Lovely In Her Bones

by Sharyn McCrumb

  In an urgent undertone she recounted the details of the Moonshine Massacre, ending with the disappearance of the sheriff’s nephew. “And he has not been found to this day,” she finished solemnly.

  Milo rocked back on his heels and picked up a skull from the box. “That must be it,” he agreed. “One of these skulls must be him.” After a moment’s scrutiny, he set the skull back in the box. “Not this one, though. Keep looking.”

  He watched for a moment as Elizabeth deftly hoisted another specimen. She had a steady hand, without a trace of beginner’s squeamishness. “You’re doing very well, Elizabeth,” he said awkwardly. “I’d just like you to know that-”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “No, Milo,” she said gently. “Not until this is over.”

  Pilot Barnes and Hamp McKenna rode in silence along the Sarvice Valley Road. Pilot was too preoccupied with his newly complicated responsibilities to engage in small talk, but despite his worries, he looked out across the valley with a stir of satisfaction. There were pastures of scrubby black cattle, and mounds of green hills attached like ribs to the spine of a wooded mountain. Weathered barns and laden apple trees became postcard pictures framed by split-rail fences.

  At least this hasn’t changed, Pilot thought. He wished he could say the same for the rest of the county. The new four-lane, which had been built to speed tourists on their way to Asheville, and the motels and gift shops designed to slow them down, were sources of jobs and revenue, he supposed, but their ugliness saddened him. A mainstream of American culture had washed over the mountains, drowning most of what had been there before, and leaving flotsam of rusted car bodies and old beer cans. Pilot Barnes wondered how long the Cullowhees could hold out against the tide, or if in fact they wanted to.

  “Wonder how Dummyweed passed the night,” Hamp mused, an edge of sarcasm in his voice.

  Pilot grunted. Assigning Dummyweed to guard duty had started him on this train of thought, he guessed, because Dummyweed was a perfect example of the county’s new settlers. They arrived in minivans, armed with Foxfire books to teach them how to live “country,” and they built forty-thousand-dollar log homes with solar water heaters. He saw them as year-round tourists, who sold their pots and dulcimers to the more seasonal variety. And now, with Duncan Johnson gone ocean-fishing, the county had its first instance of computer crime and complicated homicide. He might have known it would come to this. Pilot Barnes felt a little like an Indian watching the wagon trains roll toward his hunting grounds.

  * * *

  In daylight the clearing seemed less ominous, Pilot thought, threading his way past the trenches. In June, when the mountain laurel bushes were blooming, it was probably beautiful. Pilot thought cemeteries ought to be beautiful; he didn’t hold with making horrors out of people just because they had died.

  “Good morning,” said Dummyweed with more than a trace of eagerness in his voice. “Everything’s fine here.”

  Pilot edged past him and peered into the tent. “It is, huh?” he barked. “Then suppose you tell me where the contents of that tent went to!”

  Daniel Hunter Coltsfoot paled. “Contents?”

  “When we took the body out of here last night, there were skulls all over the place in there. Where are they?”

  “Over there! They said they needed them to do their research. They said that they weren’t important to the case. They said-”

  Pilot cut him off with a nod. “I’ll handle it. You go on home now.” You couldn’t fire someone who wasn’t on the payroll, the deputy reasoned. He motioned for Hamp to begin the routine investigation.

  Elizabeth and Milo, having seen the uniformed deputies approach, were busy with their measuring instruments, apparently oblivious to the new arrivals. When Pilot Barnes loomed over them, blocking their light, they looked up in all innocence. “Good morning,” said Elizabeth politely.

  Pilot Barnes’ lips tightened. “Tampering with evidence in a homicide constitutes being an accessory after the fact,” he informed them.

  Milo sighed. “Look, I’ve worked on cases with our coroner back home. Why don’t you call him? His name is Dr. David-”

  “Makes no difference,” said the deputy, shaking his head. “Everybody here is a suspect until I know different from my own investigations. I’m going to impound those skulls as material evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” Milo demanded.

  Pilot gave him an appraising stare. “I’ll bet you could tell me that.”

