Sally Beth sighed. “I cain’t set a broken bone. Leastways not a break this bad. Can yew, Geneva?” Geneva shook her head. “Howard?”
He looked stricken at the thought. Sally Beth thought briefly and continued, “Well, Lilly’s no good either. I reckon we’ll jist have to tie it up best we can so he cain’t move it. And I reckon we might as well get Lilly down here. No use leavin’ her up there to fall apart waiting for us. We’ll need some sticks. Geneva, yew and Howard go get some. I’ll go back for Lilly so we can decide what to do.”
Geneva’s estimation of her silly cousin moved up several notches. Nodding, she moved toward the rock face, but Howard stopped her. “I’ll go,” he said. You stay here with Jimmy Lee. Didn’t Howard give you some medicines? Is there something in there to ease his pain some?” He indicated the bag tied around Geneva’s belt loop.
“Of course. Willow bark. If I had a cup, I could mix it in water. It’s terribly bitter, especially if you chew it.”
“I have a cup,” said Sally Beth. “And I have some aspirin, and some Tylenol, too.”
Somehow, with much pleading and encouraging, they got the whimpering Lilly down to the ledge, put a splint on Jimmy Lee’s leg, and gave him enough aspirin and Tylenol to ease his pain. Geneva wiped away the blood on his face and discovered, to her relief, that it came from a cut lip. He was also bruised and scraped but otherwise unharmed. Geneva began to feel hopeful, but worry descended again when she realized that the afternoon was growing late. Howard, too, was becoming anxious. He glanced up at Lamentations, who lay with his head hanging mournfully over the edge of the cliff. “You suppose that dog could go for help?” he asked Jimmy Lee.
Jimmy Lee grinned. “Why shore! Hey! Lamentations?” Lamentations jumped up quickly and peered eagerly down at his master’s face. “Go fer help, boy! Go on home! Bring back Chap!”
The dog responded immediately. He circled around a few times, looking around him, then he grinned and panted back in Jimmy Lee’s direction. Excitedly, he tried to descend the cliff.
“No! Lamentations! Go fer help! Go git Chap. Go on, boy!”
Lamentations was puzzled. He sat down, his head cocked to one side, and looked at the group below him. “GO ON!” they all yelled. Lamentations gave them one mournful look and departed.
“Thank goodness,” sighed Geneva. “Maybe he’ll get home before nightfall and get Howard or somebody back up here. Sure hope we don’t have to spend the night here.”
“How far is it, Jimmy Lee?” asked Howard.
Jimmy Lee’s face clouded. “Not far,” he said evasively. He kin git there and back in a hour, I reckon.
Sally Beth stood up. “Well,” she declared briskly, “We’d better be prepared just in case. Howard might not be home, and once it gets dark, nobody’s going to find us here. Why don’t we try to build a fire, and fix us up something to eat.”
Geneva, suddenly ravenous, remembered that she had not eaten since the evening before. A cold pain clutched at her as the thought of the jerky and bread Howard had packed for her this morning. “Yes. I have some food,” she said, pulling the little bag from her belt.
“So do I,” said Sally Beth. “Yew never know when yer going to get hungry.” A bag of trail mix and a box of Fig Newtons appeared magically from her purse.
They were just beginning to portion out the food when they heard a whine from above.
“Lamentations!” cried Jimmy Lee. “What are yew adoin’ back here? Yer supposed to go git Chap!”
Lamentations wagged his stump pitifully and cocked his head, then tried to scramble down to the small group below him.
“Jimmy Lee,” said Howard sadly, “I’m afraid your dog isn’t very smart.”
Jimmy Lee looked sheepish. “Hit ain’t his fault. A eagle caught him when he was jist a pup and dropped him on his head.” He gazed at the women with a naked pleading. “He’s a good dog,” he asserted mournfully. “Jist ain’t got much sense.”
“Do you think he’s capable of getting his own dinner?” asked Howard.
Jimmy Lee grimaced apologetically.
“Okay,” said Howard. “It’s obvious he wants to be down here with you, so I’m going to see if I can get him down. Anybody want to help? Got any ideas?”
“I do!” cried Sally Beth. “We could make a chain! Yew know, Yew and me and Geneva and Lilly can climb up part way and pass him on down to each other?”
