Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  She stood up from her chair. She hadn’t made any notes or started a file or anything.

  “But you don’t understand! I can bring them here this evening. They’ll probably have a car-load full of plants by then! I can do the leg work for you!” Leg work was another crime term I had gleaned.

  “Now, listen, Teresa.” There that name was again. “You keep your eyes open, but don’t say a word. You just go enjoy your day and let us handle things from here. I promise, we will.” She began ushering me toward the door. “Tell your mama I said hello, sweetie.”

  She patted me on the head as she deposited me on the front step. I took a deep, disappointed breath. The town was beginning to stir. Mr. Garner, who owned the art shop, was out sweeping his sidewalk. He waved to me and I waved back, even though he had blue hair and I knew that probably made him someone I shouldn’t wave to. He was a fellow crime-stopper. He had nabbed his own prospective mother-in-law, Miss Millicent Hart, on numerous occasions. Well, if he could do it, I thought, and him with blue hair and not even born in Mossy Creek, then so can I.

  I’d just have to do it alone. And why not? I did everything else that way.

  GRANNY GEORGIE wasn’t the sort of grandmother who teaches you how to make perfect biscuits or takes you to the roller rink and sits there for hours while you wobble around to loud rock-n-roll music. In fact, I wasn’t even sure if she liked me. But whether she liked me or not, Granny Georgie was determined to indoctrinate me with all the Stroud family history, according to her. She was also training me in the finer points of feminine beauty according to Mary Kay cosmetics. Stroud traditions and Mary Kay were both held sacred by my grandmother.

  I never knew my granddaddy. His name was Claude and he died back when Mama was still a kid. Granny still missed him, and in her way, she continued to honor him. For example, in recent years she had bought a used male mannequin from Mr. Hamilton at the department store and dressed it up in Granddaddy’s clothes. She often put that dummy in the passenger seat of her Buick so she wouldn’t be a lady traveling unescorted when she took a road trip to see her cousin, Irene, who lived way down on the coast, in Savannah.

  Granny was a die-hard Braves fan, so on one trip to see Irene she stopped off in Atlanta to catch a baseball game. I don’t know if she left the dummy in the car or if he went to the game alongside her, but she said that mannequin made the best company she had ever had on a vacation.

  Thus far, my summertime days with Granny and her Claude mannequin had been fairly quiet, filled with stringing beans on her back porch while she rolled my short hair in tiny curlers and slathered some kind of pink lotion on me, which drew every bug in the county.

  Now I watched as Granny Georgie whizzed past me in a flurry of floral house dress, looking like a Banty hen in a fizz. She primped up for the monthly trip to the graveyard. Every third Wednesday she and her sisters went to clean up the graves of our forgotten relatives, since the Baptist church had moved into town fifty years ago. Most days, by the time I got to her house Granny was already on the telephone with one of her sisters, planning the day’s trip and gossiping. They would argue about the local Southern Baptist congregation or argue about the gossip Granny hasn’t been the first to hear.

  But today was not a day for casual telephone calls. Today was the day another well-organized heist would take place, and finally, for the first time, I would be allowed to go along and see it, in person.

  I parked myself on Granny’s big, maroon sofa, which was covered in plastic so Granny could keep it clean for the “good” company. I did my best to blend into the big, pink peonies on the wallpaper behind it, not moving a muscle. The plastic stuck to my legs in the humid, eighty-degree air of the living room, but I knew if I budged I would draw attention to myself. With that one crunch or squeak, Granny might change her mind about taking me along to the cemetery, and then I wouldn’t get The Scoop.

  I learned about The Scoop from overhearing Sue Ora Salter, publisher of our town newspaper, talking to Mama at the bank one day about some fiasco down in Bigelow. Anything about the city of Bigelow, the Bigelow family, or Bigelowans in general was a real attention-getter around Mossy Creek. Despite being married to a Bigelow herself (in fact, her husband was president of the Bigelow County Bank, the biggest competition for the Mossy Creek Savings and Loan), Sue Ora (who kept her maiden name, just like Mama) put the scandal right out on the front page of the Mossy Creek Gazette. Then our town gossip columnist, Katie Bell, would dig into the story and keep it going on the front page for weeks at a time. Katie Bell was still writing about the reunion events from last fall and the plans Governor Bigelow had announced back then—under suspicious circumstances—for rebuilding Mossy Creek High School.

