Backwoods Girl

by Peggy Gaddis

  “They’ll spare anything and everything that can be counted on to raise an extra buck,” she whispered. “That skin-flint of a wife is the kind the mountain people say would skin a flea for its hide and tallow. Or have you already discovered that?”

  “I came here just a few minutes before you, but I’m beginning to believe you’re right,” said Jim and added, “Don’t tell me you live around here.”

  She laughed. “I have a cabin about a quarter of a mile up the creek,” she told him. “Just for weekends and summer vacations. It’s lovely here in the summer, and I happen to be that zany type that likes the mountains even in the winter. And now, to prove I’m at least a part-time mountaineer, I’ll reveal my curiosity about you. What are you doing here this time of year?”

  “Promise not to laugh? Or call me a liar?”

  “Don’t be absurd. I don’t know you well enough to call you a liar.”

  “I’m on a walking trip, and I got lost,” he told her.

  She nodded, smiling. “That’s good enough for me.”

  Storekeeper came back in triumph, bearing a pint bottle, a half-pound of butter and a paper sack in which were six eggs. ‘”Marthy’s mighty pleased to let you have these, Miss Blake, and says she’d come and speak to you herself, only she’s got to fix vittles for Mr. McCurdy here.”

  “That’s very kind of her, Storekeeper. Thank her for me, will you?” said Miss Blake and laid a bill on the counter, as she turned to Jim with an air of having a sudden inspiration. “Why don’t you come and have dinner with me tonight, Mr. McCurdy? There’s going to be enough stew for two—maybe even second helpings.”

  “Thanks, I’d love it,” said Jim happily. “You’re very kind, Miss Blake.”

  “The name is Lorna, Jim,” she said. “Shall we get started?”

  Jim picked up her purchases, and Storekeeper asked politely, “Will you be back t’night, Mister?”

  Before Jim could digest the implications of that, Lorna said sweetly, “Don’t wait up for him, Jake.”

  “I wasn’t aimin’ to,” said Storekeeper.

  “I’ll be back, of course,” Jim said stiffly.

  “Then I’ll build ye a fire in the stove over to the second cabin out there, and Marthy’ll make up your bed with enough kivers,” said Storekeeper, his little eyes derisive, though his tone was polite enough.

  Lorna led the way out into the thick dusk, and Jim followed her, still seething at the man’s look.

  “All my life,” he said, “I’ve been told that up in the backwoods country people were kind, and hospitable and really knew what it meant to ‘love thy neighbor.’ Well, one more illusion has bit the dust.”

  “I know just what you mean,” Lorna agreed. “In the eyes of the dozen or so people who make up this charming little settlement, I’m a completely abandoned woman, whose every word and action is searched and probed to find an evil meaning to it. But I made up my mind when I first came here and ran head on into their narrow, curious way of thinking, that it was of no importance to me what anybody thought about me so long as I, myself, was satisfied with my own behavior.”

  “Lucky you, that you can be!” Jim said.

  She was walking ahead of him along a trail so narrow that they could not walk side by side, and in the thickening dusk she turned her head and laughed. “Oh, I have a conscience that’s well taught to behave itself and play dead when it’s ordered to,” she assured him. “You ought to try it sometimes, Jim. It’s a damned sight more comfortable than having one that’s always sitting back on its haunches and yapping at you.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Jim agreed. “Maybe a little tough to do, though.”

  Her laugh floated back to him. “Oh, it’s easy, once you learn the trick.”

  She turned, a shadow dimly seen against the dusk, away from the trail that had edged its way beside the creek, towards a light that glowed from a dark huddle of a cabin. She guided him up the steps; and across the veranda, and opened the door.

  Just inside the room, Jim paused and looked about him, startled, while Lorna watched him, smiling.

  “Hi, this is a little bit of all right!” he said swiftly. “Electricity, comforts, civilization in the heart of the wilderness!”