“Nuh uh. Not me,” said Lilly, shaking her head and cowering as far from the edge as she could. “I cain’t believe I got down here myself. I’m not going to climb up anywhere after a dog.”
“You don’t have to,” encouraged Geneva. “We’ll bring him down most of the way. You just climb up about two feet and catch him.”
“I believe I can get him to one of you, then I can climb down below and catch him again,” added Howard. “Shall we try it?”
Somehow they got Lamentations, carried and coaxed, down the precipice. Immediately he ran to Jimmy Lee and began licking his face.
“Yeah, yer a good old dog,” murmured Jimmy Lee. “Stupid as hell, but a good old dog.”
Lamentations sniffed at Jimmy Lee, then pressed himself up close by his side. He laid his head on Jimmy Lee’s shoulder and sighed.
Howard interrupted the reunion, “It looks like we may be spending the night here. I doubt if they will search for us much today, if at all. Howard may not even know we’re missing if he went back to his cabin.” He bit off a hunk of beef jerky and chewed thoughtfully.
Lilly put her head on her knees and wept softly.
“Oh, Lilly, quit being such a sissy,” admonished Sally Beth. “We’ll get outta here tomorrow anyway, and we can build us up a big fire and pretend we’re camping out!”.
“I’m jist tired,” sighed Lilly.
“I didn’t say we couldn’t sleep!” her sister cried. “And look! We’ve got plenty of water. Shoot, yew can even take a bath if yew want to.”
Lilly just kept her head on her knees and rolled her head a little.
“Aw, Lilly. Come on, be a sport,” she coaxed. “I’ll do yer nails fer yew.”
Geneva was tired, too, so tired of spirit that she wanted to die. Being here was not horrible in itself. She had spent nights in the woods before, and she knew they were safe perched on this ledge on the high precipice. Surely the bear would not return and venture down the cliff face. But the darkness in her heart overwhelmed her and made her want to cry out for her lover, to call and call, like a whippoorwill, until the echoes reverberated across the mountains and hollows and he came to her. She gazed at the horizon and found no joy in her soul.
Howard Graves put his hand on her shoulder. “You feeling bad, sweetheart? Do you want some Tylenol?”
“No, I’m fine, Howard. I’m a little blue, is all.” She smiled wearily. “I appreciate your coming to look for me. Sorry I’ve caused you all this trouble.”
He smiled a strangely gentle smile and followed Geneva’s gaze out over the distant blue. “Would you believe me if I said this is no trouble for me? Being out here has been invigorating. I can see why you love it here.”
He stood. “But it’ll get cold tonight, and we need to see about getting a fire going. Want to help me gather wood?”
“Sure. But everything’s wet. I don’t know if we can get anything to burn.”
“Maybe so. Let’s see what we can find up on the trail. If we can get enough dry stuff to get a good blaze going, maybe the damp wood will burn if it’s not too wet.”
“I’ll help,” added Sally Beth. “Lilly, yew stay here and take care of Jimmy Lee.”
“Yes, I need to find my shoe, too, if I can,” said Geneva. “I sure hate the thought of walking all the way home with one bare foot.”
They set out in search of wood and Geneva’s shoe. They did find reasonably dry wood in the hollows of rocks, but the shoe did not materialize. Wearily, Geneva returned to the ledge to sort through slightly damp pine knots and cedar splinters. Jimmy Lee patiently whittl
ed out enough cedar shavings to lay out a hopeful fire start. They added some larger, damp, but not soaked, firewood. The rest they stockpiled to last the night.
“Sally Beth, do you have any matches?” asked Howard, winking at Geneva.
“Why, sure. Right in here somewhere.”
Before long they had constructed a nice fire, which blazed merrily in the cooling dusk. They ate the rest of their food and drank from the spring gushing out of the side of the mountain, then watched the stars come out and the moon climb over the far ridges. Sally Beth gave Jimmy Lee more aspirin and they moved in close to the fire, huddling together to keep off the chill. Howard stirred the coals and settled back next to Geneva.
“Well, that was a pretty good supper, considering,” said Lilly thoughtfully. “But to tell yew the truth, I could go for some real food—even for some of Miss Nancy’s pet chicken.”
Sally Beth laughed. “Me too. I probly could eat the whole thing myself right here and now.”
“Who’s Miss Nancy?” asked Geneva.
