A MistY MourninG

by Rett MacPherson

  “Get in the car,” Gert said. “I am never going anywhere with you again. Dragging me all over God’s creation and getting me hit over the head. I coulda had a heart attack. And there’s panthers and everything.”

  “See ya, everybody,” I said and waved. Just as I was about to get in the car, I stopped and took a piece of paper out of my purse. I walked back to Elliott and handed it to him.

  “What’s this?”

  “The boardinghouse. I’m signing it over to you.”

  “What?” he asked. “No . . . I can’t—”

  “Take it. Make me proud,” I said. “Restore it. Besides, you may not thank me for it if turns out to be really cursed.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” he choked.

  “That I’m welcome anytime?”

  “You are welcome anytime,” he said and hugged me again.

  I was happy with that decision, I thought as I got in the car. Elliott had the same relationship to Bridie that I had, and he already lived in West Virginia. He was a family historian, too. He knew what he had and he’d take care of it. If I kept it, I would feel as though I had to be here, and I couldn’t do that. I belonged in New Kassel. And I couldn’t live with myself if I sold it and two years from now they built those cheap pop-up houses in some stupid subdivision named River’s Bend Luxury Homes, or something. No, it was where it should be.

  Twelve hours later, Gert and I had not sung one song, nor had we played a single round of I’m Hiding Behind the Color. . . The trip home had been quiet. Reflective. I’d learned so much during my visit. So much about coal mining and life in the coal towns. I’d always known my family members were miners, but I never really knew, if you know what I mean. I’d learned a lot about desperation. Desperate people in desperate situations will do very desperate things.

  I let out a huge sigh as the Gateway Arch and the St. Louis skyline came into view from the east side of the Mississippi. The Clarion Hotel the only round building sitting to the left, the riverboat casinos, all parallel-parked along the riverfront. New Kassel was just thirty or so minutes away. My home. My family. I was never leaving it again.

  “Smooth sailing from here on, Gert,” I said.

  “Yup,” she answered.

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “I think my water just broke.”

  Author’s Note

  I decided it was time to address the most popular question I get asked: Where is New Kassel? I thought long and hard when I started to write the first book in this series, Family Skeletons, about where the series should take place and decided it would be better if the setting was fictitious. New Kassel and Granite County do not exist. Nor do Wisteria, Partut County, or Progress. My inspiration for New Kassel can be found in Missouri’s historic river towns, like Hannibal, Herman, Ste. Genevieve, Kimmswick, and St. Charles. Part of the reason I made this a fictitious place is because I can do so much more with it. I can place an ice cream shop anywhere I want. I don’t have to be concerned if I accidentally pick a name that belonged to a real person from an actual place. Which brings me to the town in this book, Panther Run, West Virginia. For the same reason, the town and the town’s coal company are both fictitious as well. The boardinghouse is architecturally based on the old Beech Glen boardinghouse located in Beech Glen, West Virginia, which was falling down and in disrepair when I saw it in the mid-1980s. The area along the Gauley and New River is real, however, and is, in fact, the land covered during Mary Draper Ingles’s infamous escape from the Shawnee in the 1750s.

  A note on the issue of coal mining: The miners of the early twentieth century led a very hard life, working sunup to sundown with no hope of a better life. I was humbled when I realized my great-grandfather, a slew of great uncles, my great-great-grandfather, and a plethora of other male and female relatives lived in those conditions during hard times. Some of the anecdotes in this book come from my family. If you are interested in learning further about the life of the coal miner, you might rent the movie Matewan, a John Sayles film that accurately depicts the coal miner’s predicament in southern West Virginia. Also, see the following books: Images of Appalachian Coalfields by Builder Levy; Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America’s Blood} Coal Industry by Priscilla Long; Lament for the Molly Maguires by Arthur H. Lewis; Hillbilly Women by Kathy Kahn; and Life, Work, Rebellion in the Coal Fields by David Corbin.

  I hope you will all forgive me for venturing out of New Kassel and join me for Torie’s next adventure, which will have her back home with the whole cast of characters you all have come to know.

  —Rett MacPherson

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  If anyone here has any reason why these two should not be married, speak now or forever hold your peace,” the Reverend McIlhenny said.

  I just want to state for the record that I did not say a word. I just stood there in my peach satin gown, holding back tears and waiting to hear my mother and the sheriff say the words “I do.” Evidently everybody in attendance thought I was going to say something because the entire congregation looked at me. The reverend, my mother, the sheriff, everybody.

  The breeze ruffled my dress, and I tried to think about the gorgeous weather on this August day and the pink and yellow roses that climbed up the trellises of the Laura Winery. My mother had picked the perfect spot to get married. High on a cliff, just north of town, the Laura Winery had attracted thousands of people for nearly seven decades. My mother had always said that if she ever remarried, she wanted to do it in the courtyard of the winery overlooking the Mississippi River. She got her wish.

  It seemed like a full minute had passed since the reverend had asked his question and still everybody was staring at me. I couldn’t help but wonder just how the entire town had found out that I wasn’t real hip on this marriage. Well, I was all right with it now, but I hadn’t been. My mother was marrying the sheriff. And let’s just say that the sheriff and I have had a few disagreements in the past.

