by Debra Dixon
“I haven’t decided,” he said. “I thought maybe I’d interview other folks about what they thought and then use it in the paper. It’s due on Monday. So what does Homecoming mean to you, Miss Lucy Belle?”
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath of the fresh autumn air. They say that your sense of smell triggers memories better than any of your other senses. Sure enough, aromas of the boiled peanuts, cotton candy and freshly-popped popcorn on sale nearby brought back memories of Homecomings past. The town square was decorated with bundles of Indian cornstalks tied up with twine and bales of hay strewn with autumn leaves. Pots of gold chrysanthemums were on sale everywhere.
“First off, Homecoming comes at my favorite time of year,” I said. “I love the fall when the air gets nippy and it’s time to get out your soft, comfy sweaters and boots. The mountains hereabouts are so pretty with all the changing leaves. You can go on hikes and bike rides without getting all hot and sweaty and then drink hot chocolate with friends in front of a roaring fire.”
“I love fall, too,” John Wesley said. “Besides football, I think I love the candy apples best. And popcorn balls all sticky with butter and corn syrup.”
“And then there are all the events. Homecoming brings all the pageantry of high school football, the parade with the marching band, the floats, the cheerleaders, everything. But the best part is getting together with old friends who’ve come back into town for Homecoming, roasting hotdogs and marshmallows over bonfires after dark, laughing about old times when we were young and full of promise.”
“I like all that stuff, too,” offered the youngster. “I guess I don’t understand why people leave Mossy Creek to begin with. So they can do the coming home part of Homecoming?”
I reached out and ruffled his hair. John Wesley was a firm believer in the town motto, “Ain’t goin’ nowhere and don’t want to.”
“Sometimes people have to move away to find the kind of jobs they want,” I said. “I did that for many years. But wherever you go, it’s hard not to leave your heart right here in Mossy Creek.”
“Oh, I remember. You were a computer programmer.”
“That’s right. But when Grandma’s and my chow-chow business took off, I quit that programming job and moved back to Mossy Creek where I belong.”
“I’m never going to leave,” John Wesley assured me. “If my friends like Little Ida or Timmy or Clay decide to move away when they grow up, I’ll be here to welcome them back for Homecoming.”
“Good for you, pal,” I said.
“Psst!” I heard Inez hiss from somewhere over my right shoulder.
I turned around to see her waddling along as fast as she could, holding aloft a mason jar, a woman and a girl in tow.
“That’s my friend, Melissa,” announced John Wesley, indicating the little redhead.
I recognized the girl and her mother. Melissa Henderson and her mother, Maria. Their family were migrant farm workers who’d come through town last year and wound up working for Hope Stanton at the Sweet Home Apple Orchards in Bailey Mill.
When they reached us, Grandma looked left and right before seizing my elbow and thrusting the Mason jar into my hand. “You’ve got to taste this,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper.
“Is it Clementine’s apple butter?” I asked. Then I peered through the greenish-blue glass of the jar and knew better. Whatever it was, it wasn’t apple butter. The murky, red contents looked like some of the more unsavory specimens my old high school biology teacher kept on the shelves of the lab when I was in school. In particular, it looked like the specimen Eddie Brady had given her after one of his hunting trips. The label, hand-lettered on a strip of adhesive tape stuck onto a mayonnaise jar, had read simply: “squirrel innards.”
“Go ahead,” Inez urged. “Taste it.”
“Uuuuh,” I heard myself moan. I managed a smile for Mrs. Henderson, who grinned up at me with sweet expectation. Gingerly I unscrewed the cap and saw to my relief that the jar held a crispy-looking stack of spiced apple rings afloat in a tantalizingly aromatic red sauce swimming with cloves. I snagged the piece on top with my forefinger and thumb and took a bite. My taste buds came alive with delight. “This is wonderful.”
“That recipe is off tha hook, yo,” Grandma insisted, poking her finger toward the jar.
