I looked at those limbs a long time.
GRANNY HAS GIVEN me her house and I’ve decided to stay in Mossy Creek. Not in failure but seeking something that has been lacking in my life—a place to belong, someone to belong to. I remember Granny’s famous prediction. Appreciate what you have, Emily Sue. What goes around comes around.
She should add, Be careful what you wish for.
I wish I had. As I stood looking out Granny’s windows the other day, I saw a strange man with a long braid of black hair walking up the drive to Miss Mamie’s house. He stopped to pull up the for sale sign, unlocked the door and went inside. Moments later the shades went up and the windows were open. What came next filled the air with sounds I couldn’t begin to describe.
Music? No. Drums began to beat, accompanied by the stomping of feet and a melancholy chanting that rose with the intensity of the drumbeat. I soon closed the windows on my side and pulled down the shades. All afternoon and into the night the noise continued, vibrating through the night air. By midnight I decided it had to stop. I’d have to shut off that yowling or I’d never get any sleep. I’d call Chief Royden. No, I’d take care of this myself, just like Granny had.
Moments later I found myself marching across Granny’s sidewalk as a nighttime thunderstorm began rumbling in the sky. I knocked on Miss Mamie’s back screened door and peered through the mesh. “Hello, inside.”
The man appeared and flicked on the back porch light. He was barefoot and bare-chested, with a dark braid of hair hanging over one tanned shoulder. I gazed up into a handsome face with high cheekbones and dark eyes. He gazed down at me as if I were a rabbit and might make a tasty meal. It felt like a compliment. “Yes?” he asked in a wonderful, deep voice.
“Are you going to be the new occupant of Mamie’s house?”
“Yes. And you’re my neighbor, the granddaughter of the woman who fought with Mamie? The agent warned me about you.”
“Fought? No. I mean Yes.”
“And what can I do for you?”
“I . . . I . . . You have to turn off all that noise. You’re polluting the air!”
He smiled. “Really? You have air pollution regulations?”
“Yes, and your air stops at the fence.”
He stepped out past me into the yard and looked up at the dark shadow of the mountain behind Mamie’s house. The wind was blowing harder now and the night threatened a hard, warm rain. “I don’t think so,” he said. “We cannot control nature. Mother Earth welcomes her children, the wind and the rain.”
“You’re an Indian?”
“Cherokee.”
“I thought you back-to-nature types preferred living in teepees.”
“Actually, I’ve been living in a condo in Oklahoma.”
“But you’re here now. Why?”
“Because this is my birthplace. My people are related to the Settles and the Halfacres.”
“You were born in Miss Mamie’s house?”
“No, in these mountains. In this cove.”
“If that’s some kind of rain dance you’re playing in there, you’re going to have to stop. Storms in Mossy Creek can get pretty fierce. They don’t need encouragement.”
“I’m not bringing the storm. It’s coming around that ridge from the north. I think you may be attracting its force.”
I gaped at him and absorbed the electric feel that ran before a storm. Thunder was gathering force in the distance. Then the lightning started. The thunder rumbled.
The pecan tree caught the breeze and the two limbs held to each other. The storm that killed its ancestor had come from the north. The one brewing now was approaching from the south. What goes around, comes around, Granny had said. It never occurred to me she was talking about storms. I thought she’d meant life.
The storm moved closer. The stranger and I stood our ground. The wind caught my thin robe and nightgown, pressing them against me like an old Betty Davis movie where Betty stood on a cliff, looking into the distance while a storm tried and failed to frighten her. My new neighbor remained staunch beside me, his head cocked a little as if he were listening to something I couldn’t hear.
Then the lightning started. The sky cracked open and a bolt hit so close by the ground shook. I turned and ran back to Granny’s house as the rain started. The stranger stayed put, his face turned up to the water. Oh yes, he was a Creekite by nature. A lover of water and trouble. I huddled on Granny’s back porch and watched as he turned and calmly walked back into Mamie’s house. But just as I shivered and started inside my own door he returned.
