Summer in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  At that moment I didn’t give a damn if the priest himself took me to task.

  Jack simply held onto me and let me cry. I have no idea how long we stood like that, blocking the door for anybody else who wanted to leave the house. Finally, I loosened my grip and let him lead me to the swing around the corner of the porch.

  I had a momentary qualm when he sat. I don’t think the chains that held the swing up had been replaced in my lifetime. I’m no lightweight, and Jack probably weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds, not an ounce of it fat. I had visions of both of us landing flat on our backsides in the middle of the splinters from swing and ceiling.

  The swing groaned, but it held.

  “If this thing starts to let go, jump,” he said.

  “I was just thinking the same thing. Oh, Jack, I’m so glad you came.”

  “I’m sorry I missed the funeral. I just found out about it yesterday and I was out on the coast at a meeting. Came straight here from the airport.”

  “You drove from Atlanta?”

  “Nope. From Bigelow. Company jet.”

  I laughed. “Impressive.” If I’d given it any thought, I guess I’d figured the limousine I saw standing at the curb in front of Aunt’s cottage was a leftover family car from the funeral, but now I took a closer look. “Yours?”

  “Rented.” He grinned. “I figured the best way to handle this was to put the big pot in the little one and just come on.”

  “And rub the noses of some of Mossy Creek’s finest snobs in it.”

  “Uh-huh.” His gigantic brown hand enveloped mine. Looking down at the two hands entwined, I remembered how as a child I’d always felt so unfinished next to him with his lovely milk chocolate skin. Like God had primed me and never painted on my top coat.

  “You should have called me directly when she died,” he said.

  “I left a message with your secretary or assistant or whatever she is. I know you’re busy, Jack. I mean, damn, you’re a real captain of industry these days. About the richest man I know. Sure richer than anybody in Mossy Creek.” I turned to him. “You remember when you came home from Brown the summer after your freshman year and I asked you to go water-skiing with me?”

  “As I recall I said that I had no desire to try to water-ski and wind up in a couple of hundred feet of chain and an anchor or two.”

  “Miss Virgie went upside your head and said big as you were, you were not to say things like that in polite company.”

  “But she knew it was the truth.”

  “She sat me down after you’d gone off and told me that if you and I were going to stay friends, we’d have to meet up north.”

  “We’re meeting now.”

  “We met at her funeral, too. I guess that’s the last time I’ve seen you. At your mother’s funeral.” I managed a laugh. “I never felt so underdressed in my life. I haven’t even owned a hat since the Episcopal church decided the Lord didn’t really care whether I wore one in church or not.”

  “Momma would have been pleased at the turnout.”

  “Aunt leaned over to me and whispered that this was a real celebration of Miss Virgie’s life. That’s what she wanted when she went, too. I’ve tried to give it to her, although without the choir and the three-piece combo it lacked a little something.”

  “Y’all stuffy Episcopalians don’t run much to ‘yes Jesuses’ either.”

  “I’m sorry we didn’t visit Miss Virgie more often those last few years when she was in the nursing home.”

  “She always did say you were as much her child as your momma and daddy’s. I used to tell her that made us as good as brother and sister.”

  “She taught me how to make beaten biscuits and to soak chicken in buttermilk before you fry it and that you have to add coffee to make decent redeye gravy. Manners, too. I’d probably still be eating my breakfast toast whole if she hadn’t taught me it was proper to break it into pieces and eat one at a time.” I shoved the porch gently with the toe of my black pump and felt the swing move back with a creak.

  “Don’t press your luck,” Jack said. “Better sit still.”

  We were silent for a long moment. “How’s your family?” I asked.

  “Randy’s a sophomore at Morehouse, Virginia’s at George Washington law school.”

  “And Peggy?”

  “Peggy’s Peggy. That woman spends more money than God.” He shook his heavy head. For the first time I realized his short hair was steel-gray. “Peggy would have come along to the funeral with me if I’d been driving up from Atlanta.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” I said softly. “Not unless you made her.”