I took a sniff of the contents. “I see the cloves, but I can’t rightly tell what that other sweet-hot flavor is coming from. What else am I tasting? Cayenne and sugar? Ginger and honey?” I held out the jar for John Wesley to sample a ring.
“It’s a whole bunch of them red-hot candies all melted down,” Mrs. Henderson said proudly. “It’s my own recipe. I’ve been working on it for years.”
“Genius!” declared Inez, who indicated the small case of jars the woman carried. “Mrs. Henderson here brought these jars to sell right out of this here box. I told her we would buy every one of them, but I’ve got an even better idea than that.” Turning to the woman, Inez continued, “Would you be willing to sell me that recipe, too? I want to refine it a little and enter it in the county fair next year.”
“That is, unless you want to enter it yourself,” I put in hastily.
“Of course,” Inez said, rolling her eyes as if that went without saying.
“We won’t be around here by then anyway,” Mrs. Henderson said with an eager and faraway look in her eye. “My husband’s cousin has asked us to work with him on his new fish farm down in Pensacola, so any money you want to give me for that recipe would come in mighty handy.”
John Wesley looked so stricken I thought he was about to choke on his apple ring. “You’re leaving?”
“Yeah,” said Melissa. “Daddy said we’d be close enough to the beach we could go swimming every weekend. Isn’t that great?”
“Uh, I guess.”
John Wesley would never make a decent poker player. I could see clearly the question in his eyes: Why would anyone ever voluntarily leave Mossy Creek?
“It was great living here,” Melissa said. “I reckon this is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere in my whole entire life.”
“Everybody’s been so nice and kind,” Mrs. Henderson said. “We’ll always have fond memories of living here with y’all, won’t we, girl?”
“Sure will,” she agreed.
“We’ll miss ya,” Inez put in, rubbing her hands together. “Lucy Belle, get your checkbook out.”
“Will do.” I grabbed my purse from the cardboard box stashed under the table, fished out my checkbook, jotted down a brief but legally binding statement on the memo line of the top check and filled it out. I let Inez see the amount and after her nod of approval I handed the check to Mrs. Henderson.
The pretty little woman blinked her blue eyes once, twice, and finally found her voice. “Do you mean it?”
“Sure do,” I assured her. “But just to make sure you understand, you’re giving us the rights to sell your recipe as a product in our line if we ever decide to.”
“That’s mighty fine,” the woman said, fanning herself with the check. “I’d be proud to see y’all sell it along ’side your chow-chow. This money is going to let us set up housekeeping in style. My kids will all be able to have brand new school clothes and shoes, too.”
“And books!” Melissa put in.
“All the books you want, honey,” her mother assured her.
“You have my word that if our Piggly Wiggly distribution deal goes through for our whole line, we’ll give you a big bonus, so you be sure and keep in touch, you hear?”
I gave Mrs. Henderson a business card with instructions to write to us when she and her family got settled in Florida, and with one last word of thanks, and a kiss on the cheek from Melissa to John Wesley, they disappeared into the crowd.
“Wow, this has been productive day already,” I said. “An
d the sale is just now officially open. John Wesley, let’s see if you’re as good a salesman as you are a football player. Are you ready to help us move this chow-chow and these fried chocolate pies?
He nodded, but I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. I put my arm around his shoulder. “Don’t worry about your friend. When we get her address you can write to her. I’m sure her mom won’t mind.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he said with a sigh. “I just can’t understand why the Hendersons want to leave when they have such a good home right here.”
“Some folks long for the open road, son,” Grandma observed. “They’ve got what’s called the wanderlust. No matter what good a home they’ve got, they crave to see what’s just over the next hill or around the next bend in the road. It’s just who they are. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Why, I was hoeing in the field one time while my uncle Lee was plowing. He dropped the reins and said he was going to the house for a drink of water. He left the mule right there in the middle of the row, her trace chains just a’ droopin’. I didn’t see Lee again for seven years.”
I smiled, having heard this story many times growing up.
John Wesley’s eyes grew wide. “Where did he go all that time?”
