Will stiffened, halted, and wavered in place as if trying to come to attention. “I’m forbidden to talk on penalty of . . . of something . . . can’t recall right now,” he slurred, then clamped a fist over his heart. “I know nothing.”
I nodded. “Same Fang and Claw ritual crap, just like thirty years ago.”
He groaned.
I pushed his head under the garden hose and turned the ice-cold water on.
* * * *
John, looking rumpled in khakis and a sweatshirt, was waiting on the porch of Sue Ora’s handsome little house just outside town. He pulled his son out of my car, hugged him grimly, and helped him to the house, with me following.
His mother, wrapped tightly in a long terrycloth robe, glared at him from the front door. “Is this a new kind of trick or treating? You sneaked out of this house after lying to me that you were going to bed early? What were you doing? You could have been killed by alcohol poisoning. Haven’t we taught you better?”
“Aw, Mama, I didn’t have that much to drink. Just a couple of beers.” He paused. “And some bourbon. And a little tequila. And . . . ” He clamped his fist to his chest and swayed. “Sworn to silence.” He hiccupped.
John guided him into the living room. “Will, dammit . . .” John swallowed the rest of those words and said instead, “Let’s get you in the shower and wash off the smell. Sue, will you make some coffee?”
“I don’t drink coffee,” Will said. “It’s unnatural. I drink healthy herbal tea.”
Sue Ora snorted. “Sure, and I didn’t think you drank liquor, either.”
She left to make the coffee while John pushed Will down a back hall.
“Don’t go, Ed,” John called over his shoulder. “I want to talk to you.”
“I’ll be waiting,” I said, then found the nearest bathroom and washed Will’s vomit scent off my hands. My own stomach twisted. For a second, I went back thirty years to the dark shadows of another autumn night, when I stood over Punky trying not to throw up when I saw what the stick had done to his eye.
When John and Will returned, Will wore jeans and a Bigelow Wildcats sweatshirt. He looked scrubbed and his dark Bigelow hair stood up in damp spears. Slumping on a couch, he leaned back and took a deep breath. “I apologize,” he said.
“Tell us what happened,” John ordered.
Will squirmed. “There’s a code of honor and silence—”
“Not where the Fang and Claw Society is concerned,” John said in a tone that made his son sit up straight.
“Dad, you don’t understand. You couldn’t understand. You were never—”
“Don’t make assumptions,” Sue Ora said as she set steaming coffee mugs on a bar between the living room and kitchen. “We’re going to find out one way or the other.”
“Start by telling us why you were out at the Brady farm,” John said.
Will slumped. It was clear he didn’t want to confess. History was definitely repeating itself.
“Maybe I’d better leave,” I said.
“No, please don’t, Mr. Brady,” Will said, his face sunk in misery. “I need a witness when Dad and Mama kill me.”
“Trust me, Will. Tell the truth. Trust your parents.”
Sue Ora sat beside her son and took his hand. “Why were you in the Brady driveway?”
“I was looking for something.” He winced.
“Something?” she coaxed.
“A girl’s bra. It was a kind of initiation. I had to bring it back.”
John’s face went hard. “I thought so. Dammit. The Fang and Claw Society.”
“You don’t understand, Dad.”
“I thought you were smart enough to stay away from those idiots.”
“Dad, the Fang and Claw doesn’t hurt anybody. I’m a Bigelowan. I have to keep up the tradition. I’ll look like a wimp if I don’t join. Besides, nothing bad happened.”
John sat down in a chair across from his son and jabbed a finger at him. “You have no idea what the Fang and Claw is all about. Or what kind of stunts the members have pulled over the years.”
“Dad, that’s just talk. Look, just because you weren’t part of it when you were in high school twenty years ago doesn’t mean—”
“I was part of it.”
That brought Will to the edge of the couch. He stared at his father. So did I.
Righteous, conservative John Bigelow?
In the meantime, Sue Ora retrieved something from the pocket of her robe. “As you said, Will, the Bigelows follow tradition.” She held out two small pendants on her palm. “I believe the way it works is that all the Society pledges get a fang pendant. When they’ve been accepted, they get the claw pendant, too. Both are worn secretly on a chain around the member’s neck. Is that still the way it’s done?”