  “The deputy won’t let us work up there today,” Milo told the assembled diggers. “I’m sorry we couldn’t let you guys know before you drove all the way up here.”

  “That’s okay,” said the president of the archaeological society. “We’re sorry to hear about Dr. Lerche. What happens now?”

  “We’ve decided to continue. I’m going to town this afternoon and call the chairman of the anthropology department. I’m pretty sure he’ll let me finish the project on my own. It’s only a couple of weeks. Come back tomorrow. We’ll be back in business by then.”

  When the local workers had gone back to their cars, Milo turned to Jake. “I need to go to town to make phone calls. You’re in charge while I’m gone. Don’t let the sheriff’s department impound our equipment or anything, but otherwise, cooperate with them.”

  Jake nodded. “Anything you want us to do?”

  “No. Just stay out of trouble.”

  “Do the police have any leads on the killer?” asked Victor, lapsing into television cop talk.

  Milo gave him a grim smile. “We seem to be their first choice,” he said.

  “Have you told Comfrey Stecoah about this, Milo?” asked Elizabeth.

  “I expect he knows. But you’re right. He ought to hear it from me. I’ll stop by this afternoon.”

  “Milo, would you like me to come with you?” asked Elizabeth. She tried frantically to think of some grocery item they might need, which could only be chosen by herself. No inspiration was forthcoming.

  “No, thanks,” said Milo. “I need the time.”

  When he had gone, Elizabeth turned to Jake. “I hope they solve it soon, Jake. Milo looks awful!”

  Jake nodded. “He’s going to have to eat one of these days.”

  Victor nodded. “It’s dreadful. I have had to force myself to eat. I simply will not give way to nerves! But I really don’t see why this case is dragging on. It is perfectly obvious who the killer is.”

  “It isn’t obvious to me,” Elizabeth told him.

  He smiled complacently. “Ah! Perhaps you don’t see things as I do!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  ELIZABETH, preoccupied with thoughts of the murder and its aftermath, did not stop to look at the plants along the trail. She might have noticed a coiled snake or a clump of poison oak, if her foot had been about to land on either, but otherwise she was oblivious to her surroundings. Not the right frame of mind in which to visit the Wise Woman of the Woods, she thought, but she was going anyway. When she mentioned to Milo that someone should tell Comfrey about Alex, it had suddenly occurred to her that Amelanchier was an elderly woman living alone in the woods. She should know about the danger. Elizabeth decided that she would feel better knowing that Amelanchier was all right; and perhaps the Wise Woman would have some bit of advice to comfort her.

  Amelanchier was outside her cabin, talking to some visitors. Not wanting to interrupt, Elizabeth stayed hidden in a clump of laurels and listened to the consultation.

  “Don’t forget what I told you about drinking sassafras tea,” Amelanchier was saying to a tall woman wearing a sundress. “Beets and asparagus’ll do you good too.”

  The woman was nodding, absorbed in the lecture, while her husband, a red-faced man in doubleknit trousers and a pink polo shirt, was circling the two of them with his camera. “Ann, move your shoulder a little to the right,” he commanded. “The light’s not right.”

  Amelanchier looked him over carefully and turned back to the woman. “Now, you mind what I told y
ou about brewing your bitters from them herbs I give you.”

  “Yes. Yes. I’ve written it down,” the woman assured her.

  “All right,” said Amelanchier doubtfully. “But don’t you use no city water, and don’t cook it up in no aluminum pan, neither.”

  “Copper?” asked the woman anxiously.

  Amelanchier was scornful. “Copper’s for moonshine,” she declared. “You want to use enamel or stainless steel.”

  “I will! I will!” the woman promised.

  “How much do we owe you?” asked the man, lowering his camera.

  “You got four bags of bitters, and two gallon jugs of it already made up. That’ll be seven dollars.”

  The man smiled. “Do you have change for a twenty?”

  Amelanchier hesitated. “Take it on,” she said, waving him away. “You can pay me when you’ve got it.”

  The woman started to protest, but her husband led her down the path, smirking at having got something for nothing.

  Elizabeth glared at them from the laurel bush. They acted as if Amelanchier were an exhibit in a zoo, she thought angrily. “Why did you let that awful man get away with that?” she demanded, marching out from her hiding place.

