Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith, Sandra Chastain, Donna Ball, Debra Dixon, Nancy Knight, Virginia Ellis

  “Throw it in here, Pitch,” I called out. “You’re holding up the game.”

  He gave me a weak grin and threw a high, slow ball so far outside that he might have been trying to walk me.

  I forced a grin in return. “Throw me a strike. You know I can’t walk.”

  He took me up on the taunt. The next ball had a perfect arc, straight down the middle of the plate. I swung—hard. And missed. And fell. I sprawled across the plate like a side of barbecued ribs flopped on a plastic platter.

  “Casey!” Hank started toward me from first base.

  I gave him a look that froze him in his tracks. When they’d fitted me with the braces in the spinal center, I’d fallen—lots of times. They even taught me how to get up.

  “Casey!” Little Ida called out. I could hear the tears in her voice. “You don’t have to bat, Casey. We love you anyway.”

  I positioned my legs so my feet were pointed toes out, then reached for my bat. Marshaling every ounce of strength in my upper body, I clasped the bat and began to ratchet myself up, dragging my feet forward. Now I had to do something I’d never done in public—push myself erect without losing my balance and falling over in another humiliating display. Inch by inch, I moved the bat toward me and I straightened my body until I was standing.

  The crowd roared.

  I wiped my forehead on my sleeve and pulled my turquoise cap lower.

  The pitcher threw the ball. I drew my bat back and swung. The bat connected with the ball with a clang like an old-fashioned dinner bell. I raised my gaze, hoping, praying. As if it were in slow motion, the ball rose and shot across the sky.

  The crowd was on its feet, cheering. The ball seemed to hover for a moment, then fell—just inside the centerfield fence. I simply stood and watched. Then I heard the thunder of feet. Our three base runners had to touch home plate, and I was blocking it. I couldn’t reach my chair and I couldn’t walk.

  I had to walk.

  Like a mummy in a bad horror movie, I leaned on the bat and inched forward. Sandy reached the plate and danced around me. Mutt pranced across the plate next. Hank, not the fleetest-footed member of the team, was running like he was being chased by the hounds of hell. He tried to miss me. I tried to get out of the way. Neither of us succeeded. It was a déjà vu all over again.

  With a crunch, I went down. Hank fell on top. I grabbed his hand and planted it squarely on home plate. The crowd went wild. The impossible had happened. Mossy Creek had defeated Bigelow twice in one tournament. A home run on an Olympic team wouldn’t have been as sweet.

  Hank rolled over, turning me with him. “Are you okay, babe?”

  I looked down at him and smiled. I was fourteen and falling in love with him at first sight, again. “Oh, yes.”

  If I could coach and play on a softball team, I could get myself back to college and finish my degree in education. If I could teach Little Ida to play softball, I could teach other children. And maybe I could help Hank out in the clinic. And maybe…well, there were a lot of maybes. They’d just have to get in line.

  That evening, as we sat on benches around the town square listening to the Mossy Creek band play It’s a Grand Old Flag and watching fireworks, I leaned against my husband and knew that today’s victory was more than just winning a game. It was a victory of the heart.

  Mighty Casey didn’t strike out.

  The Mossy Creek Gazette

  215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia

  From the desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager

  Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope

  Cornwall, England

  Dear Lady Victoria,

  All right, I admit it. We Mossy Creekites—past or present—are fools for love.

  Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Isabella was pledged to marry old Lionel Bigelow. She began to suspect Lionel might be more interested in her Mossy Creek land-owning connections than her own sweet self. Her uncle, Joshua Hamilton, was suspicious of Lionel’s plans, too, so he hired the finest land surveyor in the South—your great-great-great-great grandfather, Richard—to survey the land in Mossy Creek. Just in case there were any squabbles with Lionel Bigelow over the old land deeds.

  Richard Atworth Stanhope—now if that’s not a dashing Englishman’s name, I don’t know one that is! Legend has it that Richard wore a diamond collar pin. He’d barely settled into a room at the Hamilton House Inn before his collar pin was pilfered by Amarinth Hart Salter, a nutty aunt of Isabella’s on the Salter side. Amarinth said she needed the collar pin to work a love spell on Isabella’s behalf. Nobody in the Hart or Salter families seemed at all embarrassed when she was caught. They just returned the pin to Richard and promised it wouldn’t happen again. He was gentlemanly enough to let the matter drop.

