Tempest of Tennessee (Episode 1): Tempest of Tennessee

by McDonald, Terry

  TEMPEST OF TENNESSEE

  BY

  TERRY MCDONALD

  Tempest of Tennessee

  Copyright by Terry McDonald

  February 20, 2018

  All rights reserved

  Any resemblance to a person living or dead is accidental

  TEMPEST OF TENNESSEE

  During a thunderous Tennessee rainstorm, at three a.m. on Christmas morning, Mama’s water broke and she went into labor. While Mama worked up the big push needed to shoot me into the world, wind was blowing sheets of heavy mist and sleet sideways that froze on everything it touched.

  It had snowed the day before, snowed, melted to slush and refroze. When Mama’s water broke, Daddy knew his truck was no match for black-ice roads. Against Mama’s wishes, he did the unthinkable, called 911 for an unaffordable ambulance ride.

  We were fifteen miles from Henderson, the nearest sizable town, but the ambulance would have to come from Jackson, Tennessee, forty-miles away.

  Bad weather caused too many emergency calls. Grandma Sophia delivered me. Mama always said I was a bargain basement girl. The ambulance arrived after I was born. They wanted to take Mama to the hospital anyway, but Daddy ran em off.

  Grandma Sophia’s reminder, “Tempest Sophia Fuller, born on a waning moon,” always came as an epitaph, used whenever I got myself in trouble. They should’ve named me Tempest Trouble Fuller because I was always in it.

  Lies came from my mouth as easy as food went in it. “Is your homework done?”

  “Yes Mama.” Lie; I was out looking for butterfly cocoons.

  “When? I saw you come from the woods and there wasn’t a book in your hand.”

  “I did it at school.”

  “Bring it to me. If you can’t show me your homework, bring me a switch.”

  “Did you top off the water for the chickens?”

  “I sure did, Daddy.” Lie; I was in my hut looking at feathers under my microscope.”

  “That’s strange. I just came from there and they’re empty. Get your chores done, When you finish, it’s the belt for you” Daddy wasn’t forgiving when he laid his belt to work. He swung to leave deep bruises.

  When I young I’d piss him off because I wouldn’t scream or cry. When I got older, I’d smirk at him and act as if his belt was nothing, that he couldn’t hurt me. One day, back before my thirteenth birthday I made him mad by laughing while he swung his belt.

  Red faced, madder than hell, “I’ll beat the goddamn laugh out of you.” I think Mama saved my life that day. Daddy laid his belt from calf to neck, front and back. He didn’t beat the laugh out of me, but I passed out while Mama was screaming for him to stop. Mama had to tell the school I had the flu to give time for the bruises to fade.

  Another thing that called for a switching or a beating was my lack of time sense. That’s what Daddy called it, no time sense once I went into the trees. I’d go in, the wonders of nature would snare me and time lost meaning. I’d miss meals, chores, once I missed my own birthday party. It wasn’t that important anyway. Daddy didn’t believe in wasting money on presents, but Mama always baked a cake.

  Color me belt-bruised and switch-striped in red. It wasn’t that I was lazy. Nature had that strong a hold on me mainly because I could be alone, away from everybody. Summer was best. Not having school gave hours free to roam and to touch, smell, taste and see.

  Don’t get me wrong, I loved the learning part of school, good grades came easy to me, but I didn’t love my classmates. I didn’t fit the mold. I wasn’t a chit-chatter. I never wore makeup. I couldn’t stand the feel of it on my skin.

  Another thing was I didn’t care how I dressed. In my opinion, as long as none of my privates showed, torn jeans and a dirty tank top and I was good. A shirt over the tank top was overdressed. As far as the makeup thing went, dirt for facial accents was fine by me. Contrariwise, I was a sucker for a sentimental romance novel.

  Of course, my way opened me to bullying, but bullies learned the bite of my teeth, the sting of my jagged nails ripping flesh. My feet found their shins and my hands their hair. Ultimately, they learned to avoid me. That, and the fact I was a loner with no friends earned me the title of ‘crazy’.

