Wild Raspberries

by Connie Chappell

  The sun was just rising when she threw John out of the house. She told him the Scottish Tart should watch her back. From somewhere, her mind dredged up a backwoods cottage scene where justice was delivered over the barrel of a shotgun. There was the sense she heard it fire when she slammed the front door on John’s grass-stained ass.

  If one element of Arnett’s life ran true, it was that she’d always been a product of her upbringing. She turned away from truth early in her twenties. Secrets were gaveled into obscurity until they did not exist. Pretense overtook reality. Now she faced nothing but uncompromising turmoil at every turn.

  To herself, she admitted that she wished John were healthy and living. His calming influence made him a natural mediator in smoothing out family situations. She closed her eyes and heard his voice of reason in the silence.

  Deep down though, Arnett obsessed over victory. She felt victory’s addictive qualities first, when she fought for and won John. The elation of that victory had always been a feeling that, over the years, she could rejuvenate and relive, even taste. Its sweetness sustained her. She found it curious, bordering on unthinkable, that Callie MacCallum approached the same situation so differently. Where Arnett unseated her rival in short order, Callie was satisfied to let the situation ride.

  Crazy, Arnett thought over and over. Why hadn’t Callie taken what she obviously wanted with all her heart? She was a sportswoman. She owned a competitive spirit. John and she were deeply and undeniably in love. Arnett believed that.

  A satisfied smile slid onto Arnett’s face. For a time, victory lived in Callie’s house because John climbed into her bed every night. But only for a very short time.

  . . .

  On Saturday morning, Arnett sat in the same chair, facing the picture window. Two SUVs pulled to a stop at the curb. She got up, locked the house behind her, and wheeled her suitcase down the walk. She also carried a bag of groceries. Beebe insisted each woman contribute to stocking the cabin’s larder.

  Lizbeth stood at the Tahoe’s opened cargo door. Callie MacCallum and Beebe Walker climbed out of Callie’s Santa Fe. Arnett felt like she was being escorted to a torture chamber rather than a mountain retreat. The trip felt especially tortuous since the call came from Beebe. Initially, Arnett agreed to ride with Beebe, but her car failed to start. Arnett couldn’t drive. She took advantage of the week away and drove her station wagon in yesterday for routine maintenance. With the last minute change in driving arrangements, there wasn’t even time to book a rental car. So, it was Lizbeth she’d ride with to West Virginia.

  Out in the street, ten-year old Carson Tillman from next door rode his bike in circles, watching the proceedings.

  After loading Arnett’s things, Lizbeth slammed the cargo door. She turned to Beebe. “We’re ready,” she said.

  Beebe made an arm gesture that gathered Arnett, Lizbeth, and Callie into a line at the foot of the drive. Carson’s bike jumped the curb. He ground it to a stop nearby. The nosy boy might have thought the ladies were posing for a send-off photograph.

  A breeze kicked up Beebe’s crop of straw-colored hair so that it stood out from her head like a crayon drawing of the sun. She raised her right hand into oath-taking position, then used several upward gestures with her left to prompt the others to hoist their hands as well. Beebe recited a pledge, breaking it into five chunks, which the others repeated in unison.

  “I hereby swear an oath to honesty. From this point forward, I promise to provide fully factual information and will express my feelings earnestly and without reservation.”

  As all the hands dropped, Carson, a respectfully polite tattletale, his broad mouth gleaming with dental hardware, announced, “Miss Arnett had her fingers crossed.”

  Lizbeth’s mouth flew open. Her gaze jumped off the boy and landed on Arnett. “How could you?”

  In a teacher-to-student tone, Beebe said, “Show me your hands.” Arnett complied. “Do you swear to this honesty pledge?”

  “Yes, I swear.” Arnett glared at Carson. “Are you satisfied?”

  He shrugged and pedaled away.

