Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  I squinted up at General Hamilton as I tossed the butt of a chewed cigar in a nearby trash can. I didn’t even have to look to see I’d made the pitch. Instinctive aim. Great reflexes. A fighter pilot forever. In my retirement, I might take up precision cigar-butt tossing for fun and profit.

  I gave the General a casual salute.

  Settles, here. Lieutenant-Colonel Settles. Formerly of the Union-Yankee Air Force. Want to fight, you old Reb? No? All right, then does anyone else around here want a piece of me? They’re watching me like kittens watching a spider. Bring it on.

  I sank my hands in my trouser pockets and debated going over to speak to Ingrid Beechum, an older cousin of mine, four times removed or something like that. A Settles girl had married a Beechum boy about a hundred years ago. Ingrid must be about Ida’s age now, sixtyish going on thirty, hell on men of all ages. I remembered as a kid watching a teenaged Ingrid yelling, “You damned worthless Settles are no kin of mine,” as she chased Creighton out of her parent’s bakery because he’d tried to steal another doughnut. He was maybe eight at the time, but already filching anything that wasn’t tied down.

  Speaking of which . . . in my shirt pocket was a long list of Creighton’s debts to pay back. First I’d walk into Beechum’s and hand Ingrid a hundred dollar bill. “For all the doughnuts,” I’d say. Then I’d hand another C-note to Dempsey at the I Probably Got It Store, because Creighton pilfered tools from Dempsey’s father, and next I’d give several hundred-dollar bills to Rosie at Mama’s All You Can Eat Café, where Creighton had bashed out the windows one night after Rosie’s mother fired him from his dishwashing job—because she caught him stealing tips off the tables. I’d work my way down the list from there, until no one in Mossy Creek could say the Settles hadn’t settled up, at least in terms of money. The other debts—Jeb Walker’s death, Hope’s life without me, our kids never knowing I was their father—could only be paid down, never worked off completely.

  “Get going,” I said aloud. I rolled my shoulders to ease the tension. Put me in a jet flying over enemy anti-aircraft sites and I’m as calm as a cat in the sun. Put me on the Creek’s square with every eye on me and I feel like a human tourniquet.

  “Well, it’s about time you showed back up around here, Marle Settles,” a little-old-lady voice said behind me. I turned and looked down at, well, a little old lady. After mentally erasing twenty years off her, I realized she was Millicent Hart. Crazy-sweet Miss Millicent had been the only person in Mossy Creek who stole from more people than my brother did. At least she hadn’t done it out of meanness, and she’d never deliberately hurt anyone.

  “Miss Millicent,” I said gruffly. “I’m glad you’re still roaming free.”

  She snorted, then held out a blue-veined hand, palm up. On it lay a small wood chisel, the handle pockmarked with termite damage, the blade coated in decades of dust and rust. “This belonged to your great grandpa,” she announced. “When his son went bankrupt after the sawmill accident, the bank sold off all Joe Settles’ tools. I stole this from the auction. I was just a little girl at the time. I liked old Joe. He built my parents’ house, you know. Now my daughter, Maggie, runs an herbal shop there. She’s sleeping with a blue-haired sculptor, you know. They have sex in the very house your great grandpa built. So I thought you should have this chisel.”

  After a moment, I gave up on logic and said quietly, “I want to buy that chisel from you, Miss Millicent.”

  “Buy it? Son, you can’t buy what the heart loves enough to steal. No, you have to take the heart’s gifts as a gift. A gift from Mrs. Hart to your heart.” She pressed the chisel in my hand. “Welcome home. Now settle down and make old Joe proud. Go build yourself a life.”

  She scooted away with the agility of an eighty-something-year-old kleptomaniac who plans her get-aways as carefully as her targets. I took a step after her, then realized people were heading towards me from every side.

  It was as if Millicent Hart had broken some spell, and now I was fair game. I slid the heirloom chisel inside my trouser pocket, and waited, head up, legs braced, arms hanging quietly but ready by my sides, ready to stay by my sides, that is. Like most men who’ve been trained to fight, I never forget how easily I can hurt people. Unlike most men who’ve been trained to fight, I also never forget that I was capable of wrestling a gun away from my own brother and shooting him. Whatever happened next wouldn’t happen because I started it.

