Miss Julia Hits the Road

by Ann B. Ross

  “You have our sample jar, Little Lloyd?” I asked, preparing myself to brave the wilds.

  “Yessum. Right here.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “I don’t much like this,” Lillian said, looking out from one side of the car to the other. “I jus’ been thinkin’ ’bout that ole graveyard out yonder. We ought not be ’sturbin’ no haints in the middle of the night.”

  “Lillian,” I said. “You know better. We’re not going to bother them, and they won’t bother us.”

  “It’ll be all right, Miss Lillian,” Little Lloyd said as he opened the car door. “Just shine your flashlight in front of you so you won’t trip on anything.”

  “You can stay in the car, if you want to,” I told her, but she pushed up the front seat and got out beside Little Lloyd, mumbling that she wasn’t about to stay by herself.

  It was fairly easy walking along the old logging road, but I was glad I’d had the foresight to wear my galoshes. The weeds rustling against my feet and lower limbs would’ve ruined my stockings.

  I held up my hand and whispered, “What’s that noise?”

  We all stopped in our tracks and listened. “I don’t hear anything,” Little Lloyd whispered back.

  “Me neither,” Lillian said, swallowing hard.

  “Well, now I don’t, either,” I said. “Let’s keep going.”

  But as soon as we started walking again, I heard a rhythmic rubbing noise as if something or someone were following alongside of us. I swung the flashlight beam on each side of us, but the trees were too thick to see anything.

  I stopped again, as did they, and the noise stopped, too.

  “What’s it sound like?” Little Lloyd whispered, his voice slightly on the quavery side.

  “Like somebody’s rustling through the leaves, making every step we make,” I answered. I didn’t want to scare him or Lillian, but I was on the verge of being unnerved, myself.

  “I think it me,” Lillian said. “See, this be what you hearin’.” And she walked a few steps as we stood watching her. Sure enough, the nylon fabric of her running suit sliding between her lower limbs with each step made the noise that had given me such a turn.

  “Lord, Lillian,” I said with a nervous laugh. “You need to do something about that. Anybody could hear us coming a mile away.”

  “They’s not nobody out here anyway,” she said. “Ever’body in they right mind be home eatin’ they supper.”

  Little Lloyd had walked a few feet beyond us and was shining his light along the left side of the road. “There’s got to be a path somewhere,” he said. “This road just stops on the map and doesn’t go over the ridge at all. There has to be a way for those men to cut across the ridge to get to where we saw them.”

  We kept on walking, pulling our coats closer as the autumn cold began to seep around us and the night kept getting darker. I glanced up and saw one lone star twinkling in the deepening night. About the same time, I began to realize that the left side of the road was getting steeper as the ridge rose beyond it. We watched for a path that had to branch off the dirt road.

  “Here it is,” Little Lloyd called out, pointing his light into an area of flattened weeds. “This has to be it. You want to follow it, Miss Julia?”

  I pointed my light into the narrow opening among the trees and rhododendron thickets, and saw how the path angled upward. “Well, we’ve come this far, so I guess so. I just hope it’s not too steep.”

  “We can always turn back if it is,” Little Lloyd said as he plunged in. I followed with some trepidation, and Lillian brought up the rear.

  “Don’t y’all go too fast an’ leave me,” she said.

  The walk was easier than I had feared, though I wouldn’t’ve wanted to do it every day. The path soon leveled off as we followed it along the top of the ridge. I could see a sprinkling of lights from the town through the trees.

  “Be careful here, Miss Julia,” Little Lloyd said. “And you too, Miss Lillian. We’re starting to go downhill now.”

  It wasn’t long before I could smell a dampness in the air and, in spite of the noise Lillian’s running suit was making, hear water bubbling and trickling.

  “Hold up,” Little Lloyd said, stopping so that we almost ran into each other. “There’re rocks and boulders along here.” He threw the beam of his flashlight around so that we could see a rocky incline. The sound of water was louder, and Little Lloyd’s light finally steadied on a small, noisy rush of water that seemed to seep from among some large rocks above us, then fall in a miniature waterfall to pool at the bottom.