  Our property backed up to government land, a Wildlife Management Area. The WMA was three-thousand acres of forests and swamp. The land across the street from our graveled dead-end road belonged to a pine forest planted by Southern Pacific, a paper company.

  Our house was at the end of a graveled dead-end road. On the mile to where it joined a narrow paved road were two other houses. One belonged to Bella and John Causley. You could see their house from our yard. They were brother and sister in their seventies. The way they acted with each other, you’d think they were married.

  Way further down the road at the corner where our gravel road met the paved one was a yard full of what looked like junk with a RV parked on it. That place belonged to Billy Westover.

  The junk wasn’t junk, it represented spare parts and recyclable metal. Billy made a living hauling scrap to the junkyard, doing odd jobs and repairing people’s stuff, appliances, and sometimes people’s vehicles. Mostly he liked working on farm tools that had small engines like chainsaws, weed-eaters, lawnmowers and such.

  Billy was in his thirties and I wasn’t supposed to go around him. Mama thought he was a pervert because of the way he would look at my two older sisters and me.

  Forbidden, naturally I disobeyed and went around him. Billy was a perv, but not a bad one.

  “Will you teach me how to weld, Billy?”

  “I don’t like girls around me and I especially don’t need an insane one hanging around.”

  “I’m not insane.”

  “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

  “Jesus, man, forget it.”

  “Show me your pussy and I’ll teach you to weld.”

  “Man, you’re the one that’s insane. You know that’s not happening.”

  “Well, I reckon I’ll teach you, but it wouldn’t kill you to show me. All I want is a look.”

  Mama and Daddy didn’t switch or beat me for going around Billy. I was thirteen by then, too old to whip. They did tell me if Billy raped me, it’d be my own fault.

  Billy didn’t like people much I was the only person he allowed on his property unless it was someone dropping off or picking up a repair job. More than once, I heard one of his customers ask him why he let the nut-case hang around his place. His stock answer to who every asked him was, “She’s no nuttier than you.”

  He taught me to weld and so much else. I learned how to tear apart gas engines and repair them. He spent hours showing me how to wire circuits, and then let me help him wire new sheds and buildings people hired him to build.

  When our refrigerator broke down while Daddy was at work, Mama was frantic because we didn’t have money to replace it. Thanks to working with Billy, listening to him talk to himself while troubling shooting appliances, it took me less than an hour to narrow the problem to the compressor relay. He was due another thank you for supplying a used part.

  One thing Billy loved more than repair work was shooting his ‘weapons’. Besides his thirty-ought-six hunting rifle, in a gun safe he had an AR15, an AK47, and six pistols all chambering 9’s. He and I spent many hours way back in the trees of the WMA. Not only did he teach me how to shoot, he showed me how to use natural material from my surroundings to camouflage my body.

  I found out that in the military he’d been part of a special unit trained in covert activities behind the enemy line. Because of him, I know several ways to make lethal booby-traps. He also taught me how
to make ANFO and an easy formula for a different explosive to detonate the mix.

  I learned a lot from him over the next three years. I can sharpen a chainsaw, repair broken handles, and safely use all the various woodworking tools.

  If needed, I can clear a room full of perpetrators in seconds without wasting a bullet. Per Billy, “Assess your targets from most threatening to least. Be prepared to change the order as the scenario unfolds.”

  He had full size, full-color cardboard cutouts of men and women he salvaged from a stage play in Henderson that went flop. He’ set up different scenarios. A roped off square in his workshop was a room. While my back was turned he’d stand the men and women at random, attach pieces of pink Styrofoam to them to represent pistols and rifles, some weapons in hand, some not at ready. When he said, “Go”, I had to turn around, assess the room and dry-fire a pistol he called his junker. He’d analyze my action, and then have me do it over.

  Billy introduced me to moonshine. I took a shine to his shine, you might say.

