Bittersweet Creek

by Sally Kilpatrick

  If Daddy thought something was wrong with me that summer, he kept it to himself. He didn’t even say a word when I told him I wanted to go to Nashville a month early to see the sights and get settled in. He didn’t question for a minute that I was staying in an apartment with a girl I’d only met once at the Volunteer Girls State program the summer before. Either he’d decided I was eighteen and could do as I pleased, or he knew enough about losing the love of your life to figure I was going to do some stupid things whether he liked it or not.

  And I did some stupid stuff then, just as getting drunk at The Fountain and letting Julian drive me home now had been incredibly stupid. As I heard Daddy wrestle with the front door, I realized I’d been very, very stupid.

  I expected him to bless me out, but instead he sighed deeply as I wiped away my tears with the back of my hand. “Come on in here before the skeeters eat you up.”

  I got up and walked into the house. I wanted a hug from my daddy. I wanted a fierce hug, as though it would somehow make up for tonight and what’d happened ten years ago. But he couldn’t hug me very well from his wheelchair.

  I was lucky. He’d get the cast off, and then I’d be able to get one of his crushing hugs, but that wheelchair reminded me he was old. Even when he got out of the cast, he needed to start taking it easy and not take any more chances with temperamental bulls who snapped legs like twigs. I’d already lost my mother, and I couldn’t bear to lose him, too.

  For the first time ever I wanted to stay home. Forever. It was a stupid pie-in-the-sky kind of wish, but I didn’t want to miss another moment with my father. Of course, if I stayed, I’d be stuck next door to Julian and would run the risk of running into him every time I needed a carton of milk. Every time I saw him and he looked away, I’d hear those four words that had ripped my heart out all over again: I changed my mind.

  “Julian? Again?”

  I nodded.

  “C’mon.” He turned the wheelchair with a grunt and rolled to the kitchen. He nodded at the table, and I took a seat while I watched him rummage through the lower cabinets. By the time he emerged with the bottle of Jack he was panting from the exertion.

  “Need some help?”

  “Nah, get a Coke out of the fridge, though.”

  “You sure this is a good idea?” I asked as I reached for a couple of cans of Coke.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Already drunk off your ass, aren’t you?”

  By the time I sat back down he had two coffee mugs—the only glasses he could reach—and he’d already poured a finger or three of Jack into each mug then passed them to me. He tilted each mug sideways before slowly pouring Coke on top.

  “You’re going to have to let that boy go,” he said as he lifted his mug in a sad toast.

  I clinked my mug against his. “I just want to know why. That’s all, Daddy. Why?”

  He drank for a while before setting his mug down hard enough to make his drink slosh. “I ask that question about your mother every damn day.”

  From Rosemary Satterfield’s History of the Satterfield-McElroy Feud

  In the first of many lawsuits, Benjamin Satterfield took Shaymus Magilroy to court over the calf, but the case got abandoned in favor of more important things like the Civil War. As a transplant from up north, Benjamin Satterfield sided with the North. Shaymus Magilroy supported the South.

  While the Satterfield sons fought in blue, half of the Magilroys fought in gray. The other half commandeered everything on the Satterfield farm and other neighboring farms that they could get their hands on. Eventually, the entire Satterfield clan moved up north to wait the war out. They came back in 1864 once the Union was in control. By returning early, they kept their land and property despite the best efforts of the carpetbaggers. But they’d lost everything. Their farmhouse and all of the outbuildings had been destroyed.

  Ben Satterfield had a new Yankee wife, though, and it was her family’s money that saved the place. That genteel finishing-school graduate, your great-great-grandma Alma, had to learn to work with her hands. And she also had to learn to deal with the slurs and snubs of almost everyone in Yessum County.

  Meanwhile, the Magilroys barely held on to their smaller farm, being called into court more than once for being delinquent on their taxes. Then Shaymus Magilroy’s wife called him into court for something unheard of in those days: a divorce.