  “This must be it,” I said, not at all impressed with its size. “The one Mr. Gibbs wants to bottle and sell, if anybody can believe that.”

  Lillian peered over my shoulder. “It don’t look no different from any other spring, an’ I seen a million of ’em.”

  “Slip down there, Little Lloyd,” I said, not wanting to slide down the incline. “Scoop up some of that water for our sample, while I hold your flashlight.”

  As I lit his way, the boy slid down to the little basin below the spring. He knelt down and filled the jar, then turned to climb back up.

  As he reached us, Lillian drew a sharp breath and said, “You hear that? I think them haints is movin’ ’round.”

  Before I could answer, Little Lloyd grasped my arm and whispered. “Turn off your light.”

  I did, Lillian did, and he’d already done his. I was blind as a bat in the sudden darkness.

  “What is it?” I whispered, feeling the child edge closer to me and Lillian reach for him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Something.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Lillian said under her breath. “They be comin’ up from they graves.” I could feel her trembling behind me. Or it could’ve been my own shivering.

  As the three of us huddled together on the path, fearing even to breathe, a bright light from the other side of the spring suddenly spotlighted us. I nearly fainted.

  “Well, as I live and breathe,” a voice I could’ve done without hearing called out. “I do believe that’s Mrs. Julia Springer and her entourage out gallivanting after dark.”

  Of all the people I hadn’t expected to run into, Thurlow Jones was the most unlikely. “Turn that light off,” I snapped. “You’re about to blind us. And get out here where we can see you.” I flicked on my flashlight as soon as the bright beam swung away from us. “What do you mean jumping out at us like that?”

  Thurlow Jones moved his scrawny self out from behind a large boulder on the other side of the pool, his flashlight in one hand and a quart Mason jar in the other.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” he said. Our lights glinted off his glasses, and I thought to myself that he looked even crazier than when I’d last seen him.

  “But we didn’t scare you half to death, Mr. Jones,” I reminded him. “And I don’t appreciate being sprung at like you did. What’re you doing here, anyway?”

  “Same thing you are, little lady. Testing the waters.”

  I drew myself up tighter and taller, taking offense at his term of address, as well as his assumption of my mission. “I’ll have you know that I have no interest whatsoever in testing water from a cow pasture.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he said, holding up the Mason jar. He gave the jar a shake so that the water in it sloshed around. “It’s supposed to give a man a new lease on life and, as I’ve already had a jar full of it, I can feel it doin’ its work. Stand back, folks, I’m coming across.” And he backed up on the slippery bank to get a running start to jump the stream.

  “Run!” I yelled, grabbing Little Lloyd’s hand and pushing Lillian to lead the retreat.

  As we scrambled back up the path, we heard a slithering of rocks, the shattering of glass, and a small splash. The beam of a flashlight flickered wildly through the treetops, and Thurlow Jones yelped, “God doggit!” But we neither lingered nor looked back.

  “Turn off the lights!” Little L
loyd called out. We did and were plunged into darkness. Our sudden blindness didn’t stop Lillian. I don’t know how she did it, but she kept us on the path up the ridge, across it, and down the other side, all of us panting and wheezing as if the devil himself was after us. And for all I knew, that’s exactly who it was. As for Little Lloyd and me, we had it easier than Lillian, who had to keep on the path by instinct. The child had me by the hand, pulling me along the narrow way, as he took aim on the reflecting strips on the heels of Lillian’s running shoes. How she did it, I don’t know, but she guided us straight to the car.

  I cranked the car with shaking hands and backed out from the logging road onto Mountain Lake Road, gratified that I’d managed to go in reverse without hitting anything.

  “At least we got our sample,” Little Lloyd said. “Some of it sloshed out, though. I should’ve brought a lid.”

  “Just so we have enough to look at,” I said, straining to keep the car on the twisting road. “But I don’t think it’s going to matter. Image is everything when you’re selling something, Little Lloyd. And if big talkers and big spenders like Mr. Jones think there’s something special about that water, then everybody else will, too.”