  “Marle Settles.”

  “Marle Settles.”

  “Marle Settles.”

  My name was spoken by each person as he or she arrived in the inner circle of my homecoming—Ingrid Beechum and Rosie from the café, Dempsy, Dan MacNeil from the Fix-It Shop (I owed his old man a hundred dollars to cover a carburetor Creighton had stolen), Pearl Quinian from the bookstore, Rainey Cecil from Goldilocks, who had been a feisty, red-haired little girl who aimed hairspray at Creighton every time he tried to sneak in her mother’s beauty salon. And finally, here came ancient Eula Mae Whit, who had quietly fed me dinner on her back porch when I was a kid wandering around town without a meal but too proud to ask for one; and ancient Zeke Abercrombie, who had been mayor of Mossy Creek back then, and who now kept up the flower beds around General Hamilton’s granite, fergit-hell feet.

  Like worried ghosts they closed in on me, a little nervous, frowning, throwing me off for a minute until I realized they’d spoken my name without anger, and in fact, were only watching me for a reaction before they moved in any closer. I held up both hands, palm out, like Millicent Hart offering to return the goods. “I don’t understand.”

  “We know you don’t, Marle,” Ingrid said. “Because you never came back to ask how people really felt about you.”

  “I don’t expect a welcome mat—”

  “Looks like you expect to be tarred and feathered, instead,” Mr. Abercrombie said. “Marle, we can’t promise you that everyone in Mossy Creek is thrilled to see Creighton Settle’s brother come home, but we do want you to know you’ve got friends here.”

  “You always had friends here, Boy,” Eula Mae Whit intoned in a voice as old as parchment. She wrapped her dark, bony hands around my forearm like the talons of a bird coming to roost gently. “You think Creekites forget their own? You think what your brother did is what you did? Last year I turned a hundred and I thought I was ready to die, but then I saw all the folks who didn’t want me to die and I said, ‘Well, I’m just a plain fool if I don’t stay around a while longer.’ The way I see it, you looked death right in its face a long time ago, but you haven’t yet seen why you got the right to live. Well, I teetered over here today to tell you. You got the right to live, Boy. Welcome home.”

  Okay, now most of the women were crying and even Dan MacNeil, who looked like he could bite nails in two, was snuffling. A tight spot grew in the back of my throat and I couldn’t come up with any words to get past it. How in the hell had I forgotten that Creekites are always surprising and never take a backseat when it comes to plain, bald-faced, public displays of intent? I’d just gotten the equivalent of a group hug from some of the most important citizens in town, and all under the stony eyes of a Hamilton who’d fought for the wrong side and maybe, just maybe, wanted me to realize what side I belonged on, now.

  “I . . . have a list, here,” I said gruffly, then pulled out my notepad of Creighton’s petty crimes. “It’s something I wish I’d taken care of a long time ago. Things my brother did. If I’ve forgotten anything my brother stole, or broke, or vandalized, I want you to tell me, because I’m going to do everything I can to repay—”

  “Then go down to hell, drag your brother back and let me have five minutes to kill the bastard myself.”

  Rob Walker finished that entrance by stepping through the startled crowd. I would have recognized Jeb and Ida’s tall, dark-haired son anywhere, even after twenty-two years. But it caught me off guard to see him in a pin-striped
blue suit and silk tie—the president of Hamilton’s Department Store. I’d heard about his likable lawyer wife and nice little daughter. I envied him, but then again, I didn’t. One look at the fury in his face and the fists he clenched in front of him told me this was payback day for him. I’d known hardened soldiers in the field with kinder eyes. He didn’t see me. He saw my brother.

  “Take your best shot,” I said quietly.

  And he hit me.

  It’s one thing to be noble; it’s another to be lying on the ground feeling as if your jaw just bounced off the inside of your skull, tasting your own blood—and sensing—I have some military experience with the sensation—that the earthquake in your brain is not going away in the next five minutes, because you probably have a concussion. I raised myself to my elbows and became dimly aware of various people shrieking around me. Rob bent over me and wrapped one hand in my shirt. “You’re not welcome in my town, and you never will be,” he said. “To me, you’ll always be Creighton Settles’ brother, and nothing else matters. Get up and fight like a man—the way your brother never did.”