  Julian

  The first rule of Fight Club really is that you do not talk about Fight Club. I didn’t have a destructive alter ego, but I had been born into that special club. Curtis didn’t talk about hitting, and Mama didn’t talk about getting hit. In those early days when I showed up for school hardly able to walk from the tanning my hide had received, I didn’t talk about Fight Club. And most of my teachers didn’t, either, because they’d heard about Curtis McElroy and what he had done to my kindergarten teacher when she had the gall to break rules one and two by calling social services.

  So, instead of talking, I’d taken to hitting. Only I couldn’t stand the sound of fists pounding flesh, of teeth cracking, of the grunts and whimpers that came from being beat up. I worked hard one summer until I could buy a punching bag. First, I hung it from one of the rafters in the old barn. Later, when I inherited Mamaw’s house, I strung it up on the back porch. I would beat that bag until I couldn’t catch my breath, and I tried like hell to replace the memory of my mama’s cries with the groans of the ceiling rafters as the bag swung back at me. The damn thing always swung back at me.

  After dropping Romy off at her place, I needed to beat something. First, I punched at Curtis’s imaginary face. He was the reason I was like this. His poisoned blood flowed through my veins.

  Then I couldn’t help but punch at the impossibly handsome face of Richard Paris. That lucky bastard had the only thing I’d ever wanted and enough money to make her truly happy. He probably didn’t even know what kind of woman he had.

  Pounding, pounding until dust came from the bag and my knuckles started to ache.

  Why didn’t you just sign the papers, you dumb-ass?

  Deep inside, I’d hoped she would come back. Now I’d finally got my wish, but I couldn’t answer her question. Time and distance had shown me all too well the hundreds of reasons I couldn’t be the man she thought I was, nor the man she deserved, so I beat my fists against that punching bag some more.

  You could’ve gone to her, you know.

  I could’ve, but if I’d gone she would’ve followed me back. No matter what I told her, she would’ve followed me back, and Curtis would’ve made our lives a living hell. Besides, Romy had the smarts for Vandy. She belonged there.

  You could’ve gone to her and stayed there.

  Yeah, I should’ve, but I couldn’t leave Mama. And I wasn’t getting into Vanderbilt, that was for sure. I still remember the deep belly laugh from the high school counselor when I told him I wanted to go to Vanderbilt. He’d said, “Son, Vandy’s the Harvard of the South. You think you can hang with that crowd?”

  Of course, we McElroys don’t like being laughed at, so I’d held on to that dream all the way up until the spring of my senior year when I broke my leg—playing baseball of all things—and ended any chance of a football scholarship. Romy told me that was no reason not to go to Vandy, but we both knew I didn’t have that kind of money. I sure as hell didn’t have the grades to get an academic scholarship, either.

  That SOB Richard probably didn’t have the grades, either. But I bet he had the money.

  I pummeled the punching bag until my fists were on fire and my lungs burned. I was no stranger to pain. Sometimes I welcomed it. Any time I started thinking about what might have been, I went to my punching bag. I might picture a cheery farmhouse, a glowing Romy who was decorating a nursery or grading papers at a sunny kitchen table. Then I would punch until the exertion helped me remember who I was and the havoc I could wreak.

  There was a time when I was young and stupid, a time when I thought I would somehow be able to outrun my temper. Maybe
I’d call on the Collins part of me and find something meek to counteract what Curtis had given me.

  But now I knew.

  I knew I needed to sign Romy’s papers and let her go.

  My fists, now numb from pain, flew into the bag.

  She deserved to grade papers or decorate nurseries in a mansion, not a tiny farmhouse. Heck, she deserved the ability to do or be whatever she wanted. As long as she was stuck with me, she wouldn’t have a lot of options.

  Sweat dripped down from my brow and stung my eyes as I launched everything I had into my own Fight Club.

  She deserved everything that Richard bastard could give her and a million things he couldn’t.

  The beam holding the punching bag groaned, and one of the chain links gave way. The bag thudded to the floor followed by the clink of the chain.

  You gotta sign those papers.

  I wiped away the sweat and bent over to catch my breath. Tomorrow. I would go up there and sign the papers tomorrow. Then I would badger the hell out of Curtis until he made me power of attorney like he’d said he would. If I couldn’t have Romy, I could at least have the old home place.