  Amelanchier shook her head. “I didn’t hardly like to charge her. She was buying the medicine for him, and you could see he wasn’t going to take it.”

  “What was the matter with him?” asked Elizabeth. He had seemed healthy enough.

  “Did you look at his hands? That’s the best way to tell.” She shook her head, dismissing the tourist couple from her thoughts. She turned back to Elizabeth with a happy smile. “You’re looking a little peaky yourself, gal. What’s been going on down there?”

  Elizabeth told her, omitting only the details of Alex’s personal problems with his wife and Mary Clare. “I came up to see if you were all right,” she added.

  “Shoot far,” snorted Amelanchier, easing herself onto a wooden bench on the porch. “I’ve lived by myself in these woods for a coon’s age. Don’t you worry about me. But I’m sorry to hear about your boss. He seemed like a nice enough fella.”

  “He was. Milo-that’s his assistant-is pretty broken up about it.” Elizabeth looked up hopefully. “I don’t suppose you have anything for grief?”

  Amelanchier shrugged. “Just a handful of rocks.”

  “Rocks?”

  “Yep. You take a handful of rocks and put them in a jar. Then once a week, you take one tiny pebble out of the jar and throw it away. When the jar is empty, why, you’ll just about be over your grief.”

  Elizabeth digested the instructions. “I see,” she said at last. “You mean that it just takes time.”

  “That’s right. Time alone will do if you’re short on rocks.” She closed her eyes for a while, and her face relaxed from its usual smile into creases of age. “A-lord,” she sighed. “I reckon I could use some bitters myself. How ’bout you?”

  Elizabeth looked doubtful. Anything called “bitters” could not be very pleasant to drink, she thought. “What’s in it?”

  Amelanchier heaved herself off the bench and over to an old icebox beside the banister. She took two paper cups from a stack on top of it and poured dark brown liquid from a gallon milk jug into each. “Take a sip of that.”

  In the interests of science, thought Elizabeth. Taking a deep breath, she tasted it and was surprised to find that it was not bitter at all. “It’s a little like root beer,” she said wonderingly.

  “That’s the sassafras root bark,” nodded Amelanchier. “You taste that, and the honey, which makes it sweet. There’s other things in there, too, but I don’t reckon your tongue told you that.”

  “Like what?” asked Elizabeth, holding her cup out for another helping.

  “Comfrey and yarrow,” said Amelanchier. “They’re my favorites. And there’s spikenard and Solomon seal and great blue lobelia, and about ten other things.”

  “It’s really very good.”

  “Better for you than that old sody pop.”

  “What is it supposed to do?”

  “Whatever you need done,” Amelanchier declared. “Once you get the bad foods out of your system, the bitters will clean you out and keep you healthy.”

  Elizabeth was impressed. She wondered if the Appalachian studies department would consider a master’s thesis on Amelanchier’s brand of folk medicine. “How did you learn this?”

  Amelanchier smiled. “Why, hit’s Indian medicine. Old as the hills, but I don’t reckon it’ll do much for the poor in spirit, which is how I judge you to be right now.”

  Elizabeth sighed. “It’s been awful,” she admitted. “I’ve been trying not to worry about it, though.”

  “No, it’s best to take things as they come,” Amelanchier agreed. “Like they say in that old hymn: ‘Farther along, we’ll know all about it.’ ”

  “I guess we will,” said Elizabeth, taking the literal meaning. “The sheriff has been up here investigating. Or maybe not the sheriff himself, but some of his men. Of course, Victor claims to know it all now.”

  “Victor?”

  “The one I told you about who is allergic to everything. He’s full of himself today because he was out in the woods last night, and apparently he saw something. Of course he is keeping it to himself. By the way, remember that ginseng cure you gave me for him? He wouldn’t try it.”

  Amelanchier nodded. “Some folks won’t. They’re afraid you’re trying to trick ’em. My gran’daddy used to say that believing nothing is just as foolish as believing everything.”