  I have to admit that my soon-to-be stepfather, Sheriff Colin Woodrow Brooke, looked spiffy in his dusty charcoal grey suit and spit-shined black shoes. He was a huge man, twelve years younger than my mother, tall and broad through the shoulders and just plain old big. No matter how many times I said we’d called a truce, I still couldn’t help but think mean thoughts about him. Just how much food did he consume in one day, anyway? I imagined feeding him was much like feeding a horse. He probably bought his food in feed sacks rather than little cardboard boxes or cans. Did he use a trough or a plate? See, I can’t help myself. What was my problem with him? Maybe it was that he was one of the few people who made me answer to authority. Yeah, that could be it.

  So, there I stood next to my mother, who looked absolutely radiant in her ivory crocheted dress, imagining her soon-to-be husband on his hands and knees eating out of a trough when they said the words “I do.”

  I looked over at Mom and thought that she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. A splash of baby’s breath graced her salt-and-pepper hair, and her large brown eyes were full of joy. The sheriff had to bend down to kiss her because she was in a wheelchair, having been one of the last polio victims of the 1950s before the vaccine was made public.

  And so they kissed and now I had a stepfather who was the sheriff. How fair was that? I looked over at my husband, Rudy, who was the best man, and he winked at me. He looked pretty good in his suit too, I might add.

  My mother and the sheriff made their way down the aisle, and Rudy came over and grabbed my hand. “Torie,” he said. “Are you going to cry? You always cry at weddings.”

  “No,” I said, as a tear ran down my cheek.

  He smiled, squeezed my hand and kissed me. In the front row, my infant son Matthew wailed at the top of his lungs. I knew just how he felt.

  After t
wo hours of plastering smiles on our faces and posing just so for pictures, we all traveled back to New Kassel to the Knights of Columbus Hall in a long caravan of freshly washed cars. I was determined not to cry all the way back to town because my eyes would be swollen and everybody would know I had been crying; I was just determined not to do it. So I thought of the sheriff eating out of his trough again.

  Once we were at the KC Hall, I was approached by too many people wanting too many things. The caterer wanted to know where to put the cake. My Aunt Bethany showed me the lipstick that my daughter Mary had somehow found in my purse and smeared all over her face. At least she hadn’t gotten it on the dress, and at least she had waited until after the pictures. Helen Wickland wanted to know what to do with the party favors she’d made. Chocolate party favors. I told her to put them on the tables far away from me. Tobias wanted to know when he could start playing his accordion. I wanted to say never but I just smiled and said, “In a minute.” My grandmother insisted that I introduce her to the sheriff’s sister. And there was no putting my grandmother off. It had to be done now.

  In between carrying Matthew all over the room showing off his newborn son and keeping Mary from climbing onto the wedding cake, Rudy wanted to know when we would eat. And last, but not least, no less than a dozen people approached me and asked me just who the hell had invited my father.

  My mother had. They were still friends.

  I wanted to go home. Eat, cry, sleep. In that order.

  Instead I smiled, raised my chin a notch and took care of everything, although not necessarily in the order of their appearances. My grandmother came first.

  A while later, my husband stood and gave a touching toast. It ended with “And she’s the greatest mother-in-law in the world, and I don’t say that lightly. Because my saying it means my mother isn’t. So you take good care of her, Colin.”

  Great. More tears.

  I stood in the corner, watching everybody, as the newlyweds prepared to cut the cake. Next, the music and the dancing would start. I thought I could blend into the deer-brown paneling, but I did not. My best friend, Colette, walked up to me and gave me a big hug.

  Colette was thirty-five and still single. Not because she couldn’t find a man, but because she couldn’t find a man. She liked plenty of men, but she was usually too much woman for them. She was my height, curvy and buxom, with lots of hair. She couldn’t help that big hair had gone out in the ‘80s. Hers was naturally big.

  She wore a Caribbean-blue dress, cut low enough to show plenty of cleavage and hemmed high enough to show plenty of thigh. She simply loved to give old men cheap thrills and, well, she was thrilling them tonight. She was a reporter in the big city and I loved her like a sister, not just because I didn’t have one, but because I have no memory of life without her. B.C. in my life means “Before Colette.”

  “I don’t see you enough,” I said to her.

  “I know. I’ve got deadlines, you’ve got kids. I’ve talked to more women who say they really enjoy their fifties because their kids have moved out and their jobs are winding down and they can finally enjoy life,” she said. “It’s just not fair that by the time I get there my boobs are going to be keeping company with my navel.”

  “Ha. It’s obvious you don’t have kids,” I said to her and smiled.

  She studied me a minute and then caught what I had said and laughed. We laughed together a moment and then she regarded me cautiously. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine. This is a huge adjustment, that’s all. Remember our senior year, when you were running for homecoming queen and you said that you didn’t care if you lost, just as long as you didn’t lose to Cindy Lou Marks?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “God, she was my arch enemy. No, it was more than that. I hated her guts.”