Sally Beth laughed again. “I don’t know if yew ever met her. She was Grandmamma Tate’s neighbor for a while, before she moved!”
Lilly hooted at this.
Geneva perked up. “There’s got to be a story here I haven’t heard before.”
Sally Beth began, “Well, there was this chicken…”
“No, Sally Beth, yew have to start from the beginning,” broke in Lilly. “Let me tell it.” She turned to the others, her face alight with pleasure. “Well, it all started the summer Sally Beth turned sixteen. She flunked her driver’s license test…”
“I didn’t know yew had to take a written test!” exclaimed Sally Beth. “Shoot, I’d been drivin’ since I was twelve, and I could drive better’n anybody in the family, even Daddy!”
“Well, that’s what yew get for not tellin’ anybody yew was going to take the thing,” asserted Lilly. She turned to the others. “She’d been drivin’ for so long without a license that everybody sort of forgot that she needed to get one. But the day after her sixteenth birthday, she decides to get one, so she puts me in the car and we go down to the courthouse. And she marches herself in and says, ‘I want a driver’s license.’ And the deputy there says, ‘Well, little lady, yew’ve come to the right place. Where’s yer mama or yer daddy?’
“Well, we had to admit that we hadn’t brought anybody along with us, and of course he figured out in about two seconds that she had driven down to the courthouse without a license.” Lilly began to giggle. “But Sally Beth just stands right up to him and declares she’d been driving better’n anybody in the family since she was twelve, and somehow talks him into letting her take the test, thinking that all she’d have to do was drive around the block. Yew should have seen her face when he tells her to sit down and take a written test!”
“It was awful,” asserted Sally Beth. “It took me completely by surprise! I bet I didn’t get half of them right!”
Lilly went on. “So then, when she ups and fails it, the deputy gets all hot and tells her she’d better never let him catch her driving without a license, or there’d be hell to pay, and then he won’t let us drive back, but puts us in the squad car and takes us home himself. Daddy had to go pick up the car down at the station!” At this Sally Beth and Lilly broke into gales of laughter.
“So what does this have to do with Miss Nancy and her chicken?” asked Geneva.
“Oh!” exclaimed Sally Beth. “The next day we went over to Grandmamma Tate’s. I drove, of course, ‘cause it was only a coupla miles, but she wasn’t there, so we just decided to wait on her. Then Lilly sees this cute boy next door at Miss Nancy’s, come to find out he’s her nephew, and Lilly, she gets to flirting with him, and then she ups and invites him over for supper that night! But then we get to thinking about what we’ll have, and we have no idea when Grandmamma will be back, and we get to thinking maybe we’d better do something ourselves, but there isn’t much in the house that would make a company kind of supper, so we decide to drive to the store and get some chicken.”
“Now, remember,” broke in Lilly. “I’m just fourteen, and Sally Beth has flunked her driver’s license test the day before, but who cared about what that silly old deputy had said? He couldn’t stop us from getting in the car and taking off. Well, we get to the end of the driveway and Sally Beth’s about to pull out into the road, when guess who drives by. The deputy who had just told Sally Beth the day before that he’d better not catch her drivin’!
“Well, he just about busted something getting his car stopped and gettin’ over to us, and he was all red and hollerin’, and tells us he’s going to arrest us both. And Sally Beth just sits there as calm as an ice cube, and when he finishes, she just says, ‘Deputy, I’m jist driving up and down my grandmamma’s driveway, and this is private property, and yew can’t stop me.’ Which was true, but that made him even hotter, and he said he was going to park his car right on the road there and make sure she didn’t try to drive anywhere outside that driveway, so we had no choice but to go on back to the house.”
“By that time it’s about three o’clock,” added Sally Beth. “And we still didn’t have anything for a company dinner, and then Lilly sees this funny little chicken running out in the yard, and she gets the bright idea to catch it and fry it up.”
Lilly giggled. “It seemed like a real good idea at the time. But have yew ever tried to catch a chicken?” she asked the group in general. They all laughed, except Howard, who looked askance and asked, “What’s so hard about that?”
The others just laughed harder. Jimmy Lee slapped his thigh, then winced and moaned.
“What did you do?” asked Geneva.
