Autumn Winifred Oliver Does Things Different

by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb

  I do things different. It helps to remind yourself of that when you’re staring down the wrong end of a Smith and Wesson.

  “Tom Tipton?” Pointy George swung the shotgun up over his shoulder. He smiled, which made his scar all crinkly. “You look worse’n a two-week-old cow pie on a hot summer day.”

  Gramps huffed but smiled. “Feel that good, too, Burchfield.”

  Screeeeee—blam! The infernal screen door opened and shut again, this time turning out Colonel Chapman. His eyes twinkled, but I couldn’t tell if it was a flash of delight or disgust.

  “Well, if this ain’t some coincidence! The colonel here was just tellin’ Momma and me”—Pointy George jerked his head toward a dried-up crabapple of a woman hovering near the door—“that you been workin’ on some national park. Tellin’ folks to lend their support, I hear.”

  “That is true.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off Pointy’s momma. She scurried back and forth across the kitchen, hauling bags of cornmeal that must’ve weighed fifty pounds each. But she carried a huge, silvery butcher knife in her tiny fist the entire time.

  “So it’s true you’re gonna sell your land and move out of the Cove? ’Cause I told the colonel here—” Pointy clasped a massive arm around the colonel, squeezing the shotgun between the two of them. “I told him they’s no way Tom Tipton’s sellin’ his family land, no sir. Not a stubborn mule like Tipton.”

  The colonel looked pretty calm for a man with a shotgun under his chin, but he was white as flour. Pointy’s momma had stopped hauling the bags of cornmeal and had begun stabbing open the bags with the butcher knife. She grunted each time she gutted a bag: “Huuun-unh!”

  “I ain’t sellin’, Burchfield,” Gramps said. “Sellin’ wasn’t part of the deal. Right, colonel?” Gramps fixed his eyes on the colonel like a hunter lines up a shot in his crosshairs.

  “Huuun-unh!”

  Colonel Chapman shrugged Pointy off his shoulders and moved toward his nephew. “Cody? May I ask what you’re doing here?”

  Gramps stepped between the two of them. “Boy’s with me. Now, what’s this about sellin’ off my land?”

  “Huuun-unh!”

  The colonel’s face drew into straight, flat lines. “I came here to offer Mr. Burchfield a fair price for his property.” Pointy George huffed and his scar turned bright pink.

  “A fair price, just like the offer you’re going to get, Mr. Tipton,” the colonel said.

  “Sellin’ wasn’t part of the deal,” Gramps repeated. If he was a snake, he’d’a hissed it.

  “The deal has changed, Mr. Tipton.”

  “This is the first I’m hearing about this, Colonel.” Gramps was as staid and stolid as the ring of mountains around us, but for some reason, a wave of pity washed over me as I watched him fight for his farm. I hated it. I didn’t want to feel pity for him. He wouldn’t want it, neither.

  “Huuun-unh!”

  “C’mon, Tom,” the colonel said, and my ears curled at this fella calling my gramps by his familiar name. “You really think those tourists want to bunk up with a bunch of strangers?” He motioned to Pointy’s shack, as if this box represented all the houses in the Cove.

  “That’s how it’s done in the Cove.”

  “That’s not how it’s done anywhere else in the world.”

  The colonel and Gramps stared each other down like two crouched cats. The colonel finally cracked. “Tom, we needed your help in selling the idea of a national park to your neighbors.” Who is this “we”? I wondered. “After all, do you really think they would’ve listened to someone like myself?” He stretched his arms out, and his razor-sharp suit and shiny shoes made his point for him.

  “Tom, you helped us, and we thank you for fulfilling your civic duty. But the time has come for the Cove to enter a new age. I would think you’d be excited about that opportunity.”

  “I won’t sell.”

  “Huuun-unh!”

  The colonel laughed, and I realized it was the first time I’d seen him look truly happy. “Tom. You’re dealing with the federal government here. You don’t have a choice.”

  The wound on my arm throbbed, the dynamite on my leg itched, and I wanted to jump right out of my skin, I was so hot.

  “Off.” Pointy George jabbed his finger toward the road.

