Fleetie's Crossing

by K. Bruce Florence

  Dorotha saw the deputy’s car and cried even harder. “Mommy, Mommy, he’s coming to get me.”

  Virginia grabbed her hand and pulled her off the track where the two of them crouched down on the rail bank. “Shhh, Dork. They can’t see you. It’s too dark. Don’t yell and let them know we’re here.”

  Fleetie lost all patience. It was not enough that Dorotha had been shamed in front of the neighbors. Now here she was, cowering in the dark like some criminal. “Get up on the track and hurry up about it. No one is looking for you, but I’m gonna whoop both of you if you don’t get to moving.”

  For all the fierceness of her words, Fleetie had no force behind her threat. She took Dorotha and Virginia by the hand and helped them stand and find their footing in the dense dark. Dorotha kept snuffling and snubbing all the long way home.

  Mother, as a rule, let us traipse about the valley with the Sargeant children without worry. But tonight, she had one of those feelings of hers and nagged Daddy into going to look to make sure we were safe. Daddy told me he knew better than to argue with her. She was more often right about her “feelings” than she was wrong. Even if he could not figure out right at that moment what was causing her skin to crawl, in the days ahead, he would discover she was right. He met us just as we were coming up the crossing at the foot of the hill. Fleetie, distracted and jumpy as I ever saw her, walked nearer the car.

  “What’s the trouble, Fleet? You all don’t look like you’ve been to a party. Hey, Dorotha, you been crying? Lost your feller, did you?”

  Daddy’s teasing, which always brought gales of laughter from Fleet’s kids, was met tonight with silence.

  “Don’t pay them no mind, Ed. They was a fight, and Nessa and Clifford got themselves off somewheres. We couldn’t find them before we left. Burl and Fred is over at the settlement looking for them. Won’t you come on in for a spell?”

  “No, thank you. I’ll take my girls on up the hill. Katie is pacing the floor. Are you sure Nessa is at the settlement?”

  “Lord, I don’t know. Young’uns’ll drive you crazy, wear you out when they are little, and worry you to death when they are grown. We sure pay for our raisin’.”

  “Want me to drive over and see if I can find them?”

  “Lord a’mercy, no, Ed. Burl will find them. No use gettin’ the whole valley in a uproar, but I sure thank you anyway.”

  “Girls, get in the car. Your mom is frettin’ over you both. Send one of the kids to get me if she don’t show up, Fleet. I’ll come down, and Burl and me will go scoutin’. Don’t worry, kids usually land on their feet.” Daddy pulled away, turned the car around, and drove up the hill.

  We had barely walked in the house before Burl drove up to use the telephone. He reported that Nessa was nowhere to be found in the settlement. Burl had driven back to the schoolhouse and searched the grounds and did not find the pair. It was beginning to look as if they had run off, and Burl’s temper was about to get the best of him.

  “Ay god, Ed, when I get my hands on that boy, I’ll not leave a spot that’s not black and blue. Nessa’s just a baby. I swear a man ought to drown kids as soon as they’re born. They’re nothing but trouble the rest of your life,” said Burl.

  “Slow down, Burl. I’ll call the sheriff. You can’t find nobody if you’re shouting and stomping like a crazy man. Come on, we’ll go to town together. The sheriff will most likely already know something. Kids running off to Jellico leave a pretty clear trail.”

  Daddy called the sheriff’s office and told the dispatcher they were coming in to see the sheriff. The two of them walked down the front steps and climbed in Burl’s truck. I walked right behind the truck, grabbed the tailgate, and swung myself up. I wasn’t ready to let all the ruckus of tonight end. The Margie Grand didn’t show movies this exciting—it was too good to miss.

  Burl pulled the truck beside the gate, and I jumped off the back. Dorotha was standing behind Fleetie. All she had heard was that Burl and Ed were going to find the sheriff. No one was paying any attention to Dorotha and didn’t see the pure terror cross her face. The mention of the sheriff sent her flying into the kitchen and onto the back porch, where Leatha and I found her crouched beside the washing machine.