  If I turned in Granny and her sisters for grave robbing, Katie Bell and Sue Ora would have the whole town talking about me. I studied my worn-out sneakers and thrilled to thoughts of a parade featuring me on top of the Mossy Creek Volunteer Fire Department’s ladder truck, just like old Mr. Brady sat on top during the Christmas parade every year, dressed up like Santa. I’d be a celebrity, get to ride on top of the truck and I wouldn’t even have to wear a Santa suit.

  Granny got dressed in a pair of cotton capri pants that made her ankles look even more like chicken legs. Then she pulled on her long, narrow Keds, complaining that they covered up her fuchsia toenails, but saying she couldn’t see wearing sandals to work in the cemetery. I almost snorted at the idea of my prissy grandmother doing anything that might threaten to make her break a sweat.

  Fifteen long minutes later Granny emerged from her bathroom in a cloud of aerosol fumes, all ready to go, bottle-red hair teased and sprayed generously with Aqua Net, her skin smelling strongly of Oscar de la Renta perfume.

  “Come on, Therese! What are you doing just sitting there? You’re going to make us late!”

  I peeled my legs off the sofa cover, straightened my cut-offs and followed her out to her enormous, baby-blue Buick. We barreled down the road.

  My grandmother’s incessant need to be on time consistently provided me with opportunities to be thrown from a moving vehicle. I’d learned it was best to sit close to the door in the back seat. That way, I could hold onto the door knob to keep from being slung all over the place. Clinging to the door with all the strength in my scrawny little arms, I pushed my feet into the floor board to keep from slamming into the back of Granny’s seat. We came to a screeching halt at the one traffic light in Mossy Creek that never failed to turn red upon our approach.

  “That blame thing catches me every time!” Granny complained. “It’s beyond me why Amos Royden thinks we need it. You see anybody coming either way, Therese?”

  Before Granny could make a break for it, the light changed and she gunned the engine. Being that I was on a mission to catch my grandmother up to no good, the adrenaline was coursing through my skinny little body at such a speed that I felt light-headed. I was relieved she had been spared a chance to incriminate herself so early in the day.

  We shot down the street like bandits.

  I WAS RELIEVED TO tear into Great Aunt Burt’s gravel driveway, a cloud of dust roiling up behind us. Granny honked the horn long and hard. The Buick’s horn sounded like a freighter docking. She honked again, then flipped down the vanity mirror to check her hot-pink lipstick. Loud, pink colors were a big thing for Granny.

  Granny sat stewing and growing increasingly agitated. It would be another ten minutes before her sister, Burt, lumbered out her screen door to resume their on-going disagreement about the time of departure. By then, Granny would be worked into such a dither that no rational comment would be heard until kingdom come. I couldn’t figure out how you could be late to visit dead relatives.

  Aunt Burt shared my opinion on this topic.

  Her given name is Coretta, but no one could remember, or would admit to remembering, how she came to be known as Burt. Aunt Burt was a short
, broad woman with a sharp nose and an easy smile. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut short like a man’s, and she went barefoot in her blue jeans most days. She wore no-nonsense, button-down shirts that pulled tight across her massive bosom. She set no value in the painstaking beauty regimen Granny insisted upon. Burt’s fingers are always stained with different colors from her oil pastels.

  She lived alone in a house behind the public library, with a couple of parrots and a blue-tick hound dog named Rufus, who she rescued from the Bigelow County Pound. Burt had never been married, and no one ventured any opinions—at least not in front of me—as to why she remained single. She always seems content enough to me, and she was my favorite great aunt. Burt had a big, boisterous laugh and she was always full of funny stories. She was always in a good mood, she was always casual and she was always, always late.

  All of which provoked my dandied-up, precise little Granny into a fit of nervous indignity.

  “You’re late!” Granny yelled as Burt lumbered to the Buick.

  “You’re on time,” Burt shot back, and grinned.