“He was traveling all over the country, doing all kind of things for a living, married a woman and eventually left her. You name it, he did it.”
“What made him come back when he did?”
Grandma scratched her head through the sweatshirt hood. “I don’t rightly remember.”
“Maybe it was Homecoming,” I suggested with a wink for my young friend.
John Wesley grinned and reached into the mason jar for another spiced apple ring. He and Inez had matching red stains around their lips and I probably did, too, but I didn’t care. Those apple rings were delicious.
I was looking right at Inez when I saw her stiffen. Afraid she was fixing to have one of her spells, I said, “Grandma, are you all right?”
“Quick! Hide the rings!”
I stuffed my checkbook down beside the jars and slid the box under the tablecloth before I figured out why I was doing it. When I straightened up, I saw.
Ardaleen Bigelow was standing stock still twelve feet away from us. She was dressed in a casual but expensive pantsuit and Italian flats. Her hairdo was a retro beehive affair, a tacky off-note that clashed with her otherwise stylish ensemble. Over her shoulder she carried a voluminous designer bag out of which poked the fuzzy, bow-festooned head of her vicious little dog Pierre.
As a breed, the Shih Tzu are said to be sweet and loving animals. Pierre, on the other hand, was a tiny hellhound. I figured years of enduring the indignity of being dressed up like a sissy had turned him into five pounds of fractiousness. He backed his ears and bared his teeth the instant he recognized me.
To say I had a history with this hideous creature—the dog, not Ardaleen—would be to say that Ham Bigelow was a bad governor. That is, a vast understatement.
And Grandma Inez had a longer and more checkered history with her cousin Ardaleen that went back fifty years to an incident in which Ardaleen stole a prize-winning chow-chow recipe and the heirloom pepper pods that went with it.
The two women faced one another, squaring their feet and glaring. Passersby instinctively stepped aside as if the two elderly women were gunslingers about to draw on each other and they didn’t want to be in the crossfire.
“Ardaleen,” Inez drawled. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s Homecoming, or haven’t you heard?” her cousin sneered. Her dog pulled back its lip even farther, revealing a double row of sharp teeth.
“Oh, I know it’s Homecoming. What I can’t figure out is why you’d bother coming home to Mossy Creek. You’ve been ashamed of your roots ever since you threw in with the Bigelows.”
“This is like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” John Wesley whispered to me. “I read about them one time.”
“They’re a lot like that,” I agreed. “Only with more hate and less bloodshed.”
“You’re just jealous because you came from the poor branch of the Hamiltons. Y’all stayed stuck here in Mossy Creek while I actually made something of myself.”
“Ha! It doesn’t take much effort to marry into money,” Grandma said. “Just a little flirtin’ and a little luck.”
Ardaleen gasped, and Pierre clawed at the bag with his painted toenails, itching to get out of his confines—and sink his fangs into my shin bone, no doubt.
“Why you—you ridiculous-looking little redneck, you.”
“That does it, hussy! This bake sale ain’t big enough for the both of us!” Grandma pulled the sweatshirt hood off the back of her head, causing her thinning white hair to stand out in all directions in a bristly, static-charged halo. I caught her by the shoulders as she started to charge the governor’s mother.
“Grandma, get a’hold of yourself,” I hissed in her ear. “You see that state trooper coming up behind Ardaleen yonder? He’s her bodyguard, the one that almost wrestled us both to the ground when we got caught crashing that garden party to steal back the pepper pods. You are not going to get us arrested right here amongst the bundt cakes and cheese straws!”
“Let go of me.” She tried to wrest herself away from my grasp, but lapsed into a coughing fit. “This ain’t your fight,” she wheezed.
“The hell it’s not,” I said. “Any fight of yours is a fight of mine. Always has been. Always will be.”
“Bless you, child,” Grandma said, genuinely moved. It was one of those special moments in the lives of grandmas and granddaughters.
Or it would have been, between normal grandmas and granddaughters, that was.
