents knew Marle’s great grandfather as Settin’ Down Joe. His Cherokee-white name. Settin’ Down Joe was a master carpenter and it was him who turned the big log cabin here on this spot . . .” Ida jabbed a long, clear-polished nail at the Turkish rug, “. . . into the Victorian showplace it became by the turn of the century. By then Settin’ Down Joe was known as Joe Settles, a Creekite of means and respect. He built most of the bridges in Mossy Creek, including yours up at Bailey Mill. He owned a fine home, property, the Settles sawmill. He had a beloved wife from a good family—who happened to be white. No one threatened him or his mixed-race children. It took a will of steel and more courage than most of us will ever have for Joe Settles to stay here and fit in and prosper.”

  Ida sighed. “But it was that same tough pride that led his son, Marle’s grandfather, Payson Settles, to reject anything that smacked of ‘charity’ after he lost a leg in a sawmill accident in the nineteen-twenties. That wonderful, terrible Settles’ pride ruined their family. Marle’s grandfather wouldn’t accept help so he lost the sawmill, lost all his money, lost the family homestead, his wife left him, his children began to run wild—everything went wrong. That was the beginning of the end for the Settles’ dynasty in Mossy Creek. Hard times bring out the worst in people, and the Settles became a perfect example of that.”

  “Until now,” I said quietly. “Marle intends to redeem his family name.”

  “Yes. And he will. I don’t doubt it.”

  Jane delivered sliced ham and a biscuit the size of my hand. Ida doused my steaming cup of tea with liquor the color of old wood. I sipped the potent brew in silence. After Jane left us alone in the study behind discreetly closed double doors, Ida ordered, “Eat, drink, be merry.” Then she moved around the elegant office as if she’d forgotten I was there. She straightened paperwork for Hamilton Farm’s dairy operation atop a gilt-edged desk and flicked dust motes off a wall filled with framed commendations from various civic groups for her work as mayor of Mossy Creek over the past two decades.

  I was dutifully swallowing a bite of ham washed down with bourbon tea when she stopped before a large, framed, black and white photograph from the late 1960s. A handsome, dark-haired man in khakis and a black aviator’s jacket smiled at her. The jacket hung around his shoulders with one sleeve free for the white sling that held his right arm. He smiled despite the injured arm and the fact that he was standing among the wreckage of his favorite small plane. In the background, several hundred fat dairy cows grazed the pastures of Hamilton Farm, and Colchik Mountain towered in the distance.

  The cocky, injured pilot was Jeb Walker, and he was smiling at 25-year-old Ida Hamilton, who had found him and his downed plane in her cow pasture the day after she graduated from college and returned home to take charge of the Hamilton businesses. Her father had just died. Her mother was long dead. Ida was whispered to be too young and reckless to run the farm, the department store and the Hamilton real estate holdings. The last thing she needed was public consternation over her private life.

  That fact never stopped her from loving Jeb Walker the second she pulled him from the wreckage and he kissed her as a thank-you.

  Jeb, the notorious, 30-ish son of a wealthy Savannah family down on the Georgia coast, had been an Air Force pilot and was a decorated vet of the Korean War. He owned five high-powered stunt planes and was on his way to yet another air show or wild adventure who-knew-where. Then the sky bluntly dropped him into Ida’s hands, and she refused to give him back.

  Ida had already proved her ability to get what she wanted and protect what was hers. She’d bested her graspy, much-older sister, Ardaleen, for control of the family’s Mossy Creek legacy—no small victory, considering that Ardaleen had married into the powerful Bigelow clan and was already the mother of a smug little baby boy named Hamilton Bigelow, the future governor of Georgia. The Ida-Ardaleen war had raged through the courts, the newspapers, the whispered waterfalls of local gossip—in essence, through the heart, soul and divided loyalties of every related Hamilton/Bigelow family in Bigelow County. But finally Ida had come out on top—to the joy of Creekites who detested Bigelowans. Her fellow small-town citizens immediately began to refer to her as “Big Miss Ida,” the title her legendary grandmother had worn as a title of respect.

  Jeb Walker, with his courage, his money, his charm and his utter devotion to passions he embraced—which immediately included Ida and her entire realm—was no less and no more than a perfect match. That first Creekite-kingdom photograph of him said it all: The intense expression in his eyes showed he’d found where he belonged and who he belonged to, and that “who” was only a few feet away, in jeans and a tie-dyed silk blouse, flirting with him as she snapped his picture.