  “Aren’t you sweet?” laughed Lorna. “I like my rusticity with modern improvements. I’m as fond of my creature comforts as a cat. I have a small light plant that provides not only light but running water as well. And if you think the natives can be nuisances, you should have heard their comments on that thar crazy woman from the flatlands, while the cabin was being fitted up. I’m sure they thought my family should have me clapped in the loony bin and marked dangerous.”

  Jim was looking around at the pleasantly-furnished place, the bright calico curtains at the windows, the native-craft rugs on the waxed wide boards, the two couches that at night were beds but that now wore their daytime covers. At the two or three electric lamps well-placed about the room, and beyond at the half-partition that separated the cooking and dining area from the living-room.

  Lorna, watching him, chuckled. “Go ahead and say it,” she drawled. “It must have cost a fortune.”

  “I had no intention of saying such a thing,” he protested.

  “Then that makes you unique,” she drawled. “It’s what everybody else says. It was a bit expensive, but I earned the money myself. It was not paid for by some money-proud guy in return for the surrender of my beautiful body.”

  Jim said swiftly, “I had no such thought.”

  She looked up at him, mocking. “Weren’t you?” she asked. Then she said, “Suppose you put those things down in the kitchen and fix us a drink while I get into something comfortable.”

  “I think that’s a wonderful idea.”

  She opened a door at the end of one of the couches, and he caught a glimpse of a small, compact bedroom with a bed and a dressing table. The door closed behind Lorna before he could see more, and he went through to the kitchen and dining area from the living-room.

  He had been tired, cold, hungry, and his spirits had been low when he had reached Ghost Creek and walked into the store. But meeting this attractive, sophisticated woman from his own world had given him a lift. He was whistling and his thoughts were quite busy as he opened the cupboard above the sink, found a surprisingly amply supply of liquors, and began mixing highballs.

  He turned at the sound behind him and saw his hostess in a crisp calico dress, patterned in tiny yellow rosebuds on silver-grey. The skirt of the dress was very full and wide, the bodice snugly fitted above breasts that were generously and beautifully molded.

  Lorna put her head a little on one side and studied him, her green eyes brimming with mocking amusement.

  “Well, what did you expect?” she teased him. “I said something comfortable—but I didn’t mean black chiffon and lace with my rose-ivory body temptingly outlined beneath the frail black stuff.” Her voice made mockery of the phrases, and he could sense the quotation marks about them.

  “I wasn’t expecting anything of the kind,” he protested halfheartedly and offered her a drink. “Besides, you needn’t apologize for how you look at all.”

  She took the drink, sipped, nodded her approval and went on studying him. “Liar—,” she drawled provocatively. “But you mustn’t anticipate, darling. We’ve got the night before us, you know.”

  Jim lifted his drink in a silent salute to her, and, his eyes holding hers, he said softly, “What a lovely thought. Shall we dwell on it?”

  Lorna laughed and led the way back to the living room, and dropped into a cushioned rattan chair, motioning him to one across from her.

  “We’ll have our drinks, and then I’ll get busy with food,” she said. “Want to tell me how you happened to stumble into this forgotten ghost town? Or am I being nosey?”

  Jim lau
ghed and briefly sketched his trip. He told her about being lost and spending the night in the cabin on the mountain top, and was puzzled as he mentioned Cindy at the sudden eagerness in Lorna’s green eyes.

  “So you’ve met our legendary Indian maiden!” she said.

  “Legendary? She’s a very real girl, and a very lovely one, and I’m sorry as hell for her,” Jim said.

  “So?” Lorna was watching him intently. “Why?”

  “Why? Can you imagine anything more ghastly than living alone up there in that beat-up place, with no company except her dog and her gun?”

  Lorna lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug that did interesting things to a beautifully-shaped bosom.

  “Oh, the popular legend is that she doesn’t get too lonely,” she drawled, but her eyes on him were sharp.

  “Then the popular legend is a damned lie!” Jim said. “I’d bet anything that she’s a decent, honest, respectable girl. That old witch—I don’t know her name, but she has a huge, hulking brute of a son she calls Enoch—.”