I made the mistake of turning Inez loose. As soon as I looked back at Ardaleen, who wore a maddening smirk of triumph, I knew I’d made a mistake. It was clear from the look on Ardaleen’s face that she thought she’d gotten the last word. I knew my grandma well enough to know that she would never let that stand.
This was not going to end well. Kind of like that Bigelow Mercedes and its trunk full of fireworks that time. Or was it a Cadillac? You’d think I’d remember a thing like that inasmuch as I could have been charged with criminal destruction of property and all.
Quicker than you can say Jack Robinson, I heard Grandma yell, “John Wesley, go long! Go long!”
John Wesley took off as fast as Hershel Walker, the end zone stalker. He took a zigzag route in and out amongst the crowd of onlookers and right past Ardaleen as she dipped a celery stick in a sample jar of tomato aspic and brought it toward her lips.
Inez threw John Wesley’s football in a wobbly spiral, but her aim was true. It struck Ardaleen in her beehive hard enough to spin her around and startle Pierre into a yapping frenzy. I wondered if there was any way to get dog pee out of a designer bag lining. You can think of the strangest things in a time of crisis.
As she stopped spinning, she faced us, her hairdo at right angles to itself, her face red with outrage, and her suit red with tomato sauce. The trooper, who had caught up with her by then, must’ve decided that she’d been shot. At least that’s why I figured he knocked her completely to the ground and lay on top of her.
As Ardaleen screeched and the rather dim trooper wondered why he hadn’t heard a gunshot, I took the opportunity to get Grandma out of sight. My hand shot to her cheek and jerked her by the plastic tubing that ran across her nostrils and hooked behind her ears. Her heart and mind—not to mention the rest of her elfin body—soon followed the way of her sore nose. “Ow!” she hollered. I shushed her and guided her under the table as gently and quickly as possible.
Then I made sure the long tablecloth hid her completely and stood upright again to assess the chaos. John Wesley had retrieved his ball and the last I saw of him, he’d cleared the squar
e and was running down the sidewalk. I could see him in the distance, getting smaller and smaller as he approached the horizon. Derned if that little fella wasn’t going to make a fine running back, just like old Herschel.
As soon as I could tell that Ardaleen, the trooper, and even Pierre were all unhurt, I backed into the booth space, grabbed the cash box and the half-finished jar of spiced apple rings, lifted up the table cloth and settled in beside Grandma.
We munched on the apples and—in hushed tones—brainstormed ideas for tweaking the new recipe that we just knew would make us a fortune. Then we listened quietly as Ardaleen raged and the trooper asked people in neighboring booths where the troublemakers had gone.
“Why do you think that Ardaleen came to Mossy Creek in advance of the Homecoming game?” I asked.
“Are you kidding? She’s here to steal the best recipes, of course.” Inez sniffed.
“Or maybe it has something to do with the time capsule. I wonder if there’s something embarrassing to the Bigelows in there that she wants to try and hush up...”
Grandma’s eyes widened as she finished my thought. “...or get rid of completely.”
We were jarred out of our speculation when a fuzzy black nose peeked under the tablecloth and quivered with recognition.
“Uh-oh,” Grandma said.
“Oh, crap,” I said. I offered Pierre an apple ring, and he snapped at my fingers instead.
Grandma reached for a box of the chocolate pies.
“No!” I whispered. “You can’t give a dog chocolate. It could kill him.”
“But it’s Pierre,” Grandma hissed, “the most godawful dog in the history of, of dogdom.”
“There’s got to be a better way,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Grandma allowed. “I’d go a fer piece to show up Ardaleen, but even I wouldn’t murder her dog no matter what a sorry specimen he is.”
That’s when I remembered Pierre’s reaction to the pepper pods he’d gotten hold of at the ill-fated garden party. His eyes had watered and his mouth foamed. I had to dunk the poor little devil in Ardaleen’s swimming pool to get him some relief. I hated to do to him what I was gonna do, but he should have remembered that I was nobody to mess with.