  Ida married him two weeks later. For more than a decade, they ruled as the royal couple of the mountains—not just Mossy Creek, but all the Southern mountains, from Georgia to Virginia. Ardaleen and no other Bigelow even came close in terms of sheer popularity and personal charisma. Rob was their crown prince, their darling; with baby Rob in tow
, Ida ran the businesses while Jeb flew everything from crop dusters to experimental gliders to rescue helicopters. He saved at least a dozen Creekite lives over the years—helping the forestry service search for lost hikers, airlifting the sick and injured to the hospital down in Bigelow. No man was more willing to fly into a bad situation if someone needed his help. He always made it back to Ida’s earth-hugging arms, until Marle’s brother robbed Hamilton’s, two county deputies crashed in a ravine up on Colchik and Jeb flew his helicopter there to help them. Creighton Settle’s crime brought Jeb up the mountaintop on a day full of storms and fate. It was as if the sky had always planned to take him back from Ida.

  And it did.

  After Jeb died, we all feared she’d kill herself within the first year. If she hadn’t had Rob to think of, I believe she wouldn’t be here, now. In a way, Mossy Creek helped save her. In the middle of her worst grief, our high school burned down. As everyone knows, the circumstances were bizarre and there were wild rumors attached. The loss of the school threw the whole town into civic chaos. There was dire talk of no one running for mayor that next year; of the town’s franchise being revoked by the state legislature, of The Creek, as people called Mossy Creek combined with its four outlying communities, being dis-incorporated to await a terrible future when its big, bloated sister-city of Bigelow would annex the unallied Creekites like a snake eating scattered chicks.

  Ida stood up at a town hall meeting and said, to put it simply:

  Not as long as there’s breath in my body.

  She pulled us all together. She ran for mayor and won the election with 97 percent of the vote. (One percent went to Elvis and two percent went to Jesus—a Creekite electoral tradition.) Ida had found a calling big enough to keep her focused on living. She made Mossy Creek her lover, husband and second child. Rob made the town his mission in life, too, though I have never understood why salvaging Hamilton’s Department Store helped him cope with his father’s death. It was as if he had to take charge of the place that had played a part in the crime that led Jeb into the stormy sky above Colchik.

  The swirl of memories made me dizzy. I finished choking down a section of breakfast biscuit and ham, took another deep swallow of liquored tea and blinked back tears. Over by the photograph of Jeb, Ida stood as if held by his spell. Maybe that’s why she didn’t seem to age like normal women. Maybe love can hold us still in time. One way or the other, for good or for bad, I believe that’s possible.

  I shifted miserably and gave a polite cough. Ida moved away from Jeb’s photograph, took and released a deep breath, fluffed her sofa pillows, adjusted a crooked rose in a vase and trailed one hand along a sleepy gray housecat stretched across an antique English side table. Every move was a symphony of sensual restoration.

  Suddenly I understood. She mourned, but she lived.

  She was giving me a good long look at her serenity and strength. At her life two decades after losing the man she had loved more than life itself. At how well she had survived. That she was no victim, and neither was I.

  “I’m about to get drunk and philosophical,” I announced.

  She turned slightly and nodded, regal and wise and smiling with just the slightest bawdy humor. “That was the point of giving you bourbon at seven a.m.”

  “You didn’t fall into grief and bitterness when Jeb died. You never stooped to taking revenge on Marle for what his brother did. You kept your principles and your priorities straight. So you’re telling me that now I have to do the same thing. That I should welcome Marle home even at the risk of our children learning that I hid the truth from them about their real father, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  Ida froze. The sassy, sly woman was gone. Once again, she became the young widow who had buried a dearly loved husband. “You’re wrong. I was bitter. I did fall into grief and revenge. Do you think I’d have let poor Marle—just nineteen years old and not to blame for his brother’s crime—be driven out of town if I’d been in my right mind? No. At the time, I was glad there were no more Settles in Mossy Creek. I wanted Marle gone.” She flung out an angry hand toward the photograph of Jeb. “Even now, I still miss Jeb, and I’ll always be bitter over losing him. And I’ll never forgive Creighton Settles for being the cause—even indirectly—of Jeb’s death.”

  My tea cup rattled as I set it down. “So how can you help Marle? If you can’t forgive his brother and you hate—”

  Ida said a few disgusted words I won’t repeat. Let’s just not forget that she is an educated woman with a wide vocabulary that includes language mountaineers use when they’re wrestling bears. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she summed up more politely. “I don’t ‘hate’ Marle and have never hated him. I’ve told him so. Don’t you understand what I’m saying to you? We use every crude and not-necessarily-noble method we know to keep ourselves alive after we lose someone we love. We fight the loss in pathetic and sometimes destructive ways, but we go on breathing and we learn to love again. It’s never the same kind of love but it’s love. You loved Charlie, even if it wasn’t the same wild feeling you had for Marle. You mourned Marle but went on living. That didn’t mean Marle was dead to you—and it didn’t mean you could or should forget him, any more than he forgot you.”