  He was silent for a moment. “No, she wouldn’t. She’ll never get over being jealous of you and feeling out of place up here. I’ve never talked much about you and Mossy Creek, but she knows.

  “Besides, she wants everybody to believe I sprang a full blown financial genius from the Harvard Business School, not out of some tobacco patch outside of Mossy Creek. All the time Momma was in the nursing home, I doubt Peggy went to see her once that I didn’t drag her.” He laughed. “Which was fine with Momma. She finally told me she thought Peggy was the uppity-est paper-sack heifer she’d ever met and that I should never have married a witch who acted like she was doing me a favor marrying a man blacker than she was.”

  “She didn’t! Miss Virgie?”

  “Miss Virgie.” His big laugh rumbled up from his belly. “So how are you, Louise? Charlie? Your family?”

  “Everybody’s fine. Hard to believe I’m a grandmother. Oh, Jack, when did everybody get to be so old?”

  “You and me, we don’t get old. It’s just those other folks get crows feet and pot bellies. You like being a grandmother?”

  “Better than being a mother. I can send them home when I get tired of them. But I try to be patient and teach them things the way Aunt and Miss Virgie taught you and me. I’m content in Mossy Creek.”

  “Content? How about happy?”

  “Happy, too. I guess. Most of the time, anyway. Aren’t you?”

  “Most of the time. I got to admit I like being rich. If it hadn’t been for Miss Catherine, I’d probably be teaching school in some ghetto in Atlanta and driving a ten-year-old clunker.”

  “She paid your tuition because she loved Miss Virgie.”

  “That wasn’t the only reason.”

  “She knew you were brilliant.”

  “Not that either.”

  I let that lie and went on quickly. “Those two women were closer than sisters. When I was going through Aunt’s closet I found a couple of shoeboxes full of letters from Miss Virgie that she wrote from the nursing home.”

  “I found the same thing in Momma’s stuff. I held onto ’em. I should have sent them back to you. My mind doesn’t always recognize what’s important.”

  “Would you like Miss Virgie’s letters? I can give them to you now if you’ll wait.”

  He shook his head. “You hang onto them. I’m not sure I could take that much of Momma’s honesty.”

  I had to laugh. “Then you hang onto Aunt’s for the same reason. I don’t imagine they’re going to be many scholars investigating two old ladies for a biography.” I leaned back and closed my eyes. “Aunt Catherine never got over Miss Virgie’s death. Life started trickling out of her when Miss Virgie died. It’s taken all this time for the last little bit of sand to drop through the hour glass.”

  “Louise, dear, we’ll be going.” Eleanor Abercrombie and her husband came around the corner of the porch. She didn’t miss a step when she saw Jack.

  Jack stood.

  “My goodness! Don’t tell me this is little Jack, Virgie’s boy. Why, I barely recognized you.”

  After they had left and Jack had carefully resumed his seat on the swing, I snickered. “
What’d she expect? International banker coming home in bib overalls and a baseball cap?”

  “She might have been more comfortable if I had.” Jack stood and pulled me to my feet. “I got to go, Louise.”

  “You’ve only been here a little minute!” I wailed.

  “I know, but I’ve got—hell, no, I haven’t got a meeting to go to. I still feel weird in Mossy Creek, I guess.”

  “Things have really changed, Jack.”

  “Some folks never did need changing. The others? I don’t know.” He shrugged.

  I slipped my arm through his and walked with him to the porch steps. Out on the street across the lawn and the sidewalk Jack’s chauffeur slid out of the front seat of the limousine and opened the passenger door for his boss.

  “Call me when you come to Atlanta,” Jack said, and kissed me on the forehead—my cheek was down way too far for him to reach. “We can have lunch.”

  “Sure.” I knew I wouldn’t. So did he.