  One day, not long ago, in the middle of breaking down a motor off a riding mower, he said, “If I can’t see your pussy, will you show me your tits. It’s been ten years since I saw any. I haven’t seen any naked part of a woman since Afghanistan. All I want is a look. Flat as you are, it’ll be mostly imagining anyway.

  That’s the day he told me about the wounds he got during a fight with ‘a damned rag-head’. He won the fight, but the man cut his thigh and groin so bad that he had to take a medical discharge.

  Then, without telling me he was going to do it, he pulled down his pants and drawers to show me. The ‘rag-head scarred him more than bad, his ding-a-ling, fat and long hung limp between his legs.

  “Fucker cut the nerve in charge of my dick”… “Useless scrap of nerveless meat,” he called it, shaking it and thumping it with a finger, “can’t get it hard even if I use the hose of a vacuum cleaner to suck it. Damn thing’s good for nothing but pissing.”

  Yeah, he pity-punked me, but he died with his wish fulfilled. He talked me completely naked.

  All he did was look. “How long can I look at you?”

  “I don’t know, Billy. This is the first time I’ve been naked for someone to look at. I guess I don’t care, as long as you stay in your chair.”

  He told me I was beautiful. I like to think he died happy. A few days after he talked me naked, I went to his place but he wasn’t there and neither was his four-wheeler. I waited a while, but got tired of it and went home. When he wasn’t there the next day, I went looking for him on the WMA.

  I found him thirty feet from his four-wheeler face down in the dirt. I went home and told Mama and she called the police. Later on, they came by the house and told us Billy had brushed a hornet’s nest and was stung to death.

  Billy didn’t have a funeral, but a week after the hornets turned him into a swollen balloon, Mama told me that the county wanted me to pick up his cremated ashes.

  Daddy didn’t want to take me. He said, “What the hell do you want with that shiftless bastard’s ashes,” but Mama made him do it.

  Daddy worked for part of FEMA, the Federal Food Distribution Agency. They formed the FFDA, the Federal Food Distribution Agency, not long after I was born. Mainly their job was to monitor the crops grown by the farmers and to distribute any excess not needed locally to other places that needed them.

  Billy had told me often enough that by setting prices and controlling what farmers could do with their produce; the state had turned all of Tennessee’s small farmers into sharecroppers. He was always ranting about the dumb-assed politicians and about embargos and tariffs, stuff that I didn’t know about.

  Politics wasn’t a subject talked about in our house. Nothing much of interest was a subject. Mama and my sister’s interest lay in getting them married off.

  Daddy’s interest was all about us getting chores done, Mama having dinner on the table and then leaving him alone to watch his wall screen in his “Man Room’.

  Nope, there was never anything interesting going on at my house. Grandma said being born on a waning moon during a thunderstorm gave me a restless mind. Maybe so, but my belief was that they were all born half-dead and were passing time until they were full dead. That’s why I took to hanging with Billy. He liked do stuff.

  Anyway, Daddy said he wasn’t making a special trip for a jar of ashes, so the next morning on his way to work he dropped me off in Henderson at the County office building.

  “I don’t know how long you’ll be taking care of this business. If too much school passes for it to matter, wait at the McDonalds until I pick you up.”

  I wasn’t about to wait hours with no money and nothing to do. “I’ll hitchhike home.”

  “Suit yourself, girl, but if you get raped, don’t come hollering to me. Put yourself in trouble’s way is how you get in trouble.”

  Daddy’s not the loving type, and he’s not a pretty man. He has a blackhead-pitted nose that I’d probably punch if I were a boy. His favorite phrases for me were, stupid, retard, idiot, or if he was on a roll, insane little bitch

  Walking to the courthouse building, staying between the yellow lines painted on the walkway, I stopped on the blue square twenty feet from the door.

  Because of uncounted attacks on public buildings by various groups, strong security measures were in place, even in small towns. Stopping on blue squares at government buildings was one of them.

  A police drone, one of several on a dedicated perch attached to the wall of the building, flew over and hovered in front of me. In compliance, I looked directly at it for the required three seconds for a face and retinal scan. It flashed green and buzzed back to its perch above the entrance and I went inside.