  The two SUVs traveled west on Interstate 70. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication was handled via cell phone. They stopped at The Porch, a trendy restaurant just off the Morgantown exit and lunched al fresco on salads and iced tea. Conversation was painfully stilted: There were so many subjects to avoid.

  Back on the interstate and cruising south toward Baron, West Virginia, and a cabin named Heatherwood, Arnett rode again in Lizbeth’s passenger seat. Lizbeth cleared her throat. “I have something to say.”

  Arnett looked over. Lizbeth held her chin high. Damn, Arnett thought, what’s coming now?

  “If I decide to stay in Maryland and allow you to keep Chad, you must agree to not only accept the quilt, but display it.”

  Arnett frowned. “Now you’re giving me decorating tips?”

  “That’s the deal. And the quilt remains out in the open, not tucked in a bedroom.”

  “Well, should I take it to the Vatican and have the pope bless it, or will a local priest do?”

  “I’m not changing my mind, Arnett. If you want visits with Chad, then I want him to see the quilt. And I want it prominently placed.”

  “When are these incessant terms going to stop?”

  Lizbeth’s lack of response was answer enough. Arnett’s fury roiled. The thought of never seeing Chad again was more than she could bear. Neither could she bow to Lizbeth’s demands: They’d become a smothering membrane.

  Arnett executed a mental countermove: She concentrated on Harlow Nolan’s letter and the favorable outcome of her appointment with the lawyer. His letter would be comfortably tucked in Lizbeth’s mailbox, awaiting her return. Stella promised Arnett that Nolan would scare the pee out of Lizbeth. That picture pleased her. When her daughter-in-law stood in a puddle of her own making, then they’d negotiate.

  Hum of Paradise

  August ripened sweetly in the mountains around Baron, West Virginia. Lucius Dameron considered them stocked with the fullest complement of nature and wonder. The pollinating wilderness proudly displayed its fragrant offspring. Roadside wildflowers in maize and mauve and melon bordered the narrow gravel-and-dirt trails that seemed to wind all the way down from the sky. Lapping streams, forever in motion, wore grooves, like wrinkles in weathered skin, into the mountainous terrain. The streams’ clear whispers told of both timeless and innocent secrets. The mountains sustained life, Lucius’s included, with the heady scent of pine, the sticky ooze from maple trees, and the hum of paradise.

  Lucius hummed to himself that morning as he steered his red Ford pickup through the traffic light at Carmody and Armament, then bumped into the parking lot set aside for Baron’s 1892 train depot. The passenger trains of old seemed little more than a myth. Those who visited present-day Baron turned west off the interstate, chose to stop at the Waffle House or not, then used Carmody to ease toward the town’s nucleus.

  Baron was old, and its citizens wanted to maintain the town’s originality. That made a lot of work for a restoration carpenter with twenty-five years in the business. Back in July, the town fathers hired Lucius to introduce the mothballed station to the new century. Baron held its Festival of Leaves in mid-October. The festival’s premier event that year was the christening of the old station as Baron’s new visitors welcome center. He made steady progress to that end.

  Five weeks ago, he ordered globes with a retro look for the overhead lights. This morning, he was regretfully informed again by the Lowe’s rep that the large, bulbous, white glass fixtures had not been on the truck, so Lucius concentrated on other tasks that inched the train depot closer to its former pride.

  By noon, he finished erecting the center’s outdoor s
ign in the grassy area behind the sidewalk. Lucius stood to admire his work. He chose an angle for the sign that gave traffic on Carmody and Armament an equal look. To finish off the job, he planted pansies around the sign posts. The sign shared its location with an ancient crabapple and a salvaged and repainted iron bench. On a whim that morning, he picked up cleaning supplies and polished up the station’s two small bathrooms. There wouldn’t be an official cleaning crew until the official grand opening. With Lucius Dameron, one received full service: carpentry, gardening, and a Lysol shine.

  During its forced retirement, the building became a repository for everything imaginable. Once its contents were emptied, Lucius decided nothing of size should interrupt the impact of the room. Stark was best—just the surround of mullioned glass and those fourteen pillars bracing walls and ceiling.