Lighting flashed again and I saw that he’d changed his jeans for some kind of loin cloth. His unbraided hair hung down his back in dark, wet strands. I put a hand to my heart and stared at the wild, masculine image. And I’d thought Mamie was trouble. What would Granny have done about this? What am I going to do?
I’ll get a dog, I thought. I’ll rebuild the fence. I’ll refuse to look at the man. Or think about him.
In the next moment lightning shimmered around the pecan tree. I held my breath, fearing the worst, but the lightning appeared to arc around the intertwined limbs as if they were shielding each other and nothing could harm them. A few minutes later the storm moved on. My astonishing new neighbor looked over at me. When one last flicker of lightning showed his face, he looked from the pecan tree to me. He nodded. Before I realized I was doing it, I nodded back. He smiled and walked inside his house.
What goes around, comes around.
I told myself I wouldn’t follow in Granny’s footsteps. Her freezer was still full of pies. The pecan tree wouldn’t bear fruit for ten years. And I had wished for a friend, but not a friend so unnerving he made me feel I’d been struck by lightning.
The drumbeat started up again. I sighed. On the other hand . . .
Mossy Creek Gazette
Volume III, No. 2 * Mossy Creek, Georgia
The Bell Ringer
Changes & Choices
by Katie “Tree Hugger” Bell
I’m sorry to announce that Grace Peacock has taken up residence in Magnolia Manor’s assisted living quarters. She will be sharing an apartment with her long-time dear friend and neighbor Mamie Brown. We wish them all the best. Mrs. Brown’s house has been sold. As of this column, your Bell Ringer does not have information on the buyer.
Beginning in the fall, at the request of Opal May Suggs, a class in Spanish will be offered in our continuing education program. Any suggestion that the request has anything to do with ghosts or the unusual amount of thunder from her side of the mountains has been totally discounted by one of our summer residents, recently retired from the weather department of one of the Atlanta television stations. He also says it has nothing to do with Rip Van Winkle or bowling. When questioned, Miss Opal only smiles and invites her friends to open their minds and hearts, lay in a supply of bran flakes and learn Spanish.
Jayne Austen Reynold’s baby, young Matthew, has celebrated his first birthday with a party at Jayne’s coffee shop. In Matthew’s honor there’s a sale on at Hamilton’s Department Store in the children’s clothes, newborns to size five. When submitting the advertisement, Robert Walker, president and general manager of Hamilton’s, bemoaned the shortage of young children in Mossy Creek. We do have some weddings planned and hopefully the couples will fill our gaps. After the weddings, please, not before. We’re old-fashioned here in Mossy Creek.
Incidentally, last week we had a tree surgeon visit from the University of Georgia. Mrs. Howell called him in to examine one of our lover’s lane sites, The Sitting Tree. He said the old maple seems to be in remarkably good shape considering it’s in the middle of an open area where the elements can get at it. Mrs. Howell says it has a guardian angel, but I’ll let her tell you about that herself.
Chapter Four
SADIE and ETTA
—unknown
IT’S BEEN JUST over fifty years since the summer Etta Jones Howell insisted I come to Mossy Creek for a visit. She kept begging me even though she knew I didn’t like to leave my neat, tiny, post-war apartment in Atlanta. In the end I gave in. Etta was my very best friend. How could I refuse her?
At the time, I didn’t know she was dying.
I can hear her now. “Sadie Johnson, I will not allow you to waste your life any longer. I know you better ’n anybody else and I’ve got a plan.”
Listening to her back then, my curiosity rose, though Etta and a secluded mountain town named Mossy Creek seemed a distant cry from my ordinary, daily routines as a single career woman, which is what people called a young, unmarried elementary school teacher in the late 1940s.
Etta added something she knew would work.
“I’ve got a surprise or two for you.”
“Are they good?” I asked.