  Romy

  Holy hell, my mother was right about nothing good coming from Satterfields and drinking. Farming and hangovers don’t go together at all.

  Running behind from the previous night’s festivities, I couldn’t help but give the stink eye to the bedroom door that shielded Daddy from me. He snored as he always did: with a roar, a pause, and a gasping gulp of air. After all the work he’d done in his life, he deserved to sleep in at least one morning.

  Thanks to still having only instant coffee in the house, I was running late again. To make matters worse, I’d forgotten to order the boots and thus had to stuff socks into the toes of Daddy’s boots to have something to wear. I tripped over my feet all the way to the barn, then spent too much time staring at the practically empty barn and wondering how I was going to start filling it with hay for the winter. I could buy hay, but I was rapidly running out of funds and Goat Cheese had told Daddy there wasn’t much hay to be bought that year.

  I wondered how many other women stood looking at an empty barn and dreamed of putting a café in the corner complete with friendly barista. Shrugging off the impossible—health code violations galore in the old barn, no doubt—I turned to the garden instead. Making it to the end of both rows through sheer determination, I finished up the green beans. Then I cut some okra and picked tomatoes. The cows obliged me by standing close to the barn and being all present and accounted for—that left me with Maggie May.

  I rounded the corner of the barn and climbed a slat up on the gate to look over into the little pen. Squat and black with fuzzy ears and enormous brown eyes, Maggie stood chewing her cud, oblivious to how lucky she was. That cow was living proof that Hank Satterfield was a soft touch because she was old and now had trouble calving, but he wouldn’t get rid of her because she was the last calf my mother had named.

  Inexplicably rejected by her mother when only a few days old, Maggie had been bottle-fed by my mother, who would come with bottle in hand each morning singing an off-key “Wake up, Maggie, I think I’ve got something to say to you.” Now, why Rosemary Satterfield, staid librarian, had sung Rod Stewart to a baby calf, I’d never know, but the name stuck. And soft touch Hank couldn’t bear to part with the old cow, who now snorted and anxiously paced the pen, her uterus obviously prolapsed despite the vet’s earlier stitches to hold it in place.

  Shit.

  “I’m going to get Daddy and call Dr. Winterbourne, so you can stop your fussing.”

  My country accent bounced off the barn. Great. There was that West Tennessee lilt again, the one that would make me the laughingstock of my students, not to mention all of Richard’s friends. Oh, good. More get-togethers where we played everybody’s favorite party game: Let’s ask Romy to speak so we can hear her accent. Maybe she can trot out those quaint weather expressions or explain to us once again that she did, indeed, grow up wearing shoes.

  Damned cow should’ve already been ground chuck.

  As if soft touch me could take her off, either. Since she’d been bottle-fed, Maggie was friendlier than the rest of Daddy’s cows. She ambled over and sniffed my outstretched hand, then snorted cow slobber with tiny bits of grass all over me as if to say, “You’re close, but you’re not quite my Rosemary.”

  “I know I’m not,” I muttered under my breath as I scratched her dirty forehead. “And she was your mama, too, wasn’t she?”

  Maggie did her sniff and snort at me again.

  “You know what? That’s more than enough cow slobber for one day.” I wiped my hands on my shorts, knowing they were destined for a double wash with color-safe bleach anyway. “Besides, I’m not happy with you for what happened with Daddy.”

  She laid back her ears again and tossed her head back to lick a quivering fly-infested spot on her flank. I wasn’t being fair to her. It wasn’t her fault Beauregard, the old bull, had taken offense to having one of his sister wives culled from the herd. He’d been the one to kick Daddy into the old wooden gate and break his leg. Thanks to that, Old Beau was now on his way to being USDA Grade A. None of the cows seemed too sad to see him go, either.

  This time Maggie butted my elbow hard enough to knock me back from the fence. “All right, I know the drill. I’m going to call the vet. You’re an awful lot of trouble. You know that, right?”