“Well, we chased it around for about half a hour,” said Lilly, “and then when it was getting obvious that we weren’t going to get anywhere, Sally Beth went in and got Grandpa’s shotgun and came charging out to shoot it. She missed, of course, but got birdshot in the cow’s rump, which she tried to get out with tweezers…”
“I did get it out!” declared Sally Beth. “By that time, yew were too excited to remember anything! I got it out and rubbed it down with alcohol, and Grandmamma never even noticed the Band-Aids I put on it!”
Geneva stifled a snort.
“Anyway, we ended up catching the chicken,” continued Lilly. “Sally Beth got out Grandpa’s fish net and caught it on the fly. But catching it turned out to be the easy part!”
“Shoot, the rest was easy for yew!” asserted Sally Beth. “After we caught the thing, we didn’t know how to kill it. I wanted to chop off its head, ‘cause I knew if I shot it up close it would be full of birdshot and not fit to eat, but Lilly wouldn’t hold it, and she wouldn’t chop, either, so finally I had to put my foot on it and try to chop it off all by myself. But just as the ax came down, it jerked away, and I only got about half of its neck chopped.”
She began laughing uncontrollably and slapped her knee several times. “Oh, it was awful! Blood was squirting out everywhere, and the chicken took off running with its head sort of flopped over, jist sorta hanging on by its skin! And Lilly started puking, and then she passed out right there in the back yard! I was afraid the chicken would get away, and I didn’t know what to do about Lilly, so I jist grabbed the chicken, and honey, blood was just squirting out! And Lilly was laying there, dead to the world, so I had this squirting chicken in one hand, with its little legs moving like they was still runnin’, and Lilly in the other hand, and me trying to bring her to! Yew can just imagine!”
Lilly took over again. “By that time, I didn’t care if we ever ate again or not, but Sally Beth just threw water on me then told me to go lay down, but I couldn’t even make it to the living room, so I just laid on the kitchen floor, and Sally Beth, she set about to plucking this chicken because she said she’d be damned if a scrawny little chicken got the best of her. It had these real long, downy feathers, so she decided to save them and make a pillow, so once she plucked it, she put all the feathers in a bag, and
then she skinned it and gutted it and cooked the thing. Made a chicken pot pie with mashed potatoes and gravy and all the fixin’s. She was real proud of herself.”
Sally Beth laughed. “It really did turn out right tasty. And this boy just bragged on it all through supper, and then I made the mistake of telling the story of how we got it.”
“‘Course we all just laughed and laughed, and then Grandpa got real quiet for a minute, and then he said, ‘That wasn’t our chicken!’” Lilly screamed with laughter and she and Sally Beth leaned against each other and laughed until they had to wipe their eyes.
“And of course that made us laugh all the harder,” choked out Sally Beth, “until this boy, what was his name, Lilly?”
“Charles,” her sister prompted. “Charles Harris. How could yew forget his name?”
“Oh, yeah. Charles. Anyway, all of a sudden, he stops with his fork halfway to his mouth, and he says, ‘Was it a Silkie chicken?’”
“We just looked at each other. We’d never heard of that kind before, and he said, ‘Long, fluffy feathers, more like fur than feathers?’ And we had to say ‘yes’, and he turned just as white, and he put his fork down, and said, ‘That’s my Aunt Nancy’s pet chicken, Geraldine! She’s been searching all day for it.’”
Both girls broke into mighty gales of laughter again, and Geneva and the men caught their hysteria. “And then, the worst thing was,” chortled Lilly, “that Sally Beth got up and gave him the bag of feathers she had plucked off it and said, ‘Here, I know yer Aunt Nancy will be wanting this!’”
They all laughed until their sides and faces ached, and then they continued to giggle for several moments as they calmed and the fire burned low.
Sally Beth sighed deeply and started to say something, but instead she gasped. “Look!” she cried, pointing up. “A shooting star! Oh, and there’s another one! And another! It’s a meteor shower!”
Geneva felt the sudden stab of memory. Howard’s long, lean body worshipping her as meteors arched across the black sky. Howard leaping and singing and holding her high as she threw back her head and drank in the wild, sweet night air. Howard loving her and filling her with pleasure and happiness with all that he had to give. She nearly groaned in her agony, but she bit back the tears and listened quietly as the others exclaimed and the night wore on.
The Women of Jacob’s Mountain Boxed Set Page 31