  I gestured toward the sheriff standing beside the triple-tiered wedding cake. “Meet my Cindy Lou Marks.”

  “Ahh, I get it,” she said.

  “Really, it’s not that bad,” I said. “I hate to admit it out loud, but a lot of this is hormones.”

  “You been crying a lot since the baby was borm?”

  I ignored the question.

  “Torie?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Torie O’Shea, you’ve got the baby blues. You need to go to the doctor.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said and waved a hand at her. I hate admitting that hormones actually play a part in my life. It just seems like one more thing that Mother Nature throws at women that men don’t have to deal with, and therefore, most of the time, I refuse to acknowledge it. It’s just not fair. But I suppose if you’re a man and you live in proximity to a woman, then you’ll have to deal with hormones after all. Maybe Mother Nature is fair in her own way.

  “Okay,” she said. “Maybe you just need to get back to work earlier than planned.”

  She was good. She always knew when to lean and when to back off. I gestured to my mother. “My baby-sitter is going to be in Alaska for three weeks. So, until she gets back, I’m kind of limited. I can’t do the tours and such. Plus, I’m not sure I could fit back in the dresses yet. All I can do is research, and then . . . Lord, Colette, have you ever tried to go to the library with three kids?”

  “I try not to even be in the same room with three kids at the same time if I can help it,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Oh, unless they’re yours, of course.”

  I smiled at her.

  “I guess being a tour guide would be really difficult with children,” she said.

  “You have no idea.”

  “Oh, here comes the wicked witch,” Colette said and looked in the direction of my boss, Sylvia Pershing.

  I stood up straighter, just because that’s the type of behavior that Sylvia has instilled in me. Sit up straight. Put your shoulders back. Elbows off the table. She walked right up to me and, without even acknowledging Colette’s presence, she said. “I’ve got work for you.”

  Sylvia owned half of the town and was president of the Historical society. I worked there, giving tours and running things. The Gaheimer house was the headquarters, and she spent most of her waking hours there. It had once belonged to an old lover of hers, and the house was a shrine in his honor. The woman was in her nineties and somehow she always made me feel as if I didn’t do enough.

  “What sort of work?” I asked. In addition to giving the tours, I was the one who compiled historical and genealogical data of the town, did displays of historical events or items, and that sort of thing. My job was also to play mediator between Sylvia and the rest of the town. The townspeople loved Sylvia’s sister, Wilma, but they weren’t nearly as fond of Sylvia. I think some of it was just a deep-rooted misunderstanding. She was actually a giving and honest woman. She just had no finesse at all.

  “I’d like for you to write a biography,” she said.

  “Me?” I asked, thinking for a minute she meant Colette.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why must you always ask why?” she asked. The fuchsia-colored pantsuit she wore gave her aged gray skin a nice healthy pink glow.

  “It’s my nature, Sylvia. You know how you swallow after you chew food? Well, I ask why when somebody says something,” I explained.

  “It needs to be about forty thousand words,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She rolled her eyes and I found this funny. Sylvia was thin as a rail and wore her hair in two long braids twisted around her head every single day of her life. Wilma used to wear her hair the same way until she realized that if she wore her hair down, it really irked her sister. Ever since, Wilma has worn her hair down.

  “Because I said so,” she answered.

  “That never worked with my mother, and it’s not going to work with you,” I said. “I always asked my mother why and she always gave me an answer.”

  “It’s a wonder your mother’s not in the madhouse,” she said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “For Pe
te’s sake, Sylvia, just tell her why,” Colette jumped in. “Before she has a stroke.”

  “You stay out of this,” Sylvia snapped at Colette. She turned back to me. “If you must know, there’s a small press . . . one of the colleges, and I thought it would be nice to compile a few histories of different things in Granite County. Maybe do a small biography on a few of the more famous residents—”

  “Are there any famous residents of Granite County?” Colette asked.

  Sylvia ignored her completely.

  “—And on some landmark places. It would be just a small print run. . . maybe a couple of hundred books on each subject that we could deposit in different libraries. One of the people that has always fascinated me is Catherine Finch.”

  “Why?” I asked. Realizing I had—of course—asked why, I added, “Sorry.”

  “Once you start researching her, you’ll understand. She was a fascinating woman,” she said.

  “I know who she is—”

  “But obviously you know nothing about her.”

  “All right,” I said. I was rather excited about actually having something to do that I could work on from home. “When do you want me to start and when do you want it finished?”

  “Right away.”

  “Which was that the answer co? The former or the latter?”

  “Both,” she said, and walked away.

  “The nerve of that woman,” Colette said as she watched Sylvia disappear in the crowd.

  “Yeah, but you gotta hope that when we’re in our nineties, if we make it to our nineties, that we’re as full of gusto,” I said.

  “More like full of sh—”

  “Torie,” the sheriff said, arriving just in time to cut her off. Sheriff. Colin. Dad.

  “Yes?” I asked as I turned to him.

  “I was wondering if you could do me a favor while we’re in Alaska?” he asked.