  She got into the car and they began to argue like professional commentators at a wrestling match. Granny volleyed something about Burt’s lack of self-respect and appearance. Burt hefted back a joke about Granny’s increasingly wider rear end. All the while Burt cast glances my way, conspiratorially grinning at my grandmother’s rage.

  We arrived at Great Aunt Darcey’s mobile home ten minutes later to find her waiting on her front stoop. She gracefully took one last, long drag from her non-filtered cigarette before crushing it underfoot on her way to the car. I couldn’t help admiring her rebellious swagger.

  Aunt Darcey’s hair was always a riot of nondescript curls, like my own, only brown instead of yellow. She wore her blue jeans just a bit too snug, according to Granny. I didn’t mind her tight pants. In fact, if I grew up lucky enough to have a skinny butt like Darcey’s instead of my mama’s wide hips, I’d wear my jeans tight, too.

  Darcey was the baby sister in the group, but she looked older because her marriage to my Great Uncle Hogue had not been easy. Her youth had gone the way of hard work in a chicken-processing plant way over in Gainesville. She had miscarried two babies buried before they took their first sweet breath. She never had any more children, after that. I was a little afraid of Aunt Darcey. She squinted wickedly when she smoked her cigarettes, and she never apologized to any living soul for any reason.

  “Lord, I thought you all were probably in a ditch somewhere,” she growled at Granny and Burt. “What took you so long? Burt, as usual?”

  “Who knows what ever takes Burt so long,” Granny snapped. “Next time, I’ll just come pick you up and we’ll get on out to the cemetery on time. Let Burt wait all morning wondering where we are, for a change.”

  Aunt Burt winked at me. She and I both knew they wouldn’t leave her at home.

  She brought the lunch.

  “How’s Hogue?” my Granny asked as she drove. Darcey let out a short blast of air.

  I waited on tender hooks. If she had finally murdered him in his sleep with a kitchen knife or poisoned him with crushed up rat poison in the cornbread, I was a shoe-in for town detective.

  “He’s as stupid as ever. We had a Big One this morning before he left for work. “Big One was our family’s slang for a brawl that usually involved cooking utensils. “I don’t know how a man can lose money like he does. I know it ain’t falling out of his pockets, cause I check ’em for holes regularly.” Darcey fluffed her hair with her long, lethal fingers.

  “Is he drinkin’ again?” asked Aunt Burt. From the scowl on her face it was just luck that Great Uncle Hogue wasn’t already stuffed in a trunk somewhere.

  Darcey snorted. “Is he ever not drinking? It’s not that. I mean, I don’t mind if he stops in to set a spell at the pub. At least I know where he is then. I just don’t like the way he’s alley-cattin’ around up in Chinaberry, lately.”

  Darcey rolled down her window to let in some cooler air. The plush upholstery in the car was stifling in the summer. There had been no air-conditioning in the Buick since the compressor went out two summers before. With all four of us packed in, it was oppressive and full of the aroma of fleshy, powdered women and whatever we had eaten for breakfast that morning. I clutched the door handle and gratefully inhaled the blast of sweet, warm air.

  “What’s Hogue doing up in Chinaberry?” asked Granny.

  “He says it’s something about some job a man over at Bailey Mill told him about. There ain’t a job, and I know it.” When Aunt Darcey was angry, she tended to sound like a saw blade. She was often angry. She continued on a tirade of accusations with a livid baring of her not-so-white teeth. I crouched down in my corner, listening for any information that might come in handy when I would surely have to testify as an accomplice to homicide.

  When Darcey came to a halt in her tantrum and put her face in her hands, I was surprised to see a look of sympathy on Granny’s face.

  “Well, there’s no use making trouble where there ain’t none.” Aunt Burt interjected. “If he gets himself a better job, it could be good for the two of you. And if it ain’t a job, then you can always get that frying pan after his head again.”

  Granny, Burt and Darcey traded a look, then smiled in sinister unison.

  I was riding down the road to hell in a Buick full of degenerates.

  THE REST OF OUR drive was an unending cackle of community hear-say. When we bumped into the cemetery along the worn gravel path that led to our family plot, I assumed my best bird-dog vigilance.