  Lorna grinned and sipped her drink. “That couldn’t possibly be anyone but Jennie Haney,” she told him. “Lovely soul, isn’t she? If the Devil really holds black masses up here, as some people claim, I’ll wager Jennie and Marthy are his two most devoted assistants.”

  “That figures,” Jim assured her. “That Haney woman met me off the trail with loud outcries of filth against poor Cindy. I wanted to push the old girl’s teeth in, except she didn’t have any.”

  “That’s Jennie,” said Lorna, and her eyes were curious. “What’s this girl like, Jim? I’ve heard a lot about her, but I’ve never seen her. Mighty few folks have, in fact. Sort of a female hermit, except twice a year when she brings her mountain-craft weaving down to Storekeeper for him to sell for her, and the herbs she gathers in the spring and summer. What few residents there are in these parts turn out en masse to see her, but I’ve never happened to be here when she came down out of that eyrie of hers.” -

  “She’s a poor little devil who’s had a rough deal from life, and I’d like to do something for her,” said Jim.

  Lorna’s eyebrows went up slightly. “For or to, darling?” she cooed, and before he could answer she was on her feet, putting down her empty glass, saying, “I’ll get some food ready before those drinks start kicking up trouble.”

  Jim forgot about Cindy as he followed the intriguing movements of her smoothly-rounded hips.

  CHAPTER 5

  Dinner was ample and delicious, and when Lorna and Jim had cleared away the dishes and were once more seated before the cheerful open fire, she lay relaxed and at ease. Jim was reminded of her saying that she was like a cat in her love of creature comforts. There was something feline in her grace, and in the complete relaxation of her mood, as she lay watching the fire.

  “Aside from the Jennie Haneys, and the Marthys, the snoopy Storekeeper, the razzle-dazzle of the summer visitors from the flatlands, this is a most marvelous spot for a gal like me,” she said slowly. It was as if she was talking to herself aloud. “It’s a lifesaver, a career saver. I shiver when I think what might have happened to me if I hadn’t come up here three summers ago, because of a story I read in the Sunday magazine of one of the Atlanta newspapers. The moment I saw the place, I knew it answered my problem.

  “I bought this cabin for a song. Marthy thought she’d stuck me, and she was chortling wickedly that she had found a woman fool enough to pay three hundred dollars for a beat-up old summer cabin. But, as I began to build on to it, adding the bedroom and bath, and when I put in the light and water plant, and all the rest of it, she felt sure she had been the sucker, and she’s hated me ever since. Of course, her hatred worries me so much I scarcely sleep more than ten or twelve hours a day for grieving about it.”

  Jim grinned, studying Lorna, puzzled to find anyone so sleek, so smoothly sophisticated in such a setting. “I’ll have to admit that it’s a surprise, a delightful one, to find a woman like you in a place like Ghost Creek,” he said.

  Lorna nursed her drink, cupping the glass between her two hands, her eyes on the amber-gold contents. She looked up at him at last, when the silence had grown long, and her eyes were wary, curious. “I wonder if I can trust you,” she said at last.

  Color touched his face, and his eyes were frank. “About that I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I’d say you might trust me about as far as you care to—no further.”

  She moved one hand in a slight gesture of dismissal. “Oh, I wasn’t talking about sex.” She disdained the word. “We’ll come to that later—I think. You’re damned attractive, you know.”

  “Thanks,” said Jim. “So are you.”

  “I’d show you the way to go home if you didn’t say that. No, I meant whether or not I could trust you with the real reason why this place is a life saver to me. There are really two reasons. One, I’m damned sure I’m not going to trust you with. The other one, perhaps.”

  “That’s up to you, of course.”

  “We might begin by your telling me what you’re doing up here—aside from starting out on a walking trip this time of the year and winding up in the Indian maiden’s cabin,” she drawled. “Nice winding up, by the way. But what are you doing away from the courtrooms and such?”