  An interior twilight existed inside the station by late afternoon. The summer breeze blowing through the leafy trees across in the park caused pinpricks of light to dance across the room. That daily shift in lighting was his cue to move outdoors. He’d been prying loose rotted and weathered sections of the raised platform and replacing them with treated lumber.

  Before he headed out, he stopped to measure the platform’s double doors for brass kick-plates. He was down on his knees when he heard a racket behind him. He turned. Three women slammed through the parking lot door with more billowing steam and the screech of steel against steel than any locomotive braking on the tracks could ever produce. They seemed oblivious to the carpentry motif. Fussing with each other, they wound around to the ladies’ room. The bathroom door closed, sealing in their voices.

  Lucius was dumbstruck—not by the invasion—but by a face he recognized through the window glass. His high school classmate Callie MacCallum crossed the parking lot to his truck, probably drawn by Dameron Restorations painted on the driver’s door.

  Smiling, Lucius rose to his feet. Through the windows, he watched Callie follow the trail of detritus left behind from his morning’s work. She stood among the scattering of plastic cups, empty after he transplanted the pansies. She inspected the sign, then carefully avoided stepping on the work gloves and hand spade that lay in the grass next to the nozzle attached to a length of garden hose.

  She tracked the lime-green hose through the depot’s front yard and around the corner. She stopped, stymied, hands on hips. The hose terminated twenty yards down at a spigot affixed to the building. Her head jerked left, her gaze falling on a pile of lumber sprawled next to the passenger platform. Farther down in the depot’s side yard, she spied an unattended wheelbarrow supporting a shovel. Together, they guarded a walk-in shed, doors wide.

  She strode off on what would prove a fruitless mission. Or was it? Callie was searching the length and breadth of depot property for him. That warmed him deeply.

  He turned when he heard the creak of the restroom door. The older woman emerged. He stepped forward through the gathering gloom. He knew his light green irises were an astonishing shade that lit his face and held the eye. He aimed them at the woman.

  Giving her a pleasant smile, he said, “Good afternoon. I don’t think you ladies saw me when you came in. You’re from Cassel, aren’t you?”

  Her mouth flew open in surprise. “How’d you know?”

  “I know Callie.” He swept a finger through the air, taking her gaze to Callie at the far end of the side yard. After a beat, he added, “We were separated at birth.”

  Her reaction didn’t disappoint. Disbelief settled on her upturned face. He had no choice but to apply the tone of a tall tale to his true story. “Yes, ma’am. We were nursery mates at Browning Regional. Born on the same day, just thirty-one minutes apart. Thirty-one.” He cocked a playful eyebrow. “That’s a prime number, you know. Blue ribbon. Grade A. There’s strength in a prime number. It can only be divided by itself.”

  She cut sharply through Lucius’s pack of polished bull. “You can’t possibly remember Callie from the hospital.”

  “You’re right. I don’t,” the storyteller acquiesced, then spun out another chapter in the truthful yarn. “But we found each other again at fourteen. We were best buds back at Cassel High. She was back from Duke and working at Chesterfield when the country club boys hired me to expand the pro shop. It’s been too long since I saw Callie. Of course part of that is, I became a Baron transplant two years ago,” Lucius went on. “Before that, we actually ran into each other, here, not in Cassel. Look at her. She’s hot on my trail.” Lucius laughed. Callie hadn’t found him in the shed. She was marching full speed toward the depot.

  “Callie and I enjoy one of those friendships that clicked into place simply by sitting down at desks one beside the other our first day of class. We were inseparable back then. When our lives cross now—as they inevitably do,” he said, leaning close to deliver the news flash, “we pick up the conversation seamlessly.”

  The two of them kept an eye on Callie’s progress. They witnessed how her face brightened when she saw him through the glass in a platform door.

  Pulling the door open, she rushed him. “Lucius! My God!”

