Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different

by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb

  “How’re we gonna get out of here, Autumn?” he shouted above the roar of the water.

  I shrugged as best I could while gripping the sides of the coffin. The rocks got pointier and the drop-offs got steeper as we hurtled farther downstream. My throat clenched up, but I wasn’t about to let on I was scared. “Guess we’ll just have to ride this one out,” I shouted back.

  We kept rolling. And rushing. And rocking. And reeling. My stomach began to roll and reel even worse, and not just from the ride. My pop without a job! Riding a coffin through bumpy waters seemed like a premonition of some sort. A sign. Mama was always talking about signs and whatnot. I thought my stomach might spew like McCauley’s old outhouse.

  Then the creek spun us around and a wave of mud crashed into the coffin. The velvet cloth inside sucked up the soupy water and weighed us down.

  “Bail it out!” I yelled. Cody and I were forced to turn loose of our white-knuckled grips on the sides of the coffin. We cupped our hands to scoop out the excess water. As we did, a surge of mud picked us up, up, up . . .

  I do things different. It helps to remind yourself of that when you’re sailing through the air toward a rocky riverbank.

  I landed with a thud and a crash. What felt like a thousand lightning bolts jolted through my left arm, and the weight of the world seemed to crush me. I told myself to open my eyes.

  Cody was lying on my chest, face to face. What was left of our canoe lay splintered on a massive boulder next to us.

  “Get off me, creep!” I shoved Cody away, and that’s when I noticed the gash on my arm. Cody looked like he might throw up at the sight of my blood. I actually smiled when I saw it—it was the first thing I’d seen in a week that wasn’t mud-colored.

  We panted like dogs for a moment. “Well, don’t just sit there,” I said, slowly standing. I felt real dizzy and sat back down.

  “You okay?” Cody asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, pushing back the sleeve of my dress and looking at the cut a little closer. It was deep—deep enough to see white inside. Not good.

  “Go get some dogwood bark, Cody.”

  “What?”

  I smirked at my boating partner. “You know what a dogwood tree looks like, right?”

  “Yeah. . . .”

  “Peel the bark off and bring it to me. Understand?”

  Cody scrambled around the area until he found a dogwood nearby, then started to scrape off the bark with his fingernail.

  My arm was beginning to throb, and the sight of my own blood wasn’t so welcome anymore. “Use a rock, Cody,” I yelled to him. As he scraped, I spit onto my arm and washed out the cut as best I could.

  He finally brought back a decent-sized pile of bark shavings. I wrung out my dress, then bit the hem and ripped a goodly bandage from it. I took the bark shavings, put them in the bandage, spit three or four times to work up a good paste, and wrapped the poultice around the cut.

  “How’d you know how to do that?” Cody asked.

  “Do what?”

  “Do that with the bark?”

  I shrugged. “Seen Mama do it a thousand times.”

  We sat there for a minute longer, looking at where we’d crashed. The floor of the forest curved up from the creek like we were in the bottom of a bowl. Boulders poked out of the earth, and clumps of azalea bushes bloomed fiery red in the cool shade of the tall pines and elms and oaks.

  “Where do you ’spose we are?” Cody asked.

  I looked around. “Townsend, maybe?” I groaned as I got to my feet. “Good luck finding your way back.”

  “What? Where’re you going?”

  I scanned the area again. Trees, trees, and more trees. Dang it!

  “I dunno.” I sank back down on the riverbank. I picked up a broad stone and winced as I chucked it sideways toward a wide spot in the water. We watched it hop five times across the surface before it disappeared. Cody gathered up stones, too. He pocketed some for his collection and tried to skip others. He’s the worst rock skipper that ever lived.

  Cody craned his neck all around like he was trying to memorize this place. I thought he might be formulating some heroic escape for himself and his injured leader, but instead he said, “The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Has a nice ring to it, don’tcha think?”

  The fool! He had no idea how lost we were. “Nope.”

  “Autumn Winifred Oliver!” Cody shouted, and leapt to his feet. He was so wound up it took me by surprise. I didn’t even get the chance to frog him one for calling me by my full name. But he took a deep breath and kept going. “You move around as much as I have, you see lots. But nothing I’ve seen compares to east Tennessee.”