“One of them is very good. Maybe the best.”
“Well,” I began . . . hooked in spite of myself.
Etta let out a sigh of satisfaction.
“Okay, that’s settled then. You have the whole summer off. Pack up your things and head north as soon as you can.” Her voice changed, became a little sad. “And, Sadie, plan to stay for quite a while.”
As I pulled together some things for the trip, my thoughts flew back to the fall of my third grade year, when Etta came into my life.
THAT SCHOOL YEAR was as difficult for me as the first two had been in the small town in South Georgia where I lived. The clothes I wore were either too small or too large and always second-hand. My hair was a nest of snarls amid burnished red curls. My nose was scattered with freckles that seemed to shriek aloud that I worked outside in the hot sun digging in the dirt, growing vegetables for my foster family to sell. It was bad enough that my outside announced to every one in town that I was poor and unkempt.
My inside was in even worse shape and would, I suspected, always be that way. Moving from foster home to foster home had left me with the enormity of being unwanted. I was too dumb, too smart for my own good, too ugly, too beautiful beyond my ken and on and on. I couldn’t understand why it was that no one loved me enough to keep me. That constant ugly lump of knowledge was something I carefully kept inside.
One day my teacher, Mrs. Sampson, announced we were going to have a new girl in our class.
“She will arrive tomorrow,” she said.
“Please welcome her and make her feel at home.”
The year was 1933, and newcomers were a rarity in the small-town South. That night I went to bed wondering what this new girl would be like. Maybe, I thought, she would be nice to me. Not like the others.
In the morning I brushed my hair carefully, scrubbed my hands and straightened my oversized dress. This new girl, whoever she was, had to like me. She just had to!
Etta walked into the room like she owned the place. It wasn’t a strut exactly but mighty close to one. She stood with her arms crossed and a frown on her pretty face that made her look downright annoyed to have to be in school. Her blue-eyed gaze, beneath a stray lock of blond hair, swept across the kids sitting at their desks and came to rest on me. I gave her a shy smile and held my breath.
“You may choose someone in the class to be your partner until you learn our rules,” the teacher said.
Etta pointed directly at me. “I’ll take her.”
My surprise was matched by the expressions on the faces of my classmates. My cheeks burned and my heart warmed. Someone had chosen me!
From that moment on, I gave my heart to Etta. With her I was someone special. Not just the poor, dirty, unwanted child everyone knew about. I was a different version of me, proud and tall. I was Sadie Johnson, Etta Jones’ best friend.
Even now, many years later, recalling that moment, I cannot help the tears of gratitude that fill my eyes. She would always be my best friend.
NOT LONG AFTER Etta called, I headed to Mossy Creek for the summer. My little blue Ford was filled with clothes and books and all the paraphernalia of a long-term stay, as if I knew what lay ahead.
Driving into the mountains above Bigelow, my heart lifted. I understood why Etta loved this place. There was something about the fresh air, the blue sky and puffy white clouds around Mossy Creek that made me think of fresh beginnings. One of the pleasant aspects of teaching was having the whole summer to myself. I cherished those times. I was a loner, and though I missed the children I taught, I embraced each summer with the joy of knowing my days were my own.
Mossy Creek greeted me like an old friend. In 1947, Main Street had just received its first street lamp and the traffic was so light that I had to circumvent two sleeping dogs in the middle of South Bigelow Road. I drove past Hamilton’s Department Store, the town hall and all the other landmarks I remembered from my last visit. Mossy Creek felt special, quiet and gathered-together, unlike the crowded life I’d left behind in Atlanta.
On the outskirts of town I turned onto a side street and found my way up a long, graveled driveway that led to Etta’s house. Howell Lane, as the little street sign named it, was a mark of pride for her.
“Can you imagine,” she once said to me. “We have our very own road with our very own name on it. Not many people can claim that, can they?”
Etta got such pleasure out of the simple things in life. I wish more people would.