  “Dork, you better get on to bed,” said Leatha.

  She was crying so hard, she wailed more than spoke. “I can’t! Daddy and Ed has gone to get the sheriff. He’s gonna take me to jail.”

  “Stay there, then. You are pure dumb, Dork. The sheriff has bigger stuff to mess with than you,” said Leatha.

  “You don’t know nuthin’. You are so prissy, you can’t tell morning from night. Leave me alone. I’m not coming in. I’m staying right here where I can run if the sheriff comes to get me,” she said.

  Leatha slammed the back screen door, and we went inside and turned off the kitchen light so we could tell where she went in the dark. She took out across the backyard and turned up the mountain. We lost sight of her, so we moved to the back of the house to watch her out the bedroom window. She looked to be heading for the deep woods high on the sheltering mountain above us. To the far left, we spotted her as she kept climbing the steep hill and passed Hobe’s back porch. In her frantic dash to get away from the sheriff and jail, she must have not noticed the red glow of a cigarette on Hobe’s porch, marking the place where someone stood watching her. As she ran by the house, I could see a red glow cut through the blackness as it flew in a high arc and fell away just beyond the porch. A black shadow moved down the two worn steps and onto Dorotha’s path as she kept moving fast on her way up the side of the mountain.

  Chapter 41

  THE STILL

  Leatha and I climbed into bed, while Fleetie kept her vigil by the window in the living room. We did not mention that we had seen Dorotha leave the back porch and go up the hill. Her goofiness had a way of wearing us all down. If she chose to run up the hill, that meant extra room in the crowded bed, so we kept our mouth shut. For once, we could curl up under the covers with a flashlight and read True Confessions without having Dorotha threaten to tell on us. But even the delicious thrill of a forbidden magazine was not enough to keep us awake for long. Soon, Emma, Rebecca, Leatha, and I drifted off to sleep.

  As the night birds gave up their low songs, and just before the first tinges of morning light nudged the day birds off their roost, a car came down the road and drove over the crossing and made its way up the hill. It stopped in front of the Sargeants’ house. Leatha punched me awake. Fleetie had fallen asleep in the living room with her arms crossed on the windowsill. She jerked awake when the car door slammed. She raced to the front door and ran down the porch steps onto the path just as Nessa and Clifford were making their way up the same path to the house. Fleetie was so breathless, it was hard for her to speak. She held one hand to her chest and the other on her hip as if she was trying to hold herself upright.

  “Where have you been? I have been half out of my mind. Are you trying to turn me gray overnight? I’ve not been to bed. Where is Burl and Ed?” Tears ran down Fleetie’s face, and she could not seem to make herself stop talking. It was as if she knew that if she stayed silent, Nessa was going to tell her the news she couldn’t bear to hear.

  Nessa grabbed her mother and held her close, and to the surprise of both of them, she began to cry deep, exploding sobs. The two women stood weeping in the early light, while a bewildered Clifford backstepped toward the car. Daddy and Burl rolled out of the car, laughing at the sight of Clifford retreating in the face of two sets of female tears.

  Daddy was still laughing. “Fleetie, you’ve got yourself a fine new son-in-law if you don’t scare him to death first.”

  Fleetie shook herself loose and sat hard on the bottom step, wrapping herself into a ball, rocking slowly back and forth as the early morning dampness twisted every strand of her hair into drifts of wispy curls. Nessa sat beside her and began to tell her where they had been. Cliff
ord stood first on one foot and then the other, not knowing whether to move forward or stay near the car. Daddy finally took pity on him and suggested to Burl that they make their way into the house for some coffee. Leatha and I jumped back in bed.

  The men left the two women on the steps whispering their way through the new situation between them. The men found their way to the kitchen and began filling cups with coffee left on the stove for far too long. They bantered and complained about the coffee.

  As we looked around the bedroom, getting our bearings in the half light, we first felt and then saw that Dorotha had not filled her corner of the bed. Her pillow was empty and smooth. The noise from the kitchen urged us forward as we pulled on our shirts and shorts that we had dropped beside the bed the night before. Leatha opened the door a crack, and seeing no one in the living room, she motioned to me, and we slipped out of the bedroom and closed the door behind us.