  Lucius, appreciative of the deity reference, reached out. She threw her arms around his neck. Lifting her off the ground, he brushed her temple with a kiss.

  “You’ve still got that terrier tenacity, kiddo,” he said, setting her down. “You never stop; never give up.”

  She tugged on a fistful of his blue shirtsleeve. “You were watching me?”

  “Every minute.”

  Lucius Dameron was suddenly thankful the retro globes hadn’t arrived. If he’d spent the day up in the rafters, he wouldn’t have posted the welcome sign. Without the sign, Callie and her group would surely have driven past.

  To merely be thankful for his lifelong friendship with Callie MacCallum missed the mark entirely. She never left his side during the final months of their senior year when the chants about his sexual persuasion rang through the school, and through his ears as a high-handed awakening. At seventeen, he and Callie were naïve about things in the world. He had yet to face himself with the knowledge and was far from accepting it. He bravely clung to the opinion that his adorable humor and be-bopping energy would carry him through the dreaded high school years. It was Terrier Callie who snarled and nipped and kept the bullies away. It was Callie who encouraged him to dig deep for his inner strength.

  Lucius and Callie rattled out a few strands of reminiscent chatter, then he angled for the awkwardly missing introduction. “How do you ladies know each other?” By the time his head bobbed from Callie to the other woman and back again, Callie’s eyes dropped.

  “Answer him,” the woman said.

  The slyness in her tone wasn’t lost on Lucius; neither was Callie’s reluctance.

  “Through Jack,” Callie said finally.

  “Oh, Jack,” he said, “Girlfriend, you two were so in love. The way you looked at each other reached moonbeam quality.”

  His insightfully romantic comment was followed by a moment of unearthly silence, then the woman clamped both hands to her head, her eyes bulged. Behind her, the two taller women stepped into the depot’s roomy lobby in time to see the first woman stomp the time-darkened floorboards and hear her produce a long guttural sound.

  She’s ready to blow, Lucius thought, amused by the short woman’s animation.

  The words, “I can’t do this. I won’t,” spewed from her mouth. The two women sprang forward, each grabbing one of her arms.

  “What happened?” the thinner of the two women wanted to know.

  Callie let the question pass unanswered. “This is Lucius Dameron,” she said instead. “I’ve known him since high school.”

  Lucius stood back, grinning, taking it all in. Neither of the reinforcements ac
tually made eye contact, let alone extended a hand. The thin woman talked over everyone, recanting rules about expected behavior. From her comments, Lucius gathered the women were on some kind of truth-or-consequences trip, and not the marijuana-induced kind. The older woman, with sudden effort, yanked free of chubby woman’s grasp and lunged at Callie. Fearful, Lucius swung a protective arm, like a crossing gate, in front of Callie, shielding her.

  “He was my husband.” The woman spat the words at Callie with a ferocity that reverberated off the glass.

  “Arnett, stop it.”

  The thin woman’s shout provided the missing introduction and wiped the grin off Lucius’s face.

  He gave Callie a sidelong look. What in the world was she doing in Baron with Jack Sebring’s widow?

  Lucius met Jack Sebring seventeen summers ago during the pro shop’s expansion project. Perhaps it was Lucius’s special wiring that alerted him to the closeness Callie shared with Jack. Perhaps it was the matching nugget-gold diamond rings they wore, third finger, left hand. During that summer, the project and the pretense played out for a short while, then Lucius pulled Callie aside. He wasn’t buying for a moment that Callie and Jack were no more than friendly, long-time coworkers. That summer, Lucius became Callie’s safe ear.

  As a barrage of pinpricked light washed through the station, the tall woman announced an all-encompassing decision. Barely a bump in time had been given for deliberation.

  “New rule, Arnett, I’m taking Beebe with me. You and Callie will ride the rest of the way to the cabin together.” The tall woman’s tone blocked all rights to appeal. “If you won’t try to get along with her in a civil, mature manner, then we’ll force the issue. Right, Beebe?”