  In the South we don’t hide our odd relatives—we get them out and show them off. Mossy Creekites are natural show offs, but there’s more to it than that. We believe the sweet truths of life can be found in the least likely places sometimes, hidden inside peculiar ways and wistful memories.

  Relatives of Amarinth made news just last month in Mossy Creek. Of course, the real story is that Maggie Hart and her mother Millicent realized they were hiding the sweet truth of life from themselves and each other. As you’re about to see, all it took was a natural force of nature to help them remember where they put their hearts.

  Sentimentally, your friend,

  Katie

  Maggie

  The Hope Chest

  To my way of thinking there was no prettier month in the year than August in Mossy Creek. My dahlias, zinnias, and daisies turned their cheerful faces toward the golden summer sunlight and nodded sleepily with the soft mountain breezes. I smiled as I clipped a sunset rose from the bush at the corner of the veranda and dropped it into my basket. My lush gardens provide baskets full of herbs and fragrant blossoms for the soaps and toiletries and potpourri I make, perfuming the Victorian house I call home. I live just a block off Mossy Creek’s town square, but my house—which is also my shop—could be a cottage in a fantasy painting.

  I guess I’m still a flower child at heart. Nearly thirty years ago, I really was a flower child, but not for very long. Just my first couple of years at college down in Atlanta. I was going to be the first attorney in my family. But I was a Mossy Creekite girl, born and raised. Set me free in a big city, and I look for adventure.

  My freshman year I met Bea, my college roommate. Beatrice Starling Williamson. Her parents had sent her to law school in hopes she’d follow in her father’s legal footsteps, perhaps even to become a judge like him. Bea immediately discovered the hippies who hung out near the campus. Within days, she renamed herself Petunia, then swapped her Villager skirts, and sweaters, and Weejuns for a tie-dyed t-shirt, ragged bellbottom jeans, and sandals. A fashion rebellion looked like fun to me. I went right along with her.

  Petunia made a perfect hippie, but I never did, not really. Oh, I perfected the look, the long straight hair, the granny boots and peasant skirts and incense sticks, but I didn’t have the rule-breaking heart of a truly shocking social rebel. I mean, a person can never forget Sunday School lessons at Mossy Creek Mt. Gilead Methodist, where little girls had to wear white gloves and hard patent-leather shoes and were expected not to burp after drinking a Coca-Cola. Oh, I burned my bra and dated a guitarist in a rock band and changed my name from Maggie Hart to Moonheart, but that was about all.

  Petunia and my guitarist ran off together, and I, brokenhearted, dropped out of college to find my way in the world of natural living. Maybe I wasn’t a flower child, but I wasn’t a lawyer either. Eventually, I wandered back to Mossy Creek, the way almost all ex-patriot Mossy Creekites do. I opened my shop and hung out a sign that named it Moonheart’s Natural Living, though no one in Mossy Creek called me Moonheart. I started out selling natural products I purchased from suppliers in California, but gradually began to make my own candles, soaps, cosmetics, teas, and other organic, nontoxic items.

  Becoming Mother Nature’s business ma
nager was the best thing that ever happened to me—unless you ask my mother.

  My mother, Millicent Abigail Hart, is one of Mossy Creek’s more outrageous characters. She considers herself an everyday, run-of-the-mill, meatloaf-and-marriage kind of woman, though Daddy disappeared on us when I was just a baby. Mother’s been waiting all these years for me to give her a son-in-law and grandchildren to redeem the Hart female pride in Mossy Creek. Yet for obvious reasons, she’s wary of men, and has never liked my taste in potential mates.

  I can’t help but agree with her. The men I chased when I was younger didn’t want to play husband. The ones who chased me wanted to play caveman. I seem to be irresistible to the world’s truck-driving, deer-hunting good old boys who wear white socks with their dress pants and love a woman who smells like a warm meadow full of does. It must be my flower scent.

  Having never outgrown my rock-guitarist phase, I’ve dated one free spirit after another. Disillusionment has always followed love at first sight–or first twang on the guitar, or stroke of the paintbrush, or quatrain of iambic pentameter—and the pickin’s are getting slimmer.