  I bit my lip, thinking hard as we coasted down Mountain Lake Road. For all I knew Thurlow Jones might throw in with Clarence Gibbs and put that stuff on the market. We’d never get Willow Lane if that happened. It looked as if the only way to stop Clarence Gibbs was to put my home in jeopardy, and I determined then and there to just do it.

  But there was something else I could do, as well. “Lillian,” I said, “how close would you say that cemetery is to the spring?”

  “Not far,” she said from the backseat. “Them graves be under that oak tree on the edge of the pasture. Nobody been buried in there for a long time now, so it won’t get no bigger. Them headstones be crooked an’ fallin’ over, an’ they ’bout a hundred years ole.”

  “It just occured to me that Mr. Gibbs couldn’t sell a drop of that water if people knew it came from under a graveyard.”

  “Oh, yuk,” Little Lloyd said.

  “It don’t run under that graveyard,” Lillian said. “Them graves be downstream.”

  “I know,” I said, “but how many others know that? If Clarence Gibbs tries to back out of selling to us after we work so hard to raise the money, I’m going to see to it that everybody knows where that water comes from.”

  “Oh, Law, Miss Julia, he gonna sue you.”

  “Let him try,” I said. “Sometimes, Lillian, you just have to hold a man’s feet to the fire.”

  Chapter 22

  “My goodness!” Hazel Marie said, as the three of us burst into the kitchen. She jumped up from the table, her eyes wide with concern. “What happened to you?”

  We’d recovered from our run, but not from the scare that Thurlow Jones had given us. Wanting to appear somewhat collected, I put my hand up and smoothed back my tangled hair. Little Lloyd made an effort to keep from laughing, but Lillian was still puffing and blowing from our flight through the woods.

  “Why, nothing,” I said as I removed my coat. “We just took a little walk, and it took longer to get back than we’d expected.”

  Little Lloyd couldn’t help it. He began to laugh out loud. “It didn’t take any time at all, the way we were moving. I think we set a record, Mama.”

  Nothing would do then but to tell Hazel Marie all about our scouting expedition, the upshot of which was that we’d learned little more than we’d known before we went. Well, we’d located the spring, but knew nothing more about the water spurting from it—other than Thurlow Jones’s testimony, which could be thoroughly discounted by reasonable people. But reasonable people are few and far between, as everybody knows. I shivered again at the thought of Thurlow’s bony fingers reaching for a tender spot on my person. Unaccustomed as I was to footraces and already feeling the consequences of running that ridge, I would do it again in a minute if that fool started after me again.

  Hazel Marie was properly impressed with our daring and said that the next time she wanted to go with us.

  “I doubt there’ll be a next time,” I said, pulling off my galoshes and wondering if my feet would ever be the same.

  Lillian began making hot chocolate and mumbling something about marshmallows to go with it. “Nobody gonna get me back up there,” she said. “When that ole man jump out at us, I like to died right there.”

  “But, Mama,” Little Lloyd said as he hung on her chair, “it was Miss Lillian who got us out of there. She was going so fast, you wouldn’t believe. And if it hadn’t been for those shoes you got her, me and Miss Julia would’ve been left in the dark.”

  Lillian smiled to herself, then said, “That the truth, an’ I didn’t even know ’bout them headlights on my heels.”

  “Let’s look at that sample, Little Lloyd,” I said. “Though I don’t know what it can tell us without microscopes and laboratories and such.”

  Nonetheless, we all gathered around the kitchen counter as Little Lloyd set the jar in front of us. We peered at it, shook it, and watched as something flickered in the murky water.

  “Law!” Lillian said. “That thing alive!”

  “It might be a tadpole,” Little Lloyd said, shaking the bottle again.

  “Too cold for tadpoles, I think,” Hazel Marie commented. “Don’t they hatch in the spring?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I know this, I wouldn’t drink that stuff for anything in the world.”

  “Mr. Jones say he did,” Lillian said, her eyes big at the thought. “Wonder he get sick from it?”