  He turned from the top step and took both my hands in his dark ones. “I don’t think it would work even now, Louise. I sure as hell know it wouldn’t have worked back then.”

  I felt the tears start again. “I know,” I whispered. “Doesn’t change the way I feel about you. Always will.”

  “You know that old Southern saying? The races can be friends until puberty, then it’s segregation of the sexes until death.” He touched my cheek. “I’ll love you until the day I die.”

  Then he turned and loped down the stairs and across the lawn. A minute later he was gone.

  I turned back to the house. I knew tongues would be wagging inside. It’s not every day we get a multi-millionaire in Mossy Creek, and certainly not one like Jack.

  I was in and out of Aunt’s house all the time I was growing up, but I only saw Jack in the summer. We went to different schools. Back then that was the norm. He started coming with Miss Virgie when she did for Aunt, and after we got to be friends, he came most days every summer. I was a loner and so was he, so we spent much of the summer being alone together. We read books together on the front porch when it rained and even rode that old horse out at his grand-daddy’s farm bareback when Miss Virgie took me out there for the day.

  He taught me to play chess, which I hated—still do. I taught him to play bridge, which he loved, and he and Miss Virgie and Aunt and I would play until after midnight sometimes during the summer. I suspect that’s when Aunt recognized how brilliant he was and started thinking what she could do to help him.

  We said goodbye in August of my junior year in high school as good buddies. Christmas Eve I walked into Aunt’s kitchen and saw him slicing on the ham. Not a boy any longer. He was a young man, and Lord, he was beautiful! He turned around and offered me a piece of ham and all of a sudden I was Juliet looking at Romeo for the first time.

  When he finally got around to admitting he felt the same way about me, he said we should be thinking more in terms of Desdemona and Othello. “And you know what happened to them,” he said. “All Romeo and Juliet had against them was a couple of nitwitted fathers. You and I have practically the whole world against us.”

  We didn’t get much further than a couple of furtive kisses. In this day and age we’d probably have tumbled into bed, but back then I expected to go to my marriage bed a virgin. I didn’t inquire about Jack and he didn’t volunteer the information.

  Miss Virgie and Aunt realized how Jack and I felt about one another almost before we knew it ourselves. They must have talked about us, but they kept very quiet until they planned their strategy.

  When they sat us down and talked to us both that long ago afternoon in January, we didn’t want to admit they were right.

  “Miss Catherine and I agree that it won’t do, Louise,” Miss Virgie said.

  “So far we have kept your parents from hearing about the two of you, but it’s only a matter of time now that school is in session. You will be a scandal.”

  “That’s bad enough,” Aunt Catherine continued. “Jack, however, will be in real physical danger. Are you willing to be responsible for that?”

  We blustered that we weren’t doing anything wrong, that times were changing, but in our hearts we knew they were right. We were already scared half to death.

  “This is what will happen now,” Aunt said. “The two of you will not meet—not here in this house, nor secretly.”

  I felt as though the heart had been torn out of my body. I know I was crying. Jack held my hand hard. I didn’t dare look at him.

  “Jack, Virgie and I had already planned for me to send you up north to a good Ivy League school after you graduate.”

  Jack started to say something, but she stopped him with a hand. “This is not a bribe, but an opportunity. We will simply move the timetable up. I will get you enrolled in a good prep school in the north for your senior year. That should make your entrance into a good university simpler.”

  “Y’all won’t talk on the telephone or write letters in the meantime either,” Miss Virgie added, then her face softened. She leaned over and brushed my cheek with her callused palm. “Oh, child, child, I know this is hard, but it’ll get easier, I promise.”

  Aunt Catherine patted Jack’s hand, the one that was covering mine. “We should’a seen this coming. Pair of old fools is what we are. You know how much we love you both. Maybe in twenty years or forty or a hundred it won’t matter—Lord, I hope it won’t. Right now it matters a lot. And not just to Louise’s people. Virgie’s people would be horrified.”