  He turned and threw his bony arms toward the sky. “If it weren’t for the park, those lumber companies would strip this place bare. Take a look around, Autumn. This place is magic!” I couldn’t help but look up and try to see this place with new eyes.

  The trees twined their leafy fingers together, like they were tickling one another. Somewhere along the way it had stopped raining, and white sunlight poked through here and there in bright beams, spotting the ground with splashes of light and bouncing off the water in blinding bursts. The whole thing looked like one of Mama’s lacy doilies. Birds chirped and water tinkled and leaves whooshed in near-perfect three-part harmony.

  But still . . .

  I shrugged. “How’m I supposed to know? I’ve never been anywhere else.”

  7

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when you’re filching

  explosives from

  the United States

  government.

  We thought we’d best stay put and let ourselves be found. We sat there for the better part of the afternoon, and all the while Cody rambled on about stick-ball, poison ivy, banana cream pie, dungarees . . . I finally snapped like a dry twig.

  “Cody! Don’t you have any idea how lost we are?”

  Cody’s face went blank, but then a small grin crept across it. “Guess your hex worked, Autumn. You told me to get lost, after all.” I wanted to smack him.

  I was getting jittery. It was looking like we’d have to sleep in the gully and hike out in the morning, but I wasn’t about to let on that I was scared.

  But after a few hours of staring at tree after towering tree, I couldn’t help myself—my throat started to swell shut and my eyes got all teary and my arm started throbbing to beat all. How were we going to get out of here? We could try to follow the river back, I guess, but we must’ve traveled ten or eleven miles outside the Cove. By late afternoon the trees began to look less like they were tickling one another and more like they were clawing one another. I was this close to allowing a tear to plop out of my eye when a high-pitched screeeeeeeeee sliced through the air.

  Cody sat up straight as an ironing board. “A saw!”

  I nodded. It was a saw, all right. Now all we had to do was find it.

  We tore off through the woods, scrambling up a steep slope toward the noisy saw. Trouble was, the sound stopped and started, stopped and started. Cody and I must’ve looked like a coupla rats smelling out a hunk of cheese, what with us darting this way and that on our hunt.

  “This’ll teach you to bad-mouth those lumber companies, Cody!” I yelled in his direction. “Those saws are gonna save our hides! Cody! Cody?”

  Finally I heard him yell, “Autumn, over here!”

  I ran in the direction of his voice and found myself in a muddy clearing that was only about twenty feet wide, but it stretched for what must’ve been miles—as far as I could see from atop the bluff we’d just climbed. It might’ve been a road, but it was far wider than most of the dirt trails I’d ever seen.

  A group of youngish men huddled round Cody like they’d just seen him walk across water to get to them, rather than just step out of the woods. They all wore uniforms—drab olive shirt, khaki pants, brown wool socks, muddy brown boots. The only thing that
kept them from blending into the earth altogether was the shiny brass buttons on their collars. These weren’t lumberjacks, no sir. A twig of a young man stepped forward, turned off his chain saw, and scowled at me. The name tag above his right breast pocket read “Jonathon Parker.”

  “What the . . . what’re youse two doing here? Where’d youse come from? Is that blood?”

  He pointed at my arm, and I looked down at myself. Wet, muddy, bloody—we looked like a coupla corpses stumbling out of these woods. Me, again the walking dead.

  “Well, we been riding the rapids, you see. . . .” I pointed to the bottom of the gully, where the coffin still lay smashed on the rocks below.

  “Is that a casket?” Jonathon’s voice was funny, like he was honking through his nose while he talked. Like a . . . a goose! I disliked him immediately.

  “Yessir. I mean, uh . . .” I hate it when I get all flustered. “We’re from Cades Cove.”

  Jonathon scratched his chin like a much older man and slid his eyes at his crew. “The Cove, huh. I suppose youse need a lift home, then.”

  He jerked his head at the beat-up jalopy parked behind him in the mud. Cody nodded.