  Only three people were ahead of me at the Security Vestibule. When my turn came, I stepped past the chest high chain-link outer gate to the blue square. Standing on the embedded cast iron grill, I felt the slight drift of air past my head to the drug and explosives sensors below the grill. I knew that other, unseen sensors scanned me for weapons.

  The lock clicked and the automatic door opened. I passed through into the reception area and crossed a ten-foot space to one of several framed openings in a counter with clear, bulletproof glass, or maybe plastic shielding to protect the workers behind it.

  Causing me to divert my direction, the man behind the center opening pointed to the far-left end where a small, ‘Start Here’ sign topped a pole.

  At the ‘Start Here’ station, glancing at her desk screen, the Asian woman behind the glass said, “Please note; All activities are recorded. Miss Tempest Fuller, how may I help you?”

  “You know my name, I’m sure your computer already knows the answer to that? I was asked to come here.”

  “There is no cause for aggression, Miss Fuller. Please answer the question; how may I help you?”

  To her bland, expressionless face I replied, “Jeez, How in hell did you take that for aggression. I was making a joke. What are you, a robot?”

  “In accordance with Tennessee law, I will respond, ‘Yes’ to your question. Please, again, how may I help you today?”

  I was gobsmacked. “You really are a freaking robot? I’ll be—.”

  “Miss Fuller, shall I call security to ask the question?”

  “No. No, forget that. Christ, it wouldn’t hurt for them to give you some face muscles or at least eye movement. You look dead. I’m here to pick up Billy Westover’s ashes.

  “One moment, please.” Again, the eyes went to her screen, but I think doing that was to make it seem more human. I doubt a computer brain needed to look at a screen. On second thought, her computer brain didn’t need a persona at all. A speaker mounted on the glass could do its job.

  “That would be the ashes of William Jerome Westover. Please take a chair until your name is called.”

  I stuck out my tongue and said, “I won’t say thank you to an inanimate hunk of plastic and metal. You need to get a life.”

  I took one of t
he chairs lined against the wall on either side of the door, was barely seated when a woman opened a door on the left sidewall and called my name.

  Following the short, dowdy woman down a hall with several doors on the right-hand side, I said, “Whoever’s programming your robots need to increase their tolerance scale. It almost called security on me.”

  Without turning to speak, she said, “Not my problem. We’ll all be replaced a few at a time.” She stopped, opened a door and spoke before stepping aside.

  “Miss Fuller is here.”

  Stepping past her, I read the placard on the door, ‘Laurence Battles, Tax Assessor’.

  Battles was young, over twenty-five though. His eyes, set in a round face and his receding hair made him look older. He pointed to a chair facing his desk. “Have a seat, Miss Fuller. This won’t take long.”

  I sat and asked, “Why did you all ask me to take Billy’s ashes? I can’t see Billy giving a damn about em”

  “While processing his remains they found a will inside his wallet.”

  I was going to ask to read it, but Battles beat me to it. He reached into a drawer and passed a sheet of paper across the desk, and then he added a clear plastic bag containing what appeared to be stove ashes, but I figured was what was left of Billy.

  “That is a certified copy of his will which you will want for your records.

  I reached over the desk and lifted the plastic bag. “Dang, couldn’t you all find something cheaper to put em in. Not much in there, what do ya’ll do, toss the excess that doesn’t reduce?”

  Battles shrugged. “I would imagine so, the bones probably. I don’t think they burn. Why don’t you take your seat and I’ll explain the ramifications of Mister Westover’s will.”

  I sat and listened. Billy left me everything he owned, his five acres of land, all his tools, everything.

  “Miss Fuller, as I pointed out, Mister Westover stipulated that the land be sold at public auction and the proceeds from the sale be held in escrow until you reach your majority; in your case, two years, on your eighteenth birthday. If you wish, I can recommend an attorney to handle this affair. Please understand that you will owe our jurisdiction taxes and fees on any amount gained from the sale.