  Virgie nodded. “That’s right, Louise. It just won’t do, child. You know it won’t.”

  So in the end we agreed to their terms. I went back to my school. Jack went back to his. He stayed away from Aunt Catherine’s house and I stayed on my side of town.

  That fall Aunt sent Jack off to a Yankee boarding school for his last year of high school and then on to Brown.

  The summer after his freshman year he came home to visit, and one of my friends brought him to a lawn party over in Bigelow. He had already integrated a previously all-white fraternity at Brown, and at least on the surface things seemed to be changing. We both tried to act like casual old friends meeting after a long absence. That was when I asked him to go water-skiing with me. He knew enough to refuse.

  Seeing him again was only marginally less painful.

  He never came back again. He graduated from Brown and the Harvard Business School. After that he was on his way up the ladder to multi-millionaire-hood.

  He paid Aunt back a billion times over, not just in money. And last year he set up a whopping trust fund in the name of Aunt and Miss Virgie to help other smart kids get the education they need.

  Oh, Aunt took care of me, too. A good college, Millsaps, but not up north. Not close to Jack.

  Aunt and Miss Virgie were doing what they thought was best for us both. If we’d tried to stay together, we would both have had to leave Mossy Creek. Instead, Jack gave me Mossy Creek and took upon himself the role of exile. A rich exile, maybe, but still an exile.

  I know now that relationships between the sexes, and certainly marriages, are tough enough when you have everything in common the way Charlie and I do—background, religion, schooling, same friends and neighbors, same view of the world, same goals—on and on. With every difference between you, marriage becomes just that little bit tougher. No matter how much we loved each other, Aunt and Miss Virgie felt those obstacles would have destroyed Jack and me in time. In the end, they prevailed.

  Could we have made it? Lord knows.

  But there are days like today when I wish to God we’d tried.

  Mossy Creek Gazette

  Volume III, No. 4 * Mossy Creek, Georgia

  The Bell Ringer

  Christmas in July

  by Katie Bell

  It may be ninety degrees ou
tside but in our hearts it’s already starting to snow. Auditions for the fall and winter play season will be held at the Mossy Creek Theater on Friday and Saturday beginning at ten a.m. each day. Maggie Hart will be directing Blue Ridge Santa, an original play by Jess Bottoms.

  Everyone will be happy to know that Ed Brady has already agreed to play Santa in Mossy Creek again this winter, marking his fiftieth consecutive year on top of the fire truck throwing candy to the kids. In honor of his late wife, Ellie, Ed and son Ed Jr. will decorate a special version of Ellie’s beloved “Ugly Tree” for the residents of Magnolia Manor.

  To get a six-month jump on the mall down in Bigelow, Swee Purla announces she will be offering artificial Christmas trees professionally decorated. Choose your theme early.

  Casey and Dr. Hank Blackshear have already ordered an “animal tree” for the veterinary clinic. I assume they mean a tree decorated with animal ornaments. I can’t image how even Swee could get the cats and dogs to be still long enough.

  Now, wipe off the perspiration and think snow. Only six months until Christmas!

  Chapter Eight

  SARA-BETH and CAROLEE

  “Friendship with oneself is all important, because without it one cannot be friends with anyone else in the world.”

  —Eleanor Roosevelt

  RECONCILIATION AND absolution crept up on me in the middle of a heat-singed Mossy Creek day. I didn’t see it coming and I definitely felt no need for it and yet, after that day there would be no place else to lay the blame.

  She (I had long ago stopped using her name) snuck up on me like kudzu: a meaningless weed whose roots needed to be pulled from my life. She had stolen my high school love; she had been my best friend; and she had made me hoard and distrust all the happiness I’d earned since then. I, Sara-Beth Connelly, had not been able to ever fully let go of the anger I’d felt toward her, Carolee Langford, for over twenty years.

  Not long before she returned I was helping my daughter with a book report on C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe, when I read, out loud, a quote that caught me off guard.