  “Pardon?” Colonel Chapman whirled to face Pointy. The colonel’s face was all smiley on one side, like this situation didn’t call for a full-face smile.

  “Off my land.” Pointy George never blinked his one good eye.

  The colonel sighed real showy. “Oh, George. Don’t you see? It’s my land.” With a sweep of his wrist, he laid claim to the whole Cove.

  “Not yet it ain’t,” Pointy said. “Off. My. Land.”

  Colonel Chapman twisted his neck real slow, like he was about to say something else. But instead he rounded the house, folded himself inside his auto, and drove away, the tires flinging mud and clumps of dirt behind them.

  Gramps’s craggy face trapped the shadows of late afternoon, and he looked like a crumpled-up wad of paper. At last he believed me. But now I felt lower than a snake’s belly.

  10

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that

  when Uncle Sam

  himself forces you

  to say uncle.

  It took but a half day’s sunlight for word to make its way to all the neighbors. Gramps sprang into action like a mountain lion. He posted signs all over the Cove:

  Feel Cheated? Meet at the

  Schoolhouse Friday Next

  at Sundown to Discuss

  “Our” National Park!!!

  Pop heard about the meeting through a friend of Jeremiah Butler’s, and sent word back that he’d be there. He hitched a ride in on a lumber truck specially for it. I waited for him on the front porch, rocking and picking at the scab on my arm. When I saw his blond head come across that swinging bridge, it was like watching the sun rise.

  “Pop!” I leapt off the porch and was inside his mighty hug in three bounds. He smelled like sweat and coal smoke, and a razor hadn’t touched his jaw in weeks. “That you in there, Pop?” I giggled.

  Pop swung me around until I was dizzy. “Autumn! How’s my favorite season?” I grinned to beat all.

  I wanted to seem more grown-up for my pop, so I answered as Mama would: “Living and breathing, so I guess I can’t complain.”

  Pop laughed. “Well, I hear we’re awfully lucky ’bout that, now, aren’t we? Not everyone gets to hear their own death tolls ring.”

  “Pop!” I got in one good tickle before Mama and Katie came spilling out of the cabin and tackled us. For a minute I forgot all about scabs and dynamite and moonshine stills and parks. The four of us hugging together were far stronger than any old ring of mountains.

  Pop always said that Mama had the steadiest hand of any person he knew. Should’ve been a sharpshooter, he says. ’Cause of that, Mama has always been the one to take the straight razor to Pop’s whiskers. He wanted to clean up before the big meeting, so they set everything up at Gramps’s kitchen table.

  The lanterns glowed warm yellow. Pop leaned back in a kitchen chair, the shaving bowl and razor on the table, a steamy cloth nearby to wipe away the excess soap. The only sound in the room was the skritch, skritch of Mama dragging the razor up Pop’s neck, across his cheek. She worked so gently, so lovingly, that my chest like near squeezed shut thinking they were living so far apart.

  I’d seen Mama shave Pop’s beard a thousand or so times before, and normally it don’t warrant a family gathering. But it’d been so long since we’d seen Pop, both Katie and I pulled up our own chairs at the table.

  “So our house—it’s completely gone, Autumn?” Pop asked, looking at me out of the corner of his eye while tilted back in the chair.

  “Yessir. I’d imagine it is now.”

  Pop clicked his tongue. Mama swiped the blade clean against her apron and lowered it
again to his throat. Skritch.

  “Darn shame. Your daddy had a really good idea with that park, Martha.” Mama nodded and pulled the razor near his ears. Tears puddled in her brown eyes. It looked to me like she was a whole lot sadder about losing the park than she had been about Pop losing his job. Come to think of it, Mama had been dragging around ever since she found out about this park mess.

  “A really good idea,” Pop repeated. He swiped at a poof of soap on his earlobe. “Could’ve been something big for folks around here. Could’ve been big for us. I sure would’ve liked to sell some of our artwork to all them tourists. Right, Autumn?” He started to nod. Mama gently swatted him with the rag and he steadied his bobbing head beneath the sharp razor.