  I grabbed him by the wrist, twisted expertly and popped his hold on me. “One free punch is my limit,” I said between bloody lips. Pain whitened his face but he refused to back off. Likewise, I refused to let go of his hand so he could pound me again. We began a free-form arm-wrestling match, me still on the ground and him leaning over me, barely moving but straining every muscle. I was forty-one and could still knock down my weight in marines, but he was most of a decade younger and looked like he spent his time in Hamilton’s sporting goods department punching a boxer’s bag.

  It was no fun.

  Someone loomed over us both. Amos Royden, Battle’s son and heir to the title of Mossy Creek Police Chief, pulled Rob up by the back of his fine suit. “Take a stroll over to my office,” Amos said to Rob. Not a suggestion, the way Amos put it, and the look on Amos’s face said he was ready to add another arm to our arm-wrestling match.

  Unfortunately, Rob still wanted to kill me. He never even looked at Amos. Didn’t seem to hear him. Never took his eyes off me. “Get up,” he repeated through clenched teeth. “It’s an insult to my dad’s memory for you or any other Settles to come back here expecting to stay. This isn’t over.”

  But for me, suddenly, it was.

  I remembered the day Jeb took me and Rob up for our first wild-ass, free-form, trick-diving plane ride. I was a dirt-poor kid who hung around his airplanes absorbing aviation trivia like a sponge, and Rob did the same. The kid was Jeb’s proud little look-alike shadow. Jeb loaded us into his restored World War II fighter plane for a hair-raising series of twists and dives over Colchik Mountain.

  “Hold onto your lunch, men,” Jeb yelled around the unlit butt of a fine cigar. “Marle, after the first roll I’ll let you take the controls.”

  “Yessir, Captain Walker!”

  “Rob, you make it through without losing your lunch and I’ll let you help land this tub!”

  “Yessir, Captain Daddy!”

  Jeb never even broke a sweat. He’d flown fighters in Korea as a young honcho straight out of the Air Force academy. He had the first small jet trails of gray at his temples, but he was a legend among mountain pilots. I wanted to be Jeb Walker. Rob, like most little boys, worshipped the ground his daddy walked on. Or flew over.

  Rob and I grinned like idiots when we climbed out of the vintage fighter plane. We staggered around then sat down hard on the dirt of the Mossy Creek air strip. But we didn’t toss our cookies. To toast our non-puking victory, Jeb stood at attention and saluted us. “You’ll both be ace pilots one day,” he said. “You’ve got the stomachs for it.”

  We saluted back.

  Twenty-plus years later, that’s what I remembered when I looked up at Rob. I saw a kid who had been more like me than not. A boy who I’d wished had been my baby brother. A kid who’d been grounded by his father’s death like a bird who’d lost a wing. Rob had never set foot inside another small plane after Jeb died. It wasn’t fear, according to Ida, but some brand of responsibility he’d adopted. He wouldn’t risk dying the same way; wouldn’t risk hurting his mother again, and later, his wife and kid. Especially his kid. Jeb Walker’s son refused to learn to fly. Or forget. I wanted to help him, not hurt him.

  I turned my head enough to spit blood, then wiped one hand across my mouth. The world swam in lazy circles. “If it would bring Jeb back I’d let you beat me to death,” I said to Rob. “But it won’t, and I’m not.”

  “I just want you out of my town.” He strained to get the words out, since Amos was now patiently twisting Rob’s arm behind his back. “I mean it. Get up. This isn’t over.”

  I took a slow breath. My head throbbed. There were three Robs, now. I heard an ambulance siren somewhere in another universe. “It won’t be over,” I told him, “until you have the guts to live the way Jeb wanted you to live. Learn to fly.”

  Rob made a hoarse sound then. He lurched toward me with his free hand drawn back in another fist. Thankfully, the maneuver helped Amos jerk him off balance. Amos spun Rob around, then calmly pushed him through the crowd. “We’ll take that stroll, now,” Amos said quietly. Rob looked shaken. All the fight drained out of him. I’d hit him where he lived, without lifting a finger. He let Amos pull him away.

  Good. Time to collect a few lost brain cells. I shut my eyes. The Creekite world whirled around me without my participation. Now everyone in town could stare at me while I dozed off in a nice, undignified little faint.