  “Where’s Mommy?” said Leatha as she stepped into the noisy kitchen.

  Daddy smiled at her. “You’ve got a big surprise this morning. Clifford here is your new brother-in-law. How about that?”

  “How come he’s my brother-in-law? Where’s Nessa? Last thing I heard, the sheriff was after them,” said Leatha.

  Burl said, “Nessa and Fleetie are out front. If you want to know about what happened, go ask the women. Tell ’em we’re hungry and to get their selves in here and cook. I swear them women are plumb no count leavin’ us men to go hungry while they moon around and beller like a barn full of orphan calves.”

  Leatha whipped around and tore out the front door, putting as much space between her and the men as she could. I ran right with her. At any minute, Daddy was going to realize I was not home where I belonged, and I would be on my way home before I could find out anything.

  Without waiting to ask Nessa what Daddy meant about Clifford, Leatha announced, “Dork’s gone. She was on the back porch last night, and now she’s gone.”

  Fleetie flew up the steps and threw open the bedroom door and threw back the covers, exposing sleeping children, now blinking and as confused as a litter of kittens. Finding no Dorotha, she ran through the kitchen, stepping over the men’s feet as she threw open the door and ran the length of the porch and down the steps. She bent over to peer into the crawl space and then ran back around to the front porch. She threw open the basement door, looking for Dorotha hiding among the rows of canned food stored in the keep. I was behind Daddy when he found Fleetie there as pale as the morning light just now beginning to swell into day.

  “Fleetie, was she here last night after you all got back from the box supper?”

  “She cried all the way back, Ed. You couldn’t miss her. She was scared plumb out of her wits that the sheriff was going to get her for blabbing all that ugly talk about Hobe. There’s no telling where she’s run off to. She knows ever’ rill and dip in this mountain. She could hide for days, and we’d not find her till she was too hungry to stay away anymore.”

  Daddy said, “Back in the summer, Leatha and Rachel built a new clubhouse somewhere above the flat. Send them up there to look, and the rest of us will fan out to the Kentenia line and Town rocks. She doesn’t need to be out there by herself, and beside, we need to get her home to meet her new brother-in-law.”

  “Lord a’mercy, I purely forgot them two. Clifford can just as well go looking for her too. He better get used to what it’s like to tie into this family. It’s sure not nothin’s as rosy as their big running-off plans last night,” said Fleetie.

  Fleetie and Nessa followed Leatha and me up the path to find the clubhouse, while Burl and the other men spread themselves across the brow of the hill well beyond the path we were taking. Fred drove up and followed Burl into the deep hollow, carved by a spring that ran past Hobe’s and the Willises’ on its way to the river.

  Dorotha was not at the clubhouse, and Fleetie sent Nessa back to the house to mind the children. As Nessa left, we continued up the mountain.

  Across the way, I saw Fred cut away from the group and swing far to the left and circle back above the clubhouse site. He had gotten so far above us that I lost sight of him. The three of us kept pulling ourselves up the steep mountain, but finally, when we came to a nest of small boulders resting just beyond the path, we stopped to catch our breath. None of us had eaten breakfast or slept particularly well, and the race up the mountain had pretty well drained us.

  “Mommy, where was Newan and Clifford last night?”

  Fleetie took a long deep breath. “They went off to Jellico. They are married, I guess.”

  “You mean that old Clifford is my brother-in-law, and I have to be nice to him now?”

  “Yes, that is what it means. And yes, you will be nice to him, and you can stop your silliness right now. Nessa is going to need us. Being married is hard, and she don’t know it yet.”

  “Well, it won’t be hard for me. I am never going to run off with some old boy like Clifford. He’s just dumb.”

  “That’s big talk today, but wait and see. You’ll come around to it one day, and when you do, you are going to need Nessa and all the rest of us to be nice to you and to him. So remember that before you go spoutin’ out a bunch of words nobody wants to hear.”