  Briefly, succintly he told her, and when he had finished, she stared at him, puzzled and curious. “But Jim, suppose every lawyer who ever lost a case, or a client, just said the hell with it and lit out for the wide open spaces?” she protested.

  “Would that be bad?”

  “Well, I’ve always heard lawyers are pretty necessary in the modern scheme of things,” she pointed out, and was immediately serious as she went on, “Surely you’re not planning to throw away all the years of preparation any man makes before he’s admitted to the bar, and the career you planned, just because you lost one case and your client went to the chair? Jim, that’s idiotic.”

  Stubbornly, Jim’s hands clenched about his glass, and his bitter eyes were on the fire. “I haven’t had time to do much thinking about it,” he admitted. “The execution took place in November. The day after Thanksgiving. Nice touch, don’t you think? Gave the wife and children something to remember next time that joyful day rolls around. And in time to spare them the bother of getting ready for Christmas.”

  There was such savage bitterness in his voice that Lorna sat erect and put down her glass and leaned towards him. “That’s hellish, of course, Jim and I can understand how you feel. But it’s a thing that could have happened to any lawyer. You’re being silly to let it wreck your whole life. Why not make amends, since you feel that’s what you have to do, by going back and taking up your job again and setting yourself more determinedly than ever to seeing that justice is done for your other clients?”

  He shook his head and gulped his drink. “Maybe some day, though now I think not,” he told her, his voice grating, harsh. “I never want the responsibility of a man’s life on my conscience again.”

  Lorna’s mouth twisted slightly. “Remember what I told you about consciences? They’re damned hard to live with, until you beat them insensible,” she reminded him.

  “The way you did with yours?”

  Color touched her face, and her eyes were bright. “The way I did with mine,” she told him harshly.

  He looked at her sharply. “And it worked?” he asked.

  Her chin came up and her eyes were cool. “For me it did,” she assured him. “Now I can fight just as hard, kick, gouge, beat my way up and not give a damn whose neck I step on. In my business, you have to be tough to survive, and I intend to survive.”

  Jim watched her, the question he was reluctant to frame, in his eyes.

  “I’m in advertising, so get that gleam out of your eyes,” she ordered him. “I’m not a flesh-peddler in any sense of the word. I hold my job by being a damned good copywriter. I�
��m well up towards the top, and the higher you go, the more slippery it gets. You have to keep one eye on the fellow ahead of you whose job you want, and the other eye on the one behind you, who wants your job. It sounds a bit screwy, but you also have to keep on your toes—to be ready to kick the guy ahead of you out of his job so you can get it, the other one to kick back at the one who’s after your job. It’s a lovely, lovely profession.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “But I love it. All right, so that makes me out a louse. I’m ambitious, and I’m going to get to the top, regardless of who I have to hurt while I’m doing it,” she told him. “That’s why the cabin here is so valuable to me. When I get all tensed up, with nerves screaming, I come up here, lock the door, drink myself into a coma and sleep twenty-four hours. I take the train back to Atlanta from Marshallville late Sunday night, and Monday morning I’m back at my desk, clear-eyed, ready to stand toe-to-toe with anyone who gets in my way, and slug it out.”

  Jim was studying her curiously, and as though she found his gaze more than she wanted to endure, she rose swiftly, moved into the kitchen, mixed two fresh drinks, and came back to hand him one. She lifted the other in a silent salute and drank deeply.

  “So now you know the secret of the cabin,” she told him. “Marthy would give her store-bought teeth to know it. She snooped and pried and prowled like crazy when I first came here, because she was sure I was meeting some man here. I’m sure the dipsomanic thing never occurred to her, though Storekeeper tries now and then to sell me some of his famous corn-squeezin’s. I always draw myself up haughtily and say, ‘But, Jake, you know I don’t drink.’ “

  She drank thirstily and Jim watched her. Suddenly he smiled at her. “You’re quite a girl,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, sure, a fine, upstanding young American gal and such,” she drawled, and her eyes were hot upon him. “D’you know something? If there were men like you around these parts, Marthy might have a point.”