Will nodded and gulped. “Are those Dad’s?”
“Yes. Your dad and I were dating, then. He gave me these. He said he was too ashamed to keep them but wanted me to have them, so I could always remind him of what he’d done.”
“What’d you do, Dad?”
John ignored the question for a moment as he studied the wife he obviously still loved but didn’t live with.
“You belonged to the Fang and Claw?” Will persisted. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
John continued to look at Sue Ora. Her face filled with sympathy. She touched his arm. “You were going to sit down with him and admit everything before the reunion festivities next month. This is just an opportunity to do what you intended—a little early.”
John laid his hand over hers, his face tightened, and he nodded. Then he turned to their son, and to me, and said very simply, “Twenty years ago, I burned down Mossy Creek High School.”
RAINEY
When it’s time to pay the piper, don’t procrastinate to beat the band.
RAINEY
Reunion Day
It wasn’t just Reunion Day. It was Judgment Day.
There were a good five thousand people in town that sunny November weekend—more than twice the permanent population of Mossy Creek. Almost all of them crowded into the old high school site along with me for the fun, the tears, and the speeches. Cars and trucks were parked ten-rows deep on the school’s former football field, and more vehicles lined the road out of town on both sides. The fat yellow buses of Mossy Creek Elementary shuttled people back and forth from the town square, where the Mossy Creek Kiwanis had set up a big tent to sell barbecue. The merchants propped their doors wide open and set out their prettiest welcome signs for business. The reunion was the biggest single-most-attended-one-day event of the last twenty years in Mossy Creek. The record holder had been Homecoming, 1981. The day of the carnival.
The night of the fire.
* * * *
Music whirled around me from a bluegrass band playing some old, toe-tapping local tune called Bailey Mill Breakdown. Heavy on the fiddle, with a washtub bass thumping like a fast heartbeat. It made me so nervous I couldn’t listen. I angled between Creekites I’d known all my life, former Creekites I’d only heard about, and friends of Creekites who’d just come along for the festivities—and not a single soul caught the whiff of my misery. In fact, I was so good at hiding my true feelings behind my petite pink wall that I was cheerfullly put upon by my unsuspecting clientele and their reunion guests.
A professional stylist is like a doctor out in public. Always being asked for free diagnoses and ad-lib advice. So I listened solemnly, checked the tightness of aging perms, calculated the next-cut-needed-when? status of growing hair-do’s, peered at split ends, and upended acrylic nails to study the tips for consistency. I noticed my new unofficial competition, Jasmine Beleau, handing out cards for her beauty and fashion consulting service, but we nodded to each other with professional friendship, and I let it go at that.
Tents from the Mossy Creek Funeral Home lined the perimeters of the old high school site, sheltering foods and crafts, smiles and memories. Funeral tents. Appropriate. To me, the day was a memorial ser
vice for my, Rob, and Hank’s reputations as Creekites of good conscience. We had kept an ugly secret that hurt our whole town for twenty years. A person can expect sympathy for making a childhood mistake, but not for being an out-and-out adult coward.
In the middle of the broad, empty field where Mossy Creek High had stood in all its handsome glory now there was only a speakers’ platform, about fifty-feet long, draped in green-and-white bunting, the colors of the old school. A web of cables and electrical cords snaked off the platform’s back end, connecting a large podium to huge speakers, which Bert Lyman of WMOS Media had loaned for the event. When Rob, Hank, and I got up to confess, our voices would carry to the farthest ends of Mossy Creek and all its outlying communities, reflect off Colchik and all her sister mountains, and echo the revelation of our cowardly shame back to us, the truth coming home to nest like a vulture of the spirit. I cringed.
About two dozen speakers had already taken to the stage to commemorate and celebrate Mossy Creek High School, reunions in general, and the faithfulness of Creekites in the world in particular.
“God’s own special tribe,” Carmel Whit called us. To hear her and the others talk, the Israelites had wandered in the desert looking not for the Promised Land, but for Mossy Creek.