  “Did you see the look on Rob’s face?” someone whispered in the crowd. “It was like Marle ripped his heart out and handed it to him.”

  “Well, Marle isn’t Creighton, and Rob is just a fool for looking at him that way. Rob Walker’s been walking around with his heart on his sleeve for twenty years. Nothing new about that. He needs to have some sense knocked into him.”

  “Don’t you talk about Rob that way!”

  “Rainey, we all know you think Rob’s perfectly fine since last fall when the reunion mystery was resolved, but he’s not fine and he never will be—”

  “He went into a rage just now, Rainey. Admit it—there’s a dark side to Rob even his wife and his best friends—like you—can’t fix.”

  “Ingrid, I will never perm you again, I swear, if you keep talking that way about one of the most responsible, good-hearted—”

  Amidst this weird bickering, I heard the soft scuffle of running feet. Someone knelt beside me. Hands curved around my face gently. I smelled an apple scent mixed with cinnamon and sugar and bourbon, sweet but sexy, clean but not shy. Hope.

  “Stand back and stop staring at him, please,” I heard her say. “He did the right thing and I’m taking him home.”

  A man can tolerate hard choices, loneliness and a concussion when the woman he has always loved says that.

  I KNEW A FACT about Marle few other people remembered: his jaw was his Achilles Heel. Creighton had broken it badly during one of their boyhood fistfights, and it hadn’t healed quite right, despite Dr. Champion’s expert care. So when Rob slammed a fist into Marle’s chin, he did more damage than anyone would have predicted. In a way, he did bring Creighton back from the dead for a vengeful beating, because he proved Marle could never escape the taint of his brother’s crime and violence; the memory lived in Marle’s bones.

  Marle spent the rest of the day and then the night with his face draped in an ice pack, resting uneasily under warm Bailey-grandma quilts in a guest bed at my farm. I woke him up every few hours and made him count my fingers.

  “Four,” he said the first time I did it. “And you’re not wearing your wedding ring.”

  “I took it off while I was working in the apple barn yesterday. The season is about to start and . . . oh, go back to dozing in a coma.”

  I held up my right hand only after that.

 
“Check his vision regularly,” Doctor Champion ordered, “and talk to him to make sure he’s coherent. Just to be on the safe side. A smack in the head like that would have put most men in the hospital.”

  Oh, Marle was coherent. His vision might be a little fuzzy, his jaw swollen, his tongue raw where his teeth had snapped into it under the force of Rob’s fury-fueled punch, but there was no doubt in my mind that he knew every move I made. The mere passage of my hand across his bare chest to smooth the apple-print bedspread drew his half-shut gaze like a magnet. He inhaled deeply every time I bent over him. When I sat in a chair beside the bed and talked to him to help him drift off to sleep, he kept his eyes shut but gingerly angled his head toward my voice. I wrapped an apple-print throw around my jeans and sweater and sat beside him all that night, even when he slept.

  “The world is clear again,” he said as he walked into my big, marble-countered kitchen the next morning. “I see only one of you. Too bad.” He latched the buttons on his blood-speckled shirt. I glanced at the disappearing sight of his bare stomach and darkly haired chest, then looked away with misery. I wanted him just as recklessly as I had when I was a teenager. If love could turn back time, then I would always be seventeen, in Marle’s arms.

  “Most people will tell you that one of me is more than enough,” I said quickly. “I’m picky, demanding, strict—you name it. According to the kids and my employees I’m about as fun-loving and spontaneous as a squirrel hiding nuts for a hard winter.” I kept my back to him and finished filling a percolator. “I sent one of my farmhands to fetch a gallon of water from the pond that used to be Bailey Branch. So when you drink this coffee you’ll be getting a dose of the old creek. I believe there’s still potent magic in the water. Hmmm, I guess you can add ‘silly’ to those other descriptions of me. Silly and sentimental and—”

  He stepped up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. I stiffened and relaxed at the same time, lost my breath, felt every inch of my skin blush like the pink-veined flesh of a peeled Sweet Hope. Marle was close enough for his warm breath to touch the back of my neck. “You’re still the Hope I remember,” he said gruffly. “And that girl was perfect, to me.”