  I walked back to the house, Daddy’s boots still slipping up and down on my heels. If I were a smart woman, I would’ve ordered some new boots along with that coffeemaker that should have already been there, since I’d paid an arm and a leg to get it faster. Whatever. I could stand anything for two months, now one month, three weeks, and some change.

  I kicked off my boots and tromped through the house. “Daddy, time to call Dr. Winterbourne,” I hollered. Then I passed through the kitchen, saw we had a visitor, and blushed to my very core.

  Richard Paris did not need to see me in a ratty T-shirt, holey socks, and worn-out jean shorts with cow-slobber veneer. And yet there he was, smiling at me instead of frowning at my disheveled appearance.

  “I think that can wait a minute,” Daddy said calmly. “Richard, here, says he’s got something to ask you.”

  The world threatened to upend itself as Richard, in his neatly pressed Brooks Brothers chinos, got down on one knee and took my hand, not knowing that five minutes ago it’d been covered in cow slobber.

  No. Not here. Not now. Not when I haven’t even talked Julian into signing the papers yet.

  “Rosemary Jane Satterfield, would you do me the honor of being my bride?”

  I can’t! I’m already married!

  “But, Richard, look at me.” I gestured to my nasty work clothes, the farmhouse that suddenly looked shabby instead of homey.

  He squeezed my hand and looked up at me with warm chocolate eyes. “I love you just the way you are. I’ve never seen you looking lovelier.”

  My breath caught. Tears stung my eyes. Then Daddy stifled a laugh into a coughing fit. “Yes, Richard. I will marry you.”

  Just as soon as I’m officially divorced. Not that you ever need to know about that.

  He jumped to his feet and grabbed me into a bear hug before I could warn him about sweat, cow slobber, and the hundreds of tiny spiderwebs I’d walked through in the barn. He kissed me full on the mouth, and I felt an honest-to-goodness excitement about getting married! A real marriage with a minister and a white dress! We would stand up in a flower-filled County Line Methodist Church with bridesmaids and a flower girl. We might even convince Bill to let us have a little reception over at The Fountain, and—

  “Oh, I’m so glad you said yes! I was going to wait until your birthday to propose, but one look at the ring and I couldn’t wait. Then Mother casually mentioned that the cathedral had an unexpected cancellation around Christmastime. I’m sure you can put something together in six months with her help.”

  “Cathedral?”
Hank and I said it together with the exact same country accent.

  Richard’s smile faded. “Yes, the cathedral. That’s okay, I hope. I mean you had to know my family would want a Catholic ceremony. There’s even an opening in the August confirmation class. How convenient is that?”

  Not very, considering I have no intentions of converting.

  I looked to Daddy without thinking. Wrinkled flesh hooded his eyes, making him look like a cross between Tommy Lee Jones and Droopy Dog.

  “I thought it was traditional to have the wedding in the bride’s hometown.” Even as I said the words, I knew better. No way would the Paris family schlep their whole brood out to the boondocks for a small church wedding and a reception in a cinder-block honky-tonk. When I looked back at Richard, his eyes were on me, patiently waiting for me to come to that realization.

  “Come on, Romy, it’ll be a storybook wedding, one for the ages.”

  Hank cleared his throat. “This is beginning to sound like a bigger production than I can afford.”

  Richard turned toward my father with his best damage-control smile. “No worries, Mr. Satterfield, I’m sure we can work something out.”

  He started to say something more, then realized Hank didn’t care for those words. He especially didn’t care for the implication that he needed help getting his only daughter properly hitched. I suppressed a hysterical giggle. Little did anyone in the room know she was already hitched.

  I sank onto the world’s scratchiest couch. I was going to hell for this. I just knew it.

  This was my hell for the sins of my youth.

  “I’m going to call Mom and Dad and tell them the good news!” Richard said as he took out his cell phone.

  I summoned a smile for him, hoping he wasn’t noticing a distinct undercurrent of despair.

  “O-kay, I’ll just have to step outside to get reception.” He leaned over to give me a quick kiss on the lips and stepped out on the porch to make his phone call.

  “Well, that went well.”