Still, I knew exactly what Miss Carmel and the other speakers meant. I’d never loved our funny little town more than I did that day, with my own public ruin right around the corner. Epic emotion and biblical doom began to settle on me. I will lift up mine eyes to the hills from whence comes my strength. I gazed up at Colchik for inspiration.
“See somebody with bad hair to be fixed up there, Rainey?” someone called and laughed. The world was full of jokes and laughter and friendship, except for me.
Tammy Jo Bigelow walked by in deep ex-beauty queen conversation with Josie McClure and Josie’s big, hulking, sweet fiancé, Harry. I blinked back tears and shook my head. Harry had come down from hiding on the mountain. After today, me, Hank and Rob might have to live up there instead.
I wandered among my friends and neighbors, pretending to browse the booths as if I saw anything but loneliness in front of me. Rob and Hank sat with their wives somberly marking time, like me. They’d secluded themselves on a picnic blanket beneath one of the umbrella-like oaks near the old ram statue. The statue had been sandblasted and painted a clean, bright white for the day, and it made a proud sight. I couldn’t bear to look at such a symbol of pure Mossy Creek loyalty. Rob and Hank were torturing themselves.
“Come sit with us until it’s time,” both of them urged, and Teresa and Casey dogged me to come and sit, too, but I said, “No, I can’t wait in the valley of the shadow of the stone sheep.”
They stared at me sympathetically. Yes, I was speaking melodramatic gibberish. I was one curler short of a set, in terms of clear-minded thinking.
“Seeds, Rainey?” one of the women of the Mossy Creek Garden Club asked. I found myself standing at the club’s booth without quite realizing how I’d gotten there. The new club member, Miss Peggy, they called her, smiled and held out a plastic sandwich bag filled with seeds. “Zinnias,” Miss Peggy explained. “Plant them next spring and you can sit by the blooms sipping a cold margarita all summer. I gathered these seeds from my own flowers. You might call it a special harvest.”
I thanked her and tucked the seeds in my tote bag. Margaritas in the summer by the zinnias? The garden clubbers had a reputation for partying, and it was clear this Miss Peggy fit in fine. Nice to be wanted by a group of friends. I had gotten used to being wanted by my friends. I better get unused to it. I wandered on. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. And it wouldn’t be zinnias.
* * * *
Eula Mae Whit and Millicent Hart sat in folding chairs beneath a canopy attached to the Magnolia Manor booth, talking in low voices, their grizzled heads bent close together. Miss Millicent’s boyfriend, Tyrone Lavender, dozed in a lawn chair nearby. Across the way, Win Allen had debuted his Bubba Rice Catering Company—a success, judging by the crowd who were eating his stew, potato salad, and namesake fried rice at picnic tables scattered in the warm autumn sun. Michael Conners was selling beer in Reunion Day plastic mugs, which I think his waitress, Regina Regina, ordered without him knowing, because Michael is not a cute-beer-mug sort of man.
At the forestry service booth, Orville Simple was giving away hand-whittled wooden whistles he swore would scare off bothersome yard critters. “Made from the wood of a former beaver dam,” Orville proclaimed.
“Don’t work on the beavers, though,” Derbert Koomer said real loud, then guffawed. Orville scowled and held up a whistle in a way that said if Derbert didn’t shut up he’d be carrying a tune where nobody would want to hear it.
Ed Brady and his son sat in the booth for the volunteer fire department. Mr. Brady, Senior, was a charter member. The department had had two men injured fighting the school fire. So it was a matter of pride for Mr. Brady and the other volunteer firemen to be there handing out candy to the kids on reunion day. They’d invited our paramedics, which included Sandy and Mutt’s brother, Boo Bottoms.
Boo was demonstrating CPR on a plastic CPR dummy stretched out on the grass, but this one kid took candy from Mr. Brady then, when Boo turned his back, secretly stuck the candy inside the dummy’s plastic lips. So when Boo squatted down and began his demonstration on how to pump the dummy’s bosom, a Tootsie Roll popped five feet high and hit Adele Clearwater right between the eyes.
Miss Adele squealed and jumped back faster than you’d think a scrawny old lady in a corset could move. Nearly dropped her custom made purse with the hand-embossed insignia of the Mossy Creek Social Society on the leather. Miss Adele was rarely startled by anything other than the degree of people’s inferiority to herself.