  Recently I looked in the mirror and saw a fifty-year-old woman. Pretty, sassy, still sexy, but fifty. I decided to stop falling in love with grown men who haven’t found themselves yet. No more hippies. No more musicians. No more poets. And no more artists.

  So, I’ve devoted myself to running my shop and keeping track of my mother, which is no easy task. You could say her phone calls to reality are all long distance, now. Some people think I phone home on a loose-screw connection, too. Even my fellow Mossy Creekites—who are very open-minded in their own way—are whispering about me since I started expanding the shop. I’ve added a New Age book section, health foods, and a few swami-psychic-goddess trinkets. I still attend Mt. Gilead Methodist. But I admit the Mossy Creek Unitarians have been courting me.

  Mother is convinced I’m a witch, but not beyond fixing. “You’re not too old to renounce this nonsense, find a nice young man, get married, and have some children,” she says. She neglects to remember that I just turned the half-century mark. Or maybe she can’t remember. Her memory ebbs and flows just as rhythmically as the eddies that dapple the edge of Mossy Creek. In her lucid moments, she plots ways to make me marry Mossy Creek forest ranger Bradley “Smokey” Lincoln. “He’s really dull,” she says, “But you’ll never run out of firewood.” She doesn’t even like him. Bradley was nicknamed Smokey as a rookie ranger after he set the forest on fire. He and I have been friends for years. I’ve occasionally considered the idea of a romance with Smokey, but it just didn’t feel right. Like dating your brother. Not that Smokey would like to hear that.

  As I pondered such circumstances in my life on that hot, beautiful August day in Mossy Creek, I cut my last rose and walked back up on my veranda to return to the cool sanctuary of my shop. I heard a car pull into my little gravel parking lot and turned around in time to see police chief Amos Royden getting out of his blue-and-white patrol car.

  I froze. “Morning, Amos. Pretty day, isn’t it?”

  Amos nodded. I could see he was uncomfortable about something. “Come on in,” I added.

  He entered the shop behind me. “This place always smells good.”

  “Thanks. I think so.” I floated my roses in a big cut glass punch bowl and turned back to him. I was procrastinating. A visit from the chief always meant one thing. “Smokey told me about the lost little boy and the skunk.”

  Amos nodded. “Smokey found him in the woods before I got there.” Amos was procrastinating, too. “Followed a skunk too close. Got lost and got sprayed. Whew, what a smell!”

  “Ah, the life of a forest ranger. Smokey brought him home in the park service Jeep, then had to fumigate it. I gave him some lemon-rosemary spray to use.”

  Amos smiled.

  I sighed, and gave up. “So, what’s Mother done this time?”

  “She’s been on a little shopping spree at the new shop by the theater.”

  “The sculptor?”

  “I don’t know what he is, exactly. She stole a tiara. You know.” He gestured vaguely toward his head, and frowned. “A tiara.”

  “A tiara? In a sculptor’s studio?”

  “Yeah. The sculptor’s ex-wife was an actress, and she left a crate full of her old costumes behind when they got divorced. When your mother snatched the tiara, he followed her next door to the theater and cornered her in the director’s office. He was nice to her. But you know your mother. She doesn’t like to be caught. He didn’t understand that he wasn’t supposed to notice when she pilfered something.”

  “How much was the tiara worth?”

  “Garner says about a hundred dollars.”

  “Garner?”

  “Right. Last name is Garner. I’m on my way over to the theater now. I knew you’d want to go with me.”

  I didn’t. Boy, how I didn’t, but I couldn’t see that I had any choice in the matter. Mother had promised to behave after the last incident. She was getting bolder in her old age. She’d swiped Julia Ledbetter’s twin-seat stroller. I’d returned it laden with two of my finest hanging baskets of moss roses, as an apology.

  “Let’s go,” I said wearily.

  I placed my closed sign on the door. Weekday mornings in August didn’t usually bring in brisk traffic, so I wouldn’t lose much business. There weren’t many tourists in town, and the locals would come back later.

  “Oh, Mother,” I said under my breath.