  The cemetery sat on a hill overlooking a little branch of Mossy Creek called Baptist Creek, since the Baptists used to divert it into a little pond for their baptisms. What had once been a beautiful church beside it was now just a stone foundation filled in with mowed grass. The old cemetery had been forgotten.

  I got out of the Buick, looking up in amazement into the bower of an enormous tree. Three gigantic oak trees were strategically placed throughout the graveyard, guarding the loved ones resting at their roots. I don’t think I had ever considered the reverence of a place that held bones and memories, before that moment. I was almost as impressed by the concrete Jesus, arms also outstretched, looking down at me from a pedestal at the cemetery’s center. His fingertips had gone missing long before he and I met. My nose filled with the sweetness of all things green and moist, a loamy sort of scent that was pleasant in the heat. I felt strangely enchanted by the hush.

  Granny and her sisters began their monthly perusal of the grounds, wandering about the smooth, cool granite stones. All the while, they spouted long-forgotten stories of ancestors they’d never known and of kin they knew and remembered all too well. They talked about the Stroud women who had married good-for-nothing men and the Stroud men who had been lured away by racy women. Great-Grandmother Stroud’s sister, Velda, had “near lost her mind to have run off with a philanderer.” Great-Great Uncle Herbert was “always too good for the rest of the family once he married that foreign woman, though that hateful hussy never loved him.”

  Some Strouds had been fools and lost souls and there was no redemption even in death for them, according to Granny and my great aunts. But none of that talk, fascinating as it was, furthered my mission. I wanted them to get down to business and start robbing graves.

  To my great disappointment, Aunt Burt decided it was time for lunch. I scarfed down a bologna sandwich and spent the rest of my time jumping over the graves of my kin while my great aunts and my granny feasted on coleslaw, meatloaf sandwiches and sweet iced tea. They communed together on their old picnic quilt like witches.

  Darcey stirred a sprig of mint around in her tea glass with a long fingernail, as if stirring a cauldron. I thought of how convincing she always looked on Halloween, when she would answer her door dressed in a wicked-witch outfit with a fake, green wart on her no
se. She, Granny and Aunt Burt huddled together on the picnic quilt like a scene from a Southern version of Macbeth. They argued over what kind of accidents and diseases Strouds were most likely to suffer, and which elderly kin or young fool was likely to die next.

  Their preoccupation with the morbid side of our heritage had led them straight to a life of crime, I reasoned. Now if they would just get on with it, I would have the evidence I needed to set our women right again. I would put the Strouds back on the Baptist straight and narrow. Granny and her sisters finally finished their meal, folded up their blanket and packed up their Tupperware. I had to stifle a squeal of delight.

  The time had come.

  “WELL, LET’S SEE,” said Granny as she inspected a grave.

  “Looks like Bobby Lee’s lobelia is gettin’ a little overgrown. Burt, do you want a piece to root for your back yard? It would do real nice out there by your crepe myrtle.” She took a hand spade from a tote bag and began digging. “I remember when old Bobby Lee told me lobelia was his favorite shrub and asked me to put this here for him one day. Lord, that don’t seem no time ago. And me just a little ol’ thing.”

  “He was so hateful, I’d have never guessed he’d have told you what he liked,” said Darcey.

  “Well . . . he wasn’t hateful all the time. I can remember when that old man would take me up on his knees some nights and we’d listen for whippoorwills out back of the house.”

  “How about that sweet little clematis vine on Baby Jane’s grave? It has some real nice blooms on it. I think you ought to pull up a piece or two to set out by your stoop, there, Darcey. Want me to walk up there and pull you some?” Darcey and Granny wandered up the hill, their conversation growing faint. I looked around in search of Aunt Burt’s round form.

  She was at the other side of the cemetery. I found her squatting beside a remnant of a fieldstone wall around a grave plot. She ran her fingers over a stone with a cross engraved at the top. Sgt. Samuel T. Blevins, it read. She looked up at me, and I was surprised to see tears on her cheeks. She reached out and took my hand. I settled beside her on the newly cut grass.