“Seeing Adele hop like a frog was worth the trip into town,” Mr. Brady said to Ed, Junior, a middle-aged man who smiled like a boy at his daddy’s joke. Ed, Senior and Ed, Junior had already held their own reunion—a good one, I could tell. I stood there watching them wistfully, with my fists shoved inside the pockets of my long pink sweater. I couldn’t stop thinking about the firemen who’d been injured twenty years ago at Mossy Creek High—not badly injured, Lor’, but still . . . what would those men think of me and Hank and Rob after we admitted we set the elephant free and caused the fire?
“He’s here,” Ed, Junior said in a low voice to his daddy. “Looking rough around the edges, but he came to do what he said he’d do. There he is, over there. ”
“He won’t back out.” Old Mr. Brady squinted at someone behind me. “He’s had twenty years to chew on hisself over this. He’s started talking, and he won’t run scared, now. Not after what he told you the other night.”
What in the world? I looked around quickly to see who they meant, but all I saw was John Bigelow walking up from the parking area. Sue Ora and Will walked with him, all three of them close together, John and Sue Ora holding hands and looking somber. Will stuck his chin out as if he expected to fight somebody. He slung an arm around his father’s shoulders and looked even more defensive.
A strange tingle went up my spine. What was going on with pillar-of-the-community John Bigelow? I turned to just flat-out ask old Mr. Brady, but before I could, everyone craned their heads to watch the governor arrive.
Ham Bigelow didn’t drive himself up to Mossy Creek like a regular potentate, anymore—Mossy Creek is the hometown of his mama, Ardaleen Hamilton Bigelow, remember—no, now he paraded into town with an entourage. His motorcade included one state patrol car in the lead and another bringing up the rear. Ham road in a long black limo in the middle, and behind Ham’s limo came a big, dark sedan full of Ham’s aides—Creekites called his two top flunkies Mayo and Mustard—and then a second big sedan carried his press secretary, campaign manager, and personal photographer.
As Ham and his gang got out of their cars, I noticed the strangest thing. Sandy pulled up in a Mossy Creek patrol car and blocked the governor’s limo. Ham’s state troopers headed over to tel
l her to move—you just don’t block the governor’s car. Amos was on the scene supervising, walking the perimeter of the festivities, watching his officers and his townsfolk just as you’d expect on the day of a big event, but suddenly Amos put his hands in his pockets and looked the other way.
For Amos Royden to look the other way when his feisty little glorified secretary-dispatcher-compulsive cleaning woman deliberately blocked the governor’s motorcade—well, I was flabbergasted.
Sandy waved her arms and called out to the troopers, “I got engine trouble, boys. Can’t move another inch. We’ll have to call a tow truck.” She looked around dramatically for help, as if she couldn’t see her own chief fifty feet away.
Ham scowled at his blocked limo. His aides and his local toady, Dwight Truman, gathered around him, and I could tell from the way they huddled and patted his back they were smoothing his feathers. With an air of impatient disgust, Ham waved his troopers away from Sandy and her stalled patrol car. He and his entourage headed for the speakers’ platform. The big after-lunch ceremonies were about to begin.
My shoulders slumped. I forgot everything but the misery ahead.
* * * *
“Rainey, what’s wrong?” Mayor Ida had walked up while I was lost in my thoughts. She was a sight, as always, dressed in sleek black jeans and a cashmere sweater that showed off a body a woman half her age would envy. Her red-brown hair, piled up on her head, gave her more than the usual regal sexiness. Of course, she wouldn’t look like her usual sexy, confident self if she knew her son was about to confess, along with Hank and me, to burning down the high school.
“What’s wrong?” she repeated, and her motherly tone did a terrible thing to me. Without warning, tears seeped through my mascara. “I have to tell you something, Miss Ida.” I gulped down a hard breath. I had to help Rob any way that I could.
“What, Rainey?” She put an arm around my shoulders.
“Rob’s a wonderful man. I love him and I always have and I always will.”
Reunion at Mossy Creek Page 34