  “I wish I knew what to believe about Milo,” sighed Elizabeth, still absorbed in her own troubles. “Ever since we got here, he has been so edgy, and now I can’t talk to him at all. I know he’s upset about Alex, but for heaven’s sake, I didn’t do it!”

  Amelanchier reached under the bench and pulled out a paper bag. “If you’re going to sit there a-twisting your hands like that, you might as well snap beans.” She set the bag between them on the bench and handed Elizabeth a wooden bowl for her lap. “You know how, don’t you?”

  “Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth, smiling at the memory of her Grandmother MacPherson, who wouldn’t allow a frozen vegetable past her front door. “When we visited Granny’s, this used to be my job.” Deftly she stringed and separated a bean sheath, dropping the pieces into the bowl. Soon the snapping became a steady rhythm punctuating the flow of conversation.

  “I guess it’s awful of me to be worried about Milo and me when Alex has just died.”

  Amelanchier shook her head. “That’s what they mean by life goes on. I reckon when you’uns get back to your college, he’ll come around.”

  “Whenever that is,” muttered Elizabeth.

  “Why, your boss has got himself killed. Ain’t you going home?”

  “No. Milo is calling the university today to get permission to stay on.”

  “Well, then he’ll be working hard, and that will be good for him. It’ll wear out the grief. Hard work is the bitters of the spirit.”

  Elizabeth smiled. “I hope so.”

  After a moment’s pause she added, “You haven’t been down to the dig site. Would you like to come and see what we’re doing?”

  “Naw, I don’t care about seeing it,” said Amelanchier. “I reckon I’m old enough to have known some of those folks, and I’ll see them again in the hereafter. I can wait.”

  “It isn’t so bad,” mumbled Elizabeth apologetically. “I don’t even think of the bones as human, somehow.”

  Amelanchier smiled bitterly. “Well, that ain’t a problem they acquired lately. Folks around here didn’t think of them as human even while they were alive.” Her blue-veined hand shook a little as it dropped the bean shards into the bowl. She looked not at Elizabeth, but at the fold of green mountains framed by the porch railings and the clabbered sky. “Most of the county was Cullowhee land in the old days,” she began slowly, as if remembering. “Flat land you could farm, down on the creek bottoms. But then the wh
ites came in wanting land, and they reckoned to steal it.”

  The pile of beans fell from her lap. “If we had been regular old Indians, why, there wouldn’t have been no trick to it atall. They would have marched us out to the desert, like they did the Cherokees-but we were different. Here we was a-talking English, living in regular old cabins, and praying to Jesus, just same as them. There was only one difference.”

  The old woman pressed her gnarled brown arm against Elizabeth’s white one. “They called us people of color, and said we didn’t have no rights. Got a law passed at the state capitol saying we couldn’t vote nor hold office. Hell, we couldn’t even testify in a court of law.” She closed her eyes. “Then they started in with their lawyers and their judges, and they stole all the farmland away from our people-till all we got left is the ridges and the hollers. Now I reckon they want that, too!”

  “Well, they won’t get it!” said Elizabeth hotly. “Er… that law has been repealed, hasn’t it?” She twisted the snap bean between her wet fingers, feeling its wetness on her hands like blood.

  “The law is gone, but the feelings stayed here right on.” Amelanchier’s eyes were dull pebbles, like uncut garnets in a creekbed.

  Elizabeth shivered. Even in August it was not really warm on the mountain. The wind under the oaks bore the chill of autumn. Amelanchier sat still in her faded sundress, staring out at the mountains. After a while, she continued.

  “No, the feelings ain’t gone. When my young’uns were little, we’d go into town and I could buy them a sody pop at the grill, but they’d have to stand outside to drink it.” She turned a level gaze on Elizabeth’s reddened face. “Why do you think I’m a root doctor?”

  Elizabeth swallowed the facile answers, woven around Amelanchier’s Indian legend and a vague impression of her as a rustic version of a garden club lady. “Tell me.”

  “The Cullowhees always had a root doctor because no town doctor would see our people. It was passed down from my gran’daddy to me, because I was the seventh child of his seventh child. Some things we can’t cure, and folks dies, but we did what we could, which is more than the white folks would.”