  She rushed over to me, grabbed me by the shoulders, and practically forced me to my feet. “He’s a good man and he deserves to be where he belongs, and he belongs here. Jeb would want me to welcome him back. This is one of the few ways I can keep Jeb’s memory alive. By doing the right thing.”

  “Ida, I’m honored that you’ve taken this fight as your own, but—”

  “It’s not my fight. It’s yours. It’s Marle’s. It’s a fight for the children you have together. For the future of Settin’ Down Joe’s descendants.” She shook me lightly. “Don’t deprive your kids of their family heritage. Don’t deprive them of their father. Yes, Charlie loved them and he was a father to them and you don’t ever want them to think of him as less. But they need a father for the rest of their lives, too, and Charlie’s gone. Listen, my father died young and that changed me forever. Then my son’s father died young, too—and it has changed Rob forever. He’s decided to live his life based on some warped notion of how a man takes care of his family—by not taking any risks, not ever taking the chance that they might lose him. I cannot get across to Rob that life is a balancing act and Jeb would want him to risk falling off the edge of the sky. Don’t deprive your children of that risk, either—the risk of loving—or even hating—Marle. Give them an opportunity to make the choice themselves. If you’re lucky, they can love Charlie and Marle, too. They can love two fathers—and if they’re smart they’ll come to understand how much they need Marle now that Charlie is gone. Trust me. Trust them. Trust your own heart. You realize why, don’t you? To put it in terms you Baileys love—you’re as tough as a Thunker but your heart is a Sweet Hope.”

  I held onto her, shaking. “I hate when my heart talks to me like an apple. Don’t you understand my point? My heart is telling me to throw caution to the wind and say ‘Yes, Marle, stay. Yes, we’ll tell the kids the truth about us.’ Because my Sweet Hope heart says, ‘You grew these kids from good stock. They’ll give you good fruit.’ But Ida, Ida . . . my heart can’t promise they’ll give Marle unconditional love and forgive me for letting them believe Charlie was their biological father all these years. What if they hate us both and turn their backs on us? What if I lose my children? What if Marle and I plant a Sweet Hope tree but get a Thunker harvest?”

  Ida rolled her eyes at yet another apple metaphor. “Spoken like a true Bailey. Look, there are never any guarantees in life and certainly no promises that you’ll get the harvest you want from your personal orchard. But there is one thing you can count on. That you’re doing the right thing for the man you love and the children you created together. Just as I’m trying to do. I can’t bring Jeb home, and I can’t stop Rob from living his life in Jeb’s
shadow, but I can help you bring Marle home and keep your children in the light.”

  She hugged me.

  I cried my Sweet Hope heart out.

  THERE’S SOMETHING about a twenty-foot granite statue of a Confederate general that makes a man a little defensive. General Hamilton, Mossy Creek’s Civil War symbol of stone cajones, stared down his granite nose at me as if I was a traitor who’d escaped a good old-fashioned firing squad. I stood there in the center of the town square as the first fall leaves drifted down, pretending to scrutinize the old Rebel but in fact just letting every Creekite on Main Street take a long, hard look at me. And they did.

  Mossy Creek. After living all over the world, I could have laughed at my hometown, but the joke would be on me. The town was still a beacon for quirky mountaineers, loners, lovers and people who liked giving the rest of the world the old five-fingered nose-thumb salute. Mossy Creek was a place I had loved, and still loved. My great grandfather built the town hall and the row of shops on the west side of the square, where a coffee shop called The Naked Bean now shared space with Beechum’s Bakery.

  I glimpsed people craning their heads to stare at me from the doors and windows of those shops and everywhere else around the square—in front of Mama’s diner, the town hall, the pub, the jail and even peering at me from behind the gazebo on the other side of the park from General Hamilton—men, women and children, old and young, black, white, pink, brown and everything in between. They were all Creekites United In Eyeballing.

  Did I look that threatening? Big and lean and hulking, maybe, but I’d deliberately dressed friendly in hiking boots, jeans and an old chambray shirt—the uniform of every Creekite mountain man old enough to ditch his diapers and young enough to, well, ditch his adult diapers. But all right, I knew what everyone was thinking: There he is, a damned troublemaking Settles. Creighton’s brother. Six-foot-one-inches of Settles-without-a-cause. A man without a Creekite country.