  During their talk, I wandered over to a walnut tree to see if there were any nuts left on the ground, and on ahead, I spotted Fred coming down the mountain far to the left of where I had last seen him.

  I called back down, “Fred’s coming. Let’s go meet him.”

  I waited until Leatha and Fleetie caught up with me, and by the time they got to me, Fred was about even with us to the far left. Fleetie waved her arms to get his attention, and when he saw us, he stopped, waved back, and acted like he was going to go on. Fleetie yelled at him to stop, and we hurried to get to where he was poised, looking ready to take off any minute.

  Fleetie got to him first then Leatha, but I held back. Fred looked funny. I don’t know funny how, just different. He didn’t want to talk to Fleetie—that, I could see—but she would have none of it.

  “Fred, what did you find? Where is Dorotha? Tell me, Fred. I can’t take no more of this.”

  After a long spell of complete quiet on that mountain except for insect hum, Fred, with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets and his head tilted down nearly to his chin, finally began to talk to us.

  “I pulled away from the others since I was already ahead of them in the truck, but finally, the mountain got too steep to drive any further. I walked on up to the old still site. The trees and undergrowth is so thick, you can hardly tell where the clearing is anymore. But I spotted a rabbit trail and pushed my way through the briars. What I saw, I never hope to see again as long as I live. There was old Hobe, crumpled up like some broke toy right there in front of me and right near the old fire ring. His head was split open about like a mush melon, and it was twisted so crazy on his neck that nothing looked real. His eyes was open, and they looked to be staring right past me. His fist was in a knot, and his arm stretched out like he was reaching for something. That something was little Dorotha. Bruises all over her face, and she is swoll up till you wouldn’t know her. It looks like her left arm is broke and splayed awkward like from her side. Streaks of dried blood has run from her mouth and nose, and blood has splattered brown all over the front of her blouse. I stood there for a time, trying to clear my head enough to decide what to do next.

  “Fleet, she is as dead as Hobe. I couldn’t stand to look no more, so I backed away and went to find you all. Fleetie, I know I shoulda stayed with her, but it hurt me too bad to see her like that.

  “When I got beyond the worst of the briars, I listened to see if I could hear anyone coming close that could help. When I didn’t hear nobody, I pushed on and started down the mountain. I did not stop until I had cleared the brow of the hill where I could cut back through that stand of dead chestnuts. I have sweated through every stitch on my b
ody, and there was no way I could keep from being sick. I puked so hard, it forced me down on my knees. I slumped against the trunk of one of those dead chestnuts. I wanted to stay there, but I knew you was on your way up here. Fleetie, I don’t want you to go up there. It is the worst thing I have ever seen. You can’t stand it.”

  “Fred, are you sure she is dead? What if she isn’t? God almighty, she could be dying right this minute. Jesus Lord, give me strength.”

  Without another word, she began running up the mountain with the two of us trailing behind her.

  Chapter 42

  THE MOUNTAIN ANSWERS

  Fleetie yelled for Leatha and me to follow close. She pointed out the faint animal trail she was following as she worked our way up the face of the mountain. As we approached the old still site, the narrow trace veered off to a sharp left. Fleetie stopped and turned slowly. I watched every move she made. I could almost feel her instinct lead her eyes over the contour and slant of land that would direct someone to a secluded place.

  She was like Pappy. He had known the secrets the mountains give to those who bend their minds enough to follow the earth’s signs and hints. I was beginning to learn that just living in the mountains didn’t mean the land would let you be a part of it, free and clear. You had to hear the sounds, even the faintest echoes, and let your eyes see the earth, the growth rising from the ground, and the very stones tossed about centuries before. You had to let your mind be open to take in the power and sanctuary and feel it in your feet and your heart.

  That mountain knew Fleetie. Ever since she was a child, her feet had traveled every slant, tilt, and stone. Years of picking greens, searching for ’sang, and trailing small game had taught her to let the mountain lead her. She listened and watched and was rewarded as she went venturing for herbs, stray dogs, and children. Fleetie knew the mountain’s moods and secrets, and today, it gave her what she was desperate to know.