  “Yessir,” I said, and my heart skipped a beat. “Do you mean—in an automobile?”

  Jonathon tossed back his head and laughed a wallop, and the other soldiers chimed in. “Do I mean in an aw-tow-mow-beeele?” He imitated me Southern-style in a way that really pinched my ears. “Of course I mean in an aw-tow-mow-beeele!” With that, he laughed a big hardy-har-har. I hoped he’d drop his chain saw on his foot.

  “Well, get in,” he said. Cody and I climbed aboard and perched atop several wooden crates in the backseat. It was cramped, but hey, it was an automobile ride!

  The soldier hopped into the driver’s seat and put on a real showy display starting up the old machine. He checked the starting levers three and then four times before fishing a key out of his pants pocket and unlocking the steering wheel. Then he finally stomped on a switch in the floorboard, and the auto roared to life. He shot a farewell salute to his crew, and we bounced and jostled down the muddy road, the ride so bumpy my teeth rattled around in my mouth.

  The soldier seemed to loosen up now that he was away from his buddies. “Man oh man, am I ever glad to get out of there,” he honked, wiping his brow. “Youse can only cut so many trees before youse go a little squirrelly, ya know? Ha! Squirrelly—get it? Ha!

  “Name’s Jonathon Parker,” he continued, tapping his name tag. His drab shirt hung from his bony shoulders like it was strung up by two hooks. He couldn’t’a been older than nineteen.

  “From Boston,” he said. “Beantown. I gotta tell ya, kids, do I ever miss baked beans.”

  I hate it when people call me kid. “You can get beans here, mister,” I said. Where’d this guy think he was, Mars?

  “Yeah, but here they put sugar in them. Everybody knows you put molasses in baked beans. Sugar! In the tea, too. It’s crazy. Man oh man.”

  Ooooo, this guy got my red up. But before I could ask him if he really drank his tea without sugar, we hit an enormous pothole. Cody bounced off the crate and hit his head on the roof of the auto, then landed back on the wooden box with a thud. He reached under him and rubbed his tailbone.

  “Hey, mister?” he asked. “What’d you say was in these crates again?”

  Jonathon shot a look into the rearview mirror, so all’s I could see was his eyes. “I didn’t say.” And then it seemed like an eternity before he added: “It’s dynamite.”

  I do things different. It helps to remind yourself of that when you’re setting atop several tons of explosives.

  “Dynamite?” I said. “What kinda crazy army detail are you on, anyways?”

  Jonathon laughed. “I’m not in no army! I work for the CCC.”

  I felt my eyes narrow. “The CCC?”

  “The Civilian Conservation Corps.”

  “I know what the CCC is.” What, did he think we don’t have schools around here, either?

  “We’re building a national park. This old junky road?” He swept his arm outside the auto at the mud below. “It’ll be a nice, paved parkway once the CCC boys are done blasting our way through these scrubby old mountains. Man oh man!”

  We’d hitched a ride with a park builder? I considered flinging myself from the auto, but the road whizzing below us soon turned from mud to rock, and when it did, I knew we were in real trouble. We were climbing Rich Mountain, and fast. To our left, the mountain rose steep as a wall straight into the clouds. To our right, it plunged down, down, down so sharp that we were riding next to treetops—the tops of trees! I could feel the vomit in my throat.

  “Mister, slow down!” Cody managed to choke out.

  Jonathon gargled a laugh. “No problem, kid! We’re all right. Unless, of course, we hit something.”

  My heart was thumping harder than the Right Reverend Feezell thumps his Bible, so when I heard the second saw of the day, I thought it was the blood rushing from my head. We’d rounded the bend on the Cove Loop Road and were bumping and skidding along toward my old house. As we got closer, I knew for sure what I heard: hammers and saws and snapping wood and breaking glass. Then I saw it. A chain saw ripping through the roof over the dogtrot. Shingles and sawdust flying. A team of workers prying loose every clean, white board from the frame of our house.

  My childhood home looked like a skeleton eaten away by a swarm of termites. Man-sized termites. With tools. And they all wore the same uniform our driver wore.