At the end of the driveway sat a small, two-story house with clapboard siding painted a bright yellow. Dark-green shutters edged the multi-paned windows. A long, wide porch in front, lined with comfortable rocking chairs, invited visitors to set a spell.
I got out of the car as Belle, a yellow lab, hefted herself to her feet and ambled down the front steps to greet me. I smiled at Etta’s long-time companion and gave her a pat on the head. Her tail wagged a hello and her mouth opened into what promised to be a canine smile.
“You’re here!” Etta called through the screen door. “Hold on! I’ll get Ben to help you with your things.”
I stood a moment and drew in a deep breath. I heard the sound of bees going about their tasks among the flowers clustered in colorful bunches along the lattice work beneath the porch. Yes, I thought, this would be a pleasant, peaceful time. No worries to think about. Just time to enjoy being with Etta and Ben, her husband.
Etta reappeared at the door, Ben in tow. She crossed the porch and hurried down the steps to greet me. I rushed forward, filled with questions. Why was Etta so thin? I hugged her and felt the absence of flesh in the body my arms surrounded.
Alarmed, I asked, “Are you ill? You’re so thin. And you look tired.”
Etta’s laugh was not the hearty one I knew. “Oh, I’ve been feeling poorly but now that you are here, it’s going to help.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so glad you came.”
I glanced at Ben standing behind Etta, one hand on her shoulder. His lanky body towered above her small, round frame. She reached up and stroked his craggy features. Ben smiled at her but turned to me with a troubled expression.
“How are you?” I said.
He nodded. “F-f-fine.”
I looked at him and knew he wasn’t fine at all. He was stuttering and that happened when he was under stress. What, I wondered, was going on?
As if he heard my unspoken question, he silently shook his head, warning me to keep quiet. My heart sank. Something was terribly wrong.
Etta’s smile was bright. “Come on in. We’ve got your room all ready for you.”
I followed her, carrying some of my bags up the stairs and automatically turned left into the bedroom I had always loved. The sloping ceiling, flowered wallpaper and big double bed were perfect for
me—and Etta knew it. I liked to keep things the same. I suppose it was the instability in my life growing up that made me that way.
“Just the way you left it from your last visit,” said Etta with a knowing grin.
“It looks wonderful. And thank you for the wild flowers.” I bent over to smell them and then turned to her.
“Are we going to have a chance to talk soon? I think you’re hiding something from me.”
She nodded and looked to see if Ben was outside, in the hall. “For now, let’s have a nice lunch. I don’t like to worry Ben. You know what a gentle soul he is.”
Ben entered the room only a minute later. “Got your bags, Sadie. Mighty heavy, too.” His blue eyes twinkled. “Glad to know you’re going to stay a while. Etta perks up when you’re around.”
I chuckled. “You know Etta. Once she makes up her mind to something there’s no stopping her.”
He put his arm around Etta. “Yessir, she’s got a stubborn streak in her.”
Etta looked up at him, a loving smile on her face. “If I wasn’t that way, Benjamin Howell, you would never have asked me to marry you. That was your lucky day!”
Ben grinned. “Don’t I just know it.”
Watching the interchange between them, I was filled with a jumble of emotions. I guess I’d have to say a good deal of it was envy. A love like hers and Ben’s was hard to find.
The next few days passed quickly as the three of us settled into a routine, although Etta avoided telling me anything more interesting than the color of the mums she hoped to plant for fall blooms. I arose early in the morning and headed outdoors, walked down to the bottom of the drive and out onto East Mossy Creek, the main drag that headed toward the small-big mountain city of Gainesville, over an hour’s drive away on bumpy country roads. I loved the peace and quiet of those early morning strolls. When I got back from my walk, Ben and I sipped coffee in the kitchen and then I would fix us breakfast. Etta remained in bed until mid-morning. Another warning sign. But each time I’d ask Ben about her, he’d just shake his head.
Summer in Mossy Creek Page 8