  My stomach like near flipped over. Sell artwork! I didn’t know Pop had planned on that. That sure would’ve been fun, all right. I felt flat as a griddle cake now that I knew I’d lost that, too. That we’d lost that. Me and Mama and Pop and Katie. I guessed Mama had known this was the plan all along. Otherwise she would’ve been a lot worse off back when she found out Pop was losing his job at the lumber company.

  “Daddy, what—” But before Katie could get any further, Mama shot her the hush-up look. Mama’d already warned Katie and me: no questions about the park. Not today. Pop would be too tired, and today was about family. It was about the hardest rule I’d ever had to follow.

  Pop knew the rules, too, but he had to get in his say. “It’s a shame those park builders had to do business that way.”

  Mama nudged him and offered up one of Katie’s jeweled mirrors so he could examine her handiwork. He jutted his chin in the air and checked himself at all angles. The puffy purple circles under his eyes showed more now that his beard was gone. He skimmed his large, callused fingers over his clean, fresh face. There was nary a nick on his whole mug.

  “Yep. Trust just ain’t what it used to be.”

  That Friday evening, I’d just returned home from school when we circled around and went right back. Like near every landowner in the Cove showed up at the schoolhouse—even Pointy George and his crabapple momma filed in. Us kids weren’t allowed inside, on account of no room. So while the grown-ups were getting situated inside, I circled round the back of the schoolhouse and pried open a section of latticework that sealed off the crawl space below the school. As I ducked inside, a spiderweb welcomed my face with a gluey hug.

  A dozen or so kids crept in after me, all crouching in the narrow space. Katie came with us, though she probably could’ve sat with the adults. At first I thought she’d followed us ’cause Jackson Tucker had come with us kids, too, but then she settled in next to me.

  Tough, gangly weeds sprouted in the dust, and the rustle of furry things in dark corners drew us kids in close. Donnie Dunlap had a tin of black licorice, and he silently doled out helpings to everyone huddled below the school.

  Footsteps and the scraping of chair legs on wooden floors were the only sounds coming from above. It was right uncomfortable, all those yakky grown-ups thrown together and nary a one of them speaking a word. Finally, I heard Gramps clear his throat.

  “Folks, we all know why we’re here. I’m open to suggestions on how to keep this park off our land.”

  There was an eternity of silence before somebody—it might’ve been Uncle John Too—said, “Can’t we file a lawsuit or something?”

  Somebody shouted, “Lawsuit! Who has money to pay for lawyers?”

  Somebody else: “I knowed this park was too good to be true. I knowed it, and none of y’all listened to me!”

  Then another voice said, “When’s all this supposed to happen? How much time we got?”

  “Nobody knows. We might get to live out our lives here, or we might get kicked out next week. We’re spitting into the wind—who knows which way it’ll fly.”

  Someone else chimed in, “Seems to me like this is a right good time to sell. Crops don’t bring near enough cash these days to keep my family fed. I don’t mind getting fair wages for my land, no sir. I hear they’s work in Knoxville and Maryville. Nope, I plan on taking the first offer.”

  “Traitor!” somebody yelled. “We got to fight this united. If one person sells, we’re all out!”

  “That’s no way to talk to your neighbor!”

  “So you’re just gonna leave your great-granddaddy’s land, are you?”

  “For the right price.”

  “For the right price you’d hitchhike nekked to Gatlinburg!”

  “Enough!” A chair scraped across the floor. “Okay, folks, listen here.”

  Pop! Here it comes: the answer.

  “What I’m gonna say ain’t gonna sit well with some of y’all. Y’all are sitting on some real valuable property. If it ain’t the park gonna buy you out, the lumber companies will. And you ain’t seen nothing sadder than a mountain stripped bare of all its trees. Trust me on that.

  “I’ve torn apart whole communities limb by limb,” he continued. His voice wavered with a hint of an apology behind it. “When there ain’t trees to protect a community, to give it shade and shelter, there ain’t nothin’ left. With no trees, the rain’ll either pool into puddles, or wash all the good topsoil into the rivers. Nothin’ but scrubby weeds and bushes can take root in that kind of mess. And no river is the same after it’s been clogged up with all that mud. I can’t bear to think of the Cove slashed down like that. Nope, if it wasn’t for the mouths I gotta feed, I would never work a job like this. Never.”