  “It’d serve him right,” I said, still smarting from the fright he’d given us. “Little Lloyd, you better run up and take a shower in case any of it splashed on you.”

  After we finished studying the water without coming up with any possible benefits to either man or woman, Hazel Marie and I lingered at the table. Lillian followed Little Lloyd upstairs to prepare for bed.

  “Hazel Marie,” I said. “I hope you don’t think I put Little Lloyd in danger by letting him traipse all over that ridge. Thurlow Jones may be crazy, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child.”

  “I don’t ever worry about him when he’s with you,” she said, with that innocent trust she extended to everybody. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was justified when it came to me, since more than once it’d been the child who’d taken care of me, rather than the other way around.

  “I appreciate that,” I said. Then I sighed and leaned my head on my hand. “I declare, Hazel Marie, I think Sam may be right, as much as I hate to admit it. That old man is after me, and if he hadn’t fallen in the creek he might’ve caught me. I don’t know what I’m going to do about him.”

  She smiled and reached out to pat my arm. “You’re an attractive woman, Miss Julia. It wouldn’t surprise me a bit if half the older men in town were after you.”

  “Huh,” I said, straightening in my chair. “I can see what’s in the mirror, and it’s Wesley Lloyd’s estate that’s attractive, if anything is.”

  “Oh, Miss Julia, that’s not true.” Hazel Marie frowned. “Look,” she said, leaning her arms on the table, “Thurlow Jones doesn’t need your money. He’s got more than the U.S. government already. And look at Sam. You think he’s after your money? Uh-uh, no way. What I think you ought to do is loosen up and enjoy the attention.”

  I started to tell her that if she knew the kind of attention that’d put a bruise on an extremely personal area, she wouldn’t be talking enjoyment of any kind.

  “Speaking of Sam,” I said, ready to turn the conversation elsewhere, “I wish I could quit worrying about him.”

  “Now, look,” she said, with what seemed to me some exasperation. “There is not a thing in the world wrong with him. And I don’t know where you got the idea that there is.”

  “Why, Hazel Marie, you’ve seen the stuff he keeps sending, the flowers and that unfortunate poetry he tries to write. And look at what he’s wearing,
and that lamentable motorbike or whatever it is. And now he’s talking about going dancing, of all things. He’s just not himself, and whenever I think about it, I get sick with worry.” I drew a deep breath, as my heart seemed to drop down inside of me. “And now, having gotten myself into that Poker Run mess, I’m going to have to put my life in his none-too-reliable hands.”

  “Oh, Miss Julia, please don’t worry about that. J. D. says Sam’s as safe a driver as he is.” At my skeptical look, she hurried on. “The things you’re worried about come from only one thing: Sam Murdoch is in a courting mood, and that’s all that’s wrong with him.”

  “Well, my word,” I said, as her words sunk in and a warm flush filled my face. Lord, I thought, could a courting mood be all that was wrong with him? Had romance on his mind made him get decked out in blue jeans, leather jackets, and cowboy boots, then lead him to put his thoughts into verse? It was hard to believe that a sensible man like Sam could act in such a way, regardless of his inner urges—the thought of which sent a shiver up my spine.

  I have to admit that I’d had a sneaking suspicion that there might’ve been another explanation for Sam’s behavior. But I hadn’t been able to let myself believe it for fear that I’d be wrong and make a fool of myself as a result. I mean, courting at our age? It was so unseemly.

  “Well,” I said, hoping that Hazel Marie hadn’t noticed my long silence. “If that’s the case, which I seriously doubt, you’d think he’d dress appropriately for it.”

  I was on the phone first thing the following morning, calling Clarence Gibbs. Sometime during my restless night I’d confirmed my decision to expose my home to his greedy grasp. What else could I do? The people on Willow Lane wanted to keep their homes, and it seemed to me that we should honor their wishes and not go looking for another place that we thought more suitable for them. I’d had some experience with somebody—namely Wesley Lloyd Springer—asking what I wanted, then deciding on his own that I’d be better off with something else. Why ask, if you’re going to make the decision on your own, anyway?