  I couldn’t help myself. “Wait!” I yelled. Jonathon slammed on the brakes, and we skidded in the mud, fishtailing past a huge boulder and coming to rest within inches of an ancient oak tree. Jonathon let loose a long, low whistle.

  He turned and glared at me. “What the heck are youse thinking, yelling at someone who’s hauling as much stick as we are?”

  “What’re they doing to that house?” I pointed to our once-beautiful home as the kitchen sink flew out a side window and landed in Mama’s azalea bush.

  “What?”

  “What’re they doing to that house?” I repeated above the racket of the chain saw. I watched as all the clean living that had once gone on inside our cozy home was loosed to the wilds.

  Jonathon shrugged. “They’re ripping it down,” he yelled back. “We got orders to level anything that doesn’t look rural enough for the national park. Guess they want to play up that whole hillbilly angle for the tourists.”

  Hillbilly? I felt almost dizzy, I was so angry. “They ain’t ripping it down to put up a new hotel?”

  Jonathon laughed. “Nah. There won’t be any hotels inside park boundaries. No living quarters what-soever.

  “Nope. All these homes,” Jonathon yelled, and he slung his wrist across the Cove, “they’ll either be torn down or turned into tourist sites. The churches and the mill . . . they say Cades Cove’ll be the best part of the park.”

  I was confused. Wasn’t this stupid park supposed to end at Cades Cove? Weren’t we going to rake in all those tourist dollars?

  And what did Gramps know about this? He was a sneak and a schemer, all right, but this was beyond even him. No way would he sell out the whole Cove. I was madder than a snake with two heads at him and this park, but I didn’t want him to lose his farm over it. Besides, Gramps was the greediest one of them all. If he couldn’t open up a hotel . . .

  But I didn’t have time to mull over the thought of tourists gawking at the places where I’d prayed and slept and relieved myself, much less to consider where I might next rest my head, because right then the roof over the dogtrot collapsed with a massive crash. Just in time, too, because it spared me from having everyone hear my heart crash with it.

  I asked Jonathon to drop us on the Cove Loop Road, a good mile or so downroad from Gramps’s cabin.

  That way, maybe I wouldn’t catch such an earful from Mama about hitching a ride with a stranger. And too, I didn’t want Katie laying eyes on a man in uniform.

  The fi
rst thing Mama did when we got home that night was make a fuss over my arm. The next thing she did was make me pick a hickory twig for my whipping.

  The first thing I did when I got home that night was hide the stick of dynamite I’d stolen from Jonathon Parker.

  I do things different. It helps to remind yourself of that when you’ve got explosives stashed under the hem of your dress.

  8

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when you’re trying

  to keep a secret

  as big as a

  national park.

  The next day I was near sick while the picture of our collapsing house burned in my brain. I twiddled the stick of dynamite that lay hidden beneath my mattress, and mulled over who I should confide in.

  Mama? No. No way could I tell Mama her house had been torn down. Mama loved that house, with its big, airy windows and high ceilings and plank wood floors. To Mama, a house is a home, not just a building.

  Pop? No. It’d take too long to send word. Dang it! Why couldn’t he be around like other dads?

  Gramps? Next.

  Katie? Katie . . .

  Yeah. Katie!

  “You must’ve heard him wrong, Autumn.” Katie fluffed the pillow behind her back and reclined on the bed again. She waved a fan that said Patterson’s Funeral Home in front of her flushed face and took a big gulp of water from the bucket I’d drawn, as I was still hauling all the water round here. Katie is on the plump side and wilts like a pansy in hot weather. After all the August rain, September had turned brutal hot. Katie had spent most of her recent days behind that paper fan. “Tell me again what he said.”

  “He said that there wouldn’t be any hotels inside the park.”

  “But the Cove isn’t inside the park.”

  “It is now.”

  “Well, that don’t mean—”

  I sucked in a deep breath. Here goes. “They tore our house down, Katie.” I was surprised to hear my voice crack.

  Katie sprang upright, and her shiny brown curls flopped forward over her broad shoulders. “They what? Who?”