  If anyone else felt like me at that moment, then they also felt like pieces of day-old fruit suspended in a drippy Jell-O mold. Katie took my hand.

  Pop grunted, and the strength in his voice returned. “So if we do have to sell out to the park—which it sure sounds like we do—well, then, we might lose a few buildings here and there. But I’d say we’d all agree that’s better than stripping bare our land. Let’s thank heaven our land was spared the saw.”

  “Exactly!” I heard Gramps leap forward. “I know everybody here thinks I wanted this park for the money. Chasing rainbows, right, Lydia?”

  I could just imagine big fat Aunt Lydia’s face growing red up there.

  “Don’t get me wrong—the money would’ve been nice.” Gramps managed a huff of a laugh. “But I don’t have to tell you what a mess those lumber companies are making. Mud washing down the mountains, pooling in our fields and destroying our crops. And Marvin”—Gramps stomped his foot at Mr. Proffitt for emphasis—“that eight-foot bear that came wandering round your homestead? It’s likely his home was destroyed by loggers, right?”

  “You knowed it.”

  “A park seemed like the perfect resolve: the loggers would stop logging, we could make a little extra money on the side . . .”

  His voice trailed off, and all the shuffling and murmuring and whispering halted.

  Gramps coughed. “Listen, folks, I—” Even from underneath the dusty floorboards, I heard the catch in his throat.

  “I’m sorry. Dang it. I am truly sorry about getting us into this mess.”

  I knew from where I crouched that my gramps had tears in his eyes. I’d never seen him cry. I wasn’t really seeing him cry now, but knowing he was up there teary-eyed in front of all those folks made my throat clench up and the tip of my nose tingle.

  Katie, crouched next to me, was the first person to let loose a big, heaving sob. She cried like those sobs of hers just might cleanse us of all these wrongdoings. I hugged her close. She smelled like honeysuckle in the springtime.

  11

  I do things different.

  It helps to remind

  yourself of that when

  the same horrible

  ditty plays in your

  head over and over

  and over again.

  Same song.

  Second verse.

  Sing it over.

  Jes’ like the first.

  I say that because most times in the Cove, a Monday is a Tuesday is a Wednesday. Oh, sure, there’s the occasional sp
elling bee here and the rare singing school there. But for the most part, it’s all likeness. No difference. But now, something’s different every day, and I can’t say I cotton to it, even as much as I enjoy doing things different. So I think we were all glad to see the Syrup Soppin’ Festival roll around. This year, folks in the Cove needed a festival like this to take their minds off their park woes, if only for a day or two.

  Do I ever love to sop some syrup! Every second weekend in October, folks from all over the Cove—all thirty families, minus the Flats folks, who never come to such gatherings—meet up at the school-house with their sorghum harvest in tow. Every last stalk gets fed between a contraption with two rollers. The contraption mashes those crisp green reeds, and eventually they ooze syrup. The juice dumps into Beef Jackson’s huge iron pan. Donnie Dunlap’s daddy hitches up his team of mules, and the old nags march round and round the pan. It’s up to all us kids to keep the fire stoked and the pan stirred, lest the syrup freeze up or bloop over.

  But the best part is the music—whew! Can those old boys put some pepper in it! Uncle John and Uncle John Too bring out the banjo and the mandolin, and Marvin McBroom and his brothers bring out the fiddles, and before you know it, we got ourselves a real frolickin’. (Especially when somebody—I won’t say who, Gramps!—brings out the happy juice.) Folks even start dancin’. Mama says such twistifications are the devil’s work, but even she’s been known to tap a toe or two at the Syrup Soppin’ Festival.

  And because the making of syrup is a round-the-clock effort, everybody in the Cove pitches tents right there on the school grounds, and everybody takes turns manning their watch. Me, I drew the four

  a.m. detail. So naturally I decided it would be wiser to stay up all night, lest I oversleep.

  Yeah, this Syrup Soppin’ Festival couldn’t have come at a better time. If a fix to our woes was out there, it was sure to make itself known at a festival like this.