  The Mossy Creek Theater was very small and anchored the southwest corner of the square with a small marquee that advertised the Mossy Creek Players’ soon-to-premiere production of Oklahoma! Nestled right beside it, in a small, turn-of-the-century storefront that used to house a shoe shop, was Tag Garner’s sculpting gallery and studio. His sign said, Figuratively Speaking. I hadn’t met him yet and gaped at his work. His shop windows were full of rugged, manly looking sculptures, some of marble and some in bronze, mostly of athletes or wild animals butting each other and snarling.

  That worried me.

  Amos and I walked past the shop and into a side door at the theater, then down a narrow hallway to the office. A well-built man with a streak of iridescent blue hair that began at his temple and ended in his graying ponytail rose from a chair near the director’s desk. He looked as if he’d been in a barroom brawl and lost. His shirt was ripped, his nose was bleeding, and his left eye was swollen nearly shut.

  My mother was nowhere to be seen, which was more than a little worrisome. “Where’s my mother?”

  “Probably wrestling a bear,” the stranger said dryly.

  “My mother is a genteel little old lady—”

  “Genteel?” He sat down again and pointed to his shiner. “I got hurt less playing football.”

  “I’m real sorry about the attack and the theft of your tiara, Mr.—”

  “Garner,” he confirmed. “Tag Garner. Victim.” Without his newly acquired bruises, Tag Garner would have been a handsome, brawny man, even with the funky blue streak in his hair and the ponytail. The door opened behind me and our theater director, Anna Rose, walked in carrying a plastic baggie filled with ice. Anna grinned. “Your mother’s performing her own brand of experimental theater these days, Maggie.”

  “She’s been obsessed with tiaras since this spring’s Miss Bigelow County Pageant. Pearl Quinlan loaned her a book about beauty pageants. It had pictures of tiaras in it.”

  “Somebody ought to give her a book on manners,” Tag growled. He held up his right arm. I saw a perfect set of my mother’s denture marks on his forearm. “She bit me.”

  I dropped into the chair opposite him and waited while he pressed the ice bag to his eye. “Did you see which way she went?”

  He laughed darkly. “I thought I had her trapped in here, but she faked me out and ran like a linebacker.”

  “My mother is an elderly woman with health problems.”

  “Health problems? Has she had her shots? I could get rabies.”
>
  “Now, wait just a minute, Mr. Gardner—”

  “Garner,” he corrected. “Tyler Adams Garner—Tag, for short—bloody but unbowed, at your service.” He held up his bitten arm, again. “I’ll probably turn into a werewolf at the next full moon. When I do, you can still call me by my human name.”

  “Well, Tag, I am very sorry—very—for everything my mother’s done, but if you don’t quit making jokes about her I’ll—”

  “Punch me and bite me? Get in line.”

  “Settle down, both of you.” Amos stepped to my side. “Let’s start over. Let me introduce you. Maggie Hart, Tag Garner.”

  I tried to smile but failed miserably. “Pleased,” I muttered.

  “And, I’m just as pleased to meet you, Mrs. Hart, as you obviously are to meet me.”

  “I’m not married,” I corrected absently.

  “So the werewolf line stops with you?”

  I glared at him, all the while wondering if my mother was admiring her looted tiara on a park bench beside one of Mossy Creek’s pretty little bridges—only a short walk away, and her favorite spots after a crime spree. Mother had no sense of guilt, so she never ran for cover. I looked at Amos. “We’ve got to go and look for her. She may have hurt herself, this time.”

  “She seemed fine when she was sucker punching me,” Tag Garner intoned. He stood up, becoming an even more imposing sight—over six-feet-tall and big-shouldered. “Look, she has a problem. I understand, I really do. But she needs to be corralled before she attacks somebody else. Wouldn’t she be happy stealing bedpans in a nursing home?”

  “My mother isn’t ready for a home. She’s just crazy.” Nobody can imagine how difficult those words were for me to say. Mother’s condition was hopeless. “I’ll be happy to pay damages—”

  “No, save your money. Spend it on a doctor for your mother. Get her some help.”

  His patient tone infuriated me. “Listen, Mr. Garner, my mother is a Mossy Creek institution. People around here don’t mind her little quirks. She just needs to be left alone. If you